by Walter Blum
As the dinner wore on, he could feel his shirt getting tighter, the starched collar digging at his throat. He felt as though he were being choked. He knew he must be sweating, and he only prayed she didn’t notice how uncomfortable he was.
“Adam?”
“Yes?”
She leaned toward across the table. “I think it’s time, wouldn’t you say?”
“Time for what?”
“For what you’ve been waiting all night to say.”
He could still taste the curry. It lingered on his tongue like a warm, brown shadow. Strange, wasn’t it, that after all these years what stayed with him most vividly, most indelibly, were the simple flavors of a meal. That brought the rest of it along, the green eyes, the pale hands, the bare shoulders caressed by waves of long hair. And the smile, that dazzling smile, as he slipped the ring from its box and onto her finger.
He could never forget that smile. It was part of him now.
***
Larry was the first to congratulate him. They were sitting, as usual, in the B&B Cafe, sloshing coffee and dunking doughnuts in a booth in the back. The lunchtime rush was over and they had the place virtually to themselves.
To his surprise, he discovered that Larry knew all about it, had suspected something was in the wind right from the start, had even gleaned from certain parties the name of the prospective bride. “The symptoms were there for some time,” he explained. “It was just a matter of narrowing it down. Well, you’re getting a terrific girl.”
“I’d like you to be my best man,” Adam said.
“It would be my honor,” Larry replied with a ceremonious nod of the head. “Now in return, you’re going to have to sit still and listen to Larry Kellin’s rules for a happy marriage, spoken from the depths of hard experience.” When Adam groaned, he put on a stern face. “Rule Number One, you must be sure—absolutely sure—that there’s a real bond of affection between you. You’re going to have to commit yourself, as they say in our business, to a lifelong engagement. For the run of the show. When was the last time you sat down and made such a commitment, one that really mattered?”
“I’m not sure I ever had to.”
“Well, this one’s for good. You can’t wake up one morning and decide you’ve had enough, the way you might give up eating strawberries or trade in your old Chevy for a new one. That’s one thing I found out the hard way. You do care for her, I hope.”
Adam nodded.
“And she—cares for you?”
Adam nodded again. “You wouldn’t think a beautiful girl like that would give a damn about some dumb announcer working in a small-town radio station.”
“Ah, you’re putting yourself down again, I see.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t think I have much to offer someone like Susan.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just that I don’t have the usual things. I’m not rich, I’m not exactly loaded with sex appeal, and you know first-hand what a klutz I can be. I break my wrist just falling down a flight of stairs.”
“And that’s it?”
“I don’t deserve her, Larry.”
“You do, you do. You’re as good as the next man, my friend. All the necessary parts are in order—two arms, two legs, two eyes and ears—” he drew closer—“and all thirty-two teeth, as far as I can tell. So you have a few minor quirks. We live in a world filled with quirks, human and otherwise.”
Feeling buoyed—temporarily at least—he made plans to take Susan to a small Italian restaurant about ten miles out of town, which was considered very romantic by the younger set. He took her there on Sunday, his night off. Candles were lit, wine was served. They ordered the house specialty, something with veal, a dark mushroom sauce and an unpronounceable name, and stared into each other’s eyes for long stretches of time without saying a word.
Afterwards, they drove a few more miles up the highway, and then down a side road to a glade overhung with drooping oaks. With the windows open, they could hear the roar of a small stream that had become entangled in rocks and turned into rapids. The air was warm and humid; the sky, barely visible through the branches of the trees, was moonless. Adam turned on the radio. She was wearing a white, off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and as he kissed her, his fingers caught the top of the blouse and pulled it down, along with the bra, and the next thing he knew he was feeling her breasts.
“If you’re afraid that—” he started to say.
“Don’t stop!” she commanded, and they gave themselves over to ecstasy and delight.
“Susan . . .”
“Don’t stop!”
The feel and smell and touch that night would stay with him the rest of his life, the warm air, the sound of the rushing stream, how close they came to going all the way, but she was a virgin, and that was important, because in those days, girls still believed in “saving themselves for marriage,” as the expression had it, and he didn’t want her to say, after it was over, that she had been carried away by passion, although she would have liked to.
When at last they pulled apart and she straightened her blouse and did a little touch-up to her hair, the heel of the hand cupping the back of the neck, another ten minutes passed as they leaned back against the car’s upholstery, savoring the moment.
Next evening, when he climbed into the Bell Tower, the room had taken on a different sort of magic. The purple wall hangings seemed richer, more elaborate. There were three times as many candles as on previous nights, and they flickered in their make-believe silver holders like a symphony of fireflies hovering in the summer breeze. The carpets, which were Persian, had become darker and more evocative. The great plate glass windows that gazed down on the city and the patchwork of fields that stretched westward to the mountains, eastward to the sea, now wrapped around him so that he could see farther and with greater accuracy. The wonderful thing about the Bell Tower was that, even at eleven o’clock at night, everything was clearly visible through the windows, as though it were mid-afternoon.
He took the captain’s seat and slid closer to the board, so distracted by all the wonderful things happening around him that he forgot to cue up the first record, making it necessary to perform the entire operation by touch—slipping the disc out of its envelope, placing it on the turntable, cueing it up by feeling for the proper groove. He hated to do that, but the only alternative was dead air. Silence. Nothing more terrifying than being trapped at the control board without anything being spun into the ether.
But everything went smoothly. Better than he could have expected. He checked the controls, and saw that there were no longer two VUs but half a dozen. Why wasn’t he surprised? It seemed perfectly natural to him. The dials, the “pots,” were larger, more pliable, and cleaner and more potent, and as he prepared the turntables for the next engagement the floor began to vibrate, a faint humming that filled the tower, a kind of sizzle, part psychic, part electrical.
Hold on, he thought. Something strange is going on here.
The transmitter must be acting up again, he thought, but usually there was a faint hiccup before that happened. This was different. This was no transmitter failure. He had felt it before, but the sensation usually subsided after a few minutes. He waited impatiently, ready to launch his first record as soon as everything quieted down, but instead the humming grew louder and the VU meters needles began swinging wildly, and when he touched one of the pots, the energy shot into his hand and up his arm, and the next thing he knew the room in which he sat had become detached from the tower and was beginning to rise.
He should have been in a panic, but for some reason his blood was quiet and all he felt was a strange inner calm. He didn’t even bother to reach for the pots, to turn up the volume on the turntables, because he knew that wouldn’t do any good. The music kept playing but the turntables seemed to have stopped dead. He couldn’t control the volume. Instead, the tower room began to veer right and left, depending on which pot he touched, and the dial in the center ma
de the tower rise faster, depending on how far he turned it.
Each dial had now acquired a new function. The plate glass window in front of him, which was usually dark, had come suddenly alive and looked out on a countryside that glowed with a pale luminescence. From his elevation he could make out streets and houses and trees and lampposts, the lights of cars wheeling from intersection to intersection, lawns and yards and even an occasional swimming pool. By now, he was almost a thousand feet off the ground, and the higher he flew, the more dramatic the scene below him became.
He had always imagined this was how Canelius would look from the air, but the geometry of it staggered him.
Like so many cities in America, the town had been laid out in a grid, the spidery lines forming squares and rectangles that exploded outward in an obsessive search for fulfillment. They kept reaching out until stopped by fields whose boundaries obeyed no human laws, having been formed in the depths of history by animals and storms and the contours of hills and rivers. From the ground, none of this was visible; but up here in the tower, with the strange luminescence that was halfway between day and night, he was reminded of an illustration from some forgotten college textbook. To cancel the illusion, he would have to close the covers and put the book back on the shelf. But only a higher entity—Mrs. Warren’s, perhaps—could have accomplished such a feat.
He wondered how Mrs. Warren would have explained what was happening to him now. Would she say the days of Apocalypse had arrived? It didn’t matter. All he could think of was how beautiful it looked. Once he’d gotten used to the arrangement of the pots on the control board before him—how to speed up, slow down, rise, sink, turn left and turn right, tilt the tower so that it could survey the ground or search the sky—he was able to let himself enjoy what was happening. The sense of power was overwhelming. He could even stop the tower from time to time and hover, like a silent helicopter, pretend he’d become a giant eye capable of penetrating every house and room on the grid below him, act as tour guide for those who were listening to him.
“We’re moving north from the center of town,” he said into the microphone. “I can see the high school from here, and someone evidently forgot to take down the flag. Sorry about that, folks. I know you’re supposed to lower the flag at sunset.”
The tower moved north in a slow, gentle glide.
“I can see the little park a few blocks away with its swings and jungle gym and the big slide that lets you come flying down at fifty miles an hour,” he continued. “I can see the city hall now and the Jefferson Davis Hotel and the Mishniak Building, but they’re receding into the distance.”
The tower turned west.
“The mountains don’t look as far away as you would think. It’s all very quiet. We have a closed environment here in the Bell Tower, so I can’t get a blast from the tobacco factory, but I don’t have to tell you about that. You know what it smells like.”
He made a 45-degree turn and piloted the tower south, flying over some of the same houses he had seen before, letting his eye caress the people inside. Once it fell on a pretty young woman in a dressing gown, standing at a sink full of dishes with a curly-haired blonde child playing on the floor beside her. It was no longer nighttime now, but mid-morning. The men, following a tradition that went back to the stone age, were away working in offices and the women were performing tasks that women had always performed and always would, for everyone believed in the separation of sexes—how could it be otherwise?
The sun glowed white and hot.
He hovered over a bright red Pontiac convertible with the top down, headed west toward the tobacco factory. The man behind the wheel was a salesman of some sort, stout, pink-faced, sweating in the summer heat. His mind was on the afternoon’s prospects, on percentages and discounts and what he would have to promise to land a big order. He could be Wally, thirty years later, with decades of beer rolling around in his stomach and eyes clouded over after a lifetime of not knowing, not seeing, not caring.
The Mishniak Building was coming closer now. At 22 stories, it was the tallest office structure in the state, all cement and steel and plate-glass windows that caught the light of the sun as it dipped toward the West. Around the corner was the City-County Library, open from nine to nine, Monday through Saturday and Sundays after church, considered one of the finest public libraries in the South. In the distance he caught sight of the country club with its long green swatch of lawn swooping down to the lake.
He wanted to stretch out and encompass it all, but when he leaned forward, one hand hit a dial that spun the Bell Tower around, as though it had been trapped in a violent tornado. It was all he could do to steady the vehicle in which he was riding. The turning made him dizzy, and he was forced to close his eyes, putting the tower on autopilot, which he discovered was a switch just above the pot that controlled the right-hand turntable.
It lasted just for a few seconds, though. When he regained his senses, he looked around for a tape to play, or maybe one of those big electrical transcriptions featuring fifteen or twenty minutes of big band music, something that would let him take his hands off the controls, relax and enjoy the spectacle unfolding below, but there was nothing. If he wanted to play something, he would have to leave the tower room, go out back and rummage around in the library, which would have been unthinkable.
Suddenly, the tower seemed to take on a life of its own, steering him south over a neighborhood he recognized, even at this altitude, a neighborhood of homes belonging to people in the highest price bracket, big sprawling ranches and old-fashioned two-story brick houses that could almost be called mansions. He had driven through it once or twice on those lonely Sundays before his life had changed around. When he’d been there before, he noticed that there never seemed to be anyone outside, no children playing stickball in the street, no couples taking walks after church, no one shouting to a friend across the street with the latest news, not even a car pulling into a driveway or a bicycle rounding the corner, nothing to break the stillness of the scene.
The tower paused several thousand feet above a two-story white clapboard house with a verandah and a large spreading oak on the front lawn. Elegant pillars framed the door, which boasted a large brass knocker. There were vines down the front, and a balcony on the second floor, which seemed more for show than anything else. On the path leading to the front door stood a small ceramic statue of a black jockey with a ring in his hand, designed apparently for tying up horses. The mailbox, its red flag in the up position, stood at the end of the path but he couldn’t make out the name or address on its side.
Slowly, silently the tower began to descend and he knew without having to be told that this house belonged to him.
Not now, but it would be his some time in the future, because that’s where he must be now. The flying tower reached a point low enough so that he could see a woman in green slacks kneeling over a bed of flowers just below the verandah holding a pair of garden shears in her hand. Her back was to him, but there was no mistaking the hair the color of spun gold, cut short now and the long, tapering neck. He wanted to shout to her, to make her turn around and look up at him, but the tower window was sealed tight and she seemed to inhabit a world apart from his.
His listeners, of course, had no idea what he was talking about. It was as though he were trying to describe a scene in a movie to an audience of the blind. And yet, in a perverse way, he really didn’t want to know what she looked like. There was something terrible, something frightening about seeing what you weren’t meant to see.
After a while she stood up, wiped her hands on the yellow apron tied around her waist, dropped the shears at her feet and with her back still to him, walked into the house. He thought he saw a slight touch of weariness in her step, and once more he called out to her through the sealed windows of the tower, but she never turned around.
Having accomplished its mission, the tower now rose several thousand feet straight up, then slowly moved away from the house and away from
the neighborhood, heading north. The sky grew darker, and there was a kind of luster to it as dusk approached, and just before the sun dipped below the horizon, everything lit up in a palette of red and orange and yellow and bright, searing blue, spidery filigrees fanned out from some invisible central point, diamond-like fireflies darted across the palette, the floor of the universe began to rumble and he could feel the sun getting ready to explode.
And then it landed. Descending slowly, purposefully, the room carefully attached itself without any help or guidance to the body of the tower. There was a tiny shiver, and he was back in the control room, the window between himself and the studio dark and the extra VU meters gone, the pots back to controlling the turntables, Rosemarie Clooney’s Hey There floating out of the speakers. The telephone flashed.
“Mr. Bay-ul.”
“Hello, Mattie.”
“Loved your show tonight. Don’t know what y’all were talking ‘bout, but it sure was romantic. Ah hope you never stop doin’ what you’re doin’. Mr. Bay-ul, would you do me a favor?”
“Yes, Mattie, I’ll play it,” he said, and reached behind him for the place in the record rack where, every night, he kept his copy of Secret Love.
11
They were married the week after Labor Day at Temple Beth Shalom. Larry stood up for him as best man and Gwen Lowenthal, Susan’s friend from high school, was her matron of honor. Shortly before the wedding. he answered an ad in the Post-Ledger for a small, one-bedroom furnished apartment five or six blocks from downtown Canelius. Susan was determined to have a place of her own, but this would serve them until a house came on the market. Adam bid Mrs. Warren a solemn farewell, silently thankful to be released from the Sunday morning predictions of the Reverend Elton Garrison and his threats of Armageddon and extinction. Susan kissed her father a thousand times, although she would only be an easy phone call and a ten-minute drive away.
She had wanted a small wedding, but after all the cousins and aunts and uncles and chums and business colleagues of Max were counted, not to mention a couple of civic leaders who could not be left off the list, almost two hundred filled the synagogue and overflowed the country club for the reception afterwards. There were a few who wondered secretly what impelled the couple to “rush into marriage,” as the saying went, for long engagements were still very much in vogue and it was not unusual for young people to wait as long as a year to fulfill their dreams. Suspicious to the end, the town gossips kept an eye peeled for telltale signs during the ceremony, and even after, but there was nothing to see, and in the end, it was generally agreed that love, not necessity, was what brought these two young people to the altar with such dispatch.
