<<  -- 5 --  Jenna Orkin    ROSALYN TURECK

After I graduated Oxford, Tureck invited me to go apartment hunting with her in London.
First we stopped at the bank. She fumbled with her checkbook, gave up in frustration and said with a dismissive wave: 'You do this.'
I was surprised to find someone who knew less about coping in the world than I did.
Atop the London bus we rode out to St. Johns' Wood, marvelling over the G Flat chord in the Chromatic Fantasy in D Minor. A G Flat chord in that key is, in Bach's time as in any other, virtually unheard of. (The apartment, she decided, was 'too quiet'.)

I left Oxford at the same time as Tureck and moved to the same neighborhood in New York where we occasionally got together. She was looking for an assistant, a lady-in-waiting, really, and asked me if I'd like the job.
What she had in mind, I knew, was a factotum: Secretary, maid, slave, shrink ...
I was busy, I said.
But I had a small repertoire of dishes I could cook and I wanted to make one for her: A cheese omelette. The secret lay in adding milk to the eggs before whipping them up. Pesto was good too, mixed in with the eggs.
One night, a week before a concert Tureck was to give in Carnegie Hall, I went over to make her such an omelette for dinner. Again she brought up the subject of my working for her. I didn't say anything. But in retrospect it's clear that she took my silence to mean that at least for that one night, I was her employee.
'Actually, I don't feel in the mood for eggs tonight,' she said as I got down to work. 'Steak, I think, very lean. Go down to the butcher on Sixty-seventh, this side of the street. Not the one on Sixty-sixth.' Her voice grew imperious.
'And don't be longer than twenty minutes!' And she slammed the door.
I thought about calling it quits on the whole evening. But I didn't want to back out on a commitment.
After dinner she asked again if I knew anyone who might want to be her assistant.
'Someone with intelligence, sensitivity ...'
'You mean to be a secretary?'
'Not just that.' She waxed lyrical. 'It's a job that requires subtlety, ingenuity.'
I mentally added, 'and the patience of a saint.'
'You mean like a maid?'
'Yes,' she conceded. She looked at me suggestively.
'Sorry, I don't know anybody.'
'Perhaps one of your parents' friends,' she said disdainfully.
Then I did a despicable thing. 'Well, Peter Sellers is dead,' I said with a bitchery equal to hers. Or so I thought.
'He wouldn't have been suitable anyway,' she replied, waving aside the sarcastic suggestion. She was exercising either quickthinking wit or insanity.
'Go get my checkbook from the desk in the living-room.' (She was sitting up in bed.)
'I didn't do this for money.'
She became coy.
'Well then, would you take a ticket to the concert?'
'I'd love one.'
'Call my secretary tomorrow and have her put aside ONE ticket. What do I owe you for the meat?'
'Four seventy-two.'
She ripped out a check and signed it. 'Here,' she said, handing me the blank check. 'Fill in the amount.'
When I got the ticket for the concert I saw the price: fifteen dollars, exactly what I would have earned had I accepted the standard rate of a maid for the three hours I'd been there.

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