Video technicians were racing about, each filming his own excerpt. The bar was open so I downed a couple and just stared around. Under a large poster of a swollen-bellied African child, I believe I spotted Cindy Lauper sipping with Lionel Richie. Suddenly there was a stir in the crowd. Was it Michael Jackson? Mick Jagger? I heard someone mumble it was Bruce Springsteen. This was his first public appearance since his first marriage. Marty excused himself. He wanted to have a look at the Boss. I listened to clumps of people talking in small groups. They were talking “labels,” and other studio jargon that eluded me.
I spotted Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sexologist, all alone. Getting a glass of white wine, I started walking over to her. She looked at me with anticipation, but suddenly Marty grabbed my arm.
“Come on, we were about to leave without you.”
“Perhaps we’ll meet at some other benefit,” I said to the sex doctor.
“Perhaps,” she replied with that accent, and her entire face smiled.
Outside Sergei was petulantly pounding his fist on the roof of the Mercedes.
“What,” I asked stupidly, “didn’t you find your next star?”
“I wouldn’t let her be a mutilated extra in a mass murder scene!” Marty quickly ushered Ternevsky into the back seat of the car. Dashing back out Marty handed me a set of keys and told me my new address. “You can move in tonight after ten. I’ll pick up the monthly rent at the theater.”
With that he jumped into the driver’s seat, made a wild U-turn, and zoomed off down Fifty-seventh Street. it was then that I remembered that I had left my Unique bag, containing my overcoat and old clothes, in the trunk. Like Cinderella after midnight, my punk charm suddenly converted to embarrassment and self-disgust. Additionally it was three o’clock. I was supposed to try to finagle a date out of Glenn. Putting on the dark sunglasses, I walked north to Fifty-ninth Street and took the IRT local down to Astor Place. Fortunately I still had some pocket money.
EIGHT
Between Broadway and the Bowery along Astor Place, street vendors lined the south side of the street spreading out anything that could be sold. The sellers weren’t franchised or affiliated with anything other than the garbage they’d collected or robbed, but occasionally they’d come across an item of worth or curiosity. I was able to buy a shirt and a pair of pants. I tried trading away articles of my punk clothes, but no one would take them. One vendor whom I had come to know, named Flowers, offered me a good deal on a leather waist jacket, so I bought it. Passing down Waverly Place, I noticed that there was no line in front of the Astor Place Hair Cutters. It was an off-peak hour. I quickly located one of the old Italian barbers in the fray and asked him to give me an old-style hair cut.
“The kind I’d give my kid, ya mean,” he muttered, as he tried to salvage something. After ten minutes, my second haircut of the day was done. My hair was very short.
By four o’clock I was on a corner phone asking a secretary if I could speak to Glenn Roberts. While waiting on hold, a very young punk girl walked by wearing a bone in her nose. It reminded me I was still wearing an earring, which I removed and discarded.
“I’m sorry,” the secretary returned to life, “Miss Roberts is presently indisposed. If you’d like to leave your name and number she’ll try to get back to you.”
That meant rejection; I was about to hang up wordlessly but I suddenly heard Glenn’s voice interrupt, “It’s okay Erica, I’ll take it.”
Erica hung up and I asked Glenn if she was available for any meals. She was silent for a moment, so I tried making it easier. “How about I bring up a cup of coffee to your office?”
In response I heard strange whiny sounds, and gradually I realized that Glenn was fighting back tears. I learned that her boyfriend—a big executive at a rival firm—had been having a torrid affair with his secretarial pool. Apparently one of the ambitious drips from this pool, a secretary to whom he had promised the world, got angry when he failed to deliver. She got her revenge by informing Glenn.
“You should go home. Do you have a friend?”
“He cheated on me,” she replied, in complete control.
“You shouldn’t be at work now.”
“I have more appointments,” she replied.
“So he didn’t really mean anything to you?” I asked. She couldn’t respond. I heard her crying, and thought about the fact that someone whom I really didn’t know was crying on the phone to me.
“Do you really think you’re in a condition for business?”
“No, but frankly I’m afraid of an empty house.” 1 offered to join her. She then gave me her address and hung up. She lived in a brownstone, with ivy up the facade, on a quiet tree-lined street in Brooklyn Heights. Wordlessly she opened the door, still wearing her overcoat. She led me through the antique-filled house into an elegant living room. I sat in an armchair. She silently sat on a sofa across from me holding a glass of Chablis and staring intensely at nothing.
“How’re you feeling?” I finally said after about five minutes.
“Fine,” she replied softly, but added, “Lets not talk.”
Which comes first, the moods or the thoughts? I focused on her lips, which looked hard and thin, but as I watched them they seemed to bloom and become increasingly more delicate. The slight gloss of her eyes seemed to increase. Devastation became her. We were in very different moods. Finally I arose and quietly sat down next to her on the sofa. First, conspicuously not touching. Gently I brought my fingers up, stroking along her collar.
“Don’t do that,” she replied tensely. “I don’t feel right, now. I just want to get over this.”
“He sounds like a real bastard.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. It might sound rude but I’m really tired.”
“I am too.”
“I have a spare bedroom you’re welcome to use,” she replied.
“I can leave if you like,” I replied.
“Despite the fact that I don’t know you,” she began, “I don’t really want to be left alone now, and few things seem more depressing than waking up at night all alone.” Fine with me. She led me to one room and disappeared off into another. And then there was sleep. And then sounds awoke me. It was dark out, hours had passed. I dressed and joined her. She was making us some food, the TV was on, we watched. She still seemed dazed, preoccupied, violently silent. I got increasingly tired. After “Johnny Carson,” “David Letterman,” “Sally Jessie Raphael,” and “Ben Casey,” 1 drifted off to sleep.
“How dare you!” I bolted off the couch, expecting an Angela. It was light out.
“How fucking dare you!” she repeated, screaming into the telephone. “Ten years of all we’ve been through together! You little sleazebag! There’s no reason for you to, cause I’m tearing up all your clothes! Some little bitch just out of secretarial school has to be the one to tell me!”
There was a tense pause. She held the phone to her ear. I awoke and realized she was speaking to him. This would be the interlude when he would be pleading, begging, wallowing, crying, punching his genitals, and quickly trying to hammer together a perspective that would minimize his crime: “I’m just a lonely middle-aged man whose life has amounted to a hill of beans. I started my first business day when I was twenty-one, fresh out of college, and now I’m forty-five, and that prototypical business day—right down to the one o’clock lunch with the boys—hasn’t changed. Twenty of my most fertile years, Glenn, gone!” He might also bring up circumstantial and peripheral details, such as: they weren’t married; his lies were indications of his concern for her; and all the boys have mistresses. But alternately, he might realize that this was a romantic case and not a judicial one; sometimes the best strategy is none at all. Suffer the pangs and continue on.