Some Other Town (26 page)

Well, there you are—lust, shock, fear, maybe panic. If I could think just now, I'm sure I could not for the life of me say which it is. So instead, as my head starts to clear, what I go back to is what a surprise this is and also that it isn't right. It's one thing to take
a roll in the grass, quite another to call it love. This declaring and kissing is not any of it right.

Besides which, the kissing is now going too far. I can no longer breathe, I can no longer tell who it is who is kissing.

“Ben Adams, stop!”

Ben opens his eyes. I have got his attention, and he lets go of me. He drops his arms, stands very still, and watches my face, waiting for whatever comes next.

I stare back at Ben. I do not know what comes next, what should come next. I only know I cannot do this.

“Ben,” I say. “Oh, Ben.” I try for a smile. “What I mean, Ben, is wait. We need to wait here.”

Ben looks at me like he does not understand, studies my face, then looks away.

I reach out for his arm now down at his side. “Ben,” I say, “Ben, it will be all right.”

I have no idea why I say that. It is not all right, not at all all right. Now in this one moment, everything is changed. Everything is pretty well ruined. Still I hold on to Ben's arm, because I cannot now think what else to do. I only want somehow to help.

“I think, Ben, we are just a little tired here,” I say. “It has been a difficult evening.”

Ben turns to me. He does not smile. “No, Margaret,” he says. And he draws back from my grip. “I love you, Margaret,” he says, his eyes steady, as though he needs to make us both understand. “I am not tired, I am in love.”

I do not know what to say. I do not know where to look.

“Oh Ben,” I say. And I think oh please, Ben, do not say anything more.

But now back again to the solarium, as Marcie—who has been listening to the editors talk, to their wailing and conviction I've just cost them their jobs—Marcie, it turns out, has news for us. It is, in the end, not good news. It is not news that the editors want to hear. But it is news that absolves me and while I'm concerned, I cannot say I am not relieved. Because now Marcie straightens her shoulders, breathes in, and says, “You know you needn't worry you're going to be fired.”

We do not any of us know how to take this. It is not really Marcie's call. And cocking his cereal bowls in a smart-alecky way, “Oh really?” Bones says right at her.

“Oh really,” Marcie replies. She looks at us, takes another breath. “The fact is, on Monday we're all being laid off.”

The editors and I sit immobile. For a long moment it is perfectly silent. Then “What?!” Frances explodes and speaks for us all.

“Laid off,” Marcie says. “The Project is folding. On Monday Steinem plans to leave us a note. Along with each of our pink slips.”

Here Marcie grins. “I read his mail,” she reminds us. “I know where he keeps all his reports. And when he left last night, I let myself into his office, I decided that it was called for. It's just seemed strange, the way he's been acting, the way he's put off getting a receptionist. So I let myself in and I read everything I could find. He's leaving with the Personality on Sunday, she is helping him pack all weekend. He is leaving for good, and he is closing the Project behind him.”

Celeste opens her eyes wide. “No,” she says, and stares blankly. Then her eyelids flutter and backing up, she collapses into a chair. It is not turning out a good day at all for Celeste. Abandoned—by her livelihood, now by her Steinem. “No, no, no,” Celeste wails from the chair.

“Well, of course he ran off with that woman,” Frances says. Frances has quickly recovered and in fact she is now not the least surprised. “They're probably on their way to Mexico right now. They probably told the crooner it's business.” Frances laughs.

“But it
is
business,” Marcie says. “That's what I'm saying. Dr. Steinem is leaving to go work for the Personality in L.A. He starts his new job on Monday. I found the draft of the note for us, explaining.”

And then Marcie fills us all in. It took her most of last night to piece it together. She read all the Personality's correspondence, well, from the last month or so. The Personality was sly, she did not come right out in one letter and propose it. Still Marcie could tell, maybe better than Steinem, what the Personality had in mind.

“The woman is worried about the
Garden
,” Marcie says. “One night last month some guy from her show got arrested in a Santa Monica bar. The papers down there had a field day because the guy was on
Magic Garden
. It worried the Personality, made her think maybe the show needed to change, needed some kind of new image.

“It's what got her thinking about Steinem,” Marcie says. “That a PhD might help the
Garden
.”

Frances sniffs. She cannot herself imagine Steinem as anyone's image. “Oh well, possibly the Salvation Army,” she says. She can
imagine he might brighten up that place. “The Personality must be desperate,” Frances says.

“Well yes,” Marcie says, “although she plays it down in the letters of course. She wrote only that there had been a little trouble with Lawrence. That was the puppeteer's name, Lawrence. Everybody in L.A. knows Lawrence. He does Floppy, it's this kind of puppet spaniel with big droopy ears who took over for some real dog they had. And the thing is, you actually do see Lawrence, his face, on the show. Sometimes he and MaryBeth have little heart-to-hearts, they let him sit on a stool out beside her with Floppy stuck on the end of his arm.

“Like Mr. Bones,” Marcie says, and smiles at Sally Ann. Bones nods his bowls once, collegially. Celeste herself, listening, sits forward. Frances lets out an exasperated sigh.

“So anyway,” Marcie says, “in her letters, the Personality just says there is this little trouble with Lawrence. She doesn't go into it much. She says only they will have to let him go and it is making them rethink their format. What would little children like? If not Floppy, what? And so they want to discuss it with Steinem. Because he knows about children.”

Lola laughs. “Maybe they're confused and thinkin' of Bones. Maybe it's really Bones they are after.” Lola looks over at Sally Ann. But Mr. Bones is back in the purse again and Sally Ann just sits oblivious.

“But the thing of it is,” Marcie says, “it's more serious, this trouble with Lawrence, than the Personality lets on. I can tell by her letters that something is up. So I call my cousin, I have a first cousin in Santa Monica, and I call her and ask does she know about it? And she says she does, everybody does, it has been all
over the papers, although in her opinion those papers have gone too far. The thing in the bar must have been at a slow time, there must not have been much other news.”

And then Marcie tells the story. What happened is this. Lawrence took a girlfriend to a bar that night. Lawrence was, the cousin said, something of a lush and he and the girl spent a lot of time at that bar. Everyone there knew both of them. The girl was maybe only twenty years old and Lawrence, who was fifty-five if a day, the cousin would swear by it, liked to bring the girl to show her off. The night Lawrence got arrested, the girlfriend was wearing a Floppy T-shirt. You can buy them in L.A., shops carry them for kitsch, white T-shirts with a big picture of Floppy on front. Apparently the girl wore no bra with hers, which turned heads in that bar, you can bet, and maybe why she and Lawrence just stayed to their bar stools drinking all night.

But then after a while, Lawrence began getting loud, he started talking in this loud goofy voice, his one from
Magic Garden
. It attracted attention, some people in the bar came over to where he was sitting. And then, the cousin said, Lawrence just seemed to lose it and started into a routine from the show. To everyone's surprise, he slid his hand up under his girlfriend's T-shirt and “Good morning, boys and girls,” he said to the people at the bar. “Floppy is glad you could join us today.” And then he wiggled Floppy's ears from underneath the shirt, he made Floppy wiggle his nose too.

The drunks in the bar thought it was funny. They laughed and called, “Do it, Floppy!” They came closer and asked Lawrence is this really Floppy? They asked him how the heck Floppy was. They asked how Floppy were.

The girlfriend, who hadn't drunk as much as Lawrence, started
to get angry. Frightened too. There were a lot of drunks in the bar that night, they were moving in close and she made Lawrence stop the show. She pushed his hands away, she tucked in her shirt. But the drunks called, “More, more” and Lawrence tried to go back under the T-shirt. “Just one more show, Floppy,” he said to the girl, “one more Floppy.” And “Floppy, Floppy,” the drunks shouted. They all thought they were having a great time.

Well, the cousin said, the girl started screaming, there was a cop just outside, and before any of the drunks knew what was up, he had them all under arrest. Lawrence too. Lawrence in particular. When the cop ran up and grabbed him, he still had his hands on the girl.

It all came out in the paper, the one the cousin reads anyway, and maybe they made some of it up, you can never be sure, but everyone was talking, just the same. You can guess, the cousin said, what it did for Floppy T-shirts.

“So that is the story,” Marcie says. “Once the papers got hold of it, the Personality had to fire Lawrence, there was nothing else she could do.”

“And now she wants Dr. Steinem to do Floppy?” Celeste asks. “Professor Steinem?” She looks at Marcie, bewildered. Henry S. Steinem in falsetto, pretending to be a spaniel?

Lola laughs out loud, she throws her head back and laughs Texas style. Lola at least is beginning to feel herself again. “Professor Floppy,” she says. “Well I guess we coulda guessed as much.”

But then she looks at Celeste and closes her mouth and tries hard not to smile. “Sorry,” Lola says. “Just struck me funny.”

Celeste looks dreadful. Marcie tries to help. “The Personality didn't say anything in her letters about Floppy,” she tells Celeste.
“She only said she wanted Steinem to come visit, have a look around. He could be some kind of consultant, she said, an educational specialist. They needed more education on the show, that was all.”

“Consultant my foot,” Frances says. “The Personality just wants to fool around. I know that woman.”

Celeste does not seem to have been listening. She is still back on Floppy, how Dr. Steinem will now end up on a stool with a spaniel halfway up his arm.

“She's going to make him talk like a puppet!” Celeste wails.

Across the room, Sally Ann clears her throat. Bones is again out of the purse. “And just what is so wrong about that?”

There's not much more on the subject to say. The Project is closing, that's all. And I sit in the solarium now only half listening as the others begin winding down, too. Frances and Lola trade some tired remarks from deep inside their deck chairs. Celeste lies collapsed in hers. Sally Ann keeps her head down, consulting with Bones. And Marcie sits forward, halfheartedly offering “Oh and one more thing.”

Their voices are low, the sounds fading. And when I look out at them all, it is as though I am watching ghosts. As though soon we will all just be specters here, like little lonely Emmaline. The end is near, we can see it. Already we are disappearing.

So I try to imagine how it will be, when we are none of us here,
when there are no breaks in this solarium, no solarium then at all. And what occurs to me is just this: How much we do come to depend on the things we think we are only resigned to. Work, for instance, rushing to catch the bus every day, riding it home with the bread man. Coffee at ten, sweet rolls on Friday, Lola's whoops from the second suite. The creak of the floorboards as Frances trawls past. Knowing the others without looking up too, just from the sound of their footfall.

And knowing then too just what each one will say before they even begin. Knowing the facts of each new romance, hearing the editors retell them at lunch. And later hearing the editors again in their suites on their phones to their Arthurs and Jean-Pauls. Knowing they yearn for these calls to come in, knowing we each of us wait all day, listening for Marcie's buzz.

So then, depending on these things as we seem to do, we cannot always be on our guard. And it will happen, therefore, sooner or later we will all be taken by surprise, by when these things are no longer there. Which no doubt will be, we now suspect, the case this coming Monday.

Frances speaks up. “Well of course it will be this Monday. Why would Steinem waste any more time?” It will be this Monday that we'll know. First thing that morning when we arrive, in our mailbox in its envelope with our name on it, there—our pink slip, clipped to a short note from Steinem. “Just you wait,” Frances says. “Do not say you did not see it coming.”

We all know Frances is right. And I try to imagine it then. Everyone's note will read the same. The Project is finished, it will tell us. Nicely, maybe not in so many words. But finished, the end. No gentle phasing out, no final text, no closing afterword. The note
does not explain why. Just that we must have our desks cleared by three. Oh, and that we'll get two weeks' severance pay. It's the least the Project can do.

As we come in that morning, we'll each stand by our mailbox and even though we have been prepared—it is generally what we expected, we are all out of a job—still it will come as a shock. We will not at first be sure we believe what we've read. And the few of us gathered there early will say well maybe it's just Lola again, one of Lola's little jokes. Lola, knowing what we all suspect, would think to write a note like this, she would pretend it had come from Steinem. She would think it was funny. The day an electrical short in the fire alarm set off the sprinklers in our ceilings, Lola thought that funny too. She was the only one of us who laughed. Lola, who sat at the time with a layout spread out on her desk, four-color separations, just watched the ink run and hooted and slapped her thigh.