The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories

by Shashi Tharoor

  The hurt showed plainly on his face. “I’m—I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to . . . to upset you.”

  As suddenly, she was contrite. “It’s all right, darling,” she murmured affectionately, raising her lips to kiss him and nuzzling against his face. “I didn’t mean to hurt you either. . . .”

  That night their lovemaking was different; gentle, tender, loving in a way he hadn’t learned to be with a woman. When it was over, it was morning, and the sun streamed in through the curtains of their bedroom. Kumar was returning that day.

  On the way to the station, she said, “Arjun, he mustn’t know of this, of anything between us, understand?”

  “Of course, Rita,” he said.

  “Auntie Rita,” she corrected him.

  He looked at her, searching her face for a hint of a smile. Her eyes were on the road. “Yes—Auntie Rita,” he said.

  The rest of the day passed in a poignant haze. He couldn’t reconcile the Rita he knew with Uncle Kumar’s Rita, the wife, the lady of the house, brisk, efficient, dutiful, loyal, loving, doting on her colorless spouse, attending to his every need, ministering to the slightest request with a genuineness of concern and care that should have had the ageing fool’s suspicions up if he only hadn’t been an ageing fool. Kumar received the red carpet, VIP treatment; wifely hug at the station, chaste kiss from his spouse as soon as they entered the door, “I missed you very much” all throughout the car journey, the works.

  Through it all Arjun sat, numb and unbelieving, his dismay and hurt and jealousy writ large on his face.

  “What are you looking so gloomy there for, Arjun?” she called out gaily once or twice while chattering to Kumar, as he sulked on a dining room chair and watched their marital empathy in action. He hated Kumar as he had hated no man before, hated his very guts, hated the impotent, ineffectual old son-of-a-bachelor from the very core of his being. . . . “Don’t be silly, Arjun,” she hissed fiercely at him once when Kumar was out of hearing. “Do you want him to know what’s going on?” And she returned to her husband, all wifely concern again.

  That night Arjun lay alone in bed staring at the ceiling, half expecting any moment to hear the bathroom door click open, and her familiar hand on the light switch to flood the room with the brightness of her smile. But she never came. Inevitable moments inexorably ticked by. The doors on the other side shut once or twice, but his never opened. He could hear voices, and, worse, noises; sounds of love from a throat he had thought was his own. Finally, as his desperation mounted, he tiptoed to the bathroom door and listened. . . .

  “Ouch!—no, no, darling. . . . My God. . . . Oh, you are a devil . . .”

  There was no mistaking the voice, or the circumstances in which it was raised. Blindly, he stumbled back to his bed and fell heavily upon it. His outstretched hand touched and grasped the small cardboard train ticket that lay on the bedside table, and he clenched it tightly in his fist, willing it to take possession of him.

  It did. The ticket suddenly filled his mind with possibilities, both symbolic and real. It was a ticket back home, yes, but not just to the life he had known at home. New worlds beckoned at the end of the railway line. He grinned at the thought of the well-endowed nymphet. He would be able to handle her now; he knew a thing or two she didn’t. And if she failed to work out, well, there would be others.

  Arjun smiled in anticipation. This was only the beginning.

  1973

  The Solitude of the Short Story Writer

  There was only one thing wrong with Jennings Wilkes’ writing. Verisimilitude.

  His stories reeked with it. No one ever accused him of not being true to life, because if anything he was too true to it. He never concocted his plots: he found them in the quotidian experiences of living. He never created characters: he borrowed his friends, and occasionally his enemies, and populated his manuscripts with their likenesses. He never struggled with dialogue; blessed with almost total recall of anything that was spoken to him, he set down others’ words as he remembered them. And since in his endeavours he proved unfailingly accurate, lack of realism was never his problem. His stories were overpoweringly realistic.

  Needless to say, publishers loved him. Magazines overflowed with his work; scarcely a fortnight passed by without some periodical decorating the stands with yet another Jennings Wilkes short story. Editors would rush enthusiastic letters to him every time a submission came in, and their enthusiasm did not diminish with the passage of time. “There’s a fellow who tells it like it is,” the portly, cigar-chewing male from the leading women’s magazine would affirm to his chief competitor whenever they bought each other grudging lunches at “21.” “So painfully twue, dear,” she would emotively respond. “So painfully twue.”

  Of course, that was precisely the problem: Jennings Wilkes’ fiction was both true and painful, and worse, it wasn’t really fiction. The truths he told were about other people, people he knew and associated with—until he committed them to print and they walked out of his life. After beginning his literary career with his popularity indexed in a black leather-bound cornucopia of addresses and telephone numbers, Jennings learned to measure his success by the number of calls he no longer had the courage to make. Each brilliant, honest, revelatory short story proved apocalyptic for some friend, ruined some relationship, shattered some illusion.

  Soon his acquaintances began avoiding him, not always subtly. “We don’t want to find ourselves splashed across the feature pages of Harper’s Bazaar,” one couple indelicately informed him when he met them at a restaurant and invited them to join his table. “No, of course you don’t,” he muttered miserably, retreating to his solitary chair. It was a recurring pattern: sometimes he did succeed in making friends with one individual, only to wreck it all by immortalizing the individual’s weaknesses in Playboy (“fiction by Jennings Wilkes” the byline read). And the truths he portrayed were painful to him, too: he hated losing his friends.

  “Then why do you keep doing it?” an admiring young interviewer from Writer’s Digest asked him.

  “Because,” Jennings replied, a spark glowing in his eyes, “because when I meet an individual who interests me I take possession of his character. My mind perceives him as a person, but my imagination gives him a personality. A personality I cause to act, to talk, to think, to breathe. And because,” he added, his gaze directing the interviewer to his notepad, “Because I have to.

  Because creativity is a compulsion and my artistic integrity cannot be compromised, even by my needs as a human being.”

  He watched as the admiring scribe took it all down. Later that evening he penned an acerbic, witty short story (entitled “Naïveté and the Nasty Novelist”) about a journalistic ingenue attempting to probe the profound mind of a superior literatteur. Cosmopolitan advertised the story on its front cover, and the interviewer admired him no more.

  And so, as friends go, his went. They went angrily, occasionally threatening libel, sometimes promising murder, once in a while tight-lipped in seething fury. Some were plainly incredulous. Jennings could never forget one erstwhile friend, waving a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal at his doorway, pages flapping in righteous indignation: “I can’t believe,” he had spluttered, “I can’t believe you did this.” Didn’t it matter, the friend went on, that after this their relationship couldn’t possibly continue? “Truth is stronger than friction,” Jennings responded with a sage smile, before the spine of the magazine’s binding struck him squarely on the nose.

  “I don’t understand it myself, doctor,” Jennings said on his second psychiatrist’s couch, crossing his feet and steepling his hands in genuinely perturbed introspection. (The first had canceled Jennings’ regularly scheduled sessions abruptly after “The Shanks of the Shrunken Shrink” had appeared in The Atlantic, a magazine usually available in the doctor’s antechamber; “It’s not so much the story I mind,” Dr. Weingarten had told him, “but the fact that you chose to put it in the Atlantic. Do you realize how man
y of my patients can no longer take me seriously?”) “But I can’t stop myself—I have to write about people I know. And I don’t even want to stop myself. When I’m sitting at my desk, first thing in the morning, long, yellow sheets of legal-size paper before me, pen and ink by my side—I always use pen and ink, typewriters are deathly for prose—I have an overpowering urge to pick up that pen and put it to those yellow sheets of paper and produce four thousand words of publishable . . . fiction.”

  “Could you speak up, please?” the psychiatrist asked. “I couldn’t hear that last word.”

  “Fiction,” Jennings said, loudly. “I said fiction, Dr. Clausewitz. I need to write fiction. Fiction, that is, about those I come into contact with. And I know what you’re going to ask me—that’s exactly what Dr. Weingarten asked me—you’re going to ask me, why does it have to be published? Why can’t I fulfill my overpowering urge to write my story and then put it in a paper shredder or something?”

  “That’s not what I was going to ask you,” Dr. Clausewitz said, “but tell me anyway.”

  “Well, I can’t,” Jennings replied, shortly. “Publication is important to me. Communication is what writing’s all about. If my fiction about real people doesn’t communicate something to other real people, if it doesn’t disseminate the message, the insight, I feel it contains, then the entire purpose of my writing is negated. I need to publish as much as I need to write.”

  Dr. Clausewitz caressed his goatee. “You haven’t answered one question, you know,” he said mildly. “Why must you write about other people you know?”

  Jennings was stunned by the question, much as a raconteur might be at the end of a joke if asked what the punchline was. “But you don’t understand, there’s no answer to that question,” he mumbled. “That’s all I can write about.”

  Jennings did try to restrain himself on his own. He tried getting up in the morning and not sitting at his desk, with its attractions of pen and paper—but he found himself writing in bed, scrawling with a pencil on the blank areas of full-page advertisements in the New York Times. He tried shutting himself off from the world so that he would have nothing to write about, but discovered that though shunned by his friends, he was not lacking in attraction for interviewers, autograph-hunters, salesmen, solicitors, would-be authors, and could-be groupies. On the one occasion he succeeded in packing a discreet suitcase and decamping to the wilds of Aspen, Colorado, he was nearly shot by a nightclub entertainer, developed an unpleasant intimacy with the impediments on the ski slopes, and barely avoided double pneumonia after dreaming he was being pursued by one of his not-entirely-fictional characters and jumping in the altogether out of his hotel window into seven feet of accumulated snow. His resultant “Not Quite Altogether in Aspen,” rejected by the travel editor of the National Geographic, appeared with minor modifications in the Saturday Evening Post.

  “Not that effective isolation would really do all that much good,” Jennings told Dr. Clausewitz as he rested his sore skiing limbs on the analyst’s couch and contemplated the ceiling moodily. “I’d probably find myself penning a soul-shattering soliloquy on ‘The Privacy of the Persecuted Penpusher.’ And selling it to Saturday Review.”

  “At least that way you’d only be libeling yourself,” Dr. Clausewitz pointed out.

  “Don’t you believe it,” Jennings replied. “One arrives at solitude only by losing the company of, or avoiding, a whole lot of people—so there will always be people responsible for my solitude. And you can bet they’ll feature in my—fiction.”

  Dr. Clausewitz coughed, but let the word pass.

  “Why don’t you seek some form of diversion from writing?” he asked. “A woman? Several women? Maybe even a man?”

  There had always been women in Jennings’ life, but none important enough to divert him from his writing. His writing took up most of his day; his women, when he had any, occupied only his evenings and his bed. He encountered no difficulty whenever the urge to write—usually about them—came to him. What female authors have termed “meaningful relationships” became, as a consequence, increasingly hard to come by. His primary fidelity was clearly not to them but to his literary muse, and the few ladies who tolerated Her departed in the wake of such revelatory exegeses as “Sex and the Single Curl” (about the fourth woman in his life, an exquisite if mildly eccentric girl who had a little curl not in the middle of her forehead) or “Sinning for her Supper” (about an indigent redhead who had begun to get involved with him, though Jennings was convinced she was more interested in board than in bed).

  “How can you carry on a meaningful relationship with an—individual who transcribes your bedtime conversation for Penthouse?” demanded one lissome brunette as she furiously packed her suitcase. “How can you whisper sweet somethings into the ear of a man you half-expect to respond, ‘Speak up, darling—it’s ten cents a word?’”

  “I guess you’re right,” Jennings agreed with a morose sigh. “But darling, can’t you understand—this is beyond my control. I have to write about you. I can’t do any—” but the door had slammed shut behind her.

  Gloomily, Jennings rose, despairing of his own redemption. A pair of the lady’s panties were still on the floor near the bed, omitted in her hasty departure. He rushed to the door with them, shouting as he opened it, “Darling, you’ve left . . .” He never finished the call; the panties in his mind reminded him irresistibly of the posterior they belonged to, the brunette’s only imperfection, a hereditarily heavy derrière whose left half was, despite dieting and exercise, appreciably larger than the right half. His exclamation disintegrated into uncontrollable giggles, and he shut his door again, laughing hysterically while leaning against it.

  “Left Behind” appeared in the next issue of Esquire.

  “Forgive me,” Dr. Clausewitz said, leaning forward in his chair, legs crossed at the knee, “but if I may ask a question that is also a suggestion—why do you not, given your obsession with penning the truth, become an investigative reporter instead of a short-story writer? Your—er—talents may then serve a social good, instead of merely contributing to your unhappy state of mind.”

  “But I already am, doctor,” Jennings almost rose from the couch. “Every writer of short stories is a reporter, an investigative reporter of society. Besides, it’s a question of the appropriate mode of expression. Do you think my perception of feminine foibles, for instance, which is after all what my stories about women depict, would belong on page 1 of the Washington Post, under the headline ‘Alleged Inconsistencies in Female Behavior Challenged?’ And I’m not interested in whether a Third Deputy Assistant Under-Secretary has accepted Swiss currency from a Chilean vice-admiral to help a Cuban megalomaniac kick the bucket. I couldn’t write a meaningful piece on that kind of stuff. But if I could have a drink with the Third Deputy Assistant Under-Secretary, and discover that he’s cheating on his wife, or that the vice of the vice admiral is the rear of a rear admiral, or that the prospective Cuban bucket-kicker smokes imported Trichinopoly cigars, then I could write a fascinating story, suitably garnished, but with the essentials preserved, and that story would have to appear as fiction, because that’s the mode in which it will receive the kind of readership and the type of attention it deserves.”

  Part of the problem with Jennings was that he really believed what he said. It is an affliction common to most authors who find themselves theorizing about their art. Writers have as large a capacity for taking their profession seriously as ratcatchers and race car drivers.

  “As I see it,” Dr. Clausewitz told Jennings at what he announced (“though this has nothing to do with that admirable story in which I fancy I see myself”) would be the last session, “your problem is really twofold. On the one hand, you feel impelled to write, but on the other, you can only write about people you know, to their embarrassment and your own discomfiture. Your attempts at resolving this problem have so far dealt primarily with the first part of this dichotomy—curbing your impulse to write. It seems t
o me it might be more appropriate to endeavor to deal with the second part of it—writing about those you know. By all means, write; certainly, write fiction, or what you consider to be fiction. Try to concentrate your energies, however, on writing not about people you know, but about those you do not. Invent characters. Merge the traits of five people you know into a sixth, nonexistent person—a truly fictional character. Try—”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking of me, Dr. Clausewitz,” Jennings interrupted. “You’re telling me to betray the very principle of truth I’ve based my fiction on. If I merge five true characters into one, I lose what is true in all five and create a lie. I can’t do it, doctor. I can’t.”

  “Then,” said Dr. Clausewitz, looking very old and very tired and very wise, “then do it not as an author but as a human being. Allow one person to matter enough to you—to matter so much to you that you do not want to, cannot, desecrate him or her in print. Then—and perhaps only then—will you be able to find your absolution.”

  Jennings took absolution seriously, “absolutely seriously,” as he told the leggy blonde he sat next to on the closest bar stool to Dr. Clausewitz’s office (which proved to be, as the doctor had surprisingly indicated with an uncharacteristic twinkle in his eye, seventeen-blocks-and-a-left-turn from the analyst’s couch). “Personally, however,” he articulated through a thickening tongue, “I prefer salvation in Scotch. Can I buy you a drink, my nebulous nirvana, or are authors and ambrosia off your diet this week?”

  The girl laughed, tossing a cultured coiffure. “You’re funny,” she observed, not entirely soberly.

  Jennings stared at her for a moment, digesting the remark. “Yes,” he affirmed. “Levity is the soul of wit. Will you try a funny fifth of this stuff, or will abstinence make your heart grow fonder?”

  “I’ll have a vodka,” she giggled, toothily. She was a model, all straight lines and elegance, with the kind of high-cheekboned look Faye hadn’t entirely dunaway with. (“A model of what?” Jennings joked gauchely. “Charm,” came the stunning reply. “The perfume, that is, silly. And a lot of other things besides.”) She was young and innocent and what in an earlier age would have been called cutely feminine—the kind of girl who called a spade a thpade. It transpired she had been stood up by the city’s leading photographer, and was spending an increasingly aimless wait getting sloshed. Jennings, who found her more than moderately attractive, quickly warmed to her.