by Tito Perdue
Because never, certainly, would ever he have a love like that, no matter how long the world endured. But wait, was he on the verge of feeling sorry for himself? And not for the first time either? Suddenly, taking his courage in hand, he returned to the bureau and opened all six drawers, finding naught but a price tag with an outrageous number on it.
Next, and finally, he went to the back of the establishment where a very fine collection of old-fashioned tools was on offer. Some of these things had wooden handles that had worn down to the grain by long usage, a reminder of the character of pre-modern America. He examined a crosscut saw with broken teeth and then, in his cruelty, turned to look at the post-modern types passing down the sidewalk.
He wandered at large through the gloaming, as he was at last entitled to call it, highly conscious of all the good people hurrying homeward with shopping bags. He also noted a number of bad ones emerging just then from their hiding places, of which New York had no dearth. What, really, did they want, these last-mentioned — to go drinking and whoring when they might so much more easily have satisfied themselves on the higher pleasures of music and books, and of constantly thinking thoughts? Or was that too exciting a course for ordinary man?
His contempt increased, as also his anxiety to get himself back home again where he could indulge unseen in the higher stages of arrogance. No doubt he ought to call Chris Martin and tell the boy that if he should turn up missing, to seek for his corpse on Osborn Street. True, it was a mid-level neighborhood, and yet he was dressed too tastefully even for this. He came to an insurance agency and waited there in front of the empty showcase — what, after all, should be displayed in an insurance window? — waited till full twilight came down over the city. He could breathe now, and no one was likely to observe his face.
Five
He spent the remainder of that weekend thinking thoughts too awful for most men even to consider, and then on Monday arrived early at the company and finished up his duties by 10:42. He had found that by bending a few degrees to one side, he could acquire a constricted view of the opposite shore of the East River where a building of some considerable esthetic value had taken on a golden hue owing to the light. But except for this, and the two dozen gardenias he had purchased from the little lame balloon man who pestered him each morning, except for these the scenery was as appalling as always.
He pulled open his drawer, finding that he had come to page 147 in the book he had been reading. It was by no mean an objective account of the epoch under consideration; the prose however was exceptionally good. And then, too, it had been a long time since he had exercised his Latin. Naturally that was the moment Sheila stepped into his office and waited to be signaled to a chair.
“O, Philip, where did you get those flowers? That’s so like you.” (He had come from rural Alabama, but even so had won a good deal of prestige among women in this city of false values. Nothing worried him more.)
“Those? Stole ’em off a little old man with a serious limp.”
“Oh, you did not. What were you reading when I came in?”
“Such a pretty day, too. See that gap between those buildings there?”
She came nearer and tried to find the view. Physically speaking, she amounted to little, but he did respect her naïveté, New York’s most infrequent product. Selecting the best of his flowers, he bent toward the girl and planted it in her hair. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe we ought to stroll over to the park and lie about in the sun.” (His face was like a bright silver coin, and both of them knew it.)
“Gosh, I sure would like to. But we can’t.”
“I suppose not.” Her sleeve was askew. Acting with delicacy, Philip made it right again. He could have put her up against the wall and penetrated her where she stood, had only the door not been left ajar. Instead, he went on talking:
“No really, you ought to let me take you out sometime. You like music?”
She paled. He thought at first she might actually faint.
“O, Philip, you just like to say things don’t you? Say, did you know they’re having a great big meeting in the conference room?”
“Ah?”
“They look real worried, too. Marsha thinks the company might go bankrupt!”
“No!” (He cared less about the bankruptcy of corporations than whether to take raisins or strawberries with his morning cereal.)
“It’s because of the war, that’s what I think. I wish they would quit doing that. Killing all those people.”
“History will never forgive us.”
“What’s it all about Philip?
“Well! Both sides want to be in control of people. People, for God’s sake.” (He could not but laugh.)
Alone again, he read five more pages in which the parallels between Sassanian times and his own decaying country were made embarrassingly clear. Himself, he would have preferred to live in a cultural country with a three-fold caste system in which everyone was white. A supernal people devoted to astronomy and song, modest living standards (no cars), and hundreds of thousands of beautiful girls consecrated entirely to the search for love. Philosophers, persuasive people, many of them, roaming the city at large. Improved penmanship and the continuation of Wagner’s work. Books printed on pigskin with gold dust on the covers. An impractical society — that’s what he wanted — a dreamy population mad for beauty and all things thereunto appertaining, not excluding rain and a curtailment of daylight hours down to about half the current system. And that, of course, was the moment Tiffany (birth name Ann) stepped briskly into his room and without invitation dropped into the facing chair.
Upholstered in blue leather, her choice of chairs sorted well with the wardrobe she was wearing. Philip looked at her. The company’s officers were still engrossed in the conference room, a circumstance that encouraged people to mill about at freedom and visit one another.
“Ah ha!” the woman said, examining Philip’s eleven surviving gardenias. “So now I know who put that flower in Sheila’s hair!”
Philip admitted it. The bitch was good-looking, as he also admitted, and wore just the amount of make-up congruent with her character. Certainly her skirt was short enough, and when she crossed her legs, a slow maneuver, he was presented with a view of about 70% of the material up in there, even to the top of her glossy hose. He knew what she wanted, which was pretty much what she had wanted from him for the past several years. Nor was he totally immune to the business with her legs. With feigned indifference, he closed his drawer, relegating his book to another day.
“You never gave me a flower,” she said.
“And so you came to collect it, right?”
“Yes! And some other things.” She smiled lewdly. She could not understand, of course, that his requirements were perfectly well served already by his personal whore, an expensive indulgence that left his mind free for more noble usage. Suddenly he tossed the hair out of his eyes and then took out his cigarettes and offered one to the flirt. In Alabama it was the boys who chased after girls, the reverse, apparently, of this new fashion.
“I suppose now I’ll have to bring flowers every day.” (He was trying to turn this into a routine conversation between himself and a woman he was inclined to abominate.) “Do you think I could put it on my charge account?”
“Sure. Why not?” (It marked the third time she had crossed her legs in just four minutes and twenty seconds. Consulting his watch, he did have to wonder if she were wearing underclothes or not. The thought came to him just then to see his prostitute tomorrow, rather than the day after that.)
“You’re so cruel, Philip.”
He needed four minutes to get shot of the girl, and then another twenty seconds to arrive at the elevator and fall to the lobby, where he bought a newspaper and carried it with him to the barbers’ shop that lay over against a tiny boutique offering rare and unusual postage stamps. But he had to wait another seven minutes for his accustomed barber to become available. This man had an array of mirrors
that enabled Philip to monitor the operation. It was essential that he be left with locks of golden hair to tumble down romantically over his lambent forehead.
“Would be a shame,” the barber said, “not to take advantage of… your appearance.”
“Not what it used to be, my appearance. I hit my stride at about age 28 I think, or thereabouts.”
“You still got a few years.”
Philip checked his watch. “I’ll be glad to be done with it, actually.”
“No you won’t.”
He knew he was going to stop off at the stamp shop and look at some of the rarities on display. He had a weakness for the Baltic area, especially in the form of the Lithuanian issues of 1920-22. But better than this was old Persia, and particularly the portrait series of 1898. Better still was the third value in that series (Scott #115) which seemed to be of the quaintest shade of lemon yellow ever seen. Philip came nearer, striving to interpret the underlying character of the rather morose-looking shah who must have been sleeping when the portrait was made. He knew of course that certain scoundrels were in the habit of producing unlawful facsimiles of these and indeed a large portion of so many other examples of nineteenth-century material. Taking the little envelope in one hand, he traipsed over to the assumed owner of the place who in spite of so much flammable matter was weaning on a cigar.
“How much for the yellow one?” Philip asked. “It’s probably a forgery anyway.”
“Yellow? We don’t break sets. Policy.”
“All right, how much for the full set?”
“How much you got?”
Both men laughed. The fellow’s teeth were just awful, and appeared to have been eroded down to almost nothing by dint of something or another.
“Anyway, they’re just forgeries.”
“Maybe so. But who was the forgerer? Some of those suckers sell better than the real thing.”
He was set back on his heels, Philip. This was not a consideration that had occurred to him.
“OK, how much for this forgery?”
“Whole set? Or just that yellow one you seem to like so much?”
“Whole set, of course! I wouldn’t want to see it broken into pieces.”
“Whenever I get a haircut, I always brush my jacket off afterward. Seventeen dollars and a half for the full set.”
“Seven…! I think you’re trying to give me a haircut.”
“Actually I wouldn’t suggest that you buy anything at all, knowing as little as you do.”
“Yes, but it’s the beauty I care about.”
“Yes! Rupert told me about those mirrors. How much extra does he charge for that, I wonder?”
Having detoured into the men’s room, Philip brushed his jacket free of the strands of golden hair, a stuff as resplendent as Achilles’. Mayhap he could sell the stuff to some of his female promoters. Next, to make himself more healthy-looking, he slapped each cheek once or twice, setting up a ruddy glow. It wouldn’t endure for very long, he understood that, but he liked to look his best whenever he was coming or going in view of the twenty-seven girls looking up from their desks. (Two of the girls did not look up, an indictment of his waning beauty.)
Actually, he would have been just as glad to be done with all that. For consolation he took up his newspaper and stapled together the uncooperative pages that were always falling out of skew. The conference room had finally adjourned and the officers, some of them despondent and others smiling, were moving away from each other to their various offices. Either the linguist (Philip, that is to say) would remain with the company or be made to look for a new position. In the latter case, he might have to change from strawberries to raisins on his morning cereal.
The newspaper was a typical representative of the urban type, an esteemed publication carrying headlines about the horrors of the South. (The editors permitted no day to go by without front page photographs of negroes engaged in positive endeavors.) Page two carried a girl in a bikini, following which the quality of the writing began precipitously to spiral down into incensed comments about the grotesque nature of western traditions.
He read about a famous singer and her new hairdo, and then, at the bottom of page 12, a two-sentence paragraph describing the work and death of a certain archeologist who had altered received knowledge on a wide range of things.
He spent the rest of that day on certain minor obligations, trivial duties not worth mentioning to garden-variety fiction readers. Previously, in February and earlier, it might fall full dark by five o’clock. But not now, not with the streetlights and illuminated advertisements holding night at bay. Nor with the office thralls trying to sneak away from work a few minutes too soon. And not with Philip, who had escaped his own office and had come back home a solid half-hour before the others had even begun to think in those terms.
Six
Christopher Martin! He found the boy and his lovely colleague waiting for him on the upper storey. These were the last good people in the city, and Philip made no complaint when he realized that they had opened, presumably had read, and then had sealed up his letters with a glue that was visible at the corners. Turning to the woman, an unusually fine-looking personality with anthracite hair, he asked just this one question only:
“Anything important?”
“Your little brother has a job.”
“Really! Where is he?”
“Guam.”
“So. And what’s the job?”
“Private first class.”
“Oh, good. But what’s that ungodly odor from downstairs?”
“We’re trying to distil something! It’s green.”
(She was a numinous creature, wifely in character and as pretty as a woman he had seen once on a French postage stamp.)
He turned, Philip, to the presumed husband. “How old are you now Chris? No, I mean really?”
“It’s kind of a bromide solution. But it won’t hurt you.” The boy then began then to explain the chemistry of it, a detailed story that fell well out of the linguist’s competency in that field. He listened, Philip, and then, exhausted as he was, insisted upon seeing the mess the boy had made.
They had rented this spacious apartment, the boy and girl, and had filled it less with furniture than with an unsteady arrangement of oddly-shaped glassware that occupied the dining room table and extended into the bathroom, where the overflow was emptying drop by drop into the toilet.
‘My goodness,” Philip said, “and what do you call that peculiar-looking thing?”
“Haven’t decided,” the boy replied.
“He works too hard,” said the woman, returning from the kitchen where a coffee pot was warming over a Bunsen burner. The stove itself was being used for purposes connected, one assumed, to the experiment in the adjoining room. “But he doesn’t get any credit for it!”
“’Take the cash and let the credit go!’” Philip adduced humorously, using words taken from one of his favorite poets. He was tired and getting tireder, and meantime upstairs some of his favorite television test patterns were no doubt being exposed. “Well,” said he, “this is all tremendously interesting of course. The complexity and vapors, and so on. Whew! However…” Just then he took out a cigarette and was about to light it when both people leapt up and aborted the procedure, thereby saving the apartment, the building itself, and perhaps the city entire.
He slept briefly, but then arose and strolled about the room. He was so glad to be indoors instead of out, and knowing that the nighttime barbarians were too fully engaged with their misdemeanors to trouble him. From the window he could see (and hear) a group of grinning ethnics singing and dancing to some old half-remembered tribal song. He next perceived a tall man gazing up at the building by means of a telescope. He judged it, judged Philip, to be just past midnight and was dismayed to learn the actual hour. Always he had prided himself on his special rapport with clocks and watches, and knowing how much time remained to him in this particular phase of his ten-thousand-year career.
&nbs
p; Having changed over from the chair to couch, he actually turned on the television and watched about five minutes of a late-night comedian making jokes about the human excretory system. He turned then to the news and for another minute or two listened to a good-looking blonde with a good deal of décolletage dilating on diplomatic affairs. His last attempt showed a crowd of youths making funny faces while doing bumps and grinds.
“You’re just too good for this world, everybody knows that,” had said one of his colleagues, a percipient individual who had long been suspicious of Philip’s real nature. “What do you think human beings are, after all?”
He had laughed, Philip, or rather had tried to, and was relieved when at last the man took an early retirement and went away. He feared these types, people of exceptional parts able to see more than they should. But mostly he feared to be caught out in the open with his attitudes on display.
Dawn was near, and his punishment one day briefer than of just yesterday. Rather than sleep again, he left the couch, unplugged the television, did his toiletries and read four pages, very decent ones, in the Historiae adversum paganos of Orosius.
For today, he chose a blue tie (all his ties were blue) with an armorial crest on it related to the Bourbon kings. The suit he selected was perhaps a shade darker than it ought to have been for the season — the season was getting warmer — while his shirt, freshly pressed, had French cuffs. Viewing himself skeptically in the mirror, he then changed his cufflinks from silver to gold. In fact, he was actually more attractive when he had done without much sleep, an unexpected benefit of his deep cerulean eyes.