Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions (9 page)

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In April I was walking through Washington
Square Park when a bearded hippie in Washington called out my
name.

“Hey there, Lauren Ginsburg! Don’t you
recognize an old friend?”

. His hair fluffed out in all directions like
a dandelion going to seed. His gauzy blue shirt was covered in
embroidery and mirrors. He looked like no one I knew.

“Okay, I’ll give you a hint,” he said.
“Kensico Dam.”

High school. Saturday nights. Little Anthony
and the Imperials on the car radio, while Jake Meltzer tries to
remove my bra.

“Jake Meltzer!”

I was so glad to see someone from my old life
that I forgot all the good reasons I’d had for never wanting to see
him again. Spilt milk. Water over the dam. Over lunch, he told me
he was dropping out of Harvard Law School if he didn’t flunk out
first. Anything lower than an A was dirt to Jake, as I remembered,
but he’d also dropped out of Cornell after the first term. It
seemed to be his particular destiny to get accepted by Ivy League
institutions he could turn around and despise. His reasons for
hating Cornell were too much cold weather and too many large,
wholesome looking women. I imagined some equally flimsy pretext for
ditching Harvard. He didn’t appreciate how lucky he was to still be
a student, to be in training for a respected profession.

No one asked lawyers if they could type.

“So what’s wrong with law school?” I
asked.

“Imagine Hell Week that lasts forever.
Everyone in your pledge class is some new form of asshole. If you
graduate you get a chance to work with and for the scum of the
earth. I’m moving to San Francisco while there’s still time to be a
hippie.”

“What about the draft?”

Back then only med school got you out of the
draft. Med school, or a doctor’s note that testified to your
physical unfitness for army life. Richard Nixon, our new president,
had campaigned on the promise of having “a secret plan to end the
Viet Nam War.” The war seemed to be expanding, but Jake did not
appear concerned.

“The family doctor swears I got a heart
murmur and any heavy lifting would kill me, so basic training is
out of the question, on account of the way they make you carry
things. You going to invite me for dinner or what?”

.

When I buzzed Jake into 270 6th Avenue, it
was as though I was noticing all its awfulness for the first time:
the buzzing of the overhead florescent lights, the egg yolk colored
hallway, and a mingled orderof onions and cat spray.

“This place is real squalor,” he said.

“Actually,’ I said,” I don’t hang out in the
lobby much.”

“What you have down here does not qualify as
a lobby. No place does where you have to keep single file. Is the
elevator working?”

“What elevator?” I said.

Eva let me borrow her fondue set for
dinner.

“If I catch a disease from this, I’ll sue,”
Jake said as he speared his first piece of raw meat.

“I bet you guys want to be alone,” Eva said,
and retreated to her room.

“What’s her problem?” Jake asked.

“She’s just shy,” I said.

“She looks like a hooker,” he said.

After dinner I showed Jake “Wake up to a New
Face!” in the March issue of Moose Monthly. I didn’t expect lavish
praise from Jake for my accomplishments, just a polite display of
interest.

“If your daddy is a Moose and he dies when
you’re a kid there’s a Moose orphanage. It’s called Mooseheart. The
old folks home is Moosehaven,” I said.

“You got a real crummy place here,” he said.
“It’s a turn-off for a guy to visit a girl in a building that
smells like onions and cat piss. You should move back in with your
folks.”

“I can’t stay up past ten thirty in my own
bedroom and read without my mother coming in and turning out the
lights. She treats me like I’m twelve.”

“I still remember the time she invited me to
dinner,” Jake said. “A very gracious individual, your Mom.”

It occurred to me that they had a lot in
common, Jake and my mother. They were both generous when it came to
constructive criticism, and quick to find fault. It was bad manners
to invite yourself to dinner and then complain about the
accommodations, but my apartment did reek of kitty litter and
downward mobility. Only someone who cared would bother to tell you
every thing that was wrong with you and the way you lived.

“Sorry to eat and run,” he said. “Got a date
to take acid with this woman I just met. If you ever get to San
Francisco, look me up.”

.

In May I wore a pants suit into work, and Ian
called me into his office to explain office policy.

“Women don’t wear pants in this office,” Ian
said.

“I’m out of pantyhose,” I explained. “You try
to keep yourself in pantyhose on $67.50 take home. What I mean to
say is, it’s time I had a raise.”

That was the point in the script where
they’re supposed to tell you they admire your spunk.

“We’ll take this up with Mr. Fischbach,” Ian
said.

After my run in with Ian over the pants suit,
Kenneth got the mail run.

The day of my appointment with Mr. Fischbach
to talk salary, I wore new pantyhose and the navy blue interview
dress. He looked through me as though I was a pane of dirty
glass.

“What makes you think you’re worth any more
money to do a job you don’t perform very well as is?” he said.

“I’m writing copy now,” I said.”I’m really a
junior copywriter.”

I handed Mr. Fischbach ‘Wake Up to a New
Face.’ He handed it back.

“The last time we advertised for your
position we had fifty applicants,” he said.

Lenny saw me when I came out of the Ladies
Room, my eyes all puffy from crying.

“Meet me across the street after work,” he
said.

.

Lenny guided me to the large corner booth in
back and ordered us both martinis.

“I’m serious about that book,” he said. “We
could make a fortune.”

The touch of his hand on the tense spot just
between my shoulder blades felt like kindness itself. How starved I
was.

Heaven protect the working girl.

Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl.

“It’s about time you took advantage of your
opportunities,” Eva said that night.

“It still doesn’t feel right,” I said.

“It’s not cheap if you actually like the
guy,” she said.

“I like Lenny all right, I just don’t respect
him,” I said. “How can you respect an old guy who cheats on his
wife?”

“You don’t have to marry him,” she said. You
just have to let him improve your career.” She tossed me her
favorite leopard print Banlon shift, which reeked of My Sin. “This
dress is Checkmate,” she explained. “I save it for closing the
deal.”

Kenneth and Ralph told me how nice I looked
in the checkmate dress. Even Mr. Fischbach managed a wintry little
smirk when we passed in the hall. Lenny winked at me over the
coffee tray. Later, he phoned me from his office.

“Under the clock at the Biltmore at 5,” he
said.

Soon I would be reborn as the Cosmopolitan
girl, realistic and proud of it. Dressed to kill and eager to
please. Something would be lost. Nothing marketable, just my jaded,
provincial side.

At three-thirty Ian called me into his
office, and shut the door.

“Take the rest of the day off,” he said.
“You’re fired.”

.

This is what my dream tells me: the world is
still cold, and I’ll never find a parking place. Wih my hard won
law degree I should have been a contender, one of those
mini-skirted babes who does it all, instead of a frump in sensible
shoes.

“I’m a failure!” I tell Dr. Freundlicht.

“If you say so,” he said, in an accommodating
tone of voice. “But aren’t you being a little disingenuous? It
sounds to me like you are bemoaning your failure to become a whore
instead of an honest lawyer who works for the Department of Labor.
You can’t have it both ways, not if you’re looking for
sympathy.”

“I’m only an honest lawyer by default,” I
explained. “It’s because I don’t have what it takes to succeed. I’m
no good at sales. When I try to please I miss by miles. There’s
nothing more pathetic than a failed prostitute.”

“You often start stories but never finish
them,” Dr.Freundlicht said. “What happened with you and the married
man?”

.

Here’s what I felt the moment Ian fired me:
sheer relief.

Dutifully, I waited for Lenny under the clock
at the Biltmore because a nice girl never stood anyone up. I didn’t
know if Lenny would come once he’d found out I was fired. I sort of
hoped he wouldn’t.

In which case, what was the point of waiting
for a married man under the clock of the Biltmore?

I thought wistfully of fresh sheets and an
absence of kitty litter. There was still time to catch the next
train back to Larchmont. No, what I really wanted to do was get out
of Eva’s slimy dress and into something cotton, something that had
my own smell on it.

The next Monday, I went down to Church
Street, flashed my college diploma at the personnel specialist, and
was hired by the New York City Department of Social Services at
twice my old salary to be a welfare caseworker. A union would
negotiate raises on my behalf, and I couldn’t be fired except for
criminal behavior. I also signed up to take the LSATs. I would
never be poor again, except in my dreams. I could even afford the
luxury of psychoanalysis four times a week. Isn’t that one
definition of success, being able to pay for your own therapy.

By now, hadn’t Psychoanalysis fulfilled its
modest promise, the transformation of misery into ordinary
unhappiness? I’d quit smoking with relative ease and no longer fell
in love with men who reminded me of my mother. I had yet to achieve
Freud’s definition of success: satisfaction in love and work. Well,
Freud never said it was easy.

“You’re so lucky to have a vocation. To do
work you believe in and make a good living at it,” I tell Dr.
Freundlicht. “What I do for a living feels like makework half the
time. If only I had a talent.”

“But you do have a talent, a very useful
one,” Dr. Freundlicht said. “You do well on standardized tests. I’m
not joking, by the way.”

Our time was up.

“We all make a living off our wits as best we
can,” he said, gently, as I got up to leave.

He was letting me in on the joke.

Vienna, 1902. Sigmund Freud seeks non-addictive
cocaine substitute ,discovers Prozac. Revises Civilization and its
Discontents to add happy ending, repudiates psychoanalysis.
Incidence of neurasthenia plummets, as does Jewish birth rate.
Apprentice pastry-chef Ludwig Wittgenstein invents the
Sacher-Masoch tort.

Prague, 1912. Franz Kafka moves out of parents’
house for good, marries. Writes Metamorphosis, a popular children’s
story about a man who turns into a great big bug and has many
exciting adventures.

London, 1920. T.S. Eliot tears up drafts of
Wasteland, tells Ezra Pound he wants to write show tunes for shop
girls and live on the Riviera. Teams up with George Gershwin to
write CATS!

Memphis, 1926. Bessie Smith quits vaudeville, opens
beauty parlor. Robert Johnson tries to buy back soul from the
Devil, struck by lightening.

Berlin, 1933. Metamorphosis adopted for stage. Lotte
Lenya sings the Ballad of Max the Roach. Burning of the
Reichstag.

London, 1944. Churchill takes up exercise and quits
smoking for the duration of the Blitz. House and Garden editor
Virginia Woolf urges wartime Britain ‘think Chintz’. 10,000th
performance of CATS!.

1952. Dixieland legend Miles Davis quits show
business to attend Dental School. Billie Holliday records White
Christmas with Perry Como.

1956. Steep decline in alcoholism, Soviet birthrate.
Nikita Khrushchev tells U.S. “We will bury you—in cheap household
appliances.’’ Russia leads world in production of hair dryers and
toasters.

1964. Lawrence Welk named Downbeat Musician of the
Year. Battle of the Bands won by British barbershop quartet,
Rolling Stones.

1970. Janis Joplin passes California Bar. Green
Beret Jim Momson missing in action. Billie Holiday stars in revival
of Cats.

1978. Sylvia Plath marries Ernest Hemingway, opens
first bed and breakfast in Ketchum.

1984. IPO for Sylvia Plath Lifestyle, Inc. withdrawn
after hunting accident.

2000, Memphis. Stash of old records found in yard
sale. Rare performances by Robert Johnson, Bukka White, and Son
House. Antiques Roadshow estimates value at $5. Nobody gets the
blues.