“Christ, go ahead and jump if you want to,” I say. “Every man to his own poison. A martini will do me just fine.”
“The thing about you is, no matter what, you always say the right thing.”
The place where I take him (and I’ll admit there may be a little malice in this; we do know how to hate) is the current favorite of the TV crowd. That is to say—if you haven’t seen it or one exactly like it—ostentatiously quiet, heavy with ersatz elegance, some studio executive’s idea of a gracious pub. Redjacketed waiters moving as deft and soft-footed as shadows. A bar with all the very best liquor winking in appropriately subdued light. Two bartenders working behind the bar, one dark and pretty, a dated Valentino, the other one, Hugo, with white hair, thin lips, and the hard blank face of a croupier, currently called “the best bartender in town,” a very fast man with a lemon peel. They were both so starched and white, so solemn and floating, that they seemed a pair of high priests involved in some obscure ritual or sacrifice. Soft, tinted, flattering mirrors in which the fat boys swam like smallmouth bass and their women, curvy at their tailored sides, as lean and predatory as sharks or barracuda. All of it, everything, of course, in the fashionable worst of taste.
We sit down at the bar and order double martinis, watching the white-haired maestro at work. He does have bravado with a lemon peel. I’ll say that for him.
“This way to the Egress,” I say, toasting Fergus with the Barnum joke, how he got everybody out of his museum.
“No,” Fergus says. “Let me make the toast for today. Okay? Here’s the way it is with me and the world. I’m just like a groundhog, a cozy old groundhog safe in the ground. What I really want to do is to come on out. I want to poke up my head, out in the clean bright air, and say, ‘Wake up all you stupid sleepyheads. It’s spring! It’s spring all over the place!’ And you know what happens? Every time I stick my head up, all set to deliver my earth-shaking message, it’s still the big middle of winter. Back to my hole in the ground.”
“So, all right,” I say. “Here’s to Groundhog’s Day.”
“Amen. I’ll drink to that.”
“They ought to make more out of Groundhog’s Day,” I say. “In a commercial way.”
“Like Mother’s Day.”
“We could be the ones to turn it into big business.”
“Yeah, man,” Fergus says. “We could sell cards and everything. Make it a kind of a universal symbol. The annual resurrection of Modern Man. I mean, pretty soon we’ll all be living underground anyway. The groundhog is a great symbol for modern man, don’t you think?”
“Fergus, did I ever tell you my plan to make a million dollars? The idea is to turn out a line of dolls, see? Like the old Shirley Temple dolls. Only these would be up-to-date celebrity dolls. Celebrity Dolls Incorporated. The kind you can stick pins in. Voodoo. A free pack of pins with every doll. There’d be Leonard Bernstein dolls and Johnny Carson dolls and David Susskind dolls—”
“What time do the celebrities start coming in here?”
“It’s too early for celebrities,” I say. “They only come out at night.”
“Like witches and werewolves.”
Soon we are talking about the old times, but they are far behind us. He gets to talking about all the crazy people he got to know, the attendants and doctors and patients, in the hospital, but his stories have too much edge. It’s hard to be funny all the time about mental hospitals. And I try to tell him something about my job, about Leo the Roaring Lion, about Rena, about our writers, the rich ones and the poor ones, and, too, about my cousin David, who is worried that I lead a sheltered life and is always taking me down to the Garment District for a look at reality. Coffee and danish, quick sweaty deals, and the models you see who look like they stepped out of a Byzantine mosaic and talk like something chalked on a wall. Of course we laugh, we laugh and we drink, but there is a kind of hopeless humor about it all, a flourish and ruffles of weariness like the messages warships used to run up in signal flags to each other. HMS Imponderable to HMS Repugnant: “Matthew 8:29.” Repugnant to Imponderable: “Jeremiah 13:23.”
A couple come into the bar and sit down near us. The girl is dark-haired, thin, and pretty. The bullet-headed man wears glasses and a fixed expression of enormous boredom. The girl immediately turns to follow our conversation. The man sits clutching his drink and staring straight into the mirror.
“Are they celebrities?” Fergus says.
“I don’t think so.”
“They look like celebrities to me.”
“That’s the whole point,” I say. “All the real celebrities are trying to look like people.”
Fergus turns on his barstool to address them.
“Folks,” he begins, “since fate has so kindly thrown us together and since none of us are celebrities, what we need is a good joke to begin with. The trouble is I don’t know any jokes. I mean I used to know some, but then I forgot them all.”
“I know a good joke,” the girl says. “There was this old couple, real old, on their honeymoon, see?”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Fergus says. “Excuse me, but I have the floor and I haven’t yielded it yet. Allow me to finish and we’ll get back to your joke later on. As a matter of fact, mine isn’t a joke at all. It happens to be a true story.”
“I like true stories,” she says, nodding. “Frankly, I prefer them.”
“This happens to be the story of my life. You see, in the poor, benighted and unwashed area which I call home—”
“I bet you’re from the South,” she says.
“How did you guess?”
“Your accent, the funny way you talk.”
“Funny?”
“You know what I mean,” she says. “Well, go ahead.”
“I can’t. I’m afraid you have interrupted my train of thought with your acute observation of my provincial background. I’ve forgotten the story I was about to tell.”
“That’s rude,” she says. “Here you had me all interested to listen to the story of your life.”
Fergus smiles and shrugs.
“Excuse me,” he says. “I beg your pardon. The truth is I suddenly realized it isn’t an amusing story at all. I can assure you, you are not missing a thing.”
He tips her a courtly bow and turns back to his drink. The girl grins and winks at me.
“What are your plans now, Fergus?”
“My what?”
“Have you got a job?” I say. “Do you need one?”
“What could I ever do?”
“You used to write poems in school, didn’t you?”
“Is that a job nowadays?”
“I’m serious,” I say. “You used to do some writing.”
“Still do,” he says. “Still do. Remind me to send you a bunch of my poems. At first, back in school, nobody but me could understand them. Now I can’t either. Old buddy, I tell you I am about to arrive. One of these days I am going to be discovered. I won’t forget you. When I’m a celebrity I won’t forget my old friends.”
“I’ve got this friend who runs an ad agency,” I go on. “He owes me a couple of big favors.”
“Do I look like I need a job?”
“I was just thinking—”
“What do I need a job for—money?”
“You could do worse,” I say. “You can do various things with money.”
“Indeed you can. Money begets money. Money begat money. In the beginning— Do you know what the forbidden fruit really was? You probably are a fundamentalist. You probably think it was an apple. An apple! Let me disabuse you. The real truth is it was nothing else but a little old stack of grubby green dollar bills. Or maybe not so little. A regular stinking compost heap of the stuff!”
“I’m trying to be serious for a minute.”
“Don’t,” he says. “It doesn’t become you.”
“Look, Fergus, I know this guy will find a place for you. It would be easy for you, a snap. You’d get along fine as long as you didn’t take it too
seriously.”
“I never take anything seriously,” he says. “No, what I mean is, I take everything too seriously. Which, as anyone can see, adds up to exactly the same thing. Lack of discrimination. ‘Lack of discrimination in love partners.’ That’s what one of the headshrinkers said about me.”
“What does that mean?” the girl down the bar asks.
Fergus turns again to include her in the discussion. Her boyfriend might as well have been carved in his place. He is still engrossed in the mirror.
“Since you have taken the trouble to ask me,” Fergus says to her, “I’ll tell you. Nothing. It doesn’t mean a thing. It merely implies that in his opinion I have bad taste.”
“Taste is always a matter of personal opinion,” she says.
“Sam, do you know what my real trouble is?”
“No,” I say. “What is your real trouble?”
“It’s like this. I go around all the time with my lips puckered up waiting to greet the world. ‘I greet thee, World!’ That’s all I want to say. The trouble is, when the time comes, I never know whether to spit or kiss.”
“It isn’t hard work,” I start again, hopelessly. “I’m sure I can fix it up for you.”
“Very good. Splendid.”
“Why do you act like that?” I say. “You make people feel so bad. Why do you have to make everybody else feel helpless?”
“I said splendid, didn’t I? A job is what I need. A job is what I am here for. I looked you up today expressly for the purpose of seeing if you could help me get a job. And if you do, I hereby promise to work hard and very conscientiously and save up a lot of money and go to Sweden.”
“Sweden?”
“You’ve never been married, Sam, have you?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, be that as it may, I have. Old buddy, I have been married.”
“Marriage,” the girl says. “What does that have to do with Sweden?”
“Nothing, ma’am,” Fergus says. “It is entirely irrelevant, as anyone can plainly see. The point is that I’m going to Sweden. With all my ill-gotten gains. Quick as I get there, I’m going to buy me a great big high-powered speedboat and a great big high-powered set of binoculars. And then all I’m going to do is cruise up and down, back and forth and up and down, in front of the women’s beaches and spend all my time looking at women.”
“You don’t have to go all the way to Sweden,” she says. “You can go to Jones Beach. You can take a subway to Coney.”
“You don’t understand,” he says. “I’m speaking of Swedish women.”
“What’s so special about Swedish women?”
“Ah!” he says. “You still don’t understand, ma’am. I have heard the rumor that in far-off Sweden the ladies swim unadorned, in a state of nature, as God made them. That is to say, buck nekkid. Notice that I did not use the word nude. I didn’t say naked either. I used the word nekkid. That is because I am a true-blue, barefoot, Southern boy. And that is why I’ll never be able to pass for a Texas millionaire—too much blue blood. Anyway, as a part of my creed I believe, as is very meet and right so to do, in the ultimate, permanent segregation of saints and sinners on Judgment Day— Where was I?”
“In Sweden, baby, looking at the girls.”
By this time the other conversations along the bar and in the room, the rise and fall and tremor of voices have ceased. Everybody seems to be watching us. Fergus is grinning and a light film of sweat shines all over his face.
“Thank you,” he says. “And please don’t misunderstand me. I hate to be misunderstood. You are probably under the impression that I’ve got a dirty mind. You are correct, I do have a dirty mind. But at present I am speaking metaphorically. Nekkid we come into this world and nekkid we go out of it. The way I look at it, metaphorically speaking, nekkid is all we are, what we really are. So what I am really trying to do is to be myself, the man I really am, a man without a fig leaf, so to speak. Are you with me?”
“Sure,” she says. “As a matter of fact I like all-over sunbathing myself. It’s supposed to be good for you.”
“No offense.”
“You left us in Sweden.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Thank you for your close attention,” he says. “After Sweden I’m heading straight for Finland. When I get there, what I’m going to do is take saunas. A sauna—that’s a Finnish bath. You sit in a hot room and they whip you with birch switches. They are going to whip the devil out of me. Now, don’t laugh, lady. It’s supposed to be good for you. Just like your sunbathing. Let me explicate. The whole time I was languishing in the booby hatch—what you would probably prefer to call a mental hospital, like catatonic schizophrenia was the measles or something—The Funhouse of Mirrors is my real name for it. Because no matter where you look you see yourself reflected. Yourself fat, yourself thin; yourself masochistic, yourself sadistic; yourself manic, yourself catatonic; yourself screaming in a strait jacket or yourself senile and having to be fed and changed like a baby. As I was saying, the whole time I was in the Funhouse, I was looking for the cure. The real cure. I tried everything. Nothing seemed to work until I hit on the idea that the Devil is responsible. And he is— Where was I?”
“In Finland taking some kind of a crazy hot bath.”
“Thank you again for your undivided attention,” he says. “Well, to make a long story short, as soon as I figured out it was the Devil’s fault, the next thing I had to do was to figure out how to get rid of him. Our Lord, when He was around, once drove the Devil out of a madman into a herd of swine. Lacking Our Lord in person, so to speak, I was forced to try the more conventional scientific methods. Pills, electric shock, therapy, and all that jazz wouldn’t even budge the Devil. So I sat back and imagined the only cure I could think of—all those pink and blond Nordic furies beating the Devil out of me with birch switches.”
“Slavs,” the girl says. “The Finns aren’t Nordic, they’re some kind of Slavs.”
Fergus bangs his fist on the bar judicially to interrupt and say something. A few glasses hop, slop over, or overturn. Hugo, the white-haired one, appears instantly before us, deferential and soft-voiced.
“Is everything all right, gentlemen?”
“We’re going to get something to eat, Hugo,” I say. “We were just leaving.”
“No, by God!” Fergus says to him. “Everything is not all right. Everything is all wrong.”
Then he lowers his voice to a stage whisper again, ignoring a room full of raised eyebrows and the grinning pretty girl at the bar.
“Believe me,” he says. “The world is going to the dogs. We’re living in the last book of the Bible. It’s the time of the hyena and the jackal. Wild pigs are going to pick our bones. They are killing each other and making each other suffer. The little children are suffering too, all over the world—”
“Take it easy, man,” I say.
He looks at me briefly as if he is trying to recognize me, then smiles.
“It’s all right, Sambo,” he says. “I’m leaving. I’ll admit the real reason I called you today was about a job. But I changed my mind. All I want to do now is ask you one question.”
He pauses and waits for me.
“Okay, ask.”
“Sam, my buddy, my old, old Jewbuddy, who is going to whip the Devil out of you?”
He gestures grandly and slips off the barstool, sits down hard on the floor, but bounces up again to his feet, straightens, hikes back his thin shoulders. He waves a benediction to all and starts for the door. After he gets his overcoat from the hatcheck girl, he returns.
“You people are probably under the impression that I am plastered,” he says. “Let me assure you, even though I have been drinking martinis with this man, I am not drunk. My trouble is much simpler. My trouble is simply that I am crazy.”
That produces quite a laugh, but when he turns to look at me there are tears in his eyes.
“Sambo,” he says. “I love you like a brother. But it’s snowing outside and I have to
be alone.”
“Give me a call, huh?”
“Sure, I’ll do that.”
“Who was that?” the girl asks me after he is gone for good.
“Nobody,” I say. “Nobody you would know of.”
“A writer?”
“In a way. Sort of.”
“I knew it,” she says. “I can spot one every time. They’re all a bunch of creeps.”
“John Irving was in here the other day,” Hugo says confidentially.
“Is that so?” I say. “Which way to the Egress? I mean the phone booth?”
“In back.”
Once inside the phone booth I start to have my troubles. Everything starts to go wrong. First I manage to drop a whole fistful of change on the floor. I know if I bend over to pick it up, I will never make it. I will just curl up on the floor and go to sleep. Finally I find a coin in my watch pocket, put it in the phone, and am able to dial the right number.
“Hello?” Rena says in my ear.
“Dollbabe, I want you to come live with me and be my love.”
“Who is this?”
“Little Sir Tiptoe.”
“Oh, it’s you,” she says. “You slay me.”
“Come to me, doll. I need you.”
“I’d just love to. But the thing is I already got a date.”
“Break it.”
“Don’t be silly,” she says. “Where are you?”
“In a phone booth.”
“Where?”
“All right,” I say. “So the phone booth happens to be located in a bar. So what?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Possible. Entirely possible. I mean a thing like that is a question of definition. Relative thing. Yes, as a matter of fact, I am a little bombed. I’ve been drinking with Nobody ever since I left the office.”
“I like Nobody,” she says. “He’s kind of cute. Nervous, but cute.”
“Never mind about Nobody. You’re kind of cute too. I’d rather drink with you.”
“Some other time, huh?” she says. “I’m right in the big middle of taking a bath.”
“Take a bath with me.”
“You’re horrible.”
“I promise it will be decent,” I say. “I’ll wear my fig leaf.”
Evening Performance Page 26
