Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions (8 page)

“It’s like Spike for me, as though he took
the hit so I would live,”I tell Molly, something I’d never tell
Max, who has no patience or the willfully irrational.

“It’s very Viking”, she says.

“I didn’t know Vikings kept cats.”

“Of course they did. All heroic people had
them”, she says.

When a Viking dies, his warrior cat dies with
him. Together in the burning longboat they set out for
Valhalla.

When her Norwegian grandfather died his cat
died the same day.

“What’s so funny?” Molly asks.

I haven’t laughed since May, and now I can’t
stop. For a moment I forget my favorable odds, so taken with the
image: Spike and me in our matching horned helmets, the burning
rowboat on the Potomac that bears us out to sea and off to
Valhalla, where we are welcomed by a blazing pantheon of glorious
Vikings and all their heroic cats.

The other night I dreamed I was a mail order
bride who hadn’t worked out, so I was returned, dishonored, to my
village, which was the Waiting Room at Grand Central Station. All
the familiar faces were there. The woman with the receding
hairline. The drunk one with the melting caramel eyes. The one with
invisible friends. With all that obvious symbolism, a perfect
offering for my analyst, Dr.

Freundlicht.

“You seem to be overly sensitive to
rejection,” was what he said.

Was that the best he could do?

“What the hell do you know about rejection?
The moment you got into Med School, you had it made in the shade.
And don’t give me that crap about penis envy, either.”

.

Desperatly seeking employment. Recent college
grad, class of ’69. Writes well under pressure. Clever with words .
. .

.

“Are you sure you’re wearing a strong enough
deodorant?” my mother used to say by way of encouragement when I
set out on job interviews.

I almost landed an editorial assistant slot
at Casket and Sunnyside, the magazine of the funeral industry, but
was passed over at the last minute for a woman with 2/3 of a Ph.D.
in Linguistics from Harvard.

According to my father, who worked on Madison
Avenue for twenty years before setting up his own shop, being in
advertising was like getting paid to play, and wasn’t I a lucky
girl to have a father with connections in the Business?

He lined up interviews for me with his old
colleagues. I wore a navy blue interview dress, industrial strength
anti-perspirant, and carried writing samples, but failed to project
employability to these sleek men with their spacious offices and
lithe secretaries. Instead, they used the occasion to brag on
themselves, and asked to be remembered to my father.

.

“All our gals start out in the typing pool,”
said Frank Mambelli, Creative Director at Doyle Dane. He didn’t
even look at my writing samples.

“Do guys have to start out in the typing pool
too?” I asked Cy Berman.

Another friend of the family. I used to baby
sit for the Berman kids.

“That’s what we have secretaries for,
Lauren.”

“Do any of your gals ever get out of the
typing pool?”

“That’s where we get our private
secretaries,” he said.

Between interviews, I hung out in the Grand
Central Station waiting room, scanning the classifieds for job
leads. I grew familiar with all the women with shopping bags, the
ones who waited for trains that weren’t coming and talked to
imaginary friends. Unclaimed women with no visible means of
support. Like me, except I was younger and better dressed. I went
to the movies on my lunch money, and saw every movie on 42nd Street
that wasn’t x-rated. In The Arrangement Kirk Douglas languished in
anguish, while Faye Dunaway blasted him for not living up to his
potential. Poor Kirk, with his swimming pool and his waterfront
mansion, who’d never write the Great American Novel because he’d
been such a successful ad man. Most of the audience thought this a
hoot,

“How did your day go, sweetheart,” my father
said when we met in Grand Central to take the train home.

“Okay,” I said, unable to meet his eyes.

.

Copy trainee wanted. English Major preferred.
Advancement opportunity for bright self-starter . . .

After Christmas I answered an ad in the New
York Times and landed an entry level job with Chatsworth Osborn, a
small agency specializing in real estate and mail order
advertising. My first press release was the letter I wrote to the
Alumnae Quarterly. Like any good press release it did not lie, but
simply stressed the aspects most likely to impress a casual
reader.

83 Bleeker Street

New York, NY

February 10, 1970

Dear Muffy,

Lauren Ginsburg is alive and well and living
in Greenwich Village. My apartment is right around the corner from
The Fantasticks and the Little Red Schoolhouse. Working on Madison
Avenue and living in the Village is everything I dreamed it would
be . . .

.

The apartment in the Village was four tiny
rooms on the sixth floor of an old six-floor walk-up tenement
building. For $65 a month and my share of utilities I moved into a
closet size bedroom with a view of the air shaft. Zebra striped
contact paper covered the wall facing my bed. The yellow and green
daisy stuff was in the kitchen.

I’d never met anyone like Eva, the roommate
who came with the apartment. She fit none of the available
categories. She was a philosophy major from Oklahoma State with a
Fredericks of Hollywood wardrobe; a logical positivist with bad
taste. Everything in her closet was either jungle print or black.
It all fit tight and smelled of stale perfume. She sold magazine
subscriptions by telephone, which she thought was a fabulous job.
She loved everything about New York except New Yorkers, who were,
in her words, jaded and provincial. After dinner Eva and I often
played chess. She could talk and play at the same time, which gave
her a decided advantage over me.

“I just hate it when I call those mean little
Westchester County towns,” she complained one night.

I defended the folkways of New York
suburbanites.

“You always have to answer a ringing phone no
matter what else you’re doing, and it’s a real pain when someone
interrupts your dinner to sell you something.”

“But people don’t have to be so unfriendly
about it. And no one ever smiles at you on the street,” she
said.

“There’s eight million people in the Naked
City. If I smiled at all of them my teeth would fall out. Plus lots
of them are crazy and you don’t want to make eye contact.”

“That’s what I mean by jaded,” she said, and
swiped my remaining bishop.

Provincial was wearing white cotton
underpants instead of black nylon panties. The very word “panties”
made me cringe, and still does. I hated the way nylon felt next to
my skin. Cold and insinuating, like the men I met in the East Side
singles bars Eva took me to, who put their hands on my thighs and
talked about their careers.

“You can’t go back to the freshman mixer,”
Eva said. “It’s time to move on to men in suits. Read
Cosmopolitan.”

She found Cosmopolitan lively and
informative, a fount of wisdom and inspiration, but I found it
unbearably sad. The Cosmo Girl, with her spike heels and cleavage,
lived exclusively under man-made light. She was calculating, yet
innocent, avid to please. Her eye always on the main chance, yet
she seemed satisfied with so little: a clerical job, lingerie, and
a boss to seduce.

.

My boss, Mr. Fischbach was the president and
founder of Chatsworth Osborn. Tall, gray, and cadaverous, he was a
presence behind closed doors. He was rumored to be an Angel, one of
those Broadway investors who financed vehicles for aging stars and
young proteges. Twice a day I delivered his mail. He never spoke to
me. Sometimes he didn’t even look up from the pages of his
Variety.

Besides delivering mail, I proofread copy and
clipped our ads as they appeared in print. Chatsworth Osborn ads
ran in airplane magazines and publications of fraternal orders. A
Chatsworth Osborn ad was direct. Never buy another pair of socks in
your life! Improve TV reception for only $9.95! There was always a
fourteen day money back guarantee if you weren’t completely
satisfied.

The bard of Forever Socks and Day-glo Panties
was Lenny, chief copywriter and self proclaimed “dirty old man.” He
looked like a friendly mastiff. Lots of jowl and grizzled hair at
the temples, but he wore great shirts. His attitude towards me was
of good natured lechery, which I didn’t take seriously, since he
was married. He had one of those cigarette scorched, Humphrey
Bogart voices, like my father. He even smelled the same, a friendly
aroma of coffee and unfiltered Camels.

“You’re the only broad with class around
here,” he said when I asked him why he didn’t bother the
secretaries instead of me.

“That’s because I still wear knee socks and
Weejuns,” I said.

“Seriously. You’ve got an aristocratic
profile. C’mere,” he said, and grabbed for my ass in a pro forma
sort of way.

“Cut it out, Lenny. You’re old enough to be
my father.”

“You took Psychology, college girl,” he said.
“ Admit it. Haven’t you ever wanted to make it with the old
man?”

.

I shared a windowless cubicle with two other
trainees. Kenneth was 19 and had the face of an angel if you could
overlook the acne. He spoke real slow because he was trying to get
the Brooklyn out of his voice. Ralph, who said he was 19 but looked
older, spoke fast and southern. I imagined Ralph outfitted by
doting maiden aunts who still shopped the boys department. He wore
such odd clothes, everything too small, and in strange colors or
wallpaper prints. Ralph and Kenneth were roommates in real life as
well.

One night they invited me over to the
apartment they shared off Central Park West. Black leather and
chrome Barcelona chairs, a white overstuffed sofa, and only the
barest glimpse of kitchen behind a mirrored screen. I wondered how
they could afford it.

“What do the bedrooms look like?” I said.

“Bedrooms?” Ralph said, and Kenneth
blushed.

I felt very, very provincial.

Dinner was fondu. Cosmo recommended fondue as
the perfect little dinner for promoting an intimate situation.
Under candlelight, the three of us huddled around the fondue pot
with our small skewers of raw meat. After dinner, Ralph and Kenneth
showed me their portfolios, the collection of glossy photographs
that would give them the edge they needed for modeling jobs. In
black and white, Ralph looked sophisticated, debonair, and ageless
as Astaire, while Kenneth combined the intense self-absorption of
James Dean with the clean gleam of Tab Hunter.

“You’re so lucky to get the mail run,” said
Kenneth.

“I’ve never met anyone as weird as Mr.
Fischbach,” I said. “Does he only come out at night, or what?”

Ralph giggled.

“I’m not furniture, “ I said. “It wouldn’t
kill him to thank me for bringing him his precious Variety.”

“He’s just shy,” Ralph said. “Ian doesn’t
think you’re a threat.”

Ian Fishbach was the Vice President of
Chatsworth Osborn. He had a face like the hatchet fish in the
reception area aquarium, and no one knew what he did for fun.

“What exactly do you mean by threat?” I
asked.

“Elliot won’t notice you the way he’d notice
Kenneth,” Ralph said, using Mr. Fishbach’s first name as though
they were actually friends, although there was a little. Like the
word “panties”insinuated

“I don’t see the connection,” I said.

“With a little help from Elliot, Kenneth
could be a star,” Ralph said.

“Aw go on,” said Kenneth in Brooklyn, and
looked down at the floor.

“You know it’s God’s own truth, sweet pea,”
Ralph said, and turned to me for confirmation. “Doesn’t our boy
have star quality?”

Apparently anyone could be a star; it was
just a matter of perceiving your opportunities. When I got home I
found Eva had left the latest Cosmo on my bed page opened to a
story about how one woman launched a successful career in
advertising. She was only a part time typist but her Boss took the
requisite interest. First he let her write copy for some of his
smaller accounts. Next came bigger accounts, and finally a
promotion and a secretary of her own.

.

A few days later Lenny handed me a miniature
grandfather clock .

“Write me a headline and some body copy,” he
said. “ I need it by lunch. Be sure to mention the beautiful
lifelike woodgrain vinyl.”

The follow up assignments included a book
entitled Painless Office Rectal Surgery, and a digital alarm clock
in the shape of a television. “Wake up to a New Face!” I wrote.
Lenny liked that one best.

In February I had ads running in Popular
Mechanics, The Wall Street Journal and Moose Monthly, which was the
magazine of the Loyal Order of Moose.

“I always said you had star quality,” said
Ralph when I showed him my first proofs.

In March there was a rash of mid-town
Manhattan bomb scares, which were attributed to the Weather
Underground. I suspected ours was a hoax, and that Lenny phoned it
in so we could play hooky. It was sunny, almost balmy outside and
the air smelled like spring that day. Lenny and I spent bomb scare
afternoon in the bar across the street, along with Kenneth and
Ralph. We drank martinis and talked about Naked Came the Stranger.
A bunch of Newsday reporters had written the book as a joke under a
pseudonym. Now they were rich and famous.

“I bet we could do something like that in six
weeks,” Lenny said.

That day it felt like my brilliant career was
finally under way. Play for pay, the way work was supposed to be,
if you were bright and funny and basically nice.