Free Living Room by Sol Stein Page A

does? Politicians? Could you be a politician?”
    “Never.”
    “Come have tea some time. No charge. As a friend.”
    *
    For a week she consciously tamed her wit, kept all conversation bland, lanced nobody, bored herself. The hell with that, she thought, parole is over.
    It was the evening that Arthur’s wife, Jane, had invited her to dine with them in Connecticut. They had several local friends in. After dinner, the women clustered together, talking about their children’s adolescent vicissitudes, the difficulties of getting good domestic help, the gossip of suburbia. Shirley longed to join the men at the other side of the room. They had to be talking about something that would keep her awake.
    Finally, she just excused herself from the domesticities and took her brandy over to the men. To Jane, Arthur’s welcome to Shirley was a bit too effusive. She could see the men laughing in response to something Shirley had said. Jane felt, with some justice, that Shirley’s conversation interested Arthur a great deal more than her own news of Westport charities and social events, and since Shirley was so much younger, and attractive, and was seen by Arthur every working day, Jane could not see why Arthur, from his position of power as head of the firm, did not have an affair with her. She assumed he did, which was incorrect.
    When the women finally joined the men, Shirley still held center stage. It was that evening, when the guests had gone, that Jane dubbed Shirley “Ms. George Bernard Pshaw.”
    “I think she’s clever,” said Arthur, taking his tie off. He was watching Jane’s expression in the hall mirror.
    “Very clever,” said Jane.
    Arthur decided it ought to be a long time before Shirley was invited back.
    *
    Al Chunin had a dream in which the Shirley Hartman he had seen on TV was sitting on a chair in a large room that otherwise had nothing in it. Coming through the door, Al bumped his head on the lintel. He felt too tall, so he stooped as he walked toward her. She raised a hand as if in warning, stopping him dead. Smiling, she then motioned him to take one step forward. Why the hell should he obey her? He took one step, hating himself, he must master her by talk, overwhelm her with a flail of words, wit, facts, flashing insights to put her in her place, but he could not speak. He tried shouting, but no sound came.
    He woke from the dream, determined to cancel his Friday dinner date at Jack and Mary’s, where he was to meet this Shirley Hartman person face to face. He forgot to call until evening of the next day. When he did, the Woods were both out. Their baby sitter answered the telephone.
    “Any message?” asked the baby sitter.
    “No,” said Al Chunin. He hung up, wondering about the flash of cowardice. It was only a dream. She was only another woman.
    *
    Shirley was intrigued by the nature of power in office life. The executives of Armon, Caiden, Crouch were always summoned to Arthur’s office. If he ventured into someone else’s office, it had to be a casual drop-in lest it be interpreted as a dimunition of his status. To Shirley, rank seemed ridiculous; hierarchies were for totem poles.
    She knew that some women achieved a special status in business through an after-hours connection with someone of rank. Even if she would ever be genuinely passionate about one of the higher ups in the agency—a fantasy beyond belief—she would abstain; any accretion of Shirley Hartman’s power would derive from her skill. But the idea of sex as a means of control continued to prickle through her sometimes mischievous mind.
    In the office Shirley now wore short red or orange or yellow dresses that made her look younger than her twenty-eight years. Once, when she caught Arthur staring, she said, “I know Arthur, you’d rather have me wear blue-gray and below the knees, something with a mature look, right? Wrong.”
    “Shirley, for all I care you could come to the office naked.”
    That remark set Shirley’s