“What’s so funny?” said Dickie, kissing my neck; necking was then a popular terme d’art.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just like that your perfume is so cocky.”
I removed the cap and put my nose to the sprayer, finding to my dismay that up close it had an almost urinary note. I felt grateful that Dickie hadn’t chosen to wear it that night.
“It’s not perfume,” said Dickie. “It’s cologne.”
I ignored his concern with being manly and slipped his suit jacket off his rowing-team shoulders and onto the floor.
After we’d finished, I had to hurry home. I was never able to stay overnight. Dickie understood, obviously. Walking me back to the Christian Women’s Hotel, he kept a hand on my elbow. He spoke what might be considered pillow talk, but upright and ambulatory and without the pillows.
“Maybe one day we can stay together longer,” he said. “When you get your own place.”
And that is how that night went, and how all our nights went, until we parted, inevitably, not with enmity, but with incredulity on his part: He, like the rest, could not believe that I really was not on the prowl for permanent union. Or he thought that he would be the one who made me realize that deep down inside, I surreptitiously was.
I kissed him quickly, for an instant, on the lips, then rapped my knuckles on the glass of the Christian Women’s Hotel door once he was down the street and out of sight. Helen and I were friends with the doorman, who let us enter by this method instead of ringing and getting in trouble over curfew.
*
The last time I saw Dickie was at the first party that Helen and I threw at our brand-new place: the sixth floor of the six-floor walk-up in Murray Hill. He came bearing booze. He did not stay the night. I did not want him to. It would have been impractical, for one—the place being too small, with Helen in the bedroom and Abe in there with her, and I in the room designated for living. But that aside, I could feel it was over, and I told Dickie so.
He explained to me calmly that he knew I was only saying that because of the upheaval of moving to a new place and because of my mistaken ideas about where my “career”—he sneered semi-intentionally as he said that word—might take me.
“You’ll call me up again, Lillian,” he said, placing a hand at my waist as we stood in the doorway, me trying to see him out, him seeking to stay. “I bet you will in under a week’s time.”
But I didn’t. I was too busy. Doing new things—writing new poems and learning a new trade and meeting new people. New men eventually.
In the month prior to that party Helen had gotten her job in advertising illustration at R.H. Macy’s, and thanks to her, I’d gotten mine there, writing advertising copy.
When Helen had told me to apply that June, after she was hired on, I had been leery. I had not entirely enjoyed the PR work in D.C. But advertising, I found, was a different and entirely more rideable beast.
With the pure driven vision of Phoebe Snow glimmering in my mind, I sent out my rhyming application letters—not only to R.H. Macy’s, but all over the place, just in case. Thanks to Helen and some mild exaggeration on my résumé—or a bit of finesse, as she suggested I call it—R.H. Macy’s took me on on a trial basis, and I tried and tried until they agreed to keep me.
Ginny had moved out of the Christian Women’s Hotel that first weekend in July, too. Independence Day indeed. She became a journalist, and we invited her to that first party, as well, full of goodwill and gratitude at being so free. A few years later Ginny would have to return to Kansas City to help her parents after the crash and through the Depression, settling in to work for the paper there. But Helen and I, we stayed in the city.
We couldn’t stay that way forever, Helen and I, living together, but while we did, everything was charmed. We never fought, we never felt crowded. We gave one another everything we required by way of fun and friendship, and the only necessity either of us could not get from the other was male companionship.
Before that party, we stood together on our fire escape, smoking and waiting for the guests to show up. The ravines of the city as seen from that vantage were sublime: Some of the other fire escapes strewn with shirts hung to dry, and clouds shifting overhead, dyed red by the sunset.
The following Monday I came home from work and paused to get the mail, our first delivery there.