Living Room (25 page)

“Mary says you keep a pretty fancy place. That doesn’t fit in with a few extra bucks.”

“I mean I could make out with a room anywhere if I had to. Now, I mean, not before I tried it. Once you discipline yourself to freedom, the material things matter a lot less.”

She looked at him.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Al said. “He can be smart-ass about money because he’s got it. Do you need as much as you make?”

“I suppose I could get on with less. I once sure as hell did.”

“If what you like to do, Shirley, is come up with solutions, if the rest is garbage, why don’t you set yourself up as a consultant? You and Twitchy, a two-man office. Let advertisers, agencies, media people come to you with their marketing problems.”

“I can see myself sitting in an empty office day after day waiting for the phone to ring. It sounds worse than what I’m doing now.”

“You wouldn’t sit twiddling your thumbs. Twitchy waits for the phone. You see people by appointment.”

“I’d have to be my own bookkeeper.”

“You have an accounting firm come in whenever you need them.”

“Who would show?”

“Ford.”

“You’re crazy.”

“They’ll be first in line.”

“They don’t work that way. They want to see an organization full of people. Your idea makes me feel like I did when I was a kid planning a party and thought, ‘God, nobody’ll show up.’ How would I get my prospects, stand on the street corner handing out calling cards?”

“If you were a fool. If you were Shirley Hartman, however, you’d probably call a press conference to announce the setting up of Shirley Hartman, Inc., and make it a news story.”

Shirley started to interrupt.

“Hear me out,” said Al. “Your prospects are not one agency and its clients, like now. If the problem somebody presents to you sounds interesting and remediable, you take it on for a fee. They go away. Maybe you go away to Bermuda for a few days and lie in the sun. They don’t have to know that it only takes five percent of your time to come up with the answer. Then, after a psychologically suitable period, you provide them with the answer. If the answer is good enough, maybe, in time, you can get a percentage as well as a fee. Do you think you would starve to death?”

They wondered why the cab was stopped and the driver looking at them. Christ, they had arrived at their destination. Al paid the man.

“The doorman will never let us in,” said Al.

The doorman recognized them both, grease and all.

“Dare we take the elevator?” asked Shirley.

“If you’ve been in an accident, you want to drive a car again as soon as possible.”

They arrived at the door of Jack and Mary’s apartment. It was nearly nine o’clock.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

AL LISTENED AT THE DOOR.

“That’s not nice,” said Shirley.

Al rang the bell. Mary opened it a crack, saw them, opened it wide, said, “My God, I thought you’d never get here. We were worried. A man called and said you had an accident.”

“Stuck in an elevator,” said Shirley, accepting Mary’s buss. “Need to get cleaned up. We’re a mess.”

Mary darted a look at Al.

He shook his head. Mary led the way to the living room, followed by Shirley and Al. When Mary sidestepped out of the way, Shirley saw seven faces, seven people sitting and standing soundlessly about the room. Then Jack, standing to one side, suddenly yelled “Surprise, surprise!”

On the couch, Philip Hartman smiled. Mrs. Bialek, sitting next to him, nodded at Shirley, an acknowledgement.

Behind her father, Jesus, Arthur Crouch, who needed him tonight? And his wife, Jane, her eyes showing too much drink.

On a chair, a ghost she hadn’t seen since they roomed at Barnard, the friend she couldn’t trace, Hester Fedder, where had she
been found?

Near Hester a face she would never forget, gray-maned, wrinkled in a smile of total affection, Dr. Koch, Gunther Koch, how had they gotten him to come?

And suddenly they were all in their individual accents echoing Jack, “Surprise, surprise!”, seeing that their presence had indeed been unexpected.

Shirley felt the vacuum in her chest, anxiety, disbelieved her eyes. Surely these people had never been in a room together before, how had they been assembled?

They held their champagne glasses up and in unison proclaimed, “Happy birthday!” Then they were swarming around her, congratulating.

You played a different role with each person in your life, what role to play when they were all together?
Flee the room.
She pulled Mary aside.

“What gave you this idea?” she whispered.

“I thought it’d give you a kick.”

“Like a mule in the chest.”

“Enjoy yourself,” said Mary.

“Drop dead,” said Shirley, trying to smile despite the hooves clattering inside her. Hester was coming over. So was Dr. Koch. Too many all at once. “Listen”—she tugged at Mary’s sleeve— “I’ve just got to wash up.”

In the sanctuary of the bathroom, she locked the door, scrubbed her hands as if for a ritual, and then cupped them under the now metal-cold water and raised the chalice to her face.

*

When Shirley emerged from the bathroom, calmer, the people in the room seemed less ready to cluster around her. For a second it looked like Dr. Koch was going to step toward her in slow motion, but it was her father who decided the priorities by striding up to his daughter, who was exactly the same height as he was, and pulling her head awkwardly to his breast and then his face, kissed her resoundingly on each cheek like a Cossack, not tenderly as he
might in private. This man, who had pumped his joy into her mother, one seed of which was today twenty-nine years old, now demonstrated by harsh hug and noisy buss that his connection with Shirley had no visible sexuality.

Hester Fedder had to be the least menacing, as always. Shirley sequestered herself in the corner with Hester, hugging her, saying, “who found you, where, how, quick tell me.”

“Ran into Mary in the street and we talked about Barnard and you, and she said this evening. Well, here I am.”

“Didn’t you get married and move into…I thought…” Shirley was stopped by the film over Hester’s face. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Oh no,” said Hester, “I did in fact get married. You were right.”

“What’s his name? Where is he? Why isn’t he here?”

Hester was summoning a speakable answer. Shirley liked Hester’s oval face, even her bunned hair, but was distressed to see her still wearing a dress that hid everything, just as at school, when, in the apartment they shared, Shirley would parade naked as she dressed, and Hester contrived robes and burnooses to hide her attractive body from view. Once, yes she remembered that, Hester had said just the slightest something, a hint, a hushed plea about Shirley being more decorous. Had Hester interpreted Shirley’s lack of shame as a tempting display? All that had been brushed out of her mind when she heard Hester had gotten
married. What had happened?

“Quickly,” said Shirley, “bring me up to date.”

“I don’t need updating on you, I read the newspapers,” said Hester, blushing.

“Who’d you marry?”

“A fellow named Andy Robinson.”

“Oh I remember now, you moved into his—”

“Only for a week. Good thing I wasn’t able to sublet fast.
He—we—
well, it’s complicated. We decided we’d each have our own apartment and so I moved back into mine.”

“Doesn’t sound like two living as cheap as one.”

“Andy feels strongly that we shouldn’t have economic ties. I call him for a date. He calls me for a date sometimes. I stay over. He stays at my place once in a while, but he had his friends and I have mine.”

“You like that kind of arrangement?”

“I guess Andy likes it.”

“Are you happy, that’s what counts.”

“Oh I love my work, I’m doing interior design for Jeb-Hart-Peters, I’m learning so much.…”

There stood Philip Hartman, stopping speech.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said.

“No, no, no,” said Hester.

“This is my father,” said Shirley.

“We met before you came.”

“My father’s got an off-beat setup too, right, Pop? How long have you and Mrs. B. been living in sin?”

“Shhh,” cautioned Mr. Hartman. “Not so she can hear.”

“I’m keeping you from your other guests,” said Hester.

The other guest was Al, bringing Shirley a glass of champagne, looking as if he owned the world.

“Hester, Hester,” said Shirley, “why didn’t you keep in touch?”

“Well, you know, at first there were other things, and then you were getting famous. I thought I’d be intruding. I didn’t want to push myself.”

Shirley took Hester’s hands in her own. “Never. Tell me, what kind of interiors do you design?”

“Offices mainly. Sometimes private homes. It’s great to start with bare walls.”

“It must be…”

“Shirley, all of us envy you.”

The face that Shirley saw behind Hester’s shoulder, near enough to have heard, far
enough not to be participating, belonged
to Jane Crouch.

Then Dr. Koch, at last, was upon them, saying, “Ah, you thought old Koch was dead.”

“No, no, no,” said Shirley, pointing to her father, who had moved back across the room to deserted Mrs. Bialek, “he’s the one who’s supposed to be dead. I don’t confuse the two of you any more.”

To ease Hester’s bewilderment, Shirley said, “Dr. Koch supervised my three-times-a-week rush course, total failure, cured me of thinking I could be different.”

“Shirley,” said Dr. Koch, “you are exactly the same, except more beautiful.”

“The good doctor is Viennese,” said Shirley. “He stopped kissing the inside of ladies’ wrists only because it was constantly being misinterpreted.”

“I’ll bet it wasn’t,” said Al.

“Correct,” said Koch, “I was even more of a lecher when my wife was alive.”

Shirley remembered the dark study, the desk, the couch with the overstuffed chair behind it, the pictures of Marta. Koch, the ultimate widower who loved his wife desperately and missed her, yet despite it was a happy man. He had convinced her that it was not a sin to be Shirley, or happy.

“I remember,” said Shirley, “when I called you an orthodox Freudian Neanderthal and you said, ‘What Freud? Who Freud?’ You were marvelous.”

“Listen,” said Koch, “I have to tell you all, to be an analyst is to be bored most of the time, listening, but this Shirley Hartman, she was my favorite, she was never boring.”

Shirley hugged him. “That was worth your atrocious fees.”

“Why atrocious? I enjoyed spending every penny!”

Koch pulled her away from the enveloping circle for a private word. “That stringbean, the tall pole who looks over your shoulder like a landlord, he’s new?”

Shirley nodded.

“Anything special?”

“I hope so,” said Shirley.

Koch’s smile showed his wholly false tops and bottoms. He caught her looking. “They may be the most artificial teeth in America, but they eat well, I am indebted to them three times every day.”

Shirley squeezed his hand. He had been helpful. When she had gone to see him, “to interview him” was the way she had put it, her mother was a daily voice in the back of her mind, instructing, reproving, condoning, remonstrating. At some of their meetings, Shirley had been aggressive toward Koch, belligerent as she had been with most authority figures, and he had put her down, wittily, but down. “You give traffic directions to policemen? You tell a
cordon bleu
chef how to boil water for coffee? You were born out of the head of God with full instructions for everybody else’s life?” And when she had cried the very first time, he had switched first to silence, then a word or two of casual tenderness, and then to an explanation of what probing her past might do for her.

Koch wiggled a finger at Al to join them. “I watch you watching us,” said Dr. Koch. “Between Shirley and me is nothing private.”

“Any more,” said Shirley.

“Young man,” said Koch, “what do you do?”

Al and Shirley looked at each other and laughed.

“I didn’t mean to be impolite,” said Koch. “You’re a gangster? You’re an astronaut? What you do, is it illegal or silly? I’m sorry I asked.”

“I don’t work for a living, Dr. Koch,” said Al.

Koch’s face brightened. “That’s a new one for me. In the books, the early analysts had lots of patients who did nothing. But today, everybody seems to do something.”

“This is your life,” said Jack, barging in, a bit soused.

“How’d you miss my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Manning?” asked Shirley.

“I thought you skipped first grade,” said Jack.

Mary joined them, proclaiming, “You must all be starved. It’s a
good thing I planned on mostly a cold buffet. I’m getting it out right now. Last chance for everybody to catch up to Jack on champagne.”