The Other Typist (31 page)

There are times when Dr. Benson likes to tussle with me over moral conduct and justice, especially on the subject of Edgar Vitalli. I find this a bit more than vaguely insulting, as I was the only one who actually cared about seeing to it that justice got done.
A man
’
s life was in your hands
 . . .
how can you justify condemning him with no proof?
Dr. Benson asks me. I try to tell him Mr. Vitalli’s guilt was plain to see, that it was
obvious
, yet no one was willing to go to the lengths I was, that I was the only one willing to do what was necessary to make sure justice was done. If I were a man and had spearheaded the official investigation, I would’ve been congratulated! But Dr. Benson only shakes his head at me.
You cannot appoint yourself judge, jury, and hangman, Ginevra,
he says, as though I am some sort of righteous loony who has gone on a tirade.

But perhaps the greatest injustice, the one that offends me the most, is the fact Odalie will never understand how much I loved her. Ironically, I think it was Gib who might have had a grasp of this, albeit an incremental one. A person simply cannot see what they are not looking to see, and I have finally come to grips with the simple truth that Odalie was never seeking my devotion. It’s true she wanted my loyalty—for a time, at least—because it proved useful to her. But
devotion
is a word whose definition reaches a depth that threatens to swamp this current generation.

The modern world is a strange place indeed, and I fear it is one in which I do not belong. It’s not as if I’m daft; I’ve seen the world, leaving me behind in fits and starts. And from the very first, I knew Odalie was a creature born of this new time, with her golden-hued skin and skinny boyish arms and sleek black bob. There is much to admire about these new modern girls, superficially speaking. That much I fully admit. I know when people think of romance they will think of Odalie, standing in the moonlight, the beads on her dress like a galaxy’s worth of stars come temporarily to rest, the sheen of her hair refracting a halo. But of course this notion is something of a bum steer. All along, all those nights we spent searching out back doors and reciting lines of gibberish to enter those innumerable speakeasies, it was really Odalie who was the true blind. Her breathless charm and musical laugh are promises that true romance, the most exciting variety of life-changing romance, is just around the corner. But the truth of the matter is Odalie herself possesses not one romantic bone in her entire body, and she has little patience for sentiment of any kind. She is the mirage that moves constantly before you, always a fixed distance away as you step deeper and deeper into the desert.

No, between Odalie and myself, I am the romantic. A relic from an already forgotten era. The world has no patience these days for the formalities of ladylike conduct. Nor does it have any interest in nurturing the bonds of sisters, of mothers and daughters, of bosom friends. Something—perhaps it was the war; I cannot say—has torn these bonds away. I realize if I am to survive in this world, I must sooner or later evolve. Evolution. Another modern innovation to reverse the old thinking that the meek shall inherit the earth.

But enough. I know this is all simply a lament—surprisingly, not one for Odalie, but for myself.

T
hey tell me I am to have a visitor today. They informed me of this fact when I first woke up this morning. I think the nurses fancied themselves thoughtful for telling me, believing it would give me something I might look forward to, but since they are not allowed to reveal the identity of my visitor I have spent the last few hours agonizing over who it could possibly be. I’ve always had difficulty eating the watery oatmeal the hospital serves as our breakfast each and every morning, and today my overexcited nerves made it even more difficult than usual.

Why, Ginevra, you
’
re not even making an effort,
one of the nurses scolds me as she takes away my still-full tray. Visiting hours are from one o’clock to four. By noon I am nearly crawling out of my skin. I am not sure whom I am hoping to see.

Actually, that’s untrue.

I
am
sure whom I am hoping to see. Old habits die hard. But the cynic in me already knows the truth: She will not come here to see me. If nothing else, she is very clever. Coming here would be a mistake; there would be no benefit in it for her. And yet I find myself looking anxiously in the direction of the door, hoping to see the silhouette of a stylish cloche appear. The heart is a funny organ, with such stubborn biases. Yesterday I went to bed making a careful list of all Odalie’s unforgivable faults and reminding myself of all the reasons I ought to hold myself in superior regard. And then, this morning—in the time it took for a silly gossiping nurse to let it slip that I was to have a visitor—my every grudge against Odalie immediately lifted. And now I sit here, wretched instinctual creature that I am, my eyes hungry once again for the sight of her.

But at precisely a quarter after one, all my soaring hopes come crashing to the ground when Dr. Benson comes to tell me my visitor has arrived, and as a special reward for my good behavior as of late I will be allowed to visit with “him” privately in my room as long as I heed the rules of proper conduct, of course.
The orderlies will be watching,
Dr. Benson reminds me. I nod.
So,
I think with considerable disappointment.
My visitor is a man.

I suppose there was a time when I would’ve been cheered to see, say, the Sergeant stepping over my threshold. But sadly, now that time has passed, I admit: From the moment we met I’d placed the Sergeant on so high a pedestal, he could not help but eventually fall. In my adulation, I overestimated him. His was not an unbending constitution after all, for in the end Odalie bent him to her will as she did with so many things. If I were to see him now, I fear I should be preoccupied, speculating over exactly what the—ahem—
rate
of exchange was between them. It is best to remain ignorant of certain things.

I am markedly disappointed now, but still full of apprehension. I sit and fidget until I realize I am practically wringing my hands, so I stop and concentrate on sitting very, very still.

The last person I am expecting to see is the Lieutenant Detective, but suddenly there he is, slouching in my doorway, his hands jammed into his jacket pockets like always.
May I come in, Rose,
he asks, and I realize it is a strange comfort to hear my given name, even though under normal circumstances I would prefer for him to call me
Miss Baker
. Never one for bad manners, I invite him in. He ambles in comfortably enough, but once in the center of the room he looks uncertain of what to do next. I gesture to the metal chair the orderlies have set out for expressly this purpose, and the Lieutenant Detective coughs and sits down.

Rose,
he says.

Lieutenant Detective,
I say.

He doesn’t speak for several minutes. The nerves I felt just minutes earlier have mysteriously disappeared. I feel more calm than I have in weeks, though I can’t exactly pinpoint why. The Lieutenant Detective, by contrast, looks more jittery than I have ever seen him. I watch as he extracts a cigarette from his inside jacket pocket. Absentmindedly, he pats a different pocket (for a match, I assume), but then, with a glance at the
NO SMOKING
sign posted in the hallway just outside my door, stops and holds the cigarette as if unsure what to do with it. He twirls it over his knuckles until it slips to the floor. Our eyes trail to where it falls, but he makes no move to pick it up.

Rose,
he begins again. But this time I interrupt him.

They call me Ginevra these days,
I say. His eyes widen. I can see them raking over the contours of my face, searching for something.

Yes, about that . . . ,
he says.

Why have you come here,
I interrupt again.

I’ve come because . . . ,
he says, but stops when he senses a shadow over his shoulder. An orderly passes by my door and pops his head in, aggressively swiveling it once in each direction—making sure, I suppose, that no funny business is going on, that the Lieutenant Detective is not slipping me a spoon and a map with instructions on how to tunnel my way out. I picture this scenario playing out and suddenly laugh aloud. Startled, the Lieutenant Detective looks up at me, and I catch something familiar in his expression—something I realize has always been there but that I haven’t ever put my finger on before. It is fear. The Lieutenant Detective is afraid of me. All this time, and I am only just now seeing it has always been so.

You would think they might trust a man of the law and just leave us be,
I say about the orderly having just put in a none-too-subtle appearance. I mean this kindly, in the spirit of solidarity, but I can see my comment further disturbs the Lieutenant Detective.

Yes
 . . .
well. You know, technically speaking, I was above the Sergeant
 . . .
and so responsible for his conduct, as he was
—
of course
—
for yours,
he tells me.
That Vitalli business got me into a bit of hot water as well.

My apologies,
I say, but he doesn’t answer. Lost in thought, he looks to the floor where the cigarette still lays without really seeing it. Several minutes pass, and then he finally clears his throat.

You know I don
’
t believe it,
he suddenly blurts in a confessional tone.

Believe what,
I say.

All this business,
he says.
About you. I can’t believe you were behind it.
Again I feel his eyes raking over my face; I wish he would stop trying to read whatever it is he believes must be written there in invisible ink (oh, so he thinks).
Especially when it’s clear she’s . . . she’s so . . .

Where is she,
I suddenly demand. At this, he gets up from his chair and ambles over to the small window at the far end of my room, pretending to look at the view. I know he is pretending because I have seen the view and I know there is nothing much to look at. One tree. The corner of the opposing brick building, speckled in moss. An unsightly amount of barbed wire atop a fence.
Where is she,
I repeat.

Gone,
he says, and although I know it is the answer I have been expecting all along to hear, I feel my heart sink. He turns around. The scar on his forehead crinkles into the folds of his brow.
It happened right after—right after . . .
He hesitates.
She said she didn’t feel safe, that she needed to start over.

Of course,
I say.
Of course she did.
Inside I feel my soul curl up into a small, knotted thing. But then the Lieutenant Detective says something I am not expecting to hear.

She asked me to give you something
. He reaches deep into his right jacket pocket and produces a box. My heart immediately sets to pounding again—the way it did this morning when the nurses told me I had a visitor and I had dared to hope it would be her. It is a small box, about the size of a jewelry box, and covered in paper printed with roses. No detail was too small for Odalie. This embellishment cannot be a mistake. I reach out for it and take it in my hand. Inside I discover a single object. It is a brooch—a very expensive-looking one, with opals, diamonds, and black onyx stones all set into a very modern starburst pattern.
She got it from your desk,
he needlessly informs me. She said you would want it.

I hold the brooch in the palm of my hand and gaze at it. It is a lovely, mesmerizing sight; the shapes of it are now sharp and jagged and bittersweet in my mind. I understand what she is saying, and her cruelty has knocked the wind out of me. My eyes well up, but I do not cry.

Are you all right, Rose,
asks the Lieutenant Detective. When I do not answer, he crosses the room and stands directly in front of me.
Are you all right?
He puts his hands on my shoulders. We are face-to-face. So close our noses are almost touching. I look into his eyes and see a soft, vulnerable spot somewhere deep within the dark of his pupils. Something vaguely malicious comes over me. I hear him give a little gasp of exhilaration and I feel him draw in his breath sharply, and I understand finally he has been wanting me to do this all along. I have never kissed a man before, but I have observed Odalie on more than one occasion, and I find myself taking action with a natural ease, as though executing by rote memory the scenes I’d witnessed. It is slow and warm, until I feel a sense of urgency in the Lieutenant Detective’s lips awakening an inkling of urgency in my own lips, and for a moment I almost believe in the truth of this gesture. But seconds tick by and before the kiss is over, I remember the knife he used on the night my dress got stuck in the door of the passageway exit at the speakeasy, and I feel my hand automatically reach for it. The Lieutenant Detective does not appear to feel a thing. When I pull away from him, he is gazing at me in a daze, a slow smile spreading over his face.

Then he looks down and sees the knife in my hand. I flip it open.

Rose,
he says, his eyes going wide.

I put a finger to my lips and I shake my head. And then, in a flash, I have gathered all my hair into one hand. The knife slices through it in a single clean cut, and I feel my unevenly bobbed hair tickling my cheek. Suddenly, there is a great commotion all about me. Two orderlies have caught on and have rushed into the room. The Lieutenant Detective staggers backward. The orderlies pounce on me and take the knife from my hand. They start to wrestle me to the ground, but when they feel no resistance from me they stop and seat me in the metal chair, where I sit with my body gone slack like an abandoned marionette. They shout down the hall for Dr. Benson.

On the ground there is a pile of mousy brown hair, already netted together like some sort of absurd bird’s nest, and somewhere underneath the pile lies a single cigarette. I bend down and, brushing the hair aside, pick up the cigarette.
Would you mind terribly giving me a light,
I say to the Lieutenant Detective. For a moment, I think he is going to turn and run out of the room. He is looking at me with a different expression now, one I have never before seen on his face, and I know this will be the last time he comes to visit me. Slowly, with a shaking hand, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a matchbook. He strikes a match, and the flame dances with his quivering hand.

As I lean down to the match and inhale, I think of Odalie on the infamous day she strode into the office with her freshly cut bob of hair. I remember it was a Tuesday. In my mind, Tuesdays have always seemed like the most ordinary and mundane of all weekdays. But there she was, making Tuesday into a day none of us would ever—could ever—forget. I hardly knew her then; at that point she was still just the new girl in the typing pool with pretty clothes and a careless way with her jewelry. We had yet to share the secrets that were still to come, the late nights over hot toddies, the drowsy chat sessions spent reclining together on the same bed. She walked in that morning and the entire precinct held its breath. It was as if someone had stopped the very ticking of the clock. Then, someone—I can’t for the life of me remember who—paid Odalie a compliment. She turned her head to acknowledge it, and as her voice rode those familiar musical scales in a mellifluous trill of laughter, the glossy black of her newly shorn hair swung in a jaunty embrace of her cheeks. With that short hair it was as though every angle of her was crying out,
I am free! Oh, how free! And how much freer than you!

The match goes out, and the Lieutenant Detective slowly retracts his trembling hand. But no matter; my cigarette is lit. I take a nice long drag on it, tilt my head upward, and exhale. If I am still sorry for anyone, it is Teddy. But as I’ve already explained in great detail, there must always be sacrifices along the road to evolution. For the briefest of seconds, I see a flash of Teddy’s face, his eyes wide with terror as he falls downward toward the concrete below.

How about that, Odalie,
I think, and take another drag of the cigarette.
Two can play at this game.