by Packer, Vin
Another facet of this change was the thought that certain people were on to him — here and there he would run across one of them. They looked at him in a peculiar way.
That cool July evening, at the Princeton Inn, where he was meeting Lake Budde, it was the girl at the desk.
While he waited for her to finish her conversation, his eyes fell to a small basket of matchbooks set out on the counter, each one with PRINCETON INN marked on the cover. Harvey Plangman prided himself on never pocketing a place’s matchbooks, never once giving a place the satisfaction of thinking that he would like to show off their matchbooks. Instead, for a dollar, Harvey sent away periodically for 30 matchbooks from famous hotels and niteries. He sent his dollar to a P.O. box in New Orleans, copied from an advertisement in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. That way, he not only had matchbooks from places he would probably never visit, he also saved face by never being seen in the act of picking up one for a keepsake. Yet, anyone who knew Harvey Plangman at all, knew he was never without a matchbook from a famous hotel or restaurant.
Harvey edged over closer to the girl behind the counter, as the gentleman she was talking with moved away. “Yes?” she said.
“I beg your pardon,” said Harvey, bowing, “would you be good enough to inform me of the location of your telephone booth?”
She pointed to it. “Right over there.” “Thank you most kindly.” “You’re welcome.”
She was looking down at his hands. He realized he had been standing there cracking his knuckles. He dropped his hands to his sides. Then he said, “Oh, by the by,” with a casual air, “one other thing.” “Yes?”
“Would you be good enough to tell me where I might purchase a copy of Fortune magazine?” “We don’t sell magazines.”
“Oh, I’m aware of that! I simply thought you might know where I could purchase Fortune.” “I don’t know.”
“Oh, dear!” said Harvey. He sighed. “It’s quite important that I obtain it. Something pertaining to business.” “Umm hmm.”
“Well, thank you anyway. I’ll find it someplace!” he said importantly.
The girl seemed unimpressed. She licked her finger and began shuffling papers.
Harvey took out his new cigarette case, removed a Player’s cigarette (he had switched brands last week, from Virginia Rounds to Players) and reached for a pack of the Princeton Inn matches. He lit the cigarette, blew out the match, and left the matchbook on the counter in front of the girl. Then he walked back slowly, inhaling nicely, to make his phone call.
THREE
ON THE way to Lambertville Margaret said, “and I think for this party I’ll go back to round butter balls again. They always look more formal, somehow. I don’t mean formal exactly, but you know what I mean, Robert. We always used to have round butter balls before the war, remember?”
“Umm hmm,” said Robert. He was thinking that he would probably miss Margaret; it would probably hit him all of a sudden, once he got to Brazil. After all, he had been with Margaret for twenty-one years. He would have to miss her, wouldn’t he?”
“I haven’t seen round butter balls in years, now that I think of it,” said Margaret. “No, I really don’t think I have.”
“Margaret,” Robert said, so impulsively that he was surprised at the sound of his own voice, “I love you.” He simply wanted to test the sound of those words again; did they have any meaning? The instant they were out, he realized they did not. He loved no one.
“Why do you suddenly announce it?” said Margaret.
“Maybe it’s your perfume. What is it?”
“Balenciaga’s Quadrille? I wear Quadrille most of the time.”
He glanced at her to see if she were pleased. Her eyes looked back unsmiling, concerned. He wondered if Margaret ever had the feeling she could not contain pressure in her head. He wondered, if he were to tell her that he had that feeling now, what she would say. “How can you sit there with the feeling you can’t contain pressure in your head, saying you love me, Robert?”
“Oh, well, it’s an innocent remark, isn’t it?” said Robert.
“I’m just interested in why you made it at that particular moment.”
“I guess there wasn’t any reason.”
“Well, what promoted it? Did it come out of the blue?”
“Out of the blue,” said Robert.
“You must know what prompted it. Go back over it. I was saying that I hadn’t seen round butter balls for years. That’s just what I was saying when you said it.”
“Said what?” Robert felt uncomfortable and silly now; he knew she would not drop the matter, and he hated that.
“You know what. What you just said.”
“Is it so hard for you to say the words?” He was tired of his own voice bantering with her, but he could not stop this asinine conversation.
“Robert, you’re acting very strangely today. I know you’ve been under a tremendous strain over the Baker thing, but …” and he hoped she too was tired now, of the whole thing. She let her sentence go unfinished, sucked on her cigarette, and stared out the window moodily.
He gave her knee a gentle squeeze and said, “I’m sorry, Margaret. I must be a bore. I probably am a little nervous, you’re right.”
“That’s all right, dear.” She glanced across and smiled at him.
He smiled back. “We’ll have a nice meal at Chez Odette.”
“I do wish, though, that you could explain why you made that remark just at that time, Robert. Did round butter balls remind you of something in our past?”
No, he was not going to miss Margaret. He forced himself to say calmly, pleasantly, “I honestly don’t know, Margaret. As you say, it came out of the blue. Will you please accept that answer? Will you cross it off to strain, nerves, tension — anything?”
“Have it your own way!” Margaret snapped.
He laughed bitterly to himself at the idea of Margaret allowing him to have his own way. It was a safe, meaningless offer, and Margaret knew it. Perhaps she had sensed that about him when she had married him, in the same way he had sensed (but never said it out to himself) the fact that if Margaret had not had money, he might not have loved her. It was not the dollars and cents aspect of Margaret’s money — but all that someone like Margaret represented to Robert: prestige, refinement, security. All those things Robert himself possessed, in a lesser degree. If Robert’s father had not gambled away the family fortune, things might have been different — but worse than any poor boy’s awe of a rich girl, was a once-rich boy’s hungry nostalgia for the past. Worse than fear of being poor, was the fear of not being rich.
When Robert had courted Margaret, he had thought of it as a big gamble, with the odds quite a bit against his winning her. He had attributed his success to his skill at the game. He had been far too young and ingenuous to appreciate the fact there had to be something in it for Margaret as well, an intangible something that had nothing to do with Robert, but with Margaret’s determination to have her own way.
He had read somewhere that people deserved each other, particularly husbands and wives. The fishwife deserved her husband’s beatings and the Milquetoast deserved his wife’s nagging — not only deserved it, but was pulled toward it, like a hairpin to a magnet.
He could remember the years and years of giving in to Margaret, and all the accouterments of the process — the hot water bottles, the long distance calls to Mother Franklin, the thermometers and bottles of nerve medicine, and Margaret’s martyred silences — until Robert said, “If you really think we ought to …” or, “If you really think we shouldn’t …” It was a pattern, he knew, dating back to his youth; his life had always been controlled by someone with a stronger will than his. Margaret’s sick headaches and sorry expressions were not unfamiliar, which was one reason Margaret and Robert’s mother had been arch enemies from the moment they met, until Mrs. Bowser’s demise. Yes, the pattern was as clearly marked as a tire tread in fresh snow. It was not simply Margaret’s money which had draw
n Robert to her; nothing was ever that simple. Robert Bowser had learned that slowly and very well. With every gamble, there was a more subtle gratification involved than just winning the prize.
He glanced over at his wife, who was silent now, peeved. She pretended to sleep. Her left leg swung nervously on her right one. Robert knew how Margaret hated unpredictability, and how much she believed that there was an answer to everything. She was probably right now searching for the very sentence she had said before the one about round butter balls — searching for some clue to the mystery of his sudden declaration of love. A part of him wished it had been another way. “I love you, Margaret,” he would have said, because he would have felt very close to her after twenty-one years of marriage — close, and not at all self-conscious about expressing his affection. And Margaret would have reached across and touched some part of him, smiling. She would have said, “I love you too, darling, very much.” But then, they would have had to be two different people.
He could not honestly say life with Margaret had been unpleasant. Her control was consistently benevolent; firm, but very gentle. She had a way of leading him to believe that she knew him much better than he knew himself; that she was just a little surprised he did not know himself that well. His mother had known the same tricks. “Robert,” she used to say, “you don’t really want to do that?” Whatever it was he had wanted to do, he put it out of his thoughts — and gladly. That was the peculiar part. It seemed almost as though he asked to do certain things, simply to please her by then not doing them.
A year after he had been married to Margaret, they had gone to Paris. They had stayed at a small hotel on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, in a suite on the top floor, with a balcony that looked down on the Seine and the Ile de la Cité. The wine and the contagious notion of Paris’ pull toward the romantic, the fact they were alone together in a foreign country, and the pleasure in buying Margaret a jewel from Christofle — a whole gentle mood of desire and delight — had inspired Robert during love-making. He had felt nearly spiritual as he touched her body; there was a new dimension to their intercourse which thrilled him. Then, in the middle, Margaret stopped him.
“The traffic noise,” she said. “I’m sorry, Robert. I just can’t concentrate.”
He remembered that he had not been as disappointed by Margaret’s failure to feel a difference as he had been struck by the idea of Margaret’s concentrating on something then. On what? It had never occurred to him that she concentrated when they made love. He had put his pajamas on and smoked a cigarette by the window a while; then he had asked her what it was she concentrated on during lovemaking.
She had answered, “That isn’t like you, Robert.”
Immediately Robert had felt immense relief. The feeling had surprised him, but there it was — and he had mumbled that he was only kidding.
• • •
Another thing that Margaret felt was not at all like Robert, was Robert’s friendship with Bud Wilde. Wilde had been Robert’s roommate at Princeton, and the year Robert was graduated, Wilde was his Best Man. Friendship was a slight exaggeration. Necessity had forced them on one another.
Wilde had taken the initiative in making the best of it. Robert was reserved and bespectacled, solemn and already engaged to Margaret. Wilde called him “Stuffy” and treated him with that combination of affection and tolerance that sometimes happens between opposites when intimacy is thrust upon them. They were somewhere on the outskirts of friendship, and for Robert, it was the closest he had ever come. Wilde, the younger of the two, treated Robert good-naturedly, as one would treat a kid brother who had turned out to be a disappointment, but was still kin. At Robert’s wedding, Wilde got very drunk and told the entire wedding party an obscene joke that had to do with a honeymoon night and a busy hotel elevator. After that, he was Margaret’s favorite target, until years later when John Hark came into their lives.
Robert had seen Wilde several times during the war years, when Bud passed through Washington. Bud was a Navy pilot with Task Force 58, in the Tokyo area, Iwo Jima, Jyushu, and the islands of Nansei Shoto. Before the war was over, he had flown twenty-six missions. Whenever they lunched or drank together, it was Wilde who talked, while Robert sat dumbly, fighting an inevitable headache, and a fear there would be a lapse in the conversation, when he would have to think up something to say.
Once Robert had blurted out, “How I envy you!”
It was only half true. Part of Robert Bowser did envy Wilde, but the rest, the greater part of him, saw Wilde’s ostensible intrepidity as foolishness; risks too great for the gain.
“Then do something about it, Stuffy, before you’re fat and forty!”
“I tried to get in … My eyes are …”
“I’m not talking about the war, Stuffy,” Wilde said. Neither was Robert talking about the war. He was talking about Bud himself, about caution thrown to the wind, and little gambles — about impetuosity and the thread of daring woven through Robert Bowser’s own cloth. Robert was always given to wonder what it would be like if there were more there. He let Bud go on, without telling him his thoughts.
“You’re like one of those spiders that walks on top the water all the time,” said Bud. “Get wet, Stuffy! Listen — have you ever done anything just on impulse? You know what I mean, taken a foolish chance, hopped in the sack just for a good hard kick, ever done anything totally unthought-out, just because you goddam felt like it?”
“Margaret’s perfectly adequate in bed,” Robert had answered, knowing how dull it sounded, but thinking that he could not tell Wilde the idea just seemed unnecessary. Was that it? Or was it that he simply knew people didn’t get away with things? You couldn’t get away with it, and Wilde didn’t know it.
“Stuffy,” Wilde went on, “a kick — a real kick, is never described by the adjective ‘adequate.’ Neither is a real risk, nor an impulse. What you need to do, Stuffy, is to take off your goddam gloves!”
“Yes,” Robert had sighed, “I remember that poem.”
All the while they had roomed together, Bud had a poem tacked to his mirror. Robert forgot who the poet was, but he could still see the small index card with the poem typed on it, the red thumbtack holding it.
TO A FAT LADY SEEN FROM THE TRAIN
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white lady whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is as soft as the breast of doves,
And shivering sweet to the touch?
Robert had resisted the notion of telling Bud about the $50,000 gift from Mother Franklin, which he had lost on the stock deal. It would have astonished Bud, but Robert did not want to put it down as a risk taken and lost. A miscalculation, not a gamble. Wilde would not understand that — that there was a difference. It was the difference between big business and little business, between the graceful maneuverings of heads of industry and the paltry caviling of street peddlers.
Wilde had sighed. “It was tough that Margaret roped you in so early, Stuffy.”
“I wanted to marry Margaret very badly,” Robert answered honestly.
Bud Wilde had smiled. “Who was it who said that when the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers?”
The last time Robert saw Bud Wilde was the same day Robert was made treasurer of King & Clary.
It was a day in March. He had not seen Bud in fifteen years. Clary had ordered a standby that day. It meant Robert was to keep himself available at a moment’s notice for a call to the twentieth floor. There was the usual electricity in the air; the cluster of secretaries and file clerks whispering by their desks the elevator boy holding the special elevator for the express trip to twenty; the hush of tension, and the leap of temporary relief at the phone’s every ring.
Bud had called New Hope and Margaret had told him where Robert worked. Impulsively, wanting to surprise Robert, Bud had gone directly to the Southw
orth Building without calling.
Their reunion took place one minute after Robert had received word he was due on twenty. Wilfred Clary was a stickler for punctuality, and for all the petty ritual and protocol of the patriarchal company life. Robert was actually running down the hall toward the elevator. There, in the corridor between his office and the elevator, he came upon Wilde. For a moment he did not recognize him. His first impression was that Bud Wilde was one of the brash Coronet cigar salesmen, since Coronet Corporation had offices on eight too. When Wilde slapped him across the back, pulling Robert’s coat sleeve at the same time, Robert had stepped back, the beginnings of a reproachful look spreading across his face — then slowly changing as Bud called out, “It’s me, Stuffy! Bud!”
He was dressed in a seedy tweed suit, a blue shirt, and a loud blue and red tie. Brown shoes. A worn felt hat in his hands, with weather stains on the band.
“It’s Bud!” he grinned, pounding Robert’s shoulder.
“Hello!”
“Hel-lo? Holy Christ, is that all?”
Then had come the embarrassment of trying to explain to Wilde that he was due on twenty immediately. There was Wilde’s disbelief: immediately meant immediately, not two minutes, not five. Robert was perspiring, beads of it dotted his forehead and he could feel his shirt sticking to his ribs. Wilde sensed the seriousness of Robert’s situation slowly, perhaps not until Robert was walking away — perhaps not until the elevator doors had sealed off Robert from view, leaving Wilde there with his bewilderment. They had arranged for a drink at the Roosevelt at five-thirty. All the way up to twenty, Robert Bowser thought of Wilde’s last words in the corridor, “Why, Stuffy, you’re about to pee in your pants — like some kid on his way to the principal’s office!”
When they met later in the Rough Rider Room, Bud told Robert he had been doing some test-piloting, some stunt-flying at state fairs in old World War I crates, and some freight piloting between the States and Brazil. Robert had just been told of his appointment as treasurer. In the back of his mind, Robert Bowser knew what the new position meant to him: a chance at the coup. He could not frame it right out, but he knew that as he listened to Bud and his talk of wild schemes for the future, he felt vaguely resentful and impatient with Bud. Things took time; things had to be thought out — timing was everything — everything. It was almost as though he feared some of Wilde’s reckless impulsiveness would rub off on him, if he were to listen to Wilde any longer. There was just enough of Wilde in Robert Bowser to make Bowser recoil.
