Dry Your Smile (9 page)

“I—uh, yes. I am.”

“Oh I thought so,” Cindy-from-her-lapel-name-marker chimed back. “I just knew it. I saw you on television last week, that talk show, what was it—”

“Mel Chester.”

“Mel Chester! Yes, that was it. You were talking about—uh, not equal pay for equal work but, uh—”

“Equal pay for comparable—”

“Yes, that's it! Comparable. And you said schoolteachers and flight attendants get paid less than truckdrivers or, uh—”

“Parking-lot attendants—”

“Right! Parking-lot attendants. Because we're mostly women.”

“Yes, well, it's true. I—”

“And you said after all what should a society value most? Its safety and its education, or trucks and cars? I
loved
it.”

Julian couldn't help but grin back at her. “Thank you. I'm glad it sounded good.” Stand By We're On The Air.

“Well, I really didn't want to disturb you. But I just … and there's another thing, too. But I must be crazy …”

“No, really, it's quite all right. I'm sure, whatever it is, you're not crazy. What were you going to say?”

“I wondered about this before, when I saw your picture in some magazine. Is it possible? I mean, what I'm trying to say is, when I was growing up, every week just like a ritual I used to watch this TV show called ‘Family.'” Cindy began to giggle. “You couldn't be. Could you possibly be the same little Julian Travis who was on that program?”

Julian adjusted her smile. Try to relieve this woman's embarrassment. Remember that the idiot box can reduce us all to idiots. Remember that this woman is capable of directing the evacuation of a 747 in three minutes flat.

“Yes,” Julian nodded, “the same person.” At least try to use it constructively, then. “How nice that all this time later we're both in the women's movement.”

“Well, I'll be … Oh I'm not really
in
… Well, yes, it's nice. Oh and that wonderful Elizabeth Clement. Does she still—”

“She died, I'm afraid. Last year.”

“Oh what a pity … Well, anyway, sorry again if I disturbed you. It was great talking to you. Now you just buzz if I can get you anything, okay?”

Julian smiled her thanks and turned back to her tray-table, sensing the curious gaze of Polly Esther fix on her profile.

Notes for a Novel
, the paper demanded.

It wasn't even discomfiting anymore, hadn't been since—when? Age four? It was neither embarrassing nor thrilling, not a violation or an ego-lift. It was “normal.” There was only one unsettling aspect to it, against which Julian's reactions had gritted for years, trying to pearlize some matter lodged inside her shell exterior: the admiration or hostility accompanying recognition always landed just off-tilt, for the wrong reason or at the wrong time or for the wrong Julian—for the spotlit persona she followed like a shadow, the doppelgänger who had usurped her life, whose movements and convictions were more convincing than her own. Only some obscure Julian knew what she had accomplished that genuinely merited praise or warranted criticism; the heights of her secret worth, the depths of her hidden evil. And how does anyone believe in the validity of their own vantage point? Megalomaniac! she chided herself. Who are you not to be misunderstood? Every actor knows that a drunk scene, or one involving hysterics or “madness,” can be counted on to bring down the house—just as every actor knows that melodrama is child's play and that comedy is what requires seraphic technique: nuance, timing, understatement.

Still, beyond her longing for the dross to be seen as dross and the gold gold lay her lust for “the real.” And beyond that lay the painfully gained insight that most attempts to live the real appeared to invite cries of “Fake!” What doubts she might have entertained about that had been put definitively to rest by a vulgar little man named Harry Clayburn.

He worked in the first agency she registered with to apply for any kind of basic office job, so she could get her own place and support herself free of Hope and free of Hope's withholding of the childhood earnings.

“I know this name,” he said, looking up from her filled-in card and peering at her over smudgy bifocals.

“Uh. You do?”

“You were a child star. TV kid. Big stuff.”

“Well, that was a while ago. Look, I realize I have no office skills and no experience, but I'm willing to take whatever—”

“So, Miss Big Stuff, why's a millionaire who got rich from doing nothing but being cute want a secretarial job, anyway?”

The old ignorance, the old envy, she had thought. Don't get smart with him. Play humble. The Little Match Girl.

“Because I need the job, sir, that's why.”

“How come? Spent all your money on caviar lollypops? What are you really up to, huh? Doing research for some role on being a schmuck of a secretary? Ya know, there's broads
really
need these jobs, cutie.”

“I know. And I know they have the skills, too. But
I
also really need this job. Now, could we please discuss any openings you might be willing to send me on?”

“Nope.”

“Nope?”

“That's right, nope. No go. Forget it.

“Because I have no skills?”

“Nope. Because you're you. I won't play the patsy for whatever ploy you're up to, cutie. Try somebody dumber at some other agency.”

So, shaking with humiliation, Julian had done that. After three weeks of pavement pounding, being told she should go to secretarial school or “get experience first”
(how?)
, and after three weeks of having nursed a festering desire to get back at Clayburn, she had learned more than any secretarial course could have taught her. So she returned to the seedy Placement Perfect offices on West Forty-second street, filled out a new card, and sat again in front of his desk.

But this time her own skills were being practiced. Clayburn glanced at a card which listed her accomplishments as typing sixty words per minute, rapid-write shorthand, fluent French and German, previous experience three years in executive assistant positions with convincing-sounding small businessess abroad. The signature at the bottom of the card was in an ornate scrawl, but might be deciphered with difficulty to look something like “Janie Purvis.” Clayburn looked up from the card, impressed despite himself. The young woman he saw wore glasses, earrings, and a deep shade of lipstick. A russet scarf wound in a turban covered her hair. She smiled winningly at him. Clayburn never stood a chance, especially when she began to respond to his questions in her boarding-school voice with the faint British pitch—acquired from years of working abroad. He began to comb his files for something “of her class.” Together they chose a distinguished literary agency, the post of executive assistant to the head of the periodicals department. He told her who to call and how to approach them. He wished her the best of luck and in a fatherly way assured her that if this didn't work out she should come right back to him and he'd be darned if he wouldn't find something worthy of her sooner or later. It was only after she'd thanked him effusively and was turning to go, job address and personnel contact's name secure in her purse beyond reclamation, that he glanced again at her signature and called,

“What's your name again, baby? Janie? Junie?”

—permitting her the supreme moment of turning, whipping off her glasses and scarf, and smiling, “Julian. Julian Travis. And don't call me cutie. And
never
call me baby,” before she stalked out of the office.

She had not yet learned that such a triumph warms the victor with a gaudy temporary satisfaction only to smolder in a long-fuse doubt that one has not only failed to educate the person one was trying to impress but has confirmed his prejudices. Nevertheless, that time Julian learned part of the lesson.

And that time she got the job.

Her gamble had been correct: Clayburn was too embarrassed to call and denounce as an imposter someone he would have to admit he himself had sent over. Nor did cautious Julian cite him as a reference. She said that she'd heard about the job as a favor from a (nameless) friend at another placement agency, thus saving both the new boss and herself paying commissions. It had been astonishingly simple. She had called for an appointment and gone looking like herself but lying about her office skills and experience, which she'd scripted this time in a literary direction. Her references weren't checked. Instead, she was asked if she could start on Monday.

It had been, Julian remembered, what the New Left militants would later call “Another whoops radicalizing experience.” Now she wondered wryly how many radicalizing experiences it took to bring you round full circle into becoming reactionary.

“A Mask of One's Own,”
Notes for a Novel
, stared up at her.

But Sister Passenger, who had disappeared off toward the lavatory, could be seen weaving her way down the aisle back to her seat. Julian, afraid the flight attendant's revelation might inspire a conversation, snapped off her light and settled quickly into a pillow, turning toward the window.

Hypocrite. Playing at sleep. Just as you once played at being a child playing the part of a child. Deliberately played to Laurence, when he appeared miraculously, an honest presence moving crude as a bull through the bric-a-brac china-shop of Sutton Place. Knew somehow that the simplest brown wool sweater should be dug out of the bottom of the drawer, that this was not the time for the pale cashmeres Hope liked to see you in. Knew which was the best facial angle to present to him during long intense talks about art, knew how to sit (cross-legged, not demurely), knew how to pepper your speech with a few four-letter words. All the while longing for him to see through to whomever was looking out of you, desperately wanting what he represented.

Julian saw the reflection of her own smile twisted on the night-backed plane window, as she remembered how with a single gesture—loving Laurence—she had managed both to get away from Hope and to get back at her on every level. To love anyone but Hope at all. To love a man. To love a man twelve years her senior. A man from a working-class background, a man who was born a Christian—and, worse, became an atheist. A man who would never be wealthy.

Age, class, religion, style—Julian had touched almost all the bases. Laurence had been a bargain. Not all Hope's tears, her screams of betrayal, collapses, threats, warnings, and curses, could halt the inevitable. Laurence had been freedom on every level Julian could conceive. Loving him was the act of Persephone uprooting the aconite so Hades could roar through the split maw of earthcrust and sweep her away to an alien landscape where the beauty of growing things lay not in petaled preciosity but in thick-braided furry roots. Laurence was the region where all rivers began, where the fickle weather of Demeter—her fog, her noon blaze, her sheet lightning—could never prevail. Life with Laurence would be privacy, peace. And it would be defiance.

Beyond the plane window, a fragile membrane stretched against forces of enormous pressure, Julian could see a drift of midwest plains and farmlands. Wide patches of darkness were punctuated by clusters and then larger constellations of lights, as the megalopolis that now stretched from Kansas City to St. Louis distantly approached. Towns spreading into cities, roads widening to streets to avenues to highways to superhighways. The night retained its starless indifference if one looked up, but every downward glance encountered more displaced brightness exhibiting itself: streetlights, roadlights, car headlights, small yellow-lit houses swelling into white-lit buildings. None of the lonely autonomy of stars here, winking at one another across absolute space and silence. No, these dots of brilliance below were proudly artificial, signals of a human vigil, beacons of people clinging together, brittle and brave, risking the appearance of being flashy in their insistence on becoming visible, in their denial of the power of night.

Like Laurence and Julian, she thought: with my rebellion I thee worship, he might have vowed; and with all my worldly resistance I thee endow, she might have responded. A mutual, interlocking defiance. Laurence and Julian, in a conspiracy like that between aircraft and air, an utterly mismatched couple in league against the logic of gravity.

Julian's reverie was broken by the voice of Cindy, chirping through the plane's intercom that the movie was about to start and the sound could be located on channel five of your earphones. Julian stirred and glanced at her seatmate. Polly Esther remained immersed in her magazine, unruffled by the announcement.

I've got to try, I've got to at least try, Julian thought, if not about
her
then at least about
him
. Switching her own light back on, she took a fresh piece of paper and began to write:

It had been a year of barely touching, of talking passionately about art, of meetings in secret and delicious conversations in which he lost contempt for my childhood and came to have compassion for it, in which I lost admiration for his childhood and came to commiserate with it. Each loved each for the dangers each had passed, and each loved each that each did pity them
.

I would sneak off to his Chelsea loft to sip instant coffee in a cracked mug without a handle, and watch him work. I loved the simplicity of the loft: light streaming through uncurtained windows, the clean expanse of unstained, unvarnished, uncarpeted wood floor, the double mattress covered with an India print in earth colors, pushed against one wall. There were two rickety chairs, rescued from a street-discard pile, and a paint-spattered stool. On one of these three I always sat, or on the floor itself, avoiding the mattress where he often sprawled and where I fantasized sprawling with him
.

Most of all, I loved his sculptures that populated the loft. They were to me classical, romantic, modern—all at once. In those years Laurence had already been forced to sacrifice working in marble, partly because it was too expensive but mostly because no gallery would touch his marbles: too neoclassical, outré. Some of them still stood in corners—nude male torsos twisted in strenuous effort, as if leaping or lifting or straining in orgasm. But through the muscle tension gleamed a lyricism, something of the indomitable human spirit, that took my breath away. He loathed the avant-garde, the rise of Warholism and cynicism. He would say, “If it's going right, the work sings.”