Free Living Room by Sol Stein Page B

mind whirring. She had an idea. An unused idea was a waste. She would not waste this one. She would get Arthur to pay attention.
    Later that morning, nervous but determined, she buzzed Arthur on the intercom. “I could come to your office,” she said, “but it might be preferable if you could come down here.”
    When he knocked and walked in, Shirley was seated behind her desk wearing her glasses and nothing else.
    Impeccable Arthur’s clean-shaven WASP face flushed. He didn’t think he should be looking at her breasts, which seemed startlingly perfect, and tried to focus on her face—how could she be so relaxed?—as Shirley removed her glasses and said, “You didn’t mean it, did you?”
    “Suppose someone walked in?”
    “You just did.”
    “I mean someone else.”
    “No one walks in here without knocking.”
    “You know my policy.”
    Ah, Arthur, she thought, your policy. In her first months over drinks, as she and Arthur waited for a client who was late for lunch, Arthur had said, as if he were announcing a slogan, “I never put my penis in my pocketbook,” meaning if he had affairs, which Shirley doubted, they would never be carried on with someone in the office.
    “Are you trying to make me, Shirley?”
    “I’m trying to make you a good boss.”
    “Put your clothes on, please.”
    She stood, her pubic hair showing now just above the level of the desk, saluted, and proceeded to dress in front of him, and Arthur, who wanted to look away, couldn’t help the quick glimpse at her buttocks and thinking how unfair God was to give a girl so bright such an attractive body as well.
    Finally, slipping her shoes back on, knowing she had him at his weakest moment, she said, “Arthur, I’ve taken a crack at the Ford campaign. I want you to look at it now, before the Plans Board meeting.”
    Arthur nodded with a touch of sadness. The inevitable was going to happen. The Ford account couldn’t be saved. And Marvin Goodkin, whose macho was the car account, would use Shirley’s involvement in that failure to hound her out of the agency. Arthur wished the game plan weren’t so damn clear.
    Shirley had dropped the gauntlet. Arthur went around to her side of the desk, keeping as many inches as he could between his fully clothed body and hers because the memory of her nakedness did not fade with her dressing, and over her shoulder looked at what she had come up with.

CHAPTER NINE
    SHIRLEY HARTMAN’S BEST FRIEND was not a person but a couple. Jack and Mary Wood had fallen in love under Shirley’s auspices while Mary was in her last months at Barnard. He was then a surgical resident, perpetually exhausted from assisting at too many operations, and from the countless indigents at the city hospital who adopted Jack as the young doctor between them and a community that wished them dead and out of the way.
    Shirley and Mary took turns putting together meals on short notice or picking up the check for the threesome at some inexpensive joint. More than once Shirley had provided them with a shelter for their lovemaking at her own considerable inconvenience. She was the only witness to their wedding in City Hall four months before Clarence was born, a child with three parents. Shirley accepted the title of godmother with reluctance. Once Jack and Mary settled down, they devoted some small part of each month to trying to make their relationship to Shirley symmetrical by introducing her to a man they thought she would like. Over the years they must have introduced Shirley to more than half a dozen men, always luckless occasions, the last a fiasco named Warner Calley, a surgeon friend of Jack’s who turned out, they learned from Shirley in dismay, to have a hopeless sexual incompetence. Thus now a whole year had gone by without introductions and Shirley’s suspicions were quiescent when Mary phoned her at the office and invited her over for dinner Friday evening, a quiet supper “just like in the old days.”
    But when