Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions Read online

  “I bet we could do something like that in six weeks,” Lenny said.

  That day it felt like my brilliant career was finally under way. Play for pay, the way work was supposed to be, if you were bright and funny and basically nice.

  .

  In April I was walking through Washington Square Park when a bearded hippie in Washington called out my name.

  “Hey there, Lauren Ginsburg! Don’t you recognize an old friend?”

  . His hair fluffed out in all directions like a dandelion going to seed. His gauzy blue shirt was covered in embroidery and mirrors. He looked like no one I knew.

  “Okay, I’ll give you a hint,” he said. “Kensico Dam.”

  High school. Saturday nights. Little Anthony and the Imperials on the car radio, while Jake Meltzer tries to remove my bra.

  “Jake Meltzer!”

  I was so glad to see someone from my old life that I forgot all the good reasons I’d had for never wanting to see him again. Spilt milk. Water over the dam. Over lunch, he told me he was dropping out of Harvard Law School if he didn’t flunk out first. Anything lower than an A was dirt to Jake, as I remembered, but he’d also dropped out of Cornell after the first term. It seemed to be his particular destiny to get accepted by Ivy League institutions he could turn around and despise. His reasons for hating Cornell were too much cold weather and too many large, wholesome looking women. I imagined some equally flimsy pretext for ditching Harvard. He didn’t appreciate how lucky he was to still be a student, to be in training for a respected profession.

  No one asked lawyers if they could type.

  “So what’s wrong with law school?” I asked.

  “Imagine Hell Week that lasts forever. Everyone in your pledge class is some new form of asshole. If you graduate you get a chance to work with and for the scum of the earth. I’m moving to San Francisco while there’s still time to be a hippie.”

  “What about the draft?”

  Back then only med school got you out of the draft. Med school, or a doctor’s note that testified to your physical unfitness for army life. Richard Nixon, our new president, had campaigned on the promise of having “a secret plan to end the Viet Nam War.” The war seemed to be expanding, but Jake did not appear concerned.

  “The family doctor swears I got a heart murmur and any heavy lifting would kill me, so basic training is out of the question, on account of the way they make you carry things. You going to invite me for dinner or what?”

  .

  When I buzzed Jake into 270 6th Avenue, it was as though I was noticing all its awfulness for the first time: the buzzing of the overhead florescent lights, the egg yolk colored hallway, and a mingled orderof onions and cat spray.

  “This place is real squalor,” he said.

  “Actually,’ I said,” I don’t hang out in the lobby much.”

  “What you have down here does not qualify as a lobby. No place does where you have to keep single file. Is the elevator working?”

  “What elevator?” I said.

  Eva let me borrow her fondue set for dinner.

  “If I catch a disease from this, I’ll sue,” Jake said as he speared his first piece of raw meat.

  “I bet you guys want to be alone,” Eva said, and retreated to her room.

  “What’s her problem?” Jake asked.

  “She’s just shy,” I said.

  “She looks like a hooker,” he said.

  After dinner I showed Jake “Wake up to a New Face!” in the March issue of Moose Monthly. I didn’t expect lavish praise from Jake for my accomplishments, just a polite display of interest.

  “If your daddy is a Moose and he dies when you’re a kid there’s a Moose orphanage. It’s called Mooseheart. The old folks home is Moosehaven,” I said.

  “You got a real crummy place here,” he said. “It’s a turn-off for a guy to visit a girl in a building that smells like onions and cat piss. You should move back in with your folks.”

  “I can’t stay up past ten thirty in my own bedroom and read without my mother coming in and turning out the lights. She treats me like I’m twelve.”

  “I still remember the time she invited me to dinner,” Jake said. “A very gracious individual, your Mom.”

  It occurred to me that they had a lot in common, Jake and my mother. They were both generous when it came to constructive criticism, and quick to find fault. It was bad manners to invite yourself to dinner and then complain about the accommodations, but my apartment did reek of kitty litter and downward mobility. Only someone who cared would bother to tell you every thing that was wrong with you and the way you lived.

  “Sorry to eat and run,” he said. “Got a date to take acid with this woman I just met. If you ever get to San Francisco, look me up.”

  .

  In May I wore a pants suit into work, and Ian called me into his office to explain office policy.

  “Women don’t wear pants in this office,” Ian said.

  “I’m out of pantyhose,” I explained. “You try to keep yourself in pantyhose on $67.50 take home. What I mean to say is, it’s time I had a raise.”

  That was the point in the script where they’re supposed to tell you they admire your spunk.

  “We’ll take this up with Mr. Fischbach,” Ian said.

  After my run in with Ian over the pants suit, Kenneth got the mail run.

  The day of my appointment with Mr. Fischbach to talk salary, I wore new pantyhose and the navy blue interview dress. He looked through me as though I was a pane of dirty glass.

  “What makes you think you’re worth any more money to do a job you don’t perform very well as is?” he said.

  “I’m writing copy now,” I said.”I’m really a junior copywriter.”

  I handed Mr. Fischbach ‘Wake Up to a New Face.’ He handed it back.

  “The last time we advertised for your position we had fifty applicants,” he said.

  Lenny saw me when I came out of the Ladies Room, my eyes all puffy from crying.

  “Meet me across the street after work,” he said.

  .

  Lenny guided me to the large corner booth in back and ordered us both martinis.

  “I’m serious about that book,” he said. “We could make a fortune.”

  The touch of his hand on the tense spot just between my shoulder blades felt like kindness itself. How starved I was.

  Heaven protect the working girl.

  Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl.

  “It’s about time you took advantage of your opportunities,” Eva said that night.

  “It still doesn’t feel right,” I said.

  “It’s not cheap if you actually like the guy,” she said.

  “I like Lenny all right, I just don’t respect him,” I said. “How can you respect an old guy who cheats on his wife?”

  “You don’t have to marry him,” she said. You just have to let him improve your career.” She tossed me her favorite leopard print Banlon shift, which reeked of My Sin. “This dress is Checkmate,” she explained. “I save it for closing the deal.”

  Kenneth and Ralph told me how nice I looked in the checkmate dress. Even Mr. Fischbach managed a wintry little smirk when we passed in the hall. Lenny winked at me over the coffee tray. Later, he phoned me from his office.

  “Under the clock at the Biltmore at 5,” he said.

  Soon I would be reborn as the Cosmopolitan girl, realistic and proud of it. Dressed to kill and eager to please. Something would be lost. Nothing marketable, just my jaded, provincial side.

  At three-thirty Ian called me into his office, and shut the door.

  “Take the rest of the day off,” he said. “You’re fired.”

  .

  This is what my dream tells me: the world is still cold, and I’ll never find a parking place. Wih my hard won law degree I should have been a contender, one of those mini-skirted babes who does it all, instead of a frump in sensible shoes.

  “I’m a failure!” I tell Dr. Freundlicht
.

  “If you say so,” he said, in an accommodating tone of voice. “But aren’t you being a little disingenuous? It sounds to me like you are bemoaning your failure to become a whore instead of an honest lawyer who works for the Department of Labor. You can’t have it both ways, not if you’re looking for sympathy.”

  “I’m only an honest lawyer by default,” I explained. “It’s because I don’t have what it takes to succeed. I’m no good at sales. When I try to please I miss by miles. There’s nothing more pathetic than a failed prostitute.”

  “You often start stories but never finish them,” Dr.Freundlicht said. “What happened with you and the married man?”

  .

  Here’s what I felt the moment Ian fired me: sheer relief.

  Dutifully, I waited for Lenny under the clock at the Biltmore because a nice girl never stood anyone up. I didn’t know if Lenny would come once he’d found out I was fired. I sort of hoped he wouldn’t.

  In which case, what was the point of waiting for a married man under the clock of the Biltmore?

  I thought wistfully of fresh sheets and an absence of kitty litter. There was still time to catch the next train back to Larchmont. No, what I really wanted to do was get out of Eva’s slimy dress and into something cotton, something that had my own smell on it.

  The next Monday, I went down to Church Street, flashed my college diploma at the personnel specialist, and was hired by the New York City Department of Social Services at twice my old salary to be a welfare caseworker. A union would negotiate raises on my behalf, and I couldn’t be fired except for criminal behavior. I also signed up to take the LSATs. I would never be poor again, except in my dreams. I could even afford the luxury of psychoanalysis four times a week. Isn’t that one definition of success, being able to pay for your own therapy.

  By now, hadn’t Psychoanalysis fulfilled its modest promise, the transformation of misery into ordinary unhappiness? I’d quit smoking with relative ease and no longer fell in love with men who reminded me of my mother. I had yet to achieve Freud’s definition of success: satisfaction in love and work. Well, Freud never said it was easy.

  “You’re so lucky to have a vocation. To do work you believe in and make a good living at it,” I tell Dr. Freundlicht. “What I do for a living feels like makework half the time. If only I had a talent.”

  “But you do have a talent, a very useful one,” Dr. Freundlicht said. “You do well on standardized tests. I’m not joking, by the way.”

  Our time was up.

  “We all make a living off our wits as best we can,” he said, gently, as I got up to leave.

  He was letting me in on the joke.

  Death of the Blues

  Vienna, 1902. Sigmund Freud seeks non-addictive cocaine substitute ,discovers Prozac. Revises Civilization and its Discontents to add happy ending, repudiates psychoanalysis. Incidence of neurasthenia plummets, as does Jewish birth rate. Apprentice pastry-chef Ludwig Wittgenstein invents the Sacher-Masoch tort.

  Prague, 1912. Franz Kafka moves out of parents’ house for good, marries. Writes Metamorphosis, a popular children’s story about a man who turns into a great big bug and has many exciting adventures.

  London, 1920. T.S. Eliot tears up drafts of Wasteland, tells Ezra Pound he wants to write show tunes for shop girls and live on the Riviera. Teams up with George Gershwin to write CATS!

  Memphis, 1926. Bessie Smith quits vaudeville, opens beauty parlor. Robert Johnson tries to buy back soul from the Devil, struck by lightening.

  Berlin, 1933. Metamorphosis adopted for stage. Lotte Lenya sings the Ballad of Max the Roach. Burning of the Reichstag.

  London, 1944. Churchill takes up exercise and quits smoking for the duration of the Blitz. House and Garden editor Virginia Woolf urges wartime Britain ‘think Chintz’. 10,000th performance of CATS!.

  1952. Dixieland legend Miles Davis quits show business to attend Dental School. Billie Holliday records White Christmas with Perry Como.

  1956. Steep decline in alcoholism, Soviet birthrate. Nikita Khrushchev tells U.S. “We will bury you—in cheap household appliances.’’ Russia leads world in production of hair dryers and toasters.

  1964. Lawrence Welk named Downbeat Musician of the Year. Battle of the Bands won by British barbershop quartet, Rolling Stones.

  1970. Janis Joplin passes California Bar. Green Beret Jim Momson missing in action. Billie Holiday stars in revival of Cats.

  1978. Sylvia Plath marries Ernest Hemingway, opens first bed and breakfast in Ketchum.

  1984. IPO for Sylvia Plath Lifestyle, Inc. withdrawn after hunting accident.

  2000, Memphis. Stash of old records found in yard sale. Rare performances by Robert Johnson, Bukka White, and Son House. Antiques Roadshow estimates value at $5. Nobody gets the blues.