by Mark Harris
“Who’d like some lunch?” Lala asked.
“I would,” said Jim. His hand was on the knob of the door, but now he reentered the room. Food might pacify him, preserve him from a journey to a massage parlor. “Although I should be getting back,” he said, glancing at Brown.
“Don’t be glancing at me,” said Brown. “You seem to think I care. I don’t care whether you go back or not. I have no loyalty to that newspaper. I am a man of tremendous loyalty, I’ll go to the end of the earth to be loyal, but that newspaper is not one of the things I’m loyal to.”
“I see what you mean,” said Jim.
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t,” said Brown.
“That’s an interesting thought,” said Jim. “I guess I was just assuming that the older people get the more loyal they get to the corporation.”
“People don’t get older,” said Iris.
“That’s an interesting thought,” said Brown.
“We’re all full of interesting thoughts today,” said Lala, leaving for the kitchen.
“Let me help you,” said James Berberick, following her.
“Don’t be silly,” Lala said, “I don’t need any help.” She hoped he’d follow her, and he did.
Iris’s eyes followed, too. Try as she might to listen to Mr. Brown or to concentrate upon the moon men falling back to earth, Lala’s being in the kitchen with James Berberick preoccupied her. What did she think could happen there? She lowered the sound of Cronkite’s voice. “It was wonderful of you to find Paprika,” she said.
“They shouldn’t really let him bark as he does,” said Brown.
“Dumb dog, who needs him? I agree with your letter,” she ventured. “Why don’t you solve the problem with a handful of sleeping pills?”
“I wrote no letter,” lied Brown.
“Then excuse me,” said Iris. “I misunderstood something.”
“But I do find the dog’s barking troublesome,” he confessed. “It’s not very considerate of other people in the neighborhood when you let a dog go on barking night and day.”
“He protects the house,” Iris said.
“How?”
“He keeps away rapists and burglars,” she said.
“What’s in the house so valuable to steal?” Brown asked. “Everything looks so heavy to me.”
“Color TV,” said Iris.
For a moment Brown inhaled the familiar odor of James Berberick. Although the odor was faint, the boy still smelled whether he knew it or not. If it wasn’t the intense smell Brown remembered from days past it was nevertheless recognizable as Berberick’s, and it was produced, no doubt, by the particular strain he was under today — of having found here another Chronicle man, who might or might not report James Berberick’s prolonged lunch hour to someone in high authority.
“They’re taking a long time,” said Iris. “In the time they’re taking to make lunch these jokers have flown thousands of miles through the atmosphere.”
“Are they in the atmosphere now?” Brown inquired.
“I have no idea,” Iris said. “They’re cuddled up in their little cocoon. I’ll turn up Cronkite; he’ll tell us. I guess there wouldn’t be any room in that capsule for fatso me, would there?”
“They’re having some sort of trouble,” said Brown. Brown could see, as a student of Cronkite’s motions and gestures, that his eyes spoke of trouble. It was the gaze of controlled distraction Cronkite achieved whenever Brown shot him on the seventeenth floor, On the Air, Off the Air, here comes Eric Sevareid, don’t fall, watch your step, walk casually on Madison Avenue, slip off your flesh-colored gloves. Indeed, it was true: Cronkite was speaking of trouble. The capsule had become overheated. The astronauts complained of discomfort. “It’s getting to feel like a Turkish bath in here,” one of them was saying to Mission Control, when suddenly the astronauts, capsule and all, picture and voice, were wiped from the screen. “What happened?” Iris asked. “Durn if I know,” said Brown. “What are you doing in there?” Iris called. “Making lunch,” said Jim Berberick, emerging from the kitchen with a serving tray in his hands. His mouth was stuffed with crackers, and for the moment he was pacified, cooled, relieved, set at his ease, calmed by Lala, with whom he had had a most pleasant conversation climaxed by an amusing story. Lala had some need of him not yet clear to him, but its effect was clear enough — to distract him from himself. On his tray were slices of roast beef, Camembert cheese, and superb rye bread from Carl’s Bakery, Eighteenth & Guerrero. A separate serving platter was arranged in green olives, sweet pickles, and stalks of celery.
“What’s my daughter doing in there?” Iris asked James. If only she could see through walls! If binoculars existed to conquer distance, why not X-rayoculars to conquer walls?
“She’s making tea,” said James.
Lala followed with a second tray. “Now you see what we were doing in there,” she said to her mother in a sarcastic tone.
But was that all they had done in the kitchen? Only put together this little lunch? No, something more than that had occurred, although even had Iris been able to see through the wall with her X-rayoculars she would have seen very little, for to the eye it had been nothing. To the nose, to the ears, and to Lala’s invisibly rippling flesh, however, it was something else. How delightful to have a man in the kitchen! “Harold never comes in the kitchen,” Lala said factually to James. “He won’t carry a dish. He won’t pick up a dishtowel if it falls on the floor — a dishtowel is a woman’s tool, that’s what he’ll say.” The last man who’d been in the kitchen was the plumber.
“It reminds me of a story,” said James to Lala in the kitchen. “I mean a true story, it happened to a friend of mine, two people in a kitchen is what makes me think of it.”
“Talk while I slice the beef,” she said, submerged in the rippling of her flesh produced by the sound of his voice. The effects of some men’s voices were different on the telephone from the effects they had on her when she met them in person, but James’s voice caused her to ripple either way, and she was receiving not only his voice now, but his smell, too, sound and smell, cologne and sweat, all mixed and mingled. She breathed deep to receive his smell at its best — a smell such as she often smelled upon busy workmen when she passed them on the street, or as she smelled upon repairmen, such as plumbers, in the house, but more persuasive now, powerful, pungent, not the sweat of labor but the sweat of person, the odor arising not from exertion but from mental passion.
“It’s not a terribly long story,” said James.
“Make it as long as you can,” she said. Oh, his voice!
“This fellow — this friend of mine — he went to an office party where he managed to get himself in conversation with this fantastically beautiful chick that he’d had his eye on in the office for a year only never had the nerve to sidle up to her before, you know. But at this office party she responded to him with super-enthusiasm. He was a handsome fellow, clean in attire, no bad smells about him, served his time in the military and one thing and another, until as the party wore on she said to him, ‘I just remembered I happen to have a couple of steaks in the refrigerator so why don’t you and I split and drop over to my apartment and eat them up?’”
“He consented. They went to her apartment which it turned out was in one of those vast high-rises like Fox Plaza . . .”
“Where you live,” Lala said.
“Me?”
“You said this morning you lived in Fox Plaza,” she said, and in fact she was correct: we heard him say so on page 97, and we suspected five pages later that he had not told the truth.
“. . . rows and rows of apartments, and they all looked like the rest, so up they went in the elevator and down this immense corridor and inside her apartment, and inside her kitchen which is what made me think of this story because here we are in your kitchen, right? Out of booze! ‘Oh Christ,’ she
said, ‘I’m out of booze, whatever your name is.’“
“I thought this was a friend of yours,” said Lala.
“Dick Richards,” he said.
“I won’t interrupt any more,” she said.
“He goes to a liquor store. He’s in seventh heaven. He sees it all before him: booze, a good steak, she had a hi-fi there, he’d spin some music very low, he’d probably dim down the lights a little bit to save electricity, like I’m going to get one of those bumper stickers once this damn election’s over and take the damn McGinley stickers off and put on Conserve Water. Shower With a Friend. It breaks me up. All right, he gets waited on in the liquor store and off he goes with his bottle of booze and a specialty liqueur he bought, whistling and singing up the street and smelling that steak in his nose and dimming down the lights in his mind afterward when . . . bang . . . smash. Guess what?”
“He dropped the bottle,” Lala said. “Don’t make me guess. Go on. Talk. Tell me the rest, I’m dying of suspense. He got hit by a car. He met his wife.”
“Wrong on all counts,” said James. “You’re a terrific listener but a lousy guesser. This fellow, what’s his name?”
“Dick Richards,” she said.
“. . . approaches the building when he realizes he doesn’t know her apartment number. Doesn’t know what floor it’s on. Doesn’t know which way it even faces. Doesn’t know her last name, and doesn’t know her first name, either, and doesn’t know anybody back at the office party that would. He looks up at the Fox Plaza. Windows, windows, windows, and somewhere in one of those windows a chick is broiling a steak for him and panting for the booze he’s bringing under his arm, and he hasn’t got one tiny little faintest chance in the world of finding out which is her window.”
“Did he ever find her?”
“Never.”
“What did he do?” Lala asked.
“Killed himself,” said James. “Ran right out in Market Street and let himself get hit by a trolley.”
“Jim told me a funny story,” said Lala to her mother, setting the tea tray on the coffee table.
“Why aren’t you laughing?” Iris asked.
“I smiled,” said Lala.
“It wasn’t exactly funny,” said James. “It was a story of monumental frustration.” He felt Iris’s eyes accusingly upon him. This fat dame knew plenty. Well, it was only experience; she had a few kitchen memories herself, of that you may be sure. But James was guiltless, and he looked her square in the eye. He was in command of himself. He had recovered control. His body, his pulse, his breath had slowed, his hands were steady, his mouth had regained its proper moist climate. But his sweat was dry and smelled a bit; at his first opportunity he’d be lavish with himself, break open a new cologne, Royall Lyme or Royall Spice today, that’s the sort of mood he was in.
At this point Paprika thought to join the group at luncheon. He bathed the cheese and the beef with his tongue, and then he rested his jaws on the edge of the coffee table, waiting for either rebuke or sanction. He had forgotten the rules. But Iris remembered them, and she said, “Scram, dog, make yourself scarce,” rapping his nose with a celery stalk.
“The whole day began with Paprika,” said Lala, clutching him by the skin of his neck and pointing his head away from the table, shooing him off, she hoped, in another direction. But Paprika was hungry, and he shook himself loose from her grasp, plunging back to the table against Lala’s resistance, his jaws wide. It was a contest, and in the melee he seized the flesh of Lala’s right forearm, perhaps by accident, for he was instantly contrite, remembering with certainty that this was a rule — not biting people (he had once bitten Catherine in the face) — running with sunken tail to the corner of the room, where he lay against the base of the wall, as if to merge himself with it, and disappear. “He bit me,” cried Lala. “My arm.”
“Kill that dog,” her mother said.
“It’s only a scratch,” said Lala. “He didn’t mean it.”
“Didn’t mean it,” Iris said. “It doesn’t matter if he meant it or not. How do we know what a dog means? You’ll get hydrophobia.”
“The skin’s not broken,” Lala said.
“Call the police,” said Iris.
“Everything’s the police with you,” said Lala.
“That’s what they’re for,” said Iris, examining Lala’s arm from wrist to elbow, and then, for some strange reason, examining Lala’s other arm; if Lala had two of anything Iris examined them both. Her skin was unbroken, although a white scratch extended six inches along her forearm. “That dog has got to go,” said Iris. “Poison him,” she said, looking to Brown for support. “Mercury is good. Tell Harold somebody dropped some mercury and he lapped it up. The next thing you know you’ll be paying two hundred dollars for dog surgery so some doctor can open up the dog’s stomach and find your ear. Did you read about that in your newspaper, Mr. Brown?”
“I wrote the headline,” Brown said.
“Have him put to sleep. Shoot him. I don’t care what you do, but do something before somebody really gets hurt.” She was red with fury, agitated beyond her ability to contain herself without motion. Therefore she rose and strode back and forth across the room, her heart laboring hard beneath the triple burden of fear, fury, and weight. Her breath came short, and she sat down again.
The astronauts, too, were breathing with difficulty. For several seconds they returned to the screen. Apparently, however, the television monitor had admitted them by mistake, for they were shortly taken away again, and Cronkite appeared upon the screen. Although, to Brown’s view, the astronauts seemed to have been suffering, Cronkite’s report was reassuring. “Cronkite’s looking grave,” Brown said. “There’s a certain look he gets when he’s scared, when something’s going wrong. Something is going wrong. Today is going to be the end of something.”
“I hope you’ll all pardon me,” said James Berberick, “but I must be racing back to the office. That was a very good lunch, Lala, I feel a million times better.” This was true. He was restored. His passion had diminished. He had never seen reported in the studies of sexual activity the phenomenon he observed in himself — that hunger increased desire. He had noticed in his military career, too, that he had killed most thoroughly on an empty stomach. “I hope I see you all soon again,” he said, confident now that he was superior to his compulsions, that he could drive swiftly and directly from here to the Chronicle without distraction. He’d easily see the afternoon through. And then, tonight, on his own time, without jeopardizing his good job, he’d prowl if he must, or indulge himself in a beautiful massage somewhere, or perhaps return here (his heart fluttered at the thought) and swap yarns again with Lala, keep her company in view of her husband’s being off to the bowling wars; get together here with the gang at Yukon & Eagle, Lala and her mother, her husband, Brown, and Brown’s wife. “This is a great neighborhood,” he said.
Lala joined him at the front door. On the doorknob their hands by accident met, and she inhaled him one final time. “I appreciate the super-service the Chronicle is giving me,” she said.
“I’ll cancel the ad,” he said, “but it’ll run in tomorrow’s paper, so you’ll get billed anyhow. That’s the breaks.”
Tomorrow’s paper! It would be historic indeed, banner headline by Brown, McGinley dead, astronauts dead, and one small obsolete classified advertisement for Paprika, already found.
“Can’t be helped,” said Lala. “Will you bring me the bill personally? Just give me a little jingle first.”
“I might do that,” he said, but actually he felt above it; he was subdued, he was calm, he was cool, he had triumphed over the wild beast within him. Watch him now return straight to his desk!
Eight
Leaving Lala’s house, James Berberick turned his head once to remember it. We Are A Girl Scout Family. Anyhow, he’d remember it without clues. He was no dunce like the dunce
at Fox Plaza. None of that for him. He wouldn’t throw himself in front of trolley cars. He’d masturbate in the street. He’d once done that, too, under absurd conditions of frustration, stupidly on a still night by the light of a lamppost on Liberty Street, and been in the midst of the act when a householder — a man, a gentleman perhaps — came running at him shouting “Silk for sale, silk for sale,” or so it sounded, whereupon James wheeled and ran down Liberty Street into the dark, his penis falling from erection to flaccidity by the force of fright, poor James running, and the gentleman calling, “Silk for sale,” which James puzzled over for many months, putting it together, and believing finally that the man had been shouting not “Silk for sale” but “Filth, for shame,” as perhaps it was, although it might have been something else. But there was no danger now of his forgetting this house, its number, its street, or the name of this lady, either. Those crucial things he never forgot — the names of girls, the names of women, the numbers of their houses, their telephone numbers, and their husbands’ hours when relevant. With the same keenness he remembered the names and addresses and telephone numbers and singular characteristics of every friendly massage parlor or studio, too, and the wonderful names of the wonderful masseuses who managed them. He would have been capable, had anyone asked him, of reciting them alphabetically, or by district, whether Sunset or Mission, North Beach or Marina, cruising the city of his mind. But no one ever asked him. Would that such a position offered itself!
