Getting Rid of Mr. Grainger, Part 2

Part One • Part Two • Part Three

She stared at Binnie Greenberg, slim and big-eyed, in blue denims and an orange linen blouse. Binnie’s studio was a white loft with a low ceiling on the roof of a building in downtown Jacksonville. The furniture was Japanese. There was a vast drawing table in a white blaze of fluorescent light, racks of drawing papers, shelves of type specimen books, t-squares, triangles, French curves, jars of brushes and pens. On the wall hung a big green and white Matisse. Binnie sat on the tall stool with her back to the drawing board and grinned ecstatically. She bent toward Olive and clapped her slender hands between her knees in a paroxysm of joyous excitement. Her black eyes shone.

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, Ollie!”

Olive’s heart sank. She didn’t take her eyes from Binnie’s radiant face, but she reached for a chairback to steady herself. Inside, silently, she was saying over and over again, no, no…no, no. She made herself smile. “You mean…the job? The One you said…”

“Look. Read it and rejoice. Isn’t it too much?” Binnie jumped from the stool like a ten year old, flagged a letter from the desk and thrust it into Olive’s hands. While Olive read the words on the stiff, elegant paper, Binnie alternately stroked her back and hugged her waist. Then, when Olive raised her gaze from the typing, Binnie tossed the letter away, pulled Olive tight against her and kissed her hard and long.

“Oh, Ollie, Ollie! It’s come at last. What I’ve waited all my life for. Jesus. Imagine. All around the country, all around the world, there are artists working and waiting for this. It’s one of the big prizes, Ollie. The biggest.”

“Yes, dear, yes,” Olive said softly into the dark perfume of her hair. She held the younger woman’s quivering excitement close and desperately. “It’s wonderful. But I knew it would happen.”

Oh, that was false. She hadn’t known. Loving Binnie as she did, she still hadn’t believed. She knew Binnie was a gifted designer. But she’d never been able to think (or had she only never allowed herself to think?) that this was any more than a daydream — that she would become art director of one of the two or three biggest advertising agencies in New York. At twenty-eight? A woman? Impossible.

“I knew it would happen,” she said again, “because I know how wonderful you are. Nobody knows that better than I do. Do they, Binniekins? Do they?”

“No, sweet, no…”

They lay in shadow, the faint rosy glow from the city’s neons coloring the broad, bamboo-blinded windows above them, the sound of the night traffic a muffled distant hum. They lay together in grateful nakedness, smoothness to smoothness, contentedly spent. For a time they smoked, and Binnie chattered on once more about the job and all it would mean until, like a child after a big birthday party, she was suddenly asleep.

But Olive could not sleep. Foolishly, fondly, again and again, she had promised that when the chance came to Binnie she would, without nonsense, knowing what she prized and what must be foresworn, pick up the telephone, call a nursing service and get a white and starchy and efficient woman to the house for good and all, pack up her own things, say to her mother, Goodbye, mother darling, and shut the door and ride in a taxi to the airport and be off with Binnie to New York. So she had foolishly, fondly, again and again promised…when it was out of the question that she would ever have to keep that promise as it was that Binnie would ever get the great, fabulous, the unimaginable job.

Yet now the moment had come to keep the promise and she knew she must keep it, because Binnie was the sweet, warm, quick, perfect answer to her deepest hungers, and if she did not follow Binnie, she would die — not in the melodramatic sense, but only in the dull sense that had nothing to do with ropes, knives, pistols, sleeping pills. Dying inside oneself.

If only the letter had not come. If only they could have gone on together as they had been, Mrs. Murphy coming in to look after her mother on Thursdays and on Saturday afternoons and evenings, and for an occasional week to let Olive trek with Binnie to New York to see the shows — Mrs. Murphy, who was distinctly not a nurse, but with her slovenly Irish mother-hen kindliness the only woman her mother would tolerate to look after her. Her mother couldn’t stand nurses. They make me feel I’m sick and dying. I’m not sick, Olive, I’m only paralyzed. I won’t be treated like I have a loathsome disease.

God help me, Olive thought, it’s going to be so damn difficult. Have I got the courage? Who was it had said to her not long ago that she had guts? Grainger. She laughed.

“Mmm?” Sleepily Binnie stirred and kissed her shoulder.“What’s to laugh?”

“The answer to a maiden’s prayer, chuckled Olive.

Getting Rid of Mr. Grainger

by James Colton (Joseph Hansen)