Twenty-One
AS MUCH AS I WANTED IT, transferring over to Listening is a struggle. The men are loyal to Ed, take their anger out on us. Our first morning, they stand outside their booths with their arms crossed, glowering.
“Now fellas,” Mike says, distressed. “This is no way to behave.”
Sally and Ivy and I talk it all over, standing in a tiny circle in front of the building at the end of the lunch hour, sharing a single cigarette.
We decide it will be best to ignore their glares, say good morning and good afternoon and nothing more, do excellent work as we always do, hope that one day they’ll come around.
“We’re going to be fine, with or without them,” Ivy says, and smashes the smoking butt under her heel before we turn and go back in.
For the first week, I keep my sketchbook tucked away in my purse, focus on learning the job. It’s enough: A booth of my own with a seat. Music to listen to. A role with something major on the line.
We make trips back and forth from Production, taking records from each of the machines for quality control.
The idea is that most records will be fine because the master they’re made from has been tested and approved.
But flaws can come from the machines, too—an inconsistency of pressure or a contaminant like a piece of dust or hair.
If one of us catches a skip or a pop in the record, we burst from the booth and run to Production to stop work on the machine that made it.
We troubleshoot with the person manning the machine to find the problem, and then the process starts all over again.
The work is just as I wanted it to be, and I’m good at it. It isn’t a complex job, only a painstaking one. My shoulders don’t ache at the end of the day anymore, and I get to listen to music. To listen in a new way. I hear every instrument, each pluck and strum, each breath and note.
Once I know I have the job down, I start to draw during my shifts.
I find that pencils against paper are too loud, too like the scratches I’m listening for, so I find a Sheaffer Snorkel pen that glides across paper.
Pen ink instead of graphite forces a change in style.
No soft shading like I’m used to, no blending with my finger.
Now it’s all contour lines, crosshatches, swaths of black.
Starker, and when I do it well, stronger, too.
A few times a day, someone from Production will come to my booth asking for me to listen to a record with them, if they want to double-check that the master’s good, or if they suspect that something’s off with their machine.
I close my sketchbook and let them in. Sally and Ivy and I notice that it’s the girls in Production who most often come to our booths now.
One day a group of them asks us to join them for drinks after work, and we do.
We all slip into a large, curved, red-leather booth, our shoulders pressed against one another’s, and they tell us how Ed used to put his face too close to theirs whenever they had to bring a record to him, how his breath stank of tuna salad and sometimes his bristly cheek would graze theirs.
“Kenny is hardly better,” a Production girl named Maryanne says. “He once put his hand on my knee and left it there for the whole song.”
“Curtis is respectful,” Claud says. “I always try to go to his booth. Or I did, before you girls came. Now I always go to one of you.”
The hour grows later. Some of the girls peel off to go home but Ivy says she’s ordering dinner.
Sally can stay, too, and so can Claud and a couple of the other Production girls.
Clément and Nathalie are having dinner at Adele’s house.
The night is my own, so I stay. We have more room in the booth now, and I slip out my sketchbook, and the girls are enthused.
“We won’t peek,” Ivy says. “As long as you promise to show us when you’re done.”
I sink into a place of looking, the world around fading out, only seeing what’s right in front of me.
These women around the table, our martini glasses and highballs.
I’m using my pencil, which is still my favorite way to draw, and I’m among them but also alone in my task, and their conversation flows while I listen in.
Someone in the Art Department is getting married and someone else is unhappy in his marriage, sleeping on the sofa.
Someone in Production’s leaving the plant to move to San Francisco and work for Levi Strauss.
“Training again,” Maryanne says. “I always get stuck with the new people.”
“No training will be necessary,” Claud says. “Haven’t you heard? Ginny’s coming back.”
My pencil tip freezes in place.
“Oh, she is?” Maryanne says. “I didn’t know. Well, that certainly makes things easier for me. Where has she been? I forgot.”
“Wyoming?” Ivy says. “Or maybe Idaho?”
“Montana,” I say, and they turn to me as though they’d forgotten I was here at the table, and I expect them to see right to the core of me, my pounding heart, but Claud says, “Montana, that’s right,” and Ivy says, “Are you done with your picture? Oh, goody. Let’s see it.
” I hand my sketchbook over to them, face burning while they ooh and ahh, and no one says another word about Ginny all night.
It’s a few days later—Felix in town, out with friends somewhere—and the kids and I walk to Lionel’s house as we do before dinner sometimes.
“Look,” Clément says as we turn the corner. “The birds are out.”
There’s a flock of them, moving through the sky over Lionel’s apartment. Voices carry from his front yard, men laughing, growing quiet, listening now as Lionel says, “See, the secondaries on this bird are too long and dense. The primaries do the work; the secondaries only get in the way.”
We reach the gate and see him, a firm grip on a bird with one hand, spreading its wing with the other to display its feathers.
A group of neighborhood men gather round him, here to learn, jostling for the privilege of buying any of his birds when he’s willing to part with them.
He catches sight of us. “Little man, why do we want the secondary feathers thin?”
“So the air will pass through,” Clément says. “For ventilation.”
“Correct.” Lionel scans his audience. “Now how many of you could have answered that question? Shown up by a child, let that sink in.” The men laugh. “It’s all right; you’re learning. But be ready for a pop quiz. Clément here will administer it.”
Clément stands straighter, puffs his chest. Lionel beckons him with a tilt of his chin. “Which bird should we show them next, little man? Maybe KR?” Cream with a gray neck and blue-tipped wings, the bird we picked up from Union Station. Together, they named him King Roller.
Natalie squeezes my hand. “I’m going to go look at Uncle Lionel’s records.”
“I’ll go with you.”
We start up the walk and Lionel says, “You’ll find we have a long-lost friend inside,” and a hum starts in my ears but there’s no going back.
Nathalie’s through the screen door, holding it open, and there’s a woman on the sofa, reading a paperback in the light of the window, and she lowers the book from her face and it’s Ginny.
“Hello,” Nathalie says. “Will it disturb you if I play a record?”
“I’m through with reading now,” Ginny says, her hair still wavy and cropped at her chin, tan arms and a white T-shirt, gold chain disappearing past the neckline. “But thank you for asking.”
“Nathalie, this is Ginny,” I say. “Ginny, this is my daughter, Nathalie.”
Nathalie regards her as she does all strangers—seriously, discerningly—before giving Ginny a nod and busying herself with Lionel’s records and his little Dansette player.
“You’re back,” I say.
“I am.”
She’s sitting on Lionel’s sofa, plenty of room next to her, but I stay standing instead, afraid to get too close. “How was Montana?”
“Wild.” She smiles, dark eyes bright, and I can’t help but smile back. I find a spot on the floor across the coffee table from her, lean against the wall under the window.
“Tell me about it,” I say, and she does.
Nathalie plays Jerry Lee Lewis, Dinah Shore, Ella Fitzgerald.
Ginny tells me about the hotel’s underground swimming pool and the pillars in the lobby, made from the trunks of eight-hundred-year-old trees.
She tells me about wolves and rabbits and bears, the rhythm of the trains carrying new groups of guests and then taking them away again, about trips with Mare to Missoula and Bozeman, about the slow months between Christmas and the spring, when the hotel was eerily quiet.
“It was fun,” Ginny says. “But I couldn’t take another winter there. ”
Nathalie’s been turning the volume up a little bit with each song, and at some point Ginny slides down to the floor. Only the coffee table between us now. I trace the glass ring stains on the wood, circle after overlapping circle, when looking into Ginny’s eyes becomes too much.
“A lot’s changed in your life,” she says.
“Lionel told you?”
“Just a little.”
She’s quiet for so long that I have to look up. “What is it?”
She hesitates, sighs, places the tip of her finger on my gold wedding band. “Lionel says he’s a friend from New Orleans?”
“Yes. His name’s Felix.”
“What are you saying about Daddy?” Nathalie asks.
“Nothing, honey. We’re just talking.” I can’t sit here any longer, Ginny’s proximity suddenly a burden, far too much to explain and no easy words for any of it. “We should be getting home,” I say. “Nathalie, let’s go get your brother.”