MONIKA (GIRL ON THE LINE)

Part 1

it was one of those nights on the sidewalk at Broadway and Forty-second Street, in the late '90s, when the traffic lights at both ends of Broadway were out, that the lights on Forty showed up as a neon green light. Some of these lights were a second or two behind the previous ones, making it feel as if a subway train were coming from behind you. Stretch an invisible cord knee-high across the sidewalk, and a hundred prettier girls than Monica Reynolds will stumble over it. (A hundred homelier girls too, for that matter!), Monika was just the Girl in the Crowd. Look down the aisle of your subway- or surface- or L-car on the way home tonight, and you will see her. You will see her by the dozen.

But you will not observe her unless you look hard. She is not the type of girl to make you murmur fatuously: "Gee, but I wish she was my stenographer!" Nor is she the sort that excites pity for her plainness. She is—yes, my term "The Girl in the Crowd" best fits her. Living in her world, she left her home For three years, after she left high school, Monika occupied twenty-eight inches of space along one of the two sides of a room whose walls were wainscoted in honeycombed metal. At shelves in front of the honeycombing sat double lines of girls with ugly steel appliances over their frizzed or lanky hair. Their hands were ever flitting from spot to spot in the perforated wainscoting, deftly shifting plugs from hole to hole. It was hard for her at first but the room wherein Monika Reynolds toiled for the first three years of her business career was a telephone exchange. And at three years' end, she was assigned to the job of day operator at the Clavichord Arms. The long room buzzed with the rhythmic droning of fifty voices and with the purring of countless plugs clicked into innumerable sockets. Up and down the double rank marched a horribly efficient woman who discouraged repartee and inter-desk conversation. The place was fine but The pay at the hotel was no larger than at the exchange, but there was always the possibility of tips and the certainty of Christmas money. Besides, there were chances to rest or to read between calls. On the whole, Monika rejoiced at the change—as might a private who is made corporal. The Clavichord Arms is a glorious monument to New York's efforts at boosting the high cost of living. The building occupies nearly a third of a city block, in length and depth, and it towers to the height of nine stories. Its facade and main entrance and cathedral-like lobby are rare samples of architecture whose sacred motto is, "Put all your goods in the show window.", When the high cost of living first menaced our suffering land, scores of such apartment houses sprang into life, in order that New Yorkers might do their bit toward the upkeep of high prices. Here, at a rental ranging from fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars a year, one may live in quarters almost as commodious as those for which a suburbanite or smaller city dweller pays fifty dollars a month. And nobly did New York rally to the aid of the men who sought thus to get its coin. So quickly did the new apartments fill with tenants that more and yet more and more such buildings were run up.

Men who grumbled right piteously at the advance of bread from five to six cents a loaf eagerly paid three thousand dollars a year for the privilege of living in the garish-fronted abodes, and they sneered at humbler friends who, for the same sum, rented thirty-room mansions in the suburbs. And this, by prosy degrees, brings us back to Monica Reynolds. The Clavichord Arms' interior decorator had used up all his ingenuity and his appropriation before he came to the cubby-hole behind the gilded elevators—the cubby-hole that served as the telephone operator's quarters. The cubby-hole was airless, windowless, low and sloped of the ceiling, calcimined of the wall, and equipped with no furniture at all except the switchboard desk, a single kitchen chair, one eight-candle-power electric light, and an iron clothes-hook. Here, for eight hours a day, sat Monika Reynolds. Here, with stolid conscientiousness, she manipulated the plugs, that the building's seventy tenants might waste their own and their friends' time in endless phone chats.

It was dull and uninspiring and lonely in the dark cubby-hole, after the lights and the constant work and companionship of the Exchange. There was much more leisure, too than at the Exchange.

Monika at first tried to enliven this leisure by reading. She loved to read; books or magazines—it was all the same to Monika, so long as the hero and heroine at last outwitted the villain and came together at the altar.

But there are drawbacks to reading all day—even to reading union-made love stories, by eight-candle-power light and with an everlasting interruption from the switchboard. So Monika, by way of amusement, began to "listen in."

"Listening in" is a plug-shifting process whereby the telephone operator may hear any conversation over the wire. In some States, I understand, it is a misdemeanor. But perhaps there is no living operator who has not done it. In some private exchanges, it is so common a custom that the cry of "Fish!" warns every other operator in the room that a particularly listenable talk is going on. This same cry of "Fish" is an invitation for all present to listen in.

(Yes, your telephonic love talk, your fierce love spats, and your sad love secrets have been avidly heard—and possibly repeated—again and again, by Central. Remember that, next time. When you hear a faint click on the wire during your conversation, —and sometimes when you don't, —an operator is pretty certain to be listening in.), At first, Monika was amused by what she heard. The parsimonious butcher order of the house's richest woman, the hiccoughed excuses of a husband whom business detained downtown, the vapid chatter of lad and lass, the scolding of slow dressmakers, the spicy anecdotes told by half-hour phone gabblers—all these were a pleasant variation on the day's routine. But at last, they began to pall. And just as they waxed tiresome—romance began.