Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [99]
I boarded the train, walked a few cars ahead, and sat on the wooded side of the tracks so that we wouldn’t have to go through the motions of waving. Once the train was under way, I lit a cigarette and dug in my bag for the Agatha Christie. I hadn’t gotten much further than the seventh paragraph of chapter VIII and I was looking forward to pressing on. But as I pulled the book out of my bag, I saw something jutting from between the pages. It was a playing card torn in two—the ace of hearts. On the face of the card was written: Mata—Meet me at the Stork Club on Monday the 26th at 9PM. And come alone.
After memorizing its contents, I held the message over an ashtray and lit it on fire.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Road to Kent
On Monday the 26th of September, I phoned in sick.
The previous week had been unrelenting. On the twentieth, the drafts of four features vying for our first cover were delivered and Mason Tate hated them all. He threw the pages over the bullpen the way the Russians used to shoot the body parts of interlopers out of the Kremlin cannons back in the direction of their homelands. To better express his dissatisfaction, the next three nights he kept the entire staff at the office until after ten. Alley and I put in half the Sabbath to boot.
So, having dialed in sick, a wise young woman would have climbed right back in bed. But in as much as the skies were sunny, the air was brisk, and this particular September day promised to be a long one, I aimed to squander every last minute of it.
Showered and dressed, I went to a café in the Village and drank three cups of Italian coffee topped with steamed milk and shaved chocolate. I drew & quartered a pastry and read the paper cover to cover. I completed the crossword square to square.
What a transcendent diversion the crossword can be. A four-letter word for solo beginning and ending in A. A four-letter word for sword beginning and ending in E. A four-letter word for miscellany beginning and ending in O. ARIA, EPEE, OLIO—no matter how vestigial these words are in the body of common English, watching them fit so neatly into the puzzle’s machinery, one feels as the archaeologist must feel when assembling a skeleton—the end of the thighbone fitting so precisely into the socket of the hip bone that it simply has to confirm the existence of an orderly universe, if not a divine intention.
The last squares to be filled in the puzzle were ECLAT—a five-letter word for a brilliant success or ostentatious display. Taking this as a favorable omen, I left the café and went around the corner to Isabella’s hair salon.
—How would you like it? the new girl Luella asked.
—Like a movie star.
—Turner or Garbo?
—Anyone you like. As long as she’s a redhead.
Historically, once in the hands of a hairdresser, I had done whatever necessary to stymie conversation: grimacing; sleeping; staring blankly into the mirror; once I even feigned ignorance of English. I just wasn’t much of a small-talker. But today, when Luella started rattling on about Hollywood romances inaccurately, I found myself setting her straight. Carole Lombard wasn’t back with William Powell; she was still with Clark Gable. And Marlene Dietrich didn’t call Gloria Swanson a has-been; it was the other way around. I was surprising the both of us with the extent of my knowledge. It must have seemed like I had followed the celebrity papers for years. But they were just tidbits I had unintentionally absorbed during the workday. When proofreading, these nuts and bolts of the Hollywood conveyor belt didn’t seem so titillating. But they were titillating to Luella. At one point she even called over two of the other girls so I could tell them about Katharine Hepburn and Howard Hughes—since they’d never believe it if they didn’t hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. It was the first time in my life I’d been called the horse’s mouth and it didn’t seem so bad. I began to think that