Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(35)
But Bennie, looking out at the lit windows of the newly sprung skyscrapers, said, “Ah—the way a crane creates and then erases itself from the skyline.”
And I knew then that I’d be going to bed with him that night, after the guests had left us in quiet.
*
The following Monday, on my walk to the office, when it was already so sticky that it felt like being underwater, I was not hungover, exactly. For one thing, I didn’t get that way. For another, the party, obviously, had been on Saturday. But even my shoes felt glum and protesting. When I thought of arriving at R.H. Macy’s and having to see Olive, I felt tired and flat down to the arches of my feet.
To my surprise, the thirteenth floor of R.H. Macy’s that day ended up sounding like a symphony from which the conductor had struck one discordant and out-of-time instrument dumb. The fight seemed to have marked the merciful end of Olive’s and my laborious attempts at friendship. From that point on, she left me alone—watching me from afar, but not bothering me, aside from whatever minimal communication was required to get our jobs done.
“What neighborhood cat has absconded with Olive’s tongue?” asked Chester, an astute boss of the kind who would notice such changes.
“If I knew that,” I said, “I would have brought a tin of salmon for it.”
*
Olive and I didn’t have another run-in until just under a year later, June of 1934, when Bennie was but a distant, albeit pleasant, memory.
It had been a wiltingly busy spring at R.H. Macy’s, and I felt in need of a present to perk myself up. I settled on a new perfume for summer. As soon as I could, as soon as it came out on this side of the Atlantic, I bought myself a bottle of Fleurs de Rocaille, a well-blended explosion of blooms with a solid wooden base—cedar and sandalwood and musk at the core. A composition that at the time was not unlike my own: feminine, but hard.
The day after I got a bottle on my lunch break and came back to the office wearing it, my grinning enemy Olive—though she could ill afford it—did the same: purchased a bottle on her lunch break and came back to the thirteenth floor of R.H. Macy’s having practically bathed in it. I recognized it in an instant—though it smelled, on her, sour, like the sour grapes she feasted on daily.
She saw me smelling it. Her reaction, flushed and flustered, was that of a plain girl caught in flagrante delicto with the beau of the homecoming queen. A circumstance any civilized person would regard as an occasion for shame was, for her, a tiny triumph—what my profession, years after I left it, would come to call a “peak experience.”
“I couldn’t resist,” she said, breaking the silence she’d held for a steady ten months. “I didn’t get it because of you. I read about it weeks ago. That it was coming here, to America. And I knew I had to have it. Just for the name. Fleurs de Rocaille.”
Eyes closed, dreamy sigh heaved.
“Just for the name?” I said. “No other reason?”
“Lillian, really,” she said, eyes rolling skyward. “That was just an expression. I don’t need to defend myself, but if you must know, first it was for the name. Next it was for how lovely it smells on me. Third is because the bottle is so pretty. And fourth is just because I felt like it.”
“The rule of threes, Olive,” I said, “does not just apply to writing copy. Always limit your reasons to three, the number of greatest credibility. Cite more and people will assume that you’re fabricating. Often correctly.”
“Hey, Lily,” said Chester, coming up behind me. “Where’s the damn copy?”
“Right here, you sweet-talker,” I said, grateful that his good-natured question had interrupted our conversation, giving me the last word and an occasion to return to my work.
As Chester and I walked away from Olive’s desk, I could feel her eyes on the back of my suit, like a child with a magnifying glass trying to set ants on fire. I ignored her and felt the fire grow hotter. I breathed in: floral, woody, aldehydic—a smell I would always associate from that point on with rosy serenity in the face of irrational hate.
As I sat in Chester’s office and listened to his revisions of the work I’d done that morning on our new campaign, I thought about how Olive, even after years, still did not understand the most basic principles of what we did. Good advertising had to be genuine, joyful, unforced. To write informal copy, we had to be informal—to forget motives and mechanisms for a moment and simply speak to the public in the voice we might use to greet an acquaintance encountered on the sidewalk. The instant Olive took pen in hand, she stiffened up. She wrote drafts that left her humiliated because she permitted herself to be humiliated, revealed as fundamentally phony. As Chester tore through my first drafts with abundant blue-pencil edits, I felt no humiliation. That was the process. Nobody’s first cracks were perfect. Olive thought mine were, but she didn’t see how hard I worked. How I loved this job, but how it wasn’t easy for me.
Especially—though I hated to admit it to myself—lately. My mind was on other things, like my upcoming move to the Village. I was excited about that, truly. But increasingly I’d come to wonder if this was it. Though my achievements—professional, literary—were sweet, it was hard not to be conscious of the gaps between these successes and what I’d imagined of them, and hard, too, to see what route to take now that I had won almost everything I had wanted. From the peak, of course, all paths lead down.