But along came Eddie, so what was a girl to do?
His own plan was to earn his master’s in business that June (which he did) and then get a job with a Wall Street brokerage firm (which he also did that August, to start in September) and then sit back and watch the big bucks roll in (which he never did manage to do, but he was still young, and that was the plan). He didn’t reveal the rest of his plan to her until Halloween night of that magical autumn thirteen years ago.
She was dressed as Cinderella.
Eddie was dressed as Dracula.
An odd couple, to be sure, but the pairing was granted some measure of legitimacy by the fact the Eddie was carrying one midnight blue satin slipper in the pocket of the frock coat under his long black cape, and Alice was limping along on one shod foot, the other clad in a skimpy Ped.
“The limp adds vulnerability to your undeniable beauty,” Eddie told her.
She was, in fact, feeling quite beautiful that night, all dolled up in a sapphire blue gown she’d rented for a mere pittance at a costume shop on Greenwich Avenue, masses of pitch black hair piled on top of her head, faux diamond earrings (they came with the gown) dangling from her ears, a faux diamond necklace (also courtesy of Village Costumes, Inc.) around her neck, a lacey low-cut bodice to surpass that of the heroine on the cover of any Silhouette romance — but hey, she was Cinderella, the romance heroine of all time!
And Eddie was as sinister a vampire count as anyone might have conjured in his wildest nightmares. Alice had never seen a Dracula with a mustache and a pointed little beard, but Eddie was wearing those tonight, together with greenish makeup around his startling blue eyes, creating a sort of hungry look — hell, a famished look — that promised an imminent bite on the neck from those prosthetic fangs he was also wearing.
“Are you supposed to be Lucy?” their host asked them. “Or was that her name?”
“Beats me,” Alice said. “I’m Cinderella.”
“What’s Cinderella doing with Dracula?”
“We’re in love,” Eddie said.
“Ah,” their host said.
“See? I have her slipper,” he explained.
“Ah,” their host said again.
His name was Don Something-or-Other, and he was an NYU student taking classes in Method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute on East Fifteenth Street. Don himself lived on Horatio Street near Eighth Avenue, in a loft that was probably costing his parents a bundle, and which tonight was filled with a variety of Trekkies, monsters, clowns, superheroes, hookers, ghosts, witches and warlocks, pirates both male (with mustaches and eye patches) and female (in ragged shorts and soft boots), angels, devils and demons, and one girl dressed as a dominatrix (but this was, after all, Greenwich Village). Since this was thirteen years ago, and the first President Bush had recently sent ground forces to Saudi Arabia in preparation for the first of the Bush Dynasty’s Persian Gulf Wars, there were also two men wearing Bush masks.
The dominatrix, who said her name was Mistress Veronique, made a pass at Eddie, and Alice whispered in his ear, “I’ll break your head!” which seemed to dampen any interest he might have had in whips or leather face masks. He asked Alice what she wanted to drink, and then he made his way to the bar, where a girl who identified herself as a Barbie doll made yet another pass at him. (Apparently there were many would-be vampire victims on the loose tonight, longing for the count to draw first blood.) Eddie made his way back to Alice, cradling a pair of dark-looking drinks in his hands. He made a toast to “All Hallows Eve and beyond” (significant pause), and then led her through the crowd to a pair of French doors opening onto a small balcony overlooking a postage-stamp garden below.
The night was mild for the end of October.
Back in Peekskill, she’d be shivering. But here in New York, on a balcony well-suited to a scullery maid soon to become a princess, or at least already a princess until the horses turned back to mice at midnight, Alice stood looking out over this dazzling city, her one unshod foot somewhat chilled, but otherwise toasty warm in the cape Count Dracula wrapped around her, the better to bite you on the jugular, m’proud beauty!
Eddie took the midnight blue slipper from the pocket of his frock coat.
He knelt before her.
“May I?” he asked.
And tried the slipper on her shoeless right foot.
And, of course, it fit.
“Will you marry me?” he whispered.
The words took her quite by surprise.
They’d been living together since September, when Eddie started work at Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich. This was, after all, thirteen years ago, and the entire civilized world east of the Mississippi had already been sexually liberated. But marriage had never come up as a viable option. Not before now, anyway. How could a married woman go trotting off to Brazil lugging cameras and running out for coffee while some would-be eminent director filmed piranhas in the Amazon?
She was speechless.
Eddie was still kneeling.
His hand was still resting on her now-slippered foot.
His wonderful blue eyes were asking, “Well?”
“I’ll have to think about it,” she said.
They were married shortly before Christmas.
She didn’t want to get pregnant, either.
That wasn’t part of her revised plan.
She had already begun implementing this modified plan by getting a part-time job editing film for an indie who was making a movie titled The Changing Face of the Lower East Side. Her idea was to find a series of similar temporary jobs in various aspects of film-related work until she could find full-time employment as a production assistant in a New York — based company.
What she wanted to do, you see, was produce films. She wasn’t interested in cinematography or screenwriting or directing or, God forbid, acting. What she wanted to do was create, for all these other people, an environment in which they might make good movies. Movies that won all the prizes. She felt this was an ambition compatible with a good marriage. Eddie was beginning to find his way downtown on Wall Street; she was beginning to find her way in the film industry. Pregnancy was not part of the scheme.
Encouraged by her sister, Carol, who’d been married for two years already and had been successful in avoiding any unwanted pregnancies, Alice consulted her gynecologist about acquiring the same sort of diaphragm Carol had been using so effectively. She was told by Dr. Havram — a woman whose first name was Shirley — that the diaphragm was a flexible rubber cap that a woman filled with a spermicide prior to intercourse and before inserting it.
This, Alice already knew, duh.
She learned, however, that there were some slight, ahem, disadvantages.
To begin with, using it increased the chances of bladder infections. Whee, just what Alice needed, a bladder infection! Next, the cream or jelly spermicide might have an unpleasant taste, not very appealing to Count Dracula, eh, kiddo? Moreover, it might “interrupt the effortless flow of foreplay,” as Dr. Havram put it, and added, “Although you can teach your husband to insert it as part of the foreplay.”
Not to mention the fact that it was less effective than the condom either as a birth-control device or as protection against STDs. Although Alice knew what an STD was, Dr. Havram informed her anyway that the letters were an acronym for “sexually transmitted diseases” such as gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydial infection, or herpes, none of which Alice had ever had or ever wished to have.