The Receptionist (10 page)

But the place we came back to again and again was the Five Spot in the East Village, to hear
Th
elonious Monk in what must have been a summer-long gig. Here my education in the stratosphere of jazz piano became complete.
Th
e room was always covered in a blue haze of smoke; the crowd was always putting away quantities of scotch. Dewar’s and soda became my drink for its ability to build to a not incapacitating buzz that could be sustained through the four or five drinks that Evan consumed during an average stay. Was I listening? he’d ask. Did I hear that? Did I follow what sophisticated variations the Monk was pulling out of the long-since-abandoned melody? Yes, I was listening. Yes, I heard, and yes, I was caught up in the sense of a musician far, far away inside his own head; but truth to tell, I have never been able to keep hold of a melodic line past the third or fourth variation, and the atonal stuff left me completely at a loss. Never mind, Evan liked it and I was there to learn.

When I got back from the grand tour that separated me from Evan for nearly four weeks—and me from the
New Yorker
art department forever—it was immediately apparent that something had shifted. Mainly him. He had become shifty eyed.
Th
is was unnecessary, since he had seen this coming all along, but perhaps it made him nervous that I had been a virgin. He was used to more experienced partners who were better at the game. He began using a cutting style of mockery, making fun of what he called my “Aw, shucks” manner and attributing it to my “Spamtown upbringing.” I couldn’t seem to stop hunting for relationship clues. Were we engaged or weren’t we? And why, each time I attempted clarification, did Evan turn so mean?

On the first of October, at Evan’s suggestion, I moved down to Jane Street in Greenwich Village to an apartment with no roommate. He said it was more convenient.
Th
e places we went to in October were basically the same places we had gone to all summer, but their importance as glamorous lead-ups to bed now seemed a bit threadbare and transparent.

In early November I was heartened when Evan asked me to arrange a long lunch hour in order to view an apartment he wanted me to see, which was for rent and immediate occupancy, on Washington Square. We were welcomed into the bare flat by the landlady, a bright-eyed woman with a curly frizz of salt-and-pepper hair, the leathery, wrinkled skin of a heavy smoker, and the determinedly cheerful demeanor of the businesswoman ready to close a deal.

After she finished showing us through the somewhat dim one-bedroom apartment on the second-floor front of the old brownstone (a matter of a very few minutes), Evan invited me to give him my opinion.

“Well,” I began dubiously, as I peered into the shallow hall cubbyhole that separated the front parlor from the rear bedroom, a hall that also contained what there was of a Pullman kitchen and a bathroom with a two-foot-square shower stall and no tub. “
Th
ere isn’t much closet space.” “Oh”—the landlady shrugged, jiggling her ring of keys—“putting one of those charming French armoires in the bedroom will take care of that.” Perhaps realizing that she needed to do more in order to enlist me on her side, she gave me a toothy smile and said, “It is so good of you, dear, to come down here with Mr. Simm on your lunch hour to give him, as he put it to me, ‘the woman’s point of view.’ ” Shifting her smile to “Mr. Simm,” she went on, “When was it you said your fiancée would be coming over from Austria? December? I wish I could hold it for that long, but as I mentioned on the phone, I have another party waiting, and if I am to keep it for you, I really have to have a deposit today.”

Evan took my elbow and drew me into the comparative privacy of the bedroom, where he must have been moved by the stricken look on my face as I hissed, “Fiancée? Fiancée?” All he could do was mumble, with a rueful grin, “Oh, what tangled webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” I remember thinking, even through the yellowish blue of pain closing down over my eyes and forehead, that it was unbelievable that he could be both so apt and so literary at such a moment.

How I got through the rest of that day, how I got back to the office, took up my chair at my desk, endured the routine of the remaining four hours of the workday, I haven’t a clue—all passed without leaving a trace in my memory.

In December, Evan married.

In January he called and I let him back into my apartment and back into my bed.
Th
e rest of that month found me ignorant as ever of my own inner life, yet exploring depths of self-loathing and self-revulsion I hadn’t known existed.

I see that in giving my account of this affair, I have told nothing about my own feelings. Was I even in love with this man I was condemning for having falsely avowed love for me—perhaps without feeling a trace of love for him? I thrilled to his touch—did that mean I was attracted to him physically but not morally or spiritually? Truth to tell, I was not attracted to him at all except as a torso, with legs and a penis of fine proportions. I thought he was funny looking, jug jawed and knobby nosed and ungraceful in stride. How in the world, if I was not attracted to him, did it happen that I thrilled to his touch? Quite surprisingly, these were questions I did not ask.

I did, however, begin keeping notebooks.

Now I am lost. I’m not even sure of my sex any longer. I want to swing from the rafters, to hurl a bottle of ink at a white wall. I loathe that I haven’t the courage to do either of those things. I haven’t the courage to walk into the water as Virginia Woolf did. She weighted her pockets. I would not find it necessary—I can’t swim.

Cover up. Hold tight. Shut up and wait.
Th
at’s what I do. But lately I know it is wrong and dangerous. I’ve begun to shout.
Th
e wrong words at the wrong people. All the louder because I did not do it when I should have.

But for those notebook entries I might have remained clueless about what was happening to me and thus escaped harm altogether. Yet there was the abyss, waiting to stare me in the face when, on Wednesday, February 3, I narrowly avoided desecrating Evan and Marta’s marriage bed. Evan had insisted we stop at the Ninth Street digs he and Marta had moved into to pick up his “forgotten wallet.” Marta was in St. Vincent’s, where she had been hospitalized with appendicitis. When I refused the offered bed (offered to my horror), Evan accompanied me in a taxi to my place and left me at the curb. Not because his finer feelings surfaced, but because he had to go and fetch Marta, and as he explained to me, my push-back at Ninth Street had cost us valuable adultery time. I got up to my cold, high-ceilinged flat with no conscious participation of my own.
Yes,
I thought as I opened the door,
this is hell.
Th
is is where I live now.

Th
at evening I attempted suicide. My life, as I learned later on, had hinged upon a misunderstanding. I knew you were supposed to stuff a rug under the door when gassing yourself. But not having any rugs, I took at face value the notice on my aluminum-plated front door proclaiming it a fire door. Assuming that this meant it was airtight, I blew out the pilot light, turned on the oven, opened all the burners, and went to bed.

I was slapped back into groggy consciousness to find an oxygen mask over my mouth, an intern shaking me, the lights, the damned lights, blazing, the doors and windows wide open, and a mortifying cluster of neighbors and policemen around my bed.
Th
e neighbors I could hardly resent. It was their home I had nearly destroyed. True, I had thought the house was empty at the time, but I had given no thought to the inflammatory possibilities of a house with a serious gas leak. Dimly I was aware of Art, the neighbor from downstairs, telling the policeman how lucky it was that he and his wife had decided to come back from their country place early, and how he had gotten in by climbing the fire escape and jimmying the badly warped sash on my fire escape window.

Later, in the ambulance, I noticed the intern’s hairy arms as he pressed me close to his starched white jacket, and I saw that he had a nice face as he looked into mine and said something like, “Oh, sweetheart, what have you done? And why have you done it?”

Th
e attendant at Bellevue was much less attractive and not at all nice. She said two things only, “Strip,” and “Shower with this bar of disinfectant.” After that, she handed me a blue two-piece pajama suit and a pair of paper slippers.

Th
e women’s dorm was fairly quiet, if you didn’t count snores, but the likelihood of sleep was sharply reduced by the bare bulbs burning on through what seemed like twelve hours of the night. But that couldn’t have been true, because at 7:00 a.m. we were lined up and taken to a dining hall and given oatmeal and weak coffee—in other words, breakfast.

Dr. Feingold told me, when he saw me sometime later that day, that he was recommending a week of observation, after which, if another evaluation merited release, I would be given the name of a short-term therapist to whom weekly visits would be prescribed.

“I spoke to your parents,” he said.

I opened my eyes wide at that.

“Your mother came on the line. I told her I was a doctor calling from a hospital in New York. I heard your father’s voice in the background asking, ‘Is she pregnant?’ I assured your mother that you were not pregnant and that you were all right.”

“What did you say had happened?” I asked around stiff
lips.

“Only that you had been brought in because you had tried to hurt yourself a little.”

“Oh, great,” I replied.

Dr. Feingold seemed very young. A resident psychiatrist probably, sympathetic, but he clearly didn’t have a clue about how to dispel alarm in middle-class parents standing in the kitchen of the living quarters behind their mom-and-pop grocery, trying to make a go of it out in southern Minnesota.

When I could have visitors, my pal Lizzie came around with a book and a magazine I had requested and asked, “What in the hell are you doing here?”

My office mate Betts was too polite to say the same, but I could see that she was just as mystified.

Later that week, a second evaluation resulted in my release from Bellevue, though there was good reason to suppose I was still in deep trouble. On the slender excuse that I knew no one else with a car, I called Evan and asked him to pick me up. What was I thinking? He agreed. He always knew good eating places, and it being noonish, he took us to a fifties diner on First Avenue that still had jukeboxes. Over tuna sandwiches he let me choose and I chose the song with the lyric “You must remember this,” and Evan said, “Yes, there is such comfort in cheap music, isn’t there?”
Th
at, finally, did it. I was still too sick in the head to muster anger at his miserable behavior toward me, but Evan’s misquote of Noel Coward put an end once and for all to my sleeping with him. How could I ever go to bed with someone who not only misquoted Coward but could dis the song Ingrid was humming just before she said, “Play it, Sam”?

As for the rest of Evan Simm’s story, it was so full of madness, sickness, and death as to evoke pity even in me. He used the imminent arrival of his child to order a lot of custom cabinetry to be installed in his two-bedroom flat on Ninth Street. Custom cabinetry is expensive, and Evan exerted a lot of pressure on Jim Geraghty to give him a drawing account and office space at the magazine.
Th
is would have to be on the eighteenth floor (
my
floor), an area mainly given over to writers, two departments (fashion and Talk), the mail room, and the library. Only six other cartoonists had offices there: Charles Addams, Frank Modell, James Stevenson, Ed Koren, Bob Weber, and Warren Miller. Perhaps detecting a look of desperation in Evan’s eye, Geraghty gave in.
Th
e move did not, however, result in more purchases of Simm cartoons. As his drawing account grew, Evan’s troubles grew, too.
Th
e baby arrived. When the little girl was no more than two, Marta was hospitalized for what may have been bipolar disorder. Evan sent for his mother to look after the child. A little woman, uncertain on her pins, she made a dazed trip or two through the eighteenth floor to her son’s office, perhaps in search of an emergency set of keys, or cab fare.

Hardly a faithful husband, and now with no wife at home to be faithful to, Evan’s pattern of too many girls, too much drinking, too much nightlife, and too many unpaid bills went into high gear. He grew a beard, which somewhat improved his jug chin by hiding its outline but emphasized his nose in an unfortunate way.
Th
e drinking was giving it the telltale flush of pink that comes of tiny burst blood vessels and has been seen in drinkers’ noses ever since W. C. Fields—maybe ever since Bacchus.

I was forced to see him slouching past my desk daily. I did my best to ignore him or, failing that, gave him censorious looks. When he got to the office before me, he took to leaving me message-pad drawings designed to soften the unsoftenable. Day after day I would come in and there would be another variation on the theme of the punning soup series.
Th
e constant was a shallow bowl of soup with a spoon resting beside the full-to-the-brim, steaming vessel. Some of the variations: A turtle’s head would emerge from the center of the bowl, looking sick and holding a partially smoked cigar. A caption on the back would read, “Green turtle.” A ropy, hairy appendage with longer black hairs at the end would droop bowlside and be labeled “Oxtail.”
Th
e head of a wattled, becombed chicken would occupy center bowl and be dubbed “Chicken noodle.” On and on it went, going through ever more groan-inducing puns until a blond nude lifted her saucy torso from the midst of a number called “Wanton.”

It all seemed too little and too late to me, a mere Band-Aid applied to a broken heart that didn’t begin to salve my wounds. But what did I know? Hadn’t someone named Norman Lear or Norman Jewison—anyway, Norman something —written a book that year about how watching Groucho Marx movies had cured him of cancer? So for all I knew, these stupid cartoons were playing their part in healing me. At any rate, Evan’s amusing drawings did me no harm, and I now think they came from his hands as a rather touchingly inhibited stab at an apology, a mea culpa in cartoons.