"Grossman is always funny and always serious, and when he involves you, the humor abruptly swoops to heartbreak."
Newsweek
"Alfred Grossman manages to give his characters a conviction that is upheld throughout his story, and the narrative itself never loses its interest and plausibility."
Saturday Review
"Funnier than you have any right to hope and more menacing than a switchblade."
Washington Post
"... wildly amusing and profoundly disturbing...."
Minneapolis Sunday Tribune
"Grossman has a fine feel for words. He writes tersely; his dialogue has a deft touch. An entertaining book."
St. Louis Globe Democrat
"... razor sharp . , . searingly funny."
Worcester Sunday Telegram
"Caustic wit, touching humor, keen observation. This is in the best tradition of the modern satiric novel."
Library Journal
"Wit, subtlety, and a concern with people ... a real work of art."
Books of the Day
"The originality of the author's mind and the farcical horror of his hero's situation become gripping. If you enjoy Peter de Vries, you should enjoy this book."
The Sunday Times
THREE'S A CROWD
... and no one believed it more firmly than Charles Kraft, married man on the prowl. Charles' eye was on Pia, a sultry young steno as adept at seduction as she was with a switchblade. And everywhere that Pia went, these were sure to go:
Little Sister, permanently attached to a pair of tight toreador pants and a portable radio.
Buddy, tough-talking chieftain of a gang of vicious hoods.
Carol, his girl, whose hobbies were making out in cars and beating her mother, in that order.
Dirty, a dirty old man who loaned the teen-agers a clubhouse for initiation rites-and other purposes.
Prying the sexy Pia from her teen-age cronies and getting her into more interesting surroundings-like a dark bedroom-became an obsession with Charles Kraft. But even he didn't dream where his obsession would lead....." offers many shadings of delight."
The New York Times
"Brilliant ... a definite detonator."
The Observer
"Seeing there is nothing (right well beloved students of Mathematics) that is so troublesome to mathematical practice, nor doth more molest and hinder calculators, than the multiplications, divisions, square and cubic extractions of great numbers, which beside the tedious expense of time are for the most part subject to many slippery errors, I began therefore to consider in my mind by what certain and ready art I might remove these hindrances."
Morning, but the plaza blinding hot. The great unlikely buildings all a glare of stunning green. Pull-Tires to the blessed conditioned air, reprieved from nature. I thought of Purbeck the Englishman, who came to us in spring, making dainty deprecation of this and other machines he'd heard we had. I asked him yesterday. "I may kiss the bloody thing," he said and turned away. He knew it was my victory.
Absorbing cold, increasing entropy, to the elevators. Later than usual, fewer crowding; tourists not yet started. Up, with Laszlo's joke. The elevators lift, cannot the operators erect? Down statistic corridor with self-righteous step of having last night worked until eleven. The yearbook all but done, two days more of desultory prodding, and done. The world given the word one more year.
Our tandem team of griffins in the outer office: Eyck's secretary, Mrs. Mutton, the Branch secretary, Mrs. Hirsch. Their good-mornings in tandem, Mrs. Mutton's ahead. A dump of a woman, sloping out to her chair-spread rump. Twenty-two years a good secretary, and very happily married for twenty-two years, she'd said once. Meaning Mrs. Hirsch, no older than twenty-two, dark and tight, on her second marriage and looked unhappy about something.
Settled at my desk, feet on an open drawer, to admire the bulk of manuscript. To be 779 pages, XXXII Tables from Area Population to Life Tables through Births, Stillbirths, Deaths, Marriages and Divorces. The known globe. Known to us: nothing on the U.S.S.R. and Sumatra not solid. But the globe, if only the globe known to us, and if not known to us, not known. Earth's whole sweet pullulation. Outline of activities. Not a picture, no frames that big nor lenses to resolve that small. A composite outline, which is all we know, and when you know all you can know, then you know something fine.
Eyck rang the phone and asked me in. As always straight behind his clean desk. A sparse man, fine-boned and erect. He looked manufactured, the Special Model, one cleverly planned unit: close-fitted light suit over thin squared shoulders, dark tie never loosed from its pinch. The head larger than the body might have had, but not incongruous; a smooth bulb-shaped head, small straight nose perpendicular to the plane of the small straight mouth, precisely bisecting the line between the small blue eyes, and all the features arranged low beneath the symmetrical dome of skull covered with light hair. He was thirty-six, five years more than I, a good statistician, a good man to work for. Unimaginable as a close friend, unimaginable without the good-natured formality, the neatly contrived distance.
"Good morning, Charles," he said, "you seem warm."
"Good morning, Henry," I said. "It is a hell out there, I can do no less than to seem warm. Do you never perspire?"
"Infrequently, if at all." He liked his image of the un-movable man. "I hope the yearbook did not keep you late?"
"You know my penultimate scratching at it. I like to fondle the footnotes. Probably sexual," I said.
"Yes. You would not surprise me." A courteous return nod to my image, the movable man. Mutual respect for foliage.
He said: "To keep you assured that your work does not lack continuity and long-range purpose, here is the draft publications-schedule for next year."
"Oh, God," I said. "Another steel-ringed vista. This place is an Antaeus heap."
"Good, Charles," he said, smiling a larger smile than his mouth seemed to allow. "I suggest you look at it with some care. I have not found the time to consider it with the care I would like, and it does not seem that I will find the time. I would appreciate your doing so, keeping in mind both the capabilities and limits of the staff. I would also appreciate your discretion. Please do not mention that you possess or have seen a copy."
That I, of the staff, was to deal with matters Eyck ordinarily reserved for himself was pleasing, if no more. I was satisfied with my competence and Eyck's judgment. More interesting was the hint that there were concerns making unusual demands upon his time. I had decided that Eyck possessed ambitions towards the topmost bars of the jungle-gym. His wife, after intelligence and good looks, precisely nurtured, had money, quantities of money; I suspected certain pressures brought by these quantities on Eyck to soar. He would not be content to seem an appendage to fortune.
"To be sure," I said, picking up the draft schedule.
Just before lunch Mrs. Hirsch hung in the doorway and came in at my smile. Thin arms, bare to the shoulder, brown and pretenaturally long. Those, her cropped brown hair and flat chest made her seem about to leap up to a hidden branch, to hang by one brown limb, gibbering warmly.
"Mrs. Mutton asked me," she said. "She's upset about it, a little."
I looked inquiring.
"Not to bother Mr. Eyck, we thought. She found this in the ladies' room."
The monkey-arm put a knife on my blotter. It was a big switchblade, black-bone handled; I touched the button and a narrow six-inch blade, scratched and sharp, sprang. Mrs. Hirsch said: "Whooie."
"In the ladies' room?" I said. It seemed excessive.
"Yes," Mrs. Hirsch said.
"Not one of ours, surely," I said.
"Oh yes, yes, that's what upset Mrs. Mutton. She saw the girl who left it there, on the table after she did her face."
"Who, in God's name?"
"Cacherini," she said. "Who?"
"Cacherini. The new typist, from the pool, we've had her two months."
"Oh, of course," I said. "I'll give her her knife back."
"But you'll talk to her, I mean, you don't think the police?"
"No," I said, "I don't think so. It's not really our business what she carries with her. She hasn't done anything incendiary since she's been here?"
"No," Mrs. Hirsch said reluctantly. "Nothing. I haven't talked to her much. She's just like all the other typists, I guess." Pride of place.
"It could be a present for her father," I said. "Perhaps he fishes."
"Yes," looking doubtfully at the battered haft, the switch-button dull where use had worn the chrome.
I said: "Thank you very much for bringing it up. And reassure Mrs. Mutton."
"Yes," she said, "thank you," and went out. I'd met Mrs.
Hirsch's current husband once, as I passed her desk on the way home for the day. A thick man, much older than she, inaccurately shaved, who when she introduced us repeated my name with distaste and said: "You use a lot of mathematics around here." I replied with Laszlo's automatic office joke: "They multiply, we add."
I put the knife in my middle-drawer, and wrote "knife" on my pad. Then blacked out knife opaquely and wrote "Cacherini." Then tore off the leaf and into pieces and threw them away, and wrote "check."
Later Laszlo came in from his office next door crying: "Lunch, lunch, we must eat at once, are you free?" It was too hot to go out, so we ate downstairs. Laszlo strode nobly in ahead of me, a large swagger of benign majesty, Colonel of Hussars in the Old and Only Real Empire; decisive vote in the Magyar Diet arriving from far estates in momentous time. Ignoring the mere headwaiter, we arrived at a table at the window over the river. He ordered bourbon. I did not, and we both had the poor food.
At once Laszlo began his habitual discourse, great square face pushed at me over his glass, voice far down. "Charles, I am hit numb."
"Again," I said.
"Again," he said. "Do not mock me, it is not hospitable. You are native here, as the eagle in the mountain where it lives and dies, you know this land as you know your face. I am a poor stranger, a foolish barbarian, an ignorant Magyar herdsman whose eyes are wide with awe and wonder to look upon this second Rome, this Vienna more than Vienna, this capital of the world. You are wise, you are knowing, this civilization you have within you is the milk from your mother. It is not kind to keep from me a few pitying crumbs from the great table of your wisdom."
"All right, Laszlo," I said, "in whom did you fail to get?"
"You have no human pity," he said. "I knew it. Try only to remember that I am a miserable exile, homeless, without country, state, people."
"But Belgian citizenship, dubiously procured," I said, "two ex-wives, three children and a position of unwarranted respect in this organization which, as we have been told, is nightly prayed for by all the fearful children of this world."
"Eyck is an imbecile," Laszlo said.
"He was being funny," I said, in old debate. "But your numbness."
"I am invited to dinner by acquaintances I have. A nice little man, a nice little wife. Very sweet. She teaches in the schools. There is at dinner also a friend, also a teacher. Very young, very sweet. Beautiful, no, but in a nice little way pretty. With breasts. Very bold, speaks with spirit, makes remarks. Takes trouble to show me she is no fool, no innocent. I say birth rate, she says contraception. Very good."
"Oh no," I said.
"Oh yes. Very good. I say, why not? I blossom. I speak. I give my amazing history, the many strange sights I have myself seen, the things I have done. I am witty, intelligent, brilliant. I fascinate. She is fascinated, I smell it. She is but a little teacher in the schools, I have seen the great world, have done great deeds, am someone. Why should she not be fascinated? Very good.
"She says it is necessary to go. She looks at me. I say it is necessary to go. I suggest we take a little drink in my apartment. She says yes. We go. I make two little drinks. I toast her with beautiful and flattering Hungarian toast. She is very pleased, she laughs in pleasure. I sit beside her and kiss her. I feel her to hesitate, she kisses me also. She is more competent than I expect. I am pleased. I stand. Gently I tell her where is the bathroom, where she can hang up her clothes so that they will not be disturbed. She looks at me. She stands up. Bang. She is out of the door, she is gone. But that look she gave. Terrible. I am a monster. I am mad. I do things to very small children of which one cannot speak. I must be held down behind bars my arms strapped to my back."
"Ah, Laszlo," I said, "you romantic."
"But what is this? What kind of people is this?"
"Laszlo," I said, "you remind me of Purbeck, our English one."
"That little toad," he said, with real annoyance. "Charles, it is not being funny to say I remind of that little toad."
"Laszlo," I said, looking past my shoulder to the river metal-hot in the damned blaze of sun. The island, across, was black in the heat. "I am your friend, you are my friend, we are each other's friends. But in this you are like that little toad. Laszlo, you remember when Purbeck first came here? Always the look of a bad smell. It was not the smell he knew, it was therefore a stench. You remember? Everything. The birds in the trees were not the birds he had seen, they seemed to him mechanical birds. The cut of the coats was vulgar and the trip of the speech unspeakable. How gross the cars, how small the beers, how hot the rooms, how cold the water. He did not note differences, he cried stinking fish. Description was moral indignation."
"But that is not me," Laszlo said. "Air-conditioning, I almost killed him when he made me laugh. Every place has little ways, some to me are comfortable, some are not so. But I do not say like Purbeck, oh, how it is revolting. Except the Germans," he added automatically. "Everything there is revolting."
"Yes, but you do. Every time you meet a girl who won't put down her ass for your rich Magyar charm the first ten minutes, you ask me, what kind of people are these? No, that's unfair. Every time you meet a girl who makes you think she will and then doesn't, you ask what kind of people are these? Then I tell you to try a second time and she does, but still you have asked, what kind of people are these?"
"But why? Why did this sweet little teacher with breasts make me signs, dance me her dance, and then she looks at me like I must be right away burned on a stake and runs out? She does not want, she does not, but why does she pretend at me?"
"Laszlo, I have told you. You can't play in a game if you don't know the rules and recognize the moves. She was playing her game, you were playing another. The world is full of players each at a different game, making unrecognized moves, outraged with misunderstanding. I'm on your side, far better her ass down. But no Purbeck, no moral indignation."
"All right. It is not revolting, only to me it is revolting. Is it not to you revolting? Does it not give you moral indignation, Charles?"
"Laszlo, Laszlo," I said. "No meaningful questions. Not here, not now."
"Charles, at what so angry today?"
"Nothing, Laszlo," I said. "It was hot this morning."
"Yes," he said, as the waitress came to change dishes. A fat, middle-aged woman, sweating from the kitchen. Her collar showed pebbled skin at the top of her breasts, and a bit of a stout brassiere. Laszlo stared impersonally into the channel as she bent over, and added: "Air conditioning."
CHAPTER TWO
I left before five. Not far to go home. Sixty-third between First and Second, but hot and the taxi embedded in First Avenue traffic, trucks and cars leaving the city. We had four rooms, the first floor of a house, too small and too expensive, but suitable.
Drying gratefully after a shower, the air conditioning taking hold, the telephone. "Have you changed yet?"
"Naked but clean. Tabula rasa but no shave again. Why?"
"Kate's in town, she'll stay overnight. She has a date, we're going to dinner with them. All right?"
"Sure."
"They'll be up around six. Have pants on. I think there's gin."
"What's the stake?"
"She was casual enough it might be important. And coming into the city in this heat. I never heard of him."
"What's holding you?"
"Nothing, dear," my wife said. "I'm on my way."
We were a year married, still trying to get out of the tidal marsh of what we thought we ought to feel, to where we felt. I had little hope we would arrive. Her fault more than mine: she so intensely lived in what she thought she ought to feel. Mine, too, although I tried to pull: I resonated to her, so did not pull hard enough.
I had just dressed and settled nicely down to drink, when they came in together, my wife, Sally, and her sister, Kate, laughing that they had met at the door and moaning at the heat. They looked sisters, both pretty, not more nor less, with careful profiles and skin, fine hair between brown and blonde, good bodies. Sally was twenty-six, her sister two years less, but their main difference to eye and ear was that Kate seemed harder. Un-likely; Sally had been in the world since college, in the working world which surely is supposed to harden women, and Kate was still in the college world, now a teaching assistant. But Kate seemed the tougher. Perhaps it was my eye, I had never been to bed with Kate.
"Hello, Charlie," Kate said, which no one else did. "You've got a hot city."
"An odd time to come to it. You're looking well."
"Thank you. You look tired but distinguished. I couldn't take the little girls any more. Summer session's the worst. Strange types, and all that yearning female flesh exposed."
"As I told you, adjust, take the Greek way, travel lesbian."
"Crap," she said, to show I couldn't annoy her with that, and they went off to chatter, shower and change.
Sally came back first, by which time I had made martinis and commenced my second. She handed me her pearls and turned her back. "So, honey," I said, fastening the clasp at her nape.
"So, honey," she said. "Friday at last. What a week."
I kissed her above the clasp, and said: "True."
She nuzzled me with her ass and said: "God, that little rat, D'Annunzio. Four hours late with it today." One of the photographers at the place she worked. She was still sufficiently in the week to demonstrate her involvement with the great rough real world, even as I was involved.
"Ah, you career women," I said. "Balancing a gracious home on one rump and a responsible meaningful job on the other. Fantastic."
"Don't be snotty," she said, turning inside my arms and leaning on me. "How are you? Anything terrible happen?"
"No," I said. "I'm fine. How are you?"
"Fine," she said. "A little tired. I'll take a Dexamyl. I wish it were next month and vacation."
"It will be."
"I'm glad Kate is down. It should be fun. Let's have a good peaceful weekend."
"That's a good idea," I said. "Let's."
"You don't mind Kate and me making arrangements, and all?"
"Of course not. Kate and me are buddies."
"Yes, but there wasn't anything else you wanted to do?"
"We'll get to it later," I said, inserting her sexual desirability to soothe her. "Relax."
"I know. I'm tense. I'll be all right."
"All right, lay off it for a couple of minutes with guests in the house," Kate said. She had done herself well in a red-and-black-striped dress, unbuttoned low. I said it was tough she wasn't getting any up at school, but she mustn't be catty about her more fortunate sister, and gave them both drinks.
"So he's going to be late," Kate said, looking at the time. "Oh well." It was pushing six-thirty.
"You'd better sketch it in, dear," Sally said, "so we can take the proper tone."
"That reminds me," Kate said to me, "I don't know this one very well yet, so keep it clean."
"Yet?" I said.
"Yet. I like him, I think."
"What is it?"
"He's a lawyer, a wheel, I understand, city politics, state politics. You should get along with him, he's like you in some ways. I've only met him a few times, he was up at school for a few days visiting Morgan. They're buddies."
"Younger and cleaner than Morgan, I hope?" Morgan was head of her department, Political Science, decrepit and notably unwashed. I resented her telling me anyone was like me.
"Much," she said. It occurred to me that although we had a few times in the year met Kate's young men, they had all been young men previously known to Sally. This was the first specimen run before our eyes quite fresh. Kate must have a good deal of confidence in his presence to hazard him before us. Even though she was the younger, and being unmarried was relatively acceptable.
When, in a little, the doorbell rang, I went and opened. "Mr. Kraft?" he said. I agreed and put out my hand. "I'm Robert Richard Russell," he said, taking it firmly and looking me square in the eye. "I believe I was to meet your sister-in-law, Katherine, here."
"Yes," I said, "yes," and brought him in. At beef prices, Kate had a bargain: he was big and wide. Bright-yellow hair slicked close to a long head, sharp, handsome face, and a smile that, when he smiled, smiled.
"Well, Katherine," he said at the living room, "it's really good to see you again." He took her hand and turned the spotlight down on her. "Hello, Bob," she said.
When he'd been introduced to Sally, announced that he was very glad to know her, and she'd blinked in the glare, he said: "Would you excuse me if I washed up a little? I've just come from a Mayor's meeting, and you know what a rough ride up that is on a Friday." He did not appear to need it, but I showed him to the John. As I came into the living room, Kate was talking high and hard about school, so I didn't say anything. I looked at Sally, but she didn't look at me.
Two drinks at home and dinner at a near Italian restaurant, Robert Richard Russell and I making the conversation. Sally was quiet, smiling or putting in a word. Kate was extraordinary. She alternated bursts of hard intrusive speech, leaning forward tightly looking at nothing, with massive periods of boneless silence, staring full-eyed and solemn at Robert Richard Russell.
He was not stupid, but ponderous, I thought, ponderous. "I believe I remember Katherine's telling me you are at the United Nations," he said. "With Stevenson?"
"No, in the Secretariat," I said.
"With Thant."
"With Eyck and Purbeck, the Englishman," I said. "I'm a demographer."
"I see," he said, realizing I was a simple technician. "It is a fascinating field. The terrible pressures of population in the East. Food scarcities. Malthus, and so forth."
"Yes," I said, letting him know he hadn't confused demography with something else.
"Tell me," he said, "what are the major dimensions of your problem today?"
I sloshed a piece of veal in the lemon sauce, and said: "The minor dimensions of my problem are scarcity and inaccuracy of data and the prevalence of typographical errors in published reports. As a technician I have no major dimensions."
Katy took her eyes off Russell with soft plopping sounds of little sea life pulled from a rock, grew hard, and said: "Charlie is a snob. Like specialists are. They get inundated in the techniques of their mystery, and anyone who doesn't know the intricate problems of their techniques is just another civilian. Like some of the men at school, like little Klein, for example, the only important thing is the mathematics of probability applied to interviewing, and if you can't follow him into that country you're just a foreigner." With certain justice, but misplaced.
"My dear Kate," I started, but she had gone again boneless, fixed the wide jelly of her eyes on Robert Richard Russell, and was far from us. He smiled at me and said: "Yes, of course we all get fascinated by the details and disciplines of our work.
Nevertheless, I think you'll agree that we must also keep these details in the perspective of the longer view, the strategy rather than the tactics."
"Perhaps," I said, overtly watching his chewing process, "I nevertheless find it a tactless moment to discuss starvation deaths in India. If views are important enough to be longer they are too important to chat about. What are the major dimensions of your problem?" I had almost talked myself into sincere annoyance.
"Eat your nice scallopine, Charles," Sally said.
"Yes, dear," I said.
Russell took a moment deciding whether to anger or not, glanced into Kate's clear limpet gaze, decided not. "Well," he said, "this conference the Mayor called was interesting, really interesting. Nothing formalized, you understand, just a group of people with different points of view talking through the problem, the over-all strategy of handling the problem, not the details."
"Problem?" I said, not heeding the argument.
"Oh, juvenile delinquency. I needn't tell you about it, you read the newspapers. You know how serious it is. The Mayor had some figures that haven't been released yet, and it's even more serious than you might be aware."
"You know," I said, "my reaction every time I read that some kids busted up a church social with zip guns, or a dozen more fifteen-year-old girls have gotten themselves knocked up, is good for them."
Russell examined me, thinking that a little baiting was one thing, but this childish contradiction was oaf's work.
"Sally," I said, "you remember. I've said so. I'm not sure why."
Russell said: "You're not serious, of course." Doubtfully.
"Partly. More than mere contradiction."
"Have you ever had any experience, any firsthand experiences, with these delinquency problems?" Expert cross-examination. Deservedly; I had descended to sincerity.
"No," I said. "I was a good kid. Perhaps the reason."
"Well," he said. There was an immoderately long pause, then, and Russell at last said that if Sally and I had no particular plans for the evening we might enjoy this get-together for a few drinks he was taking Katherine to, there might well be some interesting people we would be interested in meeting. He had for a moment started to lose the high-minded orotundity of his temper, and, a man whose career was handling himself, needed a gesture to overlay that lapse. Why, yes, we said, after a moment's scrutiny, we'd like to. Then Kate came alive again, to line out a denunciation of the projected departmental reorganization up at school, tautly proving she was a person.
The party was in a big apartment on Lexington, very crowded, very loud, not with individual exhibitions but the cumulative mass of determined communication. We got there early enough, but by the ash trays and over-all blur it must have been going well for some time. The air conditioning, game but out-numbered, was succumbing. We were introduced to the host who stood by the door, talking to a fattish woman in summer print. He was a pleasant foxy little man, who called Russell "Boy." Russell called him "Boy." There was a white table-clothed bar set up at each end of the long room, and I got gin and tonics for Sally and me. We looked at the people, and I pushed my way back for more. A woman demonstrating a tundra of sunburned freckled back was in front of me at the bar. I made room for a passer-by behind and the iced glasses I was protecting in a marsupial clutch pressed against her spine. She turned, looked me honestly in the eye, and said: "Oh, lover, don't." I found Sally talking to a pretty girl who said her husband had died four months ago and this was her first party, but tomorrow she was going to Nassau, and drifted away. Sally and I drank and watched the people, companionably pointing out discrepancies of coupling and idiosyncracies of manner. There were few of either, but we made do with divination and burlesque. There was one very young girl, a lovely thin thing, who began every sentence across the room with a hilarious whooped "My God" and swallowed up the rest. By eleven-thirty I was very little drunk and my feet hurt. Sally said she was tired and a headache coming on. We scanned for host or Russell, but the press was too great. We went home.
It was cool and quiet at home. "Ah well," I said, throwing off coat and tie and folding into the couch, "Friday gone. Peaceful party." Sally came and sat on the edge of the couch. "Lord in heaven," she said. "I'm tired. What a week. Honey, I think I'll get started toward bed right away. All right?"
"Sure, baby," I said. "What did you think of Robert Richard Russell?"
"Oh, I liked him," she said. "A little public in his manner, maybe, but I liked him."
"You did, now," I said. "Didn't you?"
"No. I did not. A dull and pompous ass."
"I don't think he'd be dull underneath the manner," she said. "Not as consistently fascinating as you, but not dull."
"All right," I said, thinking to have a bit of quiet fun, "so I'm jealous on account of Kate."
"I hope so," Sally said. "I hope he screws her tonight and she glows tomorrow and you're jealous as hell."
"What?" I said, on my elbows. "What mad talk is this?"
"I'm tired of-the way you and Kate are," she said, closing her eyes, looking tired. ""You talk together as if you were so damned close. I mean I'm tired of feeling that you and Kate are so damn close when you talk. As if I were the third person."
"Sally," I said, "that's...." i couldn't think of a non-abrasive noun.
Pause. "I know," she said. "I'm just so damned insecure," using her habitual vocabulary.
"But, Sally, what do you want to be insecure for?" I said, putting an arm around her. Family joke.
"I know," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm awfully tired, honey. I'd better go to bed."
We kissed each other domestically on the mouth and she went. I made a drink and lay upon the couch. There were faint intermittent car sounds from outside. Old Sally. Good old poor old Sally. What did she want to be insecure for? Attractive girl. Done well at school. Liked by high and low. Had a job she enjoyed. Did well at it. A career, you might say. Married a fine fellow. I loved her and she loved me, of course.
I thought of Sally when I first knew her, three years before. So bright, competent, carefully furbished and aligned, so willing to laugh; and always the silent shriek so loud to my ears that I wondered why no other heard: Love me. I heard so well I was deafened, but not everybody heard. Just after I met her a man I knew who'd gone with her on dates once or twice said to me: "A smart girl, but distant. Makes you feel she doesn't need anything."
She lived, then, in a neat old apartment off Lexington in the Seventies, with a girl she'd been to school with. A cheerful ugly little girl who liked to cook very well and was a chemist and had for several years been screwing a doctor, married and forty. She would laugh sometimes from her round blob-nosed face and say, What a mess, what a mess, and laugh again. "The trouble with Sally," she had said, "is she thinks everything that happens to her or doesn't happen to her is her fault, she did something wrong or didn't do something right. She can't understand that sometimes things happen." Got pregnant and aborted, with her own money and not by her medical friend, and married somebody from Chicago just after Sally and I got married. Happily, I thought.
And the first time we went to bed, Sally saying: "Let me," taking her clothes off quickly and neatly, pirouetting bravely with her arms up for me to admire her body striated by afternoon sunlight through the blinds, then stopping and stooping with hands over her breasts, saying crisply: "I'd better tell you I'm not very good. I'm not good at all." She wasn't until she took confidence.
There were sounds at the front door, Robert Richard Russell's "Good night, Katherine. It's been really wonderful to see you again. I'll call at five," and Kate came in.
"Drunken old slob," she said to me.
"Who, me or Robert Richard Russell?"
"Oh, he's not a drunken old slob," she said.
"True. Have some."
"All right," she said, and did. Sat glowering at me. "Oh Christ," she said.
"What's your trouble, girl?" I said. "I'm mad."
"What are you mad at, little girl?"
"I'm mad at everything."
"What everything, child?"
"Nothing," she said, and drank her drink.
"Interesting," I said. "Reminds me of an amusing incident down at the office today."
"I'm mad because I wanted to go to bed with Bob and I wouldn't let him."
"Bob? You mean Robert Richard Russell? Did he try real hard?"
"No, he didn't try at all."
"Ah," I said, "that everything."
"Oh, go fry in hell," she said. "I know he would have tried if I'd given any hint that I wanted him to. But I couldn't. It's not he didn't want to, I'm sure it isn't. But I wasn't sure enough to give any hint, I knew how terrible it would be if he really didn't want to and I hinted. But I'm sure he wanted to."
"You girls come in out of the hills pretty randy, eh?" I said.
"Oh, shut up," she said. "I've only been with three men in my life, at all, and only one that was important, or I thought so, and that was a long time ago, my God, six months. But tonight, after this miserable summer, and I like Bob, I like him a whole lot, I think maybe I'm starting to love him and I want to be pushed to it, I wanted to. Damn him. Why did he have to need any sign from me? Why did I have to do anything?"
"Why, if he won't try without a sign from you and you won't sign without a try from him, why, here you are. Never laid a glove on you, eh?"
"Oh, shut up," she said. "Of course he kissed me good night and talked about what we'll do tomorrow and looked meaningful, I guess. Damn it, I don't just want to go to bed with him, I want to love somebody without worrying."
"Yeah," I said, "ain't it the truth?"
"Oh, you're such a bastard," she said. "Such a smug, know-it-all bastard."
"Who doesn't? People want it so bitingly they're paralyzed with fear that the force of their want will be used to destroy them. So they can't give signs, for fear the tremulous branch of olive will be seized for a scourge to their naked selves. Sure. What else is new?"
"Not everybody. Not never."
"No. Some are broken early and never want to come out. Some are strong or lucky enough to push out beyond without security. Sometimes."
"Some want to be loved most, more than to love. Sally did. Of course she loves you, but she wanted to be loved more."
"She didn't feel worth enough to love. First she had to be told she was not dirt, had to be loved. I don't know. Maybe it's a sexual split, men weighing want toward loving, women toward being loved. It works out neatly. And God knows you play the man enough. But it's not so neat, l think."
"I do, don't I? I have to, I guess."
"I guess," I said.
"Well," she said. "To bed." She came over and put her fingertips on my forehead. "Good night, Charlie," she said.
I put my hand on her hip. "Good night, kid. Too bad Sally's a cautious sleeper."
"Dirty old man," she said.
Expected to, I slid my hand an inch and a half down her flank. She picked up my wrist and put my hand on my chest. "Disgusting, drunken, mean, dirty old man," she said. At the door she stopped. "What did you think of Bob?"
"Robert Richard Russell? Very nice," I said. "A very nice guy."
"Yes," she said after a bit. "Good night, Charlie."
When the sound said the bathroom had been cleared I got up and went to bed. Sally was asleep, belly down, her face beautifully empty and open turned on the pillow toward my side. I touched her shoulder and soon went to sleep.
Kate went out Saturday afternoon to meet Robert Richard Russell. "Good luck," I'd said politely. She looked at me unhappily and said: "That's not fair. I'd been drinking." A good excuse. Sally and I pottered in the afternoon, went to a film early to miss the mob, came home and went to bed right away with ice and a bottle of gin. We had a good time. Just before sleep, Sally said: "I wonder what time Kate will get back."
"If at all, poor kid."
"Maybe. But he'd probably get her back anyway, whatever. For the form. I never worry about Kate, you know? It's nice."
At six in the morning I got up, not awake but needing to urinate and some cold water, my flesh very content that it could soon return to long sleep. Sally had again taken the drinking glass from the John and I bleared my way through the living room towards the kitchen. Kate was sitting on the couch. She was gray, her eyes were closed and her shoes were off. I was naked, so stepped behind a chair.
"Kate," I said brightly. "How long have you been here?" She opened her eyes and closed them again. "Anything wrong?" I said.
"No. I'll go to bed in a minute."
"Yes. You're all right?"
"Yes," she said. "Bob asked me to marry him."
"Oh," I said. "That's very nice. What did you say?"
"I said I didn't know. I'd tell him as soon as I could."
"Well, you'd better get to bed."
"Yes," she said. "Good night." I went back and drank from the tap.
When I awoke it was eleven. Sally surfaced and I told her.
"She didn't look good," I said, "not really first-rate." Sally got blank and went off to the little spare room. She came back right away; Kate was sleeping. We got up and had breakfast, and I continued pushing through the Times as Sally went in for another look. She stayed a long time while her coffee got cold. When she came out she was still blank. "She'll be up in a little while," Sally said.
Kate came out eventually, dressed as she had come Friday, with suitcase. "Good morning," she said, and that she had thought to take an early train so as not to get back too late. She wanted no breakfast but coffee, and as she had it we talked of the Times' front page. A young female schoolteacher had been murdered and I almost related Laszlo's Friday anecdote, but obscure instinct prevented. Kate kissed Sally good-by, I took her suitcase and we went out to get a taxi. Six passed full. "Damn," Kate said without vigor. I asked if she had something to read for the train, she said a book in her bag. I asked what book, but a taxi stopped to my wave. I said good-by, she said: "Good-by, Charlie. Thanks. Have fun."
"Well?" I asked Sally.
"Well," she said, "I don't know. He's asked her to marry him. She told him she'd think about it. He had to fly someplace today."
"Yes."
"Apparently he asked her after they'd been to bed."
"That seems sensible," I said. "Where's the horror part?"
"No horror. She was just a little upset. Well, she knows I'd tell you, I suppose."
"Of course," I said, annoyed that Sally should suppose it possible not to tell me.
"They went to bed but nothing happened. He got awfully emotional about it, apparently. Said it had only happened to him once before when he was in love for the first time and it proved he really loved her. He was upset and she was upset. And his air conditioning broke down, it was hot."
"I see," I said. "Robert Richard Russell. She won't do it, of course."
"I don't know. I couldn't tell. Probably not, I suppose. But she sounded. She sounded awfully involved, awfully, I don't know, nursy. She thinks maybe she loves him."
"But, but. Aside from last night. So quickly?"
"I know," Sally said, "I know. Do you think I should have said something? I didn't. I just listened and patted her. I suppose I should have told her something."
"No," I said. "You can't. People get places where there's nothing to tell them. She can't tell herself anything. When there's a decision in her, then she'll have decided. That's all."
"I suppose," Sally said.
"Well," I said, stretching. "Another weekend past apogee. We live a nice peaceful life, honey."
"Yes," Sally said. "I hope it will be all right."
CHAPTER THREE
Still hot Monday. Still lances of oppression in the morning's burn. At the office a flap. Before ten, the dance of life still a somnolent twitch, Purbeck came. Nasty little man in a dark suit, behind a pointed nose. "Morning," he said, "have you a copy of the draft publications-schedule?"
"Good morning," I said, "why?" Schedule Eyck had told me not to say I had, but then no one was supposed to ask a direct question. Besides, what fuss?
"I'd like to know, that's why," Purbeck said.
Possible to tell him none of his damn business, but not practical. The lie direct would only complicate; he was both angry and certain. "Yes," I said, "I do. Why?"
"I see," he said, danced around and out. In to Eyck's office, next door. I took the schedule out of my desk, but cursory examination saw nothing inflammatory. The phone rang, and Eyck asked me in. Purbeck was there, furious and fierce as a new-spayed mongoose. Eyck thoughtfully annoyed. And Laszlo, tipping back his chair, a foot on one of Eyck's immaculate bookshelves ("As," he would say, "you stretching Americans"), attempting noncommittal.
"Gung-ho," I said. "Work together."
"Charles," Eyck said slightly over my head, "Roger has brought up a matter involving you, he feels. I thought we'd better have you here. He seems to feel that I erred in having you glance at the draft publications-schedule. I am not sure I understand what he means, but then I interrupted him to ask you in. Roger?"
Purbeck iridesced outrage. "It had been my belief," he said to Eyck, "that there were five Chief Statisticians in this bloody branch, of which you were Senior Officer. It had not been my belief that any one of these Chief Statisticians was your deputy, or in any way elevated above the rest."
"Why, yes, Roger, your impressions seem accurate," Eyck said.
"In the time I've been here it has been made plain to me that he thinks himself your deputy and that in fact he is so considered. Now if that is true I think we ought to have some formal statement to that effect. Quite aside from the questions of nationality it raises."
Eyck stepped up the power source of his apparatus for outward calm. 'That's very odd, Roger. Just what has given you this very odd impression?" I wondered what Laszlo had to do with this nonsense. He was examining the wall behind Eyck's shoulder.
"Odd?" Purbeck said. "Then how does it happen, I'd like to know, that he obtains the draft publications-schedule and we do not? I had believed it was to be discussed at a staff meeting, not that he had rights to prior examination or authority for prior suggestion. And isn't it striking that he should have the office next to yours, not being senior by a long chalk, he's junior to Szabo Gere for one. And I suppose you know that it's common knowledge among the secretarial staff here that he is to be treated as your deputy."
"Roger," Eyck said, "you excite yourself unduly. Charles has that office because it was empty when he came here. Our geographical distribution is not hierarchical. I do not know what is common knowledge among the typists and I am not sure that you do, but whatever it is, I would not confuse it with reality. As for the publications-schedule, I do not see your point. If you seriously believe I was attempting to keep it from you, you are wrong. If you like, you may have a copy to read, or to use in any other manner you see fit. I happened to let Charles see it because we happened to be discussing it, and Charles, as you know, is more intimately concerned with certain areas of our publication than any of the rest of us, myself included. As you have your areas of particular interest. Now, as to the national prejudice you seem to have hinted at, if you have any serious grounds for complaint at my actions or attitudes towards you or anyone else, I can only suggest that you put them into a memo which I will be glad to send on up channels."
Purbeck swayed a moment, then prudently said: "I don't really see any need for that sort of thing," in a low voice.
"No," Eyck said, "neither do I. Let's agree, then, that this was an unfortunate misapprehension, possibly brought on by the heat. You go on vacation next week, don't you?"
"No," Purbeck said, "I've changed my plans."
"Indeed? Unfortunate. We could all use some cool relaxation. Now, I was talking to Laszlo, and if you gentlemen ... Oh. Perhaps in all fairness I might ask you, Charles, if you wanted to say anything about this."
"Why, no, no," I said. "Except that I am stunned to be thought capable of presumption above my station. Why, Roger, in the few months you've been here I've come to look up to you almost as a second father. I...."
"All right, Charles," Eyck said. "It's a busy morning, no time for games."
"All right," I said, and opened the door for Purbeck. He roared out and down the corridor, past his office and outside.
In a little while Laszlo went past and I went in to Eyck. "Yes," he said, "you'd better come in." I sat down. He said, "You know, I asked Laszlo what he felt about this business. He deplored Purbeck, of course, but he was noticeably reserved about it. Obviously he shares some of Purbeck's resentment. Not much, I think, but some."
"Good God," I said.
"Of course," Eyck said, "there is the fact that you and I are the only Americans. I'm not sure but to the European mind that wouldn't provide automatic suspicion of collusion and favoritism. Nevertheless, thinking about it, I think it's probably true that I have been seeing more of you than others. And I did give you the publications-schedule. Without prior discussion. No substantiation of Purbeck's absurd charges, of course, but in the situation, unfortunate."
I was somewhat cast down by his description of Purbeck's charges as absurd. I had thought the content rather pleasant, despite the tone. "Of course the real trouble," I said, "is that Purbeck is a poisonous little son of a bitch, and I have never made an effort to disguise my awareness thereof."
"Yes," Eyck said. "You should not have said that before, you know. I think one of his difficulties is that he is by far the oldest man on the staff, ten years older than any of us. It doubtless grates him to be your equal. Paranoiac fears of being your subordinate must be intolerable."
"I suppose."
"I want you to try, Charles, to be a little emollient with him. We don't want any more of this."
"All right," I said. "God help me. How did he know I had the publications-schedule?"
"I mentioned it to Mrs. Mutton. Mrs. Hirsch apparently asked Mrs. Mutton whether you had any documents not in general circulation. He therefore must have learned from Mrs. Hirsch. That's Mutton's story, of course. She wouldn't want to say she'd volunteered the information, although I admit I neglected to caution her."
"Well, well, well," I said. "Mrs. Hirsch asked. And told Purbeck. Why?"
"I don't know. They lunch together, I am told."
"Oh," I said.
"Yes," Eyck said. "Nevertheless, I do suggest that you stop abrading Purbeck. He's perfectly useful to us, despite his manner, which I admit to be painful."
Now I was mollified by the implication, or the possibility of interpretation, that I was of that order to which mere Purbeck must be considered in light of usefulness. "All right," I said. "I will abandon the urge to break his instep. I wonder how they are in bed? With those arms of hers she could scratch between his toes. Must be an odd sensation."
"Go away, Charles," Eyck said. I went.
I tried to get Laszlo for lunch, but he was gone. I was, to my mild surprise, shaken. Dis-like, so naked and so sharp, from even a Purbeck, gave an unsettling sensation as if he thought me someone else and not myself at all. Could anyone really dislike me?
After a quick lunch I worked until the word "check" on my pad stopped me. Fumbling a moment with money, I remembered the knife. I called Mrs. Mutton and asked her to send the Cacherini girl in. She came. I asked her to close the door. She stood in front of my desk.
"Miss Cacherini," I said.
"Cacherini," she said, with a hard "k" in the middle. "Sorry," I said. I took the knife out and put it on her side of the desk.
"This, I am told, is yours," I said. She looked at me and said: "I had it."
"Yes. Apparently you left it in the John. Mrs. Mutton found it."
She looked at me again. Smooth skin with a dark metallic sheen, black hair short, black brows. Thin nose, wide mouth. Assiduously made up; something at the eyes, the brows worked over. Dressed in a red blouse, black skirt. Inexpensive, effective, a little tight.
"You'd better take it," I said. She picked it up and held it hidden by her skirt. "I'm not sure," I said, "but I think that kind of knife is illegal." She said nothing. "Perhaps you'd better not carry it any more. At the office."
"No," she said, "I won't."
The nose was not thin, actually. Rather there seemed bone and skin, without flesh. The eyes looked enormous. The neck flowed up, softly metallic. "All right," I said. "Except would you mind telling me what you use it for?"
"Nothing," she said.
"Oh," I said. "Then possibly a weapon of smaller caliber would do as well." Realizing I had not smiled at all, I smiled, engagingly. She looked at it, then without moving her eyes looked away. "Well, I said, "you'd better get back."
She stopped before opening the door. "What is Mr. Eyck going to do?" she said.
"Mrs. Mutton didn't want to bother Mr. Eyck. There is no official cognizance." She nodded once, and went out.
When I got home, soggy, Sally was assembling a cold supper. "Kate called this afternoon," she said.
"How is she?"
"Not too well. She still sounded upset. She'd like us to come up next weekend. It would be nice to get out of the city."
"Well," I said, "it would. But I can't, damn it. Trouble came up on the yearbook today, I'm going to have to work all weekend."
"Oh, damn," Sally said, turning to me. I slumped there, looking hot, overworked, miserable. She was very trim in shorts, and very pale. "Can't you get it done before?" she said.
"Revised pages won't be back from the printer until Friday. I'm trapped."
"Damn. Kate didn't sound well at all."
"Go on up," I said. "She'd probably rather talk to you alone, anyway."
"I could," Sally said. I knew she would. "You wouldn't mind?"
"That's all right," I said. "Nobody cares about me. I'm used to it."
At dinner, I told Sally about Purbeck's cavalry charge. Her response was not completely satisfactory. At first she wondered whether indeed Eyck and I were being quite fair to Purbeck. He seemed, she said, from what I had told her of him, to have serious personality problems. I pointed out that his personality, if the concept could here be applied, was more a problem to others than to himself, that it was not his function to impede the operation of the branch by imposing that problem on his betters, and that my burdens were already sufficient without the addition of Purbeck's problems. I was perhaps a shade violent in these expressions, and Sally turned from expounding the possibilities of Purbeck's humanity. "Yes," she said, "I can't understand how some people let themselves react. You remember, I told you about the girl at the office, Arlene, who'd been a dancer but things didn't work out. Her roommate was a dancer too, I met her at the office a few times, for months she was looking for a part, or whatever dancers call it. I think Arlene was supporting her, or helping. Then finally after all that time a few weeks ago the roommate got something, something very good with one of the big groups. Poor Arlene has been absolutely murderous with envy ever since. At first she kidded about it, saying how she could just break the girl's leg, ha ha. But now she's stopped even trying to be funny, she complains all the time about what a bitch the girl is, and she's started to tell this fantastic story that the only reason she got the job is because she played up to some woman in charge who absolutely everybody is supposed to know is a lesbian, and so forth. I think it's terrible."
"Well," I said, "one can sympathize with poor Arlene. She gave up the struggle, doubtless with regret and self-contempt, and here the other girl exacerbates that failure in the most striking way possible."
"Yes, of course," Sally said, "I can see how Arlene might be a little depressed. But I can't understand how she can let herself be so envious and so bitchy. It's all so terribly obvious."
"Not everyone is as afraid as you of being seen through," I said.
"That's not the point at all," Sally said. "The point is I think it's wrong to lose control of yourself so much, to be such a bitch for such reasons. She should know what she's doing and stop."
"Well," I said, "that's how you can tell she's an earthling. Nice people, but not dedicated to the triumph of reason. And the employment policy at your place being what it is, no Venusians or niggers, what can you expect?"
"Don't say niggers, Charles," Sally said.
That night, after Sally was asleep, I saw the coming weekend. A montage: dinner with laughter, and afterward I hesitated but it had to be here, home, not here in this bed but in the living room, the couch. A montage, moving fast and slow, the moving sequence seen at once as a whole, each element held motionless for inspection, all through the figure of the Cacherini girl as I had seen her, cut off at the thighs by the desk, black, then red tight over the breasts, throat, face that told me nothing, nothing at all.
It occurred to me that I had been to bed with no woman but Sally since months before our marriage. It was an irrelevant thought: that vision had nothing pertinent to Sally. It also occurred to me that no part of that vision was at all probable. For a moment I felt probability an iron ring around my neck, choking and dragging. I raged at probability, then resigned to sleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
In the morning, shaving, I surrendered myself to the shoreless possible surrounding the precipitated stone of probability. It was a little cooler this day. I turned to face the front of the elevator, the Cacherini girl walked up to my chin and turned her back. Two quick steps down the corridor and I said good morning. She looked at me and said Hello. I said: "No conventional armaments?"
"No," she said.
The weekend, twenty steps from the office door, was un-sayable. "Have dinner with me tonight," I said. Softly, hoping no one walked behind.
"Dinner?" she said.
I heard Purbeck's ass-bray in the corridor behind me. "Stop in to see me some time this morning, around eleven," I said, and stood back to let her through. I went in after and to my desk. At five past eleven, as I watched the open doorway, I saw her come in. She stood in front of the desk, and I stood too, this time.
"Have dinner with me," I said.
"Why?" she said.
"Curiosity," I said, unsure whether I was trying to threaten. "To hear about the knife."
"It's not mine," she said. "I don't have it any more."
"Even better," I said. I suddenly fumbled with the problem of secrecy, but could see no solution not unpleasantly transparent. I compromised, and smiled.
"Five-thirty in the plaza by the stairs. All right?"
She did not smile, but said: "If you want to."
"Fine," I said. She went out and back to her typing. I sat and wondered if there'd be much chatter among the girls.
Five twenty-five I left, passed through the outer office, empty but for Mrs. Hirsch typing furiously, who did not look up. In the plaza by the stairs, the throng going home or to an evasion was thick and moving fast. I stood at the comer above the stone steps and watched the flow. It seemed cheerful enough.
Twenty to six the Cacherini girl cut suddenly across the stream. She emerged, walked up to me and stopped to stand, looking neither at me nor away. "Welcome," I said. "Let's walk over a bit, I know a place." Feeling word-ridden.
"I don't drink very much," she said, and had a coke to my martini.
"My name is Charles," I said. She nodded at the information. I waited in a silence. "What is yours?" I said at last. It began to occur to me that the abyss of opaque unfamiliarity which had brought me here teetering forward on my chair's edge staring into that face which told me nothing was no more than a profound stupidity.
"Pia," she said. "Pia Maria Anna Lisa Cacherini. What do you want from me?"
"Why, to have dinner with you," I said. "To talk. Curiosity, as I said this morning. About you, not the knife. Although that would be interesting, too."
"You married?" she said.
"Yes," I said, "I am. Why?"
She grinned. Widened her red mouth over small teeth. Not amused. Not unpleasant. Not stupid. What? "Okay," she said. "Let's eat and talk." I ordered another martini.
I spend, as do you, certain moments of time in the imaginative reorganization of my reality. Re-creation. Dry dreams. I am aware of the distinction between these little puppet plays behind my eyes and the real environment through which I move. If they were true, it would not be necessary to invent them. It was, therefore, with mounting surprise that I came to believe, as dinner proceeded, that there was indeed in Pia Maria Anna Lisa a great area not understood by me, a sector where the language of operation, of reaction and motivation, was of a vocabulary and grammar unknown to me. Or even when not completely unknown, a language in which my proficiency was so small that only the crudest generalities came through, leaving me ignorant of the real meanings communicated by the subtleties of association and intent. I had thought this so before, but that was of the puppet in my play. I had not, I now perceived, seriously expected it to be true. It seemed true.
"Do you live in New York?" I asked.
"No, in Brooklyn," she said. "With your parents?" I asked.
"My father's dead," she said. A couple of years. Lived with mother, fifteen-year-old sister.
"Do you like working with us?" I asked. The flesh of her face seemed always peculiarly rigid, not that the dark-lit skin were carapace, but that all the flesh about the hard bones had hardened too. It was not perfect, but it had one quality of perfection: unthinkable that it could be different.
"Sure," she said. "It's all right." She looked at me. "I like it," she said. "There are people always picking things up and keeping things clean. Every night after I go home they dust off my desk and empty the wastebasket."
"Yes," I said, "must keep up staff morale."
"I guess," she said.
"How did you happen to come work for us?" I asked. "'Why not?" she said. "I'm a good typist."
"Yes, yes." I said, "I'm sure you are. But you just wandered in?"
"Sure," she said. "Why not? How come you work there?"
"I'm a demographer," I said. "There aren't many places a demographer can work. If he doesn't want to teach."
"Teach?" she said.
"Yes," I said. "And I didn't want to teach."
"I guess so," she said. "I'm a good typist. I can get a job anywhere. My married cousin's husband fixes televisions. He makes more money than you do."
"To be sure," I said. "The frequent lack of correspondence between financial and social status is a long-noted element of our fabric."
"I'm sorry," she said, "but you make me nervous."
"Why?" I said.
"Why not?" she said. "A lot of things make me nervous." I said: "Would you like to do something Friday evening? A film?"
"You want a date with me Friday?" she said.
"Yes," I said.
"No," she said, "I can't."
"How about Saturday?" I said.
"No," she said, "I can't." She moved her arm and knocked her coffee-spoon to the floor, and reached to pick it up. I told her to leave it, the waiter would get it. "I have to go somewhere," she said. "If you want to come you can come."
"Yes," I said, "I'd like to. Go where?"
"Nothing much," she said. "Some kids I know."
"Oh," I said, "a party."
"I guess," she said. I arranged to pick her up at eight-thirty. When she gave me her address I asked the apartment number, and she said no, she'd meet me in front.
We taxied to the Fourteenth Street BMT. She went down. When I got home, Sally had just come in. She said that Robert Richard Russell had called her that afternoon to ask us to dinner Friday, and that although I would have to be working, she thought she had better go.
"But you're going up to Kate," I said.
"I'll leave Saturday morning," she said. "God knows what he wants, but I might find out something that would be useful with Kate."
"Hell," I said, "he's not going to send messages of moment by you. The boy knows how to write, wire or call."
"No, not that, but Kate's going to ask me what I think, and I'd better have more information than I do now."
"Fine," I said. "The moment your sister is driven from the city you fling yourself at her young man. I suppose he got word from the top that I'd be working late."
"Very funny," Sally said.
"I guess," I said.
CHAPTER FIVE
Trapped, I decided to work late Friday at that. I fended off invitations for drink, had a sandwich sent up so as not to sap my will by exit, and stayed until nine. Mostly treading through reports that had piled up while the yearbook moved to climax. Then a slow drink across the street to wind down and make it less probable that I would have to wait for Sally to come in, and a slow walk home. The night was very fine, and smelled of city summer and the river, a heavy compound of odors and atmosphere more touching than the simple smells of country summer.
Sally and Robert Richard Russell were in the living room. He rose and shook my hand. "Delighted to see you again," he said, beaming more than I was worth. "Sorry you couldn't come to dinner."
"I think of myself as an ant of this world," I said, "dull, even drab, but humble, hard-working, useful." I kissed Sally, and noted the small smile doing its best to be cryptic. This meant that she had information of interest, and had been drinking. Thus clued, I saw that Robert Richard Russell, standing with hands in pockets and looming periodically as he teetered up on his toes, was also lit. No significant loss of motor-control, but happy, happy.
"All drunk again, I see," I said.
"Oh, Charles," Sally said, "we had a lovely dinner with marvelous wine and then brandy. You should have come."
"Probably," I said.
"Indeed you should have," Russell said. "The waiter was continuously of Dijon, of where we derive also the mustard." They both laughed in child-like innocent glee. Lacking their fond memories, I did not.
"Yes," I said, "amusing how these foreigners speak bad English. Especially the lower classes, upon whom poverty and ignorance force the role of body-servant, waiter or stool-pigeon."
"You're right, of course," Russell said, solemn. "I shouldn't make a joke of it. I'm sorry."
"Charles is having his little joke," Sally said. "You can always tell, he tries to look like Savonarola."
Russell correctly interpreted my glare at Sally. "But seriously," he said, "I had a wonderful time. As I told your wife, the only person whose company I've enjoyed more than hers is her sister's. Since my wife died."
"Oh," I said, booby-trapped, "I didn't know."
"Yes," he said. "A long time ago, eight years. We married very young."
"I'm sorry," I said, not saying, you sure as hell didn't screw her to death.
"It was terribly sad," Sally said. "The poor girl had a heart-attack with absolutely no warning at all. The doctors said she'd be all right, though, and then a few months later she had a fatal one."
"I'm very sorry," I said, aware that Sally was rubbing it in.
"Well," Russell said, "I was pretty disturbed, but it was a long time ago." He had a nicely attuned dramatic sense, and changed the subject. "By the way, we were discussing the delinquency problem last week. Interesting. I'll be going out to the coast, Los Angeles, this Tuesday. There's going to be a national conference on the subject in Washington in the Fall, and a number of us are getting together for some informal preparatory discussion." His liquor was leaving him fast.
"Interesting," I said. "You going out for the Mayor?"
"James Corbett, our senior partner is," he said, "and I'll be going along. Mr. Corbett is seventy-one, and he probably thinks of me as a contemporary of the problem children."
"Never liked the phrase," I said. "Patronizing, simplifying."
"They're children," he said, "and they're problems."
"It's not the construction I dislike, it's the tone. And what is the contribution of Corbett, at seventy-one?"
"Mr. Corbett," he said, "is the most intelligent and the most decent man I've ever met."
I was tired, and of Robert Richard Russell. "Well," I said, "let us hope for the triumph of intelligence and decency, poor tools, but we have no other. I feel an unbridgeable abyss between elderly gentlemen of profound intelligence and decency and the tough kids I see tearing down advertisements on the subway. But I am ignorant in the ways of the great world."
"But you admit that we must do what we can to fight against, oh, the dark, if you will."
"I guess," I said. "Except that I am in equal ignorance of the dark."
"Well," Russell said, "I do have to be going. Please give my best to Kate."
"Yes," Sally said, "I certainly will. And thanks a lot for dinner. It was lovely." We said our good-bys, and he left, with smile.
"Moving in on Kate's property pretty fast," I said. "Hope you have better luck than she did."
"Stop it, Charles," Sally said. "You really shouldn't be so nasty to him. Although I'm not sure he recognized the beautiful subtlety of your venom as well as I do, with all the practice I've had."
"Sweet child," I said.
"It was really very educational," she said. "The business about his marriage, apparently he never told Kate a thing about it."
"You think it's true?" I said.
"Why, yes, why shouldn't it be true?"
"No reason," I said.
Sally ignored this opportunity to explore the dark. "And he really does want to marry Kate. He did everything but ask me to carry up the ring. He went on and on about her, how intelligent she was and how beautiful and so forth. And full of oblique reminders of his financial and professional worth. But I still do like him, you know?"
"I suppose one could grow used to that beaming orotundity."
"And it's so transparent, to me, anyway," Sally said. "So much a public mask. I can see him like a little boy behind it, consciously putting on the show he'd learned impresses."
"Oh, my God," I said. "That woman's my mythic little boy lurking within the man. That's not a lovable little boy, that's him. And if it existed, why should an encysted retardation be lovable? Does Kate want to love a little boy? But it's not your insight that sees it, it's fear that he's a man less simple than his surface, and desire to dispel that fear by denigration, by casting the parts to the play of surest womanly domination, the little boy and the great mother. So you don't have to deal with him as a complex adult with a complex relation to your complexly related sister, but as an actor in the charade of mother-love, as a midget in an outsize costume of flesh, and you the understanding, the encompassing adult. What idiocy makes women do that?"
"I don't think that's true," Sally said. "I think you're an adult and I love you as one, but sometimes I think of you as a little boy playing games. When you act tough, for example, when you say screw them all."
"Oh, Christ," I said in horror. "You don't."
"Now don't look like that," Sally said. "I do. There's nothing wrong with it, and you want me to be honest, you want us to be honest about each other."
"By all means," I said. I was enraged, of course. "Maybe we'd better start producing children, so you can give more accurate scope to both your maternal and conjugal love."
Sally looked down at her knees. Her fine light hair came down on either side of her face, putting her chin and mouth in shadow. She looked then weak and I was not moved. "You know I want to," she said. "You know I'm afraid. I won't be able to do everything right. I'm afraid they'll turn out like me."
This was our habitual exchange on children (although my introduction of the subject had here an unusual malignance). I did not follow the habitual action, I did not comfort her. She waited past the time when I should have held and soothed her, then looked up and after a moment smiled. Bad instinct or perhaps no instinct at all made her smile the foolish what-a-good-time-we-are-having smile that girls learn young as simple-minded weapons in their social wars, that some women can smile and mean that there is more, or that we both know the emptiness of this and are amused by ritual gesture, but that Sally could only smile with such self-mistrust that I would pity her and love her. But this time neither of those two branches of the same root stirred. Yet because to do nothing then would be to make an impossible statement of rejection, I went and kissed her hard and harder, and then in distant lust stripped off her clothes and mine and put her down upon the floor, finding access to my own pleasure only, ignoring hers, and when she tried to rise to get her shield from fear and children I would not permit her, but pressed her down and on in unenkindled rape. When at last I took my face up from her neck and looked into her face, she smiled again, but this time softly, curtained with quiet emphatic joy, and I myself spread like a stain in tenderness. "Charles," she said, smiling. Then: "But we shouldn't have done that."
"No," I said, "I shouldn't have."
CHAPTER SIX
Sally left for rate's early Saturday morning. She kissed me good-by and I went back to sleep. I awoke late and did nothing all day. After cold roast beef dinner I showered, shaved and dressed, and walked to the subway at eight o'clock. It was hot, not the city's worst, but hot, the red sun going down in my eyes as I walked the street west. The subway mouth exhaled heated fleshy air, and I thought of taking a taxi, but it would have been spoiling; I wanted to go to Brooklyn the right way. The ride was slow and fragmented, many stops and a change, the turnover was high, many came and went, many faces.
When finally I came up the iron stairs the sun had gone down and the air seemed cooler. I walked the five blocks as directed. The houses were all of six stories, all in that light the same color of brown dirt, hung with intricate fire-escapes. The entrances were tiny doors into alleys of halls, deltaed by garbage-pails.
I stopped at the proper number and Pia came immediately out, wearing tan toreador pants tight to her calves and a sleeveless black cotton pullover. There was a young girl behind her. Pia said: "My sister." The girl stared. Her hair was made an impossible brass yellow, great ugly ringlets heaped about her head. She was thin, an exaggeration of Pia's cutting nose, and white skin. She wore red-and-green plaid toreador pants and a white pullover like Pia's, so tight that her brassiere stood in high relief. The little breasts, pushed out and pulled up, looked hard as metal. She carried a silent portable radio.
"See you," she said, and walked off, swinging the red plastic radio and the hard plaid rump. Pia and I followed. "Pretty child," I said.
"You can't tell anyone in the office what I tell you because I can tell them you came out here to see me."
"True," I said, "perfectly true."
"She's stupid. She already got herself pregnant once, but she was lucky and lost it. She's even too stupid to make them be careful."
"Why don't you move away?" I said. "Move into Manhattan, get a place with some congenial non-relative?"
"Money," she said. "My stupid sister still has to be in school and my mother is sick. She can't work. Does your wife work?"
"Yes," I said. "What's wrong with your mother?"
"How much does she get?"
"Not very much," I said.
"How much?" Pia said.
"About six thousand," I said. "What's wrong with your mother?"
"That's not much more than I make," she said. "I mean, so much. But it's more, and I got my sister and my mother."
"What's wrong with your mother?" I said.
"She's sick. She's crazy," Pia said. We stopped at a corner. Pia looked at me again. She was as carefully made-up as at the office, but no more.
"Everybody I know here is either stupid or mean. Most are stupid, but some are smart and mean. But not really smart or they wouldn't live here and I wouldn't know them. You're really smart, I guess, but I guess you're mean too."
"Sometimes," I said.
"Why don't you take off your tie?" she said. "It's hot."
"It's all right," I said.
"Better take it off," she said. I took off my tie.
We crossed the street and there were stores here. Half-way down the block we stopped in front of a soda-fountain. Two dirty windows with a cracked cardboard Coca-Cola sign in each. Inside, the noise was immense. The jukebox at the back drenched the room with odd sound, and the children in the booths at the left shrieked unintelligibly to each other. There were six booths, the first empty, the second holding two girls, the third two girls and three boys, the fourth one girl and two boys, the fifth two girls and one boy, the sixth one girl and two boys. On the right was a soda-fountain with round stools, empty except for a fat man in a T-shirt and white apron, sipping a glass of water, his back to the counter. We sat in the empty booth.
Stupid sister came to us, her radio on now barely audible below the bellowing of the jukebox. She carried a coke, leaned her little belly against the table edge, and stared at me. "Hi," she said. A boy came up behind her from the back booth, wearing khaki army pants with big pockets on the thighs, white T-shirt, a cloth-billed army cap. He dropped beside Pia. "Hiya," he said. Pia said: "Buddy, Charlie." He was a big boy, in his last teens, perhaps, black hair very long and oiled, carefully arranged over and behind his ears, a big chin. He looked a lout. "You work where Marie does?" he said, accenting the name's second syllable. I fogged until I saw Pia's face and considered the possibilities. "Yes," I said.
"Waddya do?" he said.
"Figures," I said.
"Yeah. How's it go?" to Pia.
"All right," she said.
Stupid sister moved her feet through some intricate pattern. "Let's go," she said, "I wanta dance."
"I got canned again," Buddy said. "Again," Pia said.
"Yeah," Buddy said. "I was late all the time. Screw 'em. I'll get some money from my uncle and learn a trade, I don't have to break my balls carrying stuff."
"Sure," Pia said.
"You sound like my old lady," Buddy said. "You watch me. Hey, we got a letter from Ralphy. He's doin' real good, he says."
The fat man trundled his belly up beside stupid sister. "You want something?" he said.
Buddy got up. "Let's take off," he said. He called down the booths: "C'mon, we're takin' off." The girl and boys in booth six, the two girls and the boy in booth five and the two girls and three boys in booth three slid out and went past us out the door. The girls were dressed as Pia and her sister, or in cotton skirts and cheap lacy blouses. They were all younger than Pia, some her sister's age. The boys seemed older, in the later teens, wearing dungarees or army pants and T-shirts. The faces of all the boys were louts' faces. The faces of all the girls, like stupid sister's, looked raw, a layer of skin and nerve removed, replaced with cosmetic.
The girls and boys in booth three did not move or look up from their cokes. The two girls in the booth next to ours looked up at Buddy. One was fat and blotched, the other pink and pretty with extreme youth, but fat coming on. She said: "Let me and my girl friend come, Buddy." Buddy didn't hear. The last girl moving up the aisle from the back stopped and put her arm around Buddy's waist. She had big breasts, her hair the impossible color that stupid sister had, but cut as Buddy's hair. "Carol, ask him if me and my girl friend can come," the seated girl said. Carol looked at Buddy and said: "Dirty said we should have an initiation." Buddy looked at Pia, who shrugged. He said to the asking girl: "You want to get initiated?"
"Sure, if I can come dance," she said. "How about my girl friend?"
Buddy shook his head no, he and Carol walked out behind the others. The seated girl got up and went after them. Pia and I followed.
"What pantomime is this?" I said. "What does it mean?"
"What does what mean?" Pia said.
"It all."
"It's a club. Like a club. All the kids want to belong because we have a place to go. There's a man lets us use a place."
"Is Buddy your young man?" I said.
"No," she said, "he's Carol's young man," and laughed. "Young man, what a way to talk. No, I used to go with his brother, Ralph. He's in the army now. He wanted to marry me, but I wouldn't."
"Why not?" I said.-Pia shrugged.
"What's an initiation?" I said.
"You'll see," she said. "You're probably mean enough to like it."
"Thank you," I said. "Do you?"
"These are the people I know here," she said. "Buddy's the leader since Ralphy is gone, but I'm kind of a leader too. I'm not stupid, so I can be kind of a leader, and the only way I can do that is be mean."
The others were on the corner, in a slouched circle. The boys seemed carefully to push their shoulders forward, hollow their chests. Loose like a goose. The girls shoved out their breasts, let their heads loll almost to the shoulders. Casual. Buddy said: "We got some beer in Gilly's car, but not much. Anybody got any money to get liquor?" He looked at me. "I'll get a bottle," I said. "Get a case, man, get a case," one of the louts said. "Pick us up around the corner from the store," Pia said. And pulled my arm. A bright sign said "wines and liquors" a block down.
"Presumably my entrance fee," I said.
""You don't have to come if you don't want to," Pia said. "You asked to take me to a show, remember. That costs money."
"I'm not complaining," I said. I bought two fifths of cheap blended rye. We walked around the corner. There were two cars at the curb, motors on, a five-year-old Ford and a new Pontiac. Carol, Buddy and the lout driving were in the front seat of the Ford. Pia and I crowded into the back seat, we started up, the Pontiac followed. The two girls in the back with us sang, with feeling, the jukebox's last song. They had gone through it twice when we slowed, bumped over the curb into a lot, and stopped. As we got out the Pontiac came up, slewed around to the other end of the semicircular corrugated metal structure, the Nissen hut. Buddy unlocked a door and we went in.
There was one light bulb hanging at one end of the one long room. There were three torn easy chairs, gut-sprung to the concrete floor, some dented metal folding chairs, wooden orange crates, a few dirty mattresses against the walls. The floor was swept clean, there were colored pictures of movie stars and singers Scotch-taped to the Walls. Pia's sister came in with the second carload, put her radio on a crate and turned it on to jukebox music. She and a lout began to dance, two other couples followed. Buddy took the rye from me, opened one bottle, took a pull and passed it to Carol, who drank and passed it on. Little later and little lower it came to me, I offered it to Pia, who declined, and drank myself, putting pestilence out of mind.
A door at the other end opened and a man came to us. Old, small, carefully shaved with a dull blade by the cuts. In dungarees and a clean white shirt, collar buttoned without necktie, sleeves rolled down. Short gray hair center-parted, wire-rimmed glasses on a clever face. "Evening, kids," he said.
"Hello, Dirty," Pia said. "This is a friend of mine." He nodded at me, said, "Nice to know you," passed on making greetings. He refused rye, accepted a can of beer, sat on one of the crates and watched the dancers.
I asked Pia what it was. 'That's Dirty," she said. "He lets us use the place."
A lout came up and said "How about it?" to Pia, and they went to dance.
I sat on one of the metal chairs. When Pia came back the lout came with her, and a couple with the bottle, which went around. They talked about a baseball game, but not to me. I danced with Pia; she asked me if I liked to dance, I said not particularly, she said okay and we stopped.
The girl who'd asked to come along stood against the wall. Once when Pia was dancing I looked at her, she smiled and started to come over. Carol grabbed her arm, said something and shoved her back against the wall. When Pia came back I asked if I was not to be communicated with, Carol had stopped that girl. "No," she said, "it's just they don't know you, they haven't figured you. She can't talk to anyone until after initiation." I asked if she were having an enjoyable time. She shrugged. The girl against the wall watched the dancers, chewing a nail, the old man sat straight and watched the dancers. I watched the dancers. It was warm.
In an hour several drunks were started, the dancing had become slower and closer. Buddy turned off the radio. "Okay," he said, "initiation." The couples took chairs and boxes. Pia sat on a box next to me. Carol brought the girl to stand under the light.
"You want to join up, Rita?" Buddy said formally. I smiled. "Sure," she said.
"Why you want to join up?" Buddy said.
"You know why, Buddy," the girl said. "You know I been asking to join all year. You come here and dance and have fun, there isn't hardly anybody else around to have fun with, not around the block. Only some jerks around. Everybody who has fun comes here. You know why I want to join, Buddy."
"Okay," Buddy said. "Anybody vote Rita shouldn't?" A mutter of no and shit no. The girl grinned.
"Hey, Dirty," Buddy said, "what kind of initiation you want we should have?"
"Whatever you kids want," the old man said. "It's your club. What kind did you. have last time?"
A fat dark girl said: "You had slapsies on me. Oh, boy."
"How about round the circle?" the old man said.
"Okay," Buddy said. "Round the circle. Round the circle is we go around, everybody tells you to do something, you got to do it. Whatever they say to do. Anything except screwing."
The girl looked around the circle watching her. She was wearing a skirt and ruffled white blouse pulled down her shoulders. Her light-brown hair was in a ponytail. "Gee," she said, "anything?"
"You said you wanted to join up," Carol said. "You want to quit now?"
"Yeah, okay," the girl said. "Let's go."
"Another thing," Buddy said, "you don't do what somebody tells you to do, you don't do it right, they give you three whacks with this." He picked up a ping-pong paddle with stippled rubber blade. "Carol first."
Carol stepped away from the girl. "All right, Rita," she said, "you bend down and touch your toes and don't move till I say you can." The girl looked at Carol, then slowly bent until her short red nails touched her red shoes. Carol stood looking at her, then circled behind her. The girl's breathing became audible. Carol took a quick step forward and brought her knee up hard against the girl's rear. She went over on her side to the floor. "You moved," Carol said: "Three whacks." Everybody laughed but Pia and the old man and the girl and me. Carol took the paddle, pushed the rising girl down, and hit her three times on her bottom. She yelled at the last blow. Buddy hauled her up by an arm. "No yelling," he said. "I forgot to say, you yell, we put your head in a pillow and you get three more."
"She kicked me," the girl said.
"You moved," Carol said, grinning. The girl watched the grin.
"Okay," Buddy said, "my turn."
A lout called: "Hey, Buddy, have her take 'em off." Several louts whistled.
The old man said: "No nakedness in here, I told you that. You know what I said you could do."
"Okay, you show her," Buddy said to Carol. Carol directed the girl in taking off her shoes, her skirt, unfastening her brassiere and slipping her arms through the shoulder-straps. She handed the skirt and brassiere to Carol. Carol threw them on the floor in the corner, and moved the girl up to stand under the light bulb. The girl's underpants were frayed. She had a good young body, through the translucent blouse. She put her hands behind her back, then over her groin, then at her sides. More whistles from the louts.
"Okay," Buddy said. "Marie next." I turned to look at Pia. She was looking at me. She turned back to the girl and said:
"Kiss Dirty." After a silence there were groans around the circle. Carol snarled: "What the hell's wrong with you?"
The girl smiled a little, went over to the old man. He turned his face away, she pecked his cheek. She went back to stand under the light.
"Okay," Buddy said, "Fat's next." A lout, not fat, stood up. "C'mere," he said. The girl walked over to him. "Turn around," he said. She turned her back to him. He slipped his hands under her blouse and held her breasts. He pushed them up into the material of her blouse, pointed them down, juggled them. The girl stared ahead. He cupped his hands over them and squeezed, pushing his groin against her and moving his body, grinning. The girl said: "Hey, stop, you're hurting," and tried to pull his hands away. He laughed and shook her, lifting his elbows and closing his hands harder. She cried out and wrenched sideways, falling. He let her fall. She jumped up, a scrape on her forearm. "Son of a bitch," she said, touching her breasts, "you hurt me."
"Initiation, Rita," he said. "All the girls get it."
"Okay," Buddy said, "Arline next." The fat girl stood up. "Gee," she said, "I don't know. I can't think of nothing good."
"Jesus God," Carol said, "what a brain. Anything, and she can't think of nothing."
"Gee, Carol," the fat girl said, "anything is so...." She flapped an arm. "Carol, you do what you did to me, make her spell her name. That's what she has to do."
"You hold her, Buddy," Carol said.
"My pleasure," Buddy said. "But take it easy, hey?"
Buddy stepped behind the girl, who held one arm across her breasts, the other hand touching the scrape on that arm. She did not look as if she had been listening. He put her arms at her sides and pinioned her around the waist. Carol stepped in front of the girl, her yellow hair a foot higher than the girl's brown head.
"You know how to spell your name?" she said. The girl nodded, looking up. "Spell it out," Carol said.
The girl thought for a moment of the trick, then started to say R. Carol slammed her open-handed across the face. The girl lunged back, but Buddy held her. "Now, I keep doing it until you spell your name," Carol said. "At least you ought to know how to spell that." There were six hard slaps across the girl's face, each delivered as she started to speak, before she managed to blurt through the four letters, shrieking the A.
"Okay," Buddy said, letting go of her. She dropped to her knees, crying quietly. "Stand up," Carol said. The girl stood up, sweating.
The girl was not seeing anything when the next boy said: "You bump. You bump till I tell you to stop." She put her hands together behind her neck and pushed her pelvis forward. "Hard," he said, "I said hard." She spread her legs and snapped her pelvis forward. He pinched a fold of the flesh at the back of her thigh and twisted it. She jumped. "I said bump hard," he said. She slammed her pelvis forward with a grunt of breath. "And fast," he said, reaching for her thigh. She opened her mouth and snapped the motion faster, the grunts of breath running together in a rising falling moan. As her hips and belly slammed forward against the air faster and faster her blouse darkened with sweat and the moan became a hoarse breathed Please. Please, she said, Please, Please.
I got up and walked away from the circle out of the door through which the old man Dirty had entered.
It was a small courtyard between the curve-roofed hut and the wall of an apartment building; a few weeds grew in the packed dirt. I sat on a broken crate in the cooling night air and lit a cigarette. I had been drinking fairly hard the last hour, but was all right.
The door opened in the hut's side and the old man came out, releasing a puff of low screamed laughter. He came across and sat down on another crate. "Nice and cool," he said.
"Cooling off," I said.
"My name's Dicherty," he said. "Is why they call me Dirty. Most of the kids are kind of simple-minded. You work where Marie does, she said."
"Yes." Investigative old bugger.
"Although, at that, I bet you think it just about fits, a dirty-minded old man is what I am the way I let the kids go on. You a college feller?"
"Yes," I said, "I am."
"Well," he said, "I guess I am just a dirty-minded old man, at that. You get to be my age, is about the only to be dirty you got left, if you see what I mean. I'll be sixty-seven come winter. I've heard stories about men older than that, but I don't know. I guess I must have just used it all up. But what I want to say, it don't die easy, it don't die easy at all. Fifty years I been one thing, anyway, whatever. I was born in the city of San Francisco and after I left home at the age of fourteen in nineteen ten I never back-tracked one mile west. I never had one job more than three years or never stayed more in one town, until 1951 and I hit this New York City. All that time I had all kinds of times, mostly not so good, but some pretty fair, but all that time whatever I was I was one thing anyway, I was just as much of a man as anybody and I got reason to believe more than many. You know what I mean. Now I ain't. But it don't die easy. It stays in the head. And if I can watch the kids play around and sometimes get to feel almost like I was a man again, why, I do it. You see what I mean?"
"Sure I do," I said. Every sentence or so the eyes in the neat old face would flick around at me, gauging the audience. He had the routine down pretty good, the voice a touch nasal, diction uneducated but not slovenly, manner homespun but not rustic. The honest working stiff. "The kids have some interesting ways," I said.
"Well, sure," he said. "If I told you I didn't have nothing to do with that I'd be lying to you. I kind of suggested it would be fun if they made a club out of it. With initiations for the girls, and all. I just gave the kids the idea, they do the rest themselves. They think up some pretty cute ideas, the kids do, even if they ain't all very smart. Tonight wasn't as good as some we've had. But mostly it's just having them here Saturdays, without no initiation, having them here and watching them play around and go out to the cars, you know what I mean, why it helps me feel almost as if I was a man again. It helps everything if there is just something you can look forward to regular. So even being that I'm a dirty old man, you understand I got reasons for it."
"Reasons," I said, "everybody's got reasons."
He surprised me with a high laugh. "Sure enough," he said, "sure enough. But the smart man knows 'em. Now, I'm going to give you some more reasons. Tell the truth, the minute I seen you and when I figured out from what Marie said what you was, I been meaning to tell you."
This seemed to maunder. I glanced back at the hut. There was faint music from the radio.
"They're just dancing a little and going out to the cars," he said. "They'll be doing it for a while. You come out here because you thought it was kind of disgusting?"
"No," I said. "I was overheated."
"All right," he said, "they'll be there a while yet. You listen to me. Another reason I got, aside from looking at the girls and all, is I need help. I need help to do something I aim to do and I figger to get help from those kids in there, even if they don't know it yet. They got a pretty good deal right now, me letting them use that hut. They got a place to go, they can figger that they're in their own place. They got a place to park the cars and the cops won't bother them. Places most of these kids live, way they live, that's something. I give them that, I give them the club, they got something a little bit different from what anybody else got, and they know it. So when I tell them I need help, they're gone to be willing to help, especially if they lose what they got now if they don't help. You see what I mean?
"You know the Riverside power-plant, on the East River just down from where you and Marie work? Those four big stacks? Where they generate power for God himself knows how much of New York City?"
"Sure," I said.
"It is my aim," he said, "to destroy that power-plant. It's what I'm gone to do."
"Oh come now," I said.
"I come to New York City in the year 1951, when I was fifty-five years of age," he said. "I always had it in my mind to end up in New York City, all the time I was working in all the cities I was. You ever been to Boise, Idaho? Butte, Montana? Salt Lake? Denver? Wichita? St. Louis?"
"Not really," I said.
"I been, and many another," he said, "but I always had it in my mind to end up in New York City. In the year 1951, I got here. You like New York City?"
"Yes," I said, "I like it a lot."
"Me too," he said. "I like cities. There's something good in all the cities I seen and the more city it is the more I like it. You know what I hate? I hate the goddamned farm country. I hate the farms and I hate the farmers and I hate all that goddamn empty wasted useless space out there with not one thing to catch the wind between one quarter section and another but a few lousy corncobs. Lots of times, too many times, going from one city to another city I didn't ever make it. Lots of times I found I was stuck in some shit-ass farm. Years I spent between cities, out in that open country, getting up out of a good bed at four o'clock in the morning to go pull the tits of some big dumb-assed cow. A animal. No noise but the stupid animals, no talk but the damned dumb farmer's maybe one word every ten minutes as to if it don't rain it'll likely be dry. And not one thing to look forward to but Saturday night standing on the corner of some hick little town that's just a lot of other farmers standing around admiring the shit on their shoes."
"I had understood," I said, "that the modern farmer is a highly skilled technician, being agronomist, accountant, chemist, mechanic, biologist, meteorologist and political theorist. With no less access to the benefits of culture and diversions of civilization than a full professor at Sorbonne College, Paris, France."
"No," he said. "Why once, you know, I was working as a hand on a farm in Kansas, that farmer took a shine to me, thought I was a hard worker, and smart. I was smarter than he was, all right, by God, and I worked hard because I was so damned mad at my own self for catching myself in for a summer on a farm I was working my ass till it fell off so I'd know enough not ever to get caught like that again. That farmer had a daughter, just like the stories, dumber even than a cow but not bad-looking for a farm girl that didn't know how to do anything for herself. Didn't have no manners, she'd just find me in the barn and grab, not even asking did I have the clap, which I did, and was too dumb to know what it was when she took it from me. That farmer, one day, he says a smart feller and a hard worker like me, he's willing I should marry his daughter and get the farm when he dies, and that farm wasn't bad for a farm. I took off the same night without no money at all, didn't even wait to get my money which was the reason I had to stop there to get a stake in the first place. I jumped a train and got caught and got one side of my head busted open by a train cop and the other side busted open by a county cop, just like I knew I would without a stake. But I took off. Course, I figured that dumb girl was just about ready to ask her ma what was all that happening way up between her legs. But I sure took off."
"You prefer cities," I said. His delivery was deadpan and accomplished, and I found it difficult to distinguish between his own voice and the standard elements of classic folk humor. It was interesting, though.
"I was real happy when I got to New York City," he said. "It was more of a city than any. And I was lucky, first crack I got me a good job, a fine job, helping out the night-watchman at that Riverside plant. I liked that job, I liked as much as any I ever had. I didn't get me out of bed some days till after the sun had gone down, or if I wanted to I had all the day for going around the city, looking at all the folk and buildings and everything interesting and all. It was easy work on the job, no sweat and a full belly. And I said to myself, by God, I'm finally done traveling. I'm finally come to stay, a home-town at last, a place and a job where there wasn't no call to move off ever again, a place I wanted to be and a job I didn't mind to do and I had it made for the rest of my days. I really liked that job, you understand it, all night in the middle of the city listening to the noises, loud, then quiet, then waking up, and no Goddamned animals. I liked that river, too, it was a real city river, no bushes or trees or dirt but right amongst all them people and all them big stone and iron buildings. I figured I really had it made. In the year 1961 they tell me I'm through. Ten years I been there, not one word that I didn't do my job just exactly right. But, by God, they said I'm sixty-five years of age and out I go. Out of the job I figured to do all my days till the day I died.
"And the only place I had to go to was here, and lucky at that, somebody I knew had this janitor job, and then I didn't have the job I wanted and I wasn't the place I wanted to be. Brooklyn ain't New York City, it's all right but it ain't the same, and I guess I'm too old now to do anything about it, so it looks like I'm going to end my days just far enough off from where I want to be so I can smell it and see it, but I ain't gone to be there. Look," he said.
I looked where he pointed. The cooling night had cleared the air, and we could see the big buildings of the city, all alight.
"I can see it but I ain't there," he said. "Now, you see what I mean? It looks to me the only thing I got left is a big hate. That ain't much but it's better than nothing at all. I ain't gone to let it die out of me, either, I'm gone to work on it and do something about it. I was content to spend the rest of my days watching over their plant and keeping it from harm. They don't want to let me do that, so I'm gone to blast that thing so bad it'll take them ten years after I'm dead to set it right again, and I figure to live a good long time. You see what I mean?"
"Well," I said, "everything else aside, are you sure it's practicable?"
The old man stood up and stretched with little sounds of adjustment. "Yeah," he said, "drinking don't do much for me any more but put me to sleep. I guess I wore out the kicks in the bottle. And like I say I ain't a man no more to go with women. But by God if I can't work up a real hard-on or a real drunk I can work up a real hate, and that's more than men can do fifty years younger. You come to where I am, a real hate is as warm as anything you got. Look, son, I ain't all that dumb. I wasn't lucky, and there's lots of cards I didn't play right and I never got rich, but I ain't dumb. Maybe a dirty old man and maybe a crazy old man, like you might say, but not a dumb old man. Sure I got ideas on how to do it. I need explosive, and when the time comes I know just where to get it I need to know the lay-out there, and I got ten years of learning. I need help, and I'm going to get those kids to do just what I tell them. You know, what I like best is those God damn beautiful dirty stacks sticking up so high, what I like best is bringing them down all broken into little stones."
"Envy, no doubt," I said, "now that you can't get it up any more."
"Jesus," he said, "you college fellers think of the damnedest things."
"Anyway," I said, "it all sounds interesting."
"Now," he said, "I'll say my reasons for telling you. First I thought, I tell him and maybe he'll pass on the word what's going to happen. I don't figure you to say anything about me personally, what with me telling anybody about you being here and all. Marie says you're a married feller. And by God I don't mind thinking about the look on the face of the man that had the idea to fire me, him knowing that someday just maybe he's going to come down to the old plant after breakfast thinking up who he's going to fire today and who he's going to screw up and by God he comes around the corner and there ain't nothing left and no place to fire nobody from."
"No," I said, "I don't think I'll tell anybody."
"No," he said, "I figured. I'm pretty smart, but them kids is mostly pretty dumb and too damn young and it's a big job. You think about it, maybe you'd like to help me out with it. The way I got it figured, there ain't nobody gone to get hurt and nobody gone to get caught. Maybe you say, why should you take a chance helping out a crazy old man? Well, I tell you, sonny, when you get my age you gone to be real glad to have things saved up to remember. It's gone to be a beautiful memory for you when you get to be my age. You just think about that."
"True," I said, "very true. I'll think about it. I doubt it, somehow, but I will think about it."
"Well," he said, "now I'm tired and I got to look at the water-heater before I get to sleep. It's been good to talk with you." He nodded his head courteously as I called good night, and walked through the weeds to the apartment building.
I stood and stretched and looked at my watch. It was almost midnight. The drink had boiled down and I wasn't dulled enough. I went back into the hut to find Pia.
The smoke was heavy and the radio played but only one couple was dancing, seeming on the verge of sleep. Two of the louts were sitting on the floor against the wall, with cans of beer. There was nobody else.
I went over to the louts. "You know where Pia is?" I said.
They bleared at me. "What he say?" one of them said. The other said: "Talk up, dad."
"You know where Marie is?" I said.
He shrugged. "How the shit I know?" he said.
I saw that someone was sleeping face down on a mattress under the light. The girl who had been initiated. Her skirt, brassiere and shoes were piled on the small of her back. "She dead?" I said.
"Nah," he said. "Goddamn Buddy let her kill off the whisky. She was futzing around, cryin'."
"Never even got my whacks in," the other lout said. "That Carol, she got a real brutal sense humor." He cast back his head to get the last of his beer, then threw the empty can at the girl. It hit her on the shoulder and clanged down the concrete floor. She did not stir.
I thought what to do. I wanted Pia badly. Was she riding, or was she out in the other car? Or gone home? Nothing to do but wait, and for that I needed drink. I started to ask the louts if there was a liquor store around, but no, they would want shares and I was not convivial. I went out of the front door. Both cars were gone.
I went down the dark street. Three blocks and a larger intersection, to the left a glow of neon red. I walked towards it but it came to be a dry-cleaning sign, working while all else slept. I walked on, and after a long time a cluster of stores and a liquor sign. I bought a pint of bourbon which would hold me and transport, and started back. I found an empty lot between two houses, went in it to a broken oil-can and opened my bottle. Few cars went by, making a pleasant distant whir. It was peaceful. In half an hour I was dulled enough, put the bottle in my pocket, and went on.
The Ford was back and there were five or six more people in the hut. Pia sat on a chair by herself. I went to her.
"Where you been?" she said.
"Looking for you," I said. "Where have you been?"
"Out," she said.
"Do you want a drink?" I said. "I have private supply, but better not in here."
"Maybe," she said. "You can walk me home." Nobody was dancing any more. They sat in clusters of desultory talk, each of the three girls clutched by a lout. Pia's sister wasn't there. The initiated girl slept. We left.
We walked. "Nice party," I said.
"What did you expect?" Pia said.
"I don't know. Did you get initiated?"
"Sure. The leader was my boy friend, then. It wasn't too bad."
"Did you go for a ride with the others?"
"Sure," she said.
"Let's have a drink," I said. We walked to the shadow of a pile of bricks and lumber by the curb. Pia took a very small sip from the bottle. I recognized the difference in setting from my living room. "Pia," I said, "let's find a taxi and go across to my place." I put my arms around her.
"No," she said.
I leaned to kiss her mouth. She turned her face an effective inch.
"Let go," she said. I let go. "What am I supposed to do," she said, "fall over with my legs in the air because you want to screw me?"
"No," I said.
"At least when you told me to have dinner with you, you stood up. I'll say that much for you."
"I didn't tell you, I asked you," I said. "Sure," she said. "Your wife away?"
"Yes," I said.
"Well why do you come over here for, why do you want to mess around with me? Don't you know anybody else?"
"I like you," I said.
"I want to go home," she said. "My dirty house with my crazy mother. I don't want any trouble. I don't want any trouble with you. You're all right, I guess, but I don't want any trouble with you." She started to walk. I caught up and put my arm around her shoulder, then took it back. "Pia, it would be pleasant," I said.
"You want a girl, there's at least two of the girls back there will go out to the car with you, they're crazy to know what you're like. Go ahead." She stopped. "Go ahead," she said.
"No," I said.
"Do you really like me?" she said.
"You and your opaque face. Pia, I really do."
"That's too bad," she said, and started walking. I took a long drink and went after.
It was no less far than I expected. We finally stopped at the littered entrance. I was well drunk, now, frontiers of consciousness well pulled in. "Tell me," I said, "how many bright young middle-class men do you expect to meet and marry going out to the hut with these louts?"
"How many ask me out?" she said. "This is where I live, these are the people I know. It's a big city, but everybody lives where they live."
"Pia, please," I said. "Please come over with me. Why not? It would be pleasant."
She looked at me thoughtfully. "You're crazy," she said, and went in.
There were obviously no taxis to be had on that street at that time, so I started for the subway. A block down, the sister came out of the dark, walking with little skipping steps, swinging the radio. The hair was no realer, but messier.
"Well, hi," she said, stopping.
I stopped. "Hi," I said.
"You take Marie home?" she said. She came and stood under my face, looking up at me.
"Just now," I said. I put my hands on her back and slid them down to her tight little buttocks, and pulled her against me.
She giggled. "Gee," she said, "you think I'd be tired by now."
That close, in the dim street light, the face under the brass hair, masked in dark lipstick and eye shadow, the thin quivering body against me, the hard flesh under my hand, there in that unknown street, were all impossible. They could not happen. I kissed her mouth; it was liquid and mobile.
"Gee," she said, "you want to go someplace?"
"Yes," I said. "Where?"
She giggled. "You think I'd be tired by now," she said. "I got a place." She put her arm around my waist and we walked a few steps, our legs touching. She stopped. "No," she said. "I better not. Marie'd kill me, Marie'd murder me."
I put my arms around her again and tried to think of her name. "I better not," she said, and pulled away. I held for a moment, then let her go. She reached up and patted my cheek in unknown imitation. "You gonna come and see Marie again?" she said.
"I don't know," I said.
She giggled. "Have fun," she said, and went.
I tried to finish the liquor and choked. It was hours waiting for subways. I sat in blank drunken dignity, enduring everything, a train that didn't stop and trains that didn't come, until at last I got home and pulled off my clothes and went to sleep.
In the late afternoon, sweltering in self-contempt for the stupidity of my ambitions and the stupidity of my failures, and the telephone rang. I did not recognize her voice. "This is Pia," she said.
I said hello.
"I just wanted to say," she said, "I didn't mean to be mean last night. I didn't mean to say anything mean, but maybe I did."
"No," I said, "you weren't. You didn't."
"Maybe we can talk again sometime," she said. "I mean, talk."
"We will," I said.
About an hour later, Sally came home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
"Well," Sally said, "quite a weekend."
"Good weather?" I said.
"Oh, yes," she said. "The weather was fine. Hot, but not too bad. But I didn't realize that Kate knew so many people up there. I'm exhausted. We kept going all afternoon and all evening until late, and then we had to talk, of course, so we talked until it was light, and then today there was a party before I left. She's a strong healthy child but I'm not that young any more."
"How is she?" I said.
Sally combed her fingers back in her hair over her ears and closed her eyes. "It's hard to say. We talked and talked and she was perfectly calm, really. Not like when she left here last week, but really calm as far as I could see. I don't know, though. She seems to make these cold-blooded judgments or decisions or whatever, and you point out to her that she's not being terribly logical or rational, really, and she agrees with you and sort of takes a side-step and you find yourself agreeing that, well, all judgments are basically irrational or something of the sort so there's no reason this one should be rational, I mean, if it isn't just obviously silly or anything. She's so rational about being irrational it's hard to talk to her. I don't know, I think it's all those young men up there, all those bright young new conservatives, the parties were piled with them, they keep on talking about the basic irrationality of man and so forth until I wanted to set fire to their neckties and plead basic unreason. I mean, I know it's just a silly fad, it's fashionable and all, but they're so neat and well-dressed and modestly professional and they keep on talking about the demonic force of the irrational and the black tides of unreason and the indelible pitch of original sin, and they're so smug and happy about it all."
"Yes, yes, yes, yes," I said. "But Kate. What is she being irrational about?"
"Well, Robert Richard Russell mostly, I suppose. You understand, I'm not sure she is being unreasonable. It's just, it was difficult to talk to her, exactly. Anyway, she says she thinks she will marry him, she's not sure but she thinks maybe she will. But she doesn't want to tell him yet, she wants to wait a while, a few weeks, and be more sure and so on. So she's going to tell him that she's not sure but will give him an answer soon. I think she's coming down next weekend again."
"But why?" I said. "Why Robert Richard Russell?"
"I don't know. She wants to, she thinks. What other reason is there?"
"Money," I said, "position, power, intellectual admiration, sexual gratification."
"She seems to think sex will be all right, although she really wouldn't talk about it. She always does, with me, but she wouldn't really."
"Why can't she marry money and take us all out of everything?"
"You don't mind about next weekend?" Sally said. "We'll be seeing both of them, I guess."
"No," I said, "I don't mind."
"Did you have a good time?" Sally said. "It was hell," I said, "irrational hell."
2
Monday morning I caught a glimpse of Pia typing at her desk. Just before noon, Laszlo came in. He closed the door, pulled a chair up close to mine, leaned his heavy body forward. "You know of it," he said. "Why did you not tell me? Such good gossip."
"What?" I said.
"You do not know? Truly? Wonderful. I am a wise man of the East with gift of what? I cannot even remember. I think of a Frenchman that smells, which is often so. Is what?"
"Frankincense, for Christ's sake," I said, "and for Christ's sake what are you trying to say?"
"For Christ's sake, yes, very funny, Charles my friend, a wise man bearing gifts to you, although really, Charles, it is just a figure of speech I use, I am not serious, I hope you are not under a delusion, you are a good man, yes, but really, Charles, so good, no, that you are not."
"Laszlo," I said.
"Eyck is leaving us," he said. "Yes. You are amazed. It is true. I cannot tell you how I know, but I know. At least, it was told me so that I believe. Absolutely."
"I'll be damned," I said. "When?"
"Ah. Of this I am not sure. But I do not think until the end of summer. There is not supposed to be official announcement until then. But I know and you know and others will know, and I think perhaps there will be official announcement before, so that besides rumors there may be some dignity."
"Who replaces him?" I said.
"Charles, certainly you must be far older than the baby you look. Your face is unlined, young, honest, simple, like all good American faces. But surely you must be older, to grasp so quickly, so like crafty Machiavelli, the meat within the egg."
I closed my eyes.
"Who?" Laszlo said. "You? Purbeck? Stoinec? Allessandro? Even myself? One of us, this happy family? Or someone else? Indeed, Charles. Who?"
"Well, well," I said.
"Would you like, Charles?"
"Naturally. Of course."
"Strange. Even I, for whom it is so un-likely that even to speak of is foolish, even I, who am senior to the staff and the only man of serious talent, even I would like. Who?"
"Where is he going?" I said.
"I do not know. I am sorry. Also I do not know who follows. I bring only the outskirt, the suburb of the news. The castle at the center, the true prize of value, this I do not bring. I ask you to excuse me, to remember that I am little more than human being."
"What are you feeling so damn self-satisfied for? Aside, I grant you, from being the bearer of priceless intelligence."
Laszlo stood and stretched. "I am made happy by this news. Is not because I am pleased that Eyck is going, although I do not love him, as you know. Is not because I think myself will be the new Eyck; I have lived long enough to know the best man wins no reward. But I am happy to think of all this summer, how fine the gossip will be, of who will win and who will lose, of who will stab and who be stabbed. Think of all the fine talk, the judgments, the speculations. Think only of Purbeck, playing with this thing as a rat plays with a little dead bird. The scurry, the whisper, the look over the shoulder. Wonderful, no?"
"Happy days," I said.
"Tell me, Charles. You have ever been in a place where this play was played?"
"No. You have, of course. Under a variety of climatic conditions."
"Yes, I have. It is a very good play, a play you will find of great interest. Another thing you have not seen, perhaps, is a pit of wild dogs starved for many days, all teeth and spit and howl, when a small piece of meat is thrown down among them. You have seen?"
"The image, though forceful, seems a little strong," I said. "A little oversimplified. No, I have not seen."
"Nor I, to tell the truth. And you are correct, no doubt, we are not starving dogs. I agree. We are not. Despite this, we will have interesting times, I think. You have appointment for lunch tomorrow?"
"No. You figure to drop me a small piece of meat and study my footwork?"
"Ah ha, already, already, you see, Charles, you think I am your foul enemy going to sink a big knife in your spine. Already, and you have not been in the pit five minutes."
"Now goddamn it, Laszlo," I said, in tones indicating real annoyance.
Laszlo laughed merrily. "All right, Charles. No, I wish to have a lunch with Stoinec and Allessandro. I wish to see if they know and I wish you to be there also if I like a falcon must watch one, so you like a falcon will watch the other, also because we will talk English and you perhaps a little better than I know the subtleness of that ridiculous tongue, also because if they are less stupid than I think they will know what I do and I do not want them to wonder why I do not also investigate you. Also I will ask Purbeck so there will be no wonder why he is not there, we will pretend it is a nice jolly luncheon of the dogs."
"Also," I said, "because in your self-installed and self-delighting capacity of stage manager you wish to make as many complications as possible. You imply you know that Purbeck knows."
"You see, this cleverness of yours, this way you sniff the least faint little track of meaning. Yes, to be sure, Purbeck knows and he told me. After getting great measure of nasty conceit because he knows something I do not. 'How's your intelligence service, Szabo, old man? Your sources not terribly keen these days? Things in train around here you haven't quite been briefed on? You sometimes feel you really ought to be put more in the picture?' I smell at once there is something of true importance, to make nasty Purbeck burst to tell me rather than keep to himself the pleasure of his private knowledge. I am humble, I explain to him how no matters of importance are known to me, but he, Purbeck, with all the splendid tradition of the British Intelligence in his little finger must be aware of each thing, no matter how secret, how hidden from weaker eyes. So he tells me."
"How the hell did he know?" I said, annoyed that the little toad should have any superiority of information.
Laszlo gazed at me, all solemn wonder. "Charles, Charles, in these days to be so foolish and forgetful is to be criminal, criminal to throw away and waste the beautiful rococo-you know the word?-complications of our scene. He knows from Mrs. Hirsch, of course, who told him so that in return he would let her tickle his feet."
"To be sure," I said. "To be sure. Well, that's all terribly interesting, Szabo, old man, glad you've filled me in, put me in the picture, so to speak. I'll certainly make a note of luncheon tomorrow with old Purbeck and the rest of the troupe. Thanks for dropping in and do give my thanks to the Hirsch. Afraid I must get on with it now, all play and no work and so forth, you'll understand, I'm sure."
Laszlo rose. "I am pleased, Charles, you begin to realize what a serious joy we have in all this matter, you learn craftiness. You hide even from your friends who tell you everything your true thoughts."
"Laszlo," I said as he was at the door, "you want to sit in the seat of Eyck?"
"Of course, Charles. As you, as all."
"No," I said. "I relinquish title. I watch as spectator merely. In the un-likely event that my opinion is asked, I shall howl your name as a mad muezzin the name of Allah atop a mosque at dawn. Or sunset."
"Good-by, Charles," Laszlo said. "Do not become too drunk on ideas of what should be. Then in the morning you have hangover, not simple soberness."
3
I said to Sally: "A golden new rumor today. More than a rumor, actually, vouched to be unimpeachable fact. Eyck is leaving at the end of the summer."
As always, she got the relevant points quickly. Having rapidly determined that Eyck's departure was not, as far as I knew (my assurances were a touch artificial since the aspect had never occurred to me) indicative of any wholesale slaughter of personnel, that as far as I knew Eyck was not secretly ill, that I was completely unaware of any currents indicating who his successor might be, she said: "You'd like to have the job, wouldn't you?"
"Well," I said, "there's that, of course."
"Wouldn't it be wonderful. Would it be a lot more money?"
I said I had no idea what arrangements would be made; it would be more money, at any rate.
"Not that we need it," she said, "but it would be nice."
"Property is theft," I said.
"Of course," Sally said, "the main thing is how good it would be for your morale."
"There's nothing wrong with my morale," I said.
"Of course there isn't, but you'd like it, wouldn't you?"
"Oh, I suppose I'd like it, of course, but it's damned un-likely."
"Certainly, it would be silly to count on it, or anything. I mean, to be disappointed. But if it happened it would be nice."
"Laszlo," I said, moved to annoyance by the simple cheerfulness of this world-view, "makes a great point of the internecine warfare engendered by such a situation. He speaks of treacherous knife-thrusts in fraternal backs, bloody scuffles at the foot of the empty throne, a dark night of the bureaucratic body when each man's hand is raised against each. He seems to be looking forward to it."
"Oh, well, Laszlo," Sally said. "You know how he likes to overdramatize everything. He's not happy, poor Laszlo, unless he convinces himself he's in the last act of an Elizabethan drama, with everything terribly portentous and significant and the stage about to be simply collapsing with bodies."
Eyck passed as the five of us, Laszlo, Purbeck, Stoinec, Allessandro and myself, waited for the elevator. He stopped and smiled his small smile. "Hearty appetite, gentlemen," he said. Allessandro nodded and grinned, Stoinec said: "Will you join us, Henry?" Purbeck bobbed his head and examined the elevator telltale, Laszlo frowned massively and said: "Your staff goes together to plot on you, Henry, you must pretend not to be aware."
Eyck said: "Thank you very much, but I am afraid I have an engagement. I must say, however, I am pleased to see this evidence of staff spirit. I had worried that we lacked, ah, togetherness. Enjoy your lunch," and passed on.
After the shuffle of seating and ordering, Stoinec, a cherry Serb, white hair and red, young face, said: "Henry was perfectly right, it is a good idea for the responsible staff in a bureau to have little meetings, quite unofficial, you know."
Purbeck closed his eyes and said: "Oh, my bleeding heart of Jesus."
Allessandro, who purported to be a French national although he had played second string football for the University of Michigan, and who was quite friendly with Stoinec, looked hard at Purbeck, said: "I'd agree, except to a sensitive man with a not so good stomach it's kind of a bull market in ugly faces," and told a story about a rich widow who lived next to a fire station.
Eventually, Laszlo asked Stoinec if he planned to go to Maine for his vacation again this year. Stoinec said: "I suppose. My children have been already complaining since school closed that I am going to deprive them of the hot city streets again. But we will go. It is a place my wife and I find very dull, very peaceful, very pleasant. The children will have to suffer not to sweat and breathe gasoline for three weeks."
I asked: "How old are your kids?"
"The boy fourteen, the girl twelve. Of course, last year I was so desperate and so foolish as to promise them they would not have to go out of the city this year if they did not want. I was a coward to get peace. Now this year I am a coward again, I tell them that they must do it for their mother and me, we are old, tired, we work hard, we must go rest in the nice cool green hills, they must not make bother. God knows what I will do next year."
"What do they do in the city all summer?" I said.
"God knows. They have many friends. They always come home for dinner, and they are never out later in the evening than they are told to be. But I do not know what they do. They do not tell."
Laszlo asked Stoinec: "And when do you go for this vacation among the green peace of God?"
"The end of August."
"A good time," Laszlo said. "You can hope to return to decent weather. And there will be nothing important at the office."
Ah ha, I thought, the fabled delicacy of the Austro-Hungarian chancelleries. I promised myself words on the subject.
Stoinec shrugged. Purbeck continued to Allessandro: "Absolutely the finest piece I ever had in my life. You could have knocked me over. She'd acted as if she wouldn't know what to do with a clue. Amazing."
"Me," Allessandro said, "I like the settled family life. Faithful unto death."
"Oh, well," Purbeck said.
"No stones of moral sanction at old Purbeck," I said. "He's making his own hell, trying to prove his virility to himself."
"To hell with you, Charlie me boy," Purbeck said. "I know what I like."
"I look forward to vacation," Stoinec said.
Laszlo came into my office and said trenchantly: "So."
"So what?" I said. "Now don't tell me that was a specimen of your Magyar finesse. You sadden me. I had hoped to learn something of subtlety."
"I was not forced to elegance," Laszlo said. "So Stoinec does not know, so Allessandro does not know. But you saw?"
"The waiter's mouth twitch as you mentioned Alexandria?"
"Eyck, how does our good friend Eyck know we are all taking lunch together? He passes as we wait the elevator, good, fine, it is coincident that he is perhaps making a stroll to clear his head of the morning, fine. But how does he know we all lunch together, simply because we stand, an equal coincident, at the elevator. We cannot, after all, walk downstairs, it is expressly and absolutely forbidden."
"Except in case of fire. So?"
"So he knows. How? Stoinec and Allessandro did not tell him, it is just a thing they would not trouble to mention. I did not. You did not?"
"I did not."
"So, Purbeck. Perhaps told Mrs. Hirsch what we do and why, Mrs. Hirsch perhaps tells Mrs. Mutton, Mrs. Mutton tells Eyck, but it is too good. The communication is too perfect, it works with too great efficiency. Bang, one day Eyck tells Mutton tells Hirsch tells Purbeck that Eyck is going. Bang, next day Purbeck tells Hirsch tells Mutton tells Eyck who knows what? What we do? No."
"No what?"
"I don't know no what," Laszlo said. "I am puzzled. Can I be wrong? Is there other communication? How are Purbeck and Eyck?"
"You know how they are. Eyck distant, Purbeck outraged."
"I hope I know. You see? Already complication and confusion."
"I'm not confused," I said. "I'm doubtful. Are you sure you're not making all this up?"
"You are not doubtful, Charles, you are hopeful. You hope that the only dark complications of mystery are what a man has within, to himself. You hope that in the arrangements of men, in politics, there is mostly reason, maybe bad reason, but reason. It is not so."
"Perhaps," I said. "Nevertheless, you seem to make much dark mystery of very little substance. I'll tell you," I said, deciding that his characterization of me demanded the rebuttal of private wires, "I have certain, as you say, sources. I will try to test the validity of the hypothetic Eyck-Mutton-Hirsch-Purbeck pipeline."
"Really sources?" Laszlo said.
"Maybe really."
"By all means, Charles. Find out. Remember that an organization of many men is almost as complicated as you think one man. But find out, most certainly. I only hope."
"What?"
"Nothing, Charles. Only, I hope there is not too much complication."
4
As reaction to the sorry figure I'd cut Saturday, I viewed Pia at that moment with a certain lessening of interest, but I had, of course, no intention of letting that knot drop, and my claim of sources was immediate incentive. An intra-office note asking her to meet me for a rapid drink after work at the same place, and got there at five-thirty to find her standing outside in the heat, had been for almost half an hour.
No, she wouldn't have gone inside and waited for me. Why not? Because. And after work was after five o'clock, wasn't it?
"I'm sorry," I said, in the cool inside, "I forgot. I almost always stay till quarter to six or so, I figured you would leave just a little earlier, and time in the John and so forth. You should have gone inside."
"What time did you come to work this morning?" she said.
"Twenty to ten."
"I get there at nine o'clock. I got to. Mrs. Hirsch is there five to, any girl who isn't she talks to."
Prime opportunity to probe my point, but I decided to wait until small conversation had attained a higher coefficient of intimacy. I asked if she wanted a coke; she said she wanted a frozen daiquiri. I exaggerated surprise at this tumble into the disjointed hell of drink; she said somebody told her it was a good cocktail for a girl. I said that we must think of the alcoholic as a person who is sick and needs help.
"You probably drink too much," she said. "Doesn't your wife mind that you drink?"
"I do not," I said. "She drinks as much as I do."
"I got three aunts," she said, "all they ever talk about is how their husbands drink too much and are bad to them."
"I am bad to no one," I said. "How's your sister?"
"Just as stupid," she said. "She told me you tried to screw her."
"Come, come," I said. "The girl is wrapt in fantasy. I did no such thing. The trouble is, I suppose," I said, marshaling my tongue for a discourse on class differences in re sexual practices to the point that certain actions meant and interpreted by the middle class as merely social, only peripherally charged with direct sexual connotation, would by the lower classes be meant and interpreted as simple statements of copulatory intent, or so Kinsey et at. imply.
Pia interrupted me, however. "It's none of my business what you do," she said. "I know how she is. Do you play around a lot?"
"What?" I said.
"With girls. Does your wife know?"
"No," I said, "certainly I do not."
"How come?" she said.
I finished my drink. "It's not easy to explain," I said. "I guess," Pia said, without expression. "What's your wife like?"
"I don't know," I said, "we've only been married a year."
"Did you know her long before?"
"About a year."
"Is she nice?"
"Of course she's nice," I said.
"How old was she when you got married?"
"Twenty-five."
She thought for a moment. "That's not so old," she said.
"It isn't and it is," I said. "She thought it was old. Average age at first marriage for a woman in this country is twenty point four years. Most of her friends were long married and, indeed, offsprung. Some of them were already starting the second round. She was getting tense."
"How come she didn't, then?" Pia said.
"She was waiting for a prize," I said. "She'd had some relationships that went badly and they frightened her. She thought they indicated flaws in her. So she thought she needed to marry a prize to prove there weren't flaws in her. And the more she looked for a prize the more she didn't get married and the more she didn't get married the more she needed to marry a prize to vindicate the fact she hadn't."
I waited to be amused by comment on the concept of myself as prize. Pia said: "I'm almost twenty-one."
That day, Pia lacked in some degree the metallic completeness and inevitability of appearance I had previously found remarkable. She looked tired, I thought, although stains beneath her eyes were difficult to distinguish against her dark skin.
"You look tired," I said.
She shrugged. "It's hot to sleep. Lots of things."
Halfway through my second drink I said: "Tell me. How do you get along with Mrs. Hirsch and the Mutton? Pretty friendly?"
"No," she said.
"I mean, just in the office. Idle gossip of this and that, a pleasant word in season, and so forth. Although I suppose their elevation demands they keep a certain distance from the lower orders. I guess they must be pretty chummy with each other, though."
"I guess."
"Mutton's a lot older, of course, but still, she has the heart that knows only the climate of spring. And Hirsch must be feeling more than her years or she wouldn't as I have been informed be messing around with Purbeck. So I guess they probably are pretty friendly?"
"Purbeck?" Pia said. "And Mrs. Hirsch?"
"I have heard."
"He pinched me once," Pia said. "On the elevator."
"What was your reply?"
"I made like I didn't notice."
"A poisonous little bastard."
"What I really mind," Pia said, "is on the subway. It's hot and crowded and I'm standing up, I never get a seat going home but usually in the morning, it's funny, and some smart guy next to me acts like he's reading his paper and starts grabbing and watching out of the side of his eye to see what you do."
"Grabbing?" I said.
"You know. I don't mind so much the ones that rub alongside the top of your leg, I mean I could kill the bastards, it's so hot and all, but the ones that start pushing, you know, on top."
"On top?" I said.
"You know, stupid, the chest."
"Oh," I said, "do they?"
"I could kill them," she said. "And they look to see what you do."
"What do you?"
"Ah, usually you can just turn away, even if it is crowded, you can just pull away. Except sometimes you get real jammed, like face to face, you know, and you get one of those smart ones who thinks you won't be able to move and you'll be afraid to say anything and he puts his hand under his paper and starts poking and squeezing, sometimes it even really hurts, what I do is spit in his face."
I blinked.
"Not really spit," she said, "I mean like you would spit, I kind of spray them. And I look as if I'm going to yell. That stops them, okay. But it gets me so mad, they don't do it really because they want to feel something nice and maybe get a kick out of that or even maybe, like a boy you're out with, you know, like telling you he thinks you're nice. No, they just do it to be mean, they know you don't like it, standing there all sweaty and crushed, they know you don't like it and don't know exactly what to do about it and kind of squirm and they watch you, that's" what they like, they like watching you when they do something to you that you don't like and you don't know what to do about it. I could kill them."
"Aren't you overreacting?" I said. "Perhaps you really do like it and are guilty for liking, so assuage guilt by outrage?"
"Crap," Pia said. "Excuse me."
The inanity of my remark, I must explain, was a result of considerable preoccupation. I had become, through Pia's account of life underground, increasingly conscious of her aforementioned breasts, prominent under thin striped cotton, as objects for grabbing, pushing and squeezing. I managed, or thought I managed, to look at them without looking at them, and my hands hung on the ends of my arms and tingled. Absurdly, the detail of a droplet spray of warm saliva from that mouth excited me further. I was not comfortable.
I then thought of Sally. From time to time she would come home with a story of being, as she put it, mauled. Usually in the office elevator; she took taxis. Sally would tell of a man pinching her or rubbing against her, "the poor frustrated dear," she would say, "how inadequate his girl must be. On an elevator. I simply turned and laughed in his face. He looked wonderfully startled and tried to pretend he was twenty miles away, you can always tell someone who's pretending to be lost in thought, you know, their eyes jump. I really felt pity for him. Still it is flattering, in a small way, it's not bad for a girl's morale." Sally would say, especially underlining, if we were in company, the fact that she felt sorry for the poor fumbler, and was amused, and was wryly aware that she felt flattered. Or thought she ought to feel flattered, ought to feel amused, ought to feel sorry for the poor fumbler.
In this manner I mingled lust for Pia with anger at Sally. Perhaps transmuting lust to anger, since for that lust I could see no immediate satisfaction.
I said: "But back to our Mutton and Hirsch. You must know if they talk to each other, tell each other things?"
"What things?" Pia said. "You trying to find out something?"
"Yes, goddamn it, I'm trying to find out if it's probable that Mutton or Hirsch would tell each other confidential details of their jobs, things they learn. Would for example Mutton learn something from Eyck and tell it to Hirsch, or Hirsch maybe learn something from her demon-lover Purbeck and tell it to Mutton? If s not important but I wanted to find out."
"I don't know," Pia said, "maybe they would. How should I know? They don't tell me anything. Is that why you asked me this afternoon? To find out something?"
"No, no," I said. "I wondered, that's all, I wondered. What I wanted to ask you was when I could come out to your wild-wood and see you again."
Pia smiled. "You mean you want to play around with my little sister," she said.
"Waiter," I said as he sharked by, "the check." I had been driven too far. Pia's hand was on the table, toying with a matchbook; I put my hand on hers. "Pia," I said, "you are a beautiful young woman, efflorescent with sexual radiation of the most penetrating sort, you are twelve times brighter and better than Hirsch or Mutton and your little sister is a brass-flavored creep and I want you please to do me a favor, please. I want you to go to Mrs. Mutton and tell her I told you that she was the one who found that knife in the John and you want to explain to her that you found it in the subway that morning and just picked it up and then later in the John you noticed it in your purse and thought you might as well get rid of it and left it on the shelf. And ask her please not to tell anyone you came to her to explain, because I had told you that she found it but had asked you not to let on that you knew because if if was known that she found it maybe she might be blamed for not having done something official about it. But you were grateful to her and wanted to thank her. But she should please not tell anybody, or I might find out you had gone to her and I might be mad to be shown up as a blabber-mouth. Got it?"
"Why should I?" she said.
"Because I asked you as a favor and because I said you were beautiful and sexually efflorescent and because I talk to you as if you were almost as good as I am and because I bought you several drinks and because I didn't knock up your sister. And because after you do I'll tell you what this is all about and you'll know more of what is going on than the other girls and Mutton and Hirsch."
"Okay," she said. "Why not? It's crazy, but tomorrow."
"Excellent. And when can I come out and see you?"
"I got to go," Pia said. "I got to be someplace after I eat."
The next afternoon I stopped at Hirsch's desk. Her long arms were folded like a praying mantis while her fingers skittered on the electric typewriter keyboard. Her head, turned to read the original copy, had no relation to her fingers' business, and her face, set in a small frown over a small smile, indicated that her thoughts were unrelated to actions of hand or eye. Pondering the latest manifestation of Purbeck's sweet willfulness, no doubt. She was obviously not human, but her long body and face had a certain anthropoid charm. "Pardon," I said, and the fingers hung, the eyes focused.
I asked if there had been any repercussions in the matter of the Cacherini girl's unconventional armament. She said no, not really, that the girl had gone to Mrs. Mutton that morning and thanked her for not making anything out of it, and had given her some story about finding the knife on the subway. Mrs. Hirsch smiled. "Fat chance. She runs around with those duck-tailed bums," she said. I showed interest. "You read the papers," she said.
In Laszlo's office I closed the door and said: "Yes. I have established the existence of a communication link between Mutton and Hirsch, operating even or perhaps particularly when secrecy is enjoined. To be precise, I have established that such a link functions in the direction Mutton to Hirsch; we must, I think, assume the flow to be bi-directional."
Laszlo grunted and examined the ceiling.
"Nu?" I said. "Exhibit animation."
"Yes," Laszlo said.
"Yes, please. Now what?"
"Charles," Laszlo said, "you ever see exhibition, pornograph show, girls and men demonstrating the splendid range of what is possible for human physiology?"
"Your question holds hidden meanings," I said.
"I have seen many. Many places. All I find instructive, amusing, worth-while. All but one. One so revolting, so disgusting, even for me who accepts everything, that I wish to go swim for days in the ocean of icebergs so the cold waves wash me clean."
"More specific detail," I said. "More the reporter's eye. Less subjective nuance. You are not an English lady novelist."
"In Bratislava, after the war. I know a little man who does this show. Ukrainian. In show is three women. His wife, his mother, his daughter. Is also his brother, a hunchback idiot. The man boasts. He boasts he is so clever to have show with people he must not pay."
"Clever," I said.
"Always I think this Ukrainian to be the most disgusting man I meet. Now I am wrong. Is not bad fellow, I see. Compared to some is likable, sweet, humorous fellow. A little original with his ideas, yes, but for this we like him more."
"Compared to, for example?"
"Compared to Purbeck," Laszlo said. "Charles, you know the work I do last year on target shape of urban-area births, my urban suburban exurban rings, my nice projections? That I decide is interesting but not enough conclusive so I make up my notes and show around and put aside? You remember?"
"Sure."
"Purbeck is publishing."
"Jesus Christ. Where?"
"American Sociological. He has proofs, he shows them. Is all my material, with little analysis from Purbeck, a little twist here and question there from Purbeck, is all the rest my work. Is little line saying portions of this article use unpublished material by Mr. L. Szabo, or something like."
"The bastard. What are you going to do?"
"Do?" he said. "What is to do? I speak and I look like fool who thinks because he has made a few figures jump the whole area belongs to him, like fool who has not sense to make article but only whines at somebody else. No. I, Laszlo Szabo, I cannot make complaint that a Purbeck has done me injury. No, only to you, my good friend, can I admit that I am angered by what Purbeck does. Even to Purbeck, I smile and say very fine, very fine, of course I do not mind his using a few scraps, as he says, of my material."
"I see," I said. "Well, what the hell, a lousy article."
"Very true, Charles. What the hell. Except it is another thing I do not like at this time. Is bad time for Purbeck to publish, Charles, right this very time when we have the question of who follows Eyck. And is bad sign, just now with other bad signs I see, that a Purbeck should take from me material and make himself publication."
"You are not suggesting that Purbeck has a chancred aborigine's chance of following Eyck?"
"It is one of the many things I do not know," Laszlo said. "But I do know that our friend Eyck, however the irony he makes on the subject, approves of publication, and for Purbeck to publish now reminds Eyck that those who do not publish do not."
The sore point of course being that Laszlo spoke and read approximately fourteen languages, but was a touch idiosyncratic of expression in each of them, doubtless including his original. I had several times offered to help clean up his work for publication, but he was of necessity constrained to refuse. He was not to receive help.
I emitted a few unsuccessful attempts to cheer him. Going, I said: "Well, raise your spirits. Purbeck's piece was doubtless stinking, aside, of course, from your material, and Eyck will be reminded that those who are not inept are not. Besides, Eyck knows who really did the stuff."
"No," Laszlo said, "for Eyck there is no really but the really of finally doing. And what Purbeck did with it was not so bad at all. Not nearly so bad enough."
And Purbeck, later, in the John, told me that I might be interested in having a look at something he was publishing, a little of it was some material Szabo had, but didn't seem to know what to do with, nothing world-shaking, he said, but not without interest, not without interest. If, that is to say, a man did take a serious view of his profession and his responsibilities to it, not to mention to himself in the matter of the proper gloss upon one's professional reputation. You younger men ought to think of that, he said, your futures and all that, instead of expending any available energies in chase of the fabled and elusive tail. And with this he gave me a jaunty wink from his little weasel face.
I had arranged for a drink that afternoon with Pia, opportunity to thank her for aid in my little stratagem (she being instructed to go inside the damn bar and if need be wait in the cool: "I don't tell you what to do," she'd said). As the elevator door was closing, Laszlo came up at speed and thrust himself in, mashing a few small Orientals. He saw me when we tumbled out.
"Charles," he said, "I went for you, but already you were gone. Come, let us drink and I will tell you what a good thing I have done." He seemed recovered from his Purbeckian woes.
"No, no, not here, not here in this field where this beaten army runs from the battle of the day, they will knock us down, they will trample us, they will crush our faces. Come, we have a drink, I tell you. Where do you hurry? Sally is most likely not yet even home, she works still to earn the money to eat that you throw on old wines and adolescent mistresses. Come."
"I can't," I said. "I have to meet someone."
"Oh?" Laszlo said. "So? Yes, of course, yes, I understand. This was a joke, to speak of mistresses, I think Sally and Charles, this is such a nice young couple, this is one nice loving couple in all the evil city who know to trust, to have faith with each other, who need no universe but the universe they make together, is so that many times I think of Sally and Charles and their warm beautiful universe and I weep that I am alone. But now you say that my joke of mistresses is not a joke, and this unique universal couple have no more love or trust than all the rest of this evil city and I weep again."
"Sponge your goddamn tears," I said. "I'm just having a drink with the Cacherini girl from the office, she did me a favor." With a suspicion that this was a mistake, but what the hell. "If you want to come along, come along."
"Cacherini girl?" Laszlo said, striding. "Splendid. For a favor, a drink, also splendid. You know, Charles, really, I am joking when I speak of your mistresses, when I say that Sally and you do not make for me a picture of the human marriage in the ideal, each for ever faithful to each. I joke too much, it is true, I who have suffered so much and seen so much evil, sometimes I forget that others have not seen so much and I make bad jokes of things that to them are pure and religious and should not be subjects of joke. But really, underneath my bad joke, I understand, I am sensitive, I am tender. You understand, you forgive? And certainly if a girl with dress so tight over her nice bottom you could not pinch, Charles, excuse, the hypothetical man could not pinch the dress and not also pinch no less than a quarter pound of nice bottom does a favor, of course you must have with her a drink to say thank you, of course. Forget my bad jokes, Charles forget."
"Oh, shut up," I and.
Pia was in a corner opaquely dark after the bright street; I could not tell if she was startled to see Laszlo with me or not. "Miss Cacherini, Doctor Szabo," I said. Laszlo said, "My pleasure." Pia said, "Hi."
"It worked smoothly," I said to Pia, "as of course it was designed to do. Mutton had informed Hirsch of your remarks by two thirty-five p.m. What time did you speak to Mutton?"
"When I went to lunch, twelve o'clock."
"Maximum informational time-lag of two hours and thirty-four minutes, then," I said to Laszlo. "Note it"
"You said you were going to tell me what was going on," Pia said. "The secret thing." I had forgotten about that.
Laszlo's large eyes were on me full of bland surprise. I was indeed a touch embarrassed; it had been taken for granted that as long as the matter of Eyck's departure remained semi-private information it was not to be distributed to anyone in the office, certainly not to the lower female echelons. I could not now, of course, display discomfort or refuse the question, although I tried, with the expected lack of success, to gloss and glide. "I wanted to find out if Mutton tells Hirsch things," I said.
"Sure," Pia said. "That's what you said yesterday."
"Yes," I said. "Now we know."
"Sure," Pia said. "What's the big secret?"
"Well," I said, "It's that Eyck is leaving at the end of the summer. And it is a secret. Please, be a good girl and don't mention it to anyone. Anyone at all."
"So he's leaving," Pia said, "so what's the deal?"
"That's all," I said. "Just that Eyck is leaving."
"And that the departed Mr. Eyck must be replaced," Laszlo said, "it may be our good friend Charles here, so that you and I, my dear, who have the great honor to be good friends of Charles, may hope for particular consideration, for vacations of six months with pay and servant girls to bring glasses of gin and scratch us."
"No," I said, "but there is a certain amount of interest as to who will take the place. I myself am not in competition, but I give attention to the race. Laszlo, of course, is the prime local candidate."
"He is modest," Laszlo said, "as should be a head wearing such a crown of promise. You do not find the subject of who will follow Eyck to be an interest?"
Pia shrugged. "I guess. What difference is it to me? I just do my typing."
"Ah," I said, "the emperor sickens, and in the emperor's court the stars blot out, while grave ambitions clench and grapple at abyss-lip for hope and fear of what new constellations move to form the sky. But far from court the peasant works his little earth, whose constellations saw his father's sight, whose only change is the slow season's molt, in lumbering inexorable tide."
"Who's a peasant?" Pia said. "If I'm a peasant what do you want to bother me for? Peasant, for Christ's sake, why do you talk like that?"
"No, no," I said, "of course I didn't mean that."
"No," Laszlo said, "the young lady is right, it does not matter what happens after Eyck, it does not matter for any true reason. But some of us are very foolish and think it matters, so to us it does a little. Now I will tell you what I, who care a little, did to Purbeck, who cares very much. Do you like Mr. Purbeck?"
"No," Pia said. "He smells."
"Just so," Laszlo said. "And I suppose Charles has told you of friend Purbeck and Mrs. Hirsch?"
This, I presumed, was a gibe at my transmission of information. "Yes," I said, "why not?"
"So," Laszlo said. "This afternoon I must speak to Eyck on many matters. In his office, we speak. When we are done with our business I mention Purbeck's name, and then I say, speaking-I thought it when I spoke-as Charles here might speak, Ah yes, Purbeck, I say, it seems that perhaps that little bud might blossom even if it is far past its spring. Eyck looks at me, you know how he does, with eyes that do not blink, like a zoo-keeper looking at a quite intelligent animal who is trying to express. And I say, I presume you know, we all speak of the remarkable possibility that Purbeck will be married. Purbeck is married, Eyck says, waiting to see what the animal will do. I say, how odd, I have heard speak that Purbeck and Mrs. Hirsch. But perhaps it is all a mistake, I say. No doubt, Eyck says, and that is all. But Eyck knows just what I tell him, of course, and he knows just why I tell him. Still, I have told him something he did not know. I can see he thinks."
"But, Laszlo," I said, "not worthy. Purbeck and Mrs. Hirsch are laughable, true, but surely it's not necessary to be the one to squeal to Eyck about it."
"No," Laszlo said, "is not necessary, no, is foul thing to do, is unworthy thing. But today I felt that I must do something to Purbeck, something foul and unworthy, or I cannot live in my skin. I cannot let a Purbeck steal from me and look so sly and shrewd and make advantage for himself from me, and do nothing in return. This is not a nice thing I did, but I knew nothing else to do, nothing else so I could feel in myself that I have not let a Purbeck strike me and struck nothing back. It is a very nasty thing I did and I know it is, but I am glad I did."
"I guess," I said.
"I told you, Charles, and you did not believe that this would be a rat-fight."
"But so patly ratty?"
"You expect artistic interesting subtle strokes of fabled Metternich. No. Is rat-fight."
"I guess," I said.
"You are not sure you care," Laszlo said. "You try to make it easy for yourself by not caring. So you can disapprove what I do, and you are right. But I seriously do not want Purbeck to be chief. I want myself, but even more I seriously do not want Purbeck. He is nasty, vicious little man, he will make life nasty and vicious for everyone. So I do the only thing I can, I wish it is less a nasty thing, but not as much as I wish it is a more effective thing."
"All right," I said, "I'm on your side, damn it. Didn't I get Pia here to help so you could find out about the Hirsch-Mutton link? So you had to tell Eyck, all right, you know what you have to do, but don't expect me to sing about it."
"All right," Laszlo said. Annoyed by my refusal to salve his shame, he left shortly, making an ostentatiously gallant farewell to Pia.
Who immediately said: "What did you tell him about me?"
"Nothing. I told him you had done me a favor and I was having a drink with you to thank you. Thank you."
"What kind of favor?"
"I didn't specify, but obviously it was the speaking to Mutton business. For Christ's sake, what do you think I did, dug him in the ribs and said there's that new little typist she did me a favor she rolled over and spread her legs, so I've got a few minutes before I'm due home I think I'll buy her a drink and say thank you?"
"I didn't and you don't have to get mad," Pia said. "You don't have to talk like that. How do I know what you say? A lot of the time I don't even know what you're talking about. What do you want to talk to me for?"
It came to me, with resonance from the day before, that for brief acquaintance we had this routine down pretty smooth. Enough. "I want to screw you," I said. "I like you and I want to screw you."
Pia laughed. "So finally," she said. "Why didn't you say so before?"
"I thought I made the point out in Brooklyn."
"You were drunk and you were all hot from watching the initiation," she said. "You would have wanted to screw anybody."
"All right," I said, "I thought it was obvious. Will you?"
"No," she said. "What do you expect me to say?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
Friday I was a touch late getting home after work; clumsy, because Kate was due down from the northcountrie and Robert Richard Russell from his manipulative perch, and I had assured Sally I would be early to aid with the hewing of water and all. And also it meant that I had succumbed to the blandishments of the third empty-belly Martini, Greek gift intensifying beyond reason the demarcation between man and his universe. But it had been a hard day, late details of the report against all expectation turning refactory, and I could not refrain from drinks with Pia as transition or bridge-passage before the evening's work. I told her stories of my childhood and youth and the unflowering of my young manhood, stories so well worn in the telling that I felt borne up in a living tradition, the village taleteller re-spinning the people's lore as had generations behind, as would generations to come. Pia adding much to the occasion by her response: negative or tangential.
So I bade Pia good night and moved home through my world just turned subaqueous. To find Sally and Kate and Robert Richard Russell and an unknown pair, friends of three-R, named Box or Grumpkin, all in a vortex of speech and laughter. So I counseled my belly patience, holdfast, permitted my kinesthesia to dim its scan and scope, and drank some more.
Box or Grumpkin were all right, given my circumstances; she a meticulously laundered redhead running to plump, he a tall thin one with pouched eyes, another lawyer.
In the kitchen Sally said she was fine, was I tired, we would all go and eat in a little while except B. or G. who couldn't, did something special come up? I said no, things got dragged on and then I had a quick drink with Laszlo, I was fine, how was Kate? Sally said Kate seemed very cheerful, she was going to be in New York.
"Marvelous," Kate said, "a salmon swimming upstream in the wrong season, everybody gets out of the city now and I come in. But we're pretty well wrapped up now and I couldn't stand the prospect of rural life without even any work to sop up the silence, and then this friend Peggy said I could use her apartment, she and her roommate are going to the Virgin Islands for three weeks, so here I am."
"Salmon swim upstream to spawn," I said. "And die." She laughed.
Robert Richard Russell said: "What we were discussing the other night, Charles, I've been thinking it through. When you said that you were amused by reports of juveniles in trouble. You weren't serious, of course, but I wondered what you were driving at."
I recalled some dim byplay to this point. Pleased by the indication of a human malevolence in that bland facade, I said: "More precisely, I said that I was cheered by reports of youthful initiative, social and sexual."
"You mean criminal," R.R.R. said. "But seriously. This attitude, that it isn't at all important, that, I suppose you'd say, the reports of juvenile wildness and crime picked up by the newspapers are given undue prominence, exaggerated because of their sensational nature, and so forth. But, you know, that isn't the case. You may not be aware of it, but there really has been in the last ten years a serious quantitative increase in juvenile crimes. And more than that, all authorities agree that there has been a qualitative change in the activities of a considerable portion of our youth, a change from natural restiveness at adult control, the kind of harmless adolescent wildness we knew as youngsters, to outright rebellion against any control, whether by parents or laws or moral standards, and a change from natural youthful mischief to serious outright violence and brutality."
"Possibly," I said. "So?"
"Well. Well, it's a problem. I suppose I'm more aware of it than most, what with my Youth Board work. So I wondered what you were getting at when you said that you approved of, I remember you mentioned gangs breaking up a church dance with zipguns, or adolescent sex orgies, that kind of thing."
Hmm. I suppose we all have our cross-examinations to bear. "Not," I said, "that the matter has bulked large in my thoughts. Considering it now, I won't say I necessarily approve. But I do, I repeat, find it quite cheerful news."
Three-R regarded me and decided I hadn't said anything. "I don't know which position you tend to, but it makes no real difference whether your approach is what I suppose we can call the old-fashioned one, as a problem in discipline, that these are simply young hoodlums who have to be kept in line, or believe that the problem is a wider and deeper one, that the psychological and sociological background holds the key to successful remedy. But in either case, you must admit the problem."
"Fine," I said. "I admit the problem."
"Then what on earth can you mean when you say you find it cheerful?" he said, going backward.
"I mean that I am cheered by blows against the establishment, against what I suppose we can call the yea-saying, nay-saying commandments of our social order."
"But that's approving crime. Are you saying that you approve bank robbery or rape?"
"Ah, well, rape is a violation by force of the most personal areas of free choice, and as such to be frowned upon, or let us say that I am insufficiently removed from my society's nay-say to find rape cheerful no matter what compensatory connotations it may have. And bank robbery and the whole splendid panoply of adult crime for gain, no, that is not a blow against anything. Adult crimes against property are, after all, only trivially antisocial. The ends, capital accumulation, are the bedrock of our being, only the chosen means stray from the strictly acceptable. No, call me an idealist if you will but I scent in much of juvenile crime, which, I stress, I know only fourth-hand, something purer, a real revolt against society's great structure of standards. This, I say, cheers me."
"But good God," Robert Richard Russell said, "how can you say a thing like that? Don't you want law and order? Do you want anarchy and chaos?"
"I suppose not. Law and order, certainly. But only law and order, not the monolithic and unquestioned dicta of society without opposition. Law and order, by all means and mostly, but also a few small countervailing, as we say, forces, perhaps, a few voices raised and deeds done to avoid an absolute unity. And to remind us of several things, that law and order, over the formulation and imposition of which the individual has so little control, are nevertheless the work of man for man, to remind us that we must live in a tension between the commands of society and the demands of the individual, not acceding wholly to one or to the other. Perhaps we have too much law and order in this country, in any country highly industrialized and rationalized, which is why violence and defiance of the law in popular entertainment are so magnetic to the masses. But that is all faked up and congealed within the social framework. When it is done real, I am cheered."
"No," Russell said, "I don't understand what you mean. And, anyway, you're just talking on some high abstract level of symbols, it doesn't have anything to do with the hard realities of the problem. Do you think these kids, these kids in gangs that fight and steal, are happy? Think what it does to them, if you don't mind what they do to others."
"I don't know. Think of the lives these kids are going to live. Think of the jobs they're going to have, the boredom, the non-significance. As any industrial society increases its productive efficiency, which is its lemming-drive, the work of the mass of individuals is necessarily routinized, circumscribed, deprived of interest. A commonplace. Very well, a little excitement, tension and overt violence in their youths will give them at least a memory of color down the tunnel of the long gray years."
Russell shook his large head hopelessly. "I can't believe you're serious. Your angle is so completely wrong. It just isn't like that, the whole problem just doesn't have anything to do with what you've said."
"What Charles really means," Sally said, "is that he himself has strong impulses to violence, strong antisocial feelings, and gets vicarious gratification from hearing about others fulfilling these impulses."
"Sally's the girl for telling you what you really mean," I said. "Sally, the psychological Marxist for whom the emotional base is everything, the intellectual superstructure trivial."
Kate, who had just wandered up, put her arm around Sally's waist. "What is Charlie being beastly to you for? Stop being beastly, Charlie."
"I am not," I said.
Russell said: "We were talking about the problem of juvenile crime. Charles has some very strange ideas on the subject."
"It's something you either believe without explanation or explain without believing," I said, "and I am not prepared to do either."
"I'm starved," Kate said.
Somewhat later I seemed to be on the couch talking to Kate alone, still previous to any meaningful food. She said: "Oh, Charlie, is it all going bad?"
I said what the hell? She said the marriage of Sally and me. I said of course not, what an idiotic idea.
She said: "Stop it, Charlie, be honest with me. You never used to snarl at Sally like you do now. You snarl or you ignore her, is what you do. What's wrong, Charlie?"
"Nonsense," I said, "unconditional nonsense. I never ignore her and what you call snarling is merely an infrequent insignificant infelicity of tone meaning nothing. Why, has Sally said anything to you?"
"Of course not. She never would, she never talks about unpleasant things before they've absolutely flowered. She thinks talking about bad things brings them on. And she wouldn't talk to me about it anyway, she's the big sister so what she does has to be right, which means she has to be happy. See?"
"I guess," I said. "Kate, is it all going bad with Sally and you?"
"There's no use trying to be clever about it. I have my eyes and nostrils, I can tell. You and Sally are all the family I have, and I'd be desperate if things went really bad with you."
"They're not, I assure you, they're not," I said, and told her about a whore-house in Tokyo Laszlo had described, called The Scientific House of Astrological Surprise, where the regnant madame examined the patron's horoscope and with data therefrom obtained contrived his satisfaction in the manner he unbeknownst to himself really wanted. Laszlo got two girls tied back to back with a silken scarf, said it was fine with him but would have been better if the girl on the bottom had stopped giggling, a friend of his got scared into near senility when presented with a small young woman about ten months pregnant.
Kate began to cry. "Stop it," she said. "Please stop it."
"Well, I'm sorry," I said. I would have been more puzzled if we had been soberer, but I was puzzled. "I was just making conversation until something happened. Aren't we ever going to eat? Where's Sally? Where's Robert Richard Russell? Where are we all going?"
"Can't you see I'm sexually excited?" she said. "Why do you tell me stories that make it worse?" She cried further.
"Women aren't supposed to be excited by anecdote, Kin-sey says."
"Kinsey," she shrieked, "Kinsey, you fool, don't you realize what a botch his statistics were?"
"What the hell do you think you know about statistics?" I yelled. Sally and R.R.R. came in. Kate leaped up and went to the John, Sally said: "Now we can eat. Is everybody ready."
I asked where they had been, for Christ's sake. They had been putting R.R.R.'s friends in a cab. "Sure," I said, "sure."
We were waiting for a table. R.R.R., who had urged the restaurant and felt responsible, suggested another drink at the bar.
"Goddamn organizer," I said privily to Sally as we moved towards it, "why didn't he organize a reservation?"
"He did," Sally said. "We're three quarters of an hour late for it. You and Kate had to have another drink before we came. What was all that with Kate?"
"All what?" I said. "I didn't notice anything."
Down the small bar there were two self-drawn caricatures of middle-aged businessmen emitting improbable parodies of their order's speech. It was good meeting, Fred, I was happy to get your thinking, Fred, got to firm up that soft sales picture, Fred, it's a smooth, hard-hitting organization, Fred, function-wise we've got the most aggressive, profit-conscious team in any man's league, Fred.
Fred-wise, they were over-inventoried, and I turned to my three companions. "Why," I asked, "are businessmen all such shit? I know the formulation is hopelessly over-inclusive. I am sure there are those among them who feel hope of heaven and cramp of heresy much as we. I grant they perform, not without some seeming glints of competence, an important function in this my society which is above all societies to me dear. I admit the possibility of envy at their ability to extort from the economy massive pecuniary gain. I join heartfelt voice to the chorus that scorns the baiting of straw babbits and contemns the Neanderthal dogmatics of the know-nothing proletarianoids. These things, and more, I willingly pronounce. One question remains: why are businessmen all such shit?"
But nobody heard me except Sally. The Fred-convention continued talking of this up-coming meeting at the Ambassador, where we're going to give the new promotion a really bang-up send-off. Kate and R.R.R., beyond Sally, were deep in conference. And Sally said: "You know, you're not looking at all well."
"I feel sensational," I said.
Finally, at table. Kate and R.R.R. were discussing possibilities of action after dinner. I attempted to analyze their condition. Kate having, it seemed, made some adjustment of internal pressures by her earlier outburst, was herself with the addition of an untoward degree of calm. Or perhaps it was abstraction; she conversed readily enough, little modifying her habit of brisk response and displayed sensibility (the response more brisk, the sensibility less wide, than Sally's, within their narrow spectrum of difference), but seemed more than usual to be holding something in reserve from these patterns of self-definition. An area of suspension. R.R.R. had to a considerable degree, at unknown cost, diminished the pontifical stance to a mere gravity. Above this, a controlled but tremendously intense solicitude seemed his note; with a considerable degree of court-room (or board-room; I still didn't know which law he pled) skill he boxed the compass of Kate's possible inclinations for postprandial amusement. Of these possibilities he seemed to have a store at command: he deftly displayed a selection of half a dozen gatherings open to entry ranging from an intense knot of refugee Caribbean politicians to a widespread reception in honor of this year's National Aeronautics Committee gold medal winner. Should these all fail of appeal, he summarized the possibilities for entertainment and instruction currently available in the City of New York, a live-wire community. I myself, tired, queasily sobering up and noted for fastidious disapproval of random spectator sports, was made to feel a certain enthusiasm.
But Kate said: "I don't feel organized yet, I feel like I just arrived at the camping site and the tent isn't up yet. What I'd really like to do is go to my place and unpack and hang my things up and shove Peggy's more hideous pictures behind the couch and see what the chairs feel like and, oh, you know, settle in. Why don't we all go up there, we can look in the drawers and closets and make up stories about how Peggy and the other girl live."
"Splendid," R.R.R. said.
Kate's borrowed place, in the far east Eighties, was bright, pleasant enough; in one of the new little buildings of chromely applianced little apartments inhabited by young couples or girls functionally apartment-sharing or young men romantically likewise, buildings where there are no children and everybody office works and the rents can be exorbitant but practicable. Sally and Kate went to the bedroom to unpack, R.R.R. and I sat in the little living-room with its cheap Mexican bullfight posters expensively framed.
I remarked to R.R.R. that I felt torpid amidships, a naval jape. I added. He asked if he might have one of my cigarettes. "You are not addicted," I said, giving him one, "this implies stress."
"Something like that," he said.
"Concern that even now, in the darkest East Bronx, three feral adolescents plot the abduction and misuse of an epicene plumber's globular wife?"
"No," he said.
"Or that agents of the international Communist conspiracy are this moment substituting a cunningly programmed human-oid robot for the president of the American Bar Association, which artifact will promulgate measures designed to destroy every vestige of Anglo-Saxon common law justice as known today?"
He shook his head in the negative.
"Or," I said, "how you are going shortly to get Sally and me out of here without resorting to ignominious expedients?" He said nothing.
"Or beyond that, as Himalayan peak beyond foothill, will, once peripheral relatives are contrived off stage, Kate screw? And cognate questions."
"Why are you trying to make me uncomfortable?" he said.
"I'm just talking," I said.
"Oh, in that sense you're always just talking. Do you resent my attentions to your sister-in-law?"
"Certainly not."
"I hope not," he said. "There's no rational reason you should. And you must know about the irrational reasons."
"Indeed so," I said.
He stood up. "Would you tell me something? Why was Kate crying before?"
"She said she was sexually frustrated," I said.
He sat down again. "I see," he said.
Sally and Kate came out. Kate flung herself on the couch next to R.R.R. and said: "Whee. All unpacked. What a grind."
"It's a fine little place," Sally said, on the arm of my chair. "You're so lucky to have fallen into it." She plucked at my nape, indicating that we should haul out of there at the earliest. "It'll certainly be more comfortable for you than crowding in with us."
"Very well," I said, standing, "the haughty baggage refuses our modest lodgings, we'll leave her to the cold marbles of her fine friends." Kate protested it was too early, but Sally said how tired she was and so forth and we moved out, having said good night to R.R.R. who managed a beam but had the decency not to mutter of his own inmiinent departure.
In the taxi, Sally immediately said: "All right, how were you unpleasant to poor Robert Richard?" I protested incomprehension. "Charles," she said, and I recounted the conversation, which almost got us home. Sally said nothing, and said nothing in the living room, but sat herself straight in a chair and looked glum. I was sleepy. "Ah well," I said, and stretched.
Sally said: "Is it my fault? It must be my fault, but I don't see what I've done or what I could do."
Again I protested incomprehension.
"You don't understand only because you don't want to," Sally said.
I said: "Oh, my God."
"Aren't you happy Charles?" Sally said. "It that why you act like you do? Aren't we working out? Have I disappointed you?"
"Sally," I said, "stop this nonsense."
"No," she said, "it isn't. You act, I don't know, you act as if you're so bored, so desperately bored living with me that you'll do anything to make some excitement. I don't think you're in love with Kate or anything of the sort, that would be a perfectly possible explanation, maybe, but I don't think that's what it is. But what is it, Charles? Why do you try to make trouble, try to make trouble with Kate and Russell?"
"Oh, come on now," I said.
"But that isn't all I mean. It isn't any one thing or anything tangible, really. It's the way I feel you are."
"You feel me?" I said.
"Charles, have you gotten involved with someone?"
"Sure," I said. "You don't think I'd be satisfied with just you, night in, night out. I've got a little set-up on West 24th Street, they rent a change of girls with the linen every week, top and bottom. It's why we haven't screwed for practically twenty-four hours."
"You won't listen to me and you won't talk to me," Sally said.
"Honey, it's the end of a hard week and all the buzzing around tonight, and worry about Kate and all, you're just in what neuropaths call a state. I admit, I shouldn't have been nasty to R.R.R. tonight, but I'd been drinking and I just don't like him very much, that's all. It doesn't mean anything, but I admit I shouldn't have done it. As for the rest, no, of course I'm not bored or anything approximate to it with you. Let's go to bed."
Sally shrugged and said: "I'm tired, but that's not it. But there's no use talking about it if you won't," and got up.
I adjusted the bedroom air conditioner, put out the light and got into bed. Sally was on her back, which was not how she slept. I touched her breast with my palm, felt the nipple harden, slid down her flank and felt her move infinitesimally. I was not yet moved, but I first forced images inside my forehead, unknown faces and bodies, then watched the images flash themselves to their own logic and tempo, then left images behind inside Sally. But something just unremem-bered in that stroboscopic succession hooked at my attention, and half my mind probed back to recover it as Sally moved and moved and came beneath me in a rhythm subtly wrong. Then I carried away.
Sally curled up on her side, her back to me, I embraced her with body and arms and she was instantly asleep. I sank towards sleep, was snagged by uncomfortable moisture in our flesh's touch, and lay on my back. An interval just life's side of sleep and I became aware of the heat, which should not have been. The air conditioner's liminal hum was there, but at the window I found the machine pouring warm wet air hotter than the room's. I fumbled with the switches, made no improvement and turned the machine off.
On my back, hot, I pushed thought to the coldest place I knew, the chair lift at Stowe. The line shuffling on their skis before the wood-railed channels leading to the ticket window. No shadows because no sun, a wind coming out of the dull sky, down the mountain. Hunch back to the wind, shuffle forward. Sweat from the last run going clammy, icy. Ticket window, slip into lift-coat, slide ahead at the attendant's motion, poles both in left hand, head turned back to watch the lift come, bench edge hits the back of the legs, sink and swing, grab for the lever, pull it back and heave skis and booted feet on the bar. Forward and up, and here the wind slices and slashes through the lift-coat and poplin and wool and cotton, flaying wind abrasive with ice pellets. Swinging fifty feet over the snow, open to the cold of the snow, the cold of the ice and that wind, the body's deepest internal residuum of heat driving away in that cold and wind.
But it is a double chair lift, and someone is seated next to me. I touch her shoulder and my curiously ungloved hand slides through a slice in her protective layers and feels warm skin. She turns to me, and it is not at first a face I know, snow on black lashes, snow on tight skin, but she looks at me, and it is the incomprehension, the distance and the coldness sunk so far beyond calibration as to become heat to me, that I know. Pia, of course.
"Cheer up, Charlie," Kate said, "it'll get fixed in a couple of weeks or months or something, and you can leave the machine on out here and the door open until then and anyway they've promised it's going to be cooler tomorrow, or something."
She and R.R.R. had wandered in mid-Saturday afternoon. "Great," I said, Sally asked her if the apartment was comfortable.
"Wonderful," Kate said, "perfect." R.R.R. was without significant expression. "The only thing, one wall in the living room seems to be an amplifier, there was a fight going on next door and every word came ringing through. There were three of them, as far as we could tell, two women and a man, and they were furious as hell about each other but it wasn't terribly clear what they meant. One of the women kept on yelling he was as much of a parasite as his brother and he's going to end up right in the same ash can."
"I'll bet he will," I said. "What's new?"
"Oh, wonderful," Kate said. "I'm so glad to be in New York."
"It's splendid," R.R.R. said.
I said I needed some more coffee and went to the kitchen. Kate came in before the water's stubborn will had been broken; she wanted some, she said, and sat on the high stool. "The word, one then gathers, is splendid?" I said.
She smiled. "Adjustment," she said.
"At a rapid rate."
"We'll be all right," she said. "Is that a firm unified plural?"
"I don't know, Charlie. I mean about marriage, I really, I just haven't quite yet gotten to the point of really knowing. But there's no terribly great rush, is there? Let's see for a little bit, and I feel wonderfully unworried right now."
"But," I said, "aside from this supine rejection of rational consideration, don't the specific...." but here the water wept and babbled. I ministered, Kate said something, and as I poured two cups of instant coffee in my kitchen that irrelevant image of weeping water turned me back to the hut of Pia's louts, to the harsh-lit crying girl spelling her name as her head rocked from the other's hand, the one scraped and cringing on the concrete floor, the one thrusting and crying; all that circle of uncontrol from which I had walked away. Repelled, of course, and of course fascinated, I saw it again, imposed, of course, on the image of Pia.
A moment only, then sight faded to Kate, perched on the high chair, saying they hoped Sally and I would come with them tonight. I said I didn't think so, we were looking forward to a quiet evening at home, but they must drop by after they finished wherever they were going. "We'll certainly try," she said. "Are you sure you won't come? Robert will be disappointed. He's very fond of both of you."
"Yes," I said, "I've seen those fat eyeballs delve into my wife's bodice."
"Don't you like him, Charlie? Really?"
"Kate," I said, "of course I do."
When they had gone, Sally said: "Well."
"Uh-huh," I said.
"Actually," she said, "I'm very pleased. Things seem to be much better, as far as I could tell, I never really had a chance to talk to her."
"Adjustment," I said.
"But more than that, I don't know, but today I didn't feel she had that morbid shimmer about it all, as if she thought she were about to do something very foolish, very sick, but was determined to do it anyway. Now she seems more relaxed, whatever is happening is in her stride."
"Morbid shimmer," I said.
"I know, you're going to say it was just, oh, you'd say it was the natural and universal psycho-physical reaction of the organism passing into the love-phase."
"I would not," I said.
"But really, I felt before, when I saw her last weekend, that she wasn't in control, or she was using her control to throw herself beyond control, or something like that. But now, well, I don't know what's going on, but I don't think I'm so worried any more."
"Control," I said.
"Oh, Charles, don't argue just for the sake of arguing." Sally said. "You know what I mean."
We spent a quiet and pleasant evening reading; Katy and R.R.R. did not come. The next day, Sunday, we went upstairs at six o'clock for a drink with our neighbors, a nice, vague old couple with three dachshunds. When we came down Kate was sitting in the living room. "I kept my key," she said, "I thought you'd be coming back. Robert had to go to Washington, he'll be back Tuesday. I didn't feel like eating alone." Through dinner, Kate talked about R.R.R. and the interesting work he was doing in Washington. Afterward, we went to an Italian film; it proved that peasants on haystacks in the summer sweat. Sally suggested we walk Kate home; I knew my cue and avowed sloth, wished them a good talk and went on home.
Fifteen minutes of a silent house and I got Pia's number from information, serene that this was American penury and she had a telephone. And did, and answered, and I said that for reasons inexplicable I had to be in Brooklyn near where she lived tomorrow evening, I would be done around eight thirty, would she come out? She said just a minute and put the phone down. Waited, waited, little sister's metallic chirp said suddenly hello, I said hello, the phone went down thud again. Then Pia said: "If you want to."
CHAPTER NINE
Midmorning Monday, Eyck called in staff and told us he was leaving. General murmurs of surprise and displeasure. "Yes," Eyck said, "it had not been my intention to make public statement just yet, but having been apprised that my little secret was all but universally shared, I thought formal announcement desirable."
Stoinec gazed about in mild concern. "Who tells me?" he said.
There was going to be some embarrassment; I began to mold my face to honest ignorance and presumed Laszlo and Purbeck were doing the same, and Allessandro seemed to my eye a study in indecision, whether to feign knowledge or not. But Eyck moved on.
"No matter. To my certain knowledge the information had reached at least one of our number-I shall not say thou art the man-and general dissemination was therefore most likely. But this is trivial. What I do want to tell all of you is that my departure is purely and absolutely a matter of personal choice, prompted by a variety of personal reasons here irrelevant. I want to assure you all, if assurance is necessary, that it has in no slightest degree bearing on or significance for the continued health and well-being of this section. You may, as far as I am informed and I believe myself here to be informed fully, rest completely assured on that point. Indeed, I will take this opportunity to tell you that when I presented our superior powers with my decision to depart, it was made clear to me, aside from the routine and hypocritical asseverations of good will toward myself, that you all individually and your work collectively are held in the most august esteem. In other words, I am not acting the lead rat fleeing a foundered vessel. I hope that is clear?"
Everybody moved in his chair. Laszlo said: "Might we perhaps be given a hint of the possibility as to when we shall be informed of a tentative date of announcement of your successor as captain of this splendid, sound vessel?"
Eyck smiled. Stoinec said: "First, I want to say, Henry, how sorry I am, I know we all are, that you are going to leave us. You are absolutely certain, I suppose, or you would not say. But it is too bad."
"You're damn right," Allessandro said, and Laszlo, Purbeck and I murmured effectual Indeeds.
Eyck stopped smiling and held up a hand. "Please," he said, "I am sure some more formal and fitting occasion for these sentiments will arrange itself. No, Laszlo, to answer your question, I don't know who will succeed me. It is a matter, you know, in which my control is nonexistent and my advice scarcely heard. I am even unable to judge within any acceptable limits of error whether it will be, as I assuredly hope, one of you. I intend, as I say, to be gone by summer's end. If the powers have not then made their choice, I will put off my departure, but I see no reason not to have a decision much earlier. I can say no more than that."
Some few administrative piddles, and I went back to my office and worked. Laszlo called to have lunch, I said I had a lot to do and would grab something fast; we arranged to meet at six.
"You know," I said then, "it really is too damn bad about Eyck. In the unreality of rumor, however believed, I had forgotten about that. He's good and we'll miss him."
"It depends who follows," Laszlo said. "He is all right, but he is a pomposo. Such a speech today."
"No. He has a manner of speech which amuses him, that is a style, not pomposity. Your fat foreign ear fails to distinguish. No, I have this weekend again been exposed to my sister-in-law's young man, and I have the real pomposo resounding through my ear for comparison."
"Young man?" Laszlo said. He had met Kate a few times. "Somewhat. She's in the city for a couple of weeks. She might marry him, and then she might not. They seem to be enjoying themselves at the moment."
"Aha, I see, I am aware. Poor Charles. I wondered why you are monument to sullen gloom today. Is because someone else is taking joy with your Kate. You are cuckold-in-law, my commiserations."
"Why," I said, "is it the unanimous voice of my whole world that I writhe in lust for poor Kate and suffer unspeakable psyche lesions in envy of her young man?"
"Is it?"
"Apparently. Sally and the young man speak of nothing else. What crap."
"All Americans lust for their sister-in-law," Laszlo said. "Is common fact of sociology. But of matters more important than your failures of incest. We take it for granted that Purbeck is the one Eyck speaks of as telling him, I assume he tells him openly, of his knowing?"
I looked at my watch. I wanted to leave for Brooklyn before eight; almost an hour. I was not at all hungry; I should eat something, though.
"You are not interested," Laszlo said.
"I am, but not at the moment. I am feeling somewhat guilty over my previous lack of response to Eyck's departure. You don't like him, fine, but I do, I am conscious that he has been very decent to me, and immediate concern with the minutiae of his succession was Purbeck-like, unworthy."
"You seem these days," Laszlo said, "to have much concern not to be Purbeck. Of course, Purbeck is rat, but he is human rat, we are human, therefore we are all Purbeck too, but also other things, I hope. But now you find talk of the minutiae of succession too Purbeck-like, or you have plans to cut the throat of your friend Laszlo and are ashamed to discuss this subject, or you are living in your head a little play where Kate does dances of unmentionable seduction naked for her young man, or your fast grab of lunch gives you indigestion and you wish only to contradict, or possibly other things. Fine. We do not discuss. When then? Do we talk of your little friend the Cacherini girl? Very nice. You want some of that, Charles?"
"Sure," I said, "who doesn't?"
"No, not that, then. Fine. We will choose again. We will talk of Saturday afternoon, when I go to buy for my second ex-wife in dispute a birthday present, afterward I take walk up Fifth Avenue. Is a parade, I do not know for what reason, but it seems to me a Greek parade, I cannot even imagine why there should be a Greek parade. The day of St. Cirrhosis, perhaps, I do not know. But such a sad little parade they have, not little in size or sound, they march and they march as long as my feet can stand to watch and they march still when I leave, and always sound of marching band playing with great strength. But little in joy. There were few people who watched, and they only look, they do not laugh or cheer or shout. And the ones who march, on and on, they seem to be almost all of middle age, from American organizations of Greeks, if they were Greeks, but there are some young people, they all simply march. Or not march, even, they did not show even the disgusting joy of the Germans to march each man in step with every man, one, two, one, two, like a machine. No, these walked, without expression of joy or interest, only doing duty with maybe a little self-consciousness because other people were looking at them do this foolish thing. It was not Greek, it was American, I thought."
"Certainly," I said, and drank my drink. "Americans take their joys and celebrations privately. I remember a festival day in Milan."
"And so?" Laszlo said eventually.
"The hell with it. Our sturdy cardboard sociology, a lifetime joy."
"Ah," Laszlo said, "you miss the smooth manipulatory constructions of the mathematics. Where reality is not relevant, where we choose the fundamental qualities of our environment and have no limits to action within faithfulness to that choice. The most beautiful game. I have wondered, Charles, why you debase yourself with our statistical practicality, why you do not stay at university, perhaps, teach and do your own work?"
"The academy," I said. "Spend one's life bemired in grub-minded adolescents."
"And your own work?"
"I lack impetus. The scholar's immersive passion was omitted from me. But your neat contrast between our unstructured speculation as a toy and mathematics as a game is interesting, a toy being an inept and non-functioning imitation of reality, a game being an area of defined and created reality, self-sufficient in its own laws, for which the laws of the environmental reality are meaningless."
"Nevertheless," Laszlo said, "a friend I know taught for a year languages at Sarah Lawrence, there was so much ass he gets nervous breakdown."
"Reclining amateur nouns," I said, "averbal conjugations. But surely any cro-magnon German scholar could hew three volumes from the toy-game antithesis. Where does he teach now, agricultural school?"
"German scholars," Laszlo said, "pigeon holesteins. No, he married a widow seven years older with much money. Also three daughters. I suspect."
"In loco parentis," I said, "the madness of parents."
"And also," Laszlo said, "you are happy in what you do."
"It's that I feel non-verbal today," I said, putting my money on the table.
"Heavens," Laszlo said.
On the subway I pondered consideration of what I was doing and decided not, having no idea. Pia's neighborhood was as grimy as it had been, but the evening was cooler and the garbage less truculent. I walked up two flights of stained stairs and, finding no bell, knocked. Immediately, Pia and her sister came out and shut the door. "She's coming too," Pia said. Sister tilted back her metal head, closed her eyes, smiled her mouth in a big closed-lip grimace, raised her hands, snapped her fingers, danced alternate little breasts forward and said: "There's nothing I wouldn't do to be a success, Max, I told you that." I said: "What?" Pia said:. "Quit it and move, Mama hears and she'll get up and yell," and we went down the stairs. "She gets one sentence from the television and that's all she'll say," Pia said. "Enlightened public pressure must force the networks to balance entertainment with a healthy diet of educational and public service programs," I said, recovering, which got us to the street where sister grabbed Pia around the waist from behind, rubbed against her rump, said: "To be a success, Max, I told you, there's nothing I wouldn't do," and reeled away laughing. "What's the source of her joy?" I said. "She's not pregnant," Pia said. "That's fine," I said.
I had vaguely envisioned going someplace, having a drink, and so on. No, Pia said, she didn't want a drink, her sister couldn't get in anyway, and anyway look how they were dressed, which was in tight thin pants and tight thin sleeveless pullovers and all right with me, but no. Well, I said, my component of unease building towards regret, but Pia said that the old man, Dicherty, had asked about me, said he wanted to talk to me again if I was around, we could go over and see if he was there. Did I have a car, no I didn't have a car, well, we could walk, maybe a walk would get her tired enough to stop it, with a cold look at sister who was offering a lamp post everything for her career. All right, I said, Pia wrenched sister by her brass hair from the post's blandishments, and we walked. "What's the matter he doesn't have a car?" sister said for a change, and danced ahead.
"Your little friends going to be at the meetinghouse?" I said.
"How would I know?" Pia said.
"Look, Pia," I said, "you have long succeeded in establishing that tone of sullen disinterest necessary to protect you against the slights and sneers which the differences in our social, educational, marital and fiscal status would inevitably, you say, cause me to cast against you. Having so done, it is unnecessary to continue, like your sister, the sweetheart of cell-block nine, to rotate one tune on its tireless axis."
"My dear," Pia said, "don't be a bore. From the same show."
I groaned histrionically and with feeling, and ran fingers up the inside of her arm to the pit. Pia shivered and stopped walking. "What did you do that for?" she said. "All right, you said you wanted to screw me, I believe you, what are you trying to prove? What do you expect me to do, let you screw me against the goddamn dirty wall?" gesturing at the moldering brick. As usual, I didn't have a clue.
Sister bounced back and leaned on Pia. "Hey," she said, "you think I'm a hot-looking piece like everybody else does?"
"Sure," I said.
"Maybe I don't have very much upstairs, but I could wear big falsies and a shirt like they do in the magazine pictures, would you pay a hundred dollars a night for me like the luxury v-dolls in the papers?"
"No," I said.
"How about her?" the child said, indicating Pia, "would you pay her?"
"You embarrass me," I said.
Sister shrieked laughter and minced backward, chanting "embarrass, embarrass." Pia put an arm against my back, hand on my shoulder blade. "She's crazy, you're crazy, everybody's crazy but me," she said. "Let's go see crazy old Dirty."
In the gathering dark we traversed varied modes of the city's scruff. Immediately, the six-story brick unchanged, the sidewalk detritus slightly more thick, the natives turned black. They regarded us with cool distance. We did not relate. Then a local oasis of commerce, harsh and shabby fluorescence promulgating food, drink, clothing, communion photographs and the less comfortable amenities. Then a row of double houses, all a whine of loud electronic music and massed laughter through the gritty facades, the populace black, shading abruptly to white. Then a representation of industry, silent factories and low lofts, then a patch of concrete park, animaled with benches of silent old and sucking young, then past a high new up-ended set of parallelipods, souring orders of picture windows framing, for us, black ceilings, for within, framing only the urban slough which they were meant to reprimand. Then a broad through street, streamed with cars, then again six stories as in our beginning, and we turned past a corner and came to the Nissen hut.
Its door was locked and nobody seemed inside. We went around it to the little courtyard behind the building Dicherty commanded. At steps descending into its dark fundament Pia said: "He lives down there, I'll see if he's there," and disappeared into the hole. Little sister sat on a crate, the primary colors of her hair and clothes lit from windows above, and said: "Man, what a walk. I wish there was somebody in the place. They got my radio in there, you like to dance?" Pia came up, and behind her Dicherty, his clean white shirt buttoned at the neck without a tie. We shook hands. "Let's set out here, it's cooler," he said. "You like muscatel, it's all I got to drink? There's some chairs leaning there, you can fetch them." Sister said to his back: "Dirty, can I have the key, they got my radio in there?" Pia said: "No, you make too much noise, we'll get it when we go." I set up three broken folding chairs, Dicherty came back with a jug of yellow wine and three cups, and we sat.
"Well now," Dicherty said into the faint background of television voices and insects, "it sure is nice of you folks to take all this trouble just to come talk to a no-account old man."
"What a crap-artist Dirty is," sister said. "Why can't I have any of that stuff to drink?"
"You're too young," Dicherty said.
"Waddya mean, too young," sister said. "I'm older than Amy Morello and you tried to get her to screw you last year."
"I said you wasn't old enough to drink," Dicherty said. "Besides, you take a couple mouthfuls and you get noisy, and besides, I ain't sure I got enough muscatel here."
"Why did you try to get Amy Morello?" sister said. "I'm a lot sexier-looking than she is."
"Sure," Dicherty said, "except I wanted it kept quiet and I knew she would and you'd talk about it till your tongue got raggedy."
"Oh yeah, well then how come she told me?" sister said. "She didn't," Dicherty said, " 'cause it wasn't Amy Morello."
"I thought," I said, "that you lamented your loss of fleshly joys."
"That's what I do," Dicherty said. "There wasn't no such case, but I was ashamed just now to admit to it, in front of the girls."
"Come on, for Christ's sake," sister said, "a little drink."
"Shut up," Pia said. Sister made a noise in her nose, turned away from us, and shut.
"Things been going good for you?" Dicherty said to me. "Just great," I said.
"That's good. I mean, I know they ain't, not just from like how you say it, but if things was going good for you, what would you be doing out here talking to me, and all? You see what I mean?"
"Why," I said, "I suppose that might argue a commendable degree of perception, except that perception so commendable further argues against your lowly self-judgment and so vitiates the statement, you see what I mean. Besides, I'm out here to see her."
"Yeah," Dicherty said, "that's the and all I mean. If things was good for you, you a married man, got a good job and like that, would you be chasing after a girl like Marie, finest girl in the world you understand, but would you? I surely ain't saying you maybe wouldn't be diddling around with your wife's friends or your friends' wives, of which I seen plenty, and I surely ain't saying any man couldn't get the hots for a girl good-looking as Marie, and maybe not Marie but some girls sure wouldn't mind getting away for a weekend in Atlantic City or so. But you coming out here like a young feller on a date, no wife, no ten years older, no different class of people, making like all that wasn't, nope, that's different."
"You posit," I said, "a class differentiation, which is of course true, but you further posit social relations across that differentiation to be indicative of disturbance, which is false and un-American. It is precisely because I regard Pia as an embodiment and symbol of the lower class, I use the term absolutely without pejoration, a socio-economic reference only, it is exactly because I construe her in contrast to the pretty, pursy, smug, unvigorous, materialistic, status-raddled, can't riddled, fat-saddled, much-maligned middle class that I find her of such attraction and am here."
"Oh sure," Dicherty said.
"You're a lot the same," Pia said. "Both of you are mean and both of you like to talk too much. But you," to me, "I don't think you're so mean when you talk, crazy but not mean, and Christ knows you talk a lot so there's a lot of time for you not to be mean. But you bastard, Dicherty, you talk a lot and you're mean when you talk, and you don't cut out talking like that about me I'll pull your eyes out, you hear me?"
"If she was to raise her hand against an old man like me, older'n her father, and I was to make a move to protect myself, you'd cut me down like a weed, wouldn't you?" Dicherty said to me.
"You are goddamn right I would," I said. Pia smiled.
"I don't guess," Dicherty said, "there's any doubt that I spoke out of turn, said what I shouldn't of, so I got to apologize and I do. It's only, a man lives as by himself as I do, he near to forgets the tricks of talking to people, there's some things you say and there's some things you don't, and talks like he was talking to himself where you say anything you can think of. But no offense meant and I hope none taken, Marie?"
"When he's here you call me Pia like he does," Pia said.
"Sure, Pia," Dicherty said and he grinned at me. All illegible: was this to mean that Dicherty had with craft maneuvered to inflame or extort Pia's warmth for me? Why?
"And you," I said, "aside from the rich autumnal glow Of the Amy Morello affair, how have you been?"
"No worse than I got a right to expect," Dicherty said. "That's most of the trouble right there, expecting. All my life I wake up in the morning I expect maybe something good is going to happen to me today. Maybe it ain't happened for a long time and maybe it won't today, but at least I got the right to expect that maybe today it will. And when I think about it, I been damn lucky, more times than I can even remember I woke up expecting something good and one way or another, east wind, willow or surprise, by God something good happened."
"East wind, willow or surprise?" I said, assuming that he was pushing the expertise of his folksy patter to the poinl where he figured to fake the notes and get away with it.
"Sure enough," he said. "Thing is, now I can't even expect, there just ain't nothing that can happen good to me, is what hurts. I wake up expecting, that's a habit I can't shake out of, it's the way I wake up, and then it comes to me, it's not like today maybe I won't have no luck, or things been going against me and I'm in a hard spell or I been dumb and got myself where it's gone to take time to work things right, no, it comes to me that no matter how lucky I get or how smart, nothing good is gone to happen to me because it can't. There's nothing good could happen to me I could use. Too old, I'm just too long gone."
"I recall," I said, "you had a plan."
"Yeah." Dicherty said, "except that. You know, it's kind of funny, what fellers say when you ask them the best thing that ever happen to them. Lots of time, all over, construction camp after a day's work before turning in or maybe under a railroad bridge till the rain goes or in some lousy county jail, fellers get to talk about the best time they ever had, it's natural, it gives heart. And you notice, seven times out of ten, what they say?"
"No," I said.
"You notice, next time. Oh, sure, right at the first they always talk something big, how they blew eight hundred bucks in three days in Diego or how they was on the bum and some good-looking woman picked 'em up and took 'em to her place and loved 'em up and fed 'em and gave them clothes and cried when they left, and on like that. But that's just what they figger you figger they should say, 'cause real quick they get a look in their eye, all soft and puddly like, and they say, you know, the best time I really ever did have, was I was a kid and Poppa got a new job and Poppa and Momma and us kids we dressed up in our finest clothes and we took the railroad to Cincinnati and we went to the finest hotel in the city and walked right in and sat down in that restaurant and we all had us a dinner and Poppa and Momma laughed at everything and let us kids eat anything and laugh too. Or they say, you know, the best time I really ever did have, was I was in the sixth grade and I was in love with the teacher and she never gave me notice I thought so I was bad and one day I was bad and she kept me after school and she took me up beside her and put her hand on my arm and she says I know you are not really bad it is only that you are neglected but you are really a good boy and there is something in you more than in many and I am sure that you are going to achieve remarkable things some day."
"The last teacher I met," I said, "told me that John Dewey would have been a fascist had he lived."
"But not me," Dicherty said. "You want to know the best time I ever had, I'll tell you. It was in Chicago in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-seven. I had a job as bodyguard for the second man on the South Side. Now I never was a hefty feller, as you can plainly see, and I wasn't no kid even then, but I was real hard, hard and fast and smart, and they wasn't no man ever gave me trouble I couldn't handle right. I remember it as clear, this great big place way at the top of a building belonged to my boss, we was in liquor and the rackets, of course, but legitimate too. It was afternoon and the boss had woke up that day with a bad pain in the belly and the doctor was in looking at him. Me and Miss Garden was setting telling each other we was sure it was just maybe he had drunk or ate something too much, it wasn't nothing serious. Miss Garden was my boss's secretary, a little spinster lady maybe fifty years old, always wore a black dress and had eyeglasses that pinch her nose with a black ribbon round her neck, was a very nice lady that I never once heard say a strong word, but I seen her walk into a room where there had just been some trouble and a man was bleeding to death on that floor and as soon as she saw it was the kind of trouble the boss wanted she picks up her skirts and walks around that man bleeding to death with less say on her face than if a cat had made water. So the doctor and my boss came out and my boss said, well, the doctor tells me I have a inflamed appendicitis and it is to the hospital I must go for a operation. I won't take you, Dicherty, you stay here and help out Miss Garden whatever comes up, I'll call Bernie in the sheriff's office to send a couple men to the hospital, it'll look better. And Miss Garden says, I'll have a grip all packed and make arrangements about your food, there was nothing today except the girls from the Crazy Club and I'll cancel them and everything else until you feel yourself again. The girls from the Crazy Club was, once every week the boss had two girls from the line at one of the cabarets he owned, I recall he owned three in Chicago, they would come up, and the next day one of them would have a nice five-dollar raise and the other would get herself fired, if the boss didn't figger she tried hard enough the word would go out and there wasn't no place she could get a decent job, the boss always said it was to pick out the dead wood from the lines at the cabarets he owned, he wanted only real live-wire girls who knew what it was all about because that was what the customers wanted, but I always figured ft was kind of a game he liked to play, to have two nice young girls busting themselves out and fighting to give him a good time, not that he had troubles in that direction but he was a man with a sense of humor and some of the things those girls would say and do, he would tell. No, my boss says, don't cancel them girls, I'll tell you what, Dicherty here can take my place, as you might say, it will keep him out of trouble's way. And when I got back from seeing the boss off to the hospital, there I find two of the prettiest girls you ever want to see, a black-headed girl and a yeller-headed girl, waiting for the boss with their mouths ready to smile and their joints ready to move. I kind of take hold of the yeller-headed girl by the chin and I say, hello there, and she says, don't you touch me you little ape, I'll tell your boss and he'll have yours cut off. And I laugh and I holler for Miss Garden and she comes in and says, oh, yes, Mr. B., was what she called my boss, has had a sudden unavoidable appointment, he left instructions that you are to deal with Mr. Dicherty here. You should have seen the face on that yeller-headed girl. And I give the black-headed girl a little pinch on the bottom and I say, come on, girls, they's two cats and but one dish of cream, and I'm mistake if we ain't going to hear some yowling. And two days later when I woke up, I was so weak they was a good tooth laying right on the pillow, it just fell bang out of my head."
"Nice," I said, "a pretty parable of all golden moments. Tell me, have you considered certain of its implications? Now, at your great age, you look back to an incident of more than thirty years past as your one finest hour. Yet you make clear that such an event was the weekly habit of your then employer. Are we to conclude, then, that wealth and power can multiply life's joy by such an immense factor? That the few of wealth and power feed all their lives on a diet so unimaginably rich that a single crumb from their table is for others the one best memory of a lifetime?"
"Well," Dicherty said, "I don't know about that. I remember my boss, sure, he enjoyed them times every week with the two girls each of them studying and jumping to be the one to give him a good time and all, but he had lots of other times that was good, like everybody. I mean, it was just a thing he did, like to eat a meal, it was a thing he was used to do, like you get used to things you do. But for me, don't you see, it wasn't a thing I was used to, it wasn't a thing I expected even, not just like that then, it was a thing that just happened, that was give to me, as you might say, that I never had no chance to get used to it or maybe say, well it was nice this time but it was not so nice as the week before last and I hope it will be even more nice next week, like you hope anything will be more nice next week. It was a sudden good thing I didn't figger on. So it wouldn't be the same for my boss as it was for me."
"True," I said, "it wouldn't although surely there was some other comparable event in his life. But then we are agreeing that the whole level of his life's joy was far above yours, so that your pinnacle was his norm, your peak his plateau, and we are scarcely privileged to imagine the altitude and glory of his upper reaches let alone his one highest finest point itself. Doesn't the thought that there are men whose lives are lived at that tremendous altitude of pleasure make you sad for your poor life? For all the waste of years and energies when you could have fought toward that high eminence and its high rewards, perhaps have failed but perhaps have won? I do not think you made that fight; the minute and trivial accumulations of the day absorb us, the modest pleasures easily obtained, the mild distractions easily followed, and only a rare few exert their full naked thrust of force towards the maximum accumulation of power and so earn the rare full blazon of that greatly pleasured life. I do not even dare speak of those fortunates who are born to the highest eminence of wealth or command, have it all drop like rich oil upon their golden heads in thoughtless infant sleep."
"Hell," Dicherty said, "fun is fun, and I don't figger you can have more fun than you can have. I mean, if you have a real good time, as good as you can have, how can you have a better time, no matter what you are? And sure, I'm older'n you and all, but it don't strike me that you are ever going to be the second man on the South Side or near it."
"Indeed?" I said.
"Before God," Dicherty said, "what do you want to talk like that for? Sure I'm a old man and sure I done a lot of things I better not to of done, and sure I fooled away and pissed away and wasted a lot of things in my life, so does near everybody and so will you I bet, but you get chances left in your life, I'm an old man and I ain't got no chances left at all. What do you want to talk to me like that for?"
"What happened to the girls?" Pia said.
"Yeah," Dicherty said, "that's another thing. When I woke up, my tooth just laying there on the pillow where it fell out of my head, they was gone, Miss Garden had got rid of them, and the place was ass-deep in cops. Thing was, my boss had figgered a hospital was a safe enough place to go, what with anybody has trouble in mind has to go past all the nurses and doctors and then there's the couple of men from the sheriff's office that my boss had in his pocket, and besides there wasn't no special troubles just then, things was quiet as ever they got. What my boss didn't know, somebody in the sheriffs office was in somebody else's pocket too, and right away made a phone call. So Scalise figures this is too good to pass by, and he finds who the doctor is that is going to do the cutting and he gets to that doctor and tells him either my boss dies on the table when they cut him open, it could happen like it happens every day and nobody to blame and it's ten thousand dollars turned over, or that doctor's wife and two kids get taken off. Scalise, he was a mean man, he explains just how they get taken off. So my boss, he was not a bad feller, he goes to get his sore appendix cut out, figgering here he was safe as the pastor of a church, and that doctor got to cut the wrong thing inside him and my boss is a dead man. And the next day the place is full of cops that is in Scalise's pocket now and for me it's good-by Chicago. Except I never had no appendix operation but if I did and if I do, ain't nobody going to take the trouble to spend no ten thousand dollars or scare no doctor to kill me, no matter how good my boss lived."
"If the free clinic doctor who cuts you is sober enough to tell your liver from a sponge," I said. "But yes, all history teaches us of power's risks. Nevertheless, this was an extreme case, and statistically...."
"I'll bet I would have got a fifty-dollar raise," little sister said, "not a lousy five. I wouldn't do anything for five dollars."
"Shut up," Pia said. Dicherty poured the last of the terrible wine. A car gunned past the front of the building, muffler out, making a great noise, fading to permit again the insects' sound.
"I do hate this place," Dicherty said. "When I lived over across in New York City you never heard no goddamn bugs."
I offered to get some more wine, or something else. Dicherty looked a moment, and said that little sister might as well go, she knew the place, she should say it's for him and they'll give it to her, best California sweet. Sister said she didn't feel like walking all the way there, Dicherty hauled a thick knot of keys on a shower-curtain hook out of his hind pocket, detached one, held it up to her and told her she could get her radio from the hut and take it with her. "Maybe I'll meet somebody who want to dance," she said. I gave her a ten-dollar bill, she said: "I keep the change, okay?" Pia told her to go and she went, scraping my back with one shoehorn hip-bone.
Dicherty began to cough, loud maximally dramatic yips, touching a white handkerchief to his mouth. "Bad cough you got there," I said.
"Yes," he said, "I ain't a well man. Reason I sent the kid, I wanted to talk. You think about what I told you, helping me take care of the power plant."
Pia laughed. Dicherty ignored it. "Well," I said.
"Like I said, I'm all right, but I ain't feeling so good," Dicherty said. "One more winter, I don't know how spry I'll be. Another thing, for a while there just thinking about it was a pretty good time, but now it's not so good,. I figger I better stop just thinking and go on and do it. That make sense?"
"Of course," I said. Pia laughed.
"Go on," Dicherty said, "you go on and laugh. Don't matter how much you laugh at me, you're gone to help when the time comes. Ain't you?"
"I guess," Pia said.
"Don't give me guess," Dicherty said. "You told me yes, you tell me yes if you want to laugh."
"Sure," Pia said. "I said I will, I will."
"I don't figger you're a communist," Dicherty said to me. "Why, as it happens, no," I said.
"Didn't figger," Dicherty said. "But I known fellers that were. You ever? "Daily."
"Oh, well, where you work, sure. I mean, places they come from, it's the thing you got to be you want to do yourself any good, like once a man I worked for said he'd make me a timekeeper I put up for the Kiwanis, that a fact?"
Precision of statement seemed out of place. "Roughly," I said.
"No, I mean here, American fellers. Sure, I known some.
They was mad at pretty near everything. You listen to them, everything going was put together wrong and run wrong, and there wasn't nothing to do to fix it but knock the whole thing down and start it over again right. You feel that way?"
"No," I said.
"Sure, but don't you sometimes feel a little bit that way?"
"Ah well," I said, "surely everyone in varying degree knows some dissatisfaction with society's structure and functioning. Except possibly those few in each society who by temperament, application and happenstance can use the peculiarities of said structure and function to maximize individual satisfactions and minimize frustrations."
"Now that's just exactly it," Dicherty said. "Everybody gets screwed but the bosses who does the screwing. Thing I want to know is, what's to do about it?"
"It never occurred to me there was anything to do about it," I said.
"Thing is," Dicherty said, "I'll bet you the bosses don't even know everybody ain't as fat and sassy and cheerful as they is. Oh sure, I guess they know they're on top of the heap and everybody else ain't, else there wouldn't be no satisfaction to being on top. But I don't figger they thinks about it much, I don't figger they wakes up after a good sweet sleep and says: Oh, boy, here's another day for me to eat the best there is and drink it and have the best women there is and make anybody I want to do anything I feel like to make them do, and ain't that all the more sweet on account near everybody else there is can't do none of them things and most everybody is miserable ha ha ha. Now I don't figger that's the Way they say, do you?"
"Not," I said, "as far as I know."
"No, I figger they just don't think about it much, don't think about how most folks is miserable. So that's why."
"What?" I said.
"Why, they got to be told, got to be reminded that everybody but theirselves is miserable on account things ain't right, things ain't built right or run right, and the bosses better hump theirselves and fix things up so things get better. On account maybe it's a favor to the bosses to remind them, so they can fix things up maybe a Utile and things'll be even a little better for everybody before them communist fellers talk enough and people listen enough and get so mad they bust up everything and the bosses too most of all. So isn't that a damn good reason to blow the power station like I said, let the bosses know they got to make a move to fix things up before they ain't nothing left to fix up?"
"Why do you assume," I said, "that everybody is miserable?"
"For Jesus .sake," Dicherty yelled, "ain't they? Ain't they? Even if they too futzing dumb to know it, ain't they?"
There was a wash of light across us, and a car slammed to a stop on the other side of the hut, sound of voices and the hut window lit.
"She ought to be back," Pia said. "Maybe she's with them."
Dicherty got up. "I'll go see," he said, "anyway I want to tell them kids I'm here, they shouldn't make noise too late on a Monday." He walked stiffly.
"It is getting on," I said. "We'd better go. She must have met Max and they're checking off things she wouldn't not do to be a success."
"Ha ha," Pia said.
Dicherty came back. "Nope," he said, "Sis ain't there yet." I announced necessary departure and Dicherty and I shook hands. "Well," he said, "there's time yet, not so much, but some. You keep on thinking about it, and you get a chance you come out here some more and I'll show you how to see it my way."
"I will," I said, and thanked him for his hospitality. As we came to the hut door Pia said she wanted to tell them something. An undistinguishable lout opened. There were three of his fellows inside, sitting with beer cans. They looked bored. "If my sister comes," Pia said, "tell her I said she should go home."
One laughed with what I took to be artificially suggestive coarseness and said: "Man, all the way home." Another said: "You want a beer?" A third scratched his thigh and yawned and the one who had opened the door sat down.
Pia said: "No."
The first said: "Hey, Marie, all them Arabs treating you good?" They all laughed. "You tell her," Pia said. The third said: "Ah, blow it." Pia said: "You tell her," and we left them laughing. "Unmannerly," I said. "They're all right," Pia said.
I asked if she didn't have certain qualms about little sister visiting the young men unchaperoned. She shrugged. "Nobody can watch her all the time, and anyway she probably wouldn't do anything with them because she knows I'd find out for sure, and anyway she'd probably be scared of four of them. Anyway, you don't think she does it all the time with everybody, do you? She's just a kid, she likes to playact. And if she wants to do it she will."
"I see," I said. "Not, I'm afraid, the most interesting of evenings for you, listening to the drab maunderings of two old men, their mottled memories and obtuse saws."
"I don't mind listening to you and Dirty," she said. "I like it, even."
I was touched by this. "Yes," I said, "old Dicherty seems to devote his declining days to the development of a nice line of patter. It was funny, you noticed," I said, thinking of something to say as we walked, "how when he spoke with scorn, mild, perhaps, and understanding and even compassionate, but scorn, of the life apogees remembered by most, it was because they were the pleasures of children, the pleasures of parental warmth or a teacher's praise. But his own golden glow, which he thought so different, was a child's dream of pleasure raised to the gigantic exaggeration of myth, where daddy really was all-powerful and mummy so all-loyal that she calmly walked the blood of dying men killed by daddy's potent command. And the absolute sexlessness of mummy, who was precisely daddy's best friend and precisely nothing more. But there were women for daddy indeed, a faceless succession of bodies constrained by daddy's powers to plead and sweat and writhe for him, portent of pleasures the boy himself will make when he is daddy. So the day comes when daddy weakens and is about to die, but perfect daddy in going gives the incarnation of fair women and manhood's power. And when women's bodies fail to know that he is no longer boy but himself is daddy, then mummy is there to make them know it. Excelsior, jubilee."
I was already embarrassed by the flat patness of this, but when Pia said, in not quite her usual voice: "Yes, I guess I see what you mean, but I never would have thought of it by myself. You know a lot of things," my back twitched in shame.
"As a mattei of fact," I said, "he was right. It is an adolescent's dream rather than a child's." We had come to the thoroughfare of cars., and although I was resigned to marching all the way an empty cab's roof light came swimming up and I flung us at it.
The driver put his hand back, pressed the lock down and asked how far I was going, buddy. I gave Pia's address, the driver thought a moment and said: "Okay, so it's on my way, get in back." I opened the door and jumped to see we had been preceded: a couple lay jammed motionless in the corner, the man wrapped on top, their faces together. "You comin' or you ain't comin'," the driver said. Pia glanced at me, I nodded, she got in and I followed. "They gonna hang me for riding off the meter," the driver said softly, ruminatively, "they gonna hang me up. You could kind of slide down a little."
We slid. As Pia's firm meat jounced all along my flank, as the girl buried in the corner made a low moan, I began strongly to regret the cab. "Pia," I whispered, and tried to kiss her, tightening my arm behind. She bent her head away and beyond it I saw the one visible eye of the girl open, gaze full at me and sink closed again. "Better than walking," Pia whispered, "it get you hot?" I ground my teeth, a much louder sound than the corner girl's moan. "Move around so I don't fall on them," Pia whispered, and I knelt forward to let her slide under me into the corner. The car slowed sharply and my head banged the front seat. The driver looked back as I moved up to kiss Pia. "Moses," he said.
Mercifully, the ride was short. I paid and followed Pia up the stairs, my face close to her buttocks. At the door she said: "No, you can't come in, you'll wake her up." I could say nothing; I kissed her again. She sighed. "All right," she said, "but be quiet."
We stepped into a small smelly foyer. "Wait," she said, and left me standing against the door. She came back, opening closets to jut into the foyer behind her. "If we hear her coming," she said, sliding between me and the scabby wall, "you get out no matter what." I blinked. "Standing up," I said. "Move your feet," Pia said.
We had just finished, wonderfully uncomfortable, sweating into each other, tension pangs chewing my legs, when a plane to my right moved against me. I jumped back, blocking the door. Pia's skirt fell (and immediately in the weak light she looked as dressed, as public, as any woman ever looked), I fumbled myself together and we opened the door. Little sister, a mess, hung against the frame.
Pia hustled her back into the hall, sat her on the steps going up. I closed the door. Sister's dark eye make-up was blotched, the side of her mouth was swollen and cut, a little blood dried on her chin, there was a long scratch down her neck. "No," she said, crying faintly, "they didn't do nothing like that. There was two of them in a new Chewy, they came up when I was walking and asked me I wanted a ride and I said sure, why not. I told them I was going to the liquor store and they said they knew a better liquor store, we should go there, they was older fellas, maybe twenty-five, they sounded nice. And we rode and the one that wasn't driving necked a little bit but nothing much, and we got there and I gave the one that was driving the money and told him what you told me to get and he came out with a bag but he wouldn't give it to me. And the one I was necking said to the other one, how about parking someplace, and he said, no, Lois and her friend's waiting. And he said, maybe just a little while, and he said, no, it's late already they'll get mad. And I got mad and I said, gimme my liquor and my change if you got other women. And he laughed, and said, real women, not a skinny little kid like you. So I tried to get the bag and he shoved me and told me to shut up, and we drove near here and they told me not to tell anybody about the money or it would be too bad for me. And he saw my radio and said he wanted it and I said no and he grabbed it and I grabbed it back and he hit me and took it and I was so mad, my radio, and I kept grabbing and he laughed and said, if you want it so bad, and busted it down on his knee and gave it back. Look at my radio," she said, holding up the cheap bright plastic case. One side was crushed and broken bits sounded inside. "My radio," she wailed, "and they didn't want me, they said there was real women."
"Tomorrow," I said, "Pia and I will get you another radio." She looked up at Pia and at me. "What you been doing?" she said.
I almost fell asleep on the subway. Walking home I muzzily rehearsed a story of work and foolish solitary drinking for Sally, knowing the good chance was that she slept. On the telephone table, a note: "10 p.m. Trouble. Will stay night with Kate. Call me. Love, S." I was in the bathroom peeling my sodden clothes when the phone rang. Sally said: "Why didn't you call, it's one thirty?"
I said: "I didn't see the damn note until just now, I went right to sleep, I just woke up to go to the bathroom, what's the matter?"
"Our friend Robert Richard Russell," Sally said. "He told Kate tonight. Called from Washington. He's married. Has two children, naturally."
"Ugh," I said, trying to stay awake.
"I gave her Miltown and sleeping-pills and she's off now. But she really was upset. I haven't told her yet, but what I think I'll do is take my vacation starting Friday, go up to the Cape with her. She has to do something. Will you mind terribly much?"
"We'll talk about it. Tomorrow," I said.
"All right, honey. Sleep well."
"Good night, honey," I said. "Sleep well."
CHAPTER TEN
1
Immediately after our marriage, Sally began to annoy me. Annoy, precisely; no more than that, but no less. Of the two views, one that she annoyed me because she acted in a manner I found annoying, the other that my annoyance was symptomatic of more profound disturbance in our relationship, I prefer the first. The second implies the terms of the psychological art, which, as all arts, is a construct with the most exiguous correlation to "life." If, indeed, any.
Further, it does seem to me, of course, that any attempt at significant statement on individuals or on the relationship between two or a few individuals is absurd. Such statement can only cast an unfocused view on an undefined area, and phrased with whatever pith or wit, productive of whatever narrow insight, is, if taken seriously as the general statement it supposes itself to be, meaningless. The only general statements of meaning on individuals are those of my craft, let us say social statistics, and these apply only to individuals in a mass large enough to compose a statistical universe; of the white adult population in the United States in 1950 can be said many a trenchant thing (I leave you to obtain the tables), and of individual interactions therein can be made many a probable judgment, but only insofar as they are members of that mass. Which, of course, in answer to the questions of real interest-What is this specific she? What is the meaning of this particular mutual posture?-is useless. The truth useless and the useful absurd. Certainly a sad state.
Why annoy? No general statement, then, but the specific: she was, for one, simple-minded. Not, to be sure, stupid, no, no, intelligent, quite intelligent, but she saw through a glass clearly, distinguished right from wrong and black from white and up from down and good from bad, and, worst, when she could not so perceive it was a failure in her sight which sharper vision could resolve, never an irresolution inherent in the object. No, not at all smug or self-righteous, far from it, the admissions of her vision's failure were frequent. Another annoyance.
But when she saw what was good, it was very, very good. And horror in the perception of the bad.
Also, she was personally influenced. She remarked once (I admitted she was not stupid) that years past she had read that enthusiasm was an admirable and endearing trait, particularly in young women, and for years thereafter did not pretend enthusiasm but was indeed so. "Until you met me," I said, and she said: "You permitted me to be my real self," indicating there are limits to all intelligence.
Further and finally, as I begin to find this ungallant, she lacked, more than anyone else I have known, that element of cheap cynicism which is the beginning of wisdom.
Sally was not, in other words, perfect.
In many of her judgments I concurred. Adultery, for example, she thought a bad thing. She said: "I read that someone said that adultery could no longer be a major theme of a serious play because it was no longer something that could be taken that seriously, I mean tragically. I think it's just the opposite, if it can't be the subject of a play it's because it's become too serious, too tragic. In other times, in other generations, marriage was a combination of a lot of factors, a lot of them not having anything to do with the emotional relationship of two people, things like property or family, and so anything that disturbed the emotional relationship wasn't as serious, didn't disturb as much of the marriage, as it does now, when most marriages are almost entirely an emotional relationship without the economic or social parts. And also, people used to believe much more in systems of right and wrong, not just personal ethics but systems with religious backing, and they got security from them, but now we don't have those systems at all in the same way and we have to get our security from our personal little worlds of love and trust, it's a reason why people marry earlier, which is why adultery is worse now when it explodes that security of personal love and trust than it was before all it did was violate a law that remained a law. Now it can destroy everything." Which, as an analysis, I thought nonsense; but that adultery was a bad thing, I agreed, I agreed.
"Oh, she agrees to everything," Sally said, "at least, she says all right, meaning she doesn't care."
"You're sure your therapy is indicated?" I said. "Long peaceful days on the beach and long evenings of silence broken but by a sob. Plenty of time to savor her mellow memories. Are you sure poor Kate wouldn't be better taken out of herself, as your mother would have said, bless her, shepherded through some passages of mild but absorbing conviviality here in the city?"
"Funny," Sally said, "Mother always used to say for absolutely no reason at all that I would make a mess of things with a married man. Not Kate."
"And what do you think I am, an elderly celibate food-faddist? But mess is not really the word, is it? She's not for God's sake knocked up, is she? But one wouldn't know. Things do happen fast these days. A scant week and we've had courtship, consummation and catastrophe. Next it'll be color television."
"Yes, she feels a mess so it is a mess, she feels just terrible. And don't start telling me," Sally said, so I shut my jaw again, "that she shouldn't take it all so seriously or that for the first time you're starting to like that rat Russell or anything else you were going to tell me. She was looking for love and she thought she found it, not only that but she thought she found it safely where she was the most loved and so was safe as she could be, and then suddenly blooie, it blows up. Naturally she feels terrible."
"Yes, but for Christ's sake, talking about love, Russell didn't say he all the time was shacked up with a girl named Heloise, he admitted he was married and doubtless will add that wife is and always has been an incurable psychotic cripple whom he has never been permitted to see, telephone or address in writing. A fine story it will be, I'm sure, and doubtless true. Yes, I admit it is a bit of surprise for Kate, making things perhaps a touch complex if she had ideas of immediate lawful marriage. But did she? I thought not necessarily."
"No," Sally said, "he should have told her right away. I can understand people having complications in their lives and so forth, but he should have told her when they met, or as soon as he saw there was anything. That's what it is, he didn't tell her, and if he didn't tell her that what else didn't he tell her? And what did he tell her that wasn't true?"
"You mean the basis of mutual trust between them has been destroyed," I said.
"Please," Sally said. "So I do think it would be better for her to go away with me, she's going to think about it anyway and it's better to think about away from excitements, really it's better for her now not to be distracted so she can think Russell through and be done with it. And she feels that way too. But what I want to know, is it all right with you? It will mean you'll be alone for two weeks and it will mean that when you take your vacation we won't be able to go any place or I wouldn't be able to go with you, if you wanted to go someplace without me. I think it would be much the best thing for Kate to have me there to talk to, but if you don't want me to go I won't."
"No," I said, "I don't want you to go, but I trust your judgment about Kate, and you should go." Sally kissed me.
Going to bed, I said: "You'll be away for two weeks, and I, being both faithful and without other opportunities, will suffer."
"Oh, poor dear," Sally said, "you make me feel awful. Really, if you think it will be too terrible we'll make some other arrangement."
"No," I said. "What I'm getting at is, seeing that I have this desert of selfless suffering before me, would you credit my account and accede to a whim you might think foolish? I want to screw standing up. Against the wall."
"Charles, that's ridiculous," Sally said. "You know, you know you don't have to trade suffering for a thing like that with me, you know you don't. Of course if you feel you want some variety or that way all you have to do is tell me. It's perfectly normal to want some novelty in sexual positions some time, you know that, it doesn't have to be because I'm going away. Charles, how could you?"
"All right," I said.
"But it's not that you're bored with me, you're not trying to inject artificial excitement into our relations, are you?"
"No," I said.
Sally laughed. "You told me the prostitutes in London used to do it that way. I'll bet you've been reading in the newspapers about the problems with the prostitutes in London. Is that what you were fantasying?"
"Don't peek," I said.
I was, of course, murderously annoyed at Sally for her reaction, but at least (I had expected it) she did not giggle when her bare ass touched the wall. She did very well, as a matter-of-fact. Indeed, technically, as they always say, it was far better than with Pia; Sally and I were familiar, to be sure, and we had no clothes on, a great step forward. Nevertheless, I lacked the intellectual excitement of the previous evening.
{Book didn't have any Section 2}
3
Thursday was dinner at Eyck's. There had been some debate over Kate's disposal: should Sally absent herself and stay with Kate or should I speak to Eyck and bring Kate along. Kate insisted that we both go, she would find greatest content in staying home alone and doing some reading for the coming term's work. These negotiations were conducted, at the person-to-person level, by Kate and Sally, I functioning as a plans' analyst and reviewer to the latter. Kate I had neither seen nor spoken to since R. R. Russell's annunciation. I pointed out this odd fact to Sally. "I don't think she wants to right now," Sally said, without smugness. I asked why. "I don't know, exactly. Maybe she's afraid you'll tease her." Pah, I said. "Or maybe she thinks, well, you didn't like him from the beginning, you'd be thinking I told you so," Sally said. Pah, I said. "Or maybe she doesn't want to be reminded of her failure to make a successful relationship with somebody while I have," Sally said. Pah, I said. "I suppose you think it's because she really loves you and wants to turn to you now and is afraid of what would happen if she saw you," Sally said. Pah, I said. "I don't really know," Sally said. Me neither, I said.
We had arranged to stop in and see Kate on the way home from the dinner. Kate was not swaying and tremulous with grief, she was swaying and tremulous with booze, is what she was swaying and tremulous with. She didn't look exactly at the top of her form, but was all covered over with half-fake grim cheer she was willing to make fun of. "Eat, drink and be merry," she said with unaccustomed wit, "for tomorrow you may go to Cape Cod."
"In the midst of life," I said.
"I thought you were going to do some reading you had to do," Sally said.
"I did most of it, but I got bored, bored, bored. Then I had a drink and poked through Peggy's closets, and you know what I found. I found the old snit had one of those Olympia Press copies of Sade, and I looked at that and it was dull, dull, dull. And doesn't he write terribly, Charlie?"
"True," I said, "although of course it may be the translation in which much is lost."
"So then I drank some more. Charlie, are you mad I'm taking Sally away?"
"Sure," I said, "enraged."
"Poor Charlie," Kate said.
Sally said: "Stop babbling and get to bed. Are you packed?"
"Poor Charlie," Kate said, "going to be all alone, all alone in the big, hot, hard, cruel city."
"God," Sally said, "a drooling drunk."
"A lie, a lie, my chin is dry," Kate said. And giggled. "All my own. Or won't you, Charlie? Maybe you've got a girl friend you can be a summer bachelor with, is that what you're going to do, Charlie?"
"Naturally," I said. "Do you take me for a fool?"
"What's she like, Charlie?" Kate said, writhing with the humorousness of it all, "I'll bet she's one of those slinky foreign types, I'll bet she's the daughter of the Russian ambassador, a big lumpy girl with earnest eyes, I'll bet she doesn't shave her legs."
"Nadya is the most groomed woman I have ever known," I said.
"Does she know you're married, Charlie?" Kate said. "No," I said, "she thinks I'm too young."
"Ha, ha," Kate said. "Charlie, I've been reading about the Negro. What do you think about it, Charlie?"
"Why," I said, "it's a problem."
"What's a problem? Who's a problem?" Kate said. "You mean it's a lousy stinking way Negroes are treated, is that the problem you mean?"
"Yes," I said.
"What are you doing about it, Charlie?" Kate said. "Nothing," I said.
"Why aren't you doing anything about this lousy stinking problem?" Kate said.
"I don't know what to do about it," I said.
"You could give all your money to the N.A.A.C.P.," Kate said. "You could assassinate a Southern governor, you could throw bombs into White Citizen Councils, you could do a lot of things, Charlie."
"All right," I said, "Nadya knows I'm married. Her passion has made her stranger to all prudence."
"Well, maybe I will go to bed," Kate said.
Next day, Friday, drinking with Laszlo after work.
"How did you find the good Eyck's dinner?" he said. "Sally appeared most attractive."
"Yes," I said.
"You displayed your most charming wit," Laszlo said. "Many times I thought I must join the company in laughing out loud. Eyck is very fond of you."
"Please, Laszlo, no gossip, no intrigue. My wit today lacks the nimbleness to follow your soaring flights, your daring hypotheses. Eyck and I get along all right. Nothing political is implied."
"And how is the affair of your nice sister-in-law, for which you suffer so?"
"A nice question. Her young man reveals himself by long distance phone to be a husband and father. Emotional turmoil ensues. Sally has taken her to the Cape for two weeks, they left today."
Laszlo laughed. "It is clear," he said. 'The curious sulkiness we find you have today. Of course. It is the mixture of resentment and anxious hope of a man whose wife has gone for two weeks. Resentment of desertion, anxious hope that he will have for himself a nice little time with some nice little girl who doesn't know or does not care his wife is coming to take him back in two weeks. Ah, poor Charles, lucky Charles."
"Nonsense," I said. "It's something that happened to me this morning. I was reading the Times as usual, and suddenly it came to me with the swiftness and rapacity of heartburn, I'm not with it any more. You know me, goddamn it, I've always been a model patriot, you know how I've always held up asses like Purbeck to scorn when they tried to get away with their sleazy puerilities aimed at my country. But my God, it came to me this morning, I've changed. By God, Laszlo," I said, striking the table with a fist, "by God I'm disaffected. I'm disaffected, that's what I am, with the whole goddamn thing, with the President of the United States, with the Congress of the United States, with the judiciary of the United States, with the Cabinet officers and departments of the United States, with the regulatory agencies of the United States, with the executive, judicial and legislative branches of the fifty United States, with the system of people's capitalism as practiced in the United States, with the whole goddamn ziggurat and paradigm. I'm disaffected, that's what I am."
"My," Laszlo said.
"No, damn it, I'm serious." I said. "I'm tired of finding excuses for stupidity, for Postmaster-Generals and presidents of Columbia University, I'm tired of finding excuses for mush-mouthed hypocrisy of greed, for newspaper publishers and manufacturers of hats, I'm tired of the labyrinthine tergiversations that all is after all for the best. By God, I'm disaffected."
"I will not be so foolish," Laszlo said, "to pretend for one moment that you are not making a tedious bad joke."
"But Laszlo, after all, simply to be sensible, are you not overwhelmed with horror, revulsion, boredom and disgust? Does not the American scene as daily imprinted on your retina and eardrum make you want to leap up and down with both feet and scream pornographic imprecations into the cold desert night?"
"If you don't like it here, cocky, why don't you bleeding well go back where you came from?" Purbeck said, who suddenly appeared at our table. "Right in back of you, couldn't help hearing you go on. Mind if I join you? Sounds a very elevating conversation." Laszlo and I stared; he pulled up a chair and set his glass down. "Now then," Purbeck said, "what's all the oratory?"
"We are speaking," Laszlo said, "of various small matters. That poor Charles's delightful wife has had for family difficulties to go off for two weeks."
"On the tiles, eh," Purbeck said without interest. "Lucky you. But what's all this jingo stuff I heard?"
"Tell me, Purbeck," I said, evading Laszlo's eye, "as a man absolutely without scruple or decency, tell me something. Where did you stand on the Mau-Mau question?"
"Mau-Mau?" Purbeck said. "That awful mess. No good for anybody in that."
"You attempt evasion, as I'd expected," I said. "Let me be more specific. Do you think it reasonable for a man to protest at mass violation of intelligence and honesty in the body politic?"
"Be a damn silly-ass thing to do," Purbeck said. "Funny, you know, now that I've been in the States a bit. You remember when I'd first got here I made a sort of habit, half joking, mind, but half meaning it all right, of complaining about this and that and all sorts of things. I don't say I was wrong, and it's always a bit of fun to tease the natives, but still, I've come to see that while there might not be any particularly good reason for the way you run a lot of things there's no particularly bad reason either. I mean to say, it's the way you do things, and while it's not the way I'm used to or the way I'm most comfy with, still, I expect it's the way you people are comfy with, and why not, I say. Met a woman last week, told me her daughter was thirteen years of age and had the problem that boys wouldn't realize it was all right to mess up her clothes with a bit of petting as a regular thing, but they couldn't grasp the idea that they ought to watch themselves if she was wearing a formal ball-gown sort of thing, fragile and so on. Well, I mean to say, thirteen, formal ball-gown, petting. But then I told myself, well, wouldn't do for me or mine, of course, thirteen back home they'd jump a mile if a boy said boo, and quite right, too. But why not, if that's the drill here? I mean to say, woman was a perfectly splendid creature, gave me a splendid time, if she's the end-product of that sort of thing, why not?"
I groaned. "Purbeck," I said, "try to understand that I am not interested in sleazy apocryphal boasts of your sexual adventures. I ask you a straightforward question: Is one not simply entitled but duty bound to protest loathsome violations of intelligence and decency, the flatulent evasions of responsibility and decorum, when manifested in the apparatus and hierarchy of a nation?"
"Thing to remember, laddie," Purbeck said, "is that nobody, not one of us, is perfect. Take politicians, now, if you want an example. A much maligned body of men, as you probably know. There's a chap I used to be acquainted with when I was an undergraduate, got to be pretty familiar with him. Well, he's gone right on up, made a very nice career for himself. He's a Minister now, not the biggest job but far from the smallest, won't mention his name, you'd very likely know it. Now Freddy, let me call him, wasn't the finest mind I've ever met, but he knew his arse from a handsaw, as the man says. And as to honesty, why I'd as soon trust Freddy's word as most men's I've met. I've known him to pull a bit of fast footwork in his time, yes, and boast to me about it afterward, but, really, it was all in a good cause, he could always make you see that, and if giving a leg up to a good cause happens also to give a leg up to old Freddy, why, more power to him, is what I say. What it is, you've got to take people as they come. Nobody's perfect, I've always said, and I shan't be ashamed to say it again."
"Purbeck," I said, "don't overdo it, I warn you. Don't try to fob off ridiculous, imaginary anecdotes claiming friendship with celebrities as serious answers. What I want to know is perfectly simple: are not our rulers' publicly proclaimed and ostensibly treasured standards of competence and honesty in terrible and disgusting contrast to the realities of ineptitude, falsehood, hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement we see about us?"
"Tell you something," Purbeck said, "something I don't often like to talk about. My family, bless 'em, were strong Methodists, always have been. That's the way I was raised, straight old-fashioned chapel, and I'd no more have questioned the right or wrong of it than I would have the nose on my old Mum's face. Then, you know, one day, when I was oh say, eleven years or so, this is the part I don't like to talk about much, one day, but really it was evening, I was just snugging down to get off to sleep, bang, it came to me. Sat right up in bed, I did, and told myself, my boy, it's all muck, that's what it is, all muck, however well-meaning, and there's not a word of truth in it. There isn't any God up there listening to our prayers and our hymns, or anybody else's, there isn't now and there never was. It's all muck folks want to believe because they want to believe, and that is absolutely all there is to it. Then I cried a bit because of what Mum and Dad would say when I told them, but when I'd done with that I felt absolutely fine. Of course, I never did tell them, never let on I knew at all.
"Now what I'm getting at is just this. If it's all muck about God, and I've never had cause to revise my opinion on that, not even when I met my wife, then, if you go back far enough, where do you get the right to say good or bad, or honest or dishonest or all the rest of it? You've got no place to stand, if you follow me. So the thing to do, if you want to be straight and not muck about with muck, is just take people as they come, if they hit you hit 'em back and if they give you a helping hand then you give them a helping hand, but don't muck about calling names."
"Oh no," I said, "oh no, not that, please, I beg you, Purbeck, not the immemorial infantile deconversion, not the stock standard inevitable revelation as universal to children as weaning and masturbation. Of course there's no God, whoever said there was? Surely we agree on the simple, trite truth that we make our own standards by an act of irrelevant will? That granted, as of course it must be, I ask again and for the last time."
"Time, gentlemen, time," Laszlo said. "I begin to grow too weary of this Charles, really, I must say, if you act so just only on the day that Sally goes away, how will you act in a week? Please, you must exercise control."
"The Missus away, eh?" Purbeck said. "That's jam. Although I'm not sure I've ever taken you as the lad for slap and tickle."
"Quite right," Laszlo said, "quite right, Purbeck, my friend. Our Charles is not as some men are, having their nasty little affairs in every hole and corner, in golf courses, in libraries, in churches and in offices. For this he has too much sense, too much honor."
Purbeck laughed. "Szabo, if you think your dirty little digs get under my hide, you think again. And if you're not man enough to come straight out and say what you mean, then what are you? If you want to talk to my face about me and Mrs. Hirsch then why don't you be a man and spit it right on up in a straightforward manly way?"
"Mrs. Hirsch?" Laszlo said, large with wonder. "How? Who? What am I to spit up about Mrs. Hirsch?"
"Just because I have the decency to act friendly with a woman I like and feel sorry for, has a miserable life, things you couldn't even care to guess about, everybody in that place makes a point of gossip-mongering behind our backs and I wouldn't care to say what. You call that fair play?"
"Gentlemen," I said, "gentlemen. Our tongues run away with us, heated by drink."
Purbeck giggled. "Trouble with you chaps," he said, "is you don't know enough."
"Very true," Laszlo said. "If I knew as much as I would like to know, I would be king again."
"That's nothing," I said. "My trouble is that nobody understands me."
"Hi, ho," Purbeck said. "And where would any of us be if they did?"
Leaving, Purbeck went his way and Laszlo and I walked a few paces. He said: "So you have made great statement of disaffection. What bold, foolish actions can I expect to follow from these words?"
"Do?" I said. "Oh, I'm not going to do anything."
"So?"
"There is nothing to do, you know that."
"I know? I know nothing. I have said nothing. I have only heard you say much nonsense to Purbeck, who will use it for whatever unpleasant thing he can."
"Good Lord," I said, "there was never a question of doing anything."
4
Pia, of course, I had been trying to get to all week, without success. Notes to see me were ignored; attempts to trap her in passing were evaded. I had caused to be sent to her home a portable radio as near as possible twin in sleaze and tinniness to her sister's ravished friend. No comment forthcame.
Home after Laszlo and Purbeck, I telephoned, and got her presumed mother. No, I gathered, Pia was not there; I did not gather when she was expected to return, if at all.
I was reduced to thought. Meaning an experimental series of semi-guided reveries. Exclusively involving Pia; with emphasis on enviroments that got us off our feet.
Early Saturday afternoon I got Pia, herself, on the phone. How've you been all this time, I asked. All right, she said. How's little sister, I asked. All right, she said. She, ah, get the radio, you know how bad the mails are? I said. Yes, she said. Will you meet me in New York this afternoon or this evening or another time today? I said. No, she said, but she paused first. It seemed overcrude, somehow, to point out that I had a whole apartment freely available to me, full of a variety of clean horizontal plane surfaces. Shall I come out there? I said. I can't talk now, she said. If I come will you be there, answer yes or no, I said. I guess, she said. Four o'clock? I said. No, she said. Five o'clock? I said. No, she said. Six o'clock? I said. No, she said. Seven o'clock? I said. No, she said. Eight o'clock? I said. All right, she said.
For a moment, in front of Pia's house, fear twisted my throat, as Pia came out alone; in a moment, however, little sister followed, and all was made right. Little sister had her new radio, Pia glanced at me and then away, saying nothing, they were both dressed much as heretofore, little sister's locks seemed newly brazen, the garbage stirred fitfully in the warm night's wind: everything was there. Little sister walked with us.
At Dicherty's Nissen hut, there was light but little sound. We went in. Under the bulb stood five or six of the young folks, Dicherty and two policemen. The ensemble paused in their occupation and looked at us. We paused, and, seeing no easy alternative, shut the door behind us.
Both cops were young, swarthy and had buck teeth. The one with the notebook asked sister, Pia and me name (Charles Kraft, and greatly relieved to have told the truth when he asked for any identification), age, place of residence (my driver's license had it), and place and nature of employment (Columbia University, graduate student). What's your business here? he said. Sister said, We come here lots of times. Pia said, Why not? The cop just looked at her. I said, I'm a friend of Mr. Dicherty. That's right, Dicherty said, he is. Ain't you with them, the cop said, meaning Pia and sister. No, Pia said, he's not with us. Turn your purses or pockets on the table, the cop said to each of the three of us. They shook out the cigarettes from the three packs. You shouldn't be smoking the age you are, the cop said to little sister. I just carry them for when she runs out, sister said.
The cop addressed the whole. The old guy here ever collect any money from any of you? The whole said, Hell, no. The old guy or, pause, him, to me, ever offer you any money? To do anything? The whole laughed, self-consciously. The notebook cop motioned Dicherty and me into a corner. The other cop stayed with the bunch; he didn't look at them and they didn't look at him.
Immediately, Dicherty said: "Officer, swear to God and all the saints, it's like I said. I felt pity on the kids, not having no place to go except hang around the streets and get in trouble or hang around in soda places they spend their money for sweet drinks that rot your teeth and where anybody can come maybe looking for trouble or even maybe in bars, there are bartenders will serve kids just for the penny in it no matter how much you officers do good work to stop it, and you know I'm telling the truth. So I figgered it's a favor to the kids and to their parents and to the City of New York itself if I let the kids, hell, it ain't nothing out of my pocket, but why not, use this place just you know to sit around and shoot the bull and sure maybe dance a little, you see the radio there, but no disorder, they know I don't let no disorder, you know what I mean."
The cop looked skeptical. "How come these kids are all the way over here? Ain't any of them from around this neighborhood."
"Why," Dicherty said, "it just so happened that one of them, except he's serving in the United States Army now, God bless him, boy named Ralphy, brother of that big feller over there only he was bigger, he just happened to come walking by my place here one day and saw this hut, it was used for storage then but nothing much, some ole broken furniture and a couple busted trunks is about all, and he got the idea of him and his friends using it like kind of a clubhouse, you understand it's not a club or anything organized the kids have here, just a bunch of friends. And he asked me about it and I said, sure, why not, as long as you kids behave decent, I said. So that's how it's been, just the kids from around where Ralphy and Buddy live, and their friends and all. I swear to God, officer, there ought to be more places like this for the kids of New York City, wouldn't be all them stories in the newspapers about juvenile delinquency and all."
The cop grunted. "Now you, mister," he said to me, "what business you got here?"
"As I said, officer, I'm a friend of Mr. Dicherty. In addition such a firsthand source available, I'm grateful to Mr. Dicherty here is a man who has traveled extensively and fexperienced much in this country, and in his lifetime he's collected an immense body of oral folk material, stories, legends, salty sayings, ballads, work songs, gospel hymns, you know, officer, the people bit. It's extremely important to my work to have such a firsthand source available, I'm grateful to Mr. Dicherty for the help he's given me, and I certainly am going to see to it that he gets full credit when I publish my thesis." The evening was cooler than most, and I had hoped to get Pia away from all this, so I was wearing a suit and necktie. There was no evidence, but I hoped that it helped.
The cop looked at his notebook for a while, and turned back to the masses. "Okay," he said. "We didn't find no liquor being consumed by minors, we didn't find no narcotics, we didn't find no illegal weapons. We come back again, we better not find none."
The other cop spoke. "We could search some of the broads for pot or shivs," and winked at Pia.
"You kids understand that?" the notebook cop said. A slow nodding of heads. "All right. Let's go."
Before they got to the door, Carol, Buddy's crop-haired blond tigress, said: "Cop?" They stopped. "Hey tell me, how come you come here? How you find out about us?"
The notebook cop said: "Looks like it was somebody's mistake. We got word something wrong was going on here, we figured it for a new bopping gang, was getting ready for trouble."
"Yeah?" Carol said, "where'd you get the word from?"
The notebook cop shrugged. Carol stepped up to them. "Come on, I wanna know, who tried to screw us?"
"Really, Carol, they ain't gone to tell you nothing," Buddy said.
"That's right," the notebook cop said.
Carol was raging. Head forward, mouth wide: "Goddamn," she yelled, "I wanna know who the bastard is."
The non-notebook cop grinned engagingly and tapped her, very delicately, under the chin with his night stick. "Up yours, sissie," he said. The cops left.
Silence, followed by a burst of rejoicing and reminiscence, vituperation of the police and triumph over their frustration, with details of their crestfallen expressions as the search revealed nothing untoward. I said to Dicherty: "Lucky they didn't find any of the younger kiddies drinking, or for that matter engaged in social activities."
"That Buddy," Dicherty said, "he's smarter'n I gave him credit. Was just getting out of his car when he saw the cops coming, sent one of the boys to nip around the hut, scoot up the street and wave down another carload was on the way, had the likker in it. For the other, anything going on here, they keep the door locked, can change a scene in a minute. Wonder who it was called the station house. That Carol, she's a mean one, she find out anybody she knows and there'll be feathers plucked aplenty. You want to come on out back for a spell or stay here?"
Pia was standing with the group about Carol and Buddy. I touched her arm and asked if she wanted to go out and talk to Dicherty for a bit. "No," she said. I said that I would not either, then. "Don't be scared," she said, "I'll be here or if I get tired I'll come out."
"Oh," I said.
Outside, I said to Dicherty: "My God, what an idiot I am. What a worm, what a cowardly, craven, cringing, contemptible worm. What a thing to do. The cock crew and I denied her thrice. Why didn't I tell the goddamn police I was with Pia? Why? What difference would it have made? And what difference if it made a difference? My God, the poor kid, denied and rejected precisely in the eyes of her peer group, where a displayed denial and rejection cut closest to the bone, publicly denied and rejected at a mere foolish hint, not of danger, even, but of slightest inconvenience. What a fool."
"Seems to me you're carrying on for not much," Dicherty said.
"She knows it," I said, "she made it plain. Told me not to be scared, just now, looking at me like metal, as she does, metal or stone, and told me not to be scared. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, what a thing to do."
-"Get you to drink," Dicherty said. "Set." I sat on a wooden carton, mournful and self-contemning. The old man came back with a jug of his foul wine and two jars.
"Kind of interesting, what you say," he said.
"I beg your pardon?" I said.
"I mean, it's kind of a interesting way of looking at things. Wouldn't have done it myself."
"Of course you wouldn't," I said, "nobody but an idiot would have done a thing like that. Not the lowest, helpless, hapless, hopeless scum scraped semi-human from the decaying gutter would have done a thing like that. Whpn I think of it I can scarcely bear my own bones inside me, my guts writhe away from me as if they cannot bear the contamination of my touch."
Dicherty chuckled. "Meant I wouldn't have thought of looking at the business in just that light," he said, "but no matter. You go on and have your fun in your own way, no man stopping or staying. Every man's got a right to the pleasure of his own trouble."
"Thank you," I said. "You're a great comfort to me in mine."
"That ain't the trouble I had in mind," Dicherty said. "That ain't no trouble at all. What I meant was, it just now appears to me that you have gone and fell in love, as they say, with that little girl. I expect it's gone to be downright comical to watch. Always is. Nothing as comical as watching a feller that's lost his heart, like they say, and when the feller's married, it's even more comical."
"I hope," I said, "that I would be properly grateful for an opportunity to afford you amusement. I do not think, however, that in regard to the matter under present discussion you are capable of distinguishing your own private ass-hole from the lower and less amenable portions of the Gulf of Mexico, if you will pardon the reference to a neighboring and friendly Latin American state."
Dicherty chuckled again. "Be that as it may be," he said, "and hap as may hap. Not every chicken knows it's getting on a egg, and many a egg don't know it's bound to be a chicken. Railroad iron don't know what's in the baggage car, and the engine don't care if it's heavy on the ties. The horse thinks it owns the saddle, and the spur believes it owns the horse. What's yonder over the rise of the hill, nobody knows and nobody will, a true saying I will testify, and don't you make the mistake in the strength of yore youth that all you got to do to find out what's yonder over the rise of the hill is walk on up over and down t'other side and find out, 'cause always remember that once you done that you still got a hill risin' behind you and it's still true as grass you don't know what's yonder. And the man that stands on the top of that hill, bloat with pride that he can see all about him, heavens and earth, let that man remember that what he can't now see and ain't never gone to see, wait kingdom come and the bones to rise again, is right under his own two feet. 'Deed it's a true saying, what's yonder round the curve of the road, no man knows and no man's knowed."
"Look, Dicherty, old friend," I said, "my remarks to the sheriff back there on my interest in you as a source of folk-say were, as I thought you realized at the time, purely diplomatic and occasional, having no element in common with the truth. Spare me, please, your spurious distortions of the people's wisdom."
Dicherty chuckled, again. Pia came out of the dark and sat next to me on the carton. She said: "I heard what you told the cop about using Dirty for studying hillbilly talk. It was funny."
"Oh God, Pia," I said, in my urgency ignoring Dicherty's present ear, "I can't tell you how terrible I feel about that. I admit any accusation you care to bring. I acted like a fool, a coward and a boor. There's nothing to be done about it now, unfortunately, but I hope you'll accept my abject apology."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Pia said. Dicherty, of course, chuckled.
"My contemptible behavior before, when I publicly, in front of your massed friends and associates, denied being with you. I don't know what got into me."
"Of course," Pia said, "why not? Why tell the cops anything?"
"You mean you don't feel I denied and rejected you?"
Pia laughed, it being her turn. "No," she said, "but you're a riot. You really are."
"Like a feller I knew always used to say," Dicherty said, "if I was a whistle I'd never blow but for quittin' time. Thing to remember is, I ain't a whistle, is what this feller always used to say."
"In the name of human decency, Dicherty," I said, "cut it out."
"Carol is sure mad," Pia said. "She's going on about what she's going to do if she finds out who called the cops. Some of the things she thinks of."
"Carol does seem a very earnest young woman," I said.
"When Carol blows her bun she really blows it," Pia said. "She doesn't care what she does. Especially when she drinks, like she's drinking now. Last time she was like this, she got the idea some guy, wasn't even anybody that hung around with us, was making dirty cracks about her to Buddy. She walked right up to him in the street in the middle of everybody and hit him in the face with a brick."
"Hmm," I said. "What happened?"
"Oh, they came and took him to the hospital. I don't think I saw him around after that."
"Small wonder," I said. "I mean what happened to Carol?"
"Carol?" Pia said. "Nothing. The guy was new around, he didn't have any friends, I guess."
"Hmm," I said. "Maybe we better have those cops back."
"Ah now," Dicherty said, "that's not a thing to say, even in fun. A man's a man, there isn't any time hard enough or any reason big enough to make him call the cops. Not just a matter of what's right and what's wrong only, it's a matter of plain sense, the plain sense being that howsoever hard a place and rough a time a man has got hisself into, the cops is bound to make it more hard and more rough. They're just bound to. I admit it to be a matter of what's right and what's wrong, too, but most it's a matter of the skin off your ass and bones in your head, though I have given thought that what's right and what's wrong is in many a case a different way of saying the same thing, what's right and what's wrong is what a lot of fellers who come down through a lot of hard times and rough places have found to be the best way of keeping the skin on their asses and bones sound in their head. But whatever, now, there's no sense in talking about calling the cops."
My turn to chuckle. "Dicherty," I said, "you romantic you, you great overfed baby of a romantic. But this time sir, you outreach yourself. I am prepared to accept from you the lower romanticism, the jolly scenario where the bad guys have the pleasure and the good guys have the blame, Wrong ever holding justice's scale, Right ever in the court-house jail. Where you can be tortured to prove your toughness, enmeshed to prove your shrewdness, starved to prove your stubbornness, tarred and feathered to prove your indifference and martyred finally with the cry of flesh proudly willed as stone to spite the enemy, 'they can kill me but they can't hurt me.' Nobly alone, proud in poverty, happy in helplessness, you can soar and fall the glad self-apotheosis of society's immoral ethic, each bruise a brag of testimony to your glorious non-surrender, and your own-beaten mouth bragging that never ever could society force accommodation on you hard and tough and rough enough to make you call help from society's sullen symbol, the cops. All very well. But when you attempt the higher romanticism, when you leave the confined specific of ennobled defeat, when you embrace the ultimate romantic foolishness to say that man's standards of right and wrong have any slight tangential peripheral derivation from pain or pleasure, from survival or destruction, from safe ass and sound skull, no. There I must stop you. That man's standards can and do cause pain and pleasure, horror and health, this of course is the truth. But in your romantic frenzy to reverse the descent, make parent of child and child of parent, no, it is intolerable."
"Oh sure," Dicherty said, "talk is talk, but you take my word for it, son, don't you ever call the cops, no matter how bad things are with you. Them bastards got but one idea in mind and that is to make things worse. Ain't even got to do them any good, even it might be work for 'em, but by God, good or bad, work or no, them bastards will have your ass if it's all they ever do. I mind me a time many a year ago, I was in as hard up a way as ever I hope to be, ever I will be I can safely say. Was holed up in a room over a saloon in a little place in Oklahoma, I don't recall the name of it, all the years, and I had exactly no money and I was sick as a poisoned sheep, never slept for coughing and two men I knew was due into town to kill me, thinking I had stole some money from them we had stole together, which I had, and it got stole from me. Setting in that room three four days, coughing, coughing, not sleeping and not eating, I lost my nerve at the end, and when I look out the dirty winder of that miserable stinking room and see them two men I knew, two real rough men, walking in the bright shine of the sun, walking towards the saloon, coming through the dust of that little town where they was coming to kill me, I did it. I scaled down the back and over to the county sheriff's office and said, sheriff, sheriff, they's two men fixing to kill me, I got to ask yore help."
"What," I said, "happened after the cops killed you? I mean, what did they do worse to you than was about to be done? No, the point is that human standards are a grid, a coordinate system, a referential matrix imposed upon the reality of pain and pleasure, of act and event, and not simply measuring that reality but defining and determining it. The unmoved mover, you say? Not quite. Who imposes this determination on the illimitable universe? You do and I do. Why? you ask. Why not?" s
"Son," Dicherty said, "you just ain't been there, you can ask that question. Twenty year minimum on a hardrock Oklahoma State farm, that ain't just dying, quick short and sharp, that's dying every day and every night and waking to die again. Me a young man then in my flower, and twenty years of hardrock pain and hardrock puke, twenty years without a woman and twenty years without a rest, twenty years without a pleasure, son, twenty years. And those bastards would have done it too not for no good cause they knew of, but only out of pure poison meanness, cop meanness, having a man they could kill slow and bad for twenty years and not wanting to waste the chance of doing him the worst there was. Worse than dying, take my word."
"Well of course," I said, "it's possible to see in it a mere class orientation. If we posit, as surely we must, that a major function of the law is the protection of property, and that the law is, notwithstanding its very real human rather than economic equities, essentially a creation of the property-wielding classes, then it is understandable that the cop, in the eyes of those classes a bulwark of order, is at the same time in the eyes of the lower classes a kind of occupation trooper imposing hated martial law from above with whom co-operation is traitorous collaboration. But this is admittedly a great oversimplification. When you'd served your twenty years, then what did they do to you?"
"That was one time I was lucky," Dicherty said. "That was one time I was real lucky. Them bastards hadn't no more than started to work me over, hadn't no more than slammed me in the belly a couple times and hadn't no more than got their hoses limbered up on my kidneys, I wasn't hardly starting to yell or spit blood yet, they was just settling down to have a couple days of good cop fun until I was so beat down and ground up like a pound of raw burger that I would say what I was told to say and then it's off to that long-time twenty, when a cop comes in with the guy who did what they was trying to stick me for, I can't tell you what it was this day 'cause I never knew what it was that day, a guy all shot up to hell and freely confessing in the living fear of death. So them bastards had to let me go that time, they was too many reporters and what all around by then, and I got me out of town and never went back, like they told me I never come back if I don't want my ass ground down to a shaving, and I never again saw them two fellers who was looking for to kill me. But you listen to what I say. Ain't that much luck in the world to happen again. You never call the cops, no matter. No matter anything, be it alive or dead." From the hut, a girl screamed twice. Pia, Dicherty, and I went quickly to it. The group, now larger by four or six, slouched or sat watching Carol and the much smaller girl whose initiation I had attended. Carol stood behind the girl, holding her long brown pony-tailed hair in both hands and, just as we took in the scene, Carol, snapped the girl's head smash against the wall. The girl screamed again and clawed behind her at the hands holding her head. Carol emitted a cry, swung the girl in a circle almost off her feet and threw her stumbling; flopping and keening half-way down the hut, her head knocking over and disappearing under a light folding chair. "She scratched me," Carol yelled, holding up a hand where I at my distance could see no scratch, "the lousy cop-calling bitch, she scratched me. I'll kill the bitch, I'll kill the lousy bitch," and advanced with that apparent purpose towards the girl, who was struggling to sit. The girl sat up and Carol kicked her in the face. The girl screamed. "Stop her, Buddy," Pia said.
Buddy shrugged. "Sure," he said. "You know Carol, when she drinks and runs crazy like this. I could knock her out and when she got up she'd go to kill me and wouldn't ever have nothing to do with me, she'd cut me right out. She'll get tired. She ain't never really killed anybody."
The girl screamed again as Carol forced her to stand by pulling her arms up behind her back. "Say it right out, you lousy bitch," Carol said, "say right out you call the cops."
"I swear to Christ I didn't, I swear to Christ, please, Carol, don't hurt me no more, please I swear to Christ," the girl said. There was blood on her chin welling down from a gash on her upper lip and a bruise on her forehead was gathering color.
Carol laughed, shortly, but a real laugh, thrust the girl over to the table and threw her on it, her head and shoulders sticking over the far edge. Carol dropped the girl's arms, kept her in place by pressing elbows into her back, grabbed her hair with both hands again and pulled her head up sharp. "You listen," Carol said, "I know you called the cops so don't give me no stinking lie. You spit it out that you done it and then I'm gone to kill you." She jerked the girl's blouse out of one side of her pants, over the ribs, and raked her fingernails across the dead-white skin up towards the armpit, drawing blood. The girl screamed and flailed her body in a convulsion that loosened Carol's grip and flung the girl off the table. She landed on her back. Pia looked at me.
I walked over and tapped Carol on the shoulder. She turned her head only. Her face was flushed, she was breathing hard and there was a little saliva on her lower lip, but her eyes seemed calm, her short blond hair was perfectly in place and she could easily be about to take her seat on a bus after a short run. She was quite pretty in no subtle way. "Carol, stop it," I said. "I'm sure she didn't call the police. You've hurt her badly enough. Stop it."
"You," Carol said. "You're nothing."
"Possibly," I said, "but listen to me. If you don't stop it I'm going to fight you. No matter how tough you are, I'm going to be able to hit your nose and break it. They can't really fix a broken nose, Carol, even the best doctors can't fix it so it looks good, and you can't afford the best doctors. It'll look bad, Carol, you're a very pretty girl now but you won't be with a busted-up nose, you won't be a pretty girl at all. You don't want that, Carol, and I don't want to but if you make me fight you I will. You're a very pretty girl now, but you won't be if I break your nose and the doctors won't be able to do anything for you. You've got your good looks now but you won't then and men won't like the sight of you even, let alone taking you out, your broken nose will make you look so bad. Now, will you stop it?"
"Buddy," Carol said, "take care of this creep."
This unpleasant contingency had not, somehow, in the rush of events occurred to me. Buddy came over and stood next to me. He was a little bigger than I and looked several times tougher. "Yeah," he said, "what's all this crap about busting noses?"
"Bust him," Carol said.
"I'm gonna," Buddy said. "Nobody here busts Carol's nothing."
"Fine," I said, "then you make her stop."
"You think you can make me make her?" Buddy said.
"No," I said.
"That's right," Buddy said, "you can't. He glared me in the eye for a long time. Then he turned to Carol. "But you should ought to stop. You're gone to wreck her."
There was a squeak and a scurry, and the girl was off the floor and running clumsily but fast out the door, which Pia was holding open. Carol yelled, Hey, and took a step towards the door, but the girl was gone. I sighed deeply. There was a general relaxed laughter. Carol said something to Pia I couldn't hear and came back to Buddy and me.
"You still gone to bust him, Buddy?" she said.
"You think I can't wreck you, man?" Buddy asked me.
"I wouldn't want to make the experiment," I said. "I was hoping it wouldn't come to that. I was hoping to take Carol's mind off her bloody business and put it on her nose."
Carol laughed with a great whoop, doubling up. Buddy let his shoulders drop at this, and I took heart to evade imminent destruction. "You see my nose?" Carol said. "Is it okay now?"
"It's wonderful," I said, "it's perfect, finest pair of nostrils I know."
"It got busted three four years ago," Carol said. "The doc fixed it fine. How you hope to scare me talking about my nose?"
"Oh," I said. "You might have told me."
Buddy laughed. "Finest pair of nostrils," he said. "That sure sounds dirty."
Cheered that the good will now seemed general, I went over and grinned at Pia. "Thank you very much," I said. "Nice timing."
"I didn't think you wanted to fight Buddy," she said.
"You were right. However, all is well in the event, and we stopped the carnage. Quite crafty of us, actually. Excellent teamwork. Smooth. Coordinated. Effective."
"Yes," Pia said.
"What did Carol say to you just now?" I said. "An expression of annoyance?"
"She said she was going to get me for that," Pia said. "Oh," I said.
"Now hear me," Dicherty said, " 'Pears to me we'd better shut up the shop for tonight. All the screeching and squalling was going on here, them cops is liable to get another complaint from some of our good neighbors, God knows what they think was going on here, a bingo game or something illegal. So let's close up the place for the evening."
"Ah crap, Dirty," one of the louts said, "them cops is too scared to come back, next time we be ready for them."
"You sure will," Dicherty said.
The lout, a lumpy one with a big jaw, stepped towards Dicherty. "You got a big mouth for a old man," he said.
Carol had sulkily swallowed two big mouthfuls of rye from the bottle. "He sure does," she said.
The lout took another step towards Dicherty. "A big mouth, telling us what to do."
"What I'm telling you," Dicherty said, "is what you ought to do if you have any sense. The cops start the habit of coming round here, you won't have nothing but misery from it."
"Don't talk cops to me," the lout said. "I ain't talking cops, I'm talking you getting off telling what to do. Who made you anything?" His appetite for the tense had, perhaps, been aroused and yet unassuaged by recent events.
"Yeah," Carol said, "who the hell?"
"What makes me something is this is my place," Dicherty said, his thin neck red. "Only reason you're here is I said you could be here. Still and all, I ain't doing no bossing. Don't make a piss in the pot to me what you do, long as it don't give me no trouble. Cops start messing around here, it gives me trouble. Gives you trouble too, think you'd have the sense God give to chickens to see that. What I'm telling you is the good thing for everybody."
"Chicken," the lout said, "what chicken you talking about? You think I'm chicken, I got to do what you say because you think you own this place? I want to come here any time, I come here. What you going to do about it? Nothing, you ain't going to do nothing about it. You think you can throw me out of here? Piss you can. I do whatever I want, you can't do nothing about it. You think maybe you call the cops on me? I'll kick your gut in. What I care what you say is sense? I do what I feel like doing. Piss on you." He took another step towards Dicherty, hoping for an encouraging patriotic speech from Carol. He got it.
"Piss on him," Carol said.
"You touch me, boy...." Dicherty said, and paused, groping for an expression of adequate terror. I stepped up behind him, my mood decreasingly athletic.
"Okay, okay," Buddy said, from near the door, "cool it down. Dirty's right, let's move out of here. Come on, Carol."
The lout made a face at Dicherty, which was funny. "Just don't get no ideas that you're anything," he said. "Old man like you, what kind of a say you got? You ain't got none. Only way I do what anybody say, they can make me. You can't." He left us, following the others out.
"Well," I said to Dicherty, "the jungle prevailing, you might reconsider your distaste for the law's strength."
"Next time," Dicherty said, "I have my knife. Not that I'd use it less there wasn't no other call, but it's a thing to have. Stops talk like that punk talks."
"You better with a knife than he is?" I said.
"You bet your collar button," Dicherty said.
Buddy came back into the hut and over to us. To Pia and me he said: "You want to go with us? We're going to ride."
I looked at Pia. "If you want," she said.
I looked at Dicherty. "You go on," he said. "I'm tired, get me to bed. But you come around soon. Thing I want to say to you."
"Dirty," Buddy said. "You ain't going to get stiff on account of this? Didn't mean nothing. I wouldn't of let him really lean on you."
"That's nice of you, son," Dicherty said. "Considering who runs this place, that's nice."
"Ah, Dirty," Buddy said, "don't get stiff. You know it don't make no difference you was here first. We're here now, you know that. But I ain't going to let anybody lean on you. You don't worry. Let's go."
Dicherty looked at me and smiled. "Hear that," he said, "hear that. You come back soon. We got to talk." I said I would, and Pia and I followed Buddy out.
Buddy (at first, but Carol and lumpy lout took their turn) went fast by roads familiar to him. Street fed to wider street, to wider faster highway, to wider faster parkway. There were many other cars but the parkway was wide and the dynamic amalgam of roaring flashing traffic in which we included ourselves boomed through the night, following the dip and curve and soar and fall of the parkway, our lights flying over no man or house but only on other cars such as we and on the road.
Surely the judgment, foresight, prudence and aggression, the guided drive, necessary to keep us safe at speed among our looming speeding equals, surely this craft was an analogue to the management of our larger complexities, of affairs and of men, that larger complex within which, only within which, road and car were possible. So Buddy, driving, could say:
It is my experience that, within their limits of intelligence, most men will adjust, if only passively, to the hard facts of reality, once that reality is pointed out to them. This is not to say, I suppose, that they do not continue, in the safe confines of their heads, to waste time and attention on dreaming that what is so is not so, what is not so is. But in their actions and functions, my only concern, most men can be made to see that within the given situation, properly viewed, it is sheer self-destruction not to follow out that situation's logic.
My job is double-to create the situation and to make men see what they have to do within it. Quite a job, you'll admit, and you'll admit that whatever I get, I earn.
At the moment, I'm in perishable tools, that's what we call machine-tool parts like lathe-bits or borer heads, say, that have to be replaced on the machines. The machine tool industry, that's basic. But before now I've been in other things-I've been in trucking, for one, and in soft-drink bottling, for another, and they were basic too. When you come right down to it, everything is basic. If you're doing it, especially.
We've got three plants, employ about 2000 men. It's not General Motors, but then, the way they've pyramided organization over there, neither is General Motors. Except for a few top spots, maybe, and then they're responsible to the board, and the board is responsible to the stockholders, just like I'm responsible to my board and we're responsible to the stockholders, and that means to the people of this country of the United States of America, so I guess when you get right down to the hard facts, there's not so much difference. It's the principle I'm talking about, not the money, and my take home-salary, bonus, stock option and expense account-is right up in the brackets with most of them. What I mean to say is that I've got the kind of living standard I would want.
Not that the board or the stockholders do much interfering with me, the board knows I'm good, they've got the profit statements for that. They let me alone to do my job.
But that's what I'm talking about, the job. It's a great responsibility, and not an easy one. Men, most men, I said before, will do what has to be done if you show it to them, but most men have to be shown. And that's really the size of my job, knowing for myself what has to be done, what the hard necessities of the situation demand be done. Most men can't see that for themselves. I can. Most men get lost in what they would like to do if the situation were more to their liking-simpler, easier, not demanding a tough, here and now, live or die decision. I don't get lost.
I'll try to give you an example. It's not easy, there are always so many factors. But take this. One of our subsidiary plants had always been cramped for space and things were not getting any better. There wasn't any crisis about it, there seldom is a real crisis and there never would be if the men at the top knew what they're doing. But the situation wasn't good and it wasn't getting any better. I had things looked into, saw the extra transportation costs, not much, but a dollar is a dollar, and more to come because that plant couldn't stockpile enough materials, saw that if production in that plant had to be increased significantly it was going to be near impossible to maximize flow efficiency because of space difficulties, saw a lot of things. Only one answer, buy more space, use what you need now, make the most profitable use you can of the rest of it until you're ready to use that too.
That's the situation and its demand: there must be more space. But my men down there come to me and say, there isn't any. No land available there. I say, nonsense, we need space, there has to be space. I go down there, look things over, look at the maps. Then I say, there's only one thing. We'll take the park. The park? they say, you can't buy the park.
The way things were set up down there, there's this town, population say thirty thousand. Some light industry, small shops, not much, scattered around the southeastern edge of it. We're the only big plant, to the northwest. Between us and the town there's this good-sized piece of land, crescent-shaped, about three hundred acres, they call the park. It's not a park, you understand, that's just what they call it, in the town. It's completely unimproved land, some of it scrub, some of it brush, one big corner part of it marshy. It's not a nature spot either, if that's what you're thinking; I had that checked into, nothing particularly grows there and it's not a bird sanctuary or anything of that kind. Just some land. As far as I understood from things I'd heard, nobody went into it very much, there wasn't anything to go into it for, except it was the place where crazy kids drove at night to do their necking and whatever else they do.
You can't buy the park, they said. Brandt, my plant manager there, and he's the vice-president for that division, he's lived in that town for a couple of years, he explained to me. In the first place, he said, that park is town land, of course, and they won't sell. Even if they wanted to he didn't think they could, it was deeded to the town years ago with the express stipulation that no part of it was to be sold, it was supposed to be a real park, gardens and maybe a little zoo, but there never was any money to develop it. And, anyway, the zoning laws forbid commercial use of that section. And aside from the legal considerations, he said, there's a lot of sentiment that the great value of the park, since it isn't good for much else, is to separate our plant from the residential area of the town, keep a distance between homes and factory, and that makes the park valuable even if it isn't good for anything else. There's even an expression in town, to go past the park or to be past the park, meaning to go to work or be at work, originally it meant just at our plant, but people use it now for working anywhere, not businessmen or professional men, but common workers, they do. So we can't buy the park. I know this town, he told me, and I know they'll never do it.
That's what they told me. And I told them, the situation demands we buy that park. And if the situation demands it, we will do it, because we have no choice. Now I don't have to spell out the details of how to do it for you men because you wouldn't be top management if you had to have details spelled out, and if you do you shouldn't be. But nothing you've told me indicates that the problem has any major difficulties. The town will sell if it's made to want to sell and if it's made frightened of not selling. Eccentric provisions in some antique document won't stop us-nobody will bring it to the test, and if they do we can out-lawyer them all the way up the line. And that about keeping the plant out of sight, why that's plain foolishness. This isn't the nineteenth century, this plant of ours is one of the cleanest and most efficient of its kind anywhere, and the people in this town ought to be proud of it, we pay enough taxes to this town and employ enough workers.
Just as I say, once you show men, if you've got the right men and if you haven't you don't deserve to be in management yourself, once you show them what has to be done, they do it. They worked out a campaign that the park was a danger, was being used for illicit dirty purposes by the crazy kids, got the newspaper to play that up, put pressure on the police through civic associations to raid the park at night, got a lot of news coverage on crazy young kids in cars parked there doing all kinds of things I wouldn't even talk about-if they were kids of plant employees they were let go without any publicity, but Brandt's own kid, a crazy girl fourteen years old, they found without a stitch of clothes on above the waist, they had to let that play up in the papers, it would have looked bad if our top man there tried to pull rank. So between the newspapers and civic associations and the churches, they had sentiment in that town boiling up against the park as a downright menace. Then a few words to the council about taxes and the necessity to relocate if local conditions were unreasonable for economic operation, and a few good talks with the leading, most influential people in town-I tell you that the transfer papers were drawn and signed inside six months. The town got a fair price, too.
Then I got in touch with one of the biggest builders in the business and sold him on the idea of a development in the part of that land we didn't need yet, and that's just what happened-we showed a nice profit in turning over that land. Now they've got houses, nice little houses, right up to our fence line, but the land's on a twenty-year lease, and we'll be taking some of it over again if the expansion picture is as good as I think it is.
As I say, if you show men what the situation demands, they'll do it. But there has to be someone to show them.
They named the development after me, and I will admit I had that in mind, too.
Or the lumpy lout could say:
There's no dirtier, rougher, tougher business in the world than the cosmetic business. It's drive, drive, drive all the way, and you let up one minute you're deader than last year's color. This big campaign we've just blasted off, you'll believe me if I tell you that our major competitor had a line into our agency and would have pulled the whole thing from under us and beat us out if I hadn't played heads-up ball and punched those boys into getting us in orbit first? And it's a dream, this campaign, it's got that real built-in natural boost, it's got that soar, that climb, and we're giving it more blastoff power than we've ever done before, even us. Any moment now you'll see it, we've scheduled TV, color center-spreads, billboards, papers, the whole bit. Tell you what it is and see if you don't agree with me we're going to up our gross by fifty per cent this year.
We're going to hit the lower teen-age and sub-teen-age market the way it's never been hit before-lipstick, powder, eye make-up, nails, hair rinse, everything. A whole market there, practically untouched, over ten million girls from eight to fourteen, and we've got them. What do they buy now? The younger ones, nothing, maybe, and the rest just a lipstick or two and maybe a little more for special dates. But when we get into gear no girl with any respect for herself is going to leave the house in the morning without the works, the works, and no mother with a healthy interest in her daughter is going to let her, any more than she'd let her go without clothes on her back. We hit all the modulations-we punch it out to them that, girlie, you're a sad bag if you don't glamour, you won't date if you don't dazzle, a boy who doesn't flip at a paint-puss ain't much of a boy, be a woman first, it's never too early to be loved, plain Janes get the goons, jet-age Jills get the thrills. We promise them, we threaten them, we scare them, we seduce them, and we get them. We've thought of everything, there's a Miss Young Stuff-Young Stuff is the name of the line-we're going to elect every year, the first one is a nice kid, really is only fifteen, you know it's something how contrasty she looks to the regular high-fashion models we use, they don't have enough tit to put in a teacup, this girl is so busty it comes out of the page and squirts in your eye, we've got a movie tie-up for the first four Miss Young Stuffs already worked out, there are all kinds of other angles I could tell you, the works.
You want to know how I got the idea? I'll tell you. Good friend of mine, he's a well-known lawyer, was retained in a case involving some of these juvenile delinquents. Had to interview a lot of those punk kids. Told me about it, said you never saw anything like it in your life, those girls, twelve and thirteen, just the ages of his daughters so he noticed especially, he said, which gave me the day's chuckle, they were made up, he said, with everything they could lay their hands on or steal, he kept on looking at an eleven-or twelve-year-old girl, he said, and forgetting that she wasn't a Mrs. America contestant. He said it was shocking, but you take a look at his daughters in six months.
But it's a rough, murderous business. How about next year's campaign?
Carol, with two choices. She could say:
The most important quality, I mean, granted the brains and aptitude and incentive, is the ability to distinguish when you are being treated as a woman and when you are being treated as a business equal. Now I don't mean by that that men necessarily think a woman is inferior just because she's a woman-I'm not talking about salary differentials and limited opportunities for women, although being in the personnel business I certainly could, but what I'm talking about is something else. Because treating a woman as a woman is not treating her seriously, which is what I meant by a business equal, and business is serious.
So you've got to have the ability to sense when a man is thinking of you one way and when he's thinking of you the other. And you've got to be able to change his way of thinking of you from one to the other, but that isn't very hard, all you have to do, with most men, anyway, there are always a few you just can't deal with on a business level, all you have to do is show that you think of yourself as a serious businesswoman, and show that you know your business and aren't up to any kind of feminine foolishness.
There are some women, I know, who try to go too far, in my opinion, who try almost to become men. I'm sure you've met them, they always make you think they're just about to hit you on the back and offer you a cigar and tell you a dirty joke. They always wear mannish suits, you'll notice, and in my humble opinion most of them are more than half dike.
Then there are women who go to the other extreme, all eye-expressions and daintiness and awe at the great big wonderful strong masculine world. But you won't meet many of them who're successes. They may marry the boss or they may get to be his secretary at double the going salary and half the typing speed-but, as I always tell girls I suspect of such ambitions, if that's what you want to do you can make a lot more money doing it full time, and you won't have to do any typing at all-but they don't make successful careers.
No, what you have to do is learn to use being a woman up to a certain point, and I really think a woman has an advantage in that way, and then know when to stop. It's really a wonderful game, if you can think of it that way.
The trouble with my husband is he is not mature enough to adjust to my success.
Or Carol could say:
My analyst really surprised me, when I went to an analyst, I didn't very long, it was more of a joke than anything, I was sure he was going to say that Dick's attraction to masochistic women must mean that I'm a masochist. But he didn't at all, he said, well, nothing more boring than people who tell you in all gory detail what their analyst said, but the point is that Dick doesn't think of me in the terms he thinks of them.
Speaking of surprises, of course, Dick really is one, and maybe the biggest surprise is that he is a surprise, if you follow my girlish grammar or whatever it is. I mean, when I considered marrying Dick I thought, well, he's quite nice-looking and has good manners and he was forty, just about the right age, I was thirty, and divorced too, and he has an awful lot of money, some he inherited and a lot more he made and now he's going into this new business and I'll bet he makes a lot more, he's the type, and I think he loves me as much as he is capable of love, but it won't be a mad thing, which was all right with me, my first marriage started out a mad thing, and boy, did that get to be a drag. But I didn't think he was the very passionate type, I mean, he was perfectly all right in bed, very good even, but I'm a girl it's easy to be good in bed with, if I say so myself and I certainly do. But he was always a little abstracted or distant. I just didn't think he was the very passionate type. And that was Dick, I thought, no surprises. So you can imagine my surprise when, oh, I don't think it was two months after our marriage, he came to me, in that calm, serious, reasonable way he has, and explained that he didn't want me to hear about it from others, that wasn't fair to me, and he didn't want to have to lie or pretend, that was sordid, but that he was simply a man who had certain strong tastes and he proposed to gratify them, that I must understand that any other women were merely means to gratify these tastes and were no threat to me as a wife, and that certainly I would be equally free to do as I wished as long as I exercised the normal prudence he was sure he could expect of me.
I was surprised, and a little upset, and I asked him what if I wanted a divorce. He said that he had waited to tell me until I had taken the bit between my teeth and so I could understand that such a line of thought would do nobody any good, which explained those sudden overnight business-trips he'd taken, leaving me looking at the telephone and thinking about all the men I knew it might be fun to talk to.
Another way Dick is a surprise, I'll spend a long time figuring out to myself the real reason he has done something, I mean the psychological reason, and then I'll go and tell him, you know, to impress him with my intelligence, and he'll perfectly well know the reason and admit it. The music business, for example, publishing and records, I decided a reason he went into it, just one of the reasons you understand, he has made an awful lot of money in it and he knows a tremendous lot about music, not just the kind of music in his business, of course, but real music, he's almost a professionally good pianist, and so technically he knows more about it than most of them, but one of the reasons was about these girls of his. When I told him that, he said of course, yes, he knew himself and he knew what he wanted, and he'd carefully considered where he would be at the greatest advantage, and decided that it was some branch of the entertainment business, where there is a large supply of ambitious girls, where the rewards for success are very high and where single individuals have the power to make success possible. He wanted a situation where he would have the maximum personal power.
Dick has told me all about it, how the thing is to choose the right girl. He doesn't agree with me that they are masochistic, he says it's not that at all, but it's that they want so hard to make good, to be a success, to have the chance of really being somebody. But what he wants, you see, is also a girl who knows she shouldn't do what he wants her to, and hates it, but wants the chance so hard she'll do it anyway, not to mention letting him hurt her if he feels like it. He says there are a lot of singers come in who would be perfectly delighted to trade a few lays for the kind of chance Dick can give them, and think no more about it, but that isn't what he wants. He says the best kind of girl he wants has come from the Midwest or South fairly recently but not so recently that she hasn't had a chance to see what a tough struggle she's up against, and knows what Dick can do for her, who's young, under twenty, has been laid all right but always with the fellow telling her he loves her and how beautiful she is and everything, not like Dick does. Dick says if he gets the right girl, and his judgment is not infallible but it is very sound, he can keep her crying a whole weekend except when she's asleep and without hurting her hardly at all, just to frighten her, bang her head against the wall or something.
I remember once this amazing scene, I'd come in from the island to do some shopping, I was just in the mood to go through Bergdorf's like an avenging flame, and I stopped in the bank to check my account and discovered that Dick hadn't put my monthly allowance in. My Lord, was I mad. I called his office and they said he wasn't there, it was the middle of the afternoon so I had a pretty good idea, and I roared over to the apartment and roared into the living room and just as I got in there was a whack and a yell, and there sat Dick on the couch, mother-naked and holding a rolled up Time magazine in his hand and there was this pretty little thing, equally mother-naked, kneeling on the floor by him, crying away, and I was so mad I blazed right into Dick without a word about what was going on, asked him what kind of a cheap four-flusher did he think he was, I knew damn well he was making money hand over fist and if he thought and so forth and so on, whew, I was furious. Dick frowned for a moment and said, Good Lord, yes, of course, he'd just been signing the check when an important call came through and he remembered now he'd forgotten it, and he apologized and got up and got his check-book and wrote me out the check, adding a couple of hundred as apology, and you know, it wasn't until he handed me the check that the scene struck me, Dick and that girl naked as the palm of your hand, and all. Dick wasn't the slightest bit put out, he said they were playing a little game, Sandra here goes to the other side of the room and when he says they're off she gallops across on her hands and knees, and if she isn't fast enough he gives her a whack across the titties, and you know, he said, she never is fast enough? He said to the girl, let's show my wife how we do it, eh, but the girl took one look at me and fell over bawling harder than ever. I went to the bank and then to Bergdorf. I shouldn't have lost my temper so much about the deposit, Dick is always very good about money.
Pia seemed relaxed and cheerful, her head leaning against the back of the seat and my shoulder. Discreetly, I held her hand. It occurred to me, however, that with none of our three associates in the front had events thrown us very close, that they had all demonstrated a certain propensity for physical action and had, indeed, proffered specific threats, however much these were rhetoric or the moment's heat. What reason had I to suppose that this was merely a casual ride through the summer night, rather than a deliberate removal of Pia and myself to a battleground where isolation might give free rein to their superiority of numbers and youthful athleticism? None.
I was revolving in my mind what little I remembered of unarmed-combat training, aware that it was simple-minded optimism to hope that combat would be unilaterally unarmed, when we -edged to the right of the traffic, slowed and turned into the wide sweep of a cut-off. "Some beer and a pizza," Buddy said. "Fine," I said, wondering if such artful duplicity was consonant with what I knew of his manly, straightforward nature.
It was. The place said beer-pizza, in flourescent letters six feet high all over it. In the parking lot outside the car, the smell of beach and sea momentarily supplanted the kitchen's stench of frying fat. We were probably well out the South Shore. The night was pleasantly warm.
The place, pine-paneled wallpaper and little lamps on each table, was doing a brisk trade,-couples and foursomes over an age-spread. The jukebox was aided by the merriment and television from the adjoining bar in making it possible to converse without being overheard by those at the next table or booth. We took a booth being abandoned by two middleaged couples, the men paunchy and hirsute, the women sagging and discolored in bareback halters. The waitress who came to clear away looked much like a slightly older Carol, similar clipped blond hair and ferocious regularity of features. She called us Honey. We ordered a pitcher of beer and two large pizzas.
I remarked on Carol's resemblance to the waitress, and Carol inspected her as she passed. "Yeah," she said, "she's cute. But what a drag. I waited, once. Running around like a dog whoever calls you. And kills your feet, I got small feet, they killed me. It was good money but not for me."
I said that many commentators had agreed there was no indignity in personal service undertaken with the proper spirit of craftsmanship and self-respect. And that sensible shoes are important.
"Yeah, a real drag," Carol said.
We had the beer and another pitcher with the pizza, and had ordered a third when Carol and Buddy got up. I thought they were going to dance and was about to point out the sign over the jukebox strictly forbidding it. They walked off and out the door. I looked at Pia. "They'll be back," she said.
The lumpy lout was slumped back in the booth corner. I asked him what he did. What do you mean, do? he said. I said I meant employment. He said he was going to finish high school next year, he helped out part-time at his uncle's gas station, he thought a trick knee he got in football would keep him out of the army, he didn't much care, he didn't know what he was going to do.
"My mother, she still talks about I should be a priest, but I don't know," he said, "I don't know about being a priest."
"A priest," I said.
"That's right," he said. "You don't think I could? Don't kid yourself. I want to get good marks in any school, I can get good marks. If I want to. The study in it don't worry me at all. Last year I had a bet with a guy I could be a B-plus in American History. I got a good memory for stuff like that. Maybe even the stuff you study for a priest is more interesting than the crap at school. I don't worry about that part of it But a priest, I don't know."
"The enforced celibacy, you mean," I said.
"Nah, that's not it. Sure, I bet it's rough sometimes, but it's like part of being a priest, if you're a priest, that's what you do, if you want to be a priest. My mother, she keeps telling me there isn't any way I could have a better life, the respect of people and like all that. But I don't think I will."
"You lack a true vocation," I said.
"You a Catholic?" he said.
"No," I said.
"Then don't talk about what you don't know," he said.
"You still want to fight?" I said, thinking it far better to attempt the necessary unpleasantness when they had imprudently split their forces.
"Jesus," he said, "no I don't want to fight. You want to fight I'll fight you, but what the hell you want to fight for? And all this beer. All I say is you shouldn't talk about what you don't know."
"Are you a Catholic?" I asked Pia.
"I was baptized," she said, "but I lost my faith."
"Shh," the lumpy lout said. "Don't say that. If you got to think it it's bad enough, but you shouldn't never say it right out loud."
"Don't tell me what to do," Pia said. The lumpy lout got up and went to the John.
After a long silence, I turned to Pia and told her that I loved her. She smiled.
"I do," I said.
"All right," she said, "you do."
Carol came up to the booth alone and sat down. The lumpy lout came back and Carol said to him: "Buddy wants you outside." He went out.
"Now what?" I said. "What's all the traffic for?"
Carol said she wanted a drink, not beer. Pia asked what was the matter.
"They'll be back," Carol said. "Buddy and me had a fight. He's mad at me. Goddamn Buddy. All the time he's asking stupid questions. Do I wanna do this? Do I like to do that? Did I flip at this? Wasn't that the greatest? For God's sake, I tell him, what's it to me, if he wants me to do something I'll do it, what's to flip, there ain't anything the greatest. All right, so we went out and had a good time tonight, sure, like we always do. So he asks me, wasn't it the most I ever did? What does he want from me? Sure, I told him we had a good time. Like we always do. He gets mad. Everybody's like that, everybody's always trying to get me to say, Oh, man, isn't that it, isn't that the real jazz. My parents all the time, I get a job this summer in the candy factory, all right, so it's a job in the candy factory, my parents all the time they say don't I have the luck, ain't I glad, ain't I happy, wonderful job, great money. Jesus. So it's a job in the candy factory and they pay me money for it, I sit on my ass all day in the goddamn white sheet they give me and listen to the lousy music come out of the wall and put their goddamn candy in their goddamn boxes and they pay me money. Would I do it if they didn't pay me money? So they pay me money. What's luck? What's happy? What's great? For Christ's sake, Buddy ain't nobody's fool and my parents ain't so smart but at least they're so old, they ought at least to have learned something by now, and the teachers in school and all the time on the TV and in the papers, everything is great, everything is the most, everything is the screaming jazzing far-gone stinking end. All right, everybody wants to be full of crap, let them be full of crap. What do they want from me? I know nothing's like that, I know it's all crap, even if it's all right it's all crap, so what do I have to shoot my mouth for just like they do? Can't just one person know it's all crap and shut up?"
"Some things can happen to you that are good and some things can happen to you that are bad," Pia said.
"Jesus," Carol said, "all the time I go around so mad. All the time I go around so mad I could spit. But there's not just only one thing, I could spit at it and I wouldn't be mad any more, it's everything, it's everybody. Sure sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things, why not? You think all the time only good things should happen, or all the time bad? Sure they do, so what? Nothing ever happens so good, nothing ever in your whole life happens so good as people all the time are saying about some stinking little nothing. And so bad things happen, Jesus, of course bad things happen, what do you expect, you're a goddamn piece of iron or rock that nothing can hurt you? That Buddy, I don't know. He's going in the army, oh man, isn't that the greatest, won't he have a ball. All the time he's saying. The lousy army, so he's going in the lousy army and wear a lousy uniform and live in a lousy barracks and break his lousy back. He's thinking about the great times he'll have all dressed out in his shiny uniform and lapping up the beer and making out with all the girls in all kinds of places. All right so he'll wear the pretty uniform and look like a soldier and drink some beer and make out in a lot of places. So what? Who can't? And he's thinking how great it'll be to do whatever he does, drive something or shoot something or whatever the hell they put him to doing, just like for real, just like in the movies, just like what real men do. All right, so he'll be a man, what kind of a thing is that to say it's the greatest about? If you're a kid and you lie long enough you stop being a kid. So what?"
"What have you got against being happy if things are good or not happy if things are bad?" Pia said.
"If only I could just spit at one thing that was worth spitting at," Carol said. "But there isn't any one thing worth spitting at. Sure I'm happy some times and not happy some times, but I'm mad all the time. I'm a little happy some times and a little not happy some times, but what's the big deal? So what? What, am I suddenly going to marry a billionaire'll buy me everything I see and take me everyplace there is? And anyway my mother is always saying money doesn't make happiness, so all right, it doesn't. Am I suddenly going to get a plague so no man'll touch me? Crap I am, and if I had a plague there's always some guy who wants it so bad he doesn't care and so one guy is better than another guy but so what, so he's better or worse, nobody's that better or worse, and if he is that worse there's always another someplace who isn't. Jesus, the girls in school were always having the trots about have you kissed this guy and necked that guy and made it with the other guy and wasn't he good and wasn't he not so good. All right, so with some guys it's one thing and with another it's something else, what do they have to make all the stink about? What do they always have to try to make me talk the crap they talk? Why can't they let me alone?"
Her white face blazing, she slammed to her feet and stalked to the John. "Poor Carol," Pia said. "Mad at everything all the time."
"Yes," I said.
"Like you," Pia said.
"No. I'm not."
"I could cut your heart out, telling me you love me," Pia said. "What do you think I am? What kind of a stupid, soft, silly slop-head do you think I am? I gave you what you wanted. Go tell your wife you love her. I could kill you, I swear I could."
Carol came back and threw herself down. She laughed and softly pounded her fists on the table. "Come on, Buddy," she said. "I want to move." I ordered her another drink, one for myself, went over to put a quarter in the jukebox, punched out the songs that promised the loudest, went back, sat down, drank my drink, took some of the remaining beer and asked Carol how she was. "I feel like fighting," she said, laughing some more. "How about you and me fighting?"
"What a happy knack you have of externalizing anger," I said.
"What's the matter, Carol," Pia said, "didn't you get enough from Buddy in the car?" I begged Pia not to contribute to the witless pall of psychologizing that lay like a gritty smog over the face of the world and further urged her in all things to look upon the brighter side. Pia went to the John. Carol took my hand and said I wasn't so bad.
The verdant grounds rose by graceful degree from the artificial lake to the chateau itself, in the design and construction of which no resource of ingenuity or cunning of artifice had been omitted. Here lived the Due, in that happy time before Envy and Chaos inflamed by Demagogues self-wrapt in the mantle of spurious Reason destroyed what they were unable to comprehend. In that time when, as Talleyrand has said, men knew the sweetness of living, here lived the Due, alone but for his servants and two hundred and seventy-three laughing maidens, each attired in her own beauty and perhaps a small garland of exquisite flowers, and here the Due passed his life in the most subtle and dedicated gratification of the senses. In small groups of plane trees artfully placed about the gracefully rising verdant grounds the sweet birds sang. All the time, the birds sang. Hour by hour, day and night, night and day, weeks and months and years and quarter centuries and half centuries, the birds sang, the birds sang, the birds sang. Tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet.
I got my hand back before Pia came. Then the lumpy lout walked up and said Buddy was waiting outside in the car. Carol said it was goddamn time and she was going to have another drink before she went. The lout left. Carol had her drink. I paid and we went out to the car.
Buddy said nothing as we got in, but started the car with a tire-squealing lurch. We drove in silence, except for Carol's low singing. After a while Carol put her arm around Buddy and her head on his shoulder. She continued to sing.
I asked Pia where we were going. "I'm going home," she said. I asked her to come into New York, to my place. She said no. I said please. She said no.
At Pia's house I said good night to Carol, Buddy and lout, and went up the stairs behind Pia. At her door she said: "You should have stayed in the car, they could have driven you to the subway." I asked if I could come in. She said no. I asked if she would come to New York tomorrow, she said no. I asked why not. She said she didn't feel like it.
I said: "Pia, I'm very sorry if I have offended you in any way."
She said good night, and unlocked her door. I said I would come and get her tomorrow afternoon at three.
She said, "All right," and closed the door behind her. I went down the stairs.
Somebody said, "Hey." Carol, leaning out the window across the lumpy lout. "Ride you to the station," she said. I got in back. Carol leaned over the seat. "Didn't make out," she said. "I bet Buddy you wasn't going to make out. I said you'd be down right away. She was mad at something. Buddy bet you'd make out, but I bet you wouldn't."
"I understand," I said. The car hadn't moved. The street was empty, all the lights were out in the houses. There was the empty street, the dark houses, the back of Buddy's head, the back of the lout's head, and between them Carol's bright head and rough voice. "Buddy was hoping you would make out," Carol said. "She used to be Buddy's brother's girl, before she broke off with him, and Buddy was hoping you would make out. He hates his brother."
"He's a bastard," Buddy said, without turning. "You know what he used to do? When I was a kid, four five years ago, he used to make me go with him when he went with a girl, make me sit in the back while he made out in the front, he'd tell me later what a hot time he had and no girl would ever give me a time like that. Takes a real bastard to do a thing like that to just a kid."
"With Pia?" I said.
"Marie?" Buddy said. "Nah, that was before he knew Marie."
"Oh," I said. "Didn't the young women object?" I had a terrible sense of the degree to which I was ignorant of Pia's interpersonal relations.
"Not with him," Buddy said. "He was a real make-out artist. The bastard. I hope the army chews his ass up good."
Carol giggled. "I went with him a couple times before I started going with Buddy," she said. "What a line."
"Yeah," Buddy said. "He ever tries anything on you. I got the bastard's knife, he gave it to Marie when he went to the army and she gave it to me when she broke off with him, he tries anything with you when he comes home with his goddamn uniform and his goddamn sergeant's stripes, he even talks about trying anything with you, I'll cut his balls off with his own knife."
"Hadn't we better get moving?" I said. The chronology oppressed me.
"Jesus," , Carol said, "I hate to go home."
"Yeah," Buddy said, and started the car. Trying not to ruminate, I asked if it was Buddy's car. Somebody had parked it in the garage where the lumpy lout worked. I said good night again at the subway station.
The moment I stepped foot in my lonesome home the phone rang. A man said: "Irving? Max. Get a pencil. Here is where you go." He gave a nearby address. "Max told you he is going to see you get a good time, you are going to get a good time. Like nothing in Cleveland, Ohio. You tell them Max sent you, you're Max's friend. And, Irving, remember, this is my party, you don't pay a thing, everything's paid, it's business, ain't it, I take it off the tax. I got to go now, Irving, I'm at the airport to fly to Savannah, I'll be back Monday I'll give you a ring we can make the final arrangements."
I told the big young Negro I was Max's friend Irving. The pale matron with high blue hair shook my hand and said they'd been hoping Max's friend would come. She said, Be our guest, be our guest, have a wing, have a breast. A girl dressed as a nude chicken ran out and offered me her breasts. A gimmick, the matron said, come on, first you should see the show, is early yet, I'll give you Gretchen for watching the show, she doesn't strike your fancy for later remember you got a whole basketful of eggs to choose from. Gretchen, she called, and a girl came out.
Rather short, blond, very pretty, wearing shoes, she looked like no one I knew, especially Pia. Whatever anyone of them tells you, she whispered to me, rubbing my fly, I can do more for you, you go with me. What difference does it make to you? I said. I get paid, she said, no get paid no eat, no eat, perish. You're the only customer in weeks, she said, it's desperation.
She sat me down in the dark in a big high-backed chair and sat next to me. There was a little spot-lit stage at
THE ENDof my toes. What show do you want to see? she asked, Giving, Taking, Wanting, Needing, Liking, Hating, Demanding, Teasing, In The President's Hunting Lodge, or Variety. I don't know, I said. Right, she said. Two naked girls came out, one spread her legs, the other knelt before her and buried her face, and the standing girl sang a song. They were both terribly eager, did I like them? Sure I said, but I'm with Gretchen. Gretchen sobbed for joy. Then a big naked girl came out pulling a small naked girl with enormous breasts and hands tied behind her. The big girl explained that the small girl had the largest firmest breasts in New York. I said no, I was with Gretchen. Then a very well-dressed cool-looking girl came out and looked me in the eye and began to shake all over. I said to Gretchen, Gretchen, let's go.
In the bedroom Gretchen took off her shoes.
I said: "Warmhearted whore, tell me something. I saw Pia tonight, not my wife, she's out of town, but Pia, who doesn't look anything like you. For some reason, she would not have intercourse with me. Which is doubtless why I am here. Do you read this to mean that my only interest in the girl Pia is copulatory, as is my interest in you, for example? I am married. Does Pia represent a complaisant or hoped-to-be complaisant sexual variation, a brisk diversion from the nuptial familiarities? You might think so, since my substitute for Pia's complaisance tonight is you, a simple satisfaction of simple lusts, irrelevant to any wider interests. Yet I had reason tonight to think that I loved the girl Pia, or, not to be crude, was markedly entangled in her. Have you an opinion?"
Gretchen smiled, moaned, had five orgasms and said: "I'd have to know a great deal more about your background, about your relationship with your wife and this girl, of course. But it seems perfectly plain from the evidence you give that any observer would wonder why you are talking about her at a rosy-red time like this if all you want from her is just what I've got right here for you piping hot."
"That's very true," I said. "You're all right, Gretchen."
The next day, Sunday, it started pushing up again for a heat spell. I got to Pia's somewhat late, around four. Despite the sun's unseemly rage the street was full of life as the natives passed to and fro, bent on occasions appropriate to the Sabbath or paused for rest and shade in a stinking doorway.
"Where," I asked Pia, "is the world's child bride?"
"She went swimming," Pia said. "Should I apologize about last night?"
"No."
"I was feeling all pushed around," Pia said. "All pushed and pulled around. I still do, I guess, but I'm not mad at you."
"Good. Let's go see what's rubbing Mr. Dicherty," I said, not feeling like analysis in the hot daylight street.
We sat in the shade of Dicherty's house and there was a little wind from the river. "Warm," Dicherty said, "but livable. You heard about the cop coming back last night? The notebook, better-spoken feller. Wasn't too bad a feller for a cop. Wasn't hardly what you'd call a cop at all, told me he was going to school nights studying sociology and such, wanted to be a teacher, which pretty much takes him out of being a real cop. Just a nice enough feller in the wrong uniform, which can happen, if not often."
"You deduce a hidden flaw in his character which led him subconsciously to choose the vocation of repressive brutality, however pure his expressed motives?" I said.
"Wouldn't exactly say that. Anyway, nice enough young feller, he was asking me all sorts and manner of questions. About the kids, their little club here, how it got organized, what they do and all. Seemed real interested."
"You didn't tell him, I hope."
"Sure I told him. Oh, no, I didn't tell him exactly everything, if that's what you mean, or exactly the truth about anything, but I told him, you know, like you'd tell anybody anything that wasn't exactly their business but then wasn't exactly not."
"Why was he asking? Is this happy group of innocents to be the object of constant police supervision? Shall we write a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt?"
"Feller said it wasn't for the cops at all, and I believed him. Said he was just interested on his own, connection with his studies or something like that. No harm, I figger, and if you find a cop who's human enough so he ain't really a cop, be a shame to get on the bad side of him if it don't cost you nothing to get on the good."
"Dicherty," I said, "does it never occur to you that you are overinnocent in trusting so much to your unsupported judgment of human character?"
"No," Dicherty said, "it never does. I been wrong in my judgment and I've made my mistakes, but there ain't never a mortal man that hasn't got to admit the same in the great white light of judgment, never a mortal man except one and he was no mortal man only but the son of God came down in mortal shape to redeem us from our sins."
"Dicherty," I said. Pia laughed.
"That's right," Dicherty said, "you ain't a believing feller, are you? Little things like that, my memory's liable to lose hold afore sundown. It's wonderful how it picks right up again once that evening sun's gone down."
"Praise God a-mercy," I said. "You a believing man?"
Dicherty considered. "No, I guess if you really put my back up to the wall, I guess I ain't. I mean, all the way down deep inside, I know it's all folderol and pap, pap and folderol. It's scairty folks trying not to be scairt and preaching fellers trying to scare folks to keep their own bellies full and mostly it's folks doing and saying and thinking what they always done and said and thought on account that's the way their momma and poppa raised them up. Trouble is, I may not be a believing man, but I sure got to admit that it's a comfort and joy to talk like one. Come down in mortal shape to redeem us from our sins. It's a false saying, the old saying, the devil has the best songs, it's false by the length of the stretch of God's mercy. Believing folk have all the best songs, by saying which I don't mean musical songs but all the good kind of words and talk that fills your mouth up all packed and warm and comfortable. And that's a blessing, now, and there ain't so many blessings on this sinful earth this side of Jordan's cleansing waters that a man can afford to do without, even if he ain't, to get right down to the is or ain't, what you could call a believer."
"Perfectly true," I said.
"I hate the Church," Pia said. "I really do. They're liars and thieves."
"She was brought up in the Catholic faith, and lost it." I said.
"That can be hard," Dicherty said.
"I find such hatred, in its refusal to equivocate, wholly admirable," I said.
"You're looking right pretty this afternoon, Pia," Dicherty said.
"Thanks," Pia said.
"Well, now," Dicherty said. "I wanted to talk to you and I guess you know what about. You saw yourself What was going on last night. These kids, I'm beginning to lose them, they're starting to slip away from my hold. Bound to happen, I always knew, but it's happening a mite quicker than I figgered. Which, as you can likely guess, is another reason I got to do my work on that power station sooner'n I figgered. I got to do it real soon. Now this has to be the last time I can ask you. Are you gone to come in with me in this thing or not?"
"Well, Dicherty," I said.
"I won't say again all the good reasons I gave you before, it don't take but one bite to tell a sound egg. And I ain't gone to try convince you I ain't just a crazy ole man making crazy talk, without no real idea nor no real plan nor no real chance to do what he talks. You ought to know me good enough by now to make a sound judgment that if I say I got a good plan and a good chance, then that's what I got. Now I hope you been thinking about it these weeks, thinking about what I said, about the chance to do a great thing you'll always have by you, the chance to strike a blow at them you don't like nor no man not in their pay likes, the chance to give a warning that human flesh ain't cold stone hut human flesh and has to be treated like, or a terrible time will be coming. You been thinking, now what's it to be?"
"Dicherty, first there's something else I want to say. When we were talking yesterday I let myself get a bit carried away in the flow of my rhetoric, and I sneered at your vision of yourself as the just, lonely and suffering man, bruised and tormented by greater force against which he has no weapon but his endurance and pride in that endurance. I want to apologize. It is a world-view the intellectual basis of which I find most questionable, but it is a stance which I recognize as thoroughly to be respected in emotion. Hold up your head and cry, poor boy, hold up your head and cry. Furthermore, it is a stance deeply embedded in the mythic American texture, ten thousand miles away from home and nobody knows my name, the railroad man he says good-by, and as such to be held close to the heart. I apologize."
"Shoot," Dicherty said, "you don't have to. There's one more thing aside from all the things I've said. I ain't saying I can't do this without you, not for sure, and I ain't saying that if you do come in to help me there ain't no possibility of it going wrong. Always is that possibility, however sure the chance. But I think I need you and I tell it to you right now again, and if you don't come in with me and I try as try I will and I fail, then you'll always have in your mind that it would have worked if you had lent your hand and it didn't work because you refused to lend that hand and because you refused and because it failed an old man's heart got broke, an old man without nothing in the world to wait or hope or pray for but just this one only thing. I've walked a long hard trail and come to my last pace of the road and if I can't make this last pace then let my heart break and let me die wishing I'd never set foot to the trail at all, and there's no more bitter thought to tear your guts with than for a man to die wishing he hadn't never lived. Now, what's your word?"
"Yes," I said, "I'll do it."
"That's right," Dicherty said. "That's good and that's right. I'll get some cold wine and we'll drink to that." He went down his stairs.
Pia smiled at me. "You really like the old man," she said. "If you can really like him, you can really like me."
"Oh yes," I said.
"That's good," Dicherty said, pouring the wine. "Don't think nobody would mind if I was to propose a little toast. Here's to all good men and true."
"The blood of the martyr is the seed of the Church," I said.
"How about you, honey?" Dicherty said.
"Oh, well," Pia said. "Here's to poison, it's a smart something's way of protecting itself; if you don't like it, leave it alone."
"Where," I said, "did you get that?"
"I heard it somewhere," Pia said. "Oh," I said.
It was getting on for seven, after a while, and Pia said she had to go. I promised Dicherty I would see him in a couple of days and we left. I had assumed that Pia meant that we had to go. It appeared not. She said she had to make dinner. I said I was not invited. She said no I wasn't. I said I would fetch her after dinner. She said she couldn't she had to go someplace. I forbore from asking where. She said that I had said I was coming out in the afternoon, I hadn't said anything about the evening or she would have told me she had to go someplace. I said I understood perfectly. She said it had been my idea to come out in the afternoon. I said I couldn't agree more.
After a lot of blocks Pia said she wished she didn't have to go someplace, but she did. I asked if she would spend the next night with me.
"No," she said, "not tomorrow. Tuesday."
5
Monday in the first office mail there was a postcard from Sally: "Just got here, terrible trip, place lovely and cool, water looks divine. Kate all right, sends love, don't get too tired down in the mine, miss you already, Love, S."
Later in the day Eyck came by to ask me something. I thanked him for and congratulated him upon his party, not having seen him to talk to since. He said he was gratified I found it enjoyable. He said he understood Sally was away, hoped I was not suffering unduly from loneliness or neglect, I must come to dinner sometime that week, he would speak to his wife about it. I said fine.
I asked, in passing, if there were any further developments in the grand mystery of succession. He said there were none of which he was aware. Then he said: "It is a wonder to me, Charles, how you manage to keep up a facade of interest in the machinery of this establishment. Your motives for doing so are less obscure, I think, being in part good manners and in part a feeling of necessity to act as the position requires. But how, I wonder, given your enormous, your yawning lack of interest in this place and all that is in it, do you contrive as realistically as you do to display the outward manifestations of emotions so inwardly lacking?"
"Am I being told that I lack interest in my work?" I said. "Charles, please, do not misunderstand me, I mean no slightest insinuation of criticism. You are, as I have no doubt you are aware, most admirably competent, most unimpeach-ably successful in your tasks. No one here more so. But you are thoroughly without interest other than in the craftsmanly application of your skills, thoroughly without wider interest in the material upon which your skills operate or the milieu within which that operation is performed. I have wondered why you have not moved to an area of endeavor where this would be less so, but I suppose it is because you have not found any such."
"You stun me, Henry," I said. "You peer into my aquarium and find strange growths I myself had not dreamed of. You tell me odd glowing truths about myself I had not suspected."
"It is an ability I not infrequently display," Eyck said. "
That evening I ate alone at a fish restaurant and went to a French film demonstrating the first tender burgeonings of love and physical awareness in two sensitive adolescents, as played by a young woman who had gang-shagged the entire Academie Francaise, with swords, the previous afternoon, and a fairy. It was pretty funny. Three minutes after I got home the phone rang. Robert Richard Russell. He was agitated. He'd been trying to get hold of us all evening. Did I know where Kate was, she wasn't where she had been? I told him she was out of town, with Sally. He said he must talk to me. I invited him over.
"I suppose you know about the-the difficulty that's come up between me and Kate," he said.
"That's a very statesman-like way of putting it," I said. "I think I recall the main sequence of events."
"How is she?"
"Crying the last time I saw her, but that was some days ago and she may have stopped by now."
"Please," R.R.R. said, "try to think of us as human beings."
"All right," I said. "I'll try. Sit down. Do you want a drink?"
"No," he said, and sat down. "It doesn't mean anything, Kate has to see that. I wasn't secure enough in her love, that's all, I was afraid that if she knew things were a little more complicated, not really complicated, not complicated in the heart but only complicated in circumstance, then she would pull away. That's the only reason I didn't tell her."
"But you did tell her, therefore the present woe. Why the telephone call last week?"
"Of course, yes, it was criminally foolish of me, but don't you see, I've been ridden with guilt about this, about not having told Kate the whole circumstantial truth, and after I talked to my wife and started the arrangements for a divorce, it was a mixture of relief and exuberance and a desire to remove the load of guilt I'd been carrying, that I couldn't contain myself, I had to call Kate immediately and get rid of my burden."
"Divorce?" I said, "Kate didn't happen to mention you spoke of divorce."
"I did. I suppose she was so upset by the rest of it. But that's very cheering. If she really doesn't realize that I called to tell about the divorce, if all she's thinking about now is the married part of it, then she'll feel better when she finds out Won't she?"
"If she believes you said it and if she believes you meant it, she might. Or she might not."
"Don't you believe me?"
"No," I said. "On general principles."
"My God," he said, "how can you be like that? Don't you realize I'm a warm, breathing person, caught in a human situation, a man with all the fears and hopes and muddled emotions and contradictions of desire that any man has? In a situation with all the complexities and difficulties that any intensely emotional human situation has? I agree with you I've been foolish, but haven't you ever acted foolishly? I know you and Sally have a wonderful relationship, but can't you put yourself in another man's place, can't you try to imagine what it feels like to be in my position? I'm not a monster, I've been weak, maybe, I've tried to make things easier for myself, but who doesn't? If you want to blame me for what I've done, blame me, and I'll agree with you, I blame myself more than anybody else ever can, but at least have the compassion to realize that what I've done I've done out of terrible human necessity, out of the very nature of my humanity, a humanity you must have compassion for because you share it"
"I didn't say I blamed you, I said I didn't believe you."
"No compassion," he said.
"My good Russell, stop trying to change the subject, a normal forensic device, no doubt, but one unsuited to the occasion. Your humanity is to be assumed or I wouldn't have you in the house, unless you were a dachshund, of course. And stop trying to submerge the petty clumsiness of your real actions in the awesome tide of tragedy. Your little contretemps is, as you say, not an uncommon one and the stance of Lear upon the heath is not suitable. I myself find it unthinkable to sully the purity of my marriage vows in the way you have, but I realize that I am unusual in this. The point is, did you tell Kate about the divorce?"
"No," he said. "I didn't. I'd been thinking about talking to my wife and thinking about it and agonizing for Kate, and then I had to speak to Kate and tell her. But after that I did talk to my wife, I hadn't seen her in six months, you understand, we've been separated for years, and it's true what I told you, I am going to get a divorce. I do want to marry Kate."
"Well, I can say the best of luck to you, is all I can say."
"Don't you care what happens to Kate?" he said.
"Tell me something," I said. "What is the probable legal penalty for destruction of corporate property, said property being in the form of buildings or other structures appertaining thereto?"
"What? You mean if officers of a corporation destroy property for the insurance? Perfectly straightforward fraud, just the same as if it were private property. Why do you think there should be a distinction?"
"No, no," I said. "Insurance is irrelevant. Said destruction not perpetrated by officers or other employees of the corporation. Just folks, innocently destroying without motives of a pecuniary or fiduciary nature."
"Why? What are they doing it for?"
"No motive to be adduced as evidence. Say for the love of the game."
"Oh," he said, "you mean crackpot stuff. Oh, there'd be a finding and commitment for criminal insanity, that's all. Put him away for good, his own good too. But it wouldn't be more than one person, that kind of psycho never works with anybody."
"Not yet quite," I said. "What if it were a group, what if the finding of insanity, which, the movies tell me, depends on the inability to tell right from wrong at the time of the act, could not be applied, but it was clear that the defendants, although possibly a shade surly or even malevolent, were as sane as necessary?"
"Oh, well," Russell said, "purely theoretical. I'd have to look it up exactly, and it would depend to a degree on the extent of the damage, although if there were further intent I'm sure criminal conspiracy would come in, but it would be pretty serious. And in addition to the offense against property, destruction implies possible danger to persons, I'm sure the court would take that into consideration. And if anyone were killed as a result of the act, that is, in the perpetration of a felony, that would be first-degree murder. They could be executed."
"All of them?"
"All guilty of perpetrating the felony. Certainly. What are we talking about?"
"Just a fancy I had," I said.
"About Kate," Russell said. "What about Kate? I want your opinion. Do you think I should go up there and try to see her, or call, or what? I've written her three times since I talked to her and she hasn't answered. I'm torn between thinking I ought to wait a bit more, let her get over being angry and realize that I love her and if I acted foolishly I acted without malevolence, without meaning harm, wait for her to write, on the one hand, and on the other I'm afraid she'll simply rationalize herself out of the relationship if I don't do anything about it."
"Nicely balanced probabilities," I said, "in the absence of any information."
"I told her it proved how much I love her, the fact that for a while I was afraid to tell her about my complication but then I had to. If I didn't really care I would have told her right away or wouldn't have told her at all. I've explained this to her."
"Everything unpleasant seems to prove you love her," I said.
"And then there's that kid, Donald, she was mooning about when I met her. I don't think there's anything left in that, especially since he got engaged, but she may be driven back to thinking about him. You can never tell. He was certainly a bad apple."
"Kid Donald, too," I said. "How rich in resource is the human heart."
"But sometimes it's valuable to let anger burn itself out, until the whole person can survey its whole range of emotions without being obsessed by just one, can see what it really needs and wants."
"Plausible, most plausible," I said, "yet consideration brings counter-currents."
"Given a certain level of hurt, the healthy organism may cut itself off emotionally from the source of pain, even if that withdrawal is essentially harmful to the organism. She might react that way."
"Almost you convince me," I said, "yet unimaginable is the non-lurking of ramifications more tender."
"And of course, I've got to consider, as Kate must be considering, what my actions really mean. I love her, I know I do, more than I've loved anyone, but it's obvious that to some extent I unconsciously wanted to break off with her or I wouldn't have acted as I did."
"A point as shrewd as mother's milk," I said, "but corollary may carry comfort."
"It's true she's old enough to know that anyone has certain ambivalent feelings in any love-relationship, no matter how intense. Our emotions can never run wholly in one channel."
"We seek further withers still unwrung," I said.
"Even so, there's more to it than that. The fact that I've been separated from my wife for two years and haven't done anything about getting a divorce implies that maybe I haven't felt myself ready for a stable long-term relationship with anyone. Kate will surely think of that."
"Is gloom without glimmer?" I said.
"It has to be pointed out to her, after all, that the very fact of my bringing my marriage into the light, for myself as much as her, deciding that I'm going to clear it away, means that my relationship with Kate has passed that hurdle."
"You leave me dazzled but exhausted," I said. "What is the direction clear-distilled from this heady brew born in brow-beaded heed? Is heading bridesward? Is bedding bridling? Whither?"
"So I wanted to ask you what you thought," Russell said. "Shall I speak as a friend or as a prospective brother-in-law?"
"I hope you can do both."
"As a friend, then, you are making verbal noises without significance. Surely the permutations of Kate's possible modes and moods are endless, since each state engenders another. Surely the dullest eye can grub out what multiplicity of motives it desires. Don't stand there talking, man, act. Or don't act, but stop talking. Don't booze yourself with the belief that your ratiocinations and ramblings are within six hundred yards of intellectual analysis and the use of reason. You can't reason, you have nothing to reason about. You can't analyze, the only thing for sure in your test-tube are a few obvious blatant emotions and a few obvious blatant facts. Whatever gnarled and braided complexities may he behind these elephantine elementals are not going to tell you anything, your equipment can't reach them, your eyepiece can't focus them, your mirror can't resolve them. They're too complex for your model, too small for your wavelength, too ephemeral for your shutter.
"So either disappear for ever, leaving behind the faint odor of the indeterminate dead, or go see Kate and grovel, but only to the degree that will not destroy your position afterward. At the moment she's not communicating with you. Go communicate, put life back on the rails, and for what comes after there will be time to use craft."
"But you're not trying to tell me," said Russell, hoping that I was, "that we shouldn't bring our intelligence and insight to bear on our deepest problems? You're not saying that we shouldn't use what knowledge and reason we have, however fallible, in trying to see to the heart of our condition and see what we may do about it?"
"Oh my God," I said, "you're not trying to tell me that your deepest problem is whether you will again get into Kate, you're not trying to tell me that the heart of your condition is inability to decide whether you want to live with somebody or not?"
"It's important," Russell said.
"Crap," I said. "If it's not Kate's twitcher it'll soon be somebody else's. If Kate doesn't warm your sheets there'll be somebody else if you want somebody else. Those aren't problems for your intelligence and insight and reason and knowledge, they're the counters in the game your emotions are playing and will go on playing until they embalm you. They're beyond the scope and below the salt of your intelligence and insight and reason and knowledge. Those are other toys to be used in other games."
"But those are my problems," Russell said.
"Nonsense," I said, beginning to yell. "Your problem is to obtain the efflorescence of mathematics and poetry, to assure the purity of the air and the waters, to correct the laws condemning the sick, to refute the persuasions of all salesmen and to plot the death of kings. Leave your bleeding emotions to their own consideration and let your pecker stand up for itself."
"So you think I ought to go see Kate," Russell said. "You know, that might be the best thing. I'll go tomorrow."
"Good," I said. "I think so," he said.
The next day was fragmented on the chop of anticipation for Pia. At last we met on the plaza, got a taxi and went up to eat at a moderately grand restaurant in walking-distance of home. Pia seemed cheerful. We ate slowly, lingered, talked, and strolled to my house.
Pia investigated the place with womanly curiosity, calling attention to the fact that the hall ceiling was about to flake, that the bathroom fixtures and kitchen appliances were long obsolescent and that the small extra room was barely painted at all. At the bedroom, and Sally's and my marital bed, she had no comment. I had taken care to make the bed that morning. Back in the living room she said: "It's all right. Does it cost a lot?" I said yes but no more than you would expect these days, the ways things were.
She said, standing in the middle of the room: "Well, here I am."
I pulled her down on the couch and started to unbutton her blouse. "Don't you want to put the light off?" she said. No, I said, I had never seen her naked. "But when we do it can we go to the other room, to the big bed?" she said. I said we could. "That'll be nice," she said, "to walk around without anything on and in a big bed. Better than a car, even." I pulled her blouse off. She asked if I wanted her to do that and I said, No, I would. She smiled and said: "Like a baby." I took off her shoes, skirt, stockings, brassiere and pants. The flesh of her body was as hard and smooth as her face. She began to get excited in the process of being undressed, and by the time her clothes were all off her nipples were hardening and her hips moved fractionally. She lay on the couch smiling and I kissed her mouth, both breasts and her belly. You too, she said, plucking at my shirt. Exulting and lustful, remembering my thoughts of this moment and my regret at its unlikelihood, I took off my shoes and socks and shirt, unbuckled my belt and stood up. The outer door opened and slammed, and Kate came in.
Kate looked at Pia. Kate looked at me. Kate looked at Pia again. Kate said: "Oh my God." Kate backed out of the room. But not out of the house. I heard her quick step go down to the John, and the door close.
When I pulled my horror-drenched stare from where Kate had been, Pia had her underclothes on and was getting into her blouse. "Stop," I said, "maybe it'll go away."
"Your wife?" Pia said.
"No, no," I said. "It's my sister-in-law."
"The one that was with your wife? Then where's your wife? Put your shirt on," Pia said.
I put my shirt on. "I don't know," I said, "I don't know. What's going on?"
Pia laughed. "I guess you don't," she said. She shoved her stockings into her big purse, put her shoes on and was dressed. She applied lipstick. "And wipe your face," she said. I wiped.
"Aren't you going to get rid of me quick?" she said. "What happens when she comes out? What if your wife walks in too? Or all the rest of your relatives?"
"No," I said.
Pia shrugged. "Will you get hell," she said.
Finally, Kate came out. She stopped on the threshold, gave Pia a bright smile and said, "Hello."
"Hi," Pia said. Kate sat down, back stiff and hands folded in lap.
"Miss Cacherini, my sister-in-law, Miss Davis," I said. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm terribly sorry," Kate said, all crisp and hearty. "I never thought to call, I just barged in like a headless chicken, I have a key, you remember you gave me a key when I was staying here, I thought I might stay here, I ran away from-I ran away from up there for a day or two, I told-I said I was going to Northampton, arranged a fake telephone call just like in a thriller, didn't think I could stand the peace and relaxation without a day or two in the city, thought I might look up some people, don't have the key to my friend's place any more, left it with her superintendent as she told me, didn't want to go looking for him, horrible old man, besides, they may well be back by now, it wouldn't be fair to ask them to cram one more in that tiny place, I thought I might spend the night here if you didn't mind. Sally's fine. Sally's my sister, his wife."
"He told me," Pia said. "Relax. I feel stupider than you."
"Have a drink," I said, "I will."
"I want to go," Pia said.
I couldn't think of anything permitted me to say, but I said: "Don't." Pia stood up. "Where?" I said.
"Home," Pia said. "Where do you think?" She stepped forward and looked down at Kate. "So long," she said.
"I'm terribly sorry," Kate said. "I wish I hadn't come."
"You're a dirty liar," Pia said, and walked out. I came behind her.
At the door I said I'd put her in a taxi. She said, No, the subway would be empty now. I said I'd walk her to the station. "You don't have your shoes on," she said. "No, I want to go by myself, I'll feel better. You go and try to talk her out of telling your wife, fat chance you have."
I kissed her. She was unresponsive. I could hear Kate walking around the room behind us. "Oh, God, I'm sorry, Pia," I said. "What stinking bad luck."
Pia shrugged inside my arms. "Sure," she said. "I want to go."
"I'll see you tomorrow," I said. "After work at the regular place."
"Sure," she said, and left.
I went back in. "I am sorry," Kate said, "I wish I hadn't known anything about it. And I feel terribly sorry for her, no matter what she thinks, what a terrible thing to happen to a girl. Charlie, how could you?" and gave a sob.
"Oh shut up," I said. I poured half a glass of bourbon, drank as much as my mouth could hold, choked, coughed, poured more into my glass and went to the kitchen to get ice. Kate called for me to make her one too. Oh shut up, I said again, but not to be heard.
When I gave her her glass, Kate said: "How long has it been going on, Charlie?"
I laughed bitterly. "It was just winding up to go on," I said, "when you flamed into the garden. And I don't want to talk about it. If you are going to tell Sally then you are going to tell Sally, and if you are going to spare her the trouble then you'll do that. But I don't want to have to talk to you about it."
But of course we did. Who is she, she said. Nobody, I said. Were there others, she said. No, I said. This was really the first time, she said. Yes, I said. Am I telling her the truth, she said. Yes, I said. Do I love that girl, she said. No, I said, furious. Is she in love with me, she said. No, I said, and the flame of hope remembered itself to me again. "You mean it was just one of those things," she said, "you lonely for Sally?" That's what I mean, I said. Are you going to see that girl again, she said.
"Shut up," I said, "that's all, just shut up." I got another drink, and an enormous one for Kate. I wondered where Sally kept the Mickey Finn. Then I remembered. "I had a comfortable long talk with your Robert Richard Russell last night," I said. Kate indicated amazement. "He wanted my advice on the nature of things. He took off today for the Cape and to see you. Too bad you missed him." Befuddlement I filled in the details.
Kate asked: "Divorce, he said?"
"So he said."
"Oh damn. Now I'll have to start thinking about it again. I'd decided to accept my blighted hope and broken heart, pick up the pieces, smile bravely and go on. Or I'd almost decided. It was great fun being the object of adoration. Especially after such a long time of emotional jockeying and backing and filling and willing and wonting and doing and donting as I've had with my lousy luck. Men are supposed to be willing to say anything to get you in bed, I know, but I've been messing around too long with the academic type who are honest and have principles and owe it to you to be straightforward and merde like that. So Russell was nice, even if I didn't believe him, although as a matter-of-fact of course I did. But then when he called me and told me he was married. But now divorce. Hmm. Well, I don't know."
Delighted with this field of exploration, I said: "You could do worse, I admit, far worse. Whatever his eventual explanation of his odd information policy, I'm sure it will have the ring of truth in it and do his love no discredit. Then of course there's the problem of your own wants and desires. Not terribly important when all was simply youthful frolic and the raptures of the deep, but the threat of marriage makes you think."
"Yes," she said, "I know it does. Get me another drink, Charlie." When I came back she had taken her shoes off and was standing and stretching. "You know, it's funny," she said. "On my way down it crossed my mind that Sally would be, oh, you know, not mad or anything like that, but a little put out that I was spending the night in the house with you alone. She's never said anything, of course, but I've felt she's a little, not jealous, but you know what I mean, about you and me. Don't you think so?"
"Perhaps," I said.
"And then when I get here, what do I find, ho, ho, ho." She then laughed loud and long, jumping on to the couch and leaning her head over its armrest. After the last gasp she said: "Has Sally ever said anything to you about it?"
"No," I said. "She wouldn't dare. She's afraid it would drive me straight to your arms."
Kate came over and stood beside my chair. "Oh, Charlie," she said, "you are funny."
I put my hand on the back of her knee, as was usual in these little sports of ours. Her next line was to wiggle away and decry my proclivities as a dirty old man. Instead, there was a booming eruption and the heavy cruiser Indianapolis slugged me across the face. When I'd blinked the surf from my eyes I saw Kate flung back in her chair laughing so hard she wasn't making any noise but that of strangulation.
Jesus, I said. She came out of asphyxiation immediately and said: "And that's what I've been wanting to do ever since I saw you and that terrible girl in her birthday suit."
"Once I accept as a blow from fate's hand, not yours," I said. "But do it again and I'll tear your arm off and stuff it up."
"Oh will you?" said she. "Some o' that," said I.
Kate finished her drink and came over to me grinning. She darted her hand to give my cheek a puff of a slap. I grabbed her arm and she collapsed in my lap. "Charlie," she said, "what were you doing with her before I came in?"
"Stop it," I said. And this night had been to prove possible the crystallization of fantasy. "Stop it and get up," I said, "and behave yourself."
"Behave myself is funny," Kate said. "Tell me how you behaved yourself with her. You have to do whatever I want you to do, or I'll tell Sally." This was a relief. It meant she had not intended to tell Sally, and would almost certainly not do so in the guilty light of remembrance.
"Oh in that case," I said, to drive the wedge home, "we did all manner of forbidden and delicious things, tasted anticipatory delights and sipped participatory flights until hell itself would hardly have it Now get up, please. Don't say, Show me."
"Show me," Kate said.
"All right," I said, "take your clothes off."
She fiddled with the top button on her blouse and played at looking invitation. "Didn't you do it for her?" she said. "Anyway, kiss me first"
I kissed her, and she was farther along than I had thought. "Come on," I said, "enough faking it, take your clothes off and I will and I'll play around with you and do to you what I do to Sally and you'll excuse me if I call you Sally from time to time by mistake, you look enough like Sally to be sisters."
Kate half fell off my lap, went over and sat down and drank from her empty glass. "All right, all right, all right, all right," she said. "I know, I know, I know, I know. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'll go to bed."
"Wonderful," I said.
"I feel terrible," she said, "but at least I busted up your business. And if I ever hear a hint of it again, I will tell her." And went off.
And that was that particular year in Venice with Pia.
6
The next morning at the office, a phone call from Sally: Where's Kate? Presumably in her borrowed bed at our place, I say straight out, not complicating things uncontrollably. What is she going to do? I have no hard intelligence, but gather she is going to stay in the city for a day or so and then go back up. What is she going to do in the city? Not my field. Does she know that R. R. Russell is up there? I told her he told me he was going; how is the old boy? All right, Sally says, but terribly disappointed Kate wasn't here, and then he called her at school and she wasn't there and he got worried. He got worried, I said, ha. Is she being a nuisance? Sally asked and I said no not really, is Russell being a nuisance? Sally said no. Well, I said, I'll try to ship her back north at earliest convenience, and in the meantime don't get worn down by Russell's wanton wiles. Yes, Sally said, what a little brat she is. What a, I said, and we had the amenities and hung up. She was having a pleasant time but missed me. I was having as pleasant a time as possible under the circumstances and missed her.
Then Laszlo (it is to be understood that these little point-sets of interpersonal relationship were imbedded in the chronologically much larger and, very likely, economically more important work period. I do not dwell upon the latter because it would be understood by almost no one and I am no goddamn pedagogue; it was interesting, if it was interesting, only if you happened to be doing it, and I am trying to make the point that economics isn't everything). Laszlo, pleased to be full of doom. He dreamed last night that Purbeck was made successor to Eyck. The only explanation for this is that his unconscious perceptions, more acute than his conscious, "and I need not tell you, my friend, what absolute incredible super-radars of acuteness such a saying means," have noted signs of Purbeck-ian ascendancy. Incredible, I agree.
"My friend," Laszlo said, "Sally enjoys her vacation from you? I hope. And you, you enjoy? I hope again. But I do not know. You seem healthy but not happy, full of restful sleep, not pale with exercise of debauch, your hand is too steady, your eye is too clear. What is wrong?"
"You have a filthy tongue, like all your kind do," I said.
He asked me how Pia is. I said she's simply marvelous. Eventually he went away.
After lunch, Kate calls. She says when she woke up this morning the first thing she thought of was last night and she screamed with shame, she hopes the neighbors saw me leave because God knows what they think is going on, they must have heard her shriek, she's surprised the police and reporters didn't rush in for a good rape. Fine, I say, and tell about Sally's call. So he's up there, she says, and worried, well serves him right, I'm glad I came after all, I mean not really but still, I guess I'll go up there but not until tomorrow if it's all right with me. I say it's all right. She asks if she can make dinner for me, she needs to atone by suffering. I say she can; she seems safe as a source to Sally but best not stretch it by disappearance.
Pia after work. Although the outlines must have been clear to her, I explained carefully and in detail the circumstances of Kate's sudden resurrection, and made it clear that Kate would be leaving us in a day or two at the most. Pia seemed not terribly interested. "I didn't say you could help it," she said, "except everything has to be somebody's fault if they could help it or not so it's your fault even if you couldn't help it. But it doesn't make any difference. I don't care."
"Why mine? Why not Kate's? Or yours? I don't think it was anybody's, you understand, but if anybody's, why mine?"
"Don't be silly," Pia said, "you know why."
"No, I don't. Tell."
"No," she said, "you just want to be silly."
"All right, you're right," I said. "Mine the initiative, mine the arrangement, mine the house, mine the wife, mine the fault. But also Kate's the childish irresponsibility. And yours the complaisance."
"Sure," Pia said.
"Let us hope, then, I learn to bear my heavy faults as bravely as you do your light ones."
"I didn't say you're supposed to kill yourself. I just said you should know what's what."
"Yes. Forgive me for forgetting how sensible you are. Kate will be going, as I say. You'll come back."
"I don't know," Pia said. "I felt lousy about it yesterday."
"I know," I said. "I know you did, I'm sure you did. But that was a miserable mischance. Next time there'll be nothing to make you feel lousy."
"It was kind of fun for a while," Pia said, "I guess. And I like the idea of doing that to your wife, in her house. We'll see."
"Why do you like it?" I said hopefully.
"Why not?" Pia said. "Aren't I supposed to like stuff?"
"Certainly," I said. "Of course. Enjoy, enjoy."
Kate had a drink ready for me, which I didn't need. She was wearing Sally's shorts, Sally's blouse and Sally's apron. Sally's underwear for all Krafft-Ebing knew. I asked if she was. "I take a bigger bra," she said, "so there." Which sure shut me up.
After dinner, with which she had taken considerable pains, she said she was going to visit some people for a few hours. "I hope," she said, "that when I return I don't interrupt anything."
"No, no," I said, "I'll be saving myself for you. Blush with pie." She blushed.
I looked through some professional journals, fiddled around faith something possibly applicable to my work, decided it wasn't much. Kate came back around eleven. She'd borrowed a book for me from the Virgin Island girls, war memoirs by a Scotsman she'd read and thought I'd like. I started it. She read something scholarly.
"Very domestic, my dear," I said. "Are you testing out the process, seeing R. Robert Russell in companionable slackjaw in this chair?"
"No, I wasn't," she said. "What was that girl last night's name again?"
"No," I said.
A bit more reading. Not bad. He was against war. "I am reminded," I said, "of some man Laszlo told me about. Was an amateur photographer, had a Polaroid camera. Also was extremely wealthy and lived someplace I forget where his access to any number and variety of young women was unlimited. Peculiar thing was...."
"Don't bother," Kate said. "Peculiar thing was you want to try to tell me some complicated sexual story and make me uncomfortable. Don't bother. Can't you stand a little calm and quiet, no purple desperation in the air?"
"Sure I can," I said.
But he admitted war's illicit attraction, especially the nice clean civilized war they had in the desert. "A boy I knew took some pictures of me," Kate said. "I blush again."
"That's art," I said. "A different thing."
Until the silly ass apparently had a breakdown in the middle of it. "Well, I'm going to bed," Kate said. "I'll telephone you in the morning and tell you what train I'm getting." She waved, did not come over for a good-night peck, and went. When she had cleared the John I went too. I missed her. Or Pia, Or even Sally. Or somebody.
7
Dicherty said: "Sure, I been married a couple times. First time she died on me. Never knew what for, exactly, she just got poorer and poorer and died. Busted me up bad. Never fig-gered she'd die, was a good-looking big strapping girl when we married. I took on some, crying and yelling and raging. We had got along pretty good. Oh, I'd go along to one of the Front Street houses once in every while, but that wasn't nothing, everybody did, nobody talked about it exactly but everybody took it as a natural thing. It wasn't like doing it with a honest woman, we called them, that was cheating on your wife. I don't know for a fact she ever knew, I guess she must of. We got along fine, and her dying like that hurt me bad. Course I wasn't home much, working nights like I was doing then, was running a all-night poker parlor, just managing it, you understand, didn't own no piece of it, worked a twelve-hour day, six to six, closed on Sunday, no women, no drunks, no sharps, house took five per cent honest, another five per cent one way or another. And I'd sleep a lot of the day and we had two little kids she looked after. Sent them to her folks when she died.
"Then a time after, I was in Ohio, Canton, I married again, there'd been women between but it never got itself shook down as far as marriage. She was a pretty little woman, lots of fire and spirit and spunk, we scrapped some about this thing or another but nothing you'd really mind, just a little woman trying to be bossy to make up for being little and a woman and all like that. Was educated, too, had used to be a schoolteacher. We got along fine. Was in the Depression but I was doing good, had made some money in prohibition and bought part interest in a big saloon after repeal. Then one day somebody laughed at me wrong and I found out she was cheating on me with some feller was a second cousin or something of hers. I put it to her and she said yes right out, didn't I cheat on her. There wasn't no Front Street or houses or all like that there, and I hadn't but once but she'd found out and gone on to take her revenge with this twerpy second cousin who'd do what she told him to do. No double standard she said, and I said I admit right out I did it but I only did it once how many times did you, talk about double standard. She said she didn't know how many times I had, if I did once I could a thousand, so she'd just gone on singling up the standard. It's out now, she said, shall we wipe the slate clean and start again. I said no, woman, you've made a fool of me and it's good-by forever. Don't know exactly what made me do it, but I didn't feel no choice. Heard later she got a divorce for desertion. Had two kids with her too.
"So taking all in all, while it's so I been married a couple times, I don't stand up to be no expert in it. Getting married, sure, twice doing and about a hundred and fifty times watching out not to do, that I know. But staying married for the long pull, no, Matter of fact, I don't rightly believe there is such a thing as a expert there. You got to have done it to know and if you've done it for the long pull then you've only done it once and that don't prove a thing, knowing just one case. And if you know lots of cases you ain't done none of them for the long pull.
"Thing I can't understand is not what you're doing, I know what you're doing, but what you think you're doing and working to do. Like I told you, you ain't just out for any tail whatever exactly, or you'd be getting more of it, and whiles you say you're in love with that Pia you don't plan to do nothing about it, I mean about the love in addition to the tail, and you try to act as if you ain't married but you're all the time saying how you are, and you say sure you love your wife who doesn't but you say she gripes you a lot but you ain't planning on doing anything about that, either. You see what I mean?"
"Sure," I said. Pia hadn't come to work, I'd called; she had a cold. Immediately after dinner, I'd recoiled from return to an empty house and gone to see the old man. "You imply I must have a grand design. Not so. One swims against the tide of events, but only to stay in one place, inside oneself. The tide is in charge."
"Now that ain't so," Dicherty said. "Here come the kids." Carol and Buddy came around the hut. Buddy was carrying a case of beer. "Hey, Dirty," he said, "can I put this down the cellar?" Dicherty said yes and Buddy went down the stairs. Dicherty asked Carol where he got it. "Off a delivery-truck," Carol said, "the dopes left it open."
"Carol," I said, "are you the product of a broken home?"
"No," Carol said, "I wish to Christ I was."
"Yours is an unhappy home environment?" I said.
"Ah, it's all right," Carol said, "they just give me a pain in the ass."
"Odd," I said. "No moral sense at all, and not a product of a broken home nor an unhappy home environment"
"Moral sense?" Dicherty said. "You talking about swiping the beer? What kind of moral sense has that got something to do with?" , ml
"Property is theft, you mean?" I said.
"No I don't," he said. "So what I mean is, what do you think you're doing?"
"Why," I said, "I'm doing what any man with an ounce of brains and guts and character would do."
"An ounce ain't much," Dicherty said. "How does it divide up?"
"Don't be glib," I said, "at your age. What I'm trying to do is what every pastor, priest and rabbi is trying to do, what every marital counselor is trying to do, every mental therapist, every insurance salesman."
"It's no fat off my ribs," Dicherty said. "I was just asking. I ain't preaching no infant damnation, no predestination for hellfire, I ain't saying you was born to fail. I was just asking."
"Well don't. How the hell should I know? I am a stranger here whose train has stopped an instant at this nameless station and soon again will depart, destination unknown."
"That's okay with me," Dicherty said, "I got as much manners as any man. I know enough not to stick my nose in."
"I am reminded," I said, "of a young woman I met once in my father's house. I found her sitting on the stair-landing one morning. Her regular features, warm chestnut hair and full bosom impelled me to ask her how she was. She was not well, it appeared, being a clerk in a five and dime, living in one room with three other girls and having few social opportunities. I asked if she fornicated with any frequency and she told me, with a regretful shake of the head, that it was an act impossible, her parts being infantile. Promptly she gave birth to twins, but continued to maintain that God Himself had not laid hand on her, and had He done so it would have availed Him nothing. One never knows."
"Sure, sure," Dicherty said. "I don't mind. Thing like that happened to me once in a bus station in Salt Lake City. Fat lady got off the bus from Los Angeles, asked me if I was a Mormon, warned me if I was I better get ready to stop, she was come to convert the Mormons and put a end to their disgusting practices of pagan marriage, was what she said. I told her she could pass me by, I was saved already, but I heard about her later, in a couple of weeks was doing pretty good, had a nice little church going, until the cops stepped in and threw her the hell out of town."
"But things like that don't happen often," I said. "In the natural course things go on as before."
"I've had that happen to me too," Dicherty said.
"Well, I'm trying," I said. "Here come the twins." Carol and Buddy came shambling up and asked if no one else had arrived. We said no. They sat on a box. Buddy had a puffed lip and a torn shirt. Some guy, he said, tried to make out with Carol, I fixed him. Carol said that was crap, the guy wasn't trying anything, Buddy got on his back and made him fight just because he wanted something doing. Ah, Buddy said.
Won't the victim enlist the help of his gang, obtain weapons and come looking for Buddy with murderous intent? I asked. They said no. I asked Buddy if he thought it decent to resort to violence on another person because of his own emotional problems. Buddy said sure. Carol said the other guy didn't get the fat lip, Buddy did. I said that wasn't the point. They said so what.
I missed Pia very much. Nobody in general, Pia in particular. What if she should die?
I began to be tormented by erotic visions, starting the moment before Kate came in.
Carol and Buddy left, saying they might be back later with others.
Dicherty said: "You ain't feeling so good."
"I wish Pia weren't sick today."
"Sure," he said. "Stands to reason. Feller'd feel fine if he was on top of a fine girl like that."
"Well, damn it, of course," I said.
"Except even as good as I was, it don't last forever. Always comes a time you got to roll off," Dicherty said. "Really," I said.
"Course, they's other women in the world," Dicherty said. "Who?" I said.
"Oh, there is," Dicherty said. "Like that little sister of Pia, seems kind of sweet on you, she don't seem to be the saving kind, to keep it in the bank. She's like to be around in a while."
"No," I said.
"Don't figger," Dicherty said. "Ain't there none other you know of?"
"No," I said.
"That's a wonder," Dicherty said. "That is a wonder now. You hadn't ought to be so choosy. A man ain't got a right to be so choosy. It ain't natural."
"Good-by," I said.
"Course it's possible you was on top of some nice girl, and you roll off at the end like you got to, you still wouldn't feel no better. Possible you was just meant to feel not so good at this moment."
"I reject that," I said.
"Have a drink," Dicherty said.
"No thank you," I said.
"You ought to do something to take care of yourself," Dicherty said. "The selfsame words my mother used to tell me when I was small. You ought to do something to take care of yourself."
"Thanks," I said.
"Man's got no right to let himself go down," Dicherty said. "Man owes that to himself if he don't owe nothing more. Course, a man always does owe something more, is a lot of the trouble, aside from your wife being away and Pia being sick and you being too choosy to go down on the kid and all."
"Good-by," I said.
"Sure," Dicherty said, "I know. Now don't you go away thinking I was prying in where I been told not to pry. I was just talking, like anybody might talk to a feller he knows."
"Just," I said.
"You got no call to reproach me there," Dicherty said. "I aim to be so as much as any man. Which ain't biting off a real choker, but you can't expect more than is due."
"But I do, Dicherty," I said, "I do. I hesitate to appall your ancient ear with the enormity of my expectations. Not only of you and for you. Not only of and for all I see about me, family, clan, totem, tribe, nation and state. But for myself as well."
"Like such as?" Dicherty said.
"Why talk?" I said. "Act."
"Sure," Dicherty said.
"Good-by," I said.
"I don't know," Dicherty said. "Now you mention it, you ain't asking for so much. Regards to your wife and Pia there, all you're asking is the right to piss into the wind without getting wet. You, any man, surely got a right to ask that. You're certain as the river gone to get wet, but that ain't got nothing to do with your right to ask. Same way, you got a right to ask that the lying scheming thieving white-toothed bastards up at that powerhouse of mine take their spines out of their safety vaults and shove 'em up into place and start acting like what you think men ought to act like. Sure, asking don't cost, and if nobody never asked nothing then there'd never be no answers."
"Dicherty," I said, "you artful old man, never think that you have succeeded where the massed guns of society failed, never think that you have blinded me by your misdirection and subtle shift of ground. Congratulations, however, for what you have done, although my eyes are open to your craft. I am aroused to just that pitch of enthusiasm you require. You paint for me the futility of mere theoretical formulation. You whip me forward to the practical reality of action. I spring ready to the task, cold fire in my eye and the martyr's rapture in my heart. Bring on your explosives, your gelatines, caps, blasting powders, detonating wires, all the simple toys of your old-fashioned persuasion. Explain the plan, teach the charts, confide the passwords, and I will help you lead your ragged, gallant battalions against the bastions of the dragon Error. Up, man, and to work; my blood races."
"Yeah, well I'll let you know when things are ready," Dicherty said.
"Do," I said. Carol and Buddy came back and asked if anybody had showed. Goddamn, Buddy said, isn't any action tonight. I asked what action they had in mind. Buddy said, Whatever's going but there ain't. C'mon, Carol said, let's go find some old lady to beat up on. Buddy said that was a drag. Carol said yeah but what else did they have to do. Buddy said okay, okay. They left.
"You ever sat at the bar of a saloon," Dicherty said, "with maybe only a couple drinks inside you, not in no hurry to get a drunk on, just setting easy? First you look yourself in your own eyes in the mirror behind the bar, then you look left and look right and there's a whole world of bottles there, a whole world of different bottles, all shiny and glittering the light, all kinds of color and shape. And it comes to you, you got all the time, you got money in your pocket, you got no man to tell you yes or no, you got a whole world of bottles and you can take a drink from any bottle you want. You ever do that?"
"Sure," I said.
"Well, every minute goes past the clock they take a bottle away."
"We must learn to live," I said. "Bottle by bottle, we must learn to live."
"Till there's nothing but empty shelves behind the bar. And last thing you look, you look yourself in your own eyes again, and you see the minute coming when they take you away too."
"There's a star-spangled banner flying somewhere," I said. "Don't bother me about corporeality. There's no such thing as a real flag."
"And it all happens in a wink from the time you first look in that mirror," Dicherty said, "it all happens in a wink, from the time you got all the bottles in the world till the time you got none and you're going, it all happens so fast you never get a chance but to think about them bottles, not a one did you get to drink from. Not a real drink."
"Don't regret, Dicherty," I said. "Your portion is my portion is the common portion."
"Do tell," Dicherty said. "I was born and died at my birthing. Do tell."
"But you screamed coming out the breach," I said. "Nobody else can scream for you. Scream, Dicherty, scream. Cast your mind on Carol, say, that metdesome mare, that splendid animal."
"You know I can't use no animals no more," Dicherty said. "I told you that, was they to know twice the tricks them Crazy Club girls in Chicago knew."
"Then cast at the power station, Dicherty, the splendor of the stacks falling, the walls breaking and power wounded at its source."
"I know," Dicherty said, "I know. But that even I been thinking about too long. I'm starting to misdoubt even about that. I thought it and I talked it but now I misdoubt the doing."
"Misdoubt not," I said. "From this bottle you shall drink. I have pledged the cunning of my brain and the vigor of my arm to aid you. You must do it, Dicherty, the time cries for it, the people await it, the chronicles have prepared for it a place of honor. It is your masterwork, I won't let you shrink from it now."
"Well," Dicherty said, "yes. I reckon so. That makes me feel a mite better, thinking I will."
"Good," I said. Carol and Buddy came back and asked if anyone had showed. Goddamn, Buddy said. I asked if they had prospered in their task. Nah, Buddy said. Buddy got chicken, Carol said, we found a old lady but he wouldn't beat up on her. Why not, I said. Chicken, Carol said, just lousy chicken. So all right, Buddy said, we could of got another old lady. Chicken, Carol said. No law it says we got to beat up on my mother, Buddy said. Chicken, Carol said, I beat up on mine all the time, least I try. She's rougher than me and I got to get her when she isn't looking. I try to, but boy, is she a killer. But I try, I ain't chicken. Yeah, Buddy said, well I ain't chicken but I ain't stupid either, you want to beat up on my mother you get eight or nine guys with baseball bats and I'll help you but I ain't going to commit no suicide by trying to beat up on my mother without nobody but the two of us. Chicken, Carol said, and they left.
"I feel cut off," I said.
"Jesus," Dicherty said, "that's bad. And a young feller like you."
"Don't be coarse," I said. "You know what I mean. I suppose it's the sudden evaporation of Pia. My vital center seems suspended."
"I bet you. The most times I ever did it at a time," Dicherty said, "was fourteen. Needn't look like that, I got no cause to lie to you, it was fourteen, I kept count. I remember it plain. Was a Chinese girl in the cellar of her daddy's restaurant'. Never slept a wink all night. Had noodles all over me. She was very willing, but man, I'm telling you, was she ugly. I was just about your age."
"You mistake me," I said. "It is a sensation of removal and exiguous perception. Of the infinitely small and infinitely opaqued distance delta obtruded between this humble nerve bundle and its direct, its Wordsworthian apprehensions of reality. But not to bore you. It is, you know, a myth that ugly women are sexually superior. Breasts like bunches of sour grapes, and all that."
"I get you," Dicherty said. "Ain't nobody don't get 'em. Colored feller I was in jail with once used to say, black man, brown man, white man, ain't none of 'em but knows to be blue. Sure thing."
"Don't vulgarize the exquisite uniqueness of my state by comparison with common feelings," I said. "What's your word on the Negro problem?"
"What I can't figure," Dicherty said, "is why them fellers take it all so quiet. Was I black, I'd be rousting up all the other black fellers, get us an organization like them Mau Maus, get us guns, pass on the word to the white fellers that we start getting treated right or by blazing Billy Jesus they got a war on their hands. Was a minister to know every time he climbs on to his hind feet and starts talking about the taint the Lord laid on the sons of Ham he was as liable as not to get a gut full of buckshot, things might look up."
"You preach rapine and civil strife," I said. "Besides, there are too few Negroes. They'd lose the war. But it's an attractive idea, I admit."
"Sure. I know I would. But if I was a black feller I'd be so goddamn mad I wouldn't care. That's what I can't figure out, how come them black fellers is so reasonable. It ain't reasonable to be so. It ain't hardly human to have the patience of a saint. What was the most times you ever?"
"Sixty-five," I said, "the daughter of a vice-president of IBM, in the tool compartment of her father's computer. I was all over covered with digits. She was beautiful. We spent two days and three nights in the uninterrupted performance of the act of love. I went into that tool compartment a boy. I came out a tired old man."
"Make mock," Dicherty said. "All you want. I done and you ain't. I tell you, I bet you ain't even been in the cellar of Chinese restaurant."
"What's the use of it, Dicherty?" I said. "Have you ever asked yourself that? What's the use of it all, Chinese restaurants and uninterrupted performances of the act of love and the shy wildflower whispering its heartbroken confidences and a placid old face in the corner and the city of man and his nobilities, all, in short, this planet's populations. What's the use of it?"
"Man," Dicherty said, "that's the most goddamn stupid question I ever heard in my whole life."
"True," I said. "The most I ever did was five. With my own wife."
"Maybe I only did thirteen," Dicherty said. "And she wasn't all that ugly. For a Chinese girl. They don't run to much."
"I hope Pia's better," I said. "I really do."
Carol and Buddy came back and asked if anyone had showed. Goddamn, Buddy said. Carol said, We seen a whole lot of girls in bathing suits chasing a cop, a whole lot of them in bathing suits, they didn't have shoes on or anything, they were chasing this cop like they were going to tear him in pieces, boy, was he running fast. Odd, I said. Yeah, Carol said, there wasn't nobody else on the street or nothing, just all these girls in fancy bathing suits chasing after this cop and yelling and throwing rocks at him and he looked so scared like he was about to die of being scared and running and sweating and after him all these girls, they was all kind of cute too, big girls and kind of cute, they was yelling and throwing rocks and gaining on him. Boy, when they caught him. Come on, Buddy said. They left.
"It would have been worth a good deal to have seen that through Carol's eyes," I said.
"Sure," Dicherty said, "I know it. I done that once too. Was in the city of Tampa, Florida, spending the winter down there with a feller I knew, a Greek feller used to be in the rackets, had a chain of dry cleaners down there. Was his mother living with him, a old Greek lady wore nothing but black, looked like a hairy chinned no-tooth old witch, didn't say hardly nothing you could understand, only you could tell what she meant. Told me she knew magic from the old place, could magic a man into seeing things from out of somebody else's eyes. Do me, I said. You don't believe I can, she said. That's right, I said. I will, she said. In the afternoon, wasn't nobody in the house but the old Greek lady and me, the feller I knew was away on his business and his wife, Florida girl, kind of shirty, was away on her business and his couple kids on theirs. Old lady takes me to the parlor, pulls the shades on the sun, sits me down in a straight chair, tells me not to do nothing or say nothing or move nothing or think nothing, but only to keep my eyes open on the white wall. It was quiet, wasn't hardly no sound at all. I play it fair, like the old lady says, not moving, trying to think of nothing, which ain't so easy a thing to do. First I think how this is kind of silly, then I think things a little about that slurry wife, then I think about the wall I'm looking at, and that wall being white and empty, pretty soon I'm almost thinking about nothing. Then the old lady comes in and gives me something to drink, was warm and lumpy but I'd drunk worser tasting things. Then she sits down close behind me and puts her fingers on my nape and starts crooning at me in old country words I don't know. The quiet, and the empty wall and the drink and the crooning behind me. They go on, and they go on. And sure enough, the old lady was right."
"You pause for effect," I said. "What did you see?"
"Only one there was the old lady," Dicherty said, "so I see out of her eyes. I saw the back of my head. She was sitting behind me."
"How did it look?" I said.
"Like I was in a barber," Dicherty said.
"I don't know," I said. "Of course. But one never does, equally of course, so that best belief is equivalent to knowledge because it is the only knowledge we can have. Then what is my best belief as to the sight in Sally's eyes? Not different, I think, from the words of her mouth. Her optic recesses carry no significant secrets undiscovered in motions of lip and tongue. She sees in me a slight discomfort origined in my own intrinsic unease, discomfort which lends its quality to our marriage and to her. And since she sees a slight discomfort as the very basis and definition of human relationship, she is comforted in discomfort, holding that all being well would signal shallowness and insignificance. Discomfort, for Sally, gives meaning."
"It's a nice thought," Dicherty said. "How about Pia?"
"There you have me," I said, "there I do not dare to proffer even best belief."
"Be kind of funny," Dicherty said, "if you had it ass backward. If your wife was the one you didn't have no clue on and Pia was just only what she looked to be."
"A very cheap irony," I said. "Contemptibly cheap."
"It minds me," Dicherty said. "Time I was in Tampa. Was this kind of slutty wife of the feller, was always showing off more than need, was always acting like you just made a hint, you know what I mean, always blonding her hair up and pointing her tits at fellers, whosoever. The feller, her husband, was older than her, a real hard worker in his business, didn't 'pear to care for nothing much else but his family and the sports in the papers."
"And what do you know," I said, "it turned out he had two and a half mistresses in three and half rooms while the slut was in actuality faithful as a graying hound."
"You got it," Dicherty said.
"I don't want it," I said.
"That's all right with me," Dicherty said. "Ain't doing nothing but set here and talk. You had a better game you'd be playing it. Like getting that Pia off someplace comfortable and squeezing on her soft parts."
"Good-by," I said.
Carol and Buddy came back. Goddamn, Buddy said. What, I asked, was new? Nothing, they said, not a goddamn thing doing. They left. Have some cheap muscatel, Dicherty said. I agreed.
"Tell me, Dicherty," I said, "in your experience, is it the common belief of every individual to consider his life a work of art, significantly organized and purposefully structured?"
"Sure," Dicherty said. "Leastways, if by everybody you mean me. Thing like that's hard to tell without somebody says so right open, and mostly I forgot to ask folks. You know how it is, a man gets to talking about other stuff, hogs or elections, like, or women, even."
"Yes, yes," I said. "Well, the point is, I see my life as a work of art. Not a thing of beauty, you understand, necessarily, but an ordered composition in which each part has a relation to the whole, in which there are no irrelevancies, or, more accurately, any irrelevancies are significantly irrelevant. You take my meaning?"
"You want my opinion," Dicherty said, and foolishly paused to sip.
"So," I said, "you will see the force of my statement when I say that I feel that composition which is my wonderful and unique history is approaching the end of a chapter, stanza, movement. I am about to finish one ordered, purposeful, meaningful, significant phase. Interesting, no?"
"Bull," Dicherty said.
"Now," I said, "I suppose you will ask the obvious question. If my life is a work of art, who is the artist? It cannot be myself, since I am the work. Who is the worker, you ask?"
"I might," Dicherty said, "if I felt like playing games."
"You dirty, lying, dying old son of a bitch," I said. "What kind of a question to ask is that? I ought to rise up in ruthless rage and destroy you utterly, shred your flesh and cast the refuse into the Are and your ashes into the running river so that you are not only gone but have never been."
"Yeah," Dicherty said.
"On the other hand," I said, "let us examine one further possibility. Even granted there is no author of the art, no worker of the work, can we not easily imagine that out of all the random possibilities, out of all the functionally infinite permutations and combinations of lives and living, it might fall out that one of these, by the operation of mathematical chance, should indeed happen to be that work of art of which we speak? That all the random-ordered air molecules in a house can chance to move at the same instant upward, and so take off house and farewell, is a trite statistical possibility. Why, surely then, this is as possible. And if it is possible that the random universe may have moved to shape one life a work of art, why, then, surely, why not mine?"
"Okay with me," Dicherty said. "Why not?"
"I wish I were dead," I said.
"No you don't," Dicherty said. "Ain't no screwing."
"Well for God's sake change the subject then," I said. "By what sickeningly cruel and unusual punishment am I condemned to sit here listening to you cackle with malicious senile glee at the ultimate shapelessness and insignificance of my one life span?"
"My opinion," Dicherty said, "you ought to get yourself laid, like I told you. But you want to moon 'cause that Pia's sick, you moon."
"Do you tell me," I said, "that I can allay my deepest fears and forget my highest hopes by the simple exercise of an animal function? Do you tell me that man's profoundest questioning of his meaning and destiny is but an emotional eczema caused by the lack of immediate sexual release?"
"Hell no," Dicherty said. "Wouldn't say that, exactly. All I say is, you want to take your mind off your troubles, go find yourself a piece, is all. If, I say. Don't appear to me you really do, else you would."
"Troubles?" I said. "What troubles?"
"Fine with me," Dicherty said. "Just take it as it comes. Your life's about to make a change, don't see why not. Don't see no need for asking no foolish questions about it. It ain't no law you got to know why, it ain't no law you got to know what. Just take it like it comes, to see what happens."
"And that would be damn dull too," I said.
"Sure," Dicherty said, "but you see a man on fire you throw him in the lake. Don't mean you want to drown him."
"Thanks," I said.
Buddy came back alone. Goddamn, he said, me and Carol had a fight. No reason. There wasn't nothing else doing, there wasn't nothing else to do. So like goddamn idiots we had a fight. She ain't talking to me. He left.
"Well, now," Dicherty said, "there's Carol." Carol came back. Me and Buddy had a fight again, she said. Go ahead, Dicherty said, you can't lose nothing. Carol, I said, let me put it inside you and move it around, just for the fun of it. Hell, Carol said, I guess I better go find him. Maybe they'll be something doing later. Carol left.
"Great," I said. "But man on fire, man on fire, yes, for that, my thanks. There is, after all, a dramatic dignity about being a man on fire. A touch romantic, even. Thank you very much."
"That's all right," Dicherty said. "You done me a good turn tonight, setting me back on the rails. I'd come near to giving up blowing the power station, but you set me right."
"Good," I said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1
"I'm grateful to you," Robert Richard Russell said, "I want you to know that. I'm aware you don't like me very much. Partly because I haven't acted as sensibly as I might have, perhaps, and partially, I like to think, because you don't know me very well. But I'm grateful to you for giving me some sound advice when I needed it, sending me up to talk to Kate, and I don't have any doubts that we'll both get to know each other better. Kate is very fond of you, I know, she's told me so often, and I know you are of her, and I've said how much I like and admire and respect Sally, and now that Kate's agreed to marry me. Well."
"It is incredible to me," I said, "that a decent well-brought up girl like Kate could imagine marrying a non-Jew," I said, holding my head, chewing my lip, wringing my hands, shuffling my feet, stretching my jaw, twisting my neck, Another evening, no Pia. Sally had called, I must talk to R.R.R., talk of arrangements, act the father, there was nothing I couldn't put off, was there? She was very happy about it she said, she'd come to see it was the best thing, he was really much nicer than she'd dreamed, tremendously in love with Kate, Kate was really very happy, now that it was settled, you know Kate, she'd just been putting up a fight for the sake of the fight, she really did love him after all; R.R.R. had called, he absolutely had to talk to me, I was free for dinner?
Pia had smiled when I told her-her cold almost gone, nose not red. Tomorrow? She didn't know, she'd see.
R.R.R. and I had eaten dinner. Now we were at my house. He was still talking to me.
R.R.R. laughed loud and long. "Kate always says how funny you are," he said.
"Filthy goyim," I said, "they killed everybody."
"But seriously," R.R.R. said.
A full day. Laszlo a great bass drum upon which fate pounded out messages of catastrophe, horror, doom, perhaps worse. Pia looked splendid. Eyck at his smoothest and most allusive, but I had no idea what he was being smoothest about or allusive to; see me when you get a moment tomorrow, he said. Had Pia engineered the splendid look in specific intent for the evening? If so, how dreadful. R.R.R. rolled on. I held my head, chewed my lips, etc.
"Seems worried about you," he said. "Told me to ask you, in these words, whether it was all right?"
"Means nothing," I said. "The normal wifely concern for a husband trapped in the jungle, doomed by pressure of hunger to the exhausting and dangerous hunt while she lolls at the cool cave mouth in the uplands. She'll last out another week."
"Not Sally," he said, "Kate."
"Oh, well," I said. Great Kate, no I was not starting all over where you came in. Not at the moment, anyway. I held my head, etc. "Kate. No idea what she's talking about. She doesn't know what she's talking about. Engagement has cut the strand of her connection, always tenuous."
"You know," he said, "I got the impression. Did anything happen between you two when she was down here?"
"Just our usual furtive copulation. Sally wasn't here but we have ingrained the habit of secrecy."
R.R.R. laughed. He went on to discuss his relationship with Kate. Kate's with him. His with Sally. Sally with Kate. Eventually, he went away. I stopped wringing, etc. There I was.
2
I went to see Eyck. I know it's uncomfortably short notice, he said, but I hope you're free tonight. There's a man I want you to meet, who wants to meet you. I said I wasn't. I really do advise you, urge you, Eyck said, to make every effort to change your schedule. He's up from Washington, you understand, he'll be going back first thing tomorrow. I have taken the liberty of talking to him about you a little, he does want to see you, I strongly suggest you do try to arrange it. If there were any other time, but there's not, he's on a tight schedule. He'll be at my house at seven, it won't take long, then we're going on to a dinner party. I think it could be very important to you.
I said I'd try and let him know.
I got Pia for lunch. I told her something had come up, again. She smiled.
"If you don't want to," she said.
"Look," I said. "Look. It won't be long, Eyck's house at seven. You can come to my place, wait for me there. I won't be more than an hour, an hour and a half. I'll tell you what, there's no point in me going home at all, we can eat early, you take the keys and go to my place, I'll go directly to Eyck's."
"What'll I do at your house," Pia said. "What if someone comes in?"
"They won't. Nobody will come. You can do whatever you want there."
"All right," Pia said.
At dinner Pia laughed and once, laughing, bent so that the tips of her breasts brushed the table edge.
Eyck's man was named Riordan, fat, early forties and bright enough. The Eycks gave us drinks and went to dress. Riordan asked me the proper questions on academic background and fields of interest. There was, it appeared, a job with the Department of Defense. He conveyed, with admirable indirection but unmistable intent, that it would be a good job, starting at only slightly more money than I had then but with excellent possibilities, encompassing a whole research section. "You won't find," he said, "any place more aware than the Department of the values of the intellect and of the intellectual disciplines. I'd rather work for them than for any university."
"I believe it," I said.
"I can't settle anything now, of course, but I'd like your reaction. Henry, as you know, speaks very highly of you. I could start setting up the people for you to see right away. It won't be much bother for you. Career-wise, you couldn't hope for anything better."
"I don't think," I said, "I want to work for the Department of Defense right now."
"What?" he said. "What's wrong with the Department? You're not thinking of the old McCarthy run-around? That's been a dodo for years."
"No, not that. I don't think I want to work for any department of defense these days."
"You a pacifist?" he said. "We don't have much shooting in the corridors."
"No, I'm not," I said. "I think the departments of defense are trying to kill me, though, and I'd rather not help."
He examined me. "That's a little naive, isn't it?" he said.
"Probably. To think that my help makes any difference. Still, be foolish to take the chance."
"Come on now," he said, "you know perfectly well that any government must have a power arm. Always has and always will."
"Not with hydrogen warheads, they haven't. It's not, you understand, that I mind dying personally so much, as long as there's someone left in whose memory I'll be a faint sweet chord of regret. If everybody goes it would be lonely."
Frowned. "You know damn well that the U.S. deterrent power is the major factor in preventing that kind of war," he said.
"No I don't," I said. "I don't know any such thing. As far as I do know, which isn't very far because I don't get told much, but as far as I do hear and do know the U.S. policy is in the hands of a bunch of witless Neanderthals willing to take murderous chances with my life and my cities. I wouldn't have minded much fifty years ago, but the Department of Defense's awareness of the values of the intellect and of the intellectual disciplines now means they can manage to clean me out flat, statuary, waterworks and the little cottage where I was born. I don't like to think of nobody putting violets on my grave."
"And the Soviet war establishment?" he said.
"They haven't offered me a job yet," I said. "Frankly, I wouldn't jump at it."
"A government has to be prepared to defend itself," he said. "The only alternatives are defeat or chaos."
"I'm for chaos," I said. "Good old non-radioactive chaos. With a half-life of eight score and ten."
"No," he said, "you've got to face the world as it is. The givens of the problems are there, hydrogen warheads and all. You've got to work with what there is."
"Not me," I said. "Not those givens and that problem, I don't have to work for. Against, maybe, if I knew an against."
"Well, of course it's completely up to you. If that's the way you feel about it, there's no more to be said. I understand you knew Teddy Miller at Cambridge, did you hear his latest kid has cerebral palsy, poor guy?"
After some chat Eyck came back and we had more, then Mrs. Eyck, and we had another drink, and at last the meeting broke up. In going, Riordan said to Eyck: "Your young friend has exercised his prerogative as a free American citizen to refuse to work for us. He thinks we're killers."
"Indeed?" Eyck said.
"Not very flattering that you don't really need me," I said. "And please, to remind me of my present good fortune is to make more poignant my imminent destruction."
"All I can say," Riordan said, "is that it's lucky for you not many people think as you do."
"That's an idea," I said, "let's try it and see."
"If you don't want to be responsible," Riordan said.
"Exactly," I said. "I don't. Do you?"
"You know what I mean," Riordan said. "I don't mean emotional melodrama."
"Boom," I said. "Boom boom."
Slightly shaken by this, I hurried home through the tepid soup. After nine; there was the danger that Pia had left.
A remarkable amount of noise was coming from somewhere. I rang my bell several times, and finally Carol opened the door. Carol? I said. Hi, she said. Join the party. Hi, Pia said. Also hi said Buddy, Pia's sister, the lumpy lout, a plump girl and a pimply lout. They'd managed to find the liquor. The radio was on. The room seemed crowded.
Surprise, I said, mind if I take my coat oif, staring meaningfully at Pia. I went into the bedroom and she came after.
"What," I said, "is this?"
"Oh, well," she said, "I got mad, sitting here all by myself, waiting for you, like I was something you put somewhere. So I called up Carol's house and told her they could come here if they wanted."
"Wonderful," I said, "a party."
"That's right," Pia said.
"There ain't nearly enough to drink here," Carol said at the door. "It's almost gone."
"Very sorry," I said, "I'll order some more right now." I went to the telephone and did so. Carol giggled. Pia started to dance with Buddy.
The first fight came at eleven. The lumpy lout was dancing with Carol, and even I, morose and bored, noticed that he was clutching her buttocks and not moving his feet. Buddy wrenched her away and hit him on the mouth. He fell down. Carol said what're you shoving me for, and jumped at Buddy. They grappled hoarsely. The lumpy lout picked himself up and jumped on both of them. They all fell down. Carol rolled away, jumped up and kicked at the two bodies. They yelled and fell apart. Don't hit me, I'll kill you, the lumpy lout said. Don't dance like that with Carol, I'll kill you, Buddy said. Don't shove me around, don't dance with me like that, don't tell me how to dance, don't tell me what to do, I'll kill you, Carol yelled, picked up a glass and threw it at the wall. It broke.
"You could tell them to go home," Pia said.
"You tell them, you invited them," I said. "Go on, circulate, be a hostess." She went and danced with the pimply lout.
Half an hour later little sister came and sat on my lap. Don't you want to dance with me? she said. I'm a very hot dancer. No, I said. Virginia is grabbing stuff, she said. What? I said. In the bedroom, she said, Virginia is taking stuff, I guess your wife's. I got up, put little sister down, and went to the bedroom. The plump girl was at Sally's closet, pulling dresses off hangers. Get out of there, I said. Go jump, she said, unfocused. I pulled her away from the closet and jostled her towards the door. What the hell you think you doing with her, the pimply lout said, and hit me under the ear. I hit him in the stomach. He sat on the edge of the bed and wheezed. The plump girl went into the living room, I followed. She fell on her knees and threw up on the couch. Carol laughed and said, pointing at the lumpy lout, if I went out with him I'd puke too. The pimply lout came in and said she doesn't go out with him she goes out with me. The lumpy lout swung at him and missed. The pimply lout dived at the lumpy lout; they crashed against the big table. It collapsed sideways. The lumpy lout, kneeling, hit the other in the face three solid times. Carol hit him on the head twice with an atlas. He covered his head and fell flat.
Pia cleaned up the couch. The louts got morosely up. The plump girl went to sleep in a corner.
Carol, whom these events had not seemed to sober, said I had to dance with her. I said I didn't like to dance. She said she didn't give a goddamn whether I did or not but Pia danced with Buddy and I had to dance with her, did I want to fight about it? No, I said, and danced. She danced close and tactile. I like to dance, she said, it's fun.
I rang my bell several times, and finally Carol opened the door. Surprise, she said, surprise. Surprise indeed, I said. She kissed me a warm wet kiss on the mouth and said, If only your Pia, little sister, the plump Virginia, my Buddy, the willful pimple and the truculent lump were not here, why then, ah, what were not possible. What were not, I said, but surely in time's manifold is hidden a-? Then let time's current and our strokes combine to carry us there, she said. But that, I said. Is meat, she said. For other, I said. Discourse, she said. Dis? I said. Dis before inter, other is bete, she said. You eternal woman, I said. Ja, da, oui, si, she said.
Pia took me aside, after intemperate embrace, to explain that our little group of comrades was about to set out in quest of a meaningful experience and she had thought some small ceremony proper. Quite right, I said, and hunger is the best sauce. A truth reserved for him who dines with the perfect cook, she said. We laughed and laughed.
Buddy, self-consciously, said that he had something new and asked if we would mind hearing it. Everyone agreed, "after," as the lumpy lout put it, "we all get another drink"-everyone, that is, except little sister, who groaned and said she had read it, it was terrible; Pia clouted her across the face, and she fell silent. Buddy, as a non-mathematician, apologized to me for his work's technical lapses, but said that I no doubt agreed that the attempt to combine the two arts was worth the dangers. I agreed. His ironic title was "Primitive Integrations," he used a short, tight line of alternate first and second order differentials on an underlying but inexplicit iambic stress. It was not, I thought, wholly a success, but I joined the others, except, of course, Pia's little sister, in congratulating him. It is not, Buddy said, wholly a success, but you got to try.
Plump, pretty Virginia announced that she, too, had not been idle, she believed that she had worked out a new variation on Oppenheimer's Position. She sketched it out for us; it indeed seemed new to me, but attained novelty by an excessive use of properties-including two footstools and a system of pulleys. New? little sister crowed, you call that new, I did that last summer with a businessman. I clouted her across the face. Watch your tongue, I said. The pimply lout tapped the bridge of his nose reflectively. I think, he said, I think the kid is right, I mean aside from her dirty jokes about you know what, I think you'll find the same thing or perhaps a minor variant on page 3076 of the appendix to volume four of the unabridged. Plump, pretty Virginia looked cross. But probably I'm wrong, the pimply lout said, who prided himself on his eidetic memory. I'll show you, plump, pretty Virginia said.
All right so clout me across the face all the time, little sister said, Pia, you, everybody clout me across the face, all right, so I like it or I wouldn't get myself all the time clouted, but I don't care what you say, the way you treat businessmen is lousy, stinking lousy, it's unfair, unjust and morally obtuse. Buddy, who had been standing by the window, whirled, flung up the sash and fired his hand weapon. Damn, he said, missed him. You see, little sister said, you see you see you see. Close the window, I said, it's hot out there. You see, little sister said, is that fair is that proper is that decent? We all looked ashamed. She had touched a chord. You're right, Buddy said, checking his cylinder, you're right, I admit it. It's just that I am so culturally conditioned. See one of them shoot. But I shall try in the future to interpose in that synapse the higher wisdom of moral philosophy. Thank you, he added, for recalling me to my best self. I always been like that, little sister said, from a kid, I always had a kind of a warm thing for all that lives, be it toad or vermin or one of those poor stinking devils out there. I smiled at her and clouted her across the face. Thanks, she said. Buddy, whitefaced and intense, emptied the cylinder of his weapon, defused the charges, pulled out the instigator and crushed it in an ash try. Never again, he said, never again. Carried away, we all cheered. It was the beginning of something new. I rang my bell.
I pushed my bell and the bell came off the wall and the door swung open from one hinge.
I pushed the button and the button burned my hand, burned my hand off, burned my hand off my arm, burned my arm, burned my arm off my body, burned my body, burned my body off.
I walked into the dark hall. Hall was dark, all was dark, no lark was dark, no park was dark. No ark. The hall was floored with loose lumps of house.
I hoped I heard Pia crying someplace at the end of the house.
I looked up through the broken roof and saw wet ashes enter my eyes.
I fell over Carol at the turning, felled beside Carol I smelled her burning. Carol was almost done.
In the living room. In the living room there was none. But the fat girl and the lumpy lout and the pimpled lout and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lily St. Cyr, all spokes of a wheel, heels together, heads out, down on their backs and their mouths open. Open and shut with the wet black ash. I hoped I heard Pia crying someplace at the end of the house.
At the bedroom door. At the bedroom door there was no more. No more bedroom, no more bed, no more place to lay my dead. Or Carol. Or Lily St. Cyr. But there was the door. Buddy was in the door. Buddy was imperfectly in the door; bits of his dirty bones stuck from the wood. Bad Buddy, to be imperfectly in the door. And little sister knelt at his feet, fetally fatally folded, her metal hair molten from her head, skull small and wrinkled and brown as a nut, as bark, in the park, in the dark. I hoped I heard Pia crying from someplace at the end of the house.
I hoped I heard the world crying from someplace at the end of the house.
"I don't say dancing's the most fun there is," Carol said, "I just say it's fun."
"It's better than nothing," I said.
The terrible song ended and I turned the radio volume down; not until I had done so, and felt the removal of shoes and socks after a hot day standing, did I realize how oppressive the sound mass had been. Hey, little sister said, what're you turning it off for? I said I wasn't turning it off, I was turning it down. What's a matter, the plump girl said, you don't like music? Say not like, I said, say rather love, but it was too loud, the hour grows on, the walls are less than stone, one's neighbors are always elderly and ill, a decent respect for the opinion of mankind dictates prudence and thoughtfulness in the use of lethal machines. What's a matter? the pimpled lout said, you scared somebody'll call the cops? The cops do not enter in, I said, but rather the sense we all share of responsibility one for the other, of being, in some fashion perhaps not totally amenable to rational discourse but no less valid for that, all parts of the same body, a social body if you will, the body of Christ I should hope not, but whatever your rhetoric and image, whatever your symbol and metaphor, somehow and to some degree mutually linked, mutually interpenetrative, and therefore somehow forced towards care and concern, towards involvement, with all those, our brothers.
The pimpled lout turned the radio up loud again. You got to feel the beat, he said over the yowl. I turned the radio down again. Didn't you hear me? I said, didn't my words mean anything to you? Hey look, he said, I wanna dance, you hear me, and if I wanna dance I gotta have the music nice and loud, you hear me? What I care about your goddamn neighbors, they want to call the cops okay they call the cops, so they call the cops, but if I wanna hear the music.
I wanna hear the music and I don't care about no creepy neighbors, understand? He turned the radio up loud again.
I turned the radio down again. Well if it comes to that, I said, I say you can't. It's my house, my radio and strength of will, and I say you can't. Yeah? he said, what you gone to do about it? He turned the radio up again, and with a foolish grin turned to grasp at the plump girl. I hit him on the side of the head. He reeled back, picked up the amplifier and threw it at me. The leads to the speaker and turntable pulled it short and it smashed at his feet. Piqued, I jumped over the debris and hit him several times in the face and stomach. He grunted and hit me in the nose. This hurt, and more piqued, I picked up the ice bucket and hit him on the forehead with it. He slid along the wall and sprawled to the floor, holding his head. Man, he said.
A solution to the music problem, I said, separating the components of the amplifier with my toe, but if he won't see that we are all part of one another, then that's his hard lines. Your nose is bleeding, Pia said, and handed me a wad of tissue from her purse. Boy, Carol said, some fun. I never hit nobody with a bucket like that. She picked it up admiringly. You probably don't have one, I said, it's slightly too sophisticated a consumption-decision for the lower classes. What lower classes? Carol said, and hit me on the forehead with the ice bucket. Everything went dim.
The season of mists was brief; clarity returned with a headache and a hell of a lot of noise. Carol was screaming abuse at Pia, who returned a proud silent visage, but little sister was shrilling back at Carol from a position behind Pia; also the pimpled lout, reinvigorated, was yelling threats at me, being restrained from physical attack by Buddy, who was grinning. I bellowed for everybody to for God's sake shut up. A moment of silence fell, and Carol said to Pia, in a reasonable tone, So what's he mean lower classes, what's he mean, you just tell me that. Pia shrugged, He's crazy, she said, you know that. The pimpled lout, his struggles stopped, asked me why I had hit him on the head with a bottle. Why not? Buddy said.
Maybe, I said, the party is over.
Aw no, little sister said, I'm having fun. Everyone laughed. But without the enormous sound from the radio they did not seem quite to know what to do, and shortly they woke up the plump girl, who had gone back to sleep in the corner, and left. Carol aimed to pat me on the cheek as I stood holding the door open for them but missed and started my nose bleeding again. I closed and locked the door behind them and returned to Pia sitting in the living room. It was a mess: a table overturned, two legs broken flat against its bottom, chairs overturned, broken glass and shards of electronic components on the floor, water and spilled liquor on surfaces, a shelf pulled down at one end spilling books, ash trays dumped over scattering butts and ashes.
"What a mess, like an explosion," Pia said. "I'll clean it up in a minute, what I can."
"That's all right," I said. "The few dead are only a wound upon our body, a lesion that hurts but will heal. The body lives. It is callous to say, but the living are callous to the dead by the fact of life. Without disrespect, we may in quiet rejoice that this time, at least, the body still lives, and sound sweet flesh can bud and blossom where the dead cells slough away. Let us rejoice, I say, for that time is now when it need not be so, when the dead may be all, the body dismembered, and its power of perpetual spring forever destroyed."
"You still mad at me?" Pia said.
"No," I said. "Let's for God's sake go to bed, please; at last."
At last we did, and had proper horizontal intercourse twice, and slept all night thereafter. Pia's orgasms were sure, shuddered and silent.
3
In the morning Pia asked me if I had ever thought of getting a divorce and marrying her. I said, Well, much embarrassed. She laughed and laughed. "Oh," she said, "you're a bastard."
"I'm not," I said.
"Why not?" she said. "Telling me you love me and going to bed with me in your wife's bed but not figuring to do anything serious about it."
"All right," I said, "will you marry me?"
She laughed some more. "Hell no," she said, "you're interesting sometimes and you're fun sometimes but I'd have to be as crazy as you are to marry you and I'm not."
"That's what I thought," I said.
"That's what you hoped," she said, "and aren't you lucky."
"Yes," I said, "I consider myself very lucky."
"I thought about it at first when you first started going with me," Pia said, "and I thought maybe I would like it. But after I got to know how crazy you are. Your poor wife, I feel sorry for her."
"Do you indeed?" I said, putting her hand on my thigh. "Oh, sure," she said, caressing me, "but it's not everything."
"True," I said, caressing her.
"I know you're crazy," she said, moving with slow ease under my hand, "so I don't know why I ask you, but what do you want to make such a mess for? Why?"
"Mess?" I said, modeling her smooth meat, "there's no mess. Things are a little complicated, that's all, but it is an ordered complexity. Inside I am clear; all my structures are in calm array under a pellucid light."
"Oh yeah?" she said, heaving and stretching up her knees.
"Yeah," I said, writhing.
"Man," she said, as I fell into her, "are you crazy."
We ate and dawdled comfortably enough until the late afternoon. Pia asked where the television was and I said smugly we didn't have one. She was not amazed at my heroic defiance of admass's circling wolves. Shooting for prefinalization of the evening's program, I suggested that it might be amusing to go out to Brooklyn and see if and how her little chums had survived the long journey home.
"What do you want to go out there for?" Pia said. "I thought you came out there to see me, not those creeps, I see them all the time."
"Fine, fine," I said. "Let's do something here."
"We could go dancing only you don't like to," Pia said. "I don't feel much like a movie."
"No."
"Well I don't know, what do you usually do?"
"I don't know. Talk," I said.
"We could talk," Pia said. "If I think of something to say."
"All right," I said, "enough of this. We'll put ourselves together and go have a drink or so and a splendid dinner. Time's yawn will find the meat to fill itself."
But it wasn't time; we did it ourselves. As soon as we thrust into motion the first stage of unease, unfamiliarity, undomesticity fell away. Dressed neatly we soared to a restaurant off Lexington, drank well, ate well, prattled merrily.
With the coffee but before the bill came, of course, the Eycks, on their way out. They stopped at our table, I introduced Pia, Eyck smiled politely, Mrs. Eyck smiled politely, we smiled politely all three; Pia nodded. Mrs. Eyck inquired politely after Sally; I responded politely that she was at last report very well, thank you. They said that was nice and good night and left.
"So that's his wife," Pia said. "She certainly looks like something." She is, I said.
"Is she a friend of your wife?"
Not particularly, I said, they have seen each other around. "Don't you care if they know, him at the office and her?"
"They don't know and I don't care," I said. "All right," Pia said, "as long as I'm with you I'll do it your way."
When we had finished we went home, naturally.
Pia in the living room: Pia looking at the books, looking at the records, looking at the pictures. Pia in the bedroom: Pia looking at Sally's clothes, looking at Sally's dressing table bottles and tubes and sprays. Pia in the kitchen: Pia looking at jars and cartons and pots. Pia in the bathroom: Pia looking at pills and soaps.
Pia in the living room: "It's a shame we busted everything so much. You'll have to get everything fixed up quick before your wife comes back."
"Not necessarily," I said. "Tell me something. Do you think Dicherty is really going to try to go through with blowing up the power station?"
Pia sat down. "That," she said. "Oh, that. I don't know, I always thought it was just talk. But now I think he figures he really would if he could get you to help him like he wants. I never thought it meant anything, but now he's got the crazy idea you're going to help him. You're not going to be that crazy, are you?"
"I thought you were going to help him?"
"I said once, I promised I'd help him if he did. But I was sure it didn't mean anything. I don't think he ever really figured to either until he got the idea you were going to help him. He thinks you're smart. But of course you're not going to, to do a crazy thing like that, are you?"
"Why did you promise?"
"Oh," she said, "he did me a favor and in return. Well, he got an abortion for my sister, the idiot, I mean he told us where to go. So he made me promise. But I never thought it meant anything. You're not going to, are you?"
"I think so," I said.
"Oh, Jesus goddamn," she said.
"What's the matter? Don't you approve? There are a lot of good reasons, you know."
"Come on," she said, "let's go to bed. Let's at least get something good out of it."
I was going to go into the reasons I'd talked about with Dicherty, but this stopped me. "What do you mean?" I said.
"What do you have to be so crazy for?" she said.
"You're right," I said. "Let's go to bed." I couldn't explain, I decided; I didn't know enough about her to explain.
The next day, Sunday, Pia had to be home by early afternoon. We took a taxi out; as we approached her house I said that I was going to drop by and see Dicherty, couldn't she come along for a bit. She said she had to be home, there were things she had to do. Upstairs in front of her door I embraced her warmly, was embraced warmly, said I would see her tomorrow at the office and after work, and left.
Dicherty was sitting in his courtyard in the shade of his house. He lifted a hand; I dragged over a carton and sat down. "Hear you had a little party the other night," he said. "Glad you're helping me keep the kids off the street corners and all."
"It wasn't my idea," I said. "How've you been?"
"You want to know something? I met a feller yesterday from Canton, Ohio."
This seemed to be the end of the news. "Is it a game?" I said.
"From Canton, Ohio. Was where I was married the second time I was married."
Again full stop. "Yes," I said.
"Feller knew her pretty good, was a friend of her husband."
"The one you left because of?"
"No," he said, "some other feller she met after I was gone away."
"Oh," I said. "She all right?"
"She died last week, the feller told me."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"And the two kids I had by her, they're both of them dead too," Dicherty said. "Ain't not only dead, but always have been dead, you might as well say. Died a couple years after I left, near thirty years ago, both of them, one from a sickness and one from some kind of a accident, all that time ago."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Sure, you say I ain't got no right to feel bad, a woman and kids I left and never made no try to see again. But I say feel bad is what I feel, I say a man don't need no right for that."
"Sure," I said.
"It's different, though, one from the other. Her dead, I feel bad like any man would feel bad a woman he'd married and lived with and was a pretty good woman looked at all around was dead. Still and all, she was getting on, had lived comfortable enough, this feller said, had more kids, them that wasn't mine. Well, it happens."
"Sure," I said.
"But those two kids. Man, I tell you, there is more ways to get at you than you can ever scheme to know aforehand. Here all these years up and down, I been priding myself on them kids, nothing special about it, to tell the truth I don't even remember the names they had, but all these years without saying much about it to myself I been glad that there was two kids of mine there in Canton, Ohio, or wherever their mother was at first, and she was a good woman, would have brought up my kids right, and when they got to be of age I prided myself there was two people with my blood and her blood and brought up right. And now a feller I meet in a I automatic laundry tells me that all those years of priding I myself and being glad wasn't worth a whore's fart, wasn't! worth not one thing, that there was nothing there at all, there j never was any kids."
"You had other children," I said. "You had children in your first marriage."
"How do I know?" he said. "How do I know what happened to them? Just as like they're long dead too. These kids I know about is long dead, why not them others I don't know about? How do I know?"
"Well, of course you don't know, but-" I said.
"Yeah, but," Dicherty said. He slumped his thin old man's body, the chest very hollow. "I ain't saying I deserve more, I ain't saying I was ever any kind of a father to any kid. I left them where they was without hardly a backward look, I never sent none of them a dollar when I had it, I never wrote none of them a word in a letter, they couldn't hardly have even a memory of me above the black things maybe they heard but most like not even that. They didn't have nothing of me but my blood and that's too easy to give to make any mind. But for near thirty years I thought they was there, and now I find I was a fool about them like I was a fool about everything else. I tell you, there is ways to get at you, you couldn't think of beforehand, you couldn't figure there would be a way to get at you, you don't know about and then you find there is a way."
"Not a fool, Dicherty," I said.
He lifted his hands and dropped them flat on his knees. "Look at me. What have I got? What have I done? What use am I?"
"Remember the power plant, Dicherty. You can do that, you can have the memory of doing that, you can be the man that's done that. As you told me, Dicherty, as you told me, a fine thing to do and a fine thing to have done. You can do that, Dicherty."
He lifted and dropped his hands again. "No, I can't. Not even that. I was thinking yesterday after I met this feller, I was thinking just what you said now. I talked to the kids, Buddy and Carol and all, feeling things out. No, they ain't gone to help me, I know they ain't. They say sure, sure, to keep me quiet and not have no trouble with me about then-hut, but when it gets down to the meat, they ain't gone to lift a foot to help me and I can't make them. I see that now, all my talk, all my plans to get a holt on them kids by the loan of the hut, no, just talk and plans worth nothing. They want to use the hut they use it and a old man like me can't do one thing about it. I got to have help and I can't get it from them."
"I'll help you, Dicherty," I said.
He looked at me. "No," he said, "two ain't enough. The way I got it figgered, the only way, three is very hard but two ain't enough."
"Pia," I said. "She'll help you, she told me so. She promised and she will."
"She said that?"
"Yes, she did. She. promised and she will."
He wiped his mouth with his fingertips. "Yeah. Maybe she would at that, if you was coming along and asked her. Jesus, maybe it would work, maybe it really would. Maybe to God we could really do it, really be the folks that brought that place down, that made a mark like they would have to take note. Yeah, you know, maybe we really could."
"Right," I said, much relieved.
"I'll tell you, if we're gone to do it, we got to get on with it. Is, let's see, is next Sunday good for you?"
"It's fine," I said.
"You want to talk to Pia, tell her we're really going to do it?"
"All right," I said. "She's not really enthusiastic, you understand. But she promised and she will."
"She don't have to cheer none, just do what has to be. Now I got to think and plan, got to figger things and fix things so it'll go all right with just only three. It'll be tight, but it'll be all right. You hear?"
"Yes," I said.
"It'll be all right, and don't you think it won't. You come to see now that it just isn't the crazy talk of a crazy old man, that it's a thing that has got to be done and can be done, you come to see that, ain't you?"
"That's right," I said.
"And I'm grateful to you," Dicherty said.
"I'll be going now," I said, tired by the effort of raising Dicherty's spirit from the mire.
"In a couple of days," he said, "I'll have everything worked out. You get in touch."
I said I would. As I was leaving, Dicherty said: 'That Pia, like you say, you and her getting on pretty good."
"I'll have to ask you not to use that kind of language about her."
"Yeah. Well, you decided you going to do anything about it? Or you just figger to ease on along and take what comes?"
"I don't know," I said. "I've been thinking about it but I just don't know what I'm going to do."
"But you're thinking of maybe doing something? Like maybe getting shut of your wife and marrying Pia?"
"I just don't know what I'm going to do," I said.
Dicherty chuckled. "You have a good time," he said.
4
Monday morning there was Laszlo. He came to my office, closed the door, and in a wilderness of sighs and shrugs and silences finally got out that the new chief had been selected and it was someone from outside, that's all he knew but he knew. His reaction was so unstentorian that he must really have believed it was the word, rather than a rumor suitable for dramatization, and very likely therefore it was true. I'm sorry, I said, I really am sorry, I really had been hoping it would be you.
Laszlo fiddled with the venetian-blind cord, struggled to swallow the sour bile of disappointment's shock, and muttered mostly to himself a string of Yes, yes, I had permitted hope, too bad, very foolish, ah well, perhaps it is not so but no I must not think, my, my, so that is that, ah me. At last he managed his first swallow, stood tall again and in the familiar boom said: "Ah, now, my friend, now you will see something, something fine, something splendid, something to make the hairs on your head rise like snakes from the basket of an Indian fakir, something to make you lie at night without sleep staring at the ceiling while you wonder how the horror of tomorrow will manage to overpass the horror of today, you will not wonder if it will overpass but only how. You have never been where a new chief comes in from the outside, no, but I have, I have been, and now I tell you will be a time. The dirty little fights to be friend with the new chief, the cunning hints to him against all others and in favor of oneself, the rewriting of the past to brighten self and blacken enemies, the campaigns, the maneuvers, the assassinations, all of them, you will see them all. I promise you, you think you have seen bad times before, there are coming times you will pray for the good days past when each was a lamb sleeping in peace with each."
"Fine," I said.
"It is true that you don't really care."
"Not really."
"Well, well," he said, and left.
And Monday after work there was Pia. She was at a table, waiting for me. "And how are you, my honey, my lamb?" I said. "My dear good sweet kind Pia."
"I'm not going to see you again, like this or like we have been," she said, before I sat down. I sat down.
"What?" I said.
"I'm not going to any more. There's no use in trying to talk to me about it, I decided. I'm going to get engaged and get married." She stopped playing with a paper napkin and put her hands in her lap.
"Who?" I said.
"You don't know him, Ralphy. We're going to get engaged and he gets out of the army pretty soon and we're going to get married."
"Ralphy. Buddy's brother."
"That's right," she said.
"Pia, don't, please," I said. "Marry me, I'll get divorced and you marry me."
"No," she said, "I won't. I don't want to marry somebody crazy as you. I don't want to marry you, and if I keep on seeing you it'll get to be such a mess, on an edge of your life and I'll be such a mess, and I won't, so I'm not going to see you again ever. That's all."
"Ralphy," I said. "Ralphy the knife."
"That's right," she said. "Please, you know what I'm saying, you know it's the best thing for me to do, don't be mean, don't make any trouble for me, just let me go on and do what I want to do. Please."
"Yes," I said, "of course."
"All right," she said. "I better go."
"When did you decide this, Pia?" I said.
"No," she said, "I don't want to talk like that. We start talking about it like that and pretty soon we'll both be talking about a mistake I almost made and then we'll be right back where we were and I'm not going to let myself. There's no use talking, I decided."
"Of course," I said, "you're right." Her drink came, she gulped it and choked and coughed. I patted her back, feeling queasy to think I would hot touch that again.
"Pia," I said, "I'll ask you please once more."
She shook her head, coughing.
"Well," I said. "There is one thing. Dicherty is going ahead with his plan. Next Sunday. I'm going to help him. No one else is except you. Are you?"
She bent her head and moved her shoulders a little. "Crazy," she said, "it's so crazy I can't hardly think how crazy it is."
"Maybe," I said, "but he's going to do it and I promised I'd help. Will you?"
"I promised I would," she said. "You'll see him. He'll tell you."
She looked up at me. "Could I be wrong?" she said. "Could I be that dumb to be wrong? Isn't it a crazy thing to do? Aren't you crazy to do it?"
"Is that it?" I said. "If I don't do it, will you change your mind?"
"No," she said. "It's not just that. I better go." She stood up.
I stood up. "You'll excuse me if I don't go out with you," I said, and touched her head. She went.
I felt terrible. I sat and drank and felt terrible. But out of the roiling welter of my disappointment and frustration and, already, poignant nostalgia, one line of thought was clear and insistent and even hopeful. Sally had to go.
5
The week was dim. At work I talked as little as possible. After work I drank a lot and read disconnected pages and pieces of whatever I picked up while my eyes teared with the effort of seeing through the drink, and I let the book drop and thought about how I was going to get rid of Sally. I couldn't just turn around and tell her I wanted to quit, I didn't like her much any more. She would be reasonable, un-endurably and unendingly reasonable, with calm consideration of adjustment difficulties and professional help and scream silently that of course I didn't like her, why should I like her, why should anybody like her. No. I had to arrange better than that. I had to arrange fury at me instead of that scream. It was that scream which pulled me in once; to hear it again was too dangerous, too painful.
Anger at me, then. Simple enough. Arrange to be caught in seeming flagrante delicto with some girl who would play the game. Child's play. But what some girl? I ticked over people until, of course, I thought of Carol. Perfect. It would appeal to her high sense of the ridiculous. She could be trusted not to talk for fear of annoying Buddy. She was quite competent for the task and would be pleased to earn a few honest dollars. I got my clothes off, got to bed and went out.
It seemed a little ragged in the morning, but in the evening I went over it again and it was all right. I could sketch out pretty well the discovery, Carol's prompted acidulousness and impolite departure, my confession, Sally's rage, fine.
I sat in the bedroom. It had turned murderously hot again, heat that clamped through the night, and I stayed near the air conditioner. It occurred to me that if, however un-likely, we succeeded in harming the power station, my conditioner might go. Perhaps it would be cooler by then.
Carol. I had no idea of her last name, so I'd have to go out there and talk to her. Of course, I had to go out anyway to check with Dicherty.
All week I saw Pia at the office. We did not speak.
And so Friday came leaping out of ambush, and if I were going to arrange things with Carol (rather than be arranged by things with Sally) I had to go out there tonight. And if I were going to help Dicherty strike a blow for liberty I had to go out there tonight. Unassailable logic, so I went out there.
"That's all over, ain't nobody here," Dicherty said. "Cops came by Thursday, same cops was here before, said we got to close down, kids can't use the hut here as no club-house or such. Find 'em here again they'll get run in, and me too."
"But why?" I said. "They were doing no harm to the social body and no more harm to themselves than they could do anywhere. Why?"
"Didn't say exactly. Cops' reasons: do like I say or I'll bust your head. No, that ain't exactly right, the notebook cop, him that said he was studying to be a teacher, he said he wrote a report on it, went up channels, came down channels with the word. Somebody called the owner, asked if they wanted kids using this place, owner of course said no they sure didn't, that's all. Cop said they didn't think it'll get me fired."
"Who is the owner?"
"I don't know," Dicherty said, "I get my check from some company, have to look up the name, they manage, I guess. Cop said the reason was, the cops don't like kind of things going on where they didn't know what was going on. No supervision, he said, no authorization, no control. Sure to be some kind of a scandal some day, he said, stands to reason, and then it'll be everybody's neck. So no more times here."
"Why, that's fine," I said. "The children can return to the proper occupations of children, Carol can study lady wrestling, little sister moral hygiene and Buddy, of course, is going into the army. The others can form a troupe for psychosomatic exhibitions under the sponsorship of a soft-drink bottler."
"Yeah, well, whatever, there ain't going to be no more times here. Quiet, it'll be quiet. Just goddamn dull-as-dirt quiet."
"You were going to tell me about Sunday," I said.
"Well," he said. "Yeah. Well, I figgered about it, and seems to me like the best way, there being no more than the three of us, is to keep it as simple. That means Pia won't do nothing but be lookout the places I tell her, give us the sign anybody comes so we can lie low. You'll be with me, carrying stuff, caps and sticks and wire and all. I'll have to do the fixing, no point to try to teach you, I can do it myself, while you hold stuff and hand me stuff."
"Is that all?" I said. "No more complexity than that?"
"I told you," he said. "It's simple. You just follow along and do like I tell you. But to ease your mind, I made you up this map." He dug into a hind pocket and handed me a folded piece of wrapping paper. "You study that," he said, "so you'll know just where to be. We don't want no waiting or latecomers, it all got to go off slick and easy on the time-table."
"What is the timetable? How are you getting there? And Pia?"
"It's all been figgered," Dicherty said. "You just rest your mind and do like I say. I already done arranged the loan of a auto, Sunday evening I drive to where I got my stuff hid and load up the car, don't need no help for that, then right on the stroke of two o'clock in the nighttime I pick up Pia and we drive in, taking it slow and easy, I give us a whole hour to get there at three. You be waiting for us there, like it says on the map, and you be on time, hear? Then we wire her up, I set the timer and we all go home to bed to wait the glorious day. I figger to set her to go, say, a half-hour after we're long gone."
"You got a driver's license?" I said.
"Well, sure I got a driver's license," Dicherty said. "What kind of a fool do you think I'd be to try drive around with a car full of sticks and caps without no driver's license?"
"You have it on you?" I said.
"Sure I have it on me." He hauled out a thin wallet, shuffled some paper and handed me one. It was a driver's license issued by the State of Illinois, expiring 1 June, 1941. I remarked on this.
"Ah," he said, taking it back, "don't get all fidgety, it don't make a particle of difference. Everybody knows a license good in one state is good in all, anybody knows anything knows that. And maybe I'll take me a pen and change the four in that date to a six, see? You don't worry about details, you just be there on time."
"If you say so," I said. "You know where I can find Carol, I've got to talk to her about something?"
"Carol? I ain't seen her since Thursday, since the cops run them off Thursday, I ain't seen none of them. What you want Carol for?"
"You know where she lives, or even her last name?"
"Now how would I know a thing like that? What's the matter, you want her and Pia both? That's a thing I done, but it ain't worth the effort of keeping the peace."
"I'll have to look," I said, getting up. "All right, Dicherty, see you at the appointed hour."
"That's right," he said, following me a few paces. "And you be easy in your mind. Not a thing is gone to go wrong with this, it's gone to be simple as water. You know that, don't you?"
"Sure," I said. "Don't you have any idea where they might be?"
"They got a whole country to be in the back seat of a car in, how do I know? But you be sure in your mind, I don't want nobody on this thing with me who ain't cool and sure. You figger you can be cool and sure, a thing like this, a important thing like this?"
"I'll be there when you told me," I said.
"That's fine, boy," he said. "I'm proud of you. You act like I was still a man, to do things and figger things."
"Well, so you are, aren't you?" I said.
"That's right, boy," he said, "that's just right."
The only place I thought to look for Carol was the greasy soda fountain where I first saw her and associates. I had walked there from Pia's house that night, so first I had to get to Pia's and attempt orientation. It was a dreary walk.
After two tries down streets that became something else, I found the place. It was hot and smelled. There were some young folk in one booth, and that's all. No Carol, no familiar faces.
A girl in the booth-clump yelled Hey and waved me over. There was another girl and three male youths. "He was there, he saw," the girl said, "you tell, wasn't I in the club the cops busted, didn't I get initiated?" The girl whose initiation I had seen, indeed. Sure, I said. "See," she said, "I was, I got initiation, Carol and Buddy and all of them, and I was in the club. They wouldn't believe it," she said to me. "Jeez," a boy said, "how was it, was it really horny like they say?"
"It was something," the girl said, "it was really something, it wasn't like nothing you could imagine." The group looked awed. I asked if they knew where Carol was, speaking of her. They said no, they hadn't seen her.
I left them to the creation of history, and walked without direction. What, I wondered, to do? Carol was an absolute necessity, and no Carol. I walked.
Gaudy music came up behind me and stopped. "Hi," said little sister, "what you doing?" I said hello. "You looking for my sister?" she said. "You looking to find her and do something to her 'cause she got engaged? You looking to give her a scar or something?" She pantomimed a slash across her own forehead, under the fake metal hair, and then laughed so hard she had to hang on my shoulder.
"No," I said, "I hope they'll be very happy. Have you seen Carol, I want to talk to her?"
She shook her head and did a few shuffles to the music. "Nope," she said. "Haven't seen nobody. Just me and my little radio, walking around making a little music. Hey, you got it for me, didn't you? I suppose now she's busted up with you, you're coming around to collect from me on the radio, you know I don't have no money, so you want to take it out in a little fun, hey?" Again shrill hilarity and she hung on my other arm until she recovered. Having done so, she said: "No, I ain't seen nobody at all. Just walking by myself, you know, like it says on the TV when it says that teen-agers is moody with problems. That's me, me and my radio."
I would have preferred a more mature woman for the job, but it did not seem that I had any choice, nor any time. "Kid," I said, "that radio is yours, all yours, free and real clear. But it just does so happen that I got a little proposition for you I think maybe you might find interesting, you know what I mean? How about we go some place and talk, some place quiet?"
She said it was quiet right there, so I talked; I explained that all she had to do was come to my house about seven the following evening, just stay a while chatting with me if she wished or thinking or passing the time in any manner that appealed to her. Shortly someone else would come and she could leave at once, saying nothing. As simple as that. In return for which, and a promise of secrecy, I would give her ten dollars.
"Yeah, sure, sure," she said, "as simple as that. Only thing I don't get is who was coming."
Nobody she knew, I said, a woman, or possibly two women, it made no difference.
"Wow," she said, "two. Well, it's your party. But how come you only paying ten?"
"You just have to come and sit for a while," I said. "It's easy work."
"Okay, okay," she said, "I know I'm new at it, I don't have no leverage, no reputation or nothing. But if I'm real good to you maybe you'll sweeten it up a little, if I give you a real good time, hey?"
I explained her assignment again. She said, Whatever you say, lover, as long as you're paying all you got to do is ask for it. I asked if she understood, she nipped my nose and told me not to worry, doll, all it does is give you wrinkles. I sighed, enjoined secrecy and promptness on her again, and said good night. She hit me a bump with her bony child's hip and trotted off. In a moment she was back. Any special things you want me to wear? she said. It made no difference, I said. I guess it don't, she said, but, hey, those others, they ain't going to do anything to me, anything that'll hurt or like that? No, I said, they wouldn't. You be taking pictures? she said. No, I said. I charge extra for pictures, she said. No pictures, I said. You sure the cops is squared? she said. I said I was sure. Well, okay, she said, see you, lover. She went, without music.
I went home.
Late Saturday afternoon, the telephone, Sally. Where are you? I said.
Oh, damn, she said, I'm still up here. Everything has gone wrong, I mean Kate, of course, she's disappeared again, it's maddening the way she acts, I don't suppose she's down there, no, what happened was that Robert got here Thursday night as he was supposed to, he was a little late, had a little trouble with the directions but Kate got herself into a fury over that, she was really beastly to him and then all yesterday she was beastly to him, I don't see how he stood it but he's really so perfectly sweet and then yesterday evening she disappeared, some of her luggage was gone but some wasn't and we didn't know what on earth to think or do, we spent all evening driving around looking for her, asking people we knew and she knew if they had seen her but nobody had, and we went around again today, and made more telephone calls but it's absolutely hopeless, nobody has a clue. And of course with all this we didn't close up the place so there's still that to be done, but we're going to close up tonight and then drive down tomorrow, I felt sorry for her at first and afraid of what might happen to her but now I don't care. I'm just furious at her and that's all, we'll close up the place and come down and I'm not going to spend any more time on her, if she wants to act like a willful child instead of a responsible adult that's her business and I simply resign from any further worry or bother in the matter. Charles, she isn't there, is she? No, she's not, I said.
I don't know, she said, I changed my vacation and left you all alone poor dear because of her and she. Well, Anyway, I'll be down tomorrow.
Good, I said.
How are you, honey? she said. Fine, honey, I said, how are you? Well, you know, she said. Yes, I said.
Tomorrow, then, she said. Yes, I said, take it easy.
Well. Lethargically, I called Pia's house, got Pia and hung up. No point in complicating matters. Little sister and I could have a nice talk. I made a supper, or second breakfast, of eggs, showered and shaved.
Just after seven thirty, the doorbell, little sister. She came bouncing in, reaching up to pat my cheek as she went by. She was wearing a tight skirt, the first time I had ever seen her in anything but tight pants, which made her look much older, say fifteen and a half. And a lacy white blouse around her thin little bones. Her breasts, however, had grown much larger.
"I look pretty good, how about that, don't I?" she said, grasping her back hair in both hands. I said she did. I also said that plans had been changed at the last minute, that she was welcome to stay as long as she liked, of course, but that nobody else would be coming and she could go whenever she wanted. I gave her ten dollars.
"Nobody else coming, huh?" she said, putting the money in a wallet she carried in her hand. "Just us two, hey?"
That's all, I said.
She sat down and looked around. "I guess we busted up the place a little," she said. That was all right, I said. "Yeah, it was a nice party," she said. "Uh, could I have a drink?" No, I said, better not. "You don't like 'em drinking," she said, "okay, whatever you say." I asked her if she was looking forward to school in the autumn. Sure, she said, and carefully put on more eye make-up. I watched. She snapped the little box shut and put it in a pocket, smiled at me and said: "Hey, come on, how about giving me a break, I never did this for paid before, you know what I mean, am I supposed to do something, or something? Don't stay there just staring at me, hey will you?"
I said she might as well go on home.
"What's the matter?" she said. "What did I do wrong now?" Nothing at all, I said, nothing at all. "Hey, man," she said, throwing herself back and laughing. "I bet I had you faked, I bet you thought I was really on the make, come on, no kid, I bet you thought." The doorbell rang, I opened, Pia.
Who walked right in and to the living room, saw her sister and said: "Goddamn I knew it."
Hi, little sister said.
"What are you trying to do?" Pia said to me. "What for God's sake are you trying to do?"
"We wasn't doing nothing, I swear," little sister said. "Just sitting. Matter of fact, he just told me I should go home. How you know I was here, hey?"
"You kept on asking me what the address was here and how to get here and then you disappeared, how did you think I knew, idiot?" Pia said. "What was she doing here, what did you get her here for? You want to get back at me?"
"No," I said.
"Or you thought I would come after her, you wanted to get me here?"
"I'm terribly glad to see you again, Pia, sit down, have a drink, she was just going."
"First he said there was somebody coming and when they came I could go, but after I got here he said nobody was coming, and I thought, you know, but nothing happened," little sister said.
"Somebody," Pia said.
"I thought some people were coming, but it turned out they weren't," I said.
"Not people, a woman," little sister said.
"It's too compUcated readily to explain," I said, "but all essentially harmless. A little charade to objectify the lonely agony of the human condition, and so sweeten and purify our tears."
"Oh, I'll bet," Pia said, "boy, will I ever bet."
"He gave me ten dollars," little sister said, "for doing nothing.
"Good, keep it," Pia said. "Who was coming?"
"Nobody known to you," I said, and the outside door banged open and Kate boomed in. Tableau.
You again, Kate said. Her again, Pia said.
And another one, Kate said, look at it, another one too, a little one, a little baby beginner one.
"Well, Charlie," Pia said, patting my ear, "we're all done so there's no use hanging around talking with your mother-in-law or whatever. You got the money, honey?"
"I told you," little sister said.
"Well, come on," Pia said. They left.
"Charlie," Kate said, "you promised me, you promised." The doorbell rang. I excused myself.
Pia. "You made me see her again, wasn't one time enough you had to make me see her again?"
A mistake, I said, it was a mistake.
"The hell I'm going to do your crazy things for you and Dicherty," Pia said. "Whatever I said I was I'm not. And you can tell him so and go to hell." She turned and ran after little sister, whose radio was fading down the street.
"Oh, now what?" Kate said.
"What's happened to you, Kate?" She had a red sunburn and looked very well.
"Why do you have to, Charlie? And with that little one, what makes you?"
"What happened to you, Kate?" I said.
She dropped into a big chair. "All right, you're not responsible to me. I'm just your goddamned sister-in-law or mother-in-law or whatever she said. And if you can't take your marriage, I can understand that, it's the trouble. Charlie, I can't marry Russell, I won't do it. I know exactly how you feel having to play around, I haven't been married to him yet and I haven't played around but I know it's exactly how I'm going to feel if I do, married to someone you don't want to be to, and-"
With that, I saw my way, not the way but a way, and went it. "And not married to someone you want to be to, sure," I said.
"Tell me, Charlie," Kate said.
"I want to marry you, Kate," I said.
"I knew it, Charlie, I knew it all the time," Kate said, "I knew it ever since I saw you last, I knew it. Charlie, I want to marry you, what are we going to do?"
"Have a drink, honey," I said, "and be cheerful. We finally got where we wanted to be."
"Can we? Can we really?" Kate said.
"Why not?" I said.
Kate laughed and laughed. "Of course," she said, "of course, it's as simple as that. Why not?"
We kissed and sighed. Kate said: "But Sally."
"True, but it's better," I said. "You saw the kind of thing it's driven me to tonight, despite myself. It would get worse and so would she."
"Good," Kate said, "rationalize some more, I'll feel better. No, I won't, I feel wonderful now. But we'll have to make it as easy on Sally as we can."
"No," I said, "that would be cruel."
Before we went to bed, Kate asked what time Sally was getting in. In the afternoon, I said. We'd better be up early, Kate said, not let her catch us lying down.
Before we went to bed, Kate said: "We're not going to have anything tomorrow change our minds. We're sealing it now, by doing this, aren't we?"
"Yes," I said, "that's what we're doing."
Before we went to bed, Kate said: "I'm not afraid of Sally, it's all right. I've got her man and I'm glad. Or shouldn't I say things like that?"
"Sally wouldn't," I said, "do."
"All right," Kate said, "now no more Sally, for a long time."
"After tomorrow," I said.
"I knew it, I knew it all along," is what Sally said first, and then, in a good consuming rage, in just that past-burning rage for which I had hoped, went on at certain length: "And if you think I'm going to be sorry or mope or cry or beg you're wrong as wrong can be, if you'd come to me decently both of you or you, Charles, you're responsible of course you're the one who engineered everything, if you'd come to me like somebody responsible decent and mature and said this was what you wanted I probably would have reasoned with you like a fool I'll bet I would have and told you that what you're doing is no good, is a mistake, that it isn't me you're trying to get away from or marriage to me because nothing's wrong with me or marriage to me but it's yourself and you're so blind that you think you can change things by changing the externals but you can't and you really know you can't and when you find out that nothing has been changed and you're still the same foolish angry bitter adolescent you always were then you're going to be even more miserable than you were before with me and you're going to make her even more miserable than you've made me and I'm going to be glad, delighted I'm going to be hysterical with joy when that happens, no I won't I'm angry now so I say that but I am going to be sorry for you and sorry for her I'm going to be terribly terribly sorry for you both I don't know who I'll be sorrier for you or her, you're to blame for it most but you're the one who needs help more but of course she's to blame too but you influenced her ever since we met you've done your best to establish a sickening incestuous flirtation with her, ever since we met and I knew it and I tried to get you to stop because I knew she was being influenced by it of course she always envied what I had it's not unusual for younger sisters especially ones whose mother died when they were young and who aren't as competent and intelligent as the older but you played on this because you're so sick and perverse it gave you how would I know what kind of a sick satisfaction it gave you so I'll be sorrier for her, oh Kate you bitch how could you do a thing like that but I'll be sorry for you too." And so forth.
Robert Richard Russell said: "I'd say it's pretty disgusting." Sally told him please to shut up. R.R.R. said that he wanted to offer Sally any help possible, would naturally if she wanted handle the divorce. Sally said it was very good of him she was very grateful but please would he shut up now. He said he understood she was upset and he'd be available at any time she needed him for help or advice, right now he'd wait outside for her, passed his hand over his eyes, and left.
Sally went on for a bit; among the relevant points she made was that she was not going to stay in that apartment, she'd clean out our joint account and stay at a hotel, she was going to keep the key and until we were divorced would feel free to come at any time to get more of her things, I was going to pay for the divorce but she wouldn't take my money after that and she never wanted to see the faces or hear the voices of either of us again, ever. She embraced Kate and said, Oh you poor baby.
"Well," I said when she'd gone, "that wasn't too bad."
"No," Kate said, "not bad at all. I think I'll go he down. I'm tired."
6
That afternoon I had to decide what I was going to do about Dicherty's plan. I felt pretty sure that at this stage he would insist on going forward despite Pia's defection, would claim we two could do it. I cannot say how much my decision not to go through with it was the product of rational calculation and how much that of simple cowardice. Rational calculation had little hard evidence to operate on: I had no personal knowledge of how to blow up a power plant, nor had I ever seen Dicherty do so and could not accurately judge his competence. True, his reasoning that it should be done was flawless and his desire to do so admirable, but he was, after all, an old man, and between the desire and the performance. Perhaps, also, recent events at home had left me with a slight surfeit of excitement. At any rate, when I pulled out of my pocket the map he had given me, the map he had made such a point of giving me, and saw that it was no more than a feebly drawn cross, one line for the avenue and one for the street and that to my certainty he had misnumbered the street, I was decided. Dicherty could not do it; I had to tell him I would not help him and stop him from a catastrophic attempt to do it himself.
I went in to tell Kate that I must go out for a few hours. She was asleep. She lay on her back on top of the covers, dressed but for shoes. Her fair hair, grown longer this summer, came across her sun-red cheek and covered a corner of her mouth. Her small square naked feet, together, stood tenderly, stubbornly up. Thinking that I had never seen her face in sleep before, and that her face in sleep composed itself most excellently well, I rode a surge of pleasure, no, joy. And of course, looking down on the sweet sleeping face of the woman who was to be my wife, I felt love.
It was not too painful outside; a break in the heat was coming. I took the long walk from subway to Dicherty's slowly. When I got there it was quiet, just growing dark. There was a new padlock outside the door of the Nissen hut.
Dicherty was not in his backyard. I called down his stairs, not too loudly; no answer. I sat on a carton in the yard, leaned against the building and waited.
When it was quite dark I decided, without good reason, to go down into Dicherty's place and make sure he was not there. I went down the stairs on lit matches, stood confused for a moment in the basement, pushed open the nearest door, walked in and pulled a light chain glimpsed by a dying match. It was a small room with an unmade cot and a dirty kitchen table, and in the center of the far wall Dicherty hung by the neck from a rope tied to a pipe.
I could not see his face, twisted over a shoulder, and did not try. I felt a wrist; he had been dead for hours. I looked on the table, idly thinking there might be a note. There wasn't. There was the driver's license he had shown me yesterday, an open bottle of ink and a big old-fashioned fountain pen like a pistol barrel. On the date of the license which he had been trying to change there was a large messy blot.
I went out and at a phone booth in front of a garage, without giving my name, called the cops on poor Dicherty.
7
Now married to Kate. She is in many ways like Sally, to be sure, but in many ways unlike, so that is all right. Romantic that I am, I carry as an emergency ration the knowledge that some time there will come another, better Pia, a true unknown, a true new country, but one I will be permitted this time to explore. More practically, there will come, I am sure, another, better Dicherty, a Dicherty who not only knows that something must be done-everybody knows that something must be done-but who knows how to do it, who has a plan. Perhaps, just perhaps, it may be that I will find a plan myself.
