Lillian and Brian meet at Glamour Time

Lillian and Brian meet at Glamour Time in 1968, against a New York City buried in strike refuse. The encounter begins a relationship shaped from the outset by attraction, misrecognition, and an awkward conflict of interests: Brian is both drawn to Lillian and investigating the agency where she works. Their first meeting does not lead quickly to courtship. Instead, Brian’s professional actions help cost Lillian her job, and she cuts off contact before their first real date, eight years after they meet.

Background and Setting

The meeting takes place during the eight-day garbage strike of February 1968. One hundred thousand tons of trash accumulated on New York City’s sidewalks and streets; rats ran alongside joggers, and rubbish fires filled the air. The book frames the city’s disorder as a setting with its own “cracked magic”: Lillian and Brian have journeyed from very different places to find one another in Queens, though neither could anticipate what falling in love would bring.

Lillian, twenty-five, had emigrated from Uganda, where she had lived in Jinja through the country’s emancipation from Britain and the rule of Milton Obote. In 1967, while traveling toward Kampala with three cousins, she witnessed an agent claiming to belong to the General Service Unit shoot her cousin Arthur after he hesitated to leave the women and open the car trunk. She arrived in New York in 1968 knowing no one. Her English, learned under British rule, helped her find work; the strike’s inconvenience was slight beside the state-sanctioned violence she had left behind.

Brian, by contrast, came from Syracuse. He was a parole officer who visited Glamour Time’s founder, Pavel Aresenyev, a parolee who had served four years in prison for fraud. Brian suspected that Pavel had not gone legitimate. The agency occupied a windowless second-floor office near Queensboro Plaza, far from the centers of high fashion but convenient to working-class aspiring models. Its business was a scam: clients paid for headshots taken by Pavel, who also offered some young women after-hours sessions alone with him. Lillian, answering the phones at the front desk, was the business’s only honest aspect.

The Encounter

Lillian had been hired as a secretary during the strike. Her command of English was better than Pavel’s, and she could make the agency sound serious, although she did not know it was fraudulent. The job paid three dollars an hour, twice the state minimum wage. After failing to find work in Uganda, she valued the position and its pay.

Brian’s visits had previously been directed at Pavel, but during the week he became more interested in the new secretary greeting him at the desk. He came to the agency four times that week. The narration compares meeting Lillian to finding a rose in a landfill, joining the unlikely romance to the garbage-choked streets outside. The attraction, however, is not presented as effortless recognition. Brian repeatedly mispronounced Lillian’s surname, while Lillian kept mistaking him for other white men. Their errors make the encounter less like instant kismet than a beginning neither initially knows how to read.

Brian was short, stocky, and persistent. Even when he did not appear, Lillian found herself surprised to miss him. His persistence thus registers on both sides: he keeps returning, and she notices his absence, despite her uncertainty about him. The book describes his inability to explain his fixation as if Lillian had cast a spell. That language gives the meeting a fairy-tale charge, while the office’s actual business and the couple’s misidentifications keep it grounded in a compromised, ordinary workplace.

Attraction and Its Cost

Brian’s attention to Lillian also makes him more troublesome to Pavel. His frequent presence at the agency disrupts the fraud, and Pavel eventually fires Lillian, reasoning that Brian’s interest in her makes her bad for business. Brian continues pursuing Pavel. Charging for headshots was not illegal, but operating a photo studio without a permit violated Pavel’s parole; Pavel returned to jail, and Brian received a commendation. The investigation vindicates Brian’s suspicions, yet its immediate cost to Lillian is the loss of a job she needed and valued.

Lillian moved to an administrative-secretary position at a law firm in midtown Manhattan. It paid less, and she moved into a smaller apartment. The commute took an additional half hour each way. She also cut off all communication with Brian: from her perspective, his actions had cost her a good job, and she did not want dinner and a movie with him. Her refusal makes clear that the attraction she had begun to feel did not erase the material consequences of his conduct. Brian’s pursuit of justice against Pavel and his pursuit of Lillian move together, but they do not serve her interests in the same way.

The Long Delay

Brian gave Lillian space by moving to Staten Island, a borough away, but could not stop thinking about her. Lillian, meanwhile, continued with her life in New York City and did not accept his overture to date. The book gives no quick romantic resolution: they meet in 1968 but do not go on their first real date until eight years later. The gap preserves the importance of the first encounter without mistaking it for the start of an uninterrupted courtship.

The episode’s central irony is that Brian’s visits bring the couple together while also helping to destroy the workplace that first joined them. The city’s garbage strike supplies a vivid backdrop, but the more lasting disruption comes from the collision between Brian’s official duty and Lillian’s precarious livelihood. Their meeting therefore establishes both the force of their attraction and the uneven consequences of Brian acting on it: he is commended and remains smitten, while she loses her job, relocates to less comfortable circumstances, and withdraws from him. The eventual first date comes only after that initial promise has been interrupted by real costs.