A Week as Andrea Benstock

The people whose lives touched hers were among the hazards. Friends were essential because you needed them because living alone after almost ten years was very nearly impossible to begin with, and the city, cold and grim in the late fall, tended to magnify solitude immeasurably. That solitude constituted a kind of personal space which she very much needed, but at the same time it could become in itself a negative presence.

Friendships with heterosexual men did not seem to be genuinely attainable. Either they were founded upon sex or they withered away for lack of it. And friendships with women were also difficult. For women without men Andrea was competition; for women with men she was a threat.

So her friendship with Cal had arisen in response to this situation. At the onset she began to think of him as the closest thing she had to a friend. Now she dropped the qualification. He was a friend, and a good one.

This morning he was already in the shop when she arrived. She managed a smile in response to his greeting, then hurried into the back room and hung her coat on a hanger. In the rest room she did a quick job of drying her hair.

“Oh, poor thing,” Cal said. “You really got caught in that mess, didn’t you?”

“It started just after I left the subway.”

“Well, it seems to have ended now that you’re safely inside. All for your benefit, lucky you.”

At least her hair was short and would dry with no difficulty. She’d had it cropped close to her head on her third day in New York. She had been letting it grow for some time and the transformation had been startling. The symbolism of the gesture had not eluded her at the time. She had just cut off all her ties, and now she was cutting off her hair, and rendering herself just a shade butch in the course of this liberation. Well, she had decided, to hell with symbolism. Short hair was easier and made her look and feel younger. And the air was filthy in Manhattan. You had to wash your hair several times a week and with long hair that was just too much trouble.

She got a carton of books from in back and busied herself making room for them on the shelves. They had arrived the day before from Gallimard, and they were an assortment of suspense novels in French. All of the books were by American authors. They had been originally published in English and had subsequently been translated laboriously into French, printed in France, and now this carton had made the trip back across the ocean, its contents waiting to serve as bedtime reading for chefs and waiters and Senegalese diplomats.

The morning passed with little incident and less strain. She waited on a handful of customers, checking their credit cards and making out the sales slips, listing each title sold on the inventory-control sheet. An American woman — Midwestern, by her accent — wasted fifteen minutes of her time comparing French dictionaries without finding one she liked well enough to buy. The manager, Mr. Hubbell, arrived a little after eleven and went into the back room to go over the day’s mail. He was a plump, owlish little man, always polite but quite reserved, who lived somewhere on Long Island with his wife and mother-in-law. His name was J. R. Hubbell, and neither Andrea nor Cal had learned what the initials stood for.