The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels

by De Vries, Peter

  “Yeh-heh-heh,” Lumpkin laughed nervously. He pinched his large red nose and gazed down at the carpet. At the end of a pause intended by Tattersall to enable what he was saying to sink in, Lumpkin looked up again, to find Tattersall staring at his cranium. Lumpkin gave him the sort of smile meant to humor a dangerous man. “Uh—”

  “Or if we want to go into complete surrealism, as we probably will later, once we’ve educated the public this far—more doctors drink Kickola than any other soft drink. The two have no connection whatever, you see. Why is it a recommendation for a soda pop that doctors drink it? It isn’t. There’s a balmy irrelevance to it that gets the audience with us right away. The entire series will be like that,” Tattersall told him firmly. “They will be all non sequiturs, every last bleeding goddamned—”

  “Yeah, I …” Though the response was affirmative in nature, Lumpkin shook his head as he muttered it, like a dazed boxer picking himself up off the floor. He seemed to have buckled under the remorseless rain of complexities to which he had been subjected. After hearing out several more sample Dadaist plugs, he said he liked the idea very much but that there were difficulties. “It’s very literate. There’s no doubt about that. One of the most far-out I’ve ever heard. But there’s a twofold problem. It needs the right product as well as the right show. Leaving aside whether Kickola’s the right product, yes or no—let’s give the benefit of the doubt and say yes—it still needs the right show. And I think you’ll admit that not by any stretch of the imagination will it fit this kind of program I have in mind. You couldn’t throw sophisticated commercials into a Street Singer.”

  “You really intend to do that?”

  “Yes. The more I think of it the better I like it. I’ve talked myself into it tonight. I think the time is ripe, right now, for a revival of that kind of show. Or variation of it. And you may think me crazy, but you know what? I can see you in it.”

  “In what?”

  “The Street Singer.”

  “Why couldn’t I sing the songs in the bathtub. That’s my bag. I do it all the time. And the acoustics are terrific. The Bathtub Tenor.”

  “It wouldn’t have enough mobility. It would be too confining. Plus you can’t show a man in the bathtub on television.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “But the other way, yes. I have hunches about those things.” Lumpkin laughed again. He had recovered his good humor. His eyes sparkled as he appraised Tattersall. “But I’d want a natural voice—untrained, the way a primitive painter is untrained. That’s essential. So don’t go taking any lessons on me, Hank.”

  “There’s no danger of that.”

  “It wouldn’t kill you to try it on for size at one of the studios,” Lumpkin said. “And give me a buzz if you get any more adult commercials.”

  Eight

  Tattersall was hammering out a black commercial. “Do you hate your very guts? Have you got a bellyful of those insides, winding in and out of one another down there in a manner for which there is no excuse, getting your excretory and reproductive organs entangled in one of the great booboos of evolution? Are you nauseated with the very universe, in, and to, whose vast, drowned depths the finest idea is no more than the entrails themselves, as the late Justice Holmes suggested? Have you, along with the late Isak Dinesen, come to see man as an exquisite instrument for converting vintage claret into urine? Do you see us as no more than a swarm of maggots proliferating a moment in ‘an old chaos of the sun,’ as the late Wallace Stevens put it? Late, late, they’re all late! Do you wish you were late yourself? Dead and done with the whole stinking fraud …”

  This commercial had already run to fourteen pages—roughly between forty-five hundred and five thousand words—and the end was not yet in sight. Not nearly. It would be a half-hour program in itself, interspersed with interruptions of one or two minutes of music, reversing the customary pattern. He wanted a prime time-slot for it, such as Sunday night either just preceding or directly following Ed Sullivan, with an actor of some authority reading it, like Morris Carnovsky (certainly, since his devastating Lear, one’s first choice). The sponsor was not too important, but it might be the makers of PeptoBismol, since the emphasis was upon nausea and disgust. Their alacrity in rhyming the name of the product with “dismal” indicated the necessary resilience and maturity.

  Tattersall had finished the fifteenth page and now screwed in the sixteenth.

  “Do you think a man’s retch should exceed his gasp?” he hammered out. “Do you sometimes think you’d like to cut out this meandering tripe with that Japanese souvenir knife your Aunt Susie—”

  He saw Wurlitzer galloping down the hall toward his office door and quickly twisted the paper in the roller so what he had written was invisible. He managed to slip the rest of the manuscript into a desk drawer and slide it casually shut as Wurlitzer entered.

  “Hello, Hank. I want to show you a pilot layout for a new series we’re really keen about.” Wurlitzer was carrying a portfolio. He set it down on the desk, and was about to open it when he turned to take Tattersall in more closely. “Christ, you look like something the cat dragged in. What’s the matter?”

  “My liver. It keeps secreting unmitigated gall.”

  “Yeah, well, nothing better than good old Carter’s little pills. God, you do look like you’ve been pulled through a hedge backwards all right. Been working too hard?” Wurlitzer glanced down at the paper in the typewriter. In the three weeks since the party, Tattersall had had one more “are you sick of” accepted, but it had been written before the party. Since then he had entered a new period. While, admittedly, a note of pessimistic bitterness had crept into his stuff, it had also, he thought, grown in depth and resonance. “I’m sorry Lumpkin didn’t cotton to the idea,” Wurlitzer now said for the third or fourth time.

  “It doesn’t fit in with this Street Singer show he wants to do.”

  “No, I can see it doesn’t. I told you he was sharp as a tack. Look at this.”

  The series of which Wurlitzer spread out a rough mockup on Tattersall’s desk was one Mayo had whipped up on spec for an airline client. The central theme was a humorous, sophisticated play on the use of jet planes as a way of getting to primitive countries for relaxed holidays in a low key. One layout, which set the self-twitting tone, showed a toothless yokel grinning invitingly beside an ass-drawn vehicle of rude construction, over a caption reading, “Like to ride donkey carts? Get aboard one of our Boeing Super 707’s. We’ll have you on one before you know it.” And so on. You were to take advantage of space travel to come by its welcome reverse, in lands where the tempo hadn’t changed since the days of the Roman Empire, or even those of Belshazzar.

  “That adult?” Wurlitzer said, beaming. “That an adult idea?”

  “It’s great,” Tattersall said. “How did she ever get it?

  “God only knows. Who knows how those brainstorms hit you, what puts these bees in your bonnet? But the thing is, I wanted you to be one of the first to see it, because she’s a student of yours. You can take a certain amount of pride in her.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Well, she’s coming along fine.”

  The only way for Tattersall to behave, after the client snapped it up, was in an adult fashion. Which meant, to say nothing. And what was there to say? If he hadn’t sensed an advertising campaign in what he himself was running on about, that was nobody’s funeral but his own. It certainly wasn’t Mayo’s. If she had the wit to spot its potential, so much the better for her. Could you say she had stolen the idea any more than Tattersall had stolen the idea he was working on from his wife, just because he had happened to see her light up a cigarette under certain circumstances? That he couldn’t get his off the ground was not her fault.

  He avoided her around the office, guiltily skirting corridors in which she might be encountered, slipping shamefacedly out to lunch at hours he knew would not coincide with hers. He would stand behind the now permanently closed door of his office and, his ear to the c
rack, listen for her in the hall. He could recognize her tread, as he could that of Wurlitzer and almost everyone of importance, and her whispering voice too. She often went out to lunch with a gay little group which included Crowley, the head of the copy department, and an older woman named Kay Corcoran, who was in charge of photography and photographic layouts. She worked in close touch with both of them now. Tattersall could sometimes hear them talking about finalizing things, or firming them up. Once about a piece of text for which someone was proposed who could subtle it up.

  When glutted by these corruptions of the English language he would speed by cab to those bars where now it seemed to him to be spoken in something more like its purer form, and where he would resume his sagas to all who would listen, if only a barkeeper nodding mechanically as he wiped his glasses.

  “So I says listen, wise ass, I wouldn’t say dat last remark was very prudent wisdom-wise. Unless what you want is a little knuckle pie I says, revolving my fist suggestively under his kisser, if you know what I mean …”

  These were not the Third Avenue taverns discovered and taken up by white-collar professionals pouring out of Gabardinesville at high noon and six o’clock. No. These lay in the other direction from Madison and Fifth, the far west side where they were to be found among warehouses and trailer-truck garages, just short of the dense, polyphonic clutter of the river docks. There one also roosted at lunch counters where one ordered directly in the jargon in which the waitresses passed one’s wishes on into the kitchen. “Fried two sunnyside I guess, Maisie, and a pair down, no b.” Or, “I’ll have a b.l.t. on white toast, hold the mayo.”

  Back in his office, he worked on the commercial with his door shut. He felt it to be flowing beautifully. “Are you sick of being tired and tired of being sick? Get a bottle of those sedatives the French make in suppository form. Your friendly neighborhood druggist will tell you what you can do with them. A dozen should be about right.” That was his ending. And, having that, he could work on the rest of it with confidence and leisure, giving himself his head. It was already ten thousand words, and he felt he could go on for another ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred thousand. It was only a question of how much time he had.

  For Tattersall knew that his days were numbered here. The very extent to which he was let be proved it. No one asked to see copy any more, because they all knew the axe was going to fall, sooner or later, and till it did he was indulged. Wurlitzer he seldom saw, Wise he never had. Maybe Wise didn’t even exist, except as an abstract or symbolic personification of the tedious latter-day suffix. (Tattersall could never forgive Dylan Thomas for using it in one of the most haunting lines he ever wrote: “Altar-wise by owl-light in the halfway-house.”)

  But though he was indulged, he did not indulge himself. He now lashed himself to work as never before. He wasted not a minute of the company’s time (in contrast to the agency stars who loafed away hours of it) but got there at ten on the dot and left on the stroke of six, with strictly an hour for lunch and no more. Between times, he stayed at his desk and sweat blood over the commercial. He sweat blood over it simply because it was no use. It became a point of honor with him. Standards hopelessly adhered to are by that very token more to be commended than those pursued in the hope of gain. Indeed, his very failure validated him as an exponent of futility, especially in this game. “I stink, therefore I am”—how much more convincing a self-postulation is that than its Cartesian original, involving, as it does, evidence so much more palpable to one’s fellowmen than mere cogitation. Corroboration is wrung from them.

  So Tattersall gave the doomed job his best while he had it, after which it would be a question of what he would do next—and how long.

  For he sensed that the trend of his life was irreversibly downward, and that each decline would occur in a progressively shorter cycle He couldn’t have said why, he simply had a hunch. He saw his life as a narrowing spiral, precipitated toward a point unknown but preordained by fate. Funnel-shaped, like a whirlwind or waterspout. Or put another way, the story of his life was like a book with ever shorter chapters, spinning him giddily toward its conclusion. He did not know what his end would be, or where or when, only that his failure would be flamboyant. It would possess an eloquence alien to the monochromes of achievement all around him.

  One morning during the week of Thanksgiving he was taking a coffee break in a restaurant in the arcade of the building where he worked, called the Ad Lib. He was alone. In the booth behind him, Crowley, the copy head, was sitting with two or three other klatschers. Mayo was not one of them. She never went down for coffee. Unaware of Tattersall’s presence, they were gossiping about him.

  “Harry seems to think he’s a one-shot,” Crowley said. “Not that he’s gotten anywhere even with that idea. It’s not jelling. It’s laying an egg. Which leaves him a noneshot.”

  “He probably belongs on a campus,” Kay Corcoran said. “So they’re really thinking of letting him go? I understand they had a kind of six-months’ trial period in mind, which is about up.”

  “At the end of the year, yes. Harry says trial is the word for it, too. For everyone.” They laughed. “He says he doesn’t mind handing out these fellowships now and then to the ivory tower boys, but they have to come through, and they can’t go on indefinitely. You can only go so far supporting intellectuals.”

  It was then that Tattersall resolved he must grasp the initiative himself, by executing some gesture that would show he could not be fired—he was quitting. But what kind of gesture? One that would combine in his exit a dignity of style with a content of meaningful protest. He racked his brains in vain for the answer. A last check with a little severance pay and a notice that his services were no longer required seemed the lusterless and bathetic end that awaited him here. It was just around the corner, for the holidays were approaching fast. It was the sight ofdecorations going up around the office that made him suddenly remember something.

  He had for a long time heard about the Christmas custom at Double W. How Wurlitzer played Santa Claus with the annual bonuses by entering an improvised stage in uniform, dropping his sack before the lighted tree, and drawing from it bags containing the employees’ checks, reading the names aloud and flinging them to each in turn. There were probably a few gold pieces, or some other ballast, in them to bolster the resemblance to pouches of treasure.

  He recalled the instinctive distaste he had experienced when first hearing of this rite, long before coming to work here. Now his repugnance increased. Nor could he see how an underling in the corporation could fail to share it. He made a few tactful but probing inquiries, and learned that most of them did. They resented being treated like feudal serfs, having what was their due tossed to them as sops by the lord of the manor. But what could they do? He was the Boss, and clearly relished the role, which swelled his own ego in total, even though perhaps understandable, oblivion to what it was doing to theirs. The results of his canvass convinced Tattersall what he ought to do on their behalf, by way of valedictory—or rather by way of making his valedictory count—but he doubted whether he would have the courage. As saints were said to go slightly out of their minds in order to consummate acts of self-immolation, he would have to go slightly out of his.

  There was certainly no want of Dutch courage at the office party in question. Everyone was well oiled by the time for the ritual—which was probably why they didn’t mind it any more than they did. A bell rang, causing voices abruptly to stop and silence to reign. Wurlitzer popped from behind a drawn curtain, bent under his bag and shouting, “Ho-ho-ho!” An avuncular self-satisfaction was discernible underneath the silver whiskers. Tattersall stole a glance at Mayo, to whom he had so far managed not to speak. She stood with folded arms in the crowd, her face expressionless. He wondered whether Wurlitzer had a pillow stuffed into his costume, and if so, whether it was a bed pillow or a sofa cushion. He wanted to laugh, and yet he was also sweating. He took a nervous gulp from the glass of nearly straight bourbon in his hand. He ha
d certainly drunk more than enough, but whether it was steeling him or not he was at a loss to know.

  “Overton!” Wurlitzer called out. “Pembroke! Matthews! Crowley!’” digging the little sacks from his bag and flinging one to each in turn. He had apparently located their positions with notable accuracy beforehand, perhaps by peeking through the curtain.

  Tattersall emptied his glass and set it down on a windowsill. Perspiration covered his brow, and ran in rivulets down his ribs. His cheeks were flushed. The hot room swam in a mist.

  At last he heard his name called. “Tattersall!”

  A bag sailed through the air toward him. It went over his head, so that he had to make a leap to catch it, like an outfielder snaring a high one against the left-field wall. There was a burst of laughter at this. He held it a moment in his hand. For a second he hesitated. His courage was failing him. He couldn’t act. A kind of paralysis had overcome him. Then a cherished vision flashed into his mind—Christ beating the be-Jesus out of the money changers. But even that could not motivate him. The inspiration wasn’t right. It was not self-destructive enough. He had another. Samson willing to bury himself in the ruins of the temple in order to bring it down upon the heads of the Philistines. He drew back his arm, held it cocked for a split second, and hurled the bag back at Santa Claus. It caught him squarely on the right ear before landing on the floor with a flat, deflating smack, like a beanbag someone had dropped in a game of catch.

  Nine

  Lumpkin walked the floor of the conference room with his hands in his hip pockets. Two television network executives whom he had flown in from Chicago to consult, on getting Tattersall’s long-distance telephone call, wore the same expression of thought as his. One, a man named Bester who was a producer, sat with his lower lip thrust forward, while a director called Kohler tapped his chin with his fingertips and stared at a wall. They were trying to decide whether Tattersall should be a peanut vendor or sell flowers from a cart. They wanted some such occupation, with its aura of honest labor, to lend dimension to his image, even though it would be mainly that of street singer.