those four innocent words was a whole new world, amazing to the uninitiated and fraught with unseen traps that a novice was bound to step in, like those pits camouflaged by leaves in an old Abbott and Costello jungle movie.
I didn’t realize it myself for months, until I was sprawled on the ground, shaking the banana leaves out of my hair.
Not that it would have mattered at the time when I spotted the ad. Like I said, I was desperate. If Pol Pot had been hiring, I probably would have fired off my resume. I was sending out that document, so heavily padded that it could have played tackle in the NFL, to any and every business that sounded as though they required a semiliterate being to park at a desk all day. In a blizzard of cover letters blanketing the human resources departments of Manhattan that month, I professed my profound desire to be a proofreader, executive assistant, editorial assistant, or any type of flunky imaginable sought by the worlds of advertising, public relations, or broadcasting. I needed a job, and the sooner the better.
For two and a half unbelievable years I had been living on easy street. Actually, the address was a floor-through in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, land of the trust fund bohemian. I had no trust fund, but I had been incomparably lucky since getting out of college, when, through a professor, I had landed a position as a personal assistant to Sylvie Arnaud.
Sylvie Arnaud was one of those people that the early Twentieth Century popped out now and then—magic people who were simply famous for being around all the right people.
How she had become famous, no one remembered. Perhaps sometime circa 1935 she had written something, or painted something, or slept with someone who had written or painted something. Her name would occasionally pop up in The New York Review of Books, during the course of a discussion of a review of books about German Expressionist painters, say. She knew everybody. Ernest Hemingway. Salvador Dali. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Harpo Marx. You can play a highbrow Where’s Waldo? with her in pictures of intellectuals and rich folk gathered in salons in Paris and London between the wars. Chances are she’ll be there somewhere, maybe sitting next to Cole Porter and looking impossibly elegant in her slinky bias cut dresses, with a drink in one hand and a stretch limousine cigarette holder in the other.
By the time I knew her, she was a beaky, wizened old creature on toothpick legs, with jaundiced flesh as thin as onion skin parchment. She lived in a dark, musty brownstone on the Upper East Side, in Turtle Bay. When my old college professor who helped get me the job told me about the position, he said that I would probably be helping her assemble her personal papers so she could write her autobiography. But I was not taking down her memoirs; instead, I spent most of my time chasing after her favorite groceries, like these nasty chocolate covered apricot filled cookies that she practically lived on. Believe me, I am not picky when it comes to food. There’s nothing I can’t deem binge-worthy if I stare at it long enough, but even I would make an exception for those cookies.
And her peculiarities didn’t end there. She also liked a specific kind of hot pickled okra that could only be found in Harlem; butter mints from the basement at Macy’s; baguettes and croissants from a French bakery in Brooklyn Heights. She preferred cloth hankies to Kleenex and Lava soap to the expensive kind I bought her once on her birthday, and woebetide the person who made the mistake of serving her ice in her drinks.
She was one peculiar old lady.
She didn’t talk to me much about Picasso, or Earnest Hemingway, or the Duchess of Windsor. I arrived too late for that. Mostly I heard about her ingrown toenails and her skin problems. I guess when you’re ninety-four and you itch, dead painter friends become a second tier concern.
When I first started working for her I would bring up the subject of her memoirs.
“What are these memoirs you are always pestering me about, Rebecca?” She had a trace of her native accent, but it was an off-and-on thing. She could lay it on thick if she wanted, turning these to zeez.
I tried not to let on that I was disappointed not to be doing important literary work. “I just thought…if you needed any help going through your journals…”
She would laugh throatily at that idea. “Ah, you see me as some sort of crazy old artifact, non?”
“No, no,” I would stutter. (A lie. I did.)
“Naturally! You want to know all my little secrets, like whether Cary Grant was good in bed.”
“No, I…” I gulped. “Wait. Cary Grant?”
She would bark with glee at me, tell me to take her laundry down to the basement, and then ignore me for the rest of the afternoon. I began to suspect the diaries didn’t exist anyway. Maybe she’d never been any closer to Cary Grant than I had been.
Or maybe she had.
Occasionally an academic would make his way to the brownstone, but he always left disappointed. He might sit in a chair with a plate of those apricot cookies and listen to Sylvie rave for a few minutes about John-Paul Sartre’s bad breath; generally it didn’t take much longer to realize that Sylvie wasn’t going to divulge much useful information. Even though Sylvie had been living in New York since the sixties, her principal visitors while I was there were not glitterati or even academics, but a physical therapist named Chuck and an old lady from the Bronx named Bernadine.
Sylvie was a mystery to me, right down to the question of what I was doing there. I couldn’t figure out why she wanted to pay even my nominal salary to have me around. I couldn’t even figure out why this old French lady was in New York.
Then again, I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about it. When I began working for her I was twenty-two and it was the first time I’d ever lived in New York City, so I wasn’t exactly consumed with curiosity about my nonagenarian employer.
And I had nothing to complain about. On the first day of every month a check arrived from the manager of Sylvie’s estate, R.J. Langley, CPA, which made me the prime breadwinner among my roommates in our apartment in Williamsburg. At the time I was too young to appreciate that getting paid a living wage for buying an old lady’s baguettes was really nothing short of a miracle.
Then one morning as I was getting ready to hie myself off to Manhattan, I received a call from R.J. Langley, the first time I had ever spoken to the man personally. He asked me—commanded me, actually—to go to his office in midtown first thing.
“Why?” I asked. “Is something wrong?”
“Actually, yes. I have bad news. Miss Arnaud has pneumonia.”
“Oh, no! What hospital?”
There was a pause. “I can give you more details in person.”
During the subway ride over, I was filled with sadness. Poor Sylvie, stuck in the hospital, eating Jell-O. She hated being away from her apartment, away from all her musty old crap. I made out a mental list of her favorite things I could put into a hospital care package for her.
When I arrived at the accountant’s office, however, I was hit by a real shocker. Mr. Langley pushed an envelope across the vast oaken plateau that was his desk. “We would like to thank you for your service to Miss Arnaud.”
I gawped at the check, which was for twice the amount I usually received.
“That’s for your last weeks of work, plus two weeks severance,” Langley said. “I’m afraid we have to let you go.”
He kept saying we. “But what about Sylvie?”
“If she recovers—”
“If!” I bleated.
He winced at my outburst. “Miss Arnaud is at a very advanced age, as you know, and her condition is serious. If she survives, it is her wish and the wish of her beneficiaries that she be moved to an assisted living community. You must understand.”
I did not. And who were these beneficiaries? They had certainly not visited her while I had been there.
“I’d like to see Sylvie.”
The wrinkles of studied