by Daniel Klein
A few feet away, a tall baby-faced man with a full crop of khaki-colored hair, is waving enthusiastically at Digby. Digby knows who it is: President Miles “Kim” Herker, himself. It would be impossible not to recognize him; the man’s image is virtually everywhere in Louden: on the cover of every college publication, including the hand-out map of the campus; virtually every week on the front page of the local weekly; and—Mao-like—on posters affixed to walls and trees announcing meetings, lectures, and even sports events. Along with his face, Herker’s reputation—especially among faculty members—precedes him. To put it delicately, he is better known for his ability to raise money from alums than for his ability to think in anything resembling a linear modality, not that Digby was ever naïve enough to believe that these two aptitudes were in any way related.
Digby walks up to him and offers his hand. “I’m Digby Maxwell, the new editor—”
Herker grabs Digby’s hand and yanks him toward his going-to-flab, former-football-player chest. “Hell, I know who you are, Mr. Maxwell. Everybody does. You’re our new celebrity.”
He gives Digby a couple of good raps on the back before releasing him and Digby is relieved, having feared there was going to be some of that new, manly cheek kissing.
“Hardly a celebrity,” Digby demurs, working up an ‘aw-shucks’ expression on his brow.
“Maybe not in big bad New York,” Herker laughs. “But up here in Louden, you’re the max.”
“That’s certainly something I’ve always wanted to be,” Digby replies, doing a little boyish chortling himself.
“What’s that?”
“The max,” Digby says. He gets the feeling this conversation is not going well so he segues with, “Speaking of which, early spring up here is lovely.”
“You said it, Maxwell,” President Herker says, placing a fleshy hand on his shoulder. “Springtime in Louden is enough to make an old man’s sap run.”
Clearly, Digby’s resolve to rid himself of all Manhattan snobbery is being tested. Sorely. He decides that his best option is to move on as quickly as possible, and he sees an opportunity to excuse himself gracefully in the form of a diminutive, tightly-corseted redhead with sumptuous lips who has sauntered up to Herker.
“Well, I don’t want to monopolize you, Mr. Herker,” Digby says, nodding toward the redhead and feinting to Herker’s left. Digby is pleased that his grasp of cocktail party choreography is still intact.
“Please call me Kim. And don’t be running away now—I want you to get to know my little Muffy.”
“Your muffy, sir?”
Herker swings a meaty arm around the pinched waist of the redhead. “Muffy’s one of your biggest fans,” he says.
“I am a New Yorker moi-même,” Muffy says, winking at Digby. “I slip back down to the Big Apple whenever my lord and master isn’t looking.”
Digby shakes little Muffy’s hand; it is moist and limp. She is searching his face, looking, he believes, for traces of exoticism, perhaps a sign that he is the real thing—a New York Jew.
“That’s a long schlep,” Digby says obligingly. Lenny Bruce once quipped, “If you live in New York and you’re Catholic, you’re still Jewish.”
“I am so glad to finally meet you, Mr. Maxwell,” Muffy says. “I have a little favor I’ve been dying to ask you and now I finally can.”
“No harm in asking,” Digby replies.
“We have a little group that meets on Thursday mornings. We call it the Thursday Morning Club. And we would be enchanté if you would be our guest next week. Our invité d’honneur.”
“Sure, I guess so. What would be expected of me?”
Muffy issues a vaguely coquettish smile. “Oh, just be yourself,” she says.
“That can be chancy,” Digby replies. “I have multiple personality disorder.”
This occasions a veritable howl of mirth from the first lady of Louden College. Her husband, who appears to have had the same amount of difficulty following their little tête-à-tête as Digby has, starts chortling too. Digby’s guess is that Kim Herker has generally found it expedient to follow his wife’s lead; among other virtues, it makes him appear more quick-witted.
“All this wonderful laughter! I should have guessed you’d be at the center of it, Digby.” This from Felicia Hastings who has sidled up beside Digby, her silver-haired lawyer a discrete two steps behind her.
Felicia merits a double bear hug from Herker but, Digby observes, only a coolish handshake from his missus, while the Silver Fox merely garners a polite nod from each. From somewhere beyond the Administration Building patio come the strains of “I Am What I Am” in quaint, close harmonies more in keeping with ’N Sync than Gloria Gaynor. Undoubtedly the gay choir.
“How lovely,” Felicia says. “I heard we were going to have some light entertainment.”
Herker gives a shrug that says, in effect, ‘Nothing I could do about it’ and Digby takes this opportunity to finally slip away, but not before Muffy does an elaborate pantomime in his direction, a dumb show of a phone call—to be from her to him, he presumes.
After a few steps, Digby gazes around, considering his options. Straight ahead he sees Elliot Goldenfield, sporting a seersucker suit and, of all things, white buck shoes. Digby is now convinced that Elliot has an identity problem even more confused than his own. To his right, Digby sees Winny in a diaphanous peasanty number holding court at the center of a group of male junior faculty members. Digby is pleased by her popularity; he also feels relieved by it. He skirts around her group observing that he has only been in town a few weeks and he already has a roster of people to be skirted. Actually, this realization makes him feel at home. On his left, he hears a new serenade, a rendition of Queen’s “I’m in Love with My Car.” Digby turns to face the music and that is when the floor-to-ceiling window in front of him shatters.
He jumps back just in time to dodge the projectile that did the shattering—a Coors beer bottle—and a light rain of glass shards. A hush followed by screams. Kim Herker charges up beside Digby. For a second, Digby suspects that Herker believes he broke the window himself, and the fact that Digby is pointing at the beer bottle at his feet only supports Herker’s hunch. But now, beyond the jaggedly open window, they see a swarm of young people. Two swarms, actually. One is the lavender T-shirted serenaders, the other a more motley group T-shirt-wise—some of these varsity team T-shirts, others, “Young Republicans” T-shirts, still others, “Tea Party Republicans” T-shirts, and then the cutest of the lot, “Beer Party Republicans” T-shirts picturing Uncle Sam quaffing down a can of Bud Lite. This non-gay swarm appears to have a big tent policy, including in their number blazer-clad preppies, jocks, some gangly, Louden day students, and a few earnest Christians of the sort that Jeremiah Louden would have surely approved, two of them actually holding Bibles at their sides. A good number of this more loosely associated pack have glazed, beer-besotted eyes as a common denominator.
Digby trusts that President Herker has little doubt which group is responsible for the broken window. Both groups are frozen in their tracks. It is at this moment that Digby spots Reverend Mary out there, standing beside June MacLane. Digby notes that Mary is wearing one of those lavender T-shirts herself, hers emblazoned with the legend, “Do you know WHAT your child is?” Digby consoles himself by recalling her stated allegiance to the two-gender modality.
The Rite of Spring guests have gathered just behind Herker and Digby, most still clinging to their martini glasses. With amazing grace, Herker stoops down and worms his hulk through the broken window onto the lawn. For reasons that Digby cannot begin to fathom, he worms through after Herker.
“Whoever did this, step forward,” Herker says in a surprisingly temperate yet authoritative tone. Digby immediately takes back every patronizing thought he had about Herker; this man is a leader of men, something Digby believes he would have been if he had managed to become a totally different person.
No one, however, steps forward, although there is a lot
of shifty-eyed eye shifting in the bleary-eyed Beer Party Republican contingent. A few of them now issue some nasal snickering, culminating in an anonymous yelp of, “Musta been one of the fudge packers!” This witticism elicits a few baritone guffaws. And that is when Digby spots another beer bottle aloft.
As if in TV instant replay, Digby watches the bottle sail through the air in slow motion, reach its peak, and arc downward. It is headed directly for the ash-blonde crown of his beloved Mary.
It should be noted here that, much to his father’s disappointment, Digby is absent athletic inclination and ability. To please his father, Digby once volunteered to be the placekick holder on the Passaic High football team, but he was dismissed after the third time he reflexively withdrew his finger before the kicker’s foot met the ball.
But love, as they say, is a drug, and in Digby’s case it is apparently adrenaline. He charges forward and leaps, Kobe-like, toppling a pair of gold star lesbians in his path and—right arm stretched high—snatches the bottle in midair. He returns to his feet at Mary’s side.
The cheer that goes up both inside the party room and out on the lawn is more than enough to make Digby wish he had followed his father’s ambitions for him. He half expects to be gathered up and hoisted atop shoulders to be paraded around the campus. Reverend Mary Bonavitacola reaches up her face to Digby’s and kisses his cheek.
“Nice catch,” she says.
“It was nothing,” Digby says, channeling the high school gridiron hero he once longed to be.
Herker then approaches Digby and gives him a muscular hug more taxing on his heart-lung package than the bottle-snag itself. In mid-hug, Herker whispers somewhat forbiddingly into Digby’s ear, “Show off!” and then gives him what used to be called in Passaic High School a noogie. Digby endures it, puzzled.
Then, abruptly, it is all over. Digby’s athletic leap had denouement written all over it. Both groups of students immediately disperse, Mary vanishing with them. ‘Whoever did this’ has not stepped forward, but nonetheless Herker, looking triumphant, clambers back inside where the floor is already being swept clean of glass. And Digby is left alone, intercepted beer bottle in hand. A stranger in town.
CHAPTER 10
When it comes to the question of Digby’s attractiveness to women, the man in question has few delusions. Digby readily acknowledges that he is not a particularly sexy fellow, never has been. He appears to have been born resolutely heterosexual and possesses a normal appetite as such, but he cannot say that women were ever especially drawn to him upon first look. He has a face that vanishes all too easily in a crowd, perhaps one reason why assuming other people’s identities comes so easily to him: doggie-brownish hair and eyes, a narrow nose that has always drifted slightly eastward, and a mouth that tends to droop open like a carp on the prowl. Neither ugly nor handsome but, if there is any plus on the visual side, decidedly male. Nay, it has been his sporadic wit and occasional well-timed gag that has lured his fair share of women into bed with him, all of them far more attractive than he. This is patently unfair, he knows: a woman as plain as he is cannot as successfully compensate in the sexual marketplace with a good joke as he can. But Digby takes no responsibility for that inequality; he did not legislate the laws of attraction.
In any event, this helps explain his reluctance to work on that part of himself that habitually takes nothing seriously: that part is the mother of his wit. And his wit got him bedmates.
Dr. Epstein, who a few generations back would have been a far better rabbi than he is now a psychiatrist, found Digby’s dilemma existential in its proportions. He believed Digby needed to give his basic, serious self a chance to reemerge and to this end he put him in group therapy—Epstein’s theory being that once Digby saw his superficial self on display in front of a sensitive audience, he would see the wisdom in dropping his wiseass façade.
It was not to be so. In fact, from Epstein’s point of view, it worked out ass backwards, in a manner of speaking. On the other hand, it did change the course of Digby’s life.
At the time of his first group session, Digby was on his third job, employed as a copy editor at Food Stylist magazine, correcting the grammar and remodeling the syntax of writers who saw a porcelain plate as a canvas on which to aesthetically balance the daring swoop of a charred wisp of shallot with the blatant thereness of a broiled sea scallop. The utter absurdity of the whole enterprise worked to Digby’s advantage—it was inherently beyond the scope of his irony. That and the fact that he was sequestered in a freestanding, opaque glass cubicle kept him from peppering his coworkers with his reflexive wiseass-isms. Epstein saw the job as a step in the right direction; Digby saw it as a step to oblivion.
Digby’s first thought on taking his place at the circle of bridge chairs and glancing at his co-therapees was that he wished he had worn a snappier-looking shirt. Upon virtually every other chair was perched a good-looking woman, albeit a sad-eyed and joyless one.
“Have I come to the right room?” he said deadpan. “I’m looking for the Welcome Wagon Pep Squad.”
Laughter. Oodles of it.
Epstein then got the session rolling by asking Karen—she of golden ringlets and dolorous grey eyes—how her week had gone. Not well at all, as it turned out. She had endured a two-hour conversation with her mother in New Haven on the subject of body stockings. Digby is now a little hazy on the details, but the New Haven mom saw them as a sign of the era’s moral decay. Epstein asked Karen what she thought the conversation was really about, but the poor girl drew a blank, so Epstein threw it open for general discussion.
The young woman next to Digby ventured, “It sounds like your mother thinks body stockings are provocative. You know, like you are just inviting men to hit on you. She just doesn’t know, you know?”
A sparkling analysis, Epstein said. Anyone else?
The handsomest man in the room, a chiseled-featured fellow in his early thirties, offered, “I’m thinking of scary stuff. Like a stocking over your face like in the Boogeyman.”
Epstein asked him to develop his idea further, but Handsome responded rather gruffishly that he thought his film allusion spoke for itself.
Anyone else?
“You know, Karen, I’m trying to see this from your mother’s point of view, so I need to get an idea of what she herself would look like in a body stocking,” Digby said earnestly.
Epstein eyed him warily, but Karen, the poor sweetie, smiled. “Not so good,” she murmured. “Her thighs, you know?”
“So in a body stocking she’d look like hog shanks in pajamas,” Digby said with just the hint of a twinkle in his doggie-brownish eyes.
No one would need to advise Digby that his quip was wit-free. It was sixth grade repartee. It doesn’t even make much sense. Digby knew that then and he knows it now. But he also knew from long experience that the word ‘pajamas’ is funny; it simply has a funny sound that makes people laugh, which is exactly what it did in that group therapy session. Raucous, bent-over-at-the-waist laughter.
In that instant Digby made two luminous observations. First, this group of sad sacks was the easiest audience he had ever encountered. So woe were they that any opportunity to express a little mirth was manna from heaven. A clown hat would have been enough to do the trick. It actually helped that they were impounded there for the sole purpose of doing some serious work on their sorrowful innards; that somehow excused and legitimatized a little merriment.
Digby’s second observation was that his sex life was about to take a dramatic upturn.
It most certainly did, including amorous encounters with roughly half of the women in the group. (It should be noted that Digby’s material improved considerably as the weeks went by.) But that in itself certainly does not qualify as life-changing in any long term sense. What does was Digby’s stunning insight a few months later that group therapy was the best damned pickup bar in New York City.
For the first time in his adult life, Digby took one of his Manhattan cultural i
nsights seriously and so proceeded to write an article about this therapy-qua-pickup-bar phenomenon—wrote it at a single sitting, no less. Shamelessly, he even quoted his “hog shanks in pajamas” line as an example of how low the threshold of wit could be and still allow the therapee to get lucky. Then Digby mailed the article off to The Village Voice where they accepted it in two days’ time and then published it on page three under the headline, “Group Sex.” It got mail, lots of it.
Phil Winston phoned Digby soon thereafter. He wanted to know if Digby had any other ideas for articles for the Voice. Digby rattled half a dozen off the top of his head, most of them involving the sexual habits of his age group, but also including such topics as how basketball slang creeps into Wall Street jargon, why the belt, as we know it, is heading for obsolescence, and how illegal aliens from Chile have cornered the sushi sous chef market. Two days later, Phil offered Digby a staff job. He took it. And thus did his estimable career as a wiseass prophet begin and flourish.
For obvious reasons, the publication of his article also marked the conclusion of his therapy, both private and group.
CHAPTER 11
For the past three weeks, Digby has been serene bordering on beatific. Mary and he have lunched twice again on Moroccan fare, jabbering and laughing while purportedly going over drafts of her article about the Eternal Now. No, they have not smooched; in truth, they have barely touched except for lingering handshakes at the church door. But this, too, is at one with Digby’s heartsease. He feels they are courting and he feels courtly, a man of grace and deep feeling. He remains sanguine that he is remaking himself into someone worthy of her.
Paradoxically, Digby’s new chasteness has turned him into a more tolerant—even enthusiastic—reader and occasional editor of Sylvia’s online serial baud-fest, The Unmade Bed. He reads it daily now, often with genuine twinges of parental pride, admiring such phrases as “His body had a musty odor, somewhere between the perfume of an overused bath towel and refried beans.” And, “It was not so much a climax as a presumed outcome.” My little girl! He often emails her his compliments, occasionally along with an idea for an editorial tweak, and she writes back, “Thnx” or sometimes even, “Thnx D.” Digby likes to think that “D” stands for Dad.
