Robert Tanenbaum: Falsely Accused

Marlene Ciampi, her hostess, was, in contrast, beautiful in the conventional sense, looking, as an artist friend of hers had once noted, exactly like Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa in Ecstasy. St. Teresa was not, however, a smart kid from Queens with adorable black ringlets and a glass eye.

The meeting was in the nature of a reunion. Stupenagel had just returned to New York from a year covering the guerilla war in Guatemala. The two women were at the point of drunkenness in which confidences may begin to flow, and everything seems vastly funny.

“I can’t get over what you’ve done with the loft,” said Stupenagel, refilling her glass. “It must have cost a fortune.”

“Yes, it did,” agreed Marlene, gazing contentedly out the open door of the bedroom at her remarkable dwelling. She had lived in this place since the days in which it was illegal to do so. She had with her own hands ripped out the ruins of an old electroplating factory and installed simple plumbing, electricity, heating, and cabinetwork. Necessarily, this had been crude work; as a junior assistant D.A., she’d had little cash to spare on comforts, although the mere size of the space-a hundred feet by thirty-three-made up for a lot. Nevertheless, she had lived ten years in what was little more than a shabbily furnished nineteenth-century factory: rusty tin ceiling, the floor of splintery planks where it was not concrete slab, tepid radiators, a tiny, fetid toilet, raw drywall partitions instead of proper rooms.

Now, however, she looked out on an expanse of satiny Swedish-finished oak flooring, glowing under the track lighting that hung from the smooth dropped ceiling. She had real rooms with doors and brass hardware. The creaky inconvenient sleeping loft was now a handsome bedroom, w/bath. The kitchen was right out of Architectural Digest, oak cabinets, a double stainless reefer, a Vulcan stove. Lucy, the Karps’ seven-year-old daughter, had a cozy, carpeted bedroom and a well-stocked playroom. The stingy gas radiators were gone, and the whole vast space was heated and cooled in season by a climate control center that had its own little lair in a corner of the loft.

“Luckily,” continued Marlene, “we had a fortune. Last year Butch made about twice the combined total of what our two salaries were when we both worked for the D.A. It was like Monopoly money; we couldn’t believe the numbers. Especially coming from D.C., where we were practically sharecroppers. So we figured while we were flush, and who knew how long it’d last, we’d better fix up the place. And there it is.”

Sounds of giggling floated through the open door. Lucy was entertaining a friend.

“Why wouldn’t it last?” asked Stupenagel.

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Marlene. “It doesn’t seem right, somehow. All that dough. And Butch is not a happy camper, not really. He was born to put asses in jail. One day he’s going to come home and tell me he’s quit Bohm Lansdorff What’s-his-face and gone for a job with the Brooklyn D.A. or the Feds, and it’ll be back to genteel poverty and the joys of public service. Meanwhile, hi-ho!” She poured herself another glass of Moët.

“Why doesn’t he just get his old job back?” asked Stupenagel. “Assuming he wants to be a D.A.”

“Long story,” said Marlene dismissively.

“Mmm,” said Stupenagel, for whom no story was too long, and shot Marlene an interested look. When this prompted no revelation, she changed tack. “Well, you certainly seem to have taken to the life of a bourgeois matron,” she observed in a needling tone. “I never would have thought it, the way you used to carry on at Smith. Little Ms. Feminist-”

“Fuck you, Stupe,” replied Marlene amiably.

“Supported by a man. Dependent. Want to go shopping? We could buy slipcovers. We could play mah-jongg-”

“We could strike one another over the head with empty champagne bottles, me first.”

“Oh, is it all gone? That’s almost as bad as your pathetic domestic slavery,” said Stupenagel, and then she called out, “ Marcel! Encore de champagne! ”

“I notice you don’t mind sharing in the tainted largesse,” Marlene observed.

“Leeching off friends is completely different. There are numerous other people I could leech off of; I choose to leech off you from a position of absolute freedom. You expect nothing from me in return.”

“I’ll say!” said Marlene dryly.

“That did not come out precisely as I intended. As you know, I would give you the shirt off my back, speaking of which …”

“I’ll check the dryer. You can get your own wine. There’s another bottle in the fridge, but you’ll have to drink it yourself. I have to make dinner.” She got up and walked out of the bedroom.

“Oh, yes, God forbid hubby won’t have his meat and two veg on the table,” Stupenagel called after her. Then Marlene heard the sound of a bottle being taken out of the refrigerator and the pop of the cork. She sighed as she removed her friend’s dry clothes from the dryer. Ariadne was going to get pissed, and she could be a mean drunk. The last thing she wanted right now was to have to handle a gigantic drunken woman, two seven-year-olds, and a hungry and unhappy husband. Maybe Ariadne would just pass out. From habit, Marlene sniffed the warm clothes and wrinkled her nose. Personal hygiene was clearly not one of the journalist’s strong points and hadn’t been at college either, Marlene recalled.

“I could have washed these,” Marlene said as she tossed the clothes (black jeans, red Solidarity T-shirt, underpants, and socks) on the bed where Stupenagel was reclining, now swigging champagne directly from the bottle.

“Oh, God, never! Not a jot will I add to your domestic slavery,” exclaimed Stupenagel in ringing tones, and then, dramatically, “I’d rather wallow in filth.”

“You are,” said Marlene. “Get dressed. You can help me cut stuff up.”

Stupenagel groaned and put her bottle on a night-stand, then stood shakily and dropped her robe. She staggered nude to a full-length mirror, struck a pose with her chest thrown out, and groaned again. “Good Christ! What a great foundation for such tiny edifices!” She turned to stare appraisingly at Marlene, who was trying to slip into her own clothes as quickly and privately as possible. “Jesus, is there no justice? You haven’t sagged an inch, and you’re a mom! Marlene, if you die, can I have your tits?”

“Oh, grow up, Stupe!” snapped Marlene, tucking her blouse into a long denim skirt. “What would Gloria Steinem say if she knew you were still lusting after big knockers?”

“Easy for her to talk! She’s got nice ones.” Stupenagel collapsed on the bed again and reached for the bottle. After a lengthy swallow she said, “So. This is it for you? Cook, clean, read bedtime stories?”

“Are you going to get dressed?”

“I will, I will. Don’t nag me. No, really, tell me.”

Marlene recalled that this was one of her friend’s little oddities. In college she would stride through the dorm hallways stark naked, frightening the freshmen and, on Sundays, annoying those who were entertaining men in their rooms with the door opened the prescribed eighteen inches. Another was also observable now: her ability to carry on a normal conversation while drunk, a quality she considered essential to success as a journalist.

Marlene sat on the bed and turned her real eye on her friend, being careful to keep in view the bedside clock-radio. “Okay, Stupe-here’s the story. The loft in which we now sit is a condo. It’s worth approximately three hundred and fifty thousand dollars and was purchased and sold to me for one dollar by an old Armenian gentleman, in return for services rendered.”