The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (ebook reader browser TXT) 📕

sunglasses she’d seen in a shop window recently, with a sign beside them: “These are the exact replica of the pair worn by Her Highness, Princess Grace of Monaco.”

Then there was Irene. She met her “beau” on a blind date (the first time that had ever worked out); he was a lawyer no less. But now he wanted to have an affair with her, meaning a sexual relationship, and Irene had said no but didn’t know if she should feel flattered or insulted. Gael Greene, years more sophisticated even though she was only two years older than Irene, looked at her, and said: “Be flattered.” These were also the realities of womanhood in the 1950s.

Even as Gael was surrounded by these Lone Women, she came upon someone she knew personally, and who did not fit the category at all. It wasn’t her “low, sensual voice” but her “long-lashed green eyes” that roused Gael’s memory: this young woman, Joan, had been at the University of Michigan with her. Joan was waiting for her placement agency to find her a job, which it hadn’t yet done, and not working was getting exhausting: one day she even rode the Staten Island Ferry four times, and then walked from the dock to Fourteenth Street. When she wasn’t riding the ferry, she washed her hair, shopped, and dated one young bachelor after another. Sometimes she helped the other girls out when her blind dates brought along a friend.

Joan did not belong to the Lone Women; she was among the lucky ones who tripped happily into the Barbizon coffee shop each morning and to an assortment of tables and friends to choose from. But she had seen things, she confided to Gael: she met most of her hallmates on the night a girl in the room next door “got roaring drunk and went psycho.” She heard lots of noise and peeked in, where she saw a girl throwing things at the wall. When Joan inquired if she was okay, the girl hissed at her. Within minutes, with something happening, there were forty girls in Joan’s room, and she’d even considered serving cocktails. When word came that the police had been summoned, the girls dashed back to their rooms, took out their pin curls, and put on sexy negligees. Joan, pretty Joan, just rolled her eyes as she told the story.

No less disturbing were the ones who were “neither young nor old and have peaked faces and the first hints of desperation in their eyes.” But the worst, the very worst, said Joan, were the old ladies—“Barbizon’s inner sanctum.” Some had been here as long as twenty-seven years, having moved in only a couple of years after the hotel was built. They were still paying $8 a week for their rooms (or so she believed), while she and everyone else were paying $39. And their rooms were like museums; not only did their weekly rent hark back to another time but so too did their interiors.

Joan well knew that her way out of this life she was living at the Barbizon was a job, but she hadn’t finished college, she didn’t know how to type or take shorthand, and she’d been told she was too smart for the unskilled work for which she was qualified. While she chatted with Gael, the phone rang: it was her employment agency saying they’d set her up with an interview at a foreign film company. Joan rolled her eyes again: “Foreign films—that means dirty movies. I’d handle telephone contacts—that means answer the phone. There’d be some figurework—a little bookkeeping. Important records to file—translation: I should keep track of the boss’s bets. Some job.” She never went; she called her agency and told them that she’d come down with the Asian flu and headed off on a last date with Ted, whom she was planning to dump that night.

Jacqueline, another resident, was a nightclub singer from England who featured at a place called the Wonder Room. Small, slender, but with curves, her skin ivory and her platinum-blond hair in a neat French roll, she stared at herself in the mirror as she spoke to Gael, expertly smearing some sea green eye shadow across her lids while taking tweezers to her brows. She lived on the fifth floor—“the gay floor.” She ate four candy bars a night for dinner and missed most of the TV room arguments because her work began at 11:00 p.m. and ended in the early morning hours. Although she was twenty-three, just like Gael, she looked thirty. She had a special bond with her next-room neighbor, Helen, eighteen years old, who looked to Jacqueline for mothering. Helen also lived Jacqueline’s life vicariously, from the admiring men to the late dates and the numerous phone calls. She and Jacqueline routinely rapped on their shared wall to see if the other was in. Helen had a habit of throwing things at the wall light switch when she wanted to turn out the lights but was too tired to get out of bed. Recently, after a bottle of nose drops didn’t do the trick, she’d picked up the room’s heavy ashtray and thrown it; the crash sent Jacqueline rushing in. They both took care of each other, even as Jacqueline was the designated mother figure; when one of the elderly residents on their floor compared Jacqueline’s singing to unwanted noise, Helen hung a wet paint sign on the old lady’s door and squirted shaving cream along the threshold.

Billy Jo was a twenty-year-old college dropout, a fact that had infuriated her Southerner father, a respected dentist. As upset as he was, he was willing to pay her bills if she stayed at a women-only residence. So here she was at the Barbizon, “a tall, big-boned girl with mouse-colored hair, pale watery eyes and flawless skin.” She left college because of a boy, a sophomore with a crew cut who didn’t care for her. She got fed up trying to avoid him on campus;