by Walter Blum
“You’re missing the point.”
“I know the point. You don’t like me buying a car for Susan to drive—you realize, don’t you, that the car is in her name, not yours? But after what happened, the terrible depression she’s been in these last weeks, something had to be done. You can’t afford to buy her something like that, but I can, and where’s the harm in doing a little something to brighten her life?”
“You call a ten-thousand dollar sports car a little something?”
“Try twenty-thousand.” He flicked an ash into the tray and leaned back in his big chair. “Oh come now, Adam, put yourself in my shoes. Susan’s my only daughter, she’s been the light of my life since Rachel died and the only thing I really care about outside of business. Now that I have the money and we’re doing so well, is there any reason she shouldn’t have a gift or two if it makes her happy?”
“There are too many gifts,” Adam fumed. He recognized the irony of what he was saying, but there was no way Goldman could know that. “First the house, now a car. I told you even before we were married that I had to be my own man. I can’t ‘take’ the way some people do. I’m not going to let myself be on the receiving end all the time. I’m not that sort of person.”
Goldman flicked a growing ash from the cigar. “Well, Adam, you’ll have to learn how to take, that’s all there is to it. I understand how you want things to be, and I respect your feelings in this matter, but a father is also entitled to a few small pleasures.”
“You call this a small pleasure?”
“Look at it from my perspective, Adam. You don’t have that much to give, so for you it’s a big deal. In my bracket, this is just another expenditure, a contribution I can write off when income tax time rolls around.”
“And we’re your little charity. Is that it?”
“Yes, I guess you might say that.”
***
He was still seething a week later, and on Sunday, to take his mind off the interview, he treated the two of them to a baseball game. Susan’s eyes shone, and he knew she was on the road to recovery. The Hawks were fighting for a pennant, something that hadn’t happened in more than twenty years, and tickets were hard to come by, but Sam O’Neill managed to wangle two tickets for them along the first-base line, which, in a park as small as Hawks Stadium, was as close as you could get without being on top of the players.
It was a warm, sensual afternoon. They bought hot dogs and large boxes of popcorn and polished off two bottles of Coke. One of the things Adam liked about going to baseball games was that he could smoke without fouling up a room with odors. The crowd was in an uproarious mood and cheered wildly every time a Hawks player made contact with the ball. The warmth, the noise, the feeling that Susan was finally on the mend, made him sleepy.
During the seventh-inning stretch he got up and went to the men’s room where he ran into, of all people, Larry.
He had never thought of Larry as a baseball fan—not quite refined enough for him. They had drifted apart these last few months, seeing each other only now and then when their shifts at the station intersected. But the haggard look had vanished from Larry’s face. Now that the divorce trauma was behind him—the anger, the guilt, the laying of blame, the despair, the absolute knowledge that life with any prospect of happiness or well-being was finished—now that he had emerged from the dark shadow of that bleak and cheerless time, it was as though a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
As they stepped out of the men’s room, he pointed to a pretty young woman with blonde curls at the hot dog stand.
“My date,” he said, with a wink. “Her name’s Julie.”
“Why don’t you sit with us?” Adam urged. “The people beside us left early. We have great seats up close.”
“No, I like where we are now. How’s married life?”
“Fine. Couldn’t be better.” It was just half a lie, but at least he didn’t have to go into detail. “I’m glad to see you’re finally coming out of your shell.”
“Never was in a shell.” A slightly bigger lie. “Anyway, a person can’t sit home and brood when there’s a whole world out there, waiting to be sampled.” The young woman with blonde curls was starting toward them. “What do you say we make it a foursome one of these days?”
“I’d like that,” Adam said, although he didn’t believe it.
She had the kind of squeaky voice that appeals to some men, especially after a serious divorce. They had met in a supermarket, where Julie enlisted Larry’s aid in reaching a box of breakfast cereal on the top shelf. Adam wondered if, by now, they’d gotten around to sharing the cereal—most likely at Julie’s place—but that wasn’t the sort of question you put to a fellow worker in the presence of his girlfriend. He asked again if they cared to join Susan and himself.
Larry pointed toward the top of the stands. “No, we’ve got a perfect view up there.” A roar went up from the crowd, of an intensity that usually accompanied a home run of major proportions. “Better get back,” Larry said. “Things seem to be happening.” As they parted, Larry remarked: “Oh, by the way, I saw your wife downtown, day before yesterday, getting out of a really fantastic little car. Looks like a foreign make. Jaguar?”
“Ferrari.”
“Bright red convertible with the top down?”
“That’s the one.”
“You can afford a car like that?”
“Max gave it to her.”
“Her father? How about that?” The crowd roared again, as though adding their approval. “You’re lucky to have a father-in-law with that kind of money.”
Adam sighed, and then blurted out something he would later regret saying. “To tell you the truth, I don’t like it.”
Larry cocked an eyebrow. Don’t like getting gifts?”
“I’m not sure about his motives.”
“You think he’s trying to buy you, is that it?”
“He practically admitted it.”
“Well you’re not too well-schooled in the ways of parents, are you?” Larry said. “Particularly parents with daughters. I told you before that when a man has a child, and she’s the light of his life, he’s going to shower her with presents and there isn’t much you can do about it. Maybe he’s afraid of losing her. Did that occur to you?”
“It occurred to me.
“Listen, if I’d had someone like that looking out for my interests, I might not be divorced today.” Adam hesitated, was about to respond but before he could, Larry and the girl with the squeaky voice were already out of sight.
15
Damn it! The record was lost, and there was no reason for it. Usually, he had no trouble; they sat there on their shelves, little picket fences of vinyl in green paper sleeves, each with a number meant to go in a specific place. It all looked so simple, but if one got misplaced, you could use up precious minutes trying to track it down. If you were on the air, and had only three minutes to look, it meant three minutes of frantic searching before the record that was playing on the turntable ran out, leaving you with dead air.
And nothing could be worse than that. Dead air meant you’d failed, and everyone tuned to the station was privy to the mistake you’d made. You were dead. There was nothing worse.
Tonight, a listener had called asking for Patti Page’s Doggie in the Window. He’d played it a dozen times in the past couple of weeks, but the disc seemed to have vanished. The Doggie wasn’t even one of his favorites, but people seemed to like it and there was no accounting for taste. He himself preferred big band instrumentals like the one now spinning on the turntable in the control room, the Sauter-Finnegan group doing that Russian thing, bells and sleighs, Prokofiev with a beat.
The music filtered down from the library’s auxiliary speaker. He kept one ear cocked, knowing all too well the horror of getting caught in the library when the record came to an end.
But where the hell had it gone to? The records were supposed to be filed by label, and then in alphabetical order. He knew it wa
s one of those 10-inch discs demos sent out by Capitol, Columbia or RCA Victor. The station got them free, nothing was ever thrown away. On separate shelves stood the large LP albums that were becoming more and more popular, Sinatra and show albums and the lush arrangements of the Jackie Gleason orchestra. Adam wondered about that. He couldn’t quite visualize the fat comedian on a podium, swinging a baton, but there were stranger things in this world.
So where are you, doggie? he kept mumbling to himself. He must have seen the thing dozens of times, but he couldn’t figure out where it had gone to, where it was filed, on what shelf, in what part of the library. A lost dog wandering around the back room at WCAN could mess up everything if you weren’t careful. If only the record had been shaped like its subject, maybe with a tail and a flapping tongue. Why did it have to be a demo with a white label, so much like all the others. Was it RCA or Columbia? They sat there grinning at him in their green paper jackets. Doggie, doggie, where are you little doggie? he called. From the control room, he could hear the Sauter-Finnegan band revving up its trombones and drums for the big finale.
He had to get back. If the record ran out before he reached his chair, people would know he wasn’t at the microphone, wasn’t there to run the program—he couldn’t let that happen. It was a disk jockey’s worst nightmare. The awful sound of the needle tracking into the label of the record would be the signal that the battle was lost. He had to hurry. He was sure he knew where Doggie in the Window was located. Hadn’t he seen it dozens of times? Why couldn’t people file things properly? He began yanking green envelopes off the shelf and throwing them on the floor, thinking maybe the one he wanted was hidden behind the others.
At the last minute he spotted it, high up on a top shelf, but by this time the Sauter-Finnegan band was playing its final chords. No more than five seconds remained. And then it was too late. From the loudspeaker came the sound of the needle caught in the inside groove. I’ve had it, he thought. In desperation, he wheeled about and started for the control room, but his legs were caught in some sort of thick, viscous substance. He couldn’t move. What the hell’s happening to me? He wanted to scream, to call out for help, but what good would that do? He was all alone in the station. They’ll know, they’ll hear what’s going on and everyone who’s listening will see through the deception he’d worked so hard to create.
I’m dead. I’m dead.
***
“Adam?”
He looked up from the bed into Susan’s worried eyes. She was wearing a pajama top that came down to her upper thigh. The top two buttons were undone. For some illogical reason, he seized the blanket and pulled himself up in bed.
“Honey, are you all right?”
“What?”
“You were screaming at the top of your lungs,” she said. “Something about a dog.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was having a nightmare. Did it really sound that bad?”
“Sweetie, you worried me half to death. You’re not sick or anything like that, are you?” For all that had happened these past few weeks, the sadness and alienation, she really did love him and she cared when he was not quite right. Ordinarily, he would forget his dreams moments after they’d disappeared. They were mostly benign, but this one trailed him like an evil pet.
By rights, it should have gone back to the kennel where it belonged. The bad times were over, thanks to Max Goldman and his little red car, and in the house on Fairhaven Street the atmosphere had cleared the way a storm drifts out to sea after strafing the countryside. Didn’t the received wisdom say that dreams are merely the dark manifestation of daylight’s psychic pain? By rights, his night visions should have reflected this turn of the wheel, but if anything it was even worse, even more terrifying than before. In the days to come it returned, again and again, and each time he was convinced it was trying to tell him something about his own death.
A young man in his twenties, he reasoned, shouldn’t be troubled with thoughts of dying unless he’s in some dangerous line of work or suffering from an illness invulnerable to cure. Yet here he was, meditating on final thoughts, nourishing a nightmare that was more like some ancient friend who refused to leave when his time was up. The dog that sat in the window. How much was he worth? Why did he sit there, waiting for passersby to stop and look and finally bring out their wallets?
“It’s all right,” he reassured her. “I’m not sick.”
And, as if to demonstrate, he rolled over in bed and pulled the blanket back over his head, hoping to squeeze out another hour of sleep since it wasn’t even eight o’clock, and most mornings he didn’t get up until nine. But sleep had fled. The dream had won. He was wide awake.
***
“Call me.”
“I will.”
It was Gwen Lowenthal, phoning to ask if she would serve on the committee for the next Midsummer Ball. Susan hung up the phone and returned to Adam, her eyes dancing as she explained what an honor it was to be chosen, and how it really wouldn’t take much of her time, maybe an hour or two a week.
“All my old friends will be there,” she told him. “People I haven’t seen since high school.”
“You don’t have to ask my permission,” he said.
“Of course,” she said. “I just thought you’d like to know.”
It pleased him to see her back to her old, carefree self. The past eight months had taken him too often on that endless rollercoaster of moods. There were times when the two of them had reached such a low point, he wasn’t sure if they could climb back on the track and start over. He never dreamed that a miscarriage could be such a traumatic occurrence. Hardly a moment passed when she wasn’t in some way obsessed with it. If they went downtown, or for a walk in the neighborhood, and a woman passed by with a baby in a stroller, or a child appeared on television in a situation comedy, or there was mention of an infant on the news, or they drove by a toy store, or there was just a passing reference to pregnancy, her eyes would fill with tears.
He exhausted all the familiar antidotes: the flowers, the cards, dinner at her favorite restaurants. They drove all the way to Atlanta one day because she had developed a taste for Indian cuisine and stayed in a hotel overnight. He took her to shows and escorted her to house parties, whenever he had a night free, but she stayed in the corner most of the evening, talking to no one.
And in the end it was the Ferrari that made the difference. Although he hated the sight of the thing, he gave her driving lessons and went along when she took the test. The car had a V-8 engine and was capable of great speeds, but she navigated cautiously, was particularly diligent about giving hand signals and rarely took it out on the open road.
The car became her plaything, her hobby. It transformed her, pulled her out of the shadows, restored little by little the woman whose beauty and allure he had fallen in love with. It was her therapist and physician, but it was also his enemy, one more reminder of Max’s mastery over their lives. There was something crude, almost arrogant, about a gift like that. The man’s heart might be in the right place, but it beat with a different rhythm, an unpleasant, clangorous thumping that would have kept others awake all night. It didn’t seem to bother him at all.
And yet, what could he say? Cash or credit, that’s what it amounted to. Max was her father; if he uttered one word of criticism he knew she would resent it. Max’s good will was an important factor in their marriage. Whatever little eccentricities the older man was prone to would have to be suffered in silence. If only there was some explanation why, at important moments, Max insisted on lying to him. It was like peering through a window into another man’s world, but the glass was clouded with streaks and grime and the scene on the other side kept going out of focus. Knowing when something was a falsehood was only half the battle; the reason for it mattered almost as much, and that he would never be told.
***
One afternoon—it stuck in Adam’s memory because of a torrential storm, followed by a spectacular rainbow that h
ad everyone rushing to the windows to marvel—Hunter Baines called him into his office. He had a ruddy face and blue eyes that could sparkle or look straight through you, morosely, depending on his mood. The office was a modest one, as befit the man. A silver statuette of a golfer sat on the desk, commemorating a tournament Baines had won in his younger days. The station license hung from the wall in a simple black frame. Baines shut the door slowly, returned to his desk and gestured for Adam to have a seat in the big leather chair facing him.
“You ever have a dream that really bothered you?” he asked.
Adam started. The question made no sense. It was as if Baines had a secret tape recorder going, taking down the more intimate moments of his life. Adam wondered if Baines simply wanted to make idle conversation.
“Sometimes,” he admitted.
“Well, I had one of those last night,” Baines said. “I had to go to the bathroom—badly, it seems—but I didn’t know it. I dreamt I was in Paris, standing at a urinal, and it seems the French had somehow discovered that dipping a bottle of Evian water or soda or even a bottle of wine in the urine improved its flavor. They’d even installed a door as part of the pissoir with shelves where you could buy bottled drinks by depositing a couple of franc pieces, much like an Automat.”
“Were you thinking of taking a trip abroad, sir?”
“No.”
“Then what do you think it means?”
“I think it means that I had to go to the bathroom.”
“Oh.”
Baffled, Adam stood waiting for some further explanation, but his employer’s mind seemed to be drifting, the way it sometimes did when he was in one of those moods. There were actually two chairs in the office, often occupied by potential advertisers, occasionally by businessmen unhappy with the way their accounts were being handled. If things got too hot, Baines would call in Wally, and they might spend an hour or more thrashing things out. Baines stepped around his desk and moved behind one of the chairs.
“Well, Adam,” he said. “I guess we might as well stop beating around the bush. You’ve heard the stories, I’m sure.” Adam nodded. There was no point in contradicting the man when it was all so obvious. “Well, I think I owe you an explanation—I owe everyone an explanation, but it’s better if I do it one at a time.”
