Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [69]
Alas, ’tis true that words are queer
And yet my son, you need not fear.
For in this volume can be seen
All English words and what they mean.
Tate had directed Alley to get the dictionary and had written the verse. But the singing telegram and pink ribbon, those were Alley’s personal touches.
At six o’clock, Mr. Tate left the office to catch a train to the Hamptons. At 6:15 I caught Alley’s eye. We covered our typewriters and put on our coats.
—Come on, she said as we walked toward the elevators. Let’s cake it up.
My first day at Gotham, when I went to the washroom, Alley had followed me. Leaning over the sink was a girl from graphics. Alley told her to beat it. For a second I thought she was going to cut off my bangs and toss my purse in the toilet like the welcoming committee at my old high school. Alley squinted through her cat’s-eye glasses and got right to the point.
She said that the two of us were like gladiators in a coliseum and Tate was the lion. When he came out of the cage, we could either circle him, or scatter and wait to be eaten. If we played our cards right, Tate wouldn’t be able to tell which one of us he depended upon more. So she wanted to establish a few ground rules: When Tate asked where one of us was, the answer (day or night) was the ladies’ room. When he asked us to double-check each other’s work, we were allowed to spot one mistake. When we received a compliment on a project, we answered that we couldn’t have done it without the help of the other. And when Tate left at night, we’d give him fifteen minutes to clear the building, then we’d take the elevator to the lobby arm in arm.
—If we don’t fuck this up, she said, come Christmas we’ll be running this circus. What do you say, Kate?
In a state of nature some animals, like the leopard, hunt alone; others, like hyena, hunt in packs. I wasn’t one hundred percent convinced that Alley was a hyena. But I was pretty sure that she wasn’t going to wind up as prey.
—I say all for one, and one for all.
On Friday night, some girls liked to go to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central and let the boys riding the express train to Greenwich buy them drinks. Alley liked to go to the automat, where she could sit by herself and eat two desserts and a bowl of soup—in that order. She loved the indifference of it all: the indifference of the staff; the indifference of the customers; the indifference of the food.
As Alley ate her frosting and then proceeded to eat mine, we had a good laugh over the dictionary gag, then we talked about Mason Tate and his hatred of all things purple (royalty, plums, fancy prose). When it was time to go, like an alcoholic Alley stood up and walked straight to the door without showing the slightest signs of having overdone it. In the street at 7:30, we congratulated each other on another Friday night without a date. But as soon as she had turned the corner, I went back inside the automat, found the bathroom and changed into the nicest dress I owned. . . .
b.)
—Isn’t that a hedge?
That was Helen’s query two hours later, as five of us picked our way through a flower bed in the dark.
After a quick round at the King Cole bar, Dicky Vanderwhile had driven us out to Oyster Bay on the promise of a wingding at Whileaway—the summer house of a childhood friend. When Roberto asked how Schuyler was doing, Dicky, always so quick to bring one up-to-date on the antics of another, was uncharacteristically vague. And when we saw a couple in their midthirties greeting guests at the door, Dicky suggested we not get bogged down in the lobby. He referenced a lovely garden gate and steered us toward the side of the house, where we quickly found ourselves ankle deep in chrysanthemums.
Stiletto heels sank in the soil at every step. I stopped to pull off my shoes. From the vantage point of the garden, the night seemed surprisingly still. There wasn’t a trace