And at that, Lainie has become adept. It is both science and art, marshaling the parade of egos that crowded the lobby: tycoon execs, TV commercial playboys, yearling models. She learned to dial dead phone lines and improvise baloney to impress clients. “Hi, Larry. Pepsi-Cola had to reschedule to Thursday.” Lainie intuited when to do this. It was like monitoring Richard’s mood before asking for spending money. Of course, these days she didn’t ask; she had money of her own. She was proud of it and longed to share that pride with her husband. But he wouldn’t understand. He would take it as a personal affront.
Word reached Bernie that his impulse hire was paying off. Last week, he’d asked her to lunch. For the first half hour, he’d been like the rest of them. He’d pressured her to get an adult drink, and when she’d declined, ordered her a Gin Rickey anyway. She sipped at it once to appease him, and he’d taken that as a signal to reach across the table and place his hand atop hers. She could feel his wedding band. She slid her hand away, keeping her smile tight and cold.
It was like she’d passed a test neither had realized was being given. Bernie took a slug of his Manhattan, and the alcohol appeared to melt the salaciousness into an easy, uncomplicated affection. What must it feel like, Lainie wondered, to be a man and so blithely modify your intentions without fear of consequence?
“Look,” he said. “I invited you to lunch to offer you employment.”
“But I have a job.”
“Yes, a job—a part-time job. What I’m talking about is a career. A full-time position. Eight hours a day, forty hours a week. Benefits. Retirement package. The whole ball of wax.”
“Oh, Bernie. Thank you. But I told you—”
“I know what you’re going to say. Kids, school. But you know Melinda in accounting? You know Chuck’s girl, Barb? There’s probably six or seven ladies we’ve got on this deal right now. There’s a day care in the building. You bring them with you bright and early, and there’s a bus that comes around delivers them to their schools like packages. Klein & Saunders picks up the tab.”
“But why—” She held the Gin Rickey to settle her fidgeting fingers, even considered taking a gulp to settle her pulse. “Why would you do that for me?”
“Well, heck, Elaine. In this racket, you find someone good, you lock her down. Otherwise, she ends up at Arnold, Carson, and Adams spilling all our trade secrets.” Bernie shrugged. “This is the sixties. A few years from now, it’s going to be a woman’s world. You’ll have every single opportunity a man has. My advice is get ready, position yourself. Get in on the ground floor now. Receptionist today, but who knows? Office manager tomorrow? Down the road, future partner? You got the stuff, Elaine. You’re sharper than half the boneheads in the building.”
Had she drained the cocktail without realizing it? Her vision swam. To steady it, she looked past the bastion of ketchup, mustard, and steak sauce, and out the window, and saw a mother struggle with a grocery bag while pushing a wobbly baby carriage. Lainie looked in the opposite direction, into the restaurant’s murk, and saw sharp-suited sharks flashing teeth at heartsick mistresses, who prayed the men’s hungry looks meant something beyond their being devoured.
Lainie could guarantee them that the looks meant nothing. Just last night, Richard was saying that the asset he’d been hired to guard was nearing the end of its utility, and when it was gone, maybe the Stricklands would pull up stakes from Baltimore. He doesn’t like it here; she’s seen him with encyclopedia volumes on his lap, looking up Kansas City, Denver, Seattle. But Lainie does like it here. She thinks it’s the greatest city in the world. To be uprooted from the one place where she feels useful capsulizes the danger of attaching yourself to a man in the first place. You’re a parasite, and when your host begins to die—say, from an infection in his fingers—your bloodstream is poisoned, too.
She wanted to say yes to Bernie. She thought about it every day, every minute.
But would that be saying no to Richard?
“Tell you what, you think about it,” Bernie said. “Offer’s good for, let’s say, a month. Then I guess I’ll hire a second girl. Hey, let’s eat. I could eat a horse. Two horses. And the chariot behind them.”
16
FEAR DROPS ONTO Giles’s back like a pterodactyl shot from the sky. Occam is Baltimore’s own Bermuda Triangle, and he’s heard the wild rumors, most of which end with the suspicious death or disappearance of a courageous investigator. He feels a nausea. What Elisa is suggesting is far beyond the abilities of two broke deadbeats living above a crumbling movie theater. The fish-man of Elisa’s delusion must be a poor fellow born with physical deformities—and she wants to break him out?
Elisa is a good person, but her life experience is terrifically limited; she’s incapable of appreciating how deep run the fault lines of America’s Red Scare. Undesirables of all sorts risk their lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, and a homosexual painter? Why, that’s as undesirable as they come! No, he doesn’t have time for this rubbish. He has a meeting with Bernie, an advertisement over which he has slaved.
Giles turns away, knowing the gesture will hurt Elisa. It hurts him, too, to the point that he has trouble sliding his revised canvas into the portfolio case. He faces the wall before speaking, a cowardly tactic that prohibits a mute person’s interruption.
“When I was a boy,” he says, “a carnival pitched its tents out at Herring Run. They had a special exhibit, a whole tent full of natural oddities. One of them was a mermaid. I know because I paid five cents to see it. A sizable fortune for a boy in those days, I assure you. And do you know what this mermaid was? It was dead, first of all. All the paintings of some bare-breasted beauty didn’t square with the old mummified thing in the glass case. What it was was a monkey’s chest and head sewed to a fish tail. I knew that. Anyone could see that. But for years I told myself it’d been a mermaid, because I’d paid my money, hadn’t I? I wanted to believe. People like you and me, we need belief more than others, don’t we? Yet in the cold light of day, what was the mermaid? What was it really? Creative taxidermy. That’s so much of life, Elisa. Things patched together, without meaning, from which we, in our needful minds, create myths to suit us. Does that make sense?”
He buckles the case, the smart clicks the very sound of wisdom. He’s got to get going, after all; perhaps this will be the first of many small jiltings he delivers to Elisa like inoculations. He dons a placating grin and turns back around. His grin freezes solid. Elisa’s cold stare brings the outdoor chill gusting back into the apartment, and he shields himself from the spitting frost. She’s signing, bludgeon-hard and whip-fast, a tone he’s never seen her take, certain repeated symbols engraving themselves onto the air like Fourth of July sparklers. He attempts to look away, but she lunges into his line of sight, her signs like punches, like shaking him by the lapels.
“No,” he says. “We’re not doing it.”
Signs, signs.
“Because it’s breaking the law, that’s why! We’re probably breaking the law even talking about it!”