The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

swimming pool,” the library with the newest bestsellers added each month, music and painting studios to be rented for an hour a day at $4 a month, monthly plays, concerts, and lectures. All for $12 a week for a room with running water and $15 for one with a bath. The views were unbeatable too. That message remained consistent for decades: a 1957 Mademoiselle piece, with a Barbizon advertisement running alongside it, promised, “If you’re unescorted and the least bit apprehensive, stay at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, where you can join forces with others of your age and interest for an organized sally into the big city.” What remained unsaid was that those easy friendships available at the Barbizon were to tide you over until you found your true love, your man.

Two years after Gael Greene had stayed at the Barbizon as a Mademoiselle guest editor, she checked herself back into the hotel. This time she came as an investigative reporter for the New York Post, assigned to write a multipart series titled “Lone Women.” The newspaper promised its readers New York’s untold story: “Our town—any big town—is full of them. They come—looking for careers, romance, adventure, an escape from boredom. What happens to them once they get here? What of their high hopes for spectacular success, their dreams of marriage to a handsome prince charming? Can they overcome the universal fears of metropolitan bachelor girls—fear of failure, fear of spinsterhood, fear of sexual assault?”

Gael was now twenty-three years old, and she booked herself into an L-shaped corner room on the tenth floor of the Barbizon, with “an ivory desk and dresser” “against the pale yellow walls. The print curtains matched the bed spread.” She called it a cell. She didn’t tell her readers that she had been there before, just two years earlier, in June 1955, alongside Joan Didion, Peggy LaViolette, Janet Burroway, and Jane Truslow. For the readers of the New York Post, Gael posed as a newcomer, writing as if she had arrived at the hotel for the first time, as if she had never met Oscar before: “ ‘Do you know Oscar, Miss?’ the cab driver asked as a grinning jowly man in uniform threw open the cab door and peered inside. ‘Oscar will take good care of you. He’s famous. Everyone knows Oscar.’

“ ‘I take care of all the girls,’ the fat doorman cooed. ‘Especially the pretty ones like you.’ ”

Of course Gael was not particularly pretty—there had been that dreadful trench coat she wore around the clock during her guest editorship. And she had also been left out of the Mademoiselle fashion show, relegated to watching.

Breakfast at the Barbizon the next morning must have nudged that memory awake because, as she told her New York Post readers: “It was at breakfast that I saw the Barbizon’s two worlds on parade.” There was the world that Grace Kelly and Carolyn Scott had inhabited—“Chattering quartets of trim young girls in hats and high-heeled opera pumps filled the center tables and booths of the hotel coffee shop. As one girl finished breakfast and trotted toward the door, another zoomed into the room, heels clicking, and took her place.” The other world, however, was that of the “Lone Women”: “Others breakfasted alone. They wore no hats. Uncomfortable, self-conscious, eyes averted, they sipped coffee and orange juice. One by one they slipped into the room, looked about eagerly seeking a familiar face and, finding no one, took stools at the counter. Other women alone sat at the tables for two which ring the room. With closed faces and arms held close to their sides they breakfasted—eyes darting to the door every few seconds, then dropping back to a book or newspaper. It was the same at dinner.”

Gael took her place alongside the lonesome. With a book tucked securely under her arm, she proceeded to get to know this other half of the Barbizon. She first met Jenny, whom she joined for a plate of cold cuts and potato salad at one of the two-person tables. Jenny, “a young, flat-faced girl,” was reading the novel Compulsion, the story of two smart, upper-class Jewish young men living in 1920s Chicago who randomly murder a boy to feel the thrill of existing above and beyond the law. It was a current bestseller. Jenny was twenty years old and had done two years at an East Coast women’s college only to drop out, leaving behind her boyfriend, Reggie, at a neighboring men’s college; she had abandoned the idealized life imagined for her at the prep school she’d attended—which had insisted on college, then marriage, then kids—because she wanted to do something she could get excited about. But instead she was spending her time waiting for the next weekend she would spend with Reggie. Being a girl of good stock, she had ended up at the Barbizon because of its reputation, its parent-approved status, and its safe neighborhood. She leaned conspiratorially toward Gael as she told her story.

Jenny was not, however, a huge fan of the Barbizon lobby, which she disapprovingly noted lots of men used as a place to “take a load off their feet and watch all the pretty girls go by.” The trouble was that sometimes they also followed the girls out of the lobby and onto the street, where, as one young resident warned another, “It could happen on the street corner—any corner.” She meant harassment, even assault. Jenny ditched Gael after dinner, and the New York Post’s young investigative journalist strolled around the lobby. She watched laughing couples leave for a night out and then a large group of girls heading off together for a movie, with Oscar making sure to pat their cheeks, smiling wide, as they departed. Gael listened around her:

“They’re all the same. All trying to seduce you,” one young woman instructed a friend as she eyed another’s date from across the room.

“But, Mother, I want to come home—” another whispered from the phone booth.

“No mail for me?”