“I guess that’s how she busted it.”
“What?”
“The bicycle.”
“Oh, I guess so.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked her hand. Such pale slender hands with such exquisite, useless fingers. He used to call her his Rossetti girl, his pre-Raphaelite.
“How do you feel now?”
“Rotten,” she said. “Just rotten. I can’t budge. I feel like the top of my head is coming off any minute.”
“Call the doctor?”
“What’s the use? All he can do is tell me it’s all in my mind.”
He was possessed by an almost irresistible desire to shrug his shoulders. Exactly like Mr. Grubb.
“Why don’t you go to sleep?”
“I am. I was just waiting for you to come in,” she said. “How was your day?”
“Same old rot. Another day, another dollar.”
“Pearls before swine?”
“You might put it that way,” he said. “Have the kids had any supper yet?”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “Let them raid the icebox. They love it. Just like a picnic.”
“I was being selfish as usual,” he said. “I was thinking about me.”
“There’s a can of Spanish rice somewhere. You always like Spanish rice, don’t you?”
“I’m a sucker for Spanish rice,” he said.
The kitchen was, as he anticipated, a shambles. He put a bottle of scotch within arm’s reach and got busy cleaning things up so that at least he could have the sink and the stove free. The main thing, he thought, the real distinguished advice I have for you this morning, students, is twofold. Point one: never, under no circumstances, no, never marry an intellectual woman. If you must marry at all, which, according to St. Paul, is debatable, then search far and wide for a plump, ripe, stupid, peasant woman. Keep her barefoot and pregnant and full of meat and potatoes. If, however, you are unable to locate such a delectable mountain, such a promised land for sowing and reaping and the raising of flocks, then let this be your guide: intellectual or not, never marry a woman who is more intelligent than you are. Now for point two. Let’s see, what was point two? Ah yes, I have it right here and I shan’t detain you one minute beyond the ringing of the bell. Mark this well. Keep your grubby, and I use the word advisedly, keep your grubby, cotton-picking, unwashed fingers out of the lively arts, lest, bitten by the bug or burned by a gemlike flame, as the metaphor may go, so to speak, lest you become infected with ambition and desire and then struggle yourself gray-headed and black in the face trying to be what you most patently are not. Most patently—
“All right, kids,” he yelled. “Let’s eat.”
They ate canned Spanish rice with milk and bread and butter. He drank scotch. They seemed happy, Susie triumphantly bandaged and Ronnie eagerly pursuing the prospect of a new bicycle.
As a matter of fact, he thought, it might be something of an adventure to grow up in such a highly disorganized family.
“What are you going to do tonight?” he asked them.
“We’re going to watch TV.”
When they seemed to be sufficiently stuffed, he shooed them into the living room to watch TV and retired to his small study with the scotch. He poured himself a drink and listened awhile to the familiar sound of gunfire and battle cries coming from the living room. Then he picked up a copy of Arnold’s poems from the desk and read through “Dover Beach” in a little under thirty seconds.
“You old fraud,” he said, tossing the book aside. “You, Matthew Arnold, like all the rest of us. The truth is we all tried to volunteer for the ignorant armies, but they classified us 4-F. And now the only thing to do is to sit on the fence with the rest of the railbirds and jeer when they march by. You, too, T. S. Eliot. And you, too, Renoir, turning fat sweaty female flesh into apples and bonbons. And, oh yes, let’s not forget you, Ben Jonson, mon frère.”
He picked up a paperback detective story and began to read, hoping against hope that before he really got involved in the damn thing the phone would ring. The odds were perfectly good that somebody would call. It would not, alas, be Jenny Bell Palmer, offering herself body and soul. It would not, he trusted, turn out to be David Grubb or the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the line. But somebody would call. Somebody was bound to. Life is full of regular little surprises like that, don’t you know?
LOVE IS A COLD KINGDOM
AS SOON AS I HANG UP THE PHONE I get up and leave my desk. I tiptoe down the hallway, buoyant on the expensive carpet, hearing all around me, like the soft murmurs of confessionals, the monotonous rise and fall of human voices. Voices speaking to each other in hushed, confidential tones. Voices talking to machines, dictating. Voices talking on telephones. And, as always, the accompaniment, the faint, precise, impeccable rhythm of typewriters. Like the whispering together of a congregation of metallic insects. God knows they never stop. No doubt the last sound on Judgment Day will be a typewriter talking to itself. More likely the clicking of a word processor.
I enter the anteroom, still tiptoeing like somebody trying to sneak in late to a funeral, and come where I can stand behind Rena, our receptionist. She is a glossy thing, from the extravagance of her blond hair to the high shine on her high heels. Her hands, perfectly manicured, resting perfectly still on the desk beside a blank notepad. And she is staring straight ahead (behind her it can be imagined), her fine blank mask—the savage curve and pout of the lips, the eyebrows plucked and arched and sharply etched, eyelids blued with small dark wings, delicate wings, bruise-colored, the eyes wide and empty and deeply blue—a face that promises everything under the sun to you, you with your immortal manuscript in longhand, you with an undeniable talent for yodeling underwater or playing Chopin on the harmonica while standing on your head, you too, among all the thousands she greets with perhaps one great consuming idea in your brain like an inexhaustible pilot light; a face that promises everything you could possibly ask for, except, of course, self-respect.
I lean over close to whisper in her ear, troubled by the slight rising wave of her perfume. That ear is a perfect thing too. Like a glass flower. Or, better, like a seashell delicately whorled. You might think as you bent close to that little ear that instead of talking into it, you ought simply to kiss it. Out of pure joy that there could be such a thing in creation. Then you might think that maybe it ought to be listened to, just like a seashell. That would probably be the most honorable, the passive, appreciative thing to do—to listen. Maybe if you were very, very quiet and attentive, you could hear the long hush and sigh, the whole bone-scrawled history of the sea, songs of the drowned sailors, of the stars and the moon and the tides. In both cases you would be wrong, dead wrong. You might as well kiss the ear of a public statue. And if you kept very still and listened for a long time, as I did once, you would hear nothing. Nothing at all …
“Don’t move, doll,” I say, jabbing my index finger between her shoulder blades, “I’ve got you covered.”
Rena slowly raises her hands.
“What did I do to deserve this?”
“Nothing personal. Just a routine stickup.”
“We don’t have any petty cash.”
“Who needs petty cash?” I say. “It’s your approval I want.”
Rena drops her arms and swivels around in the chair to face me with a swift, bright smile.
“You slay me,” she says. “Always sneaking around the office and all.”
“I got to sneak around, chickie babe. I’m allergic to lions.”
(Inside joke: the boss’s name is Leo.)
“That’s no way to behave,” she says. “If you don’t want to get swallowed whole, you better break out the whip and the chair.”
“I can’t help the tiptoes. It’s just the way I am.”
“How are you?”
“Did I ever tell you I was a frustrated ballet dancer?”
“Ballet dancers!” she says. “Who needs them?”
“Them? What do yo
u mean, them? Who’s talking about them? This is supposed to be a personal conversation. I’m trying to find out who needs me.”
“Well, lover, if you don’t know …”
It can go on exactly like this. A form of communication, signals between isolate and separate souls in the manner of the medium. A conversation composed of snippets of bad dialogue from bad television plays. A couple of insects waving bristly antennae. It can go on like this in exactly this pace and tone until a man is ready to puke.
“Look,” I say, “I just had a phone call and—”
“Congratulations! Bully for you! Who was it—Selznick? Susskind?”
Why fight the problem?
“Nobody. Just nobody. I mean capital N Nobody. Have you met anybody who’s nobody lately?”
“Nobody is nobody,” she says. “Everybody is somebody nowadays.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, see? This guy that called me, he really is nobody. The last of the big nobodies. He’s a national institution like the Vanishing Indian.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Put up a tepee and get out the family wampum?”
“Look,” I say. “He’s a friend, that’s all. Just a friend. We used to room together in college.”
“I didn’t know you were a college man.”
“Where did you think I took my degree—the Garment District?”
“You could do worse,” she says.
“Look, when he gets here—his name is McCree, Fergus McCree—when he comes in, don’t buzz me or anything. Just send him straight back. I don’t want to keep him waiting out here.”
“What’s so special about him? Why can’t he go in quarantine like all the rest?”
“He’s already had quarantine. They just let him out of the hospital—the booby hatch.”
“So? So some of our best clients come here straight out of the booby hatch.”
“You missed the point, the whole point. He’s not a client, he’s a friend.”
(Exit line.)
“Wait,” she says. “Just one thing before you go. Name me some place that doesn’t have any phones.”
“Why?”
“Because Mr. Barton said to tell anybody who calls that he’s gone away to some place where they don’t have phones.”
“Okay. Tibet, Lapland, the North Pole—”
“I’m serious,” she says. “How about the Virgin Islands? Do they have phones there?”
“Why don’t we go there together and find out?”
I am saved because just then we both hear the buzzing sound of the elevator, and Rena spins around to greet the world with its briefcase and the holes in its shoes.
I tiptoe back to the cubicle from whence I came.
There are scripts and synopses piled high on my desk. In blue folders, in brown folders, in black folders, in notebooks, clipped and stapled and even dog-eared. All the raw wheat and the chaff, ready to be threshed, ground, milled, sifted, refined, and at last presented, all in a neat standard package like a loaf of bread (presliced) to the great omnivorous Television Public. Think I don’t like my work? Think I don’t love my job?
I stand up again and walk over to the window. A superb view of nothing. A nice view of nothing special but the dull serpentine shine of one-way traffic. If there is anything in the world more depressing than the sight of a long line of one-way traffic coming from nowhere and going to nowhere, I’d like to know what it is. The sheep and the goats. The just and the unjust. The flowing stream. By I. P. Freely. (Childhood joke: also the Spot on the Wall by Hu Flung Dung.) All you have to do is fall in line and play along on your little instrument, whatever it is they gave you to start with, a banjo, a Jew’s harp, a kazoo, or maybe a pocket comb with cellophane. Join right in the universal pointless hubbub and just keep tootling away until finally Gabriel raises his radiant trumpet and blows away the whole horrid mess with one fiery breath.
It must be McCree, old Fergus McCree who is responsible for this mood in me. The unspeakable sadness. The waste of it all. And, maybe, the shame. He, of course, would be the first one to laugh at my extravagant self-pity.
There is nothing, they say, like hard labor to ease the restive soul. So I sit down once again at my desk, a battered Ozymandias with a lone and hardly level waste of paper all around me. I go to work. I read:
SIGNATURE: We see an audience, well-dressed, waiting in anticipation for a concert to begin. Men in tuxedos. Women in evening gowns and furs. The maestro approaches the podium. A scattering of well-bred applause.
CLOSE-UP: The maestro raises his baton. As he brings it down instead of music we hear a shot. He topples crazily.
CUT TO CLOSE-UP: A hand at the curtain, holding a smoking pistol.
FADE OUT to First Commercial and Credits.
“A scattering of well-bred applause, my ass!”
And then I am thinking about Fergus McCree. A way, way back in the dim days beyond recall, a few short years ago, Fergus and I roomed together at Princeton. All four years. From the beginning to the end we shared a room in old Edwards Hall along Poverty Row. A strange combination it had been, a Jew who wanted to be a doctor and a Southerner with a crazy name. “You got any Scotch blood in your family?” I’d say. “Nothing but bourbon,” he’d say, “but we have some Scotch cows—Black Angus.” A Southerner with a taste for elegance and no money to support it, with the habit of arrogance and neither the physical equipment nor, really, the natural inclination to carry it off. Just the habit. With the result that his eyes were always being blacked and his nose was broken and his teeth were chipped. Late at night he’d come rolling home from somewhere, singing, drunk, and bloody, never self-pitying, in fact proud of his new wounds. As for me, I’d still be up studying and studying subjects for which I had small aptitude and even less interest.
What joined us then was hate, I suppose. We were perfectly agreed in our mutual hate of them, all the ones Fergus called “the good guys.” The clean-shaven, gray-flanneled, healthy-minded, well-adjusted them. Sometimes we hated each other, too, but never with the force of passion reserved for the rest of the world. Somehow or other our friendship endured on that diet. Looking back on it, though, I know it was a sour marrow bone and we were a couple of snarling puppy dogs.
So much for all that. A few years have gone. No doctor I. I work for my cousin Leo, who is in fact a graduate of the Garment District. He moved over to television when that was still possible and often done, leapt for his life, then clung tenaciously like an old barnacle in spite of (maybe because of) ignorance, lack of taste, bad manners, aggressively conspicuous consumption, and all the other well-known characteristics of the archetypal kike. He clung to his perch, lived in his niche, and he learned. And the truth is that he is as good as anybody in the industry now and could pass for a born Ivy Leaguer if asked to. But he doesn’t like to be asked. Which is why I, the sole Ivy League blossom on our family tree, was hired in the first place—“to give the joint a real Madison Avenue tone whenever we need it.”
I’m not complaining. I make a buck. And my little brother is in medical school now.
Fergus, damn him. He was the boy with all the talent, my idea of a real poet. Married and divorced. The Army. Sixty days bad time in the stockade for going AWOL. Back to Real Life. Work for a publisher. Fired. Work for a magazine. Fired. Teaching at a boys’ prep school. Nervous breakdown. Graduate school. Next a sojourn in the state booby hatch. Poems? Zero, zip, none—
And now for some reason he is in the city and he has called me to say he is coming to see me.
“Is this what you really do for a living?” Fergus says, coming into my office. “Do you really have to read the things?”
“Sssh. The whole place is bugged. Lousy with hidden mikes. Just like working in the Kremlin.”
He looks paler and thinner, if that is possible, and still bird- or squirrel-nervous, cocking his head this way and that as if he were listening to or for a sound you couldn’t quite hear. He always used to claim he could hear those high d
og whistles that you are not supposed to. He is smiling with his still-chipped teeth and he needs a haircut as badly as ever. His eyes, as always, are bright and clear and depthless.
“Sambo,” he says, taking my hand, “I can see it agrees with you. You’re putting on weight. You know what? You’re going to wind up being one of the little round men. One of that whole swarming faceless multitude of wonderful little round New York Jews. I like that kind.”
“You got me all wrong,” I say. “I’m really one of the lean and pushy kind.”
“Don’t just stand there,” he says. “Say something insulting.”
“All right, Fergus, it’s your turn. You look like the walking corpse of the Old South. You’re hookwormed, pellagra-ridden, corncobbed, and segregated. Even if they did let you out, you look crazy as hell to me.”
“Ain’t that a shame? Don’t that go to show you?” he says. “I thought I looked just like a Texas millionaire.”
“Sure, and I’m a dead ringer for Bernard Baruch.”
“Sam,” he says, “I love you.”
He moved to the window and stood there with his back to me, looking down at the traffic.
“Don’t pay me no mind,” he says. “You go right ahead and reject a script. Do something useful.”
I glance at my watch. It is almost four o’clock. I start to tidy up my desk, making a leaning tower of Babel out of the unread scripts.
“Looks like it’s going to snow,” he says. “I love it when it snows in this town. I forgot all about it. Isn’t that a funny thing—how you can just forget all about something, something you really love? It’s like the whole city and everybody in it was falling asleep. The snow comes down all gray and soft like burnt paper and then everything hushes—”
“Look,” I say, “I’ve just about had it for today. What say we go somewhere and lean over a drink?”
“You thought I was going to jump.”
“What?”
“I said you were afraid I was getting ready to jump out the window.”
Evening Performance Page 25
