An investor, he answered. Sidney Winfeld.
Listen Winfeld, we don’t know you, OK? You better think that’s a good thing, OK? Don’t make us know you, and don’t call here again.
So the money’s gone. The thugs don’t know Sidney Winfeld, thank God. But Mint & Greenmarch is another story. They think Sidney’s gonna sit tight with their little secret? What’s he got to hide?—it’s not like he lied every time they asked him a question, he knew plenty of those answers before Fred Mint ever pulled a lever. Furthermore he was an actor under contract, this ain’t a matter of saving face or saving a reputation, it’s a matter simply of what they owe. What’s he got to show for all he’s done for the program? What right do they have to renege on their guarantees?
From the transit depot on his lunch hour Sidney once again calls up Mint & Greenmarch.
“Hello, Denise? Yes, yes, it’s Sidney again. Now you know why I’m calling, I know you know it, Denise, and please don’t tell me Ray can’t take my call at the moment, if he’s there he needs to get on this line and talk to me—because to be perfectly honest, Denise, I’ve lost my patience—now I know you’re only doing your job, only doing like Mister Greenmarch asks of you and I understand that so don’t take this personal Denise but you can’t keep protecting the man, understand me, it’s time he gets on this phone and talks—because really it’s only fair to Ray at this point, it’s only fair he be made aware of the steps I’m planning to take beginning this week, beginning now—now don’t misunderstand me no it’s not a threat or anything of that nature but what I’m referring to is real substantial steps I will take beginning now—as recourse, you understand, public and legal recourse for Mint & Greenmarch’s failure—yes, yes, no I wouldn’t think you’re lying to me Denise, fine yes please be sure that he receives the message and please let him know that I expect him to call me in the next twenty-four hours—no that’s all thank you Denise, I know you’re only doing your job honey I understand that—OK then, bye.”
Sidney is halfway through his turkey sandwich when Ray’s return call comes through.
“Listen, Sid,” says Ray. “I’ve been very busy and I apologize you haven’t heard from me…” Blown out of proportion, says Ray. I’m sure we understand each other better than all this, he says. Confident, he says, we can reach an agreement. Why don’t you come in, he says, so we can talk.
KENYON
Kenyon has a blind date. She comes on the recommendation of Mint & Greenmarch, Inc. It’s in his contract, surprisingly enough—under the purview of that same signal phrase, “Other Considerations.” While he’s never wholly understood its meaning, he’s never suspected till now that the phrase could pertain to his sex life.
He’ll take her to see Rear Window, the latest Hitchcock film. She is, Lacky says, from an old New York family of distinction, the daughter of a gentleman with important holdings in east side shipping. They want Kenyon to drive her in the 190. He’s to bring her to Washington Square before the show to meet the program photographer for some publicity shots. It’s all a sham. Kenyon garages the car clear over in New Jersey, can’t cover the cost of storing it in the city—after all, he’s only had one small advance payment from Mint & Greenmarch thus far. So he taxies out early in the evening, already dressed for the date, to retrieve the convertible from its concrete crypt. Then it’s through the Lincoln Tunnel to her family’s place on Park Ave.
She’s waiting in the lobby, alone—he’s relieved he doesn’t have to meet her parents. She’s lovely. Her gloved hand clasps his and without hesitation she pulls him close to kiss his cheek, irradiating him with strong perfume. It’s fifty-two degrees, so they ride with the top down. She covers her hair with a mantel of golden silk, tips him a cigarette, lights his and hers both from the car lighter. “Oh boyee,” she drawls, apropos of something he seems to have missed. Her laugh is a smoky chortle. While they cruise through the city she holds her head back as if luxuriating, the glove stripped from the hand that holds her cigarette. They don’t say more than a few words, taking the wind and city noise as an excuse.
At Washington Square, with the great white arch and a spangle of city lights as backdrop, they spend an hour leaning against the car in their evening clothes, arm in arm. Pacing around the car, arm in arm. Sitting in the car, smiling at the night. Laughing and smiling all the time. Finally they can go—just in time to get to the cinema and hand the keys to the valet.
Up on the screen, Jimmy Stewart is in a fix, hobbled in a massive cast, confined to a wheelchair and bound to learn the hard way how awful it is to be noticed. Why doesn’t he read a book? Kenyon thinks, as he watches Stewart fixate more and more obsessively on the view out his back window. “Oh dear,” says Stewart’s scrappy masseuse, “we’ve become a race of peeping toms. What people oughta do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.”
Give the man a book for God’s sake!
Maureen is the blind date’s name, and she’s a free spirit. At dinner following the movie she tells Kenyon her parents are abroad for the winter. A property in Ticino, Switzerland. She hardly comes home while they’re gone. How can she? The city is endlessly exciting.
As for Kenyon, he’s taken to sleeping in his parents’ house several nights a week, whenever they’re away at the farm. In the empty rooms he sometimes sits awake for hours, alone in the quiet, all the contained years palpably manifest around him. The worn furniture. The dusty spots under the lamps. Beyond the walls the city thrums, but in the house nothing moves. He knows that in the kitchen, behind the cupboard doors, all his mother’s serving ware sits neatly stacked, inanimate, dumbly waiting—and though he cannot say why, this is extremely comforting. He doesn’t tell Maureen any of this, but late in the night, after they’ve had plenty to drink, he brings her to the Bleecker house. There by the dim glow of the parlor lamp, on the sofa between his father’s wall of books and the curtained window, she leans against him in her chiffon, paws him with her gloves off, then undoes his belt, pries him half-hard from the elastic waist of his undershorts, and shoves her wide mouth down over him. Like a senseless eye the dead green screen of the television set looks on, dully reflecting their miniaturized bodies.
They make love. It seems to be expected of them.
Afterward they drowse together on the couch, smoking.
“Boyee,” says Maureen, with a pleasurable sigh. “You must like being famous.”
“This isn’t…customary, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh, did I mean something? I don’t know.”
“Anyway, aren’t you famous?” says Kenyon. “Do you like it?”
“Not famous. Only rich. It’s different.”
“Notable, then. How’s that?”
“Notable? OK, I suppose notable.”
“And do you like it?”
“Oh, yes! Be crazy not to.”
“Well,” says Kenyon, “not that you have much choice.”
She chortles. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a kind of duty, being notable, being famous. Isn’t it? You have to make the most of it, or it makes you…”
“What does it make me? What?”
“You lose control of it.” Kenyon shrugs. “Better to control it than be controlled, correct?”
“Boyee,” she yawns. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”
“Me neither,” he says, and grunts. “The Answer Man himself hasn’t the foggiest idea.”
“I’m still drunk. How about you? Can I sleep here?”
“I suppose. Not sure it’s in the contract, though.”
“Oh now, that’s an awful thing to say.”
“Sorry. Shouldn’t have. Who is it you know at NBC?”
“The chairman or somebody. I forget his name. Father knows him. They’re gonna put me in a movie, that’s what somebody told Father. But hey, this wasn’t some kind of obligation,
you know.”
“OK, I’m sorry.”
“I like some excitement is all. I’d be good in the movies, I’ll have you know. I like to have new experiences. I’m not a tuck-me-in type, you understand.”
“How old are you? Have I asked you that yet?”
She laughs. “I’m twenty-four. What’s it matter? Well, I’ll forgive you this time, Ken Ken, but won’t you be nice and get me a drink of water?”
He groans to his feet, pads into the dark kitchen, fills her glass from the faucet.
“It’s your parents’ place, you said? It’s very quaint.”
“Well, they’re a quaint old couple, Mom and Dad.”
“I’ve never seen so many books.”
“You don’t have books up in that manor of yours?”
“Oh, Mother does. Some anyway. Have you got another cigarette?”
“Yeah. Here you go. I just remembered how tired I am.”
“I couldn’t be more awake. Hey listen, I don’t suppose your folks have some liquor tucked away behind all these books?”
“I’m remembering how tired I feel. I have to give a lecture tomorrow. This morning.”
“What’s the subject?”
“Camera versus Agora. Dear me.”
“Oh Ken Ken.”
“Don’t call me that, please.”
“Poor baby. Just put your head on my shoulder. Would you like to watch some television?”
“No.”
“It’ll help you sleep. I don’t have any idea what we can watch at this time. Let me switch it on.”
“No, leave it off.”
But she’s not listening.
The knob goes click and the room fills with voices.
MAILBAG
Dear Kenyon,
I am a classroom teacher at Mabel Bishop Elementary here in Fleming, Wisconsin, and I write on behalf of my fifth-grade class to congratulate you for your success on television. My students and I have a great admiration for the breadth of knowledge you have demonstrated, and they have made and decorated the enclosed card in appreciation …
Dear Mr. Saint Clare, [sic]
You remind me so very much of my grandson Philip whose grasp of history, geography, and literature has always impressed me. Unfortunately Philip, now in middle-age, is something of a recluse and I wonder would you ever call him up? I can’t say how much it would mean…
Dear Mr. Kenny,
How did you ever learn all the things you know? I love to read books and I only hope that some day I can be as bright and smart as you are. My mother says I may get to an Ivy League College someday. Won’t you remind me, Kenny, what college do you teach at? …
KENYON
“On one side we have the tradition of the Camera,” says Kenyon Saint Claire from his podium in front of the blackboard as the photographer circles the lecture hall, shutter clacking. “Before the age of television or Kodak, the word Camera meant a room, a chamber, an enclosure, a sanctum. Writers and philosophers of the Camera include Plato, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and perhaps more than any other, Montaigne.”
Kenyon turns and scratches CAMERA across the blackboard, and beneath it the names. His red-rimmed eyes are burning, a headache severing his skull.
Clack clack goes the shutter.
“On the other side of the literary philosophical tradition is the Agora—the marketplace, the public sphere, the realm of the common man and collective experience. In the Agora we find Socrates, Lucretius, Rabelais, and Erasmus, to name a few.”
Under AGORA he adds these names.
“It’s worth noting that in ancient Greek the word agora is directly related to the adjective gregarious. A Hebrew permutation of the term came to signify a coin of small denomination—currency, the coin of the realm, et cetera. But let us dwell a minute on polarities. … The Camera is solitary, the doors drawn shut, and its writer composes by candlelight, by firelight, or in the wintry daylight seeping through a nearby window. He keeps a blanket drawn up beneath the desk to cover his knees. The loneliness of the Camera is the necessary prerequisite for his thought. The state of mind induced by the Camera’s quietude is his ideal. That state of mind, that brand of thought, is primarily introspective.”
In large letters Kenyon chalks: INTROSPECTIVE.
He managed a meager hour of sleep before it was time to shake himself out of the night’s delirium, pull on his trousers, and chauffeur Maureen home. Ring me up, she said, before getting out of the car. Then, seeing his face, said, Well, anyway, it was very nice to meet you. He arrived on campus rumpled in last night’s clothing—and no time for a cigarette.
“Also common among a great many philosophers of the Camera is an element of stoicism. These are stoical thinkers.”
STOICAL.
“The philosopher of the Camera communicates ex officio, by virtue of silence—in other words, he uses writing. He is a writer foremost. His medium is the page, and writing is an end in itself.”
WRITTEN.
“Let us note that all of this could not be more different than what comes to mind when we hear the word ‘camera’ today.”
He makes a crude drawing of a Kodak, then chalks an X over it.
“As for the Agora, its environs are practically without limit. The philosopher of the Agora walks abroad. He lives and breathes the open air, the air of the people. His sensibilities are public. His mode is conversational, dialectical, Socratic. For the philosopher of the Agora, the medium of choice is speech, and writing, if he writes, is merely a means to an end.”
AGORA
PUBLIC.
SOCRATIC.
SPOKEN.
“To whom does the philosopher of the Agora speak? He speaks to the common man, and that man is a listener—a man who learns by listening. Unfortunately, the Agora is often noisy, and frequently the philosopher’s voice is drowned in the chatter and exhortations of the marketeers around him. This is the cost of gregariousness, of dealing in the coin of the realm.”
Dog tired as he was, this morning Kenyon noticed with a kind of disorientation a crystal quality in all the daylit scenes around him. Sights as mundane as a corner grocery, a blinking red crosswalk signal, or the stream of jacketed bodies hunching forward down a subway stairwell—they all looked suddenly aglimmer, rendered up in immaculate celluloid, shot through with a new purity like the light of some great invisible projector. He wonders, have the studio lights done something to his eyes? Or is it an afterglow of that film—Rear Window—which seemed to him, as he sat in the great darkened movie house, an explosion of color. Are all these chromatic spectacles bound to work some irreversible change on people’s retinas?
“As for the philosopher of the Camera, to whom does he speak? He speaks to the ideal man, and that man is a reader—he learns by introspection. Unfortunately, there’s a cost to dealing in ideals, as many of us know only too well. Communication by silence, by the written word, is an act of persistent idealism. Are the readers out there? After all, there are quiz shows to watch!”
Kenyon couldn’t resist, and now there comes a rumble of recognition in the lecture hall—laughter, laughter in every crowded row. He’s packing them in. He’d worried that the photographer would cause some distraction, and it’s true the man circles the room constantly, that shutter clacking without pause—but in this moment Kenyon wonders, what does it matter? Who would believe it, but they’re lining up outside the door every time he lectures, many of them merely auditing, not even registered. And isn’t that beautiful? Oh, so what if they come merely to gawk at a celebrity? They’re still bound to glean something, aren’t they? And is the photographer’s presence any concern, really? The studio did not insist on this, merely suggested, and Kenyon thought it preferable to the stilted publicity photos at NBC. Better he be seen in his natural environment for once, dealing in ideas. Well, they’re all here toget
her, and they all know why the photographer is circling, and Kenyon couldn’t resist. They love him, after all, and he smiles large as they laugh.
In suit and tie at the front of the lecture hall, Kenyon Saint Claire is photographed at the podium, smiling large. With one hand he turns the pages of a heavy book. Behind him on the well-chalked blackboard are the names of several philosophers.
Q & A Page 11
