Career in C Major: And Other Fiction

by James M. Cain

  I didn’t touch her. I poured two drinks, and set one beside her, and said here’s how. She kept looking out the window, and in a minute or two saw the drink, and stared at it like she couldn’t imagine what it was. That was another little sign, because Doris likes a drink as well as you do or I do, and in fact she’s got quite a talent at it, in a quiet, refined way. “… Oh no. Thanks just the same.”

  “You better have a couple, just for foundation. They’ll be plenty weak tonight, I can promise you that.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You feel bad?”

  “Oh no, it’s not that.”

  “No use wasting it then.”

  I drained mine and started on hers. She watched me spear the olive, got a wan little smile on her face, and pointed at her throat. “Oh? Bad for the voice, hey?”

  “Ruinous.”

  “I guess it would be, at that.”

  “You have to give up so many things.”

  She kept looking at me with that sad, orphan look that she always gets on her face when she’s getting ready to be her bitchiest, as though I was far, far away, and she could hardly see me through the mist, and then she went back to looking out the window. “I’ve decided to resume my career, Leonard.”

  “Well gee that’s great.”

  “It’s going to mean giving up—everything. And it’s going to mean work, just slaving drudgery from morning to night—I only pray that God will give me strength to do all that I’ll have to do.”

  “I guess singing’s no cinch at that.”

  “But—something has to be done.”

  “Yeah? Done about what?”

  “About everything. We can’t go on like this, Leonard. Don’t you see? I know you do the best you can, and that you can’t get work when there is no work. But something has to be done. If you can’t earn a living, then I’ll have to.”

  Now to you, maybe that sounds like a game little wife stepping up beside her husband to help him fight when the fighting was tough. It wasn’t that at all. In the first place, Doris had high-hatted me ever since we had been married, on account of my family, on account of my being a low-brow that couldn’t understand all this refined stuff she went in for, on account of everything she could think of. But one thing she hadn’t been able to take away from me. I was the one that went out and got the dough, and plenty of it, which was what her fine family didn’t seem to have so much of any more. And this meant that at last she had found a way to high-hat me, even on that. Why she was going back to singing was that she wanted to go back to singing, but she wasn’t satisfied just to do that. She had to harpoon me with it, and harpoon me where it hurt. And in the second place, all we had between us and starvation was the dough I had salted away in a good bank, enough to last at least three more years, and after that the house, and after that my share of the Craig-Borland Building, and after that a couple of other pieces of property the firm had, if things got that bad, and I had never asked Doris to cut down by one cent on the household expenses, or live any different than we had always lived, or give up anything at all. I mean, it was a lot of hooey, and I began to get sore. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help myself. The sight of her lying there like the dying swan, with this noble look on her face, and just working at the job of making me look like a heel, kind of got my goat.

  “So. We’re just starving to death, are we?”

  “Well? Aren’t we?”

  “Just practically in the poorhouse.”

  “I worry about it so much that sometimes I’m afraid I’ll have a breakdown or something. I don’t bother you about it, and I don’t ever intend to. There’s no use of your knowing what I go through. But—something has to be done. If something isn’t done, Leonard, what are we going to come to?”

  “So you’re going out and have a career, all for the husband and the kiddies, so they can eat, and have peppermint sticks on the Christmas tree, and won’t have to bunk in Central Park when the big blizzard comes.”

  “I even think of that.”

  “Doris, be your age.”

  “I’m only trying to—”

  “You’re only trying to make a bum out of me, and I’m not going to buy it.”

  “You have to thwart me, don’t you Leonard? Always.”

  “There it goes. I knew it. So I thwart you.”

  “You’ve thwarted me ever since I’ve known you, Leonard. I don’t know what there is about you that has to make a woman a drudge, that seems incapable of realizing that she might have aspirations too. I suppose I ought to make allowance—”

  “For the pig-sty I was raised in, is that it?”

  “Well Leonard, there’s something about you.”

  “How long have you had this idea?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it quite some time.”

  “About two months, hey?”

  “Two months? Why two months?”

  “It seems funny that this egg comes back from Europe and right away you decide to resume your career;”

  “How wrong you are. Oh, how wrong you are.”

  “And by the time he gets his forty a week, or whatever he takes, and his commission on the music you buy, and all the rest of his cuts, you’ll be taken for a swell ride. There won’t be much left for the husband and kiddies.”

  “I’m not being taken for a ride.”

  “No?”

  “I’m not paying Lorentz anything.”

  “… What?”

  “I’ve explained to him. About our—circumstances.”

  I hit the roof then. I wanted to know what business she had telling him about our circumstances or anything else. I said I wouldn’t be under obligations to him, and that if she was going to have him she had to pay him. She lay there shaking her head, like the pity of it was that I couldn’t understand, and never could understand. “Leonard, I couldn’t pay Hugo, even if I wanted to—not now.”

  “Why not now?”

  “When he knows—how hard it is for us. And it’s not important.”

  “It’s plenty important—to me.”

  “Hugo is that strange being that you don’t seem to understand, that you even deny exists—but he exists, just the same. Hugo is an artist. He believes in my voice. That’s all. The rest is irrelevant. Money, time, work, everything.”

  That gave me the colic so bad I had to stop, count ten, and begin all over again. “… Listen, Doris. To hell with all this. Nobody’s opposing your career. I’m all for your career, and I don’t care what it costs, and I don’t care whether it ever brings in a dime. But why the big act? Why do you have to go through all this stuff that I’m thwarting you, and we’re starving, and all that? Why can’t you just study, and shut up about it?”

  “Do we have to go back over all that?”

  “And if that’s how you feel about it, what the hell did you ever marry me for, anyway?”

  That slipped out on me. She didn’t say anything, and I took it back. Oh yes, I took it back, because down deep inside of me I knew why she had married me, and I had spent seven years with my ears stopped up, so she’d never have the chance to tell the truth about it. She had married me for the dough I brought in, and that was all she had married me for. For the rest, I just bored her, except for that streak in her that had to torture everybody that came within five feet of her. The whole thing was that I was nuts about her and she didn’t give a damn about me, and don’t ask me why I was nuts about her. I don’t know why I was nuts about her. She was a phoney, she had the face of a saint and the soul of a snake, she treated me like a dog, and still I was nuts about her. So I took it back. I apologized for it. I backed down like I always did, and lost the fight, and wished I had whatever it would take to stand up against her, but I didn’t.

  “Time to dress, Leonard.”

  When we got home that night, she undressed in the dressing room, and when she came out she had on one of the Chinese kimonos, and went to the door of the nursery, where the kids had slept before they got old enough to have a room
…. “I’ve decided to sleep in here for a while, Leonard. I’ve got exercises to do when I get up, and—all sorts of things. There’s no reason why you should be disturbed.”

  “Any way you like.”

  “Or—perhaps you would be more comfortable in there.”

  Yes, I even did that. I slept that night in the nursery, and took up my abode there from then on. What I ought to do was go in and sock her in the jaw, I knew that. But I just looked at Peter Rabbit, where he was skipping across the wall in the moonlight, and thought to myself: “Yeah, Borland, that’s you all right.”

  2

  So for the next three months there was nothing but vocalizing all over the place, and then it turned out she was ready for a recital in Town Hall. For the month after that we got ready for the recital, and the less said about it the better. Never mind what Town Hall cost, and the advertising cost, and that part. What I hated was drumming up the crowd. I don’t know if you know how a high-toned Social Registerite like Doris does when she gets ready to give a recital to show off her technique. She calls up all her friends, and sandbags them to buy tickets. Not just to come, you understand, on free tickets, though to me that would be bad enough. To buy tickets, at $2 a ticket. And not only does she call up her friends, but her husband calls up his friends, and all her sisters and her cousins and her aunts call up their friends, and those friends have to come through, else it’s an unfriendly act. I got so I hated to go in the River Club, for fear I’d run into somebody that was on the list, and that I hadn’t buttonholed, and if I let him get out of there without buttonholing him, and Doris found out about it, there’d be so much fuss that I’d buttonhole him, just to save trouble. Oh yes, culture has its practical side when you start up Park Avenue with it. It’s not just that I’m a roughneck that I hate it. There are other reasons too.

  I don’t know when it was that I tumbled that Doris was lousy. But some time in the middle of all that excitement, it just came to me one day that she couldn’t sing, that she never could sing, that it was all just a pipe dream. I tried to shake it off, to tell myself that I didn’t know anything about it, because that was one thing that had always been taken for granted in our house: that she could have a career if she wanted it. And there was plenty of reason to think so, because she did have a voice, anybody could tell that. It was a high soprano, pretty big, with a liquid quality to it that made it easy for her to do the coloratura stuff she seemed to specialize in. I couldn’t shake it off. I just knew she was no good, and didn’t know how I knew it. So of course that made it swell. Because in the first place I had to keep on taking her nonsense, knowing all the time she was a fake, and not being able to tell her so. And in the second place, I was so in love with her that I couldn’t take my eyes off her when she was around and I hated to see her out there making a fool of herself. And in the third place, there was Lorentz. If I knew she was no good then he knew she was no good, and what was he giving her free lessons for? He was up pretty often, usually just before dinner, to run over songs with her, and once or twice, while we were waiting for her to come home, I tried to get going with him, to find out what was what. I couldn’t. I knew why I couldn’t. It was some more of the blindfold stuff. I was afraid I’d find out something I didn’t want to know. Not that I expected him to tell me. But I might find it out just the same, and I didn’t want to find it out. I might lie awake half the night wondering about it, and gnaw my fingernails half off down at the office, but when it came to the showdown I didn’t want to know. So we would just sit there, and have a drink, and talk about how women are always late. Then Doris would come, and start to yodel. And then I would go upstairs.

  The recital was in February, at eleven o’clock of a Friday morning. About nine o’clock I was in the nursery, getting into the cutaway coat and gray striped pants that Doris said I had to wear, when the phone rang in the bedroom and I heard Doris answer. In a minute or two she came in. “Stop that for a minute, Leonard, and listen to me. It’s something terribly important.”

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  “Louise Bronson just called up. She was talking last night with Rudolph Hertz.” Hertz wasn’t his name, but I’ll call him that. He was a critic on the Herald Tribune. “You know, he’s related to her.”

  “And?”

  “She told him he had to come and give me a review, and he promised to do it. But the fool told him it was tomorrow instead of today, and Leonard, you’ll have to call him up and tell him, and be sure and tell him there’ll be two tickets for him, in his name at the boxoffice—and make sure they’re there.”

  “Why do I have to call him up?”

  “Leonard, I simply haven’t time to explain all that to you now. He’s the most important man in town, it’s just a stroke of blind luck that he promised to give me a review, and I can’t lose it just because of a silly mistake over the day.”

  “His paper keeps track of that for him.”

  “Leonard, you call him up! You call him up right now! You—stop making me scream, it’s frightful for my voice. You call him up! Do you hear me?”

  “He won’t be at his paper. They don’t come down that early.”

  “Then call him up at his home!”

  I went in the bedroom and picked up the phone book. He wasn’t in it. I called information. They said they would have to have the address. Doris began screaming at me from the dressing room. “He lives on Central Park West! In the same building as Louise!”

  I gave the address. They said they were very sorry but it was a private number and they wouldn’t be able to give it to me. Doris was yelling at me before I even hung up. “Then you’ll have to go over there! You’ll have to see him.”

  “I can’t go over there. Not at this hour.”

  “You’ll have to go over there. You’ll have to see him! And be sure and mention Louise, and his promise to her, and tell him there’ll be two tickets for him, in his name at the boxoffice!”

  So I hustled on the rest of my clothes, and jumped in a cab, and went over there. I found him in bathrobe and slippers, having breakfast with his wife and another lady, in an alcove just off the living room. I mumbled about Louise Bronson, and how anxious we were to have his opinion on my wife’s voice, and about the tickets in his name at the boxoffice, and he listened to me as though he couldn’t believe his ears. Then he cut me off, and he cut me off sharp. “My dear fellow, I can’t go to every recital in Town Hall just at an hour’s notice. If notices were sent out, my paper will send somebody over, and there was no need whatever for you to come to me about it.”

  “Louise Bronson—”

  “Yes, Louise said something to me about a recital, but I don’t let her run my department either.”

  “We were very anxious for your opinion—”

  “If so, making a personal call at this hour in the morning was a very bad way to get it.”

  I felt my face get hot. I jumped up, said I was sorry, and got out of there as fast as I could grab my hat. The recital didn’t help any. The place was packed with stooges, and they clapped like hell and it didn’t mean a thing. I sat with Randolph and Evelyn, and we clapped too, and after it was over, and about a ton of flowers had gone up, and my flowers too, we went backstage with the whole mob to tell Doris how swell she was, and you would have thought it was just a happy family party. But as soon as my face wasn’t red any more from thinking about the critic, it got red from something else. About a third of that audience were children. That was how they had told us to go to hell, those people we had sandbagged. They bought tickets, but they sent their children—with nursemaids.

  Doris took the children home, and I went out and ate, and then went over to the office. I sat there looking at my feet, and thinking about the critic, and the children at the recital, and sleeping in the nursery, and Lorentz, and all the rest of it, and I felt just great. About two-thirty the phone rang. “Mr. Borland?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Cecil Carver.”

  She acted like
I ought to know who Cecil Carver was, but I had never heard the name before. “Yes, Miss Carver. What can I do for you?”

  “Perhaps I ought to explain. I’m a singer. I happened to be visiting up in Central Park this morning when you called, and I couldn’t help hearing what was said.”

  “I got a cool reception.”

  “Pay no attention to it. He’s a crusty old curmudgeon until he’s had his coffee, and then he’s a dear. I wish you could have heard the way he was treating me.”

  That was all hooey, but somehow my face didn’t feel red any more, and besides that, I liked the way she laughed. “You make me feel better.”

  “Forget it. I judged from what you said that you were anxious for a competent opinion on your wife’s singing.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Well, I dropped in at that recital. Would you like to know what I thought?”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “Then why don’t you come over?” She gave the name of a hotel that was about three blocks away, on Lexington Avenue.

  “I don’t know of any reason why not.”

  “Have you still got on that cutaway coat?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Oh my, I’ll have to make myself look pretty.”

  “You had better hurry up.”

  “… Why?”

  “Because I’m coming right over.”