Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics)

by Richard Yates

  “Dear?” Janice said when they were alone that night, and at first he thought it might be about Blomberg and Borg, but it wasn’t. “I’ve been looking through some of the AA leaflets – That doesn’t upset you, does it?”

  “Course not.”

  “The thing is, they say it’s often helpful for a member’s wife or husband to go along to the meetings, and I was wondering if – I mean I’d really like to. Especially the one you told me about, where the man said he’d rather light one candle than curse the darkness.”

  “Well, I don’t know, I – okay. Sure.”

  They were climbing the stairs to the loft before it struck him that he might well be called on to speak tonight; and toward the end of the meeting Tony’s index finger swung straight at his face.

  “I see a man back there’s been with us a few times lately; want to say a few words, sir?”

  Blood beat in his ears all the way to the rostrum, and the voice that addressed the group through hanging veils of smoke didn’t sound like his own at all. “My name’s John and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, John!”

  “I haven’t been in the Program very long, but I’ve gone to meetings all over town and this one’s the best I’ve found. Trouble is, it’s the first time I’ve been asked to talk and that’s a little embarrassing because my wife’s here with me as a guest tonight – but what the hell, she’s seen me make a fool of myself plenty of times before.”

  There was some laughter – not much – and he wondered if it might be bad manners in this group even to hint at being securely married, or to bring any kind of “guest.”

  “I’m a salesman, and I guess I always thought heavy drinking was part of a salesman’s life. Well, that idea went down the drain a while back when I was locked up for a week in Bellevue …” He didn’t know how to finish: he heard himself saying “still scared” and “grateful” and “with your help” until he found his way through a clumsy final sentence that allowed him to say “Thank you.” He couldn’t tell if the clapping was tepid or hearty or even if it lasted until he was back in his chair, where Janice made a display of squeezing his hand.

  “You were wonderful,” she said when they were out on the street again.

  “The hell I was. All that self-pitying shit about Bellevue; all that false humility. I felt like an idiot.”

  “I thought you did very well. Besides, what does it matter? This isn’t show business, after all.”

  He almost stopped on the sidewalk to turn her around and shout that it was show business – the whole God damn “Program” was show business, from Bill Costello to Sylvester Cummings; that psychotherapy was show business too, with an inattentive, pink-eyed audience of one – but this was no night for another quarrel.

  “Oh, let’s just walk a while,” she was saying. “I love this old part of town; I don’t think I’ve been down here for years and years. Remember all the walks we used to take around here before we were married?”

  “Yup.”

  “Houston and Canal and Delancey, and we’d go to the Fulton Fish Market early in the morning, and we’d walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “Mm.”

  “That’s odd,” she said at an intersection. “This ought to be Seventh Avenue, but the sign says something else; I can’t quite make it out.”

  “I think it’s Varick Street. Turns into Seventh Avenue a few blocks uptown.”

  “You really are remarkable, John,” and she clung to his arm in an affectionate, almost flirtatious way as they turned the corner. “You know all the streets.”

  Well, no; not all; but he did happen to know a few. And well within a block of the secret cellar he saw lamplight flooding up from its clean, closed Venetian blind. Whatever Paul Borg was doing down there tonight, with whatever girl, he sure as hell wasn’t cursing the darkness.

  “Seen the Times yet?” George Taylor inquired, easing one haunch onto Wilder’s desk. “Bad news.”

  Like everything else concerning work these days it took a little while to sink in. He heard Taylor say “McCabe’s lost the Northeast account” and watched his mouth labor through many other words of supporting information. He said “Damn” because it seemed appropriate, but then he had to hang his head, pretending to think it over while he tried to puzzle out what Taylor had told him. His brains seemed filled with sand.

  Northeast Distillers was a giant of the liquor industry; through the giant advertising agency of McCabe-Derrickson they had bought the full-color back cover of The American Scientist every month for years, providing one of the mainstays of Wilder’s income, so it was indeed bad news. “And what’s the new agency again? Hartwell and who?”

  “ ‘Hartwell and Partners.’ I never heard of ’em. Prob’ly about six months old, one of these damn little ‘creative’ shops. Anyway you better get on the horn, try to set up a presentation.” And Taylor slid heavily off the desk with the look of a bewildered old man. “I just don’t get it – a staid, conservative outfit like Northeast pulling a switch like this. Whole thing’s crazy,” he said as he turned away. “Seems like now Kennedy’s in, everybody wants to be some kind of a swinger.”

  There was some confusion at the Hartwell and Partners switchboard when he asked for the Northeast account executive; he talked with several impatient voices before he found the man, whose name was Frank Lacy and who sounded less than thirty years old.

  “A ‘presentation’?” Frank Lacy said as if the very word had gone out of style – and maybe it had. “Well, I don’t see why not, Mr. Wilder. Things are fairly hectic around here now, but I think we can fit you in. Hold on a sec. How about Wednesday at ten?”

  And so he found his way to the thirty-ninth floor of a steel-and-glass tower, lugging the briefcase that contained his presentation in a sweaty hand.

  WE HATE TO PRY

  That was the heading of the big cardboard flip chart he propped on the central table of the meeting room, after making his own nervous opening remarks, and beneath it ran the words:

  That’s why The American Scientist never asks its readers what they drink, how much they drink or when they drink it. It’s all right to ask whether they hunt, fish, play tennis or golf, but a man’s communion with his favorite tipple is a private matter.…

  His audience consisted of five or six young men and three or four girls, all semi-collapsed in deep sofas and chairs; they didn’t look bored but they were hardly spellbound, and that prompted him to risk a little extemporaneous talk. “I’m supposed to read this thing aloud to you,” he said, “and I think I’m even supposed to underscore each line with my finger, but I’ll spare you that. I mean the Scientist is a great magazine but I’ve never figured out where they hire the people who write this flip-chart stuff; at least I don’t think I could get my mouth around ‘a man’s communion with his favorite tipple.’ ”

  It wasn’t a big laugh, and like Sylvester Cummings he didn’t spoil it by smiling, but it was good-natured enough to make him feel at ease, even a little jaunty, as he paged through the rest of the chart.

  Still, it seemed only reasonable that the 600,000 American Scientist readers would be as excellent a market for alcoholic beverages as they are for expensive cars, cameras, stereo components and European travel.

  To find out, we performed a simple exercise in logic. First, a profile was developed of the alcoholic-beverage industry’s prime consumer. The American Scientist reader was then compared to him. Here, feature by feature, are the results of that comparison:

  And on the final page, in twin columns, the prime consumer and the magazine’s reader turned out to be identical in every way. That page took longer to read than the others, which gave him time to glance over the pictures on the walls – much like Dr. Blomberg’s pictures except that one seemed to be a framed comic strip – and at the people, especially the girls. One wore her tan hair like Jackie Kennedy’s and had a face that made his heart turn over, but his several seconds of lust dissolved when he saw her long, slender legs: she�
�d be too damned tall.

  “Well, so much for the flip chart,” he said. “I have a few other things here to leave with you. This heavy one—” he felt like Bill Costello handing over the Big Book – “is a very thorough demographic survey called The Subscriber Self-Portrait; I hope you’ll have time to look it over. And I’d like to sum up with a few points about our average reader. He’s forty years old. He earns more than twenty thousand a year, and his work is so highly technical that you and I could never understand it. But he doesn’t read the magazine at work; he reads it at home, and he spends four hours over each issue. I don’t know what you people do when you’re spending four hours at home with a magazine, but I – well, hell, I guess I commune with my favorite tipple.”

  It was time to get offstage. “As you know, Northeast Distillers already has six of our back covers. The other six are still available, and I think you’d be making a good decision, as soon as possible, to pick them up. Thanks very much.” He shook hands with Frank Lacy and several others; then he got out fast and made for the reception room.

  “That was nice,” said a girl walking beside him. It was the girl with the face and the long legs, and the top of her head came only to his ear.

  “Well,” he said, “thanks. I always dread these damn things.”

  “That’s what made it nice. I mean I could tell you hated it, but you did it well anyway. I think everyone was impressed.” They were out in the reception room now, alone except for the receptionist who sat cuddled over her phone and murmuring seductively in what couldn’t have been a business call. “Have you seen our terrace?” the girl said. “It’s really the only nice thing about this place.”

  One panel of a glass wall slid open and she led him out onto a wide, windswept prairie of white pebbles. There were a few wrought-iron tables and chairs and a few stone benches among potted shrubs, but she took him straight to the low balustrade for a naked view of the city. To look out was spectacular; to look down was almost enough to scare the life out of him.

  “We spent most of our time out here all summer,” she was saying, “but I like it even better now.” She didn’t even seem to mind that the cold wind was spoiling her Jackie Kennedy hair, and he was already half in love with the proud, slim way she paced the pebbles – she moved like a student of modern dance – and with her big brown eyes and vivid mouth.

  “Been working here long?”

  “Just since I got out of school last June. I thought it might be fun because you get to do a little of everything, but it’s – I don’t know. You know.” And she wrinkled her nose in disdain. “It’s still advertising.”

  He asked her name – Pamela Hendricks – and when he’d tucked the whipping necktie back into his coat and tried to smooth his own flying hair he asked her out to lunch, which seemed to take her wholly by surprise.

  “Well, no, actually, I’m afraid I’m—” And the brightness vanished so quickly from her eyes that he didn’t dare say How about tomorrow? She was probably Frank Lacy’s mistress anyway (Frank Lacy was a hulking, rock-jawed, big-shouldered son of a bitch, and he remembered now that they’d sat thigh to thigh during the presentation); she might well have brought him out here on the terrace only in some girlish attempt to make Frank Lacy jealous.

  “Well. Maybe I could call you some other time.”

  “All right.”

  Then they were back in the reception room shaking hands, and he dropped thirty-nine floors in the elevator with a sense of falling back to reality.

  Less than a week later he walked into his office to answer a ringing phone and heard, “John Wilder? Frank Lacy, Hartwell and Partners. Look: are those six back covers still available?”

  “They sure are.”

  “Good. We want to pick them up; I’m sending over a contract this afternoon.”

  “Well, that’s – that’s fine.”

  “Great!” George Taylor said. “By Jesus, John, I knew you’d pull it off, if anybody could. Damn, I’d treat you to lunch if I wasn’t tied up.”

  And the word “lunch” rode happily back with him to his own desk, where he called Hartwell and Partners and asked for Pamela Hendricks.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hi, there. Congratulations.”

  “How’d you hear about that?”

  “Oh, well; word gets around.” Which probably meant Frank Lacy had mentioned it as she lay stroking his massive chest in bed.

  “I was just wondering if you’d have lunch with me today.”

  “Well that’s very nice, but actually I’m afraid I’m—”

  And this time he cut her off in mid-sentence with all the authority of a man who has nothing to lose: “Okay. How about meeting me after work, then. For a drink.”

  There was a slight pause. “All right. I’d love to.”

  But two other calls had to be made.

  “… Janice, there’s this guy on the Jaguar account flying in from London this afternoon; George wants me to take him out to dinner. No big deal; I’ll probably be done with him by ten, then I’ll hit one of the meetings … Okay … See you in the morning.”

  The second call wasn’t quite so easy. “Mr. Paul Borg, please … Paul? John. Listen: I just want to know if you’re going down to Varick Street tonight. … Okay, good. Is it clean? Sheets clean? Towels clean?… What do you mean, how’m I doing? I’m doing fine. How’re you doing? …” He took her to the Plaza in the hope of impressing her, but she’d evidently been there many times before.

  The first drink tasted so good that he let her do most of the talking while he savored it, sitting beside her and watching her profile. The tip of her small nose bobbed very slightly up and down at each syllable beginning with p, b or m, and that seemed a lovely thing for a girl’s nose to do.

  She talked about her school, a small experimental college in Vermont called Marlowe, of which he’d never heard – “I mean it’s sort of like Bennington only more so; and coeducational” – and about her father in Boston and her older brother who was an “absolute genius” at the piano, and he began to realize she was a rich girl; maybe even a very rich girl.

  “What does your father do?”

  “Oh, he’s a banker. An investment banker. Anyway …”

  And over the second or third drink she explained why she was never free for lunch: “I was – well, ‘seeing’ Frank all summer – Frank Lacy – until his marriage counsellor advised him to break it off, and he did. But we still have lunch together every day to sort of prove we’re friends. I know that sounds silly.”

  “And you’re still crazy about him.”

  She shook her head and pressed her lips tight. “No. Not really; not at all any more. I mean it seems to me that a man who lets a marriage counsellor make his decisions for him isn’t – well, isn’t much of a man. You’re married, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah; yeah, I sure am.”

  “Well, would you let some marriage counsellor talk you into – Oh, never mind. It’s too complicated.”

  During the prime-rib dinner, with wine, she complained that most of the other people at Marlowe had been “so terrifically creative – oh, I don’t mean ‘creative’ in the twerpy advertising sense; don’t get me wrong—” and she aimed her knife straight at his throat to make sure he didn’t. She meant poetry and painting and sculpture and music and dance; she meant theatre – “Everything from Sophocles to what’s-his-name, you know, Beckett – all that stuff. I was always the world’s dopiest, notalent square. Still am, in fact.”

  By the time the coffee and brandy arrived her talk had subsided and she’d begun to look at him as if through a mist of romance; then at last he had his arm close around her in a taxicab.

  “What street?” she said. “Where’s that?”

  “Just a little place I think you might like.”

  “You’re sweet, John.” And she offered up her mouth for the ritual first kiss, allowing his hand to cradle one breast as they began the long ride down Seventh Avenue.

  She was great. At least that
was the word that kept spilling from his mouth as they clung and rolled and locked and thrusted in the bed beneath the sidewalk, with the Seventh Avenue subway rumbling under the floor: “Oh, you’re great … oh, baby, you’re … oh, Jesus God, you’re great … You’re great …” She said nothing, but her gasps and moans and her long high cry at the end were enough to suggest that he’d been – well, not too bad himself.

  They lay silent for a long time afterwards while he pondered the remarkable truth that he was thirty-six years old and had never known this much pleasure with a woman before. He almost said it: You know something? I’m thirty-six years old and that’s absolutely the best I’ve ever – but he checked himself. She might laugh at such a confession, or pity him, after all her damned “creative” boys at Marlowe and a whole summer of romping with Frank Lacy. Instead he said “Pamela? How old are you?”

  “I’ll be twenty-one in February.”

  She disentangled herself, got up and walked naked across the linoleum, reminding him of the girl on the raft that weekend after Bellevue. How could any girl his size have legs like that?

  “That first door’s just the toilet,” he called after her. “The sink’s in the kitchen.”

  “Oh,” she called back, “I see. Like a French apartment.”

  So she’d been to France too – probably all over Europe, on long vacations since childhood – and as he padded to the liquor cabinet he allowed his head to fill with maddening images: Pamela shyly opening those legs for some oily nobleman at a champagne breakfast in the Bois de Bologne; Pamela delirious and clawing the back of some grunting Spanish peasant in dirty straw; Pamela sprawled and breathing “Te amo” to some Italian racing driver on an Adriatic beach …

  But soon she was back with him. He had made a couple of drinks and pulled on his pants; she was wearing an old raincoat of Paul Borg’s that she’d found in the closet, and they sat close together on the edge of the bed. “This is a cozy little place,” she said. “I hardly noticed it when we came in because I was so – you know, horny—” And it was all he could do to keep from saying Horny? Honest to God? For me? “—but it’s really sort of nice.”