River Girls

He was a broker, a money guy, and like all money guys he never seemed to quite add up. He was getting in from an office Christmas party just as I was heading out. He had some secretary marching unsteadily on high heels in front of him as we passed on the stairs. There is an army of girls that come from Brooklyn and Bayonne to the city for their first real jobs. They become executive assistants, which means they answer phones, smile till their jaws hurt and grind their teeth at night with worry that they don't belong, and never will, on this side of the river. Inevitably they become entranced by some unhappily married guy. The “she doesn’t understand me” guys that fill every office in every high rise on the island. The girls tell themselves a man’s lingering presence means 'I need you' or 'only you can save me.' It doesn’t of course. It means I’m tired of the boss and the bills and the wife.Or I’m tired of the harangue of living. It means I’m tired of the way the future gets smaller and quieter and a little more lost in the subway tunnels each day. The river girls, always young and pretty and hopelessly naïve, start to see these guys as the missing variable in the unbalanced equation of their own unhappiness. They tell themselves what they feel is love and probably true. And they begin to dream of a life on this side of the river, with the guys that linger near their desks. The kind of life where loneliness isn’t a muffled howl waiting for them on the train home each night. So they smile harder, let their hearts beat away the worry and the doubt and wait for a chance. In December in Manhattan that chance always shows up at a Christmas party. It always appears between the One Too Manys. The One Too Many vodka tonics, the One Too Many whispered phrases, the One Too Many wedding ring hands brushing against the small of their backs. So these girls finally step into the breach of their bosses’arms in an empty office or a stairwell and insist to themselves it’s just dancing. And, of course, the wives suddenly appear. They peer at the embarrassed girls and watch their husbands grimace and shrug. Then the sweet naïve versions of loneliness grab their coats, run for the door in tears, out alone again into the cold. In December in Manhattan they line the avenues crying and hailing cabs and feeling that first small bite of wisdom creep into themselves through the hurt of it all. Outside the next morning, the broker’s secretary was unsteadily stepping out and down the stairs into the cold. Trying not to fall, her heels too high for the ice. She looked a little forlorn, the way a woman always does the morning after when she feels the first edge of how ridiculous a heart can be. WLM