A SHORT STORY

Free love? As if love is anything but free!—Emma Goldman

LOVE AMONG THE ANARCHISTS

 “I have been ill for the past three years. But I am better today.”

Kate Howard stares at the message on her laptop. Its screen sheds the only other light in the room, besides the soft glow from a brass lamp on the marble-topped desk. The green glass shade bathes the contemplative smile of a small silver Buddha in a wash of marine light. It is midnight in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. From her 9th floor apartment Kate hears the soothing undercurrent of end-of-summer traffic on blacktop just starting to glisten. For a full minute she scrutinizes those startling sentences, sifting recent memory for a clue to Paavo’s message. Ill for three years? When had they last been in touch? It had to have been e-mail because they had not spoken in a long time. A quick perusal of her ‘sent’ mail reveals no correspondence between them for at least a year. It is late and Kate is tempted to put off answering Paavo until morning. But her husband is still working in the back room. He is very nearly finished mixing a new song. She might as well stay up because Stephen, or Stee as she calls him, will want her to hear it. And her curiosity is piqued by Paavo’s message.

Paavo Kaasik, only son of Estonian artists, was born in Paris. His father, an emotionally pale sculptor, had escaped from a Nazi slave labor camp to France where he met his bride. She was a poet, an unflappable Estonian beauty with a hardy constitution. They grew up in neighboring cities along the border of Russia. Then living as refugees in Paris, Grigory and Ruta were momentarily overjoyed at Paavo’s birth. They immigrated to America, to New York and the reassuring proximity to other refugees near Oyster Bay on Long Island. They became citizens. She changed her name to Rita. Eventually their family grew, as did the despair of Paavo’s father who grieved for his homeland. Despondency not even a son and three daughters could relieve forced his retreat from worldly concerns and he sculpted fantastical topiary from the dense shrubbery surrounding their 3-bedroom, seagull-gray clapboard colonial. Those verdant monsters fascinated the neighbor kids and embarrassed his children.

His wife was their ballast, the one to put poetry behind her and get a teaching job. This led to a principal position at the high school in Locust Valley. She earned a comfortable if not particularly privileged life for her children, hoping to increase their choices by ministering to their needs. Her husband was left to his despair and the sculpture such as it was. The girls married strapping fair-haired Americans and all produced daughters who drifted from their oddly woeful grandfather when his wife died. They grew into healthy indulged teenagers who ran track, passed out at raves, played guitar and went to college. They had cell phones and then Blackberries; they posted on myspace and then facebook. They had no curiosity about the family history, the volumes of unpublished poetry their grandmother had left behind, or for their Uncle Paavo beyond what he gifted them—expensive trinkets offered in Tiffany’s signature robin’s-egg-blue boxes and elaborately patterned squares of silk he called fichus, which were received excitedly and then cast aside, too old-fashioned for the girls’ obsession with trends. They married professional men and had babies—more daughters as it turned out. Paavo’s sisters ignored the political quagmires he created for himself. He wrote passionately and extensively about the extremist right with an often barely masked vitriol. No one had given his sonnets anything more than a cursory glance. Paavo was left to carry on the family name and he had failed miserably.

Paavo’s seduction of Kate was facilitated by her willingness, her drive, to be enthralled. She read all of his sonnets. Kate had taken many lovers after her first marriage ended in divorce. Paavo was her intellectual conquest, the others before serving merely to pave the way. That he pursued her like a rutting buck, oblivious to his vulnerability in hunting season, was irrelevant. She knew she was incapable of having children and never revealed that to Paavo. It seemed cruel, at the time, to derail his purpose.

That was over thirty-five years ago. Perhaps it wasn’t so unusual, a communication from him out of the blue. After long absences reappeared and always in a different locale invariably determined by his personal astrology readings. An eclipse—lunar or solar—usually guaranteed a message from him, warning her about a crisis occurring right smack on top of her midheaven. Her nadir often did not escape its influence either. They were always interesting to Kate, his astrological predictions, but she never felt the transformative effects he had predicted. Or at least she wasn’t aware of them. The only time he’d been absolutely correct was informing her that despite his wish for a different outcome, everything he charted for Kate and Stephen twenty years ago signaled a strong union.

Paavo had once surfaced in Northern California and he expounded on the many pleasures to be found in the wine country of Sonoma. From Saigon, which he informed her was officially Ho Chi Minh City, he’d reported that he was delighted to be an object of curiosity to so many. He was on his way to Hanoi and then the beaches where he would be revitalized, astrologically speaking of course. The last time she heard from him he was in Chile, laying low in a little town called El Molle in the Elqui Valley. From there he wrote: “Extra terrestrials make the most landings on earth here.”

Kate taps the keys. “Where are you? Why no word until now? What do you mean, ill?” Hesitating, she deletes the questions and replaces them with another. “I hope you are really okay?” Paavo’s e-mail had arrived many hours before. She had been consciously avoiding the inbox while focusing on the short story she is writing. “Where are you?” she adds. “Still in the land of E.T.?” She hits send. The beauty of e-mail is that it never wakes anyone up, never is an audible, unavoidable bellow. Before she can pick up the glass of red wine on her desk he replies.

Paavo informs her that he’s on the West Coast again, this time at the opposite end of California, in the heel of the sock-shaped state. “I’m in Redondo Beach in southern California.” She types without hesitation. “I haven’t heard from you in so long. Why now?” Kate adds the smiley face to avoid misunderstanding. Instantly he replies, “I don’t know. I was thinking of you.”

Paavo only reveals that he is into yoga seriously, Viniyoga specifically, which is a type of Hatha yoga. Concentration on the breath sharpens and focuses the mind. “This brings spiritual advancement,” he continues. “Oh, and there are many, many difficult poses. I am quite advanced.” Without Kate asking, he describes at length the light in Southern California and how earthquakes and fires frightened him but were hardly talked about as if it was just as natural as can be. The personalities he comes in contact with are a hoot, all hippy dippy la-la—organic la-la, he stresses. It is sexier in the south. He is really quite happy to be there. A young woman he is ‘educating’, beautiful, exotic, is an aspiring actress. She is absolutely smitten with him. Oh, and he is teaching himself to read and write Sanskrit.

Perhaps he is drinking. Kate sips from her glass, studies the evidence of her lips on the rim. With e-mail it is not so obvious, especially from a man who is an alchemist with words. He has not asked how she is. “Okay, tell me about being ill? What was it? Are you really better now?” As if he has read her mind he responds: “I have quit drinking. Nearly three years now.” She waits this time and hopes he will answer her question. After a few minutes, maybe more like ten, a response appears.

Kate glances over the content, looking for her answer. He writes nothing about his health. Instead he tells her that he has been spending the past few days and nights Googling everyone they had worked with in Chelsea. “Like who?” Kate types, but deletes this question and asks instead: “What made you think of the newspaper? That was ages ago.”

Again, Paavo has ignored the question and after a few moments there is another wordy response. It reads like a cast of characters in a play by Arthur Miller. Some, he wrote, had not made it to their 60s as he and Kate had.

Rusty Trenchman was the original founder and owner of the weekly community newspaper where Kate and Paavo worked. Paavo was a take-no-prisoners, muckraking journalist. Kate earned her living as a typesetter. While she contributed captions and a clever headline or two, her creative writing remained outside the drafty walls of the dank, cavernous loft on West 24th Street where they labored practically around the clock to put out a weekly edition of the Chelsea Chatter. The hard working staff was a presence in the community. After each weekly edition was put to bed, they could be found in the neighborhood Blarney Stone—a low lit, stale-smelling, blue-collar rendezvous where salt-laden piles of corned beef and cabbage sweated on a steam table at the far end of the bar. They downed numerous pitchers of cheap beer between shot glasses of whiskey, their reward for striving to right the wrongs, beat the politically unbeatable, and throw fits when Trentman rejected an exposé if the target just happened to be running a full-page ad in the paper that week.

And where was Rusty Trenchman today? The man who loudly championed the underdog and left-wing social policies that failed to impress left-wingers, who was fond of repeating to his staff and anyone who would listen that truth was more important than being liked by everyone, was a millionaire many times over having sold the scrappy rag to a major media conglomerate.

Sonny Winter’s name appears next, someone Kate had not thought of in many years. He was the ‘Boy Wonder’, a fresh-faced journalist always with a smile as wide as his innocence. People were good. Politicians could be persuaded. Wrongs could be righted. He married his sweetheart when wedding announcements in the New York Times reported the bride’s name as Miss So-and-so. He walked her down the aisle into her wealthy, politically situated family of judges and community leaders. Sonny, Paavo reported, died of cancer just after 9/11.

Kate is surprised to see another name: Blossom. She was Paavo’s first and only wife. On the rebound from Kate, he married Blossom; a pretty and vacant young woman who aspired to be a photojournalist and Paavo was just the man to help her navigate the shutter. Already twice married she readily accepted another round with Paavo. He uncovered her name in an online column of the New York Times called “Vows.” Blossom Lovett Woodward Kaasik had added yet another surname. The ceremony took place in the spacious rent-controlled apartment where she still lived; the one she’d finagled from Paavo who, at the time they were divorced, was hopelessly debilitated by alcohol and debt.

Max Schovelt is dead. The only mention Paavo found of Max was a listing in Cypress Hills. It must have happened some time ago since the cemetery has been closed for many years. Max was one of Kate’s anarchic lovers, a radical leftist Jewish photographer whose idea of a romantic date was a jarring ride on a school bus to Washington D.C. to document a protest. Targeting Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal at the Impeachment Fair on the Mall proved an aphrodisiac. Foreplay was the long, sleepy, druggy bus ride back to Manhattan to a cramped tenement walkup on Ninth Avenue where they fell up into a loft bed littered with graphically bold pamphlets proclaiming various political, social and economic injustices.

Kate reads on. She knows where Dick Hardman landed. The most feared gossip columnist in Manhattan, he was difficult to avoid. His byline appears above his column in a major tabloid, which is driven by sensationalism. She wasn’t surprised though because she’d predicted some avenue of sleaze paved with money for the young, preppy editor-in-chief of the Chelsea Chatter when she’d inadvertently overheard him deliver a sniveling apology to their boss after the Chatter staff had revolted over a completely legitimate grievance. Years later when the right-leaning owner of the tabloid sought to break the unions, especially the Newspaper Guild, Dick strode right through the picket line, and for that he was richly rewarded. Paavo’s contribution is an exclamatory footnote: “Oh my god, Kate. You’ll love this. He’s married to a fucking von Richthoften! You were absolutely right.”

The Chatter’s angry, not so lean, Lesbian theater critic, Leah Franz, was now writing lean, angry Lesbian plays. Harold Maudlin had transformed his art directorial skills into Web Design at the Daily News. Ophelia Rosamund, Princeton graduate, was an anomaly among them in her relatively low-status job as a classified sales rep at the Chatter. Nicknamed Tippy, she was waspy rich and apolitical; more interested in the powder in Aspen than the thin white lines of it hidden in Dick Hardman’s desk drawer. Paavo found her long dormant facebook page and only one other online reference to a private school in Colorado where she was teaching art and French.

Kate purses her lips, amused. Why is he bothering with all this? Who cares? And she is tempted to ask that question: “Who cares?” Instead she types: “You need a hobby. Or better yet, get a pet.” She adds the smiley face.

“Ben Klein,” Paavo writes back. “Remember him? I think you had an affair with him. Married guy. They were a couple of anarchists. Wife wrote investigative stuff for the Chatter, quite the radical. Emma something?”

Kate remembers Emma. “Emma Gustafsson. Why?”

“Well, my dear, she’s writing trifling pieces on the Internet about pot growers in California, but he’s making an absolutely obscene salary.”

She grabs the slack, gray-streaked plait of red hair that drapes her shoulder and reads on. Ben Klein earned in the high six figures. His stock portfolio made him a multi-millionaire. He was still married to Emma and they had a daughter. He’d risen in the ranks of a major finance corporation, from management positions to a leader of leveraged buyouts.

“What’s leveraging?” Kate asks. “Doesn’t it have to do with downsizing?” Paavo responds, chastising her. “Downsizing is a terrible euphemism! But, yes, it means that often they do fire people, many people. Your friend is a buy-out specialist, my dear. The employees are not usually the pieces of the whole worth they are looking to gain.”

Kate rapidly shoots him a reply, like her finger’s on the trigger. “He’s not my friend!”

• • •

It was the spring of ’84 when Kate’s once translucent skin, white as porcelain and dappled with pink across the bridge of her nose when she blushed, was framed by thick red hair. She has long since put the brakes on excesses. But attention to the requirements necessary to maintaining physical beauty has lapsed. Hairline cracks have appeared on her face. An ice pack on her aching shoulder brings sweet relief. Her hands are coarse, and her feet often give her grief. Her feet? How odd to suddenly recall Ben’s infatuation with her feet. His wife Emma, who had largely remained aloof to their affair, could get steamed about that.

Kate met Ben at a rent party in Brooklyn and they shared the back seat in Max’s car on the ride home. Emma was in the front alongside Max flirting with him, Kate recalls. Earlier, among the rabble rousing drinkers of cheap wine accompanied by Mile Davis on the record player, Kate was dimly aware of Ben following her with his eyes; heavy-lidded, dark eyes that spoke silently of a kind of eloquent sadness. He finally introduced himself to her, out of earshot of Kate’s then lover Max. Never taking his gaze from her, he told her about his work, being an outspoken advocate for Shinnecock rights. Kate knew of the Eastern Long Island tribe because she had been out to Montauk a few times. Impressed, and a little drunk, she told him she was really a writer, or trying to be one. Under darkness in the back seat of the car his hand covered hers and she did not pull away.

He telephoned the next day and many times thereafter—often three or four calls in a day—and Kate did not think to ask how he had got her number. They were an incestuous bunch at the newspaper. Their affair started one night in his apartment. Ben and Emma lived in the Ansonia. The imposing Beaux Arts-style building, turreted and laced with ornate wrought iron balconies, commanded a full block on Broadway. Its grandeur suggested the broad boulevards of Paris. Sizeable too, were the hallways—the widest Kate had ever seen. The building’s past inhabitants were no less impressive. One of Kate’s literary heroes, Theodore Dreiser, had lived there.

Kate was the only dinner guest and, later that evening, Emma casually announced that she had a meeting somewhere and would not be back until late. Very late, she added, with nearly a wink as she left them to an empty apartment. Later Kate began to piece the puzzle, but that night she was effortlessly seduced. He put her in a cab. Emma called the next morning and informed Kate that she had left her glasses behind, adding: “What were you doing with my husband last night, you naughty girl?” Kate, stymied, mumbled something about too much wine and Emma assured her it was all right. Why didn’t she come for her glasses, stay for lunch?

Emboldened by the seemingly relaxed atmosphere between Emma and Ben, Kate also began to relax. She was an adventurer so why not see where it went? Afterwards, as he hailed a cab for her, Ben blurted that he thought he was falling in love. When could he see her again? She saw he was practically begging her and agreed to another meeting. Their affair grew like wildfire, roaring through them, engulfing and destroying their ability to resist.

He couldn’t get enough of her. Besides her apartment, they made love wherever they had a chance, even sneaking kisses in anonymous doorways near the Chatter, the thrill heightened by the possibility of Emma’s appearance at any time. Escapes to Montauk were possible when he had some business with the Shinnecocks. He adored her—the perfect skin of her and her luxuriant mass of red hair. Ben called her his lioness, Kate the Red. Sexually, Kate liked to do things and she liked things done to her. Ben confessed that his wife rejected those things, claiming it demeaned a woman. His sexual appetite was voracious.

Kate did not complain. Things only started to break down in little ways. Emma was determined to be Kate’s friend, to live openly in this strange dynamic. She dragged her around to shop for a birthday present for Ben or called her to ask what she thought Ben might like for dinner. She was cutting and sarcastic about Kate’s writing when Kate acquiesced to her demands to see it. Emma also took a lover but Kate learned later that it had only served to make Emma tearful and regretful. Emma began to talk about having children.

And Kate was beginning to be bored. Ben’s hot pursuit now had a cooling effect on her. A friend invited her to holiday in Mexico with them and a fellow student of her friend’s husband. Kate accepted. Ben cried the night before she flew out to Los Angeles.

Kate returned to New York ten days later. Tanned for the first time in her life, she looked rejuvenated. Her hair, lightened by the sun, was newly cropped in a fetching boyish cut. Ben saw her and cried. When she showed him photographs from the trip, which he insisted on seeing, she did not spare him the shots of her and the young man with the broad grin who had accompanied them to Mexico, happily sharing an over-sized margarita. Ben pored over those and cried some more.

• • •

It is nearly two in the morning. The street is quiet and a crisp chill comes through. A new season is in the wings. Ben, once a champion of the disenfranchised is now a Vice President of something he and Emma had condemned. Life is strange, Kate thinks. She lives a block from Central Park. A havoc-wreaking summer storm had ripped through the nearby north end of the park, uprooting hundreds of trees as if they were spindly saplings and not old giants. The pungent scent of fermenting mulch that hung over the neighborhood for months has finally dissipated. New trees had already been planted, an encouraging sign for Kate who had been dwelling too long on aging and its logical conclusion.

Yawning, Kate is about to close down her laptop and notices there is another message from Paavo. Stephen calls from the back room, urging her to come and listen to the song. “Just a sec, Stee and I’ll be right there.” Before turning out the desk lamp she opens the e-mail. “How are you?” Paavo writes. “Well and happy I hope?” She does not hesitate and types: “I am.”

LOVE AMONG THE ANARCHISTS is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©October 2009.

PLAY IT IN THE CAR AND PLAY IT LOUD!

CAR FULL OF GIRLS

Just before The Mister’s birthday in 2007 we got the sad news that his mum had died. The day of his birthday in April we were on a flight to Leicester for the funeral. It was a week where we felt very close to his sister and her husband, a closeness that would disappear in heartbreaking clouds of aftermath a few months later. But for that week The Mister thought he had the love of his sister.

What did not change was the love and support of friends in Leicester, all of them there for him during a topsy turvy week. Pete, one of The Mister’s closest, oldest friends came out one night and joined a group of us at Dos Hermanos on Queens Road. Both of us had our suspicions that all was not right with The Mister’s friend. Oh, he was entertaining, made us laugh and he was handsome as ever. But there was a subtext to his describing a recent purchase, the flash shoes he was wearing—very unlike our friend.

We saw him again on the night before we flew back to New York. The Leicester Big Band was playing their regular monthly gig in the village of Kirby Muxloe. Our old friend Stanley plays trumpet with them. The Greenhill Road gang came out and brought their sweet friend Chris, generously overlooking the fact that it wasn’t some hard driving southern blues band and that the audience, apart from us, would be silvered-haired and sedate. Older musical friends of The Mister’s showed up and then the Contessa arrived, driven by our friend Pete in the company Jaguar.

The Mister and I are on the same page with big band songs. We love ’em. It was fitting that we were there in Kirby Muxloe the same week we said good-bye to his mum. Jean loved the big band music and, in fact, the very last time we saw her and she and I giggled together like girls was at the very same gig. When the orchestra swooned into a beautiful retelling of Bette Midler’s classic, The Story of Love, I grabbed him for a turn in the space between the seated audience and the bar at the back and crooned those lovely lyrics as we danced:

As long as there’s the two of us,

We’ve got the world and all its charms.

And when the world is through with us,

We’ve got each other’s arms.

It was a grand night and just what the Mister needed. Heading back into Leicester, his old friend offered to take me and The Contessa and our friend Jaz for a spin in the Jaguar. We piled in like excited school girls and in the close darkness of the car we sang along with the radio.

On the flight home the next morning, I recounted the excitement of driving along winding dark country roads in such a flash car. Somehow we got the idea for a title, which is always the magic that eventually materializes into a song. “A Car Full Of Girls.” We didn’t know where to go with it and it sat untouched until our return to Leicester this past year for The Mister’s 50^th birthday. In the meantime we had found out his old friend’s long term marriage had broken up and that Pete had the love of his life, in his life, now. One afternoon in Leicester, the Mister and I left Greenhill Road for a “walk and talk.” We roamed the streets of Clarendon Park with the digital recorder at the ready and talked out our ideas for the song. We flew home and finished it.

This is for Pete and his lovely Sue.

Click here to listen on myspace

He’s got a car full of girls

Heart full of loneliness

Car full of girls

Leaves him in a whirl

Blackbird Road

Flying down Blackbird Road

Surrounding years

Where have they gone

Dashboard glow

Letting the memories go

Saturday night will

Fall from love

He’s got a car full of girls

Heart full of loneliness

Car full of girls

Leaves him in a whirl

He’s got a car full of girls

Not his one and only-ness

Car full of girls

Fills his empty world

Momacre Hill

That’s where he found his thrill

Those empty miles

Where have they flown

Fancy car

Must be a jaguar

Joyriding

On the boulevard

He’s got a car full of girls

Heart full of loneliness

Car full of girls

Leaves him in a whirl

He’s got a car full of girls

Not his one and only-ness

Car full of girls

Fills his empty world

Gypsy Lane

He hears that old refrain

Saturday night

Always the same

Daylight’s gone

He’s got the headlights on

Back seat girls

They fill the night with song

He’s got a car full of girls

Heart full of loneliness

Car full of girls

Leaves him in a whirl

Stop on a dime

Turn on a penny

Looking for the one

When he’s got so many

He’s got a car full of girls

Heart full of loneliness

Car full of girls

Leaves him in a whirl

He’s got a car full of girls

Not his one and only-ness

Car full of girls

Fills his empty world

©fairalldanzmusic 2009

SIDNEY VICIOUS September 30, 2009

"I love my cats because I love my home, and little by little

they become its visible soul."- Jean Cocteau

SUDDENLY

Suddenly we have

An old cat among us.

When moments before

He'd boldly outrun us.

His coat, still black,

Sharply ruffles his spine.

His head, still sleek

Nods in elderly time.

Habits he fell to

That entertained us

We search for now

To soothe and sustain us.

When did he age

So irrevocably?

What have we missed,

What didn’t we see?

Suddenly he’s gone

And we choose to remember

Bright eyes and heartbeats of

Seventeen Septembers.

LIFELINE

This intuitive lifeline exists in Nature and yet some human beings are not only reluctant to throw out the lifeline, they often make value judgments before getting involved. The humans in our government have everything in their power to throw a lifeline to the citizens of this country—a public option to health care—and despite the successful, compassionate results in countries like France and Canada, to name a few, they gather like misers on an already sinking ship and horde their ill gotten gains while bending to the will of their real bosses, the corporate captains of the health insurance industry and big pharma. The citizens who are and always will be the spine of this country are left to float in fragile lifeboats on turbulent waters when they should be welcomed aboard and guaranteed a healthful existence. They would grow stronger, repairing the war torn ship, making her a sound vessel in the long run. She could sail proudly in international waters alongside those more progressive countries. Everyone would win. Okay, maybe not the insidious drug companies and the avaricious health insurance monsters but who needs them on an ark anyway?

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now. ~Chinese Proverb

In the midst of a grove of cherry trees along the bridle path in Central Park on the east side, a sapling has been planted where an old one fell in the storm. I'll watch this one grow with pleasure.

“The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.”

—Truman Capote

A SHORT STORY

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

for J.S.

Scaffolding ahead tarnished the entrance to the renowned ‘temple of society.’ “Perfect,” Alice Darling muttered as she strode across East 55th Street. When a younger coworker at her side, Tammy St. Clair, asked what she’d said, Alice replied: “Nothing.”

How long since that damned award was announced had it taken to get to this point, to finally be acknowledged by them? On the morning of the announcement, many months ago, Alice had stepped off the elevator on the 21st floor of Hatchet-LaFayette Media—hung over. It wasn’t unusual for her. Still able to rebound after a late night, but the time was fast approaching when black coffee and a hastily downed egg on a roll at her desk would no longer do the trick; no longer fortify her for the work ahead at ‘special interest’ magazines for women. When she had to, Alice relied on autopilot. Designing layouts like, Retouching Drab Normal With Fab Floral? Not a problem.

Alice Darling’s neglected personal life restarted its crucial, if impermanent, recovery as soon as the elevator descended from the 21st floor with her in it. After she'd passed through the soul-shrinking chill of the vast lobby’s travertine walls, waved goodnight to a benign security guard, hustled past the spaceship above the restaurant in the sunken outdoor plaza and then bounded up the short flight of stairs to Broadway, brightly lit by the Winter Garden’s marquee, a little bit of the day’s accumulated weight lifted from her shoulders. Back in her rent-controlled apartment on the upper eastside, she inhaled the blissful restorative tonic of oil paint and turpentine as she wolfed down take-out Szechuan. Nourished, she brandished a paintbrush and attacked the canvas.

If Alice left the office later—more often than not—then she went directly to Jimmy’s Corner, a down-at-heels bar not far from the office. Bolstered by a shot of Maker’s Mark she'd begin the transition to card carrying artist, swearing before the nightmarish tribunal in her head that she was not a corporate slave. She taxied uptown—sometimes close to midnight—and uncorked a bottle of red wine to stave off despair. Morning arrived like the natural catastrophe one might have been warned about, and still ignored. She’d lift an invisible gun to her head cradled in a sweat-soaked pillow and perform the ritual: “I am not who they think I am. I can get through this day.”

But on that fateful morning, as she mentally tapped her way through the department, eyelids lowered to half-mast, she passed Tessa Rizzo, another designer already slapping layouts of plaid-engorged living rooms onto the color Xerox machine.

“O-o-o-h, hello award winner.”

Alice squinted at the pert young woman. Tessa’s Lesbian bravado in the office could be heard cracking under weighty, argumentative phone calls with any one of her numerous family members, all Italian and all very Catholic. “Morning,” Alice mumbled to the mouthful of Chicklets-sized white teeth. She struggled to remember if she’d brushed hers.

Passing the corner office of Donna Gatti, editor-in-chief of the division, Alice saw her and the executive editor, Olive Munroe, with Rosalie Simpson, who was the art director and Peter Hightower, her deputy art director. They interrupted their huddle at her approach. Offered was the collective cryptic smile that usually predicted a pain in the ass. An entire layout would have to be redone—not her fault they would hasten to add—but blah, blah, the photographer, blah, blah, not enough, blah, blah. She’d heard it before. The department was run on a shoestring strong enough to strangle the life out of designer and editor alike. You bit the bullet. Got on with it. That’s what they liked about her.

Alice had shared an office with Peter Hightower. He stood out, the only male in a department of women; an escapee from a town in Wisconsin that he never talked about called Sioux Creek. Peter was single, in his late 20s. He affected an old school manner, a throwback that bordered on parody. Always in a jacket and tie even in the warmest months, his manner was genteel, with a not too self-effacing edge. The introduction of computers had allowed his inner nerd to flourish and he became indispensable in a department of overworked, computer-illiterate women. Everyone quietly guessed he was deeply closeted. In their office Alice took in an expansive view of Times Square rippled by winter slush. From above the streets looked furred with mold.

A light tap at the door was followed by: “So, you’ve heard the news.” Bunny Edmond assumed a golfer’s pose in the doorway, relaxed and yet, controlled. Arms crossed, skin newly tanned and waspishly freckled. Alice tried to gauge Bunny’s expression, inscrutable under a velvet headband that kept her auburn pageboy, recently highlighted, intact. Pleasant or stern, one could never tell. They had already shipped the quarterly issue of Decorating Inspirations magazine. It was on the newsstand. Bunny had just returned from a brief, well-deserved escape to Cabo San Lucas with her fiancé. What could possibly be the problem?

Alice mumbled through a mouthful of eggy roll that she had not heard any news. She drained coffee from a Styrofoam cup, sighing as she tossed the empty into the wastebasket.

“What’s going on, Bun?”

Like a grade-school teacher carefully praising a student for a job well done Bunny raised her chin: “We’ve won the Folio, Alice. Decorating Inspirations won. Best editorial. Best design in our category.” To Alice’s bemused expression Bunny added: “I know, right? A first for this department.”

Marta Kowalksi burst into the office, drawing Bunny and Alice to her ample chest, enthusiastically hugging them both. She was the managing editor, a generously proportioned round-faced blonde with an infectious laugh. Marty, as she was known, lived in Forest Hills, Queens with her husband who was a police officer now retired. Everyone knew how she’d met him. He had seen her weave out of a neighborhood bar one night and slowly followed her in a squad car until she safely reached her apartment building. Irritated, Marty confronted him. He liked her spunk and that, as she liked to tell it, was that. She managed the freelancers—all the disparate personalities—smoothed tensions between art and editorial, and expertly maneuvered a shifting tide of decorating magazines, journals of fitness and weight loss and those how-to craft issues with hellish instructions that designers avoided like devilled eggs on a sweltering summer day. Marty was bossy in a den mother sort of way and usually gregarious when she wasn’t under extreme pressure. Meaning when she was out of the office and halfway into a pitcher of margaritas.

She left Alice’s office with Bunny and her cheery congratulations resounded throughout the department. Later she was seen humbled before Donna’s desk, nodding her head in agreement.

A memo from the editor-in-chief arrived. It named the magazine, but not the designer and the editor. That memo and later a departmental meeting stressed that no one person could take credit for what was clearly a group effort. When Tammy dared to ask why Bunny and Alice should not be given a round of applause, she was met with Donna’s coolly calculated response: “We in this department work like a well greased wheel and as such every spoke in that wheel is important to its function.” She peered around the room, looking through rather than at anyone. Olive stood at attention by her side, planning her next cigarette. Rosalie stared at the floor and Peter searched for neutral ground. “Understood?”

The Folio award, an engraved crystal spearhead (no shaft, Alice observed) was delivered directly to Donna’s office where it sat on her desk, out of reach. Anyone who was in her office for more than 30 seconds witnessed her caressing it. Her Folio.

Since then Alice has been moved from the front office and the natural light she shared with Peter to a windowless cubicle in the back. The reason given was that she would need her own computer. The department had only just gone digital with that award-winning issue. Alice swore on first rumor that she would just as soon tend bar then go through the hell of learning the computer—at her age—and went so far as to check out bartending schools. But even she knew the dangers of an unrequited life landing in close proximity to alcohol. Instead, Alice sweated bullets tackling Quark and Photoshop and the expected frustrations, which came mostly from Donna Gatti who would be the last to embrace the digital age and the first to make you pay for her ignorance.

Donna, Olive and Rosalie had been nominally critical before the award whenever Alice and Bunny were teamed; happy to sign off on layouts, relieved not to have the kind of headaches they got from freelancers. Instead of granting them the leeway with design and editorial they’d had, the three conjurors stirred an ambiguous pot and mercilessly rejected, then revised, and refused until all traces of the original design and editorial had disappeared under their heavy-handed confabulation.

With summer approaching it was hinted that Alice and Bunny were finally going to be recognized. Or rather, as Rosalie said, “We should have a proper thank-you.” Rosalie was a middle-aged woman with an over-active son and an indifferent husband. She dressed like a good sport, like someone who needed to please. The Buster Brown hairstyle never changed. She had passed the moment when white ankle socks and black loafers made her look youthful. Peter felt certain ‘a proper thank you’ was meant for Alice and Bunny. Since the obvious change in Rosalie’s attitude toward her Alice wasn’t so sure.

But now, months later, they were about to celebrate with lunch at a table covered in thick white linen and set with gilt-edged china and flyweight crystal. The menu was French; the society of the place divinely encapsulated in a short story by one of Alice’s favorite authors. She would stay-tuned, listen for conversation ‘catty and thinly-veiled.’ As they entered, Alice glanced past the maître d’ to the few smartly attired elderly patrons seated at banquettes along the wall. The room was nearly empty. It had been some time since Mr. Capote was strategically placed on a banquette under the famous murals, perched on his haunches and beginning to gnaw at the hand that paid for the Cristal. Zagat’s bemoaned the restaurant’s loss of followers. And it was August.

They were ushered to their seats and a silver-haired waiter, honed by propriety, appeared.

“Oh, I feel like Dorothy Parker,” Donna crowed as she placed herself first with queenly attitude at the round table in the middle of the room.

Parker, my ass, thought Alice and cracked: “Wrong table, Donna.”

“What’s that, Alice?” Donna smiled tightly, splayed her freshly manicured fingernails in corporate mode before her.

“Wrong table,” Alice laughingly repeated and added: “Wrong restaurant.” She filled in the silence at the table caused by her overstepping by further overstepping. “I can see every monster as they come in,” she recited in a breathy whine. Heads lowered. Napkin fumbling ensued. Donna Gatti stared. Alice continued in her normal voice, staring back: “You know, Truman Capote.” She gestured to the banquettes, “This place?”

They had been coached on what to wear, how to behave. The French-owned company spared no expense producing upscale and not significantly profitable magazines: Belle, Belle Interior, Luxury Driver, and Urban Home. The Special Interest magazines, which had normally operated under the corporate radar, were for the time being in the spotlight. Conditional as that attention was they had to impress, or at least not embarrass. The magazines they produced profited handsomely from bored singles on line at the supermarket, dieters, craft project addicts and harried homemakers looking to make ‘quick-n-easy’ suppers. Unlike the fashionably thin women in the offices at Belle who clicked around like they were on a catwalk, they were too big, too loud, unsophisticated and they worked like mules.

All were in outfits they had worn for the photograph to appear in the issue that was just about to go to press. Even Alice was guilty as charged. Crowded in front of the fountain in World Financial Plaza the week before, Alice had been positioned on the far left of the group and in the photo she appeared to be escaping. Donna was furious. What was she thinking! But there was no time and she didn’t want to spend the money on another photo session. It would have to do. Besides, Donna—a step higher in the center—looked good. The men in production had a laugh when Alice corrected the color, always entertained by her caustic observations. She’d once impetuously scrawled at the top of the erase board and they never wiped it clean: “Better to be pissed off than to be pissed on.”

Rosalie, the first to be addressed by the waiter, shyly declined a drink before ordering from the menu. He continued with Donna who ordered her usual I-am-really-a-fun-gal-outside-the-office Johnny Walker. She demonstrated a student-level French to the waiter who expertly feigned both approval and disdain. Alice looked away, embarrassed for her. She had to have been up all night practicing that, Alice mused.

“I’ll have the same,” Olive drawled. That was expected. Both had been nastily divorced in middle age and replaced by younger women. When her cat died Donna vowed never to have another living thing in her personal life. Olive had a daughter. Apart from that, they resembled each other. Similarly styled, they wore clothes like resentment: severe and relentlessly replayed. Alice was the last to order and added her choice—a Kir Royale—to the list that included martinis and a Cosmopolitan for Peter. Rosalie, seeing she had underestimated, called the waiter back and ordered the scotch.

Alice sat between Tammy St. Clair who was twirling an olive in her pursed lips and Bunny, who had foregone alcohol. Tammy was an editor and the one she was closest to in the office, the one with the most potential for rebellion. Not that she did, rebel that is. But Tammy never left an editorial meeting without questioning something. A good twenty years younger than Alice, Tammy gravitated toward Alice’s leonine qualities. If Alice saw anyone after work, it would be Tammy. She was the only one ever invited from the office to view her paintings and from then on became an enthusiastic supporter. When they’d had a few drinks and Alice needed a sounding board, Tammy provided the cheerleading. Life excited Tammy. She was thrilled about a Grateful Dead concert at Madison Square Garden in September. Alice nearly fell over when she told her. Was that guy still alive?

Normally contained, Bunny was even quieter than usual. She was old New York and grew up on Park Avenue in the 90s, the only one of them who had dined here before. Coming from a family of professionals—father a banker and mother a university professor—it was a complete mystery to Alice why Bunny was in magazines and not editing some literary masterpiece. She revealed to Alice that morning that she’d had an offer from Bridal Veil magazine. She'd used it as leverage with Donna for an increase in salary and was not only turned down, but also lectured on loyalty. Bunny decided to walk.

Friendly for the most part, out of habit rather than choice, they sat as a group self-consciously adding to the restaurant's accolades. Constraint began to thaw like ice under a rainspout in early spring. Little by little glasses of wine were emptied and refilled. Conversation loosened but was still tied to office trivia. Wary of putting her foot in her mouth, yet bored with the direction the chatter had taken, Alice told of the time a friend of hers, a writer in Paris, had interviewed the head of the company, Bertrand LaFayette. He owned a vast collection of Surrealist art and Alice’s friend was writing a biography of the Mexican Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo. She began describing what her friend had told her of the opulence of his estate just outside Paris.

Donna charged over Alice’s tale, unable to relinquish the spotlight. “Will you look at this feast!”

Olive’s smoky laugh followed: “Imagine eating like this every day?”

Plates of Dover sole, fillet of black bass in potato crust, house-smoked salmon and roasted cod lay before them. Donna had ordered something called Noisettes de Veau Sauce Brun aux Morilles. They left her to it and went for the fish.

“S-o-o-o, let’s have a little game and everyone tell us what you would be having for dinner tonight if you had not had this delicious meal.” Donna’s rosacea had spread from her cheeks across her nose and was invading her forehead. Clearly she was feeling the alcohol. “I’ll go first.” She would be in her kitchen, over the sink, eating from a bag of salty pretzels.

“Why over the sink?” Alice ventured.

“Crumbs,” Donna replied and burst into earsplitting guffaws.

Peter, with his glass raised and pinkie crooked, revealed he would do, as usual, with a quiet burger in his neighborhood bistro in the West Village. Olive would have whatever her mother had made for her granddaughter.

“Well, you know how much I love to bake,” Marta offered and then comically pointed to her waist.

“Something Italian” piped Tessa and then asked Alice what she would be having.

“Oh, probably a freshly tossed…bottle of Maker’s Mark.”

They were interrupted by the tinkling clue of a toast to come. Rosalie stood up in awkward awareness of her surroundings, holding her wine glass aloft. “I can tell you what I would not be having.” She wrinkled her nose. “The es…the scarp…the snails.” She waited for the table to quiet down and went on: “We should not forget what we are celebrating today.” She looked at Bunny and Alice on her left. “It was a great honor for the department and we really owe it all to…” Rosalie turned to her right, “…to Donna!”

A hesitant round of applause died quickly. Alice pressed her forehead to a glass of cold water. Tammy whispered, “Okay there?”

Donna rose from the table, adjusting her too tight skirt, pulling at her jacket. “I’ve got to powder my nose,” she giggled. “Alice,” she suddenly demanded, “get me a cognac.”

Alice put down the glass and leveled a hard gaze at her boss. “Do I look like a waiter?”

Rosalie hurried to repair the breach, shooting a look of disgust toward Alice. “I’ll get it for you, Donna.” They ordered dessert, which all but Marta had left unfinished.

It was late on a Friday afternoon. Donna jokingly instructed them to take the rest of the day off. By the time they returned to the office it would be time to leave anyway. They passed the empty coatroom that once swelled with endangered animal skins. In the street Alice asked: “Anyone up for another? We are celebrating after all.” She started backing away. “Jimmy’s Corner? Guys? Anyone?” Excuses were mumbled as the rest of them trailed behind Donna. But Alice knew, in time, that others would join her on the barstools at Jimmy’s Corner.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©September 2009.