Three-Martini Lunch (12 page)

I
quickly became acquainted with the office rhythms in a new, more intimate way. Miss Everett's decree that the manuscripts—
her
manuscripts, at least—should never leave the premises meant staying long after all the other secretaries, readers, and editors had packed up for the day. Coming back from the ladies' room, I often encountered the sight of my desk lit up and looking like a lonely castaway amid a dark sea. I got a lot done during these evening sessions, but I can't say I was ever one hundred percent at ease. There was something discomfiting in the atmosphere once the lights had been turned out. I would feel the echoing cavern of the sixth floor spreading out around me, the crinkling rustle of each manuscript page I turned growing louder by the minute. The best way to describe how I felt was
haunted
. I was acutely aware of being isolated and yet not alone. At nine o'clock each evening, an elderly Swede named Olaf came to empty the waste bins and wash the coffeepots. When I glimpsed the pupils of his eyes, milky blue with advanced cataracts, I understood how it was the glass coffeepots never seemed to get completely clean. There were
often stirrings, too. Editors who came back to retrieve a bottle of scotch or to hang about their offices with the lights turned out while having a nightcap with a lady friend. These were the editors I thought of as the company's “wolves”; they were lonely men who prowled about, using the office like it was some sort of private back room at Sardi's or the Algonquin. But then I identified a species of even lonelier editors, too—the ones who worked too hard or had fights with their wives. These editors ultimately resigned themselves to sleeping on the scratchy upholstery of their office sofas for the night. Torchon & Lyle during the after hours was a place heavy with silence and yet thick with restless activity.

One night I was reading at my desk, when I looked up to see a blond apparition moving towards me. Recognizing the jaunty step, I realized it was Judy. As she drew nearer, I was astonished to note she looked every bit as fresh and perky at nine o'clock at night as she did at eight o'clock in the morning.

“I thought I'd find you here!” she exclaimed. As she stepped into the pool of light around my desk I noticed that the bright swipe of lipstick she habitually wore had been recently reapplied. “Mabel said Miss Everett had piled more work onto your shoulders.”

There was a pitying tone in her voice that irked me. “Oh, I don't mind,” I said. “I take it as a compliment she trusts my taste. Would you know what, she doesn't even bother to read the ones I say are bad? She trusts me that much.”

Judy nodded sweetly, still looking at me with the kind of expression one wears when trying to help a lost child. I didn't understand Judy; she never seemed to acknowledge that this was how I was going to make editor. But at that moment she appeared to detect my irritation with her sympathy, because suddenly her face relaxed and she laughed.

“Say, don't look so glum; I've come to rescue you! Want to take a little break? I'm awfully thirsty myself.”

I looked at the pile of manuscripts, which somehow appeared every bit
as mountainous as they had hours earlier when I'd set them on top of my desk with a plop. I realized in the course of the last couple hours my vision had gone a little blurry. “That might be nice,” I murmured, then brightened and looked at my watch. If we went very quickly for a cup of coffee, I could be refreshed and back at my desk in a little over half an hour. “What time is it? Is Schrafft's open much longer?”

“Oh. I thought we might go somewhere else. I had something a little stiffer than coffee in mind.”

“Stiffer?”

•   •   •

E
xactly two vodka martinis and one hour later, I reluctantly said good-bye to Judy and forced myself to return to the office. Going from the noisy, fusty warmth of the little Irish bar where we'd been drinking back into the echoing isolation of the office was like going from a steam room into an ice-bath. The fuzzy feeling that had come over me in such a comfortable and inviting wave at the bar now seemed more like a disjointed jangling in my head.

When the elevator doors opened on six, I stepped off but was immediately brought up short. From across the floor I could make out a dark figure hovering over my desk. As I squinted at the bulky shape, I realized I was looking at Mr. Frederick. His head turned, and as the alcoholic glisten of his watery eyes flashed, I understood he was looking in my direction.

“Ah, Miss Katz—there you are! I've been looking for you,” he said in a slow, thick voice.

“For me?”

“Yes! I promised I was going to visit you, and here I am . . .”

“That's very . . . uh,
thoughtful
.”

“Exactly! I'm a very thoughtful man. Ask anybody! Ask 'em all!”

I had no clue who it was that constituted the phantom population he thought I ought to ask, but I didn't inquire further. As I approached my
desk, Mr. Frederick stepped nearer to the desk lamp and I was able to make out his expression. He lurched close enough for me to smell his breath, and stared into my face for several seconds with an anesthetized smile plastered stupidly upon his face. Then his features fell downcast and he frowned. He jabbed a finger at the pile of manuscripts on my desk, and from the state of disarray I could see he had been searching around my desk only moments earlier.

“Yes, I came to see
you
 . . . but you weren't here,” he said. “Where were you?”

“Oh, I stepped out for some fresh air.” As soon as I said it, I was sorry. My heart was not in the lie, and I could tell from Mr. Frederick's expression he knew this was so, and that he could guess exactly where I'd been.

“Aha! ‘Fresh air,' eh?” He winked. “I
knew
you were a girl who liked to have a good time,” he said. His finger made a poking, prodding beeline to my ribs. On automatic impulse, I recoiled and raised my hand to swat his finger but stopped in the nick of time.

“I'm not trying to get fresh,” he said, holding both hands in the air innocently. He wavered there for a moment, tipping drunkenly on his feet, then dropped his hands to rub his sizable belly. “I am nothing if not a gentleman. Ask 'em. Ask 'em all! A gentleman, through and through.”

“Of course,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Yes . . .” he said, placated by the opportunity to remain chivalrous. “I do believe you young people nowadays are oversexed. You're always getting the wrong ideas . . .”

“You're so right, I apologize,” I repeated, suddenly sensing my opportunity. “It's past my bedtime, and I'm positively bleary-eyed. I'd really better be getting home.” I departed with sufficient haste to thwart the next sentence forming on his lips.

I hurried out, taking the stairs, and snuck back into the office again at five in the morning in a desperate attempt to finish my work from the night before.

Soon enough, this became a routine; once initiated, the game of cat-and-mouse between Mr. Frederick and myself proved difficult to call off. Mr. Frederick was now sharply attuned to my existence, much in the manner a mosquito—having been shooed away before completing its first full sip of blood for the night—is extremely sensitive to the presence of a warm human body in a confined room. He began seeking me out persistently, especially during the after hours. My regular maneuver—cutting out quickly and then making up for it by returning to the office at four or five o'clock in the morning—was beginning to take a toll. When Judy commented on the dark circles under my eyes, I nearly began to cry as I explained about my situation.

“Oh, he's shameless,” Judy rolled her eyes and proclaimed when I described yet another night of being chased around my desk. “And there's no telling what he'll do. He's done some perfectly wicked things to girls at the annual Christmas party—you know, put them in funny positions and then the next day claimed it couldn't be helped because he was too drunk to be held accountable for anything and that it was only meant in good fun anyhow. I think he knows he can't be fired. If I were you, I'd steer clear of him at all costs.”

“I'm trying, but it's awfully difficult to manage when Miss Everett has me working on all those manuscripts and he knows I'm practically chained to my desk.”

“I don't get it,” Judy said, her ponytail shimmering as she gave a disapproving shake of her head. “Why don't you just take them home? She'll never know the difference.”

I turned Judy's suggestion over in my mind and realized I was sorely tempted.

That evening Miss Everett came by my desk a few minutes just prior to five o'clock, as she usually did, freshly spritzed with a generous dose of Chanel No. 5. I knew she was preparing to leave the office for the day because a silk handkerchief was tied over her hair and she was holding a pair
of cat-eye sunglasses in her hand. She chatted with me in a friendly manner, during which my conscience kicked in and I changed my mind three or four times about whether or not I had it in me to go through with my plan. Finally, she wrangled an armful of manuscripts out of her ostrich-skin handbag and deposited them in a breezy manner on the corner of my desk.

“Just a few more for you to have a look at,” she said. “I expect you're getting to be quite the expert. It may look like a lot, but it shouldn't take you very long to decipher whether they're good or not. You're clever; you'll be done with them in a jiffy!”

I looked at the pile she had left behind. God knows what was in there. The stacks of pages Mr. Turner handed off to me were often quite slender, and even when the manuscripts these stacks contained weren't very good, they were never very bad. I believe he employed some sort of system whereby he winnowed them down himself first and had me read only those manuscripts he wanted to consider in earnest. In contrast, the piles Miss Everett gave me were utter chaos, containing a range of things from romances to detective novels to how-to manuals. I had sympathy for the fact that Miss Everett was treated by her colleagues as a sort of editorial catch-all; for instance, she was made to edit cookbooks and children's books—subjects her male peers assumed she liked, because, after all, she was a
woman
—when in fact she had zero interest in either. They piled all their undesirable projects on her, and now in turn she was piling her undesirable projects on me.

I attempted to take Miss Everett's manuscripts home with me for the first time that night, my heart in my throat the whole time. After she departed, I waited a solid hour just to make sure she wasn't coming back. I think I was waiting until that vapor trail of Chanel No. 5 finally dissipated.

T
aking the manuscripts home wasn't
so
terrible, I reasoned. After all, I was able to get them done more efficiently when I didn't have to worry about Mr. Frederick turning up, and I was never late meeting any of the deadlines Miss Everett set for me. What she didn't know couldn't hurt her.

Then one day I got caught. My bad luck in bungling the whole thing started straightaway. If I'd been paying better attention, I would've noticed Miss Everett was not wearing the silk handkerchief she usually tied over her hair when she came upstairs to say good night. But I didn't. Instead, I packed up even earlier than was my fashion, and by six p.m. I was already riding the elevator down to the lobby, clutching the stack of manuscripts she'd handed me only an hour earlier. Unexpectedly, the elevator stopped on the fifth floor. The doors opened, and who should be standing there but Miss Everett.

“Oh!” I exclaimed. She looked at me with a flat curiosity. She stepped
in and the doors closed. Clutched in Miss Everett's hand floated the silk handkerchief. Clearly she'd come back to retrieve it. Instead of tying the handkerchief bonnet-style over her hair, she set about rolling it into a tube and tying it around her neck, cocking it to one side like a fashionable airline stewardess. I inhaled and noticed her Chanel No. 5 had been freshly reapplied. She was going somewhere, I realized, somewhere for a night out on the town. We glanced at each other. I cleared my throat.

“Already done for the day, Eden?” Miss Everett asked in a surprised tone.

“Not exactly, I suppose.” I forced a meager smile. “I'd thought I might dash across the street to have a cup of coffee at Schrafft's.” As soon as it left my mouth, we both knew it was a lie.

“I hope those aren't
my
manuscripts.”

I glanced weakly in her direction and tried to comment, but nothing came out.

“I thought I made it clear, Eden: I really can't have them going anywhere. Not even across the street to Schrafft's.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'll go upstairs and put them back right away, Miss Everett.”

“Good,” Miss Everett said. “I don't give you that much to do, and I trust you don't mind working a little late tonight; I need a couple of those done by tomorrow morning.” She produced a compact from her handbag and proceeded to powder her nose. When she was done, she snapped it shut and sighed. “And don't worry. I won't make a big fuss over your taking them to—where was it, my dear?—
Schrafft's
, did you say?” The manner in which she said
Schrafft's
turned my stomach. She was letting me know she was onto my lie. I nodded. She tucked the compact neatly back into her purse. With her lips freshly ablaze with Revlon Red and her skin powdered white as snow, she leveled a cold blue stare in my direction. “It just can't happen anymore. I'd hate to think you already knew that and were
just disobeying me. Which is why I'm
sure
it was just an honest misunderstanding. Wouldn't you say that's just what it was, Eden—an honest misunderstanding?”

“Yes. Of course.” The elevator dinged, and the doors opened to reveal the empty, echoing marble lobby. I stood there, motionless, feeling like a prize idiot.

“Well, then, good night, Eden,” Miss Everett said, stepping off the elevator. She turned and watched me with a dubious expression as the doors slid shut, as though to ensure I wouldn't attempt to hop off at the last minute. I felt like a naughty child who'd been sent to the principal's office. I pushed the button for the sixth floor.

I felt the elevator car ascending and that familiar, even push of the floor against my legs that always made my knees all wobbly. Physically, I was rising. But internally my spirit was sinking.

I was alone for less than an hour when I heard the elevator doors slide open again. Somewhere in the pit of my stomach, I knew it was Mr. Frederick. On automatic impulse, my hand reached out to switch off my desk lamp, and I held my breath as darkness rushed in around me. A stupid, wild idea occurred to me. As swiftly as I could manage, I dove under my desk and pulled the chair in tightly behind me.

I could hear his heavy breathing from across the room. I knew from the sound of it he was quite drunk. He staggered in the direction of my desk. To my surprise, he did not switch on a single light as he made his way across the office floor. This both frightened and relieved me. I wasn't sure yet if darkness would prove to be my enemy or my ally.

When he got to my desk he grunted as he pushed manuscript piles around. I could just picture his hands as he rifled through my things: his reddish skin and bloated fingers, each knuckle twinkling with a spray of strawberry-blond hair, his fat ring finger squeezed too tightly by a gold wedding band. He was making a mess of my desk, but I kept mum as he continued his sloppy rifling. At one point, however, he must've been
leaning too far, because he appeared to lose his balance and staggered closer to the side of the desk, kicking me with the toe of one of the shiny black oxfords he always wore. The kick was sharp and unexpected. My eyes watered. I was able to muffle a cry, but by then it was already too late.

“Hey!” Mr. Frederick exclaimed. Suddenly I felt a hand clamp down around my ankle. A peal of wicked laughter rang out as he tugged at my leg. “I see you!” he sang out. When I didn't immediately emerge, he started pulling harder.

“Ouch,” I cried. I felt the hand reluctantly release my ankle.

“All right, little missy, I've caught you now! C'mon out of there!” he roared. The manic, sing-song tone of his voice turned my stomach.

I pushed the chair away, rolled onto my knees, and crawled out from under the desk. My stomach was churning and I was sweating. I stood up and attempted to smooth down my rumpled clothes, hoping to gather some dignity and regain control of the situation, but Mr. Frederick didn't wait for me to speak. Instead, he launched his body at me like some kind of crazed animal.

“C'mon, now,” he panted into my ear. “I
know
you're the kind of girl who likes to have a bit of fun. Heh, we can crawl back under your desk together if you like!” His breath was hot with bourbon, and before I knew what was happening, his hands went racing all over my body, moving roughly over my blouse and skirt. I felt Mr. Frederick's tongue in my ear. I tried to push him away, but as I struggled, Mr. Frederick got the upper hand and kissed me full on the mouth.

Suddenly the overhead lights switched on. I broke away from Mr. Frederick to see a slim man in a tidy gray suit. He was frowning with what looked like disgust.

“What's going on here?” asked Mr. Turner. His voice was flat and stern, and something told me what he had said was not really a question.