Her Mother's Daughter (76 page)

“Are you Orson Sonders?” I ask coolly.

He doesn't answer. He's busy mimicking me, making me sound like a prissy little girl. I can't, I can't put up with this, I can't, there's no way I can just accept this abuse calmly like a slave, a person with no rights, no dignity. I can't.

But what am I going to do?

I open my mouth. “I'm Stacey Stevens, the photographer assigned to work with you, Mr. Sonders.” I feel my voice about to tremble, and stop. I know instinctively that it will be fatal to show this man any vulnerability. I try to focus my mind on his outrageousness, instead of my hurt, and collect enough anger to keep my voice steady. “I'm sorry my sex and my appearance offend you. But I'm a professional, and I know you are, and I suggest we get to work. One thing I can assure you of: you won't hate working with me any more than I hate working with you, so we're even.”

He raises his head and looks at me with glassy cold eyes. “Oh, you're a professional, are you, I'll bet you are, but you don't cut it, girlie, the women
I
know who are professionals look like
women
!” He cackles.

He pounds the bar and mutters to the bartender, and lays some bills on the bar. He pulls himself upright carefully, holding to the bar with one hand, watching his feet. He stands up. He lets go of the bar. He takes a step. He looks at me triumphantly. “Well, are you coming or not?”

I don't answer. He walks toward me unsteadily. “I needa eat something,” he growls.

We walk out to the station, and find a hot-dog bar and he gulps—disgustingly—two cups of coffee with three teaspoons of sugar apiece, and eats a hot dog with mustard. “All right,” he says as he chews, “the underside of New York. You going to be able to stand it, missy? Drunks and dope addicts and whores? Streets so filthy the dust comes right up between your legs and dirties your nice clean panties that your mother told you to wear every day in case you're in an accident so the ambulance driver won't see shit stains. Guys with shivs and guns, whores with VD. You ready for this?”

“That isn't what we're doing,” I say coldly. I pull out my list.

“The hell it isn't!”

“That isn't what they want. They want charming, or interesting, or especially lively corners, places most people don't see. Look!” I point to my authority, the list. He doesn't bother to glance at it.

“Oh! Charming, interesting, lively corners!” he mimics, sounding like a priggish British spinster. “How sweet!” He swings his head around as if he were going to charge and butt me with it. “They hired me to write it, right? That means they want what I do, and Hell's Kitchen is what I do.” Truculent, dug in. I know there is no point in quarreling. I pick up my bags and start out of the dump.

“Where the hell do you think you're going!”

“To call Russ Farrell,” I say, and leave before he can say anything more.

I know I may be endangering my job. But I
will
not,
will
not be bullied by this man. As I run for the phone, I think I can present the situation in such a way that Farrell will see it as a legitimate question rather than a challenge. I hurry because it's almost noon and although I don't know what time Farrell goes out for lunch, I do know that once he's gone, he's gone for hours. I reach Farrell's office: he's at a meeting, I'm told. I find myself shouting at the poor woman on the other end, crying Urgent, and Important, and she says she'll try to interrupt it and call me back. By this time, Sonders has sidled up to the phone booth, fiddling around inside his mouth with a toothpick.

We stand there waiting. I feel like crying, I want to go home and get in bed and I have to breathe the foul air of the place and feel it on my skin, and there's nothing to look at except Sonders examining the stuff he manages to extract from his teeth, and the crowd of harried miserable-looking people who rush by. At that moment I hate my life, I hate my job, I hate the world.

The phone rings: it's Russ. I explain that Sonders and I have different notions of precisely what the assignment is, and need some clarification. All the while I'm talking to Farrell, Sonders is yammering at me, “Tell him I'm insulted to have to work with a dyke cunt,” and muttering about my general idiocy and the way I'm dressed, and his own misery in having to work with such a creature. I keep my hand over the speaking end of the phone except when I talk, and then I put my mouth right up against it. I know it will be fatal for Russ to hear Sonders.

Russ hems and haws, typically. He speaks abstractedly, in a low voice I can barely hear over the noise of the crowd and the ceiling fans and the loudspeaker announcements. In the end, there is a compromise. Russ did want the kind of piece I described, but clearly he wants even more that Sonders write what strikes his fancy.

At a quarter of one, we stagger up the stairs and into the New York air, which is not a whole lot better than the air in the station. I am hungry but will be damned if I'll admit it. Sonders is grinning, pleased with himself: he's won, he's had a victory over me. We stand on the sidewalk while people stream around us.

“Okay, where first?”

“We have to sit down someplace and work it out. We have to decide where to go when, what light I'll need, and try to get some order in our itinerary so we're not crisscrossing the city for the next three days. We have to choose eight or nine sites from this list.”

“Okay, okay, you go sit down someplace, girlie, and figure it out with your little brain. Just don't forget the nights belong to me. I'll meet you here in half an hour.”

I know he is going to catch another drink. I look around. Now's the time for me to get something to eat, but there isn't a decent-looking place in sight.

“No. You'll go with me to find a coffee shop. I'll go into the coffee shop and you can go booze yourself up some more—not that you need it—and come back to the coffee shop for me in half an hour.” I talk to him like a mother to a naughty child. He shrugs.

I walk on and he follows. We walk five blocks before I find a coffee shop I am willing to enter. And there is a bar just two doors away.

“Okay,” I bark at him like a sergeant. “Half an hour. If you're not here then, I'll go without you and you'll have to go to the sites on your own, another day.”

He raises his eyebrows. He looks at me appraisingly. He turns and shuffles off.

I look at my watch. It is one o'clock of the first day, and we have not even started. I go into the coffee shop and order a sandwich and coffee. I am still trembling and I need to cry. But I can't do it here. What I have to do is all by myself pick out what look like the most interesting places, decide the time of day when they would be at their most characteristic, and the kind of light they'll look best in. Knowing that he should be helping me with this, knowing that instead, whatever I decide, he will mock and attack, make fun of me for choosing it. That I can't win.

I feel horribly abused. I look at the waitress: I would like to blubber to her as if she were a momma, that it wasn't fair of him to expect me to wear spike heels and hose and a beehive hairdo when I was going to have to be walking and climbing and bending and carrying, but I see she is wearing hose and a beehive blonded hairdo despite her hard job, and she might not sympathize. She isn't wearing spike heels though. I suppose I should have worn makeup, but you need your entire concentration when you photograph, you can't worry about eye makeup smearing and dripping and reapplying lipstick whenever it gets worn off and it's not fair, it just isn't fair….

I move from defense to attack. Look at what
he
looks like! No one says boo to him! He could wear anything and no one would say anything. But immediately back to defense: It isn't fair! How dare he, anyway, talk to me that way, a complete stranger, and innocent, I'm not a bad person, I never meant him any harm, I was even excited about meeting him….

But at the same time all this is going on in my head/heart, another part of me is looking on with a kind of appalled shock.
Why do you care!
it exclaims.
Why do you feel you have to defend yourself against this man's attacks! Why do you feel that what he says about the way you look matters at all! Why does anything he says or does hurt you, he is a drunk, a bully, an infantile tyrant!

But I can't just dismiss him as a drunk and a bully.

He is a man. And automatically, because he is a man, he has a kind of authority. Over women. Over me.

WHY!
shouts the other part of my heart/head.

I feel the way I used to feel as a child when my mother treated me with disinterest or contempt. I want to die. I feel everything is too much for me. I want to quit this job, go back to Lynbrook and get some office job that pays a little better than what I was getting at the paper, and just live for small pleasures. I want to move to the country, to some quiet rural spot where you can see the sunrise and the sunset, and live quietly with the kids, raising a garden, taking pictures of the landscape. Forget this business of career, success, the big world.

I can't manage this world. I'm not strong enough. I hate myself, I feel weak and teary and victimized and I don't want to feel those things, I want to be able to deal with whatever I have to deal with. But I know that most women, maybe all, would feel what I was feeling. I have to recognize that despite all my resolutions, I am just like other women.

My lunch arrives and I take tiny bites and chew them a long time. Even worse is swallowing. I drink three glasses of water; the waitress is looking at me strangely. I wipe my mouth finally, I can't finish this food, and I pull out my list and a pad. I work intensely, and in a half hour I am able to plan out the first day. It looks as if it will take more than the three days allotted to us. I figure I'll do the rest of the schedule that night in my hotel room. There is a sharp pain in the muscles of my shoulders and it hurts to turn my head.

I pay for my barely eaten sandwich and two cups of coffee and leave an extra tip for all that water. I go outside, my stomach tightening, expecting the worst. But he is there and together we walk to the IRT and set out for Queens.

I didn't come to like Orson Sonders in the time I spent with him, but I learned how to manage him. I spoke to him coolly and only in the imperative mode. What I resented most, apart from my problems with myself, was that the relation between Sonders and me was stipulated only by him, that I could not change it or even affect it very much. I could choose to be bullied by him and fall apart; or to be bullied by him and bully him back, something I didn't like to do, something that didn't fit into my image of myself. But there was no other choice.

He forces me to be someone I don't like no matter which role I take—just by being who he is—because he sees relations between men and women, or maybe between all people, to be power struggles and nothing else, ever. I feel exhausted by this thought, it reminds me of my marriage, of what happened to Brad and me, and that crushes me.

But I went on. I don't know why. I didn't make a decision to go on, I just did it, plodding, in the same way my mother went on and on, plodding to the supermarkets and lugging back the heavy bags, doing the laundry, the way I too went through my days doing the work that had to be done, not-feeling, not-thinking, no matter how demeaning or boring the work was. Maybe I went on because I had no one to run to, no one who would hold me and sympathize and pat my head and tell me I was good and Sonders was bad and it was all right. Or maybe I went on because it was my nature and training to do so, and someplace inside me I recognized that if I could get over this problem of mine—having respect for the male for no reason—the job was no worse than any other I could do.

On Monday, I quit shooting around four because the light was gone, and we went together back to the Pennsylvania Hotel, where
World
was putting us up because it was convenient to subways and the Long Island Railroad. Sonders of course headed immediately for the bar. I went up to my room. We agreed to meet at the bar at ten, “There's no action in this burg until then.” I ordered a large pot of coffee and spread out my lists and a pad. I knew, from what I'd been able to accomplish that afternoon, that the assignment would require at least three more days. I roughed out an agenda, then began to plan tomorrow's shooting in detail.

I ordered a whiskey and a sandwich from room service, and after three hours, I stopped working, having done as much as I could do in advance. You simply can't plan these things completely—a chance view, the weather, a badly placed garbage truck—things like that can delay and divert you. Then I showered and took a nap, having called the desk for a wake-up call at nine-thirty. I wondered what shape Sonders would be in by then.

In fact, he was sober, the only time I'd seen him that way all day. Maybe he'd eaten or slept. But he was as wretched as ever, more so, he was in command now. He had decided to start in the immediate area, Seventh and Eighth avenues, where he knew every gin mill, every arcade, every hangout. I appreciated his knowledge—it must have cost him a lot to acquire, in time and money, not to speak of the state of his liver.

I was careful about what I shot, “casing” the territory first so as not to waste film on second-rate material, and he was impatient with me, he kept pointing to one or another depraved-looking face and saying “Look at that mother, by the pinball machine.” I didn't know what “mother” meant but I could tell it was an insult. This enraged me: I knew that almost every word in the English language that referred to women had an obscene meaning, but I didn't know then even motherhood had been vilified.

We worked until two in the morning, by which time Sonders was staggering and I was yawning, despite my nap. I wanted to quit, he wanted a nightcap, and he was so desperate, he asked me to join him. I said he could stay, but I was going, and he yapped “Go ahead, girlie, whatta you ashamed to be seen with me? Ittoo dirw don wanna get dwunk with old bum, huh?” He turned angrily away toward the bar, which had already closed, and loudly insisted on being served. I packed up my stuff and left while he argued with the bartender, who was surely as tough as he was. And there I was, on a filthy dangerous street, all alone, and not a cab in sight. Not that it made sense to take a cab for so few blocks. I walked back to the hotel in terror, clutching my heavy case so that I could use it as a weapon if I needed to. I decided that despite my loathing of this man, I should have stayed with him. Although what help would he be? Why do I assume I'll be safer with a man than without one?