Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  I cover my eyes and I scream; I scream till my tendons cannot bear it, sob and scream again fit to startle the starlings off every bank from here to Brookline, Mass. I recant, I’ll accept my destiny and honestly wed the little brown nun, if she’ll have me; ay, and do for her Lord what paltry dog-tricks He’ll ask of me; only make this hippogriff, this lovely, legitimate, honorable beauty of a hippogriff save me. Aiee! and I’ll lie on my back on a scaffold and paint Thee murals, Lord, and I swear never to punch Miss Brandt in the eye, or anywhere else again, if thee’ll but send me a cloud or an eagle or a parachute or a helicopter … oh holy Pete, what a spot for him to lose his mind in and be me again. I wonder if he knows it won’t take any real time at all, where he is. And there below me the mottled earth pursues a sun-turned-rocket … whew. Giles, old boy, don’t you shut your eyes again until you have to—“Hullo!”

  There at the area railing stands a smut-faced urchin and a smaller but female version of himself, all eyeballs and streaky cheeks. “Gee, mister, you all right? You sick?” and the smaller one: “Canchasee, he’s dyne!”

  “Don’t mind me, kids,” I mumble. “I just fell off a hippogriff.” I find I’m half-kneeling and try to stand, and it seems my hands are locked around the iron uprights of the railing. I stay there stopped and feeling very foolish while they watch me, and I concentrate from my stone-cold marrow up and out until at last my left fingers begin to stir. With a little more effort the hand comes free, and with it I disengage the right, one finger at a time. I straighten up then and look a while at my hands and wiggle them. “He ain’t dyne,” says the boy in a robbed tone, and his cohort says defensively, “Anyway he wuz dyne,” because her ardent hopes had made it her production.

  Briefly, a sun flashes past, but I ignore it; I’ll be all right now. You get so you know the signs. “Here,” I say, “I’ll try to do better next time,” and I give them money, I don’t know how much but it must be enough; they beat it.

  I put my elbows on the railing, keeping these spastic hands away from it, and look across the street. The clock hands haven’t moved any that I can see, and Miss Brandt, who was just starting out the door when my addled brains caught up with me, is pausing on the portico, the door just closing behind her. Two seconds, three maybe. My God, what a way to live!

  Miss Brandt looks up the street and down, descends the shallow steps and turns right toward the old Mayor’s statue. When she has quite gone I cross to the bank and go inside. At the island table I write a check, and take it to the wicket where the fierce-faced man is caged. He takes the paper and turns it over with the same snap Mr. Saffron used, and that is a trick I must learn one day. “You’ll need to get this initialed,” he says. So off I go to Mr. Saffron again, and stand in front of his shiny desk until he looks up at me and makes the pink meaty ridge across and above his narrowed eyes. The man disapproves of me to the point of ecstasy, and I take this as a kindness; for it makes us both feel important. I let the check fall to him, and he looks, snaps, looks, and grunts. “All right, Mr. Ahh,” he says, and squiggles on it with his personal pen. I take the check and stand where I am.

  “Well?”

  “I want to know whose money this is.”

  “Yours.” He has a way of snapping off the margins of his words as if he doesn’t want you to have a whole one.

  “Yes, but—”

  “The deposit is in your name; surely that’s sufficient!”

  I look at the check. “Is there any more left?”

  He is offended by the whole thing, but he is stuck with it. “There is,” he says.

  “Much?’

  “More than you can spend today,” he says. “Or this week.”

  “Well, dammit, how much?”

  He sort of spreads his pale-pink hands, which means, I gather, that this is not an account like other accounts, and he wishes he could do something about the irregularity but he can’t. He says, “That is the one and final checkbook you get. Aside from that, there doesn’t seem to—ahh—be any upper limit. And now you’ll excuse me, I’ve a great deal to good day Mr. Mmmm.” And down he goes to his papers.

  Well, I’ve asked enough questions to know there won’t be any answers. I go back to the wicket and slide the fierce one the check. “Half in hundreds and the rest in small bills.” He makes a long snort or a short sigh, clicks the bars between us down tight, lets himself out the back with a key, and is gone for too long, but I don’t mind about that just now. Pretty soon he’s back with a sack. He opens the wicket and starts taking stacks out of the sack and sliding them to me. The sixty hundreds go into my socks; they have elastic tops and pull up high enough. The sixty fifties fan out flat enough to go between my belly and my knit shorts, though they hump up some. Then I spend some time with the hundred and eighty twenties and tens, cramming ’em into two side and one back pants pocket. By now I’m lumpy as a sofa cushion just out of the wet wash and I’ve collected quite a crowd. The fierce face flutes, “You’re going to run into trouble, carrying all that money that way,” as if it was a wish, and I say “No, I won’t. They all think I’m crazy, and there’s no telling what a crazy man will do.” I say it good and loud, and all the people watching stop their buzz-buzz and back off a little. They make a wide empty aisle for me when I start away.

  “Wait!” cries the teller, and punches some keys on his little machine. Coins slide down the half-spiral chute and pile up in the cup at the botttom with a cast-iron clink. “Wait! Here’s your twenty-eight cents!”

  “Keep it!” I bellow from the door, and go out feeling a lot happier than I’ve been feeling lately. All my life I’ve wanted to leave twenty-eight cents for a bank teller, who wouldn’t put it in his pocket to save his soul, and who hasn’t got any place for it in his books.

  Down the street there’s a big men’s shop with little letters over the door and a windowful of somber-colored suits with no creases in the jacket-arms. I look them over until I find the one with the most pockets and then I go inside.

  It’s like a church in there, but with wall-to-wall broadloom, and the only showcases I can see are the two little ones set into mahogany pillars, one with tie-clasps and collar pins, one with four hand-painted silk ties. I go look at the first one. Every velvet box has a humble little card with “the” on it: $200 the set. $850 the pair. I’m on my way to look at the ties when a tall man with a paper carnation steps out of a potted palm and stands where I have to run him down in case I’m not going to stop.

  “What,” he says, “do you want?” The “you” is a little bigger than the other words and the whole thing sounds like he’s pretty disgusted. I tell him about the suit in the window.

  He laughs with his mouth. “That is a three-hundred-dollar suit.”

  “Well, drag it on out.”

  “I’m rawtha sure we don’t carry your size,” he says, looking at my painting pants.

  “Then we’ll hack it till it fits,” I tell him. “Come on, buster, quit stalling.”

  “I’m afraid that—”

  So I start yelling a little and he backs off and bleats “Mr. Triggle, Mr. Triggle!” and from somewhere—I guess another potted palm, there’s plenty around—comes another tall man in the same sort of funeral suit, but this one’s got a real carnation. “Here,” he says, “Here-here-here. What’s this, what?”

  “You’re selling, I’m buying. Only he don’t think so,” I tell the real carnation, pointing at the paper one.

  The paper one says, “The gentleman—” (dirtiest word I ever heard, the way he says it)—“The gentleman is inquiring after the von Hochmann worsted in the window.”

  The real carnation nickers. “My good man, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong—” and then I put twenty dollars in his hand. He looks at it and the other one looks at it so I give him one too. They look at each other, so I pass out two more. “Get the suit.”

  “Won’t you step into the sample room?” says the real carnation, and you wouldn’t know it was the same man. It certainly isn
’t the same voice. “We have quite a selection in—”

  “I don’t want a selection, I want that suit in the window. That very goddam selfsame suit and not one like it.”

  “Oh but we can’t get a suit out of the—” So I give them each twenty dollars. “Yes, sir!” says the paper one, and dives to the front.

  “Now, let’s see,” says the real carnation, pulling at his chin and trying to imagine me with my face washed. “Once we get the suit out of the way, we’ll look at some cravats, and perhaps an English broadcloth, hmmm? Handmade? Rolled collar, studs? Yes indeedy.”

  “No indeedy. I got a shirt.” I pluck at the yellow ski-pajama top. This shuts him up without any money changing hands.

  The other tall man comes back with the suit and we parade into the fitting room which looks more than ever like part of a funeral home, only bigger. The two of them stand in the middle of the room wringing or rubbing their hands while I step into a curtained booth and put the suit on. The pants got no cuffs yet and the coat’s too tight. I come out and they jump all over me like Hansel and Gretel on the gingerbread house. When they get to measuring the pants they find out I still got my old ones on underneath. Forty dollars fixes that up too, before they can say anything.

  So when they’re finished chalking and pinning they want to know when I want the suit. “Now!” I roar, and before either or them can so much as “But we—” I give them money again. “How many people you got back in there, altering?”

  “Eight, sir.”

  “Well, here.” I give him eight twenties. “Give ’em this and put ’em all to work on this one suit. You’ve got nine minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” and off goes paper carnation, breathing hard.

  The other one says, “You said you were in the movie line?”

  “I did not.”

  “Ahh,” he says. “Oil.”

  “Nup. Ladies’ wear. I put out a line of underskirts with prints of umbrellas and telephones on ’em. You’ve seen ’em.”

  “I—ahh—don’t know that I have.”

  “What?” I shout, “You never heard of a Freudian slip?”

  “Why, I—” and after that he shuts up. He keeps looking at me.

  They don’t get the suit ready in nine minutes, but they make it in eleven. As soon as the man shows with the suit over his arm, I tell him, “Hey, I forgot. I want the left sleeve three-eighths of an inch shorter than the right one.” His jaw drops, but the real carnation says, “Do it, Hopkinson.” And the other one goes out with the suit, me diving along right behind him. We get to a door about the same time. Inside is a real patchy workroom with bright lights and racks of old suits, two old women and six old men. “But sir, you can’t—”

  “Shut up and give me that,” I say, and snatch the suit. “I didn’t want the sleeve fixed, I just wanted to see these people. Listen,” I say to the whole room, “Did he give you any money just now, this guy with the paper flower?”

  All those old people stand and blink at me till somebody says “Money?” and then they all shrug their shoulders and wag their heads. Paper flower, all nods and smiles, steps forward and says, “Why, I was going to give it to them just as soon as the suit was satisfactory,” and he takes eight twenties out of his side pocket. I bang them out of his hand and stick them into my pants. “You were like hell, you crumb.” I go down into my sock and haul out the pack of hundreds and go around the room giving one each to the old people. The real carnation sticks his head in just then and I tell him, “You better get that guy out of my sight before something happens around here even my money won’t fix.” The paper flower disappears.

  I go back to the booth and this time I take off the old pants. I spread the money around through all the pockets in the suit—it’s got fourteen—and get dressed. I give the carnation three hundred dollars and my old pants. “You keep ’em. They should fit pretty good.” I have to admire him; I can see he’s all aquiver inside, but he still walks like a bishop at a coronation as we go to the door, and as he walks he’s carefully folding my old pants, which hasn’t happened since I brought them home from Kresge’s two years ago, until they hang as flat as an antimacassar over his forearm. He opens the door for me and by God, bows. “Thank you so much, and come back to us soon, Mr. Freud.”

  It’s close to nighttime, eating time. Around the corner and up the street is a restaurant I’ve heard about that used to be a stable. I’m just pushing through the door when in front of me there grows a soft wall made of maroon serge and brass buttons and a monstrous braided golden silk rope. I step back and look up, and it isn’t a wall, but the prow of a commodore-type doorman; and I swear he’s eight feet tall before the hat starts.

  “Sorry, sir; you can’t go in like that.”

  The suit, it seems, gets me a “sir” but not any courtesy in the voice. “Like what?”

  He puts up a hand like a punching bag and taps himself on the Adam’s apple. I put up my hand and touch only my yellow ski pajama top. “Oh, the tie,” I say.

  “Oh,” he says, “the tie.” Mimicking somebody like that, now that’s for murder; that’s worse than what Rogero called the hippogriff. “Well, you didn’t happen to notice I got no tie.”

  He pushes out his chest. It looms up and over me like the business end of a hydraulic forging press. “I did happen to notice you got no tie,” he says, still copying my voice and you know? He’s pretty good at it.

  “You did, for sure?” I say, and give him twenty dollars.

  “Well, kind of one-eyed I did,” he says in a new voice which wasn’t mine and wasn’t the “sir” voice I first heard, but one which seems to come easiest of all to him. I give him another twenty, and he lets me go in.

  A man meets me at the inner door—quite a man, boiled shirt, tailcoat, and the magnificent head you see in college lobbies, the oil painting of the previous Dean. With one flick of his eyes—and mind you, the light’s not too good just there—he does with me what Mr. Saffron does with a check; he reads me, turns me over with a snap, puts his squiggle on me so that inside man will do what’s absolutely correct. It must be a problem, with the new suit and the worn shoes and the dirty face and the fact that the doorman let me in; but if it bothers him he doesn’t show it. “Good evening, sir,” he says. His tone has the depth of one of those console radios they built in the thirties, when the more money you had, the more bass you bumped your belly with. “Step right this way.”

  But I knock his elbow. “It bothers you I got no necktie.”

  “Why—no, sir.”

  “Yes it does.” I take out a hundred-dollar bill and fold it lengthwise and pleat it good and tight, and then I take a fifty and fold it flat and narrow, and wind it once around the middle of the hundred. Then I take the two pleated ends and spread them so I have a bow, tied in the middle. He stands there waiting for me as if people did this kind of thing all the time. “Now lend me the pin off that flower of yours.” He hands it to me, carrying it the last half inch of the way by a subtle and courteous bow from the waist. I pin the bow to the front of my yellow ski-pajama top. “A tie. Okay with you?”

  “Quite suitable, sir.”

  “I thought you’d like it.” I pull it off and hand it to him. “I want a table for eight on the edge of the floor.”

  “Yes, sir. I have just the one.” Off he goes, and me after him, and sure enough, there’s a big round table. He plucks a subdued ivory Reserved card off it and sits me down. “And when do you expect the rest of your party?”

  “I’m the rest of the party.”

  “Very good, sir. And you’re drinking—”

  “Brandy. Double. The kind that nobody but you knows is the best in the place.”

  “I have just the year. Water? Soda?”

  “Yoghurt,” I say. “About half-and-half.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  So I have that and a liver and oatmeal sandwich and crepes suzettes with a jubilee sauce made (by four men with three shiny carts) with those little tiny wild Fr
ench strawberries, and you know? It costs eighty-four bucks to eat in that place.

  I sit and I watch the show, and I watch the watchers watching the show. And I plan the things I shall do with more money than I can spend. I shall leave here when it is too late to hire anything and I’ll make my money rent a powerboat. I’ll leave twice the price with the owner and I’ll sink it, and never be seen again by him, so he’ll wonder. I’ll buy two islands with two mansions, and on one I’ll pretend to be a prude while through an agent I’ll lease everything but my house to nudists; and the other island I’ll populate with prudes while I go naked. I’ll buy Thomas Moore’s own harp from the Institute and build in a contact microphone and a music box which will play “Red Wing” for forty minutes at double tempo if anyone touches it. I’ll train up a man who can fascinate as many hungry people as Huey Long and as many frightened people as Joe McCarthy, both at the same time, and when he takes over he’ll pull a switch on them all and be as gentle and as poor and as strong as Jesus of Nazareth. And I’ll supply every male teen-ager with a hand-tainted pie, and every female with a totally new orgasmic term to apply to sundaes, convertibles, knobby-faced pop vocalists and shoes straps. For Bradamante a transparent lipstick so she can feel like a woman even if she doesn’t want it to show, and for Atlantes (poor little rich man) the full realization of destiny’s indestructibility.

  Look yonder: look! There by herself, with a candle on her table, sits the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Her hair is soft sable, long, straight, fine, and thick; her eyes and cheekbones the delicate strong interacting Eurasian arch-sequence. Her nostrils are petal-textured, moving as indetectably as the shift from one aurora-pattern to the next, but sensitively in motion even from her shallow breathing as she sits still, so still … and surely she is the saddest woman who ever lived, or a mouth such as hers could not be sleeping so, nor the head turned and held just that way of all ways, nor the shoulders so careless and the hands so forgotten. Is she grieving from loneliness, in the knowledge that never in life can she meet her like? Or has she been hurt by a small someone, and cannot understand?