One by one, everyone returns to work. Herbert and I conduct a couple of interviews in his office, brand-new girls who show some real promise, maybe, even if the poor bunnies are hopelessly na?ve in their brave red lipstick and their enthusiasm. We offer contracts to both, which they want to sign right away, God bless them. I tell them to take the paperwork home and read it carefully first. Don’t sign anything you haven’t read, I tell them, and they nod earnestly and stick the contracts in their pocketbooks.
By six o’clock, the office has cleared out. I help Herbert with his hat and coat and shuffle him out the door to the limousine waiting for him outside. While waiting for the elevator, I remind him of his dinner engagement and kiss his soft cheek good night.
The elevator arrives, Herbert steps inside, and I’m alone at last.
I return to the reception area and switch off the lights. The glow of an early summer evening pours through the windows. I’m due for dinner in forty-five minutes, and under ordinary circumstances I’d take the opportunity to walk the twenty-two blocks through this golden light. I’d set aside the worries of the day and enjoy the hubbub, the hurry, the joy of people headed home in weather like this—the way a summer evening can transform even dirty old Manhattan into a city of translucent wonder. Instead I duck into Herbert’s office and help myself to a glass of twenty-year-old single-malt scotch, no ice.
There are those who claim that I slept my way to my current position, just outside the office of Mr. Herbert Hudson of the Hudson Modeling Agency, and I will allow there’s a grain of truth to that rumor, as there are to most.
I first met Herbert when I was seventeen years old, just before Iris and I graduated from Chapin. He was the father of a friend of mine, we’ll call her Rosie. Nice girl, Rosie. She and I performed in the school play together, that spring of our senior year. We put on The Pirates of Penzance—she played Mabel and I played the major-general, twirling my mustache to great acclaim—and Herbert hosted a little cast party afterward at his handsome Park Avenue apartment, in the course of which he cornered me on the roof terrace and asked me if anyone had ever told me I should model for photographs, that he was the president of maybe the biggest modeling agency in the world and he would love nothing more than to launch my career as a world-famous fashion model.
Now, even at seventeen I was no idiot. I understood that I was no more than ordinarily pretty, not the stuff of the world famous, and what was more, I perfectly comprehended the nature of the proposal Herbert was laying out for me. Finally, and most importantly, I was seventeen years old and had no intention of losing my virginity to Rosie Hudson’s portly, red-nosed fifty-four-year-old father, and long story short, Herbert found a more gullible girl to keep him company that night, and I lost my virginity some years later to a genuine Russian prince, I kid you not.
By the age of twenty-three, however, I took a less romantic view of sexual relations, and a greater interest in what lay underneath the skin of another person. Chance placed Herbert next to me at a dinner party one evening, where I discovered that Rosie Hudson’s lascivious father spoke four languages, collected Tintoretto, and had trained as an architect before his own chance encounter—those peculiar, dazzling points of inflection that determine our fate—led to the creation of the Herbert Hudson Modeling Agency. Then he said enough about him, what about me. I told him about Rome, about my brief spell as a fashion model—he laughed and said I must have caused a real sensation among his Italian colleagues—and about the war and my opinions on it. He walked me home through the New York drizzle. He was between wives at the moment, he told me, and I said I hoped he didn’t mean to audition me for the role, because I wasn’t cut out to be anybody’s wife. He laughed some more and said he couldn’t afford me, anyway, and because I happened to stand at a crossroads in my life, because I was sick and tired of gorgeous, faithless young men, I agreed to go to dinner with him the following Saturday. We went out to dinner eight times before we slept together, which was probably a record for me if I bothered to count, but it was not until after we drifted apart that he offered me a job as his secretary.
So whatever people might say about me—and they say a lot—I haven’t been sleeping with my boss, at least not since he became my boss. And if I feel myself entitled to a glass of his private reserve from time to time—why, it’s only because I am.
I sling down the scotch and clean the glass myself. By the time I’m done with all the housekeeping, I’ve got twenty-eight minutes to make my way to the Fifth Avenue apartment of my aunt Vivian and uncle Charlie, and I’m unlikely to find a taxi at this hour. I should skedaddle right out the door, but I don’t. I leave Herbert’s office and lock the door behind me—walk to my desk to retrieve my pocketbook from the lower right-hand drawer—but I don’t continue straight to the glass doors that open to the elevator lobby.