The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  Segovia signed off, with a generous shower of grace-notes, as I came in, to be succeeded by the wailing signal which daily reminded New Yorkers that the world of togetherness was still fissionable. Twelve o’clock … I passed close to Kate on my way to the bar, but she did not look up; she was still listening to private echoes of the guitar, she knew I was alive. Two ounces of vodka, three ice cubes, top up with orange juice – the restorative screwdriver took shape and, after a moment, taste. It was excellent, proving once again that the wage-earning man did appreciate a good breakfast. On the road back to health, I turned to look at her.

  You do not see a woman, even the most beautiful, after a couple of years of her company; like a stolen picture, a missing limb, you see her if she is not there. I had not really seen Kate, nor she me, for a long time; six years had taken its customary toll, misting the eye, blunting the many edges of appetite; the only important thing about this was not to be surprised by it. Of course, she was beautiful – and she was beautiful now, lying back on the sofa, dressed in a pale grey Cashmir sweater and the kind of black tailored slacks presumably designed for homework only. The competition from the zebra stripes was formidable, but Kate still emerged as the glowing winner.

  She was slim, she was lovely, she was impeccably groomed; we had been married for six years. Today’s face, though beautiful, was sad, to match the music; and at the moment it was a face many miles away from me. She had gone into mourning again, and I knew by now that I was no longer the man to bring her out of it.

  Children die, and it is more moving than grown-ups; but it is only death, after all – the Fell Sergeant catching up with his statistics. I had mourned our son, bitterly and briefly, and then put him out of mind; if it was heartless, that was because I was heartless – the small fingers had not had time to entwine, the grown-up spirit could not become forever bound, in the space of eighteen months. I had work to do instead, and I had done it.

  Kate had been different, and she still was; for her, those eighteen months had fashioned a beloved individual, and now a mordant memory. She had blamed herself – ‘Any cow can have a baby,’ she had said, in brutal self-contempt: ‘you have to be smart, smart and loving, to keep it.’ Of course, none of it had been her fault; it was just one of those things, the kind which made you feel, if you were an on-and-off believer, that God after all was barbarous, or asleep, or dead; but she had kept this conviction of guilt locked within her, for more than three years. Sometimes she took it out and looked at it, as she was doing today.

  That made it a good time to be somewhere else, to miss the big big scene. The man who could not help was the world’s most superfluous object.

  It was not only the child, anyway.

  The guitar music started again, soft, insistent, plucking at more than the strings. This time, it was Castelnuovo-Tedesco – I knew all these records by heart, in the catalogue sense, though once again the heart itself was absent. I took another nourishing sip of my drink, and gave Kate a civil good morning.

  She looked up at me at last, smiling the faint disengaged smile of wives between breakfast and lunch. She waited for a phrase of the music to finish and then said: ‘You were late.’

  I came forward, to sit on the arm of the sofa. ‘I had to break off for an hour, to do the show. Then we kept on having one more round. Dealer’s choice. Then I couldn’t get a taxi, so I walked home.’

  ‘You’ll get held up, one of these days.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have got much out of me.’

  She nodded to herself, as if recognising a cue. ‘How did we do?’ she asked. The ‘we’ was because, by tradition, she got ten per cent of my poker winnings, and was thus entitled to the stockholders’ report.

  ‘We didn’t do so well.’

  ‘How much did we lose?’

  ‘We lost two thousand, one hundred, and eighty dollars.’

  ‘Oh, Johnny!’ She was startled, as I had known she would be. ‘You can’t afford that.’

  ‘That’s a very fair statement.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘Hobart.’

  ‘Good God!’ Hobart Mackay was my esteemed publisher. ‘Hasn’t he made enough money out of you already?’

  ‘Not recently … It was mostly one hand, damn it. Four jacks bumping four kings. Very expensive.’

  ‘Why don’t you give it up for a bit?’

  ‘Never.’

  She frowned, but as usual she did not try to follow up. Though she disapproved of my poker-playing, which most years took steady toll of all the spare money I had, she had never fought it or nagged about it. I didn’t like some of the things she did, but I didn’t try to alter them either. It was a fair exchange, a truce to mutual abrasion, and if it made two people grow a little apart, then a little apart was where they ought to be.

  I finished off my drink, went back to the bar, and poured another one. Kate was watching me, without saying anything. She had never struck an attitude about drinking, either.

  When I was within her orbit again, she said: ‘How smart you look … What’s this lunch?’

  ‘Jack Taggart, and a man called Erwin Orwin.’

  ‘Who he?’

  ‘He produces musicals.’

  ‘Oh, that one … What are you and your agent doing, lunching with the likes of Erwin Orwin?’

  ‘I don’t know. Jack set it up.’

  ‘He must have said why.’

  It was too early, for all sorts of reasons, to give her any details. ‘Just that Erwin Orwin had an idea.’

  ‘Good for him.’

  I reacted to the tone. ‘Oh, come on, Kate! He can’t help being called Erwin Orwin.’

  ‘Didn’t he do that awful Napoleon thing?’

  ‘That awful Napoleon thing is still running, after two years.’

  ‘So is Lassie.’

  I wasn’t going to be irritated, or have the lunch spoiled, or even the current drink. ‘She’s got all those feet,’ I said. ‘Unfair to people.’

  But Kate, for a change, was not to be side-tracked; poker, and Erwin Orwin, and a sense of exclusion, had triggered something important. ‘I don’t know what you and Jack Taggart are cooking up,’ she said, with sudden energy. ‘But if you want the advice of an older woman, keep out of it.’ Her voice told me she was not fooling, in spite of the fooling words. ‘Don’t let them tie you up again, Johnny … Don’t get involved in writing the script for a musical. Don’t sign on for any more TV. Don’t make a speech at the Academy Awards. Don’t go back to Hollywood. Don’t take off for London.’ She had rehearsed all this, I thought, or lived with it for too long a time; her words were too ready, even for Kate; and the next slice of expensive dialogue supplied the key. ‘You’re halfway through a novel, and you’re a writer. The best I know, in spite of all the nonsense. Do us a favour, Steele. Finish your book. Think about it. Concentrate on it. Polish it up. Write it all over again, if you have to. But finish it. It’s the only thing worth your while.’

  I took the next-to-last sip of my drink, considered the idea of pouring another one, and decided to have it somewhere else. Like many another day, this was not my day for arguing. I knew what I was doing, and I was ready to climb over all the broken bricks and crumbling concrete, all the rubbish-tip of other people’s ideas, to do it. If Kate, as part of the current drama, were in mourning for my life as well as her own, it wasn’t going to be contagious.

  ‘And in the meantime?’ I said.

  She knew what I meant; this was even older ground, fought over, abandoned, recovered a dozen times; littered with tiny gravestones captioned in red ink. She listened for another moment to the music, the dying music of someone else’s sad story; and then: ‘All right,’ she said flatly. ‘End of exercise. Go away and make some money.’

  I had to admire a text-book withdrawal. It was just what I planned to do
.

  Chapter Two

  Downstairs, Joe the doorman, an imperfectly feudal retainer, said ‘Hi there, Mr Steele!’ and then, braided cap in hand, saw me out through the swing door into 77th Street. The sun was still trying to shine, but the contrast between eighty-degree steam heat and forty-degree fresh air was too marked for comfort. I stood under the red-striped canopy, buttoning up my top coat, while Joe looked towards Park Avenue in search of a cruising taxi. Waiting, we exchanged some traditional dialogue.

  ‘Saw you on TV last night, Mr Steele.’

  ‘Did you? I hope you enjoyed the show.’

  ‘That’s one we always watch. But my wife keeps asking, what’s he really like.’

  As usual, I resisted the temptation to say, ‘Bastards don’t come any bigger,’ and answered: ‘Oh, he’s quite a character, once you get to know him.’

  ‘That’s what we thought. I liked the bit when he mixed up the commercial.’

  A taxi, answering Joe’s raised hand, drew up alongside. As I got in, Joe put on his cap, gave a windmill salute, and said: ‘Take it easy, now.’

  The master-and-servant charade was over; the one that followed it, loosely labelled ‘All New York Cab Drivers are Characters,’ now took its place. Sometimes the credit-title was true, and on a long run, say from Kennedy Airport into town, one could really enjoy a salty monologue on the state of the nation; more often than not, nature’s lovable cab drivers turned out to be just another New York myth, and the reality was crude and disobliging, preoccupied with a radio tuned to the most raucous local station of all, which was raucous indeed. This morning, I had drawn a candidate from the majority, a surly spitting man who spent a full half-minute filling in his timesheet before throwing over his shoulder the words: ‘Where to?’

  Though I knew the omens were not promising, I felt like getting my money’s worth for the ride. Why should cab drivers be the only people licensed to behave like barbarians? Just as if it were normal, I answered: ‘The Court of the Sixteen Satraps.’

  His head on its thick furry neck came round a fraction. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Don’t you know a restaurant called The Court of the Sixteen Satraps?’

  ‘Jesus!’ He spat out of the side window, which should have been closed and was letting in a frigid draught. ‘What are they going to call ’em next?’

  ‘Thirty-eighth Street,’ I told him. ‘Between Madison and Fifth. You’re meant to know that sort of thing.’

  He braked roughly to a halt for the first traffic lights, hawked and spat once more, looked at himself in the mirror, and asked: ‘What was that name again?’

  ‘The Court of the Sixteen Satraps. Haven’t you heard of it? It’s been open about a year.’

  ‘If I had to remember every nutty joint in town, I wouldn’t be driving a hack. I’d be out of my skull.’

  After that, he only spoke once more, when we were stopped by the lights at 60th Street, and he jerked his head at a policeman standing on the corner. ‘See that lousy cop?’ he growled, out of the corner of his mouth. ‘He’s the meanest bastard in town.’

  I said: ‘Don’t give up so easily,’ and he glared at me in the mirror; and after that, we rode in welcome silence, and I was free to enjoy – and did enjoy – the descent into the grand canyon of this city.

  After a season in London, we had lived in New York for the past five years; we had liked it from the moment we first went there, for the publication of Ex Afrika, and clinched the liking when we came back for the opening of the film. (I still recalled the trio of charming, watchful, look-alike Jews who went everywhere with us on that occasion, on a twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock, escort basis. I had been much impressed by the film company’s thoughtfulness until Kate said: ‘It’s only to make sure we don’t get drunk before the première.’) After that visit, we had made the move a permanent one, leased the duplex apartment, and settled in to relish all that our bouncing hometown could offer.

  It was a lot, even on an anonymous basis; and riding the crest of a book which stayed on the best-seller list for one hundred and four weeks, followed by another which lasted a full year, we had a wild and wonderful time. New York, we found, had open arms; and if sometimes they needed to be pried open first, that didn’t affect the ultimate welcome. Oysters were just the same, and just as wild and wonderful.

  There was an endless amount of things for me to do in fact, too much for a writer who wanted only to write; I had to compromise, or rather I had to accept the fact, which was no hardship, that a book every three or four years was the most I could do, if I wanted to be a recognisable, available, quotable man as well. It happened that I did want that … I had made, and still did, a lot of television appearances – all the old shows and all the new, from Dave Garroway down to Johnny Carson, via Sullivan, Parr, John Daly and David Susskind. I did a lecture tour which, at the cost of staring down upon assorted seas of millinery, from Boston to San Francisco, four times a week for three months, netted me fifty thousand dollars, and a permanent distaste for Chicken Pot Pie and pineapple salad.

  I made a trip to the Congo for Life Magazine, and another to London to sniff and then distil the fragrance of the Ward-Profumo-Keeler circus. I went to Hollywood to do Wrap-Around’s screenplay, and then to Cuba for one of those sober assessments of the Castro regime and swiftly out again as a suspected CIA saboteur. That didn’t do me any harm, either.

  It was part of a self-projection, consistent, long-term, and highly effective. Kate didn’t like it, I did. As its result, Ex Afrika earned a swift quarter-of-a-million dollars before it started to ease off; its successor, Wrap-Around, bolstered by a monumental film deal, had already made half a million more. As far as I was concerned, there weren’t any other kinds of book, and there weren’t going to be.

  $900,000 in six years was the current score, and it would top the million mark before this year was out. We still never seemed to have any money, but it was an acceptable kind of poverty; and here, as if to point the fact, was the gilded entrance to The Court of the Sixteen Satraps, home (so the ads declared) of the Gourmet Who Looks East.

  A man dressed in a jewelled turban, scarlet leather jerkin, and golden-hued Turkish trousers, and flourishing a colossal two-handed scimitar (for which, I happened to know, he needed a police permit) stood sentinel outside, waiting to open the cab doors; and he was still only a minor clue to what lay in wait within.

  The Sixteen Satraps, which was very much the ‘in’ restaurant that year, was predominantly Persian, with overtones from other vanished empires nearby; the bar was a copy of the Blue Mosque of Isfahan, the main dining room shaped like a Persian walled garden, complete with latticework and a control system of falling rose-petals; the checkroom and cigarette girls wore transparent veils, cut-out velvet hearts in strategic places, and were known as Persian Lambs.

  Vast tapestries covered the walls; vast punkah fans waved to and fro overhead; on the tables (shaped and coloured like shining half-moons) the place mats were small Persian rugs, the plates inverted bronze shields, the knives miniature scimitars, the spoons miniature slippers, the wine-coolers miniature war-chariots. The waiters wore Turkish trousers, silk sashes, white turbans and gold slave-bangles; all the men behind the bar sported false yet formal beards of curly gold thread, copied from the tapestried warriors above. The man in charge of them was called Xerxes.

  The menus were enormous, printed in Persian (small italics) translated into English (18-point Roman); at the head of each was the Omar Khayyám quotation, ‘A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and Thou,’ and underneath: ‘You bring the Thou, we do the rest.’ The maître d’hôtel, a remote personage, was known as the Head Shah. The food, leaning towards shish-kebabs on flaming daggers, stuffed vine leaves and melons foaming sherbet at every pore, was atrociously expensive, and very good indeed.

  I gave my coat to one of the Persian Lambs, a forward-looking gir
l of large and lavish build; indeed, her configuration, whether true or false, always seemed an architectural impossibility. If this was a lamb, it was no wonder about support prices. Accepting the coat, she said: ‘Hi, Mr Steele! Saw you on TV last night.’

  ‘So late? You should have been in bed.’

  ‘Oh, I was!’

  The look in her eye would have stunned a statue. I backed away prudently towards the bar, elevated nonetheless. Somebody loved me, after all.

  ‘Hi, Mr Steele!’ said Xerxes the head barman, a small foxy man whose fake yellow beard made him look like a starving actor which he may well have been, after office hours. ‘Saw you on TV last night.’

  ‘Good for you.’ One day, someone was going to tell me they had read one of my books, and I would break down altogether. ‘Did you like the show?’

  ‘I liked it when he was on every night.’

  I wrestled with this non sequitur for a moment, but it wouldn’t come out. ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Now I’m feeling thirsty.’

  ‘Farah Dibah?’

  ‘Farah Dibah.’

  A Farah Dibah was a martini with a stuffed date instead of an olive.

  Sipping it, I looked round the Blue Mosque bar, and through its entrance to the walled-garden restaurant, and wondered not for the first time, what strange tribal signal brought certain kinds of people to certain kinds of places at certain times of the year. The Court of the Sixteen Satraps, being the current ‘in’ eating-place, was naturally the current expense-account haven, particularly at lunchtime; it was as if someone had sounded a moose-horn in the heart of New York, and commanded: ‘All right, boys. Four Seasons, out! Twelve Caesars, out! Sixteen Satraps, in! Get going!’ And here they all were, the March of the Charcoal Greys in person.

  Ad men, TV men, film men in from the coast; producers and directors from the Broadway musicals; agents from all over – they had all suddenly arrived at the Satraps, brandishing their meal tickets from the Diners’, Hilton Carte Blanche and American Express; and you couldn’t tell one open-handed freeloader from another. It was a curious and grisly fact that whether a man sold Chanel or Chryslers, soap or cheese, women or men, he shared this uniform look – spearheaded by the Madison Avenue brigade, all with the same cropped haircuts, the same never-still eyes, the same contempt for the customer, the same oldest young faces in the world.