Now I get my assignment, remember the rules, and do what needs to be done. I do it well, but without Great Expectations.
I'm meeting Madeline for lunch on a Bryant Park bench at 1:15. I rip my nylons in the elevator on the way down, so I have to take them off in the lobby bathroom and dump them in the paper-towel bin.
Walking past people in the park, I see Madeline Blue, whom I love.
She sits on a bench, legs crossed, an exposed ankle beating time to the Duran Duran song in her head. Her wrist is balanced on the edge of her seat so she can shake her cigarette free of ash. Her face is pouty, pale, slightly pitted from ancient acne. There's something sultry about her full lips, big eyes, and long lashes. She's sensuous like Morticia Adams, glamorous like Miss Piggy, commanding like Cher— a pretty girl, not a gorgeous one. She looks cynical but superstitious, like a woman who reads her horoscope, twists apple stems, and blows out birthday candles while making a wish. A world-weary cynic who loves puppies and kittens.
The pout: what does it mean? Is she unhappy? The lackadaisical swing in the ankle: liberal, loose? The cigarette between her fingers: blemishes, a past?
I see Madeline Blue, the only thing I've kept from temping.
The first thing I ever said to her, three years ago, was "Is that your real name?"
Keeping her fingers on her keyboard, her shoulders hunched in an arc, she looked up at me, the new temp at Rights International. "Yes." She went back to her computer screen. "I got lucky."
"It makes me think of the seventies," I said, touching human-rights papers on my new desk in the back office I would share with this girl.
Madeline typed as she spoke. "You're thinking of that Joni Mitchell album. Blue."
"Madeline Blue," I repeated. "How Annie Hall."
She stopped typing, pushed her chair out, and swiveled around. "Is your name real?"
"Yes."
"Because it sounds like a stage name."
Then we shared that back office for two months.
When I left Rights International, I revised my résumé. She examined it, her lips moving. "What are you doing?" she asked, having reviewed it.
Puzzled, I cocked my head. "What do you mean?"
"Your objective isn't 'to find a position that combines an expertise in rhetoric and composition with a desire to serve in public relations,' " she quoted. "Give me a break—"
"Sure, it is." I had a college degree, an internship at the state capitol.
"Sybil, you write. Remember?" She closed our back office door.
I had been in New York City for over a year. I temped and halfheartedly looked for a real job. I wrote goofy pieces that were published inconsistently. "Madeline," I began, "I need a profession already. I'm aging."
Madeline Blue, with piercing eyes and blanched skin, whispered to me on my last day at Rights International, "Who says you need a profession?"
This was my epiphany. I crumpled up my résumé; I kept temping; Shock hired me shortly thereafter. I temp; I write; I live in New York. I have no real profession.
From the Bryant Park bench, she turns her head and sees me. Her lips make an o and smoke rises in artful curls and rings, like she's an expert at this cigarette thing. "What took you so long?" she calls out.
"Sorry. I had a pantyhose mishap as I was leaving."
Madeline looks at my legs. "But you're not wearing pantyhose."
"I ripped them in the elevator." I sit down and dig through my stuff. It's freezing, but we're desperate for fresh air, a shining sun.
"You threw them out?" She scrunches up her face. "Surely you could still use them for something."
"Like what? Puppet-making?"
"To wear under pants?" she suggests. "What do you have to eat?"
" Fruit cocktail."
"That's all?" Madeline swishes her ankle violently.
"I'm on a diet. Where's your lunch?"
"Are you yacking again?" Her face turns red, and she's accusatory. "You're yacking, aren't you?"
"I'm not, I swear." Only once. Last night, after I ate a pint of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey because of alienation, desperation, tragedy, sorrow, loss, life, death, and a rerun of Seinfeld that I had never seen before. It was quick and clean. I flushed the toilet and waited for ER.
Madeline makes a point of doing nostril tricks with the noxious fumes. " Drink the syrup at the bottom of your fruit cocktail for nourishment, why don't you."
"Where's your lunch?" I tip my Tupperware, wedging my spoon under a pineapple slice.
"I ate at ten. I was starving."
"Oh."
We sit there in silence, staring at people. Across the way, a homeless man rummages through garbage. Others rush around, a little sweaty despite winter. Then, for a while, we discuss low-income housing and the cost of public transportation. Bad, bad, bad, we agree.
I tell her about my boss and his snatch-this-memo-from-my-hand trick. She sighs and rolls her eyes. "Look in the mail room, Sybil. That's where the real people are."
Twenty minutes later, I offer a suggestion. "Let's sit on the lions in front of the library and drink hot cocoa."
"I can't." Madeline tosses straight hair out of her face. She irons her brown locks— she literally irons her hair. I assume other people use special gadgets and tools to straighten coiled tresses. Not Madeline. No gels called "Wavy Be Gone." No foamy formulas in her medicine cabinet declaring "Out, Frizz, Out!" Madeline pulls the ironing board out from behind her bed— the one she got at a yard sale in Park Slope— and spreads her mane across it.
I squint, unused to hearing zany Madeline refuse anything along the lines of sitting on the Bryant Park lions while sipping cocoa. "What do you mean, you can't?"
"I just can't."
"Why not?" I'm incensed.
"I'm not wearing any underwear."
I certainly didn't expect this. "What?"
"I never do." She drinks her Coke with nonchalance.
"Oh." I stare out at the park and the pigeons. "Well."
"How's Jeff ?" she asks suddenly.
My boyfriend. "Oh, fine." I spin my Diet Pepsi around, making sure it still doesn't have any calories.
"Sybil. There's something I've gotta tell you." She smashes her cigarette into the ground under the bench and pulls her coat around her legs. Without warning, she's grim.
"What?"
"I've accepted a job teaching in Guatemala beginning in October. I'm leaving."
Twice, my mouth opens and closes. "Madeline, you can't."
She looks into her lap and pulls her fingers out of her gloves. "Sybil, we knew that, sooner or later, one of us was going to get out. I thought it would be you." Lifting her eyes to mine, she says, "We can't go on doing nothing."
"We're doing something. We're doing something." I get flushed, panicky, ill. "You teach. You're a great teacher. I write— because of you. You made me. You can't go— I can't do this without you. I can't stay here. It's just biding time—"
She shakes her head. "Till what?"
My