by Max Shulman
McAndrews chuckled. “I found it out long before the Surgeon General’s panel,” he replied. “It happens that Clara was once my student. In fact, she’s the brightest student I’ve ever had.”
“Well!” said Ira, pleased. “I didn’t realize.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve known Clara for thirty years. First-class doctor. Excellent researcher. Too bad she’s a nut.”
“Nut?” said Ira, eyebrows rising.
“It’s a medical term meaning nut,” explained McAndrews.
“I’ve heard the term,” said Ira. “I just never thought to apply it to Dr. Silenko.”
“Mr. Shapian, dedication is an essential part of any scientist’s makeup. But when dedication becomes fanaticism, scientist becomes nut.”
“Well, she does get a little passionate,” admitted Ira. “But, on the other hand, she seems to have the facts to back up her opinions.”
“There’s more than one way to look at a fact,” said McAndrews. “Where will I find Clara?”
“I’ll take you over,” Ira offered.
“No, no,” said McAndrews, observing the tangle of men and machines around Ira. “You’ve got enough to do right here—more than enough, it looks like. Do you actually expect to make a show out of all this pandemonium?”
“One hopes,” said Ira.
“Incredible!” said the doctor, impressed. “Well, I’ll get out of your way. Tell me where to find Clara.”
“Out that door and across the quadrangle. The big, modern building with all the glass. You can’t miss it.”
McAndrews nodded. “I’ll catch up with you gentlemen later,” he said and walked away with long, erect strides.
When McAndrews was safely out of sight, Clendennon flung off his cloak of austerity. “Well, chickie-baby,” he cried, rubbing Ira’s neck with gleeful vigor, “what do you think of my Dr. McAndrews?”
“I think you picked a winner,” said Ira. “I also think you’re choking me.”
Clendennon’s hand slid from Ira’s neck to Ira’s back, where it delivered an assortment of frisky pinches and pummels. “You bet you’re sweet Nielsen I picked a winner!” he crowed. “I don’t care how tough your Silenko is; my boy will chew her up like gum.”
“Fine,” said Ira. “Now stop massaging me before you get to the prostate.”
“Sorry, doll buggy,” said Clendennon, removing his hand. “It’s just that I get all excited when I think of the Emmy we’re going to carry home. But I’m thinking way beyond this show. I’m thinking of the next seven years. Big years, Ira baby, big projects, big deals, big scores. You and I, Ira doll. You and I together, pussycat, for seven fat years!”
There suddenly descended upon Ira a sadness as black and stifling as the hood which is slipped over the head of a hangman’s victim. He, too, saw the seven years ahead—the finagling, the lying, the crud. In just a few hours the Acanthus telecast would go on the air, and Ira’s sun-dance would be ended; his subscription to manhood would expire.
“Clendennon, would you excuse me, please?” said Ira. “I’ve been looking at you for almost ten minutes. That’s all I can stand at one time.”
Clendennon gave an understanding nod. “That’s the way I affect most people. In fact, some cop out within five minutes.”
“I’m going to my office and hide now,” said Ira. “Please do one thing for me: get your snooping over with as fast as you can and leave my stage. I must get back here and go to work.”
“Sure, chickie-baby.”
Ira left the gym, lurched across campus, entered his office, and sat at his desk, staring silently at the white telephone and the black telephone, and seeing neither. He did not curse Clendennon. How could he? Clendennon was not the villain of the piece. The villain, the rogue and peasant slave, was no one but Ira—spineless, gutless Ira, former male.
Oh, Boo! he thought with a surge of wistfulness. Boo, where are you? Where is your purity so pure, your strength so strong, that for a moment it nearly brought back my own? Are you forever out of reach, Boo? Am I to sink helplessly into the mire, so defeated I cannot even try once more to grasp the hand that would save me?
“No!” shouted Ira aloud and brought both fists down on his desk with such furious determination that the telephones jumped twenty-four inches straight up. Ira seized the black phone in mid-air. He dialed Boo’s number. Nostrils flaring, he listened to the ringing at the other end of the line.
“Hello,” said Boo.
“Listen, I’m not supposed to call you, I know that,” cried Ira, the words cascading from his mouth, “I know that, I know it, but I’ve got to, do you understand? I must!”
“As a matter of fact, Ira, I had just made up my mind to call you,” said Boo.
“Do you understand, Boo?” cried Ira, not hearing her. “I’ve got to talk to you. Got to! Please, please don’t hang up!”
“I won’t, Ira.”
“Remember those things I said last time I saw you—about leaving Polly and quitting my job and working for Linus Calloway? Do you remember?”
“Of course.”
“Well, Boo, I know that if I don’t do it now—right now—I never will. I know that without you by my side I—” Ira paused; some words of Boo’s, delayed in transmission, had suddenly arrived. “What did you say, Boo?” he asked.
“When, dear?”
“Just a minute ago. Did you say you were about to call me?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Boo, I’m so happy! I am so very, very—” He paused again. Elation was abruptly stilled. “Why, Boo? he asked cautiously.
“Why was I going to call you?”
“Yes, Boo.”
“I have to see you, Ira. As soon as possible. I’m going out to the beach house this evening at six o’clock to talk to a man who’s building a new jetty. I’ll surely finish with him in a half-hour or so. Could you meet me out there at seven o’clock?”
“How can I, Boo? At eight o’clock I’m doing the telecast from Acanthus.”
“That’s right, I forgot,” she said. “All right then, how about this: I’ll wait at the beach house and you can meet me there when you finish the telecast. Okay?”
“But you’ll miss the program. You don’t have a tv set at the beach.”
“I know, Ira, and I’m terribly sorry. But this is more important. Please, please, my darling, I have to see you tonight!”
Elation came galloping back to Ira. “Yes, yes, tonight!” he cried. “Tonight! Yes!”
“At the beach house.”
“Yes, my darling. Yes, my good, sweet—” Elation made another quick retreat. “What do you mean, you ‘have to’ see me?” he said warily. “Do you mean it’s like an emotional need? For example, when two lovers are kept apart for a length of time, there is a certain psychic compulsion to be reunited. Is that what you had in mind?”
“Ira, I can’t talk any more. There are people in the house.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” he insisted. “I just want to clarify this one point. It boils down to those words ‘have to.’ Could you possibly be a little less ambiguous?”
“Ira, good-bye. Please?”
“Listen—”
“The beach house. Tonight. All right?”
“Fine. Now, Boo, what I’m getting at—”
Boo’s phone clicked dead.
Ira hung up his telephone. He sat and tried to be two men, one of them magically empowered to look into the soul of the other. These questions he asked himself:
Why after deciding he had to call Bon—why after receiving the joyful tidings that she too had to call him—why after such a happy return of resolution and hope did he now feel panic slithering around his innards?
Was he so totally degutted that courage had no place to cling to?
Was he doomed forever to burrow like a blind, defenseless thing in the safe, dark muck?
Was that all that remained of Ira Shapian?
Calmly, without haste, again and again, Ira asked himself these questions. But n
o answers were vouchsafed to him. The fruitless interrogation was interrupted by a buzzing of the phone on Ira’s desk.
“Yes?”
It was the assistant director calling from the stage. “Ira, listen, I’ve got a big problem.”
“You too?” said Ira wryly. “What a coincidence.”
“Could you get over to the stage right away?”
“That depends,” answered Ira. “Is Clendennon still there?”
“Just left.”
“I’ll be right over.”
Ira started across the quadrangle to the gym. He had no doubts he would solve whatever problem awaited him on the stage. As for the deeper, knottier tangle that fouled his life, he had doubts aplenty even though the solution lay in his grasp. He had only to make one simple, quick decision tonight, and his course would be forever altered. But would he find the strength to make the decision? Or would this night be still another torment of agonized vacillation?
He did not know; he plainly did not know.
Chapter 16
Meanwhile back at the Stonewall Jackson Hotel, Polly was waking slowly from a refreshing night’s sleep. She stretched her bones, made four yawns—two long, two short—and looked at the bedside clock. She was pleased to note it was only a few minutes after ten, which meant she could unhurriedly bathe, breakfast, dress, and perform a little sorcery on her face and hair before Virgil arrived to take her to lunch at 12:30.
Room service in this Southern hostelry being not only magnolia-gracious but also honeysuckle-slow, Polly had learned that if she ordered breakfast before she got in the tub, she had time for a leisurely soak while awaiting the waiter. “This is Room 411,” she said into the phone. “I would like one small orange juice, one large coffee, and two slices of whole wheat toast, no butter. And will you please send up the latest magazines, omitting, if you can, Modern Romances and Official Detective?”
She poured a tub of hot water then, added fragrant unguents, and settled in with a sigh remarkably voluptuous for one who was not a voluptuary. And Polly was surely not; it was pure pragmatism that dictated this bath. Since Ira provided her with no satisfaction at all, she seized, pragmatically, such other comforts as were available—like long sleeps and extended yawns and vodka martinis and daily lunches with Virgil and occasional conversations with Acanthus luminaries like Linden-Evarts and Dr. Silenko, and, as now, dreamy, unhasty immersions in perfumed baths.
She was, therefore, considerably annoyed when she heard a knocking on the door of the suite less than ten minutes after she had arranged herself comfortably in the tub. Why on this morning, she thought testily, should room service suddenly get so rapid? “Coming! Coming!” she shouted as the knocking continued. Muttering and dripping, she got out of the tub, flung on a terry-cloth robe, and made a trail of wet footprints from the bath through the sitting room. She stepped backward as she opened the door, concealing herself behind it. “Good morning, Swifty,” she said. “You must be new here. Will you put the tray on the coffee table, please?”
But it was not a tray-bearing waiter who entered the suite; it was young Gabriel, eyes frantic and knuckles cracking like pistol shots.
Polly’s jaw fell in stark disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she whispered.
“Please, Mrs. Shapian,” he begged. “I won’t stay long.”
“You most certainly won’t. You will leave. Now.”
“Please close the door.”
“Go!” said Polly, pointing one finger, using the other hand to clutch her robe together.
“You’re standing in a draft.”
“Out! Out!”
Two chambermaids, pushing a cart of linens down the corridor, paused and observed the scene with frank curiosity.
Polly swung the door shut. “Gabriel, listen,” she said, talking quietly, dipping deep into her reservoir of patience, “I speak to you as a woman old enough to be your mother. The last thing I want is to be unkind. I realize you’re going through some kind of hell and, believe it or not, I’m sympathetic.… However, you simply must stay away from me. This situation is ridiculous. It’s ludicrous. It’s—it’s—it’s obscene!”
“Excuse me, ma’am, but you’re wrong. It is tragic and beautiful, is what it is.”
“It is over, is what it is. Are you going peacefully, or do I call the house dick?”
“I am going peacefully, if you’ll just let me say what I came to say.”
Polly walked weakly to the chair farthest from Gabriel and sank down. “All right,” she sighed. “Talk, but keep your distance.”
“Mrs. Shapian!” exclaimed Gabriel, profoundly shocked. “Is that what you think I came here to do—molest you?”
“How do I know what you’re going to do? I never met anybody like you in my whole Me.”
“Nobody has,” he said desolately. “I’ll tell you something weird: half the time I don’t even believe I exist.”
“That would help explain a lot of things,” said Polly.
“But I do exist,” he assured her. “And there’s the tragedy. I exist, and so do you, and as long as you exist, somehow, come what may, I’ve got to be near you.”
Polly pulled her robe more tightly around her. “Okay, Gabriel, you said what you came to say, and I listened, just like I promised. Now you’re leaving, just like you promised. True?”
“But I didn’t finish what I came to say.”
“Sorry. Proceed, please. Rapidly, please.”
“Yes, ma’am … You know that big, white Spanish-style house next to yours in Bel Air?”
“I know it well,” she answered nervously. “How do you know it?”
“This real estate man out in California sent me a picture of it.”
“Why?”
“I bought it,” answered Gabriel.
Polly tamped down a shriek. “What do you mean, you bought it? That house is worth 150 thousand dollars, and you are an eighteen-year-old boy.”
“Actually,” he said, “I paid 175 thousand. But that’s okay because I got a million dollars from my trust fund on my last birthday. I get five more millions when I’m twenty-one.”
“I feel like my sanity is running out my ears,” Polly announced solemnly.
“I know it’s bad taste to talk about how rich you are,” he went on. “I only mentioned it so you won’t worry that I can’t take care of you if we get married—I mean, in case you ever want to leave Mr. Shapian.”
“Gabriel, pay close attention. I never want to leave Mr. Shapian.”
“No? Then how come you’re spending so much time with Virgil Tatum?”
Anger propelled Polly to her feet. “Have you been following me?”
He blushed incandescent red. “I’m sorry,” he said in a tiny voice.
“That is the filthiest, sneakiest thing I ever heard of!” she declared. “Have you no shame?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied earnestly. “I am miserably, loathsomely ashamed.… Aren’t you?”
“Me? For what?”
“For spending so much time with Virgil,” he answered. “Obviously you wouldn’t be chasing Virgil if you still loved Mr. Shapian.”
Polly clenched her fists tight, seeking control. She was not entirely successful. “Young man,” she said, “I want to show you what you’re doing to me. It’s ten-fifteen in the morning, and I have not had my breakfast yet. However, watch!” She walked rapidly to the sideboard, uncorked a bottle of vodka, lifted it to her lips, tilted it back, and did not stop swallowing until at least four ounces had disappeared. “You see, Gabriel?” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “You see what you are doing to a respectable American housewife?”
“It grieves me something terrible, Mrs. Shapian,” he said sincerely. “It hurts me real bad to see you in such terrible shape. I swear I’d give anything if I knew how to stay away from you. But I don’t, and that’s flat. So I guess you better get used to the notion.”
He lifted his arm in a small, despairing gesture of farewell and
left the suite.
Polly looked at the bottle of vodka she was still holding. Her hand started to raise it to her mouth, but her other, wiser hand came shooting out, snatched the bottle and returned it to the sideboard.
Calm, she said to herself and sat down slowly in a chair beside the desk. Calm, calm, calm, calm. Think green thoughts. Think of sylvan glades and bosky dells. Forget you are soaking wet, and pursued by a demented boy, and married to a squashed Armenian. Calm, calm, she told herself, and soon she grew still—except for one hand: the wicked, vodka-wanting hand. It lunged out and grabbed the telephone on the desk. “Where the hell is my breakfast?” she yelled.
“On the way, ma’am,” stammered a terrified voice, and, indeed, the waiter was knocking on the door within two minutes.
He brought in a tray. Coffee, juice, and toast were neatly arrayed on one end; on the other end was a stack of magazines.
“Who the hell ordered magazines?” yelled Polly.
“You did, ma’am,” replied the waiter timidly.
“I’m sorry I can’t stop yelling,” yelled Polly, “but something’s gone wrong. I just can’t stop. Wait! Don’t leave yet. I want to give you a tip, a great big one, on account of the yelling.”
“Oh, that’s all right, ma’am,” said the waiter and tried to sidle away.
But she found a purse on the desk, snatched out a five-dollar bill, and handed it to him before he could make his exit. “Here you are,” she said. “Listen. How do I sound? My voice, I mean. Am I still yelling?”
“No, ma’am,” answered the waiter, nearly as relieved as Polly. “Sounds normal. Real normal.”
“Glory be!” she breathed.
“And thank you for the tip. I surely do appreciate it.”
He left and Polly sat down to her breakfast. Slowly, inhaling deeply between each sip, she finished her orange juice. She poured a cup of coffee, picked up a slice of toast, opened a copy of Time magazine, and began, with forced deliberateness, to read and eat. After a few minutes she decided that Time’s accounts of calamities in Uganda, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Washington, D.C., were less than an ideal tranquilizer. She laid Time aside and took the next magazine off the stack.
