“Well I think you’re a succubus. I think you stole the lead out of my pencil.” He stood up, pointing at her, and then he sat back down. He turned to Park. “Get the car, Herman.”
I ELECTED TO walk. It wasn’t that far, and it was a pleasant evening, getting warm with a clear sky and the stars thick as bedbugs. I picked up an Evening Beacon out of a machine on my way out and walked with it under my arm, thinking about Irma. That had been the best sexual experience I’d had since Italy, where one of my girls—as it happens, the one I got knifed over—had such exquisite muscle control that her colleagues charged half price on the nights she worked. Otherwise they wouldn’t have had any johns at all, so eager were the GIs to get a crack at the average-looking Giovanna. I learned an important lesson with those gals, that looks could sometimes come in second to personality and sexual experience and, occasionally, to anatomical idiosyncrasy. Not that I ever intended to pimp again, but speaking purely as a client I thought I had a leg up on my competing johns.
I got home and turned on the lamp and read the paper in the easy chair. On the front page was a photograph of a wife-killer getting taken into custody. His name was Bensen, a shop steward on the line over at Beechcraft, which meant he’d spent the war at home. Some guys were glad about that circumstance—getting classed 4-F, or having a militarily essential job—and some let it stick in their craw until they felt like they had something to prove. What struck me about the photo wasn’t the disheveled look of the skinny murderer, with his bloodstained undershirt and wild, greasy hair, but the expression of horrified surprise on his face as he found himself staring into the camera lens, as though the worst part of the day so far hadn’t been the realization that he’d gone too far and actually beaten his long-suffering Harriett to death, nor had it been his arrest (which, judging by his bloody lip, had also involved a walloping from the arresting officers). No, Bensen looked as though the worst of it was being ambushed by the Beacon’s photographer, the explosion of the tiny bulb in its round, silvered reflector, the worst day of his life forever enshrined in a morgue drawer of Wichita’s finest scandal sheet. The look was that of a public shaming; that look was why our Pilgrim forebears invented the stocks.
I knew my way around a camera. My grandfather’s work in photography had proceeded from the wet plate era to the first years of Kodachrome, and he had passed the rudiments of the trade on to me. I didn’t own a camera any more, but that night I started thinking about the possibilities. After all, I would certainly be needing a camera soon to record the first years of the baby’s life. Besides, who knew what kind of clandestine photographs a sly and resourceful shutterbug might be able to get, if he knew enough about his subjects’ habits and comings and goings?
THE NEXT MORNING before office hours I called Ezra Groff and arranged to bring Collins in for an early visit. When we arrived, Collins had on dark glasses and an old black overcoat of my own whose arms were a little short for him and a black slouch hat. He was addled that morning and, for the first time since I’d known him, seemed actually frail.
Groff was his usual curt self, but I could tell he was impressed to have such a luminary in his office. I offered to leave the room but Collins wanted me there. We sat across the desk from the doctor, who made a steeple of his fingers and nodded, frowning, at everything Collins said.
“I don’t believe you,” Groff said when the old man repeated his boast of having gotten laid every day of his adult life.
“Well, damn near anyway. Some days more than once so it amounts to the same thing.”
Groff shrugged. “And when you’re drunk you still manage?”
“Hell, yes.”
“And how many prescriptions for Hycodan are you current with?”
Collins looked over at me in search of an answer.
“Four,” I said. “But the other three are at higher dosages than the ones you write.”
Groff nodded, rubbed his temples, closed his eyes. “Mister Collins, it’s a tribute to your virility that this is the first time you’ve failed to achieve an erection, given the amount of opiates in your system.” The eyes popped open. “How are your bowel movements?”
“When I manage to have one these days it’s a big one.”
“Severe constipation’s another symptom.”
“Are you telling me I can’t have the pills any more?”
“You can have them if you want them. You just have to accept that they have other, unintended effects.”
“But if I want to have relations with a girl I have to quit.”
“You think about it. Have Mr. Ogden contact me if you want my help.”
Outside we got into the car. When I pulled away from the curb he tapped me on the shoulder (he was of course riding in the back seat). “You got any medicine on you? I need to think about this business real hard.”
TEN
A GOOD DEAL TEN IN HOME FURNISHINGS
PARK AND I had taken to sitting around Stanley’s late mornings. A couple of able-bodied men could have found other pursuits on a weekday, but it was important the boss be able to find us if he managed to rouse himself sufficiently to roll out of bed and pick up the phone. And so we played gin rummy and read the morning editions of both papers over coffee until lunchtime, after which we drove over to the Collins manse whether summoned or not and did our best to get the old bastard into a fit condition to leave the house and make a showing at the plant, if only to stave off the rumors that had, inevitably, begun to circulate regarding his fitness to lead the company. The rumors mostly involved sickness and senility rather than addiction to opiates, but that time was probably coming before long.
A redhaired man with a lopsided tilt to his head and an extraordinarily long neck came in one day around eleven and sat down at the counter. The counterman that day was an old Dutchman we called Fritz, and he didn’t answer much when the man tried to engage him in conversation.
“I’m so worried about the whole business I’m thinking of moving up to Oregon and building a bomb-proof house. Half of ’em died of radiation sickness, did you know that? You’ll have to have a house lined with lead.”
Fritz stuck to his grill, faced away from the man without answering or even grunting. “Don’t let Fritz hurt your feelings, he’s just sore because the krauts lost the war,” I said.
Fritz spun and pointed his spatula at me like an épée. “Shut your piehole, Ogden, I’m from Holland, you know goddamn well my name’s Pier.” Then he turned back to the grill again.
The redhead turned to me now. “Do you understand what I’m talking about? We’re walking around pretending everything’s normal but the fact is the commies are probably working on a bomb right this very minute, and you know where the first one’s going to be aimed at? Right here at Wichita, because that’s where the aircraft plants are. And who knows where you can go that’d be any safer?”
Park smirked and rolled his eyes, but I just nodded in the fellow’s direction. I’d seen guys get like this in the service, monomaniacal and antsy and trying to convince the world of their private obsessive delusion, until the whole thing collapses into despair and sorrow. This guy was headed for a nervous breakdown and no amount of believing him or not would slow him down one little bit.
IT HAD BEEN a couple of weeks since the last letter, and my nameless correspondent was on the move. His latest missive was postmarked Bismarck, North Dakota, and this time he was brazen enough to write me on stationery from the Bismarck Hotel.
Dear Sarg
What I hear your maried. I sure hope shes a sweet piece of poontang cause oh buddy Im going to give it to her like nobodys busness after I kill you dead.
from
your pal
What kind of addlebrained shitbird, I asked myself, writes self-incriminating letters to his intended victim? Either he was an incompetent moron or a bona fide lunatic. In either case he had a fair amount of accurate information about me, and I was wondering where he got it. If he was a relative of one of the girls from Ro
me I didn’t see where he’d get that, but an army man or a vet with good connections might easily find things out. I was thinking maybe I’d make a visit to the VA myself.
ONE AFTERNOON NOT long after that I asked Mrs. Caspian if I might accompany her out to her car. As we walked I realized that her failure to look me in the eye and refusal to speak more than the absolute necessary minimum were not matters of rudeness or contempt but of shyness. In the daylight of the parking lot her face showed bright blushing red, and when I asked her if I had any enemies in the department she turned, met my gaze, and blurted, “Oh, yes, Mr. Ogden, all of them.”
The spring daylight revealed something else: Mrs. Caspian was not unattractive at all, her body now appearing to me full and womanly rather than fat, her face expressive and almost pretty. The effect was not unlike that in a movie where a plain girl takes off her glasses and is revealed to be a beauty.
“Is there someplace we can talk alone?”
There was a look of panic in her eyes. She looked down at her shoes as though thinking hard, then looked up. “My apartment.” She wrote an address down on a chewing gum wrapper. “Meet me there in an hour.”
SHE HAD CHANGED from her business clothes into a light spring dress when I got to her little second-story apartment in Riverside, and there was a tray with a coffee pot and two cups on the coffee table. I sat down in the middle of the couch, thinking there was no way on God’s green earth that I was going to seduce this woman, or that she was even up for it. But I had that wonderful feeling you get right before you screw a woman for the first time, that childish anticipation that permeates the air of a room. Very rarely had that feeling failed me, and she sat down next to me rather than in the easy chair and crossed her legs in a way that showed a great deal more of them than I’d seen previously.
“Now Mr. Cave and Mr. Baines, they don’t much like your being around but they’re just following along. Mr. Kohl and Mr. Linhart, though, they talk about you behind your back all the time. Call you . . . ” She could barely bring herself to say it. “They call you ‘Old Brown-nose.’ I had to ask them what it means. It means . . . ”
“I was in the Army, Mrs. Caspian.”
“Oh. Of course.”
I thought I’d ratchet things up a little and get a better idea of whether she was going to tumble. “Is Mr. Caspian at home?”
“Oh. Well.” She was sweating now despite the pleasant breeze coming in through the window, and waved a magazine in front of her face. “He’s a salesman, he sells vacuum cleaners, Hoovers, not door to door, he’s an official sales rep, and he’s got the whole territory of Kansas and northern Oklahoma, too, so of course he makes regular trips to places, in fact he’s on the road about three weeks a month, excepting weekends, when mostly he’s home.”
It was more than she’d said to me since I’d met her. I put my hand on a pudgy, dimpled, pretty knee, leaned in, and kissed her.
Mr. Caspian, it seemed, had not been fulfilling his conjugal duties on a regular enough basis even on those nights when he was home. His wife responded to my pass so enthusiastically that we barely made it to the bedroom. Mrs. Caspian liked it every which way, and she made so much noise I had to ask if the neighbors downstairs would hear.
“They’re old and deaf,” she said, in between loud yelps.
If she didn’t care, I guessed I didn’t either. She was a big gal, with a big voice, and afterward I asked her about that.
“Oh, yes, I’m a trained singer. I still sing in the choir at St. Mary’s.”
“No fooling?”
“I sure am. If you think Collins is bad, you ought to see the backstabbing that goes on in a cathedral choir.”
She wasn’t the kind of Catholic girl whose sense of guilt made sex more exciting; Mrs. Caspian didn’t seem to have any sense of guilt about it at all. She had a look of quiet contentment that was quite at odds with the face she habitually showed me.
“Penny for your thoughts, Mr. Ogden.”
“I think at this point you might as well call me Wayne.”
“Oh, no, if I do then I’ll slip up and call you that at work, and then everybody will know. Trust me, it’s happened before.”
“You’ve done this sort of thing, then, before?”
“Never at Collins, but at my last job. I had to. My gosh, even when Mr. Caspian’s home he barely gives me what I need.”
“You think he messes around on the road?”
“I think he doesn’t like sex is what I think.”
I tried to imagine what that would be like and failed. “If you’re Catholic, what do people think about your not having any kids?”
“They think we’re among those poor unfortunates that the Lord made barren, and they pray for a miracle.” She raised her left foot off the bed and wiggled her toes. “You know, Mr. Ogden, I’d say until this afternoon our department was the least scandalous in the whole company.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s all men, except me, and none of those fellows like me that way. But just look at the rest of the place. Mr. Collins himself getting that girl in trouble and sending her away to have it gotten rid of.”
“How did you find out about that?”
“I’m real nosey, Mr. Ogden. And people think I don’t listen so they say things when I’m around. But I do listen.”
Mrs. Caspian spent the next half hour regaling me with the misdeeds and peccadilloes of upper and middle management. If half of it was true, which I doubted, then our little aircraft manufacturing concern was a cesspool of vice and iniquity unrivaled since Nero’s Rome. When I asked her about our esteemed comptroller Mr. Huff she regretted having nothing to give me. “Because he’s really the one who’s got it in for you and Mr. Collins. Nobody has anything bad to say about him, though. He’s a big shot in the K of C and he’s on all those charity boards and my gosh, have you ever seen his family?”
“I never have.”
“Four of the best looking kids you ever saw. And when he was in the hospital he got over three hundred get-well cards.”
“Appendectomy or something serious?”
“He was attacked and beaten up pretty bad.”
I sat up. “How’s that?”
“Oh, it was during the war. He was out for a walk and some hoodlums jumped him.”
“You don’t say. In broad daylight?”
“Oh, no, it was at night.”
“And I suppose it was on a downtown sidewalk.”
“No, he was walking in Riverside Park. Past midnight, I think. He said he does it sometimes to clear his head. Why are you smiling like that?” she asked.
“Mrs. Caspian, you’re okay in my book.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ogden,” she said, and she took my hand and guided it below her belly again and gave me the kind of smile only a straying member of the cathedral choir can give.
HIRAM FISH NO longer worked for Mrs. Collins, he informed me over the phone, having fallen out with the old virago over the reimbursement of his medical expenses. He wanted me to know that there were no hard feelings and that he was available for any sort of work Mr. Collins might wish to have him undertake, including but not limited to surveillance and surreptitious photography.
“What kind of camera do you use for that kind of work?”
He cleared his throat and I remembered the Speed Graphic I’d batted off the hood of his car. “It depends upon the situation,” he said.
“Suppose I want to take a picture at night without the subject knowing he’s been photographed?”
“Gosh, I sure don’t know. I always use a bulb at night, and they sure know after that goes off.”
“You think you could figure out a way? We might have some work for you if you can.”
“I’d be most happy to look into it,” he said, sounding like the preening gigolo he strove so hard to resemble.
I WOKE THE next morning with a toothache. It was a right rear molar and it’d been bothering me off and on for a month or more, and now it hurt
so bad I was afraid I might need a root canal or worse, an extraction. I thought about going to see Dr. Werner, our old family dentist, but I remembered in him what I now recognized as a sadistic streak—he was a skimper on the Novocain, and he used to sneer whenever a young patient cried out. He was born in the old country, and would have made a great Nazi in the movies. I didn’t want to pay out the nose, either, so I headed over to the VA hospital on Kellogg and waited for an hour with half a dozen other guys until my name was finally called.
The ex-army dentist who examined me lectured me on the evils of sweets and the importance of good dental hygiene before putting the gas mask on me and drilling away at what was still, in his estimation, a manageable cavity. Dr. Werner hadn’t approved of the laughing gas, as he thought it might lead to narcotic use, and I saw now that the old Kraut had a point; if I wasn’t literally laughing I sure felt like it. There was a sense of separation from my body, as well as a sense that I was doing cartwheels while still seated and immobile in the torture chair, and I made a mental note never to start using Hycodan myself, a thought that came a half-second after the thought that maybe it would be worth trying out some of the old man’s pills. No, thanks, I’ll stick to peddling the stuff.
I was walking through the atrium, mouth full of gauze, when I ran into Bunk Fletcher, a kid I’d grown up with and hadn’t seen since I was inducted.
He was out of the army and working for the VA as a file clerk. Despite my temporary speech impediment, we fell to talking and he invited me up to his office to jaw and drink Uncle Sam’s watery coffee.
He was showing me the filing system and I asked him, just for laughs, to pull my file. He did it, and I was impressed with its thoroughness and accuracy. My whole military career, at least the comings and goings, and all the pertinent medical data were there, along with an identification photo that may have been the dourest image of me ever captured on film. All my transfers, from Fort Dix all the way to Rome and finally my discharge, were right on there. My current address, as well as my last one, were in there, too, as well as the fact that I worked at Collins, even in which department. It got me thinking how easy it would be for the military to find me if for some reason I wanted to drop off the face of the earth.
The Adjustment Page 9
