Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(33)
Extending hospitality to all, even to the most cloddish, truly is the basis of civilization. The fact that the most cloddish, having nothing better to do, always show up and spoil the party for everyone else probably spells civilization’s ultimate doom.
Olive was a clod, and I was loath to suffer clods. To do the kind of ad writing that I did, and to be good at it, you couldn’t just echo conventional opinion back at itself; you had to catch people by surprise. You had to bring something more to the party, so to speak. R.H. Macy’s institutional advertising was not the height of the avant-garde, certainly—not like Olive’s favorite desk prop Ms. Stein, for instance, or the artists whose work Dwight championed in the pages of his little magazines. But it wasn’t the Sunday homily, either. That calibrated understanding was what Olive lacked, and that lack was what made her seek—and fail—to copy me. And it was sinister.
That evening, as ever, Olive had made herself up quite too much like the vamp. Unspeaking, she leaned against the kitchen counter watching Helen mix drinks.
In Olive’s earshot, one of Helen’s magazine friends, waiting for a cocktail, remarked, “It is true most men dislike looking at a drippy, blood-red, oleaginous pair of lips during dinner.”
An office mate of Olive’s and mine replied, “And prefer nails that don’t remind them of Dracula, even when crimson claws are fashionable.”
“It simply reminds them,” said Helen’s friend, receiving her glass tumbler, “of our old hot primitive instinct to trap ourselves a man.”
And our colleague, receiving her own, clinked glasses with her in a sarcastic toast, saying, “Ah, we women are savages at heart.”
They went giggling to the living room to rejoin their dates. Bennie, mine, passed them on the way in, as Olive, happy to have been wounded, wound her way toward me to complain.
“The character, Lillian, of some of your guests leaves something to be desired,” she said.
I could have apologized, but I was so tired of Olive.
Instead I said, “I prefer witty friends to friends of character.”
That was a lie. I preferred friends who were witty and had character. But I wanted Olive to shut up, and the quickest course was to simply throw myself upon her poniard, knowing it to be sharp as a wet noodle. If shock was the way to stopper the drivel always rivering from her mouth, well, fine.
“This type of atmosphere is all right for a while,” she said, gesturing around the crowded kitchen with sham nonchalance, “but eventually you won’t find it so homey.”
“Nothing ruins a good thing faster than a family atmosphere,” I said.
She gave me a look that was meant to be cool and appraising—probably something she’d seen in a film. “You’re a queer thing, Lillian,” she said. “Surely every girl dreams of her wedding day.”
I could see why she thought this; the desire was endemic to our set, though I did not share it. But I also thought she ought to try thinking for herself. The walls around the main portion of R.H. Macy’s thirteenth floor went just partway to the ceiling, so all day, whenever I left my own office—which had a proper door—to walk through to find someone, I heard, as Olive did, the steady drone of colleagues’ lives lived by telephone: ranting to husbands or raving to beaux.
“Sure,” I said. “Lace and satin and showers of rice. Nice if it stops you from thinking of the years ahead, when you’ll be boiling that rice into mush to feed a screaming infant while your husband’s out on the town, trying to find someone new.”
Something changed in Olive’s face; all her studied mannerisms drifting in different directions. When she spoke again, her usual breathy coo was gone—gone low and harsh. I thought that, for all her yapping, I might be hearing her real voice for the first time.
“I don’t buy it,” she said. “That you don’t want a family. Is this all there is, Lillian? Drinking on fire escapes? It’s frivolous, I think. It’s just childish. The most successful woman in advertising, the red-headed poet princess of Midtown—cold comforts when you’re fifty and dried up and have no one to show your clippings to, don’t you think?”
Here’s a secret about me: My entire life, whenever I’ve found myself under attack by a relative stranger, or someone who means little to me, my reaction—which I gather is uncommon—has been to grow calmer, more controlled. I would have made a fine gunfighter, I suppose. Born too late! As usual.
“You don’t have to buy it, Olive,” I said, exhaling a smoke ring to the side of her head. “We’re not at the office. I don’t plan on selling anything until Monday morning.”
She tore the smoke ring with her index finger, nearly losing her balance in the process. “Everyone thinks you’re so smart,” she said. “You think you’re so smart. You’re so funny. But the truth is that you’re the biggest cynic of all time.”
“I think you’ve had enough to drink, Olive,” I said. “Maybe you don’t quite realize what you’re saying.”
“I know what I’m saying.” She took another sip and smeared a lurid lipstick glyph down her chin. “You think you’re so precious, living here in the city. Scoffing at love.”
“Love, Olive, is not what I scoff at,” I said. “What I scoff at is rank sentimentalism: the silly, simplistic idea of love that advertisers—including us—use to sell everything from soup to soap to subjugation. As for the city, Olive, I live here because I like it.”