Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions Read online

  Went for the mastectomies, gratefully.

  Not me.

  Lumpectomy with radiation is no riskier than a mastectomy. Or rather, mastectomy for the most part is no better safeguard against recurrence in the case of a small, first time malignancy.

  “We will go though this together,” Max promises me. “There will be bad times, but there will also be good times, and we will be together.”

  It is one of those late spring days where the sky looks like Renoir’s Paris, wouldn’t you know it.

  .

  Saturday we pick up my cat. The vet at Friendship doesn’t know what’s wrong with Spike, but he seems better. His fur doesn’t clump, his blue eyes are clear, and he howls all the way to Max’s house, a sure sign of health in a Siamese. Sunday is a day of suburban grace. Cat and lover in the same bed with me, along with newspapers, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. Spike nestles between my breast and armpit, his long monkey tail wrapped around my wrist, the way he always does when we sleep. Before Max there was Spike to keep my heart from turning dry and shriveling up as a walnut. Noisy and demanding, and he’d steal dinner off your plate if it’s something he likes. If I spend more than five minutes on the phone he howls like a baby with wet diapers. I have friends who’d never met Spike but knew him from phone calls. He weighs as much as a healthy baby and likes to be held.

  Monday, he pukes up mustard yellow and hides under the bed.

  Back to the hospital for both of us.

  .

  I am in no shape to make tough decisions, like whether or not to authorize expensive surgery. The last time I had a cat sick as Spike I did not. I knew the cat was going to die anyhow, why him predecess through the pain was the rationale. Maybe it was the right decision to put that cat to sleep, but I would be a liar not to admit that I didn’t want to spend the $400. My neighbor Molly, who often takes care of Spike when I’m out of town, agrees to be his guardian while I’m in the hospital . She is an Emergency Room nurse and a convert to Buddhism so I trust her to do the right thing, whatever that is.

  .

  In the waiting room with Max at my side, I feel like royalty, Queen for a Day, in my awfu1 hospital gown. Breast cancer is so much more socially acceptable than depression, at east in Washington, is what I’ve discovered. If Hillary Clinton had breast cancer she would have been the most popular First Lady since Betty Ford. Thanks to good health insurance, a steady job, and plenty of support I’m privileged class among cancer patients, entitled to ask favors and make demands.

  “If it turns out I’m going to die, Max, will you marry me? I don’t want my retirement benefits togo to waste.”

  Joint and survivor annuity. Affordable health insurance that will cover adventures like this.

  Max says he will agree to anything if it will put my mind to rest. He agrees to be my literary executor. He even agrees to look after Spike.

  And the operation goes well. Best possible outcome, in fact. Clean lymph nodes, and clean margins, the surgeon tells me. Max doesn’t have to marry me.

  .

  The vet discovers a tumor in Spike’s stomach. Molly consults with her friends, some of whom are Buddhists and some of whom are nurses. The woman at the Friendship reception desk says that it seems to happen a lot, women and their cats having cancer at the same time. They decide that what I would want is the chance to say good bye, so Molly authorizes the operation. Some cancer is negotiable, but as far as I know, no one survives stomach cancer.

  .

  With the fur shaved off his flanks for surgery, and the shaved spot on his paw for the intravenous, Spike looks like an Auschwitz victim. When I bring him home, he heads straight for the linen closet. $2000 down the tubes for an animal who probably can’t make it through the night.

  I spend the night in the linen closet, saying good bye.

  “Goodbye you old bag of bones. I’m sorry I begrudged you Bumble Bee Water packed albacore tuna and made you eat cat food. I’m sorry for leaving you alone sometimes, for talking on the telephone when I should have been paying attention to you. I’m sorry for calling you selfish just because when the burglar broke in you hid in the closet instead of attacking him like a dog would have. “

  The sound of my own voice comforts me, makes me less scared as I wait for him to die. But he opens his eyes. Spirit in the dark.

  .

  The next morning he is in my bed, tail curled around my wrist. The vet calls with what he thinks is bad news. Spike’s tumor was big, and the cancer aggressive. He thinks Spike won’t live much beyond three months, which is three months more than I expected. I will have his company for one more summer. He will see me through radiation. We can spend a whole summer napping together.

  .

  What comes next is the mopping up operation. Thirty-five hits of radiation, seven weeks of daily doctor visits. Covering the face of death with a blanket of daily obligations so the skull recedes. Cancer no longer a life threatening emergency, has shrunk to the size of a second job. A crummy one with lousy pay, but at the end I get my life back.

  “It’s like Spike for me, as though he took the hit so I would live,”I tell Molly, something I’d never tell Max, who has no patience or the willfully irrational.

  “It’s very Viking”, she says.

  “I didn’t know Vikings kept cats.”

  “Of course they did. All heroic people had them”, she says.

  When a Viking dies, his warrior cat dies with him. Together in the burning longboat they set out for Valhalla.

  When her Norwegian grandfather died his cat died the same day.

  “What’s so funny?” Molly asks.

  I haven’t laughed since May, and now I can’t stop. For a moment I forget my favorable odds, so taken with the image: Spike and me in our matching horned helmets, the burning rowboat on the Potomac that bears us out to sea and off to Valhalla, where we are welcomed by a blazing pantheon of glorious Vikings and all their heroic cats.

  The Ad Man’s Dutiful Daughter

  The other night I dreamed I was a mail order bride who hadn’t worked out, so I was returned, dishonored, to my village, which was the Waiting Room at Grand Central Station. All the familiar faces were there. The woman with the receding hairline. The drunk one with the melting caramel eyes. The one with invisible friends. With all that obvious symbolism, a perfect offering for my analyst, Dr.

  Freundlicht.

  “You seem to be overly sensitive to rejection,” was what he said.

  Was that the best he could do?

  “What the hell do you know about rejection? The moment you got into Med School, you had it made in the shade. And don’t give me that crap about penis envy, either.”

  .

  Desperatly seeking employment. Recent college grad, class of ’69. Writes well under pressure. Clever with words . . .

  .

  “Are you sure you’re wearing a strong enough deodorant?” my mother used to say by way of encouragement when I set out on job interviews.

  I almost landed an editorial assistant slot at Casket and Sunnyside, the magazine of the funeral industry, but was passed over at the last minute for a woman with 2/3 of a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard.

  According to my father, who worked on Madison Avenue for twenty years before setting up his own shop, being in advertising was like getting paid to play, and wasn’t I a lucky girl to have a father with connections in the Business?

  He lined up interviews for me with his old colleagues. I wore a navy blue interview dress, industrial strength anti-perspirant, and carried writing samples, but failed to project employability to these sleek men with their spacious offices and lithe secretaries. Instead, they used the occasion to brag on themselves, and asked to be remembered to my father.

  .

  “All our gals start out in the typing pool,” said Frank Mambelli, Creative Director at Doyle Dane. He didn’t even look at my writing samples.

  “Do guys have to start out in the typing pool too?” I
asked Cy Berman.

  Another friend of the family. I used to baby sit for the Berman kids.

  “That’s what we have secretaries for, Lauren.”

  “Do any of your gals ever get out of the typing pool?”

  “That’s where we get our private secretaries,” he said.

  Between interviews, I hung out in the Grand Central Station waiting room, scanning the classifieds for job leads. I grew familiar with all the women with shopping bags, the ones who waited for trains that weren’t coming and talked to imaginary friends. Unclaimed women with no visible means of support. Like me, except I was younger and better dressed. I went to the movies on my lunch money, and saw every movie on 42nd Street that wasn’t x-rated. In The Arrangement Kirk Douglas languished in anguish, while Faye Dunaway blasted him for not living up to his potential. Poor Kirk, with his swimming pool and his waterfront mansion, who’d never write the Great American Novel because he’d been such a successful ad man. Most of the audience thought this a hoot,

  “How did your day go, sweetheart,” my father said when we met in Grand Central to take the train home.

  “Okay,” I said, unable to meet his eyes.

  .

  Copy trainee wanted. English Major preferred. Advancement opportunity for bright self-starter . . .

  After Christmas I answered an ad in the New York Times and landed an entry level job with Chatsworth Osborn, a small agency specializing in real estate and mail order advertising. My first press release was the letter I wrote to the Alumnae Quarterly. Like any good press release it did not lie, but simply stressed the aspects most likely to impress a casual reader.

  83 Bleeker Street

  New York, NY

  February 10, 1970

  Dear Muffy,

  Lauren Ginsburg is alive and well and living in Greenwich Village. My apartment is right around the corner from The Fantasticks and the Little Red Schoolhouse. Working on Madison Avenue and living in the Village is everything I dreamed it would be . . .

  .

  The apartment in the Village was four tiny rooms on the sixth floor of an old six-floor walk-up tenement building. For $65 a month and my share of utilities I moved into a closet size bedroom with a view of the air shaft. Zebra striped contact paper covered the wall facing my bed. The yellow and green daisy stuff was in the kitchen.

  I’d never met anyone like Eva, the roommate who came with the apartment. She fit none of the available categories. She was a philosophy major from Oklahoma State with a Fredericks of Hollywood wardrobe; a logical positivist with bad taste. Everything in her closet was either jungle print or black. It all fit tight and smelled of stale perfume. She sold magazine subscriptions by telephone, which she thought was a fabulous job. She loved everything about New York except New Yorkers, who were, in her words, jaded and provincial. After dinner Eva and I often played chess. She could talk and play at the same time, which gave her a decided advantage over me.

  “I just hate it when I call those mean little Westchester County towns,” she complained one night.

  I defended the folkways of New York suburbanites.

  “You always have to answer a ringing phone no matter what else you’re doing, and it’s a real pain when someone interrupts your dinner to sell you something.”

  “But people don’t have to be so unfriendly about it. And no one ever smiles at you on the street,” she said.

  “There’s eight million people in the Naked City. If I smiled at all of them my teeth would fall out. Plus lots of them are crazy and you don’t want to make eye contact.”

  “That’s what I mean by jaded,” she said, and swiped my remaining bishop.

  Provincial was wearing white cotton underpants instead of black nylon panties. The very word “panties” made me cringe, and still does. I hated the way nylon felt next to my skin. Cold and insinuating, like the men I met in the East Side singles bars Eva took me to, who put their hands on my thighs and talked about their careers.

  “You can’t go back to the freshman mixer,” Eva said. “It’s time to move on to men in suits. Read Cosmopolitan.”

  She found Cosmopolitan lively and informative, a fount of wisdom and inspiration, but I found it unbearably sad. The Cosmo Girl, with her spike heels and cleavage, lived exclusively under man-made light. She was calculating, yet innocent, avid to please. Her eye always on the main chance, yet she seemed satisfied with so little: a clerical job, lingerie, and a boss to seduce.

  .

  My boss, Mr. Fischbach was the president and founder of Chatsworth Osborn. Tall, gray, and cadaverous, he was a presence behind closed doors. He was rumored to be an Angel, one of those Broadway investors who financed vehicles for aging stars and young proteges. Twice a day I delivered his mail. He never spoke to me. Sometimes he didn’t even look up from the pages of his Variety.

  Besides delivering mail, I proofread copy and clipped our ads as they appeared in print. Chatsworth Osborn ads ran in airplane magazines and publications of fraternal orders. A Chatsworth Osborn ad was direct. Never buy another pair of socks in your life! Improve TV reception for only $9.95! There was always a fourteen day money back guarantee if you weren’t completely satisfied.

  The bard of Forever Socks and Day-glo Panties was Lenny, chief copywriter and self proclaimed “dirty old man.” He looked like a friendly mastiff. Lots of jowl and grizzled hair at the temples, but he wore great shirts. His attitude towards me was of good natured lechery, which I didn’t take seriously, since he was married. He had one of those cigarette scorched, Humphrey Bogart voices, like my father. He even smelled the same, a friendly aroma of coffee and unfiltered Camels.

  “You’re the only broad with class around here,” he said when I asked him why he didn’t bother the secretaries instead of me.

  “That’s because I still wear knee socks and Weejuns,” I said.

  “Seriously. You’ve got an aristocratic profile. C’mere,” he said, and grabbed for my ass in a pro forma sort of way.

  “Cut it out, Lenny. You’re old enough to be my father.”

  “You took Psychology, college girl,” he said. “ Admit it. Haven’t you ever wanted to make it with the old man?”

  .

  I shared a windowless cubicle with two other trainees. Kenneth was 19 and had the face of an angel if you could overlook the acne. He spoke real slow because he was trying to get the Brooklyn out of his voice. Ralph, who said he was 19 but looked older, spoke fast and southern. I imagined Ralph outfitted by doting maiden aunts who still shopped the boys department. He wore such odd clothes, everything too small, and in strange colors or wallpaper prints. Ralph and Kenneth were roommates in real life as well.

  One night they invited me over to the apartment they shared off Central Park West. Black leather and chrome Barcelona chairs, a white overstuffed sofa, and only the barest glimpse of kitchen behind a mirrored screen. I wondered how they could afford it.

  “What do the bedrooms look like?” I said.

  “Bedrooms?” Ralph said, and Kenneth blushed.

  I felt very, very provincial.

  Dinner was fondu. Cosmo recommended fondue as the perfect little dinner for promoting an intimate situation. Under candlelight, the three of us huddled around the fondue pot with our small skewers of raw meat. After dinner, Ralph and Kenneth showed me their portfolios, the collection of glossy photographs that would give them the edge they needed for modeling jobs. In black and white, Ralph looked sophisticated, debonair, and ageless as Astaire, while Kenneth combined the intense self-absorption of James Dean with the clean gleam of Tab Hunter.

  “You’re so lucky to get the mail run,” said Kenneth.

  “I’ve never met anyone as weird as Mr. Fischbach,” I said. “Does he only come out at night, or what?”

  Ralph giggled.

  “I’m not furniture, “ I said. “It wouldn’t kill him to thank me for bringing him his precious Variety.”

  “He’s just shy,” Ralph said. “Ian doesn’t think you’re a threa
t.”

  Ian Fishbach was the Vice President of Chatsworth Osborn. He had a face like the hatchet fish in the reception area aquarium, and no one knew what he did for fun.

  “What exactly do you mean by threat?” I asked.

  “Elliot won’t notice you the way he’d notice Kenneth,” Ralph said, using Mr. Fishbach’s first name as though they were actually friends, although there was a little. Like the word “panties”insinuated

  “I don’t see the connection,” I said.

  “With a little help from Elliot, Kenneth could be a star,” Ralph said.

  “Aw go on,” said Kenneth in Brooklyn, and looked down at the floor.

  “You know it’s God’s own truth, sweet pea,” Ralph said, and turned to me for confirmation. “Doesn’t our boy have star quality?”

  Apparently anyone could be a star; it was just a matter of perceiving your opportunities. When I got home I found Eva had left the latest Cosmo on my bed page opened to a story about how one woman launched a successful career in advertising. She was only a part time typist but her Boss took the requisite interest. First he let her write copy for some of his smaller accounts. Next came bigger accounts, and finally a promotion and a secretary of her own.

  .

  A few days later Lenny handed me a miniature grandfather clock .

  “Write me a headline and some body copy,” he said. “ I need it by lunch. Be sure to mention the beautiful lifelike woodgrain vinyl.”

  The follow up assignments included a book entitled Painless Office Rectal Surgery, and a digital alarm clock in the shape of a television. “Wake up to a New Face!” I wrote. Lenny liked that one best.

  In February I had ads running in Popular Mechanics, The Wall Street Journal and Moose Monthly, which was the magazine of the Loyal Order of Moose.

  “I always said you had star quality,” said Ralph when I showed him my first proofs.

  In March there was a rash of mid-town Manhattan bomb scares, which were attributed to the Weather Underground. I suspected ours was a hoax, and that Lenny phoned it in so we could play hooky. It was sunny, almost balmy outside and the air smelled like spring that day. Lenny and I spent bomb scare afternoon in the bar across the street, along with Kenneth and Ralph. We drank martinis and talked about Naked Came the Stranger. A bunch of Newsday reporters had written the book as a joke under a pseudonym. Now they were rich and famous.