Doe

"It was the Spanish thing, right?" said my boss, Peter. "You spoke Spanish to him."

"He's French, and I spoke ordinary English to him," I said. "He's a French pastry chef."

We were in his office at lunch time, his lunch time, although I was hungry too. Peter was eating fries from a paper bag.

"How did you sell him an ad if he doesn't speak Spanish?" Peter asked me. "I thought that was your big ace, being able to speak Spanish to these other immigrant kitchen people."

Peter has giant blue eyes that look as if they never close, and big football-player shoulders.

"I had a pitch, just like you taught me," I said. "I brought out a fistful of clippings from the society pages, and I said, 'Where were you when your competition was making cakes?' I just chose some clips at random. 'Barry wedding? Who made that cake?' I said. 'One of the biggest society weddings of the year, and where were you? Goldzahl wedding? Fitzpatrick wedding? Foroohar wedding?' I spread clippings all over his pastry pans. 'Every baker,' I said, 'of every one of those cakes advertises in our magazine. They use it to get business with caterers and event planners, and they make cakes.'"

Peter was holding a fry.

"The guy bought three full-color pages because of that?" he said.

"He told me I was a very persuasive young lady," I said. "I told him I was 19 years old."

  
Peter looked at me carefully.

"Listen, Vivi," he said. "Was that your account?"

"No, but I put it to good use. He hadn't had a sales visit in years. One of the old bats here just telephoned him every six months and when he said no, they left him alone. I sold him something."
 
Peter crumpled up the bag of fries and threw it away. He got up and started to unpack his briefcase.

"With the money from this commission," I said, "I'm going to buy a fur coat. I saw one on 34th street that was hot pink, really hot. It's not true that pink looks bad on redheads. I tried it on and it looked just fine."

I sat down in his desk chair and rolled it across the room towards where he was unpacking. Peter had been away for a long weekend; I'm the only person who likes to work seven days a week, here. He was taking out stacks and stacks of magazines, and a little frame for his desk, and a bag of potato chips.

"Anyway, I want you to stop causing trouble in the office for a while," Peter said. "I'm getting married and I'll have a lot of parties to go to in the next few weeks."

"You're getting married?"

He was putting a football on his desk.

"I got engaged this weekend. Hey, I gotta buy her a ring. You're the one who buys all the jewelry. Where do I go?"

"Does she work here?" I said.

Peter grinned. "She doesn't work at anything, anywhere. Her great-grandfather invented the paper bag. She's too rich to work." He threw some papers in the bottom of a drawer. "But really, she's a nice girl," he said.

He stopped and looked at me, sitting in his chair.

"Anyway, you two would probably buy your jewelry in different places," he said.

From his in-basket, he collected an armload of sales contracts to show our publisher, his boss.

"Hey, Peter," I said.

"Yeah?"

"What's her name?"

"Doe," he said, heading for the door. "Like a deer."

"Not like the money?"

"No," he said. "D-O-E."

After I was sure he was gone, I went to look at the little frame he'd put on his desk, to see if it was a picture of Doe. But it was only a snapshot of Peter and his brother, holding cans of beer and a football.
I walked back onto the office floor, where all my old lady colleagues were sitting doing nothing at their desks. They all have hairy moles and aching backs and they're all secretly knitting something ugly. I never talk to any of them. I mostly just talk to myself.

"So we hear your boy is getting married," said a woman with a stripe in the middle of her hair from not dying it.

"He might," I said.

"I hear she's lovely," said one who was as round as a blueberry, only not blue. She was wearing a tiny wristwatch around her big fat wrist. "I hear she likes flowers."

"Flowers?" said a woman whose nose has been running for as long as I'd worked there.

"She sounds lovely," said Hair-stripe.

"Well, she has a lot of time to be lovely, doesn't she?" I said. "She doesn't do anything else. And besides, everyone likes flowers. Probably even child molesters like flowers."

I opened my book bag and got out my sales contracts. I was trying to think of a way I could let them know I'd just sold three full-color pages, when they could barely sell a two-inch classified ad.

"She seems very ladylike," said Wristwatch.

"Very delicate and ladylike," said Sniffle.

"Well, women aren't supposed to be like that any more," I told them. "Girls now are independent, and individual, and ambitious."

"And vicious," said Wristwatch.

    
 
I left the office after dark. There's nothing for me to do at home, anyway. I usually just look at my jewelry for a while before I fall asleep.

I'm the only person Peter's hired. He was only hired himself a few months ago, when they decided to change us from a cake decorating magazine for housewives to a magazine for professional pastry chefs. I don't think it's worked out too well. I guess people busy making pastry don't really have a free hand to hold a magazine. When I first got the job, I used to take the bus to the library after work and read books about pastry. I didn't know anything about pastry when Peter hired me. I didn't know anything about selling, then, either, but Peter took me around to all his accounts and I learned by watching him.

Peter hired me when nobody else would because I dropped out of college. My mother cried and cried, but really, I just couldn't bear to be poor for one more day. I never talk to her now. Now I have my own room in a residential hotel and I have a lot of jewelry, some silver but mostly gold, and some of that 24-karat. I've read all the books the library has about pastry, now.

The next day I got into the office early, around seven-thirty, with the idea of being out making sales calls early, too. But then I realized I had to wait for everyone else to get in for a meeting at ten, a meeting on how to increase revenues. I could have easily told them they could increase revenues real fast if they actually did some work. But I'd already said that and it didn't seem to make any difference.

In the office, in the early morning, there is really nothing to do. You can't call restaurants, because all you're going to get is the Mexican kitchen help, and I'm not going to have some guy cutting vegetables at eight in the morning telling me Dominicans speak gutter Spanish, which has actually happened. So I sat at my desk and went through the restaurant supplies section of the Yellow Pages looking for leads. I watched as all the other saleswomen come in after nine, pretending they weren't late.

Peter was supposed to lead the meeting, but by ten he still wasn't there. I called some people in the Yellow Pages while I waited.
Around eleven, Peter walked in with his tie in his pocket. "God, I was out late," he said, stopping by my desk. "How do I look?"

"You look okay," I said. "Were you out with Doe?"

"Her brother has a yacht. Can you believe it?"

"Is it big?" I asked.

"Massive. It's so big you can stay overnight on it. It has a kitchen and a TV."

"Can you get TV sailing on the ocean?"

He looked up, suddenly, and then I looked up. The whole room was watching us.

"Oh," Peter said, changing his tone. "Could you give the contracts from those three full-color pages to my secretary?" He took his tie out of his pocket. "You can keep this one commission, but after that it goes back to the original saleswoman. We can't have people stealing accounts around here."

The saleswoman who never did anything with that account in the first place was beaming.

Peter went in his office and shut the door. I guess he wasn't going to lead the sales meeting, after all.

I started gathering my stuff to go out and meet clients, packing my sales kits and copies of the magazine and blank contracts into my book bag. I was mad that someone else would be talking to my French pastry chef, and I was mad at Peter for not standing up for me, and I was mad that I'd wasted almost four hours sitting around the office.

Across the room, I noticed all the other saleswomen gathered around the lunch table.

"I understand her great-grandfather invented the paper bag," said one with a wart on her eyelid.

"It's true," said Hair-Stripe. "Her name's on the bottom of most of them."

"She sounds terribly sweet," said Wart.

"Of course she can be sweet," I said, from across the room. "It's easy for her. Probably nothing bad has ever happened to her in her entire life."

"Peter should have that girl give you lessons," said Hair-stripe.

I snapped closed the buckle on my book-bag.

"I wouldn't want her help if she was the last person on earth," I said.

    
 
I got my sales kits and went down into the subway. Everyone was walking so slow that I wanted to shove them aside. At the last minute before the train doors closed a businessman jammed himself in, pushing me. When he turned his back I left a huge smear of pink lipstick across the back of his white shirt.

I thought of some things I could do to get rid of Doe. I could call one of those police tip lines and tell the cops she'd thrown rocks at other cops and collect a big award when she went to jail, which she definitely would. I could take naked pictures of her and sell them to Playboy and make it look as if Peter had done it. I could sink her brother's boat.

If Peter married this Doe woman he would stop paying attention to work and be fired, and then I'd be fired, too. If I lost Peter I'd be back where I started. No matter how hard I worked I would never get anywhere and I'd always be clumsy and stupid and poor.

Then, through the lighted windows of a train running alongside us, I saw my mother. I'm almost sure it was her, although it might have been someone wearing her same cleaning-service uniform. I don't think she saw me. I didn't want her to see me. I didn't have time to be sure it was really her before the other train disappeared into a tunnel, going the opposite direction.

I got out of the subway at Union Square, the very next stop. My heart was pounding. Stumbling up the stairs to the street, I found a pay phone and I called the office.

"Peter," I said, "you can't get married."

"Vivi?" he said. "What is this? I'm on the other line."

"You're the only one in the whole world I can talk to!" I said.

"What do you want to talk about?" he said.

"You're my best friend!"

"Vivi, I hardly even know you," he said. "Now cut it out!"

"Don't go!" I said, but he had already hung up.
I stood there on 14th Street for a while, blank. I let a man holding a big paper bag of chestnuts use the telephone and he talked forever. I looked a little more closely at the bottom of his bag.

When I got the phone back, I called directory assistance. I'm used to calling up people I don't know. I'm a saleswoman.

"Is this Doe?" I said.

"Yes," she said. She wasn't so rich she couldn't answer her phone. "Who's this?"

"I'm a friend of Peter's," I said. "He's in trouble."

"Oh, no. Is he hurt?"

"No, not that kind of trouble. I mean, he's going to be in trouble. I'm just a friend of his trying to help him out. "

"Which friend is this?"

I didn't know whether or not I should tell her. A bus went by, honking.

"Viviana Duarte. My name is Viviana Duarte."

"Are you Vivi?" she said. "I think he's mentioned you. You work with him."

"Really?" I said. "What has he said?"

"Let's meet. Where would you like to meet?"

I had never actually thought of meeting her.

"How about in the Union Square subway station?" I said.

"No, let's meet for coffee. Is there a cafe you like?"

I never eat in cafes. I only sell ads to them.

"The St. Moritz Hotel, " I said, naming the place where I'd sold ads to the pastry chef. "The restaurant at the St. Moritz Hotel."

"That'll be fine," she said. "Is four o'clock all right?"

I said four o'clock was all right.

I knew she would show up with all her jewelry and furs and her money. These rich ladies wore furs as often as they could, and I didn't want to like I didn't belong at the restaurant at the St. Moritz hotel. I would have almost enough for the pink fur coat if I took the money I was supposed to be paying this week and next week in rent, and I could sell a little jewelry to get the rest. I would have to go down to Canal Street right away and sell some jewelry for cash. A fur coat can be seen from further away, anyway.

   
In my new pink fur, in the lobby of the St. Moritz Hotel, I think I looked pretty amazing. The maitre d' didn't recognize me, even though I'd been in kitchen the day before to sell ads. He knew Doe. He pointed her out to me across the restaurant.

She was a very small woman, pale, and wearing no makeup at all except for bright red lipstick. Her lips looked like a cherry dropped in a bottle of vodka. She was wearing a white blouse.
   
"Hello," she said as I came towards her table. "Are you Vivi?"

I couldn't believe that she could pick me out, in my new fur coat.

"Would you like to sit down?" she said.

I sat down, wedging my coat into the chair.

"I hope you'll forgive me for eating," she said. She had a huge menu in front of her. "I've been in and out all day, choosing flowers for the wedding."

"You're not going to grow your own?" I said.

"No," she said, "it'll be a winter wedding."

She was drinking water from a glass with a gold rim around the top. There was a gold rim around the coffee cups on the table, and on the plates beneath the cups, and even around the ashtray. The waiter was already standing by our table. I had no idea what to order.

"We'll have tea," Doe told him, "and I'll have the Caesar salad."

"I'll have two Caesar salads," I said.

"Two?" said the waiter.

I looked at her.

"My friend is very hungry," Doe said, calmly. "Just combine it in one large bowl. And could you please take her coat?"

"No!" I said. "I'll keep it."

I looked around to see if anyone else in the restaurant was looking at us. No one was.

"I'm glad you called me," she said. "Peter is always talking about you. He says you're his best saleswoman. I don't think he could run the office without you."

"Probably not," I said. The coat was so fat I could barely move in my chair.

The waiter brought out a big teapot. He put a basket of leaves in my cup, poured water over it, and it turned into tea. I don't even like tea. I don't know what I was doing there in the first place.

"I called you because I wanted to tell you about Peter," I said. "He's getting very distracted by all this party and wedding stuff. He's going to lose his job."

"If he does, I think it would be the fifth job he's lost in the two years I've known him," Doe said. "I can't say I love him for his career prospects." She was smiling at me with those bright red lips. "Fortunately, he has other good qualities."

I looked away from her, and down at the table. I looked at her hands. She had perfect, white, manicured hands. My hands were all dirty from clutching all that cash on the subway. I was going to tell her that I was actually a very famous in the Dominican Republic, but she never would have believed it. I was going to tell her that Peter and I were sleeping together, but she never would have believed that, either. All my energy was gone.

"What beautiful eyelashes you have," she said, suddenly. "Even your eyelashes are red. Do you know how unusual that is?"

"Oh, don't say that," I said.

"Why not?"

"There's nothing unusual about me. There's so many people like me, only I can sell. That's all that makes the difference. I'm not really a very good person, except that I can sell things."

"That's not true." She reached out at me with those hands.

"It is true."

"Peter says you're living in a terrible residential hotel," she said, and she was leaning forward, coming towards me. "Wouldn't you rather live with your family?"

"No," I said, my cheeks burning.

"You know, I know a lot of people on the boards of charities," she said. "Maybe we could help your family."

"No, don't," I said. "Don't help me! Just don't help me."
I pulled my coat out of the chair and rushed out of the restaurant, passing a waiter carrying an enormous salad, and ran into the street. I got on a bus not even knowing where it was going. The bus was so crowded, and I was so close to people and so close to falling apart, and I remember pressing up against a stranger and hugging her close. As she struggled to get away, I just held her tighter, as if she were the last person on Earth.


Library of Congress Copyright TKU-591208 1996