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  “Who is it?” I call. Since the outside buzzer hasn’t rung, I figure it’s someone from the building. Probably Arthur Haven coming to inquire whether my mother prefers satin sheets or Egyptian percale.

  “Louie. Louie Cappetti. Your mailman,” he adds as if I didn’t know.

  I do a quick damage-control check. I’ve got my writing clothes on. Sweatpants and a velour shirt. My socks have holes. But gold hoops shine from my ears and lipstick glistens from my mouth. Louie’s seen me worse.

  His eyes shine at me when I open the door. His hair gleams. His button’s sewn back in place. He holds a thick white envelope. “I really shouldn’t be doing this,” he begins, “but I got a feeling maybe it’s good news.”

  I grab the envelope. My name and address are typed—professionally. Playgirl magazine is printed in the top left hand corner. What looks like a leopard or a panther straddles the P and the L. I rip open the envelope. I pull out a letter whose first sentence tells me the editors of Playgirl have accepted my story “Mismatch” for the February issue. There is a check enclosed for seven hundred dollars with the same leopard or panther stamped on it. I let out a shriek. I jump. I fling my arms around Louie’s neck.

  Louie lifts me into the air. He twirls me around. I feel like a feather. Like a prima ballerina spun by Baryshnikov. I point my toes. I arch my back. Then I bend my head forward and kiss Louie full on the lips. I hear the swoosh of Louie’s intake of breath. A soft moan as he exhales. I smell peppermint toothpaste. Our mouths open. Our tongues touch. They circle. They explore. If I weren’t a writer I might hazard a cliché: the earth moves, for instance.

  Louie is the first to pull away. His mouth is slashed with my lipstick. He’s having trouble looking me in the eye. But he says, “Wow,” while staring at my socks. “If I knew that was gonna be my reward I’d bring you more letters.”This he addresses to my ugly big toe in its frame of frayed wool.

  I’m having difficulty looking at him myself. I’m a little embarrassed. I didn’t plan this assault on the object of my desires. I got carried away by animal instinct. My animal instinct. After all, if (A) all humans are animals, and (B) I am human, then (C) I am an animal.

  Louie rubs his Revloned lips across his sleeve. He’s the sleekest kind of animal. Shapelier than the logo on the Playgirl stationery. “Guess I got to be going,” he says.

  I grab his hand. “Come have a glass of champagne to celebrate,” I pause, “my story.”

  “I wish I could. But I haven’t even done Professor O’Toole’s block yet.”

  Seamus’ name triggers its predictable response. “If you see him, tell him I sold a story and that they’re paying me scads.” Even in the midst of passion, I’m not above a little self-promotion.

  He laughs. “Well,” he says, “maybe I could take a raincheck.” He turns to go.

  “Wait a minute.” I run to my desk and come back waving the invitation. My front hall starts to smell like the cosmetics counter at Bloomingdale’s. “Gregory and Derek are having a party on New Year’s Eve. Will you come?”

  He shifts his bag. “You’re asking me?”

  I nod.

  “To be your date?”

  I nod.

  “On NewYear’s Eve?” He shakes his head, incredulous. From where Louie comes from (where does he come from anyway?) a date for New Year’s Eve must carry the same cachet it does in OldTown, Maine.

  “That’s right, on New Year’s Eve.”

  “Wow,” he says.

  “It’s not till ten.”

  “Well …” He sounds, I am chagrined to acknowledge, rather tentative. “I guess so,” he adds, then gaining steam says, “Yes.”

  “Great. Come cash in your raincheck first.”

  He looks puzzled.

  I explain. “You know, the champagne. We’ll have a drink before we go upstairs.”

  After he leaves, I am in heaven, on cloud nine, the earth moves, I am in ecstasy. I’m not sure what pleases me more, that I have sold a story or that I have a date. I touch my lips. I touch my envelope. I caress my check. I flop onto the sofa where I read the rest of the letter from Playgirl magazine. The fiction editor’s name is Betty Jean Williamson. She suggests I telephone her to iron out the details. The area code is in California. She tells me to call collect.

  I call collect. I’m not sure what the time is in California, but here it’s before five, before the lower rates. I feel daring, rich, as if I’ve just bought something upstairs at Filene’s.

  The call goes through right away. The receptionist, the secretary, even the operator seem to recognize my name. “Katinka!” Betty Jean Williamson exclaims as if she has known me all her life. That’s California’s instant intimacy, I think. Maybe I should move there if things don’t work out.

  Betty Jean Williamson tells me my story is “awesome,” that it’s “outtasight.” I want to ask her if she’s got a sister in Cambridge name of Georgette. Then she becomes more businesslike. She explains the terms of the contract, the procedure of sending the galley proofs. She tells me I will join a long line of noble Playgirl authors that includes Alice Adams and Joyce Carol Oates. My ego swells, my head grows fat. “And let me reassure you …” she begins.

  The hairs along my arm stand up.

  “That you’ll be a separate insert, on good quality paper, no ads.”

  “Oh …”

  She must detect some puzzlement in my voice, for then she asks, “Are you familiar with our magazine?”

  “Actually not,” I confess, “I got your name from the fiction market book.”

  She gives a little giggle. “Not to worry” is what she says.

  The minute she hangs up, I worry. I chew my nails. I twist my hair. I think of my story “Mismatch” about an artist who marries a computer nerd. It’s a funny story with no graphic sex but much eating of grapes. The ending is happy, if ambiguous. I have sent it out for two years, it having taken that long to go from A to P on the fiction market list. I’m not Groucho Marx who’d refuse to join a club that would have him as a member. I’m not the kind of writer who wouldn’t want to be in a magazine that would publish her stuff. Still, I’d better take a look at Playgirl. I zip on my coat.

  * * *

  The magazine rack at the Prescott Pharmacy is right inside the front door. I check through the magazines once, then twice. There are Penthouses and Playboys, Car and Drivers and Modern Brides. There is no Playgirl.This is not an equal-opportunity drugstore. I can hear the pharmacist, Barney Souza, typing behind his high wall which is a fortress turreted with apothecary jars and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School mugs. A lower counter displaying cold-sore remedies and heating pads serves as the moat. “Say, Barney,” I begin as I approach.

  Barney doesn’t answer me until he’s finished typing, which, from the sound of it, is of the painstaking two-finger variety. Then he peers out at me between two milky-white jars. Barney is younger than I am. His hair is as feathery as down. But he wears a wedding ring and has old eyes.

  Which doesn’t surprise me considering the troubles he’s seen. I think of what he knows of me, my birth control pills and when I stopped using them, the urinary infection I had last year. The yeast problem that keeps coming back. Not to mention Seamus’ high blood pressure medication, the possible side effect of which is you-know-what. But Barney makes no judgments. His voice is uninflected, his face inscrutable. Condoms, Kotex—Barney can smooth a rite of passage so you hardly know you passed. “What can I do for you, Katinka?” he asks me now.

  “I’m looking for Playgirl magazine.”

  This he takes in the same stride as he would someone’s confession of a virulent venereal disease or minor sore throat. He makes some rustling sounds and then hands me a package already prewrapped in its plain brown paper bag. “We keep them behind the counter,” he explains. “You know, the kids.”

  I refrain from asking about the effects of Penthouse and Oui on unformed little libidos. I refrain from making a case for women’s rights. I refrain
from a diatribe about censorship. But my instinct for self-protection, for self-justification is too strong. “They have really great fiction writing in this magazine,” I confide, then hate myself.

  Barney nods. Nothing human is alien to him. His eyes are wise. Barney knows.

  Back home I sit at the kitchen table with my contraband. Should I pull the shades? The cover comforts me. It’s of a well-known actor fully clothed. An actor, even, who received rave reviews for an astounding Macbeth. Who studied drama at Yale. I remember the Playboys my high school classmates used to stick inside their geometry books. There were ads for Cadillacs and Chivas Regal, socially redeeming articles on politics, how to care for fine wool. Not that these snickering teens were interested in anything other than the centerfold. I open the magazine at random. My heart sinks. If Playboy is cashmere, Playgirl is a polyester blend. I see ads for Frederick’s of Hollywood, for dildoes. I check the table of contents for the short story. I am stopped by an article entitled “Mailmen of L.A. in a Sizzling Pictorial.” I turn to page 51. All thought of fiction leaps from my head.

  Later I find the story. It is an insert, on nicer paper, free of ads for sensual aids. The story itself is free of sensual aids. It’s a decent story by a writer whose name I’ve seen in literary quarterlies. I try to make myself feel better. This is after all a national magazine. With a large circulation. And I have been paid, in comparison to my usual recompense, an astounding amount. I am certain, however, that no one buys this magazine for its fiction. In fact, a half hour later, I can’t remember a word of the story I just read. But I don’t forget the sizzling pictorials of the Mailmen of L.A. I take it as a sign. I am filled with hope for the new year as I study the mailmen—their hats, their bags, their ensignia, their pectorals, their abdominals, their buttocks, the dazzling variety of their penises.

  3

  I wake up early on the thirty-first even though I haven’t set my alarm. I planned on getting my beauty sleep. Two hours more beauty than the usual eight would give me what?—a dewier cheek, a smoother brow? Some of that beauty will now have to be artificially induced. Not that I’m complaining. At five-four, I prefer to be taller. But I’ve got good bones, wide green eyes, and, thanks to braces, a barely discernible overbite. By eighth grade, though, I reached my prime. I was princess of the Old Town junior high prom. I was also crowned queen of a school for juvenile delinquent boys in the Berkshires. A second cousin, now doing time for felonious assault, submitted my photograph. You should have seen the letters I got from some of those boys.

  What am I going to wear tonight? This might not be a question you’d expect from a Radcliffe graduate, a writer, living in Cambridge without serious furniture. I confess I don’t fit the classic image of intellectual or bohemian (a point Seamus was all too fond of making during our all too many fights). I have tried. One half of my closet attests to that. There the tattered jeans, black tights, stretched-out sweaters, ethnic cottons heavy with Third World embroidery; T-shirts that save the forest, save the whales pronounce me politically, socially, materialistically correct. But that other half—padded shoulders, Italian linen, French labels, SoHo avant garde (bought, in my defense, always on sale, often drastically reduced)—reveals my secret guilty soul. Let me blame a childhood in which college catalogues alternated with Seventeen and Mademoiselle. A childhood in which my friends and I knew both that hard work meant good grades and that the right shade of lipstick might summon a cute guy. A childhood in which, after my father died, my mother would announce, “We need a little lift.”Then we’d drive five hours south to Filene’s Basement, shop for five hours, drive five hours back. From such a background springs a predictable dichotomy—Old Town and Cambridge, Ulysses and People, The Atlantic and Playgirl, Seamus and Louie, denim and lace. I choose black gabardine for dinner. For later, red silk.

  I try to stay in bed longer. There’s so much I need to do. I sit up. My pillowcase is blotted with the oils and creams I slathered all over my face and neck last night. Three days ago, after slathering all over Playgirl’s mailmen of L.A., I flipped to an article about the need to moisturize. The age of twenty is not a minute too late, the author warned. Since I am aeons too late, I tripled the amount suggested on the label. Now I slither out of bed, my knees, my elbows, my heels overlubricated, leaving a trail of grease. This doesn’t bother me. I have already planned to change the sheets.

  I stand in front of the linen shelf and contemplate the choices: flowers, stripes, plain blue, Donald Duck, hemstitched white. At the back lie a pair of red satin sheets that a student (male) of Seamus’ gave us for a wedding present. We used them once. They didn’t work, Seamus complained, because he kept slipping fro when he wanted to slip to. Though younger flesh might find this a challenge, I decide against them. Perhaps another time. If there is another time. I pick a set of gray and white stripes in conservative good taste. I shake them out. They smell of lavender from the sachets I have tucked around them.

  I make the bed. I form perfect hospital corners. I pull the sheets so taut you can’t even see where they were folded. I fluff the pillows. I fold the quilt. Underneath the bed I vacuum up dust kitties the size of tumbleweed. I find a shoe I have been missing since 1986. I stand back to admire my handiwork.

  I check the ceiling over the bed. There is a tracery of cracks in the plaster as fine as lace. A patch of damp. Nothing you’d notice in the dark. Nothing you’d notice if you were otherwise engaged. A Radcliffe dean lives directly over me. She tiptoes around on her little cat feet. I never hear her. The summer I moved in she went to India with her sister, a Wellesley dean, and sublet to newlyweds. Seamus had flown off to his M&M’s by then and what I’d lacked in a sex life had been overcompensated for upstairs. All day, all night, the bed would rock and roll, the springs would sigh and moan until, frantic, I moved my mattress into the living room. That didn’t work. They did it everywhere, even in the tub. To see them in the hall would make me blush.

  As to what’s going on three floors above in Professor Arthur T. Haven’s bed, I prefer not to know. Though we share brick and mortar and a mailman, my ceiling, thank God, is not their floor. My mother arrived yesterday morning, but I’ve seen her only once. She popped in for coffee while Arthur went to rent a video. I didn’t ask her what sort of video. I hoped something intellectual, foreign, with subtitles and lots of Nordic beating of breast, not baring of it. My mother looked dressed to kill. Her smile implied secrets. She gulped her coffee with satisfied smacks. “Do you detect a certain glow?” she asked.

  “It’s hot in here,” I said. There are some things between mothers and daughters that shouldn’t be shared. I thought of my poor father, a kind and measured man. On Main Street he would parcel out an elbow to each of us. Perhaps my mother did go through The ABC’s of Love with him, and is now dancing down the rest of the alphabet with Arthur Haven. Perhaps Seamus was my dry run for another, better-lubricated race.

  All these thoughts of sex and moisturizer reminded me. I told my mother about my story.

  She clapped her hands. She couldn’t be more pleased, she said, even though I’m pretty sure since my acceptance at Radcliffe she views all my other achievements as a slide downhill. What really surprised me was she didn’t bat an eyelash at the name of the magazine. Didn’t regret it wasn’t one of the seven sisters in the publishing Ivy League. Didn’t bemoan the harsh reality of the marketplace. This from a woman who, when I was a child, used to ink in fig leaves on National Geographic photographs. Perhaps centering her life on Arthur T. Haven allows her more tolerance for the centerfold.

  “I’m so proud of you,” my mother said. She finished her coffee. Caressed the handle of the mug. “Arthur has the most delicate ankles,” she sighed. “I think we were related in another life.”

  “You sound like Shirley MacLaine. In a minute you’ll be telling me about the healing power of crystals.”

  My mother laughed. “They’re cheaper than diamonds, anyway.”

  Was she thinking about diamonds, I wond
ered. I checked her third finger, left hand. The wedding ring was still there, its platinum worn thin as a wire. I remember when Shirley Mercer’s mother was widowed. Within a week she’d discarded her rings and had excised her husband’s name from their joint listing in the telephone book. What do I have from my own father? His pointed chin, his double-jointed thumb, some money, five letters he wrote me at summer camp, a string of seed pearls. Some days I can hardly summon up his face. I was glad, then relieved, to see this proof against his vanishing.

  My mother looked moon-eyed into her coffee cup until Arthur returned with Dial M for Murder and Vertigo. I was a little surprised, however, that neither made the pretense of inviting me to watch the movies with them.

  I fluff the pillows once more so that their indentations match. I probably won’t see my mother today. She’s got a hair appointment. Then she will be busy getting ready for the dinner party tonight. She hasn’t met Zenobia Haven. She’s a little nervous. “You know daughters and their fathers,” she said.

  “She’s not your daughter yet,” I reminded her.

  I guess I sounded irritated because she said, “Of course not, dear,” in her most irritating mother/shrink voice. Then added, “One daughter is quite enough.”

  I straighten the quilt at the end of the bed. I hope that one woman is quite enough for Louie. I hope that that one woman is me. I am not looking forward to the dinner party. Only to dessert. Gâteau Louie. Louie àla mode. I hope that Gregory and Derek have hung mistletoe everywhere. I wonder if there will be more flowers to eat. I wonder if Louie might prefer the flowered sheets. I think I am losing my mind. Be sensible, I warn myself. There is after all the possibility that Louie will not see my sheets, flowers, stripes, or Donald Duck.

  The phone rings.

  “It’s Seamus,” says the voice.

  “How extraordinary. Twice in one week.”

  “Don’t be poisonous, Katinka. I call bearing good will.”