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_"Every century has its advantages and its drawbacks," he said.
"We, for instance, have bred out sexual desire. And, as for you
people ..."_
YOU DON'T MAKE WINE
LIKE THE GREEKS DID
By DAVID E. FISHER
ILLUSTRATED by SUMMERS
On the sixty-third floor of the Empire State Building is, among others
of its type, a rather small office consisting of two rooms connected by
a stout wooden door. The room into which the office door, which is of
opaque glass, opens, is the smaller of the two and serves to house a
receptionist, three not-too-comfortable armchairs, and a disorderly,
homogeneous mixture of _Life's_, _Look's_ and _New Yorker's_.
[Illustration: Donald was determined to make Mimi go back to their
world--dead or alive!]
The receptionist is a young woman, half-heartedly pretty but certainly
chic in the manner of New York's women in general and of its working
women in particular, perhaps in her middle twenties, with a paucity of
golden hair which is kept clinging rather back on her skull by an
intricate network of tortoise-shell combs and invisible pins. She is
engaged to a man who is in turn engaged in a position for an advertising
firm just thirty-seven stories directly below her. Her name is Margaret.
She often, in periods when the immediate consummation of the work on her
desk is not of paramount importance, as is often the case, gazes
somnolently at the floor beside her large walnut desk, hoping to catch a
lurking image of her beloved only thirty-seven stories away. She rarely
succeeds in viewing him through the intervening spaces, but she does not
tire of trying; it is a pleasant enough diversion. There is an
electronics firm just five stories above her fiance, and perhaps, she
reasons, there is interference of a sort here. Someday maybe she will
catch them with all their tubes off. Margaret is a romantic, but she is
engaged and thus is entitled.
* * * * *
Beyond the entrance that is guarded by the stout wooden door is a larger
room, darker, quieter, one step more removed from the hurrying hallway.
A massive but neat desk is placed before the one set of windows, the
blinds of which are kept closed but tilted toward the sky so that an
aura of pale light is continually seeping through. The main illumination
comes from several lamps placed in strategic corners, their bulbs turned
away from the occupants of the room.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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