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“Mr. Nichols …” The tall young man who had had the exchange with Mary Jane took a step away from the wall.
“Next week, Bernie,” Mr. Nichols said. One more sweep of the beam. “Miss Saunders,” he said to the secretary, “can you come inside for a moment, please?” A languid, dyspeptic wave of the hand and he disappeared into his office. The secretary sprayed a last mortal burst out of the typewriter, enfilading the Dramatists’ Guild, then stood up and followed him, carrying a shorthand pad. The door closed behind her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Captain said to the room at large, “we are all in the wrong business. I suggest Army surplus. The demand for used bazookas will be overwhelming. Hello, Tiny.” This was for Mary Jane, who stood up, towering over him, and leaning over, kissed his cheek.
“I’m glad to see you got home alive from that party, Willie,” Mary Jane said.
“I confess, it was a little drunk out,” the Captain said. “We were washing the somber memories of combat from our souls.”
“Drowning, I’d say,” Mary Jane said.
“Don’t begrudge us our poor little entertainments,” the Captain said. “Remember, you were modeling girdles while we were walking on flak in the terrible skies over Berlin.”
“Were you ever over Berlin, Willie?” Mary Jane asked.
“Of course not.” He gri
“Oh,” she said. “Gretchen Jordache, Willie Abbott.”
“I am happy I walked down 46th Street this morning,” Abbott said.
“Hello,” said Gretchen. She nearly stood up. After all, he was a captain.
“I suppose you’re an actress,” he said.
“Trying.”
“Dreadful trade,” Abbott said. “To quote Shakespeare on samphire?”
“Don’t show off, Willie,” Mary Jane said.
“You will make some man a fine wife and mother, Miss Jordache,” Abbott said. “Mark my words. Why haven’t I seen you before?”
“She just came to town,” Mary Jane said, before Gretchen could answer. It was a warning, a go slow sign. Jealousy?
“Oh, the girls who have just come to town,” Abbott said. “May I sit in your lap?”
“Willie!” Mary Jane said.
Gretchen laughed and Abbott laughed with her. He had very white, even, small teeth. “I was not mothered sufficiently as a child.”
The door to the i
Gretchen stood up, surprised that Miss Saunders remembered her name. This was only the third time she had been in the Nichols office. She hadn’t talked to Nichols at all, ever. She brushed out the wrinkles in her dress nervously, as Miss Saunders held open the little swinging gate in the partition.
“Ask for a thousand dollars a week and ten percent of the gross,” Abbott said.
Gretchen went through the gate and toward Nichols’s door. “Everybody else can go home,” Miss Saunders said. “Mr. Nichols has an appointment for lunch in fifteen minutes.”
“Beast,” said the character woman with the stole.
“I just work here,” Miss Saunders said.
Confusion of feelings. Pleasure and fright at the prospect of being tested for a job. Guilt because the others had been dismissed and she chosen. Loss, because now Mary Jane would leave with Willie Abbott. Flak above Berlin.
“See you later,” Mary Jane said. She didn’t say where. Abbott didn’t say anything.
Nichols’s office was a little larger than the anteroom. The walls were bare and his desk was piled with play-scripts in leatherette covers. There were three yellowish wooden armchairs and the windows were coated with dust. It looked like the office of a man whose business was somehow shady and who had trouble meeting the rent on the first of the month.
Nichols stood up as she came into the office and said, “It was good of you to wait, Miss Jordache.” He waved to a chair on one side of his desk and waited for her to sit down before he seated himself. He stared at her for a long time, without a word, studying her with the slightly sour expression of a man who is being offered a painting with a doubtful signature. She was so nervous that she was afraid her knees were shaking. “I suppose,” she said, “you want to know about my experience. I don’t have much to …”
“No,” he said. “For the moment we can dispense with experience. Miss Jordache, the part I’m considering you for is frankly absurd.” He shook his head sorrowfully, pitying himself for the grotesque deeds his profession forced him to perform. “Tell me, do you have any objections to playing in a bathing suit? In three bathing suits to be exact.”
“Well …” She laughed uncertainly. “I guess it all depends.” Idiot. Depends upon what? The size of the bathing suit? The size of the part? The size of her bosom? She thought of her mother. Her mother never went to the theater. Lucky.
“I’m afraid it isn’t a speaking role,” Nichols said. “The girl just walks across the stage three times, once in each act, in a different suit each time. The whole play takes place at a beach club.”
“I see,” Gretchen said. She was a
“The girl is a symbol. Or so the playwright tells me,” Nichols said, long hours of struggle with the casuistry of artists tolling like a shipwreck’s bell under the phrase. “Youth. Sensual beauty. The Mystery of Woman. The heartbreaking ephemeralness of the flesh. I am quoting the author. Every man must feel as she walks across the stage, ‘My God, why am I married?’ Do you have a bathing suit?”
“I … I think so.” She shook her head, a
“Could you come to the Belasco at five with your bathing suit? The author and the director will be there.”
“At five.” She nodded. Farewell, Stanislavsky. She could feel the blush starting. Prig. A job was a job.
“That’s most kind of you, Miss Jordache.” Nichols stood, mournfully. She stood with him. He escorted her to the door and opened it for her. The anteroom was empty, except for Miss Saunders, blazing away.
“Forgive me,” Nichols murmured obscurely. He went back into his office.
“So long,” Gretchen said as she passed Miss Saunders.
“Good-bye, dear,” Miss Saunders said, without looking up. She smelled of sweat. Ephemeral flesh. I am quoting.
Gretchen went out into the corridor. She didn’t ring for the elevator until the blush had subsided.
When the elevator finally came, there was a young man in it carrying a Confederate officer’s uniform and a cavalry saber in a scabbard. He was wearing the hat that went with the uniform, a dashing wide-brimmed felt, plumed. Under it his beaked, hard-boiled 1945 New York face looked like a misprint. “Will the wars never end?” he said amiably to Gretchen as she got into the elevator.
It was steamy in the little grilled car and she felt the sweat break out on her forehead. She dabbed at her forehead with a piece of Kleenex.
She went out into the street, geometric blocks of hot, glassy light and concrete shadow. Abbott and Mary Jane were standing in front of the building, waiting for her. She smiled. Six million people in the city. Let there be six million people. They had waited for her.
“What I thought,” Willie was saying, “was lunch.”
“I’m starving,” Gretchen said.
They walked off toward lunch on the shady side of the street, the two tall girls, with the slender, small soldier between them, jaunty, remembering that other warriors had also been short men, Napoleon, Trotsky, Caesar, probably Tamerlane.
Naked, she regarded herself in the dressing-room mirror. She had gone out to Jones Beach with Mary Jane and two boys the Sunday before and the skin of her shoulders and arms and legs was a faint rosy tan. She didn’t wear a girdle any more and in the summer heat she dispensed with stockings, so there were no prosaic ridges from clinging elastic on the smooth arch of her hips. She stared at her breasts. I want to see how it tastes with whiskey on it. She had had two Bloody Marys at lunch, with Mary Jane and Willie, and they had shared a bottle of white wine. Willie liked to drink. She put on her one-piece, black bathing suit. There were grains of sand in the crotch, from Jones Beach. She walked away from the mirror, then toward it, studying herself critically. The Mystery of Woman. Her walk was too modest. Remember Primitive Serenity. Willie and Mary Jane were waiting for her at the bar of the Algonquin, to find out how it all came out. She walked less modestly. There was a knock on the door. “Miss Jordache,” the stage manager said, “we’re ready when you are.”