The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  I jumped up from my chair, on swift impulse, endangering the balance of the old man, who was nearby. But he recovered, and raised his hat, and bowed again. He was not to be turned from his endeavours … There were obvious dangers and complications ahead, if I did take Susan to New York, which was a small town in certain ways, and a most resonant sounding board for the faintest whisper of gossip, particularly at the café-society level.

  But the reasons for taking her back with me had suddenly grown bigger than the reasons for leaving her in Barbados, or saying goodbye in Miami, and I was walking down the garden path to tell her so.

  Armed with a stiff drink which the occasion demanded, I crossed to her cabin, and peered inside. She was still asleep, curled up under the covers of our workshop; but the shapely mound was still recognisable as a girl. I patted the mound where it was most appealing, and she raised her head, and opened one sleepy eye.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. She blinked, and frowned, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘Aren’t you the man who was here? What happened to you?’

  ‘A phone call.’

  ‘Tell her you’re all tied up.’ She was still fathoms deep, and not too keen to come to the surface. ‘Don’t call us,’ she mumbled. ‘We’ll call you.’

  ‘It was from New York,’ I said. ‘Erwin Orwin.’

  ‘What he want?’

  I took a drink before I answered: ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to go back.’

  ‘Oh … When?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  She yawned cavernously, but the news had already broken through; both eyes were open now, and she was peering doubtfully up at me, as if the warmth of our bed were no longer sheltering her from the much colder world outside. ‘I’ve lost count,’ she said, though I did not think this was quite true. ‘What day is today?’

  ‘Monday.’

  At that she really woke up, and sat up too. The view was charming, and if I had had any thoughts of changing my mind, I lost them then and there, in a stalwart determination to rescue everything in sight.

  ‘Why so soon, Johnny?’ she asked.

  ‘They need the play, and it’s ready for them. I can’t really stay on here any longer.’ I drew a long breath, the breath of determination. ‘But when I go, I want you to come back with me.’

  Her face grew suddenly wary, and guarded. ‘You mean all the way to New York?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head, flicking the small bright curtain of her hair across her shoulders. ‘Give me my robe. I can’t think when I’m naked.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. And while I remember, thank you for last night.’ But something in her face told me that she was not in the market for this kind of reminiscence, and I picked up her silk robe, and put it round her, with a kiss on the top of her head for luck. Then I sat down on the edge of the bed, and waited.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said again. ‘Maybe we just ought to–’ she was back to her old habit of not finishing sentences, and this time I could understand it. Her expression had grown more careful still. ‘I mean, we’ve had a lot of fun already.’

  ‘There’s more to come.’

  ‘Maybe. But I didn’t want this to grow into a problem … Look, I’m going back to Miami anyway. Why don’t we just leave it like that?’

  ‘What happens to you in Miami?’

  ‘I’ll get by.’

  ‘I don’t want you to get by. It’s not good enough. I want us to go back together. Then when we get to New York, we’ll do something about you.’

  ‘What about me?’

  I tried not to make it sound too noble. ‘I want to help you somehow. I really do. It shouldn’t be too difficult. It just means a fresh start.’

  ‘I don’t need a fresh start.’

  ‘That’s all you do need.’

  It was almost pathetic to watch her face as she considered what I was saying. I was reminded once again of an earlier thought – of how vulnerable was a girl like Susan, once she had stepped into this sleazy arena. Sitting on the bed, remembering last night and many other nights, I realised that I was not in the best shape for cold calculation. It was the sort of moment, the sort of potent situation, when one could be betrayed into all kinds of stupid decisions; decisions which, though grounded in pity, could flower into monsters of complication and deceit.

  But I had, at the same time, a picture of her, standing outside the airport at Miami, waiting for the bus and the next pick-up, and I could not bear it.

  As she said nothing, I spoke again. ‘It is all you need, Susan. Give it a chance. Come back to New York with me, and we’ll work out a plan.’

  ‘What sort of plan?’

  ‘I don’t know. You could take a course at one of the acting schools, something like that. Or have another try in television. They’re not all bastards, and I do know a few people who could help.’

  ‘They are all bastards … But you’re being very sweet. Wouldn’t it mean trouble for you? I don’t want to involve you in anything. I mean, being married, and tied up. That sort of thing never works out.’

  ‘It’s worked out all right so far.’

  She shook her head, like a child refusing a treat for reasons it cannot really explain. ‘That’s down here. It could be different in New York.’ Suddenly she faced the test question, the thing we were both thinking about, and not mentioning. ‘What happens when your wife comes back?’

  I didn’t know the answer to that, and I didn’t try to find it. ‘One thing at a time. Let’s get to New York first, and see how it works out.’

  ‘I’ll think about it … I’ll think about it all morning … I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but it is difficult.’ She stretched her arms high above her head, and the robe fell away from her shoulders, and she was a big girl again. ‘It’s nice to have a choice, anyway.’ She was eyeing me, and I was doing the same, without disguise. ‘Didn’t they ever tell you? – it’s rude to stare.’

  ‘I just don’t know where else to look.’

  She leant back against the pillow, and asked, as she had, sometimes asked before: ‘Shall I get up yet?’

  ‘I’ll think about that,’ I answered, copying her earlier tone. ‘I’ll think about it carefully, for all of the next ninety seconds.’

  ‘Ninety seconds? What’s happened to the great trigger-man?’

  ‘He’s getting old,’ I said. ‘But that won’t last, either.’

  Clearly, there were all sorts of dangers and complications in this idea of mine, and they might not be too far away. But once having made up my mind, I was ready to take them on happily. The death-wish, I thought, as I lay down beside her and prepared to show that I had not grown as old as all that, was not a novelist’s tiny spark of invention; it was a real thing. And to be worthwhile, it had to be strong.

  We drove back a different way, keeping more to the west and avoiding the atrocities of the Florida tourist strip; it gave us one spectacular section, a scenic road called the Blue Ridge Parkway, which rollercoasted its way for more than three hundred miles from mountain top to mountain top, striding a loose-slung tightrope in the clouds, with fantastic views of the plainlands far below on either side, and slow-circling hawks to keep us company.

  We were in high spirits, to match this vantaged eyrie; later on, when we had to drop down to lower levels, across the blue grass country of northern Virginia, we seemed to be bringing gifts from Olympus to the lowly earthlings. But happiness persisted, at whatever altitude; Susan was very good company by day, and, by night, a soft and sinuous pillow for a weary man.

  When it grew cold again, in Washington, I bought her a fur coat, bringing comfort to her, and the total cost of the excursion to another well-rounded figure, $11,000.

  Then suddenly we ran out of north-bound, home-going road, and it was April, and spring in
New York.

  Chapter Five

  First I had to console Kate.

  I was so very sorry to hear about your father (I wrote). It must have been a horrible shock for you, even though you had some warning, and a little time to start to live with the idea. These can only be desolate days for you, and I hope you have some good friends at hand to help you. But I know how close you always were to him, and how he thought and felt about you, and nothing you get from other people is going to take the place of that.

  I’ve never found out if these letters of sympathy do any good; I would doubt it myself. Anyway, husbands don’t send wives letters of sympathy; they send their dearest love, which is what I do now.

  You don’t need me to say, stay as long as you feel you have to. There are bound to be a thousand things to do at Maraisgezicht, and you are the obvious and probably the only person to deal with them. I suppose you will be selling the place itself. Anyway, all that sort of thing can wait its turn.

  New York is full, and busy, and I am working very hard, living at the Pierre as you see, and occasionally sallying out for sessions with Teller and Wallace. Teller is the tall one, Wallace the small; I was never quite sure of this till now. They are fantastic people to work with, quick like foxes. Erwin Orwin’s wife calls him ‘lover’. When I got back to NY, everyone said: ‘Haven’t seen you on TV lately,’ and that was about all they did say.

  Now it is time to drop this twelve floors down the letter shute, into the hands of the tiny postman who waits to catch it. They say he has never missed a single letter, in forty years. (He has a younger brother, who switches off the lights inside refrigerators.) My love again, and call me here if there is anything you want or anything I can do.

  Teller was the big one, and wrote the words; Wallace was the small, and wrote the music. Together they made up a team which knew exactly where it was going, and the quickest way to get there. They had done four shows together, and in planning this, their fifth, they thought and talked a kind of shorthand which often spanned chasms of question marks and produced the identical right answer at the same moment. They were, as Jack Taggart had warned me earlier, a very hard pair to keep up with.

  When I met them in New York, I had only just made my first minimum contribution to The Pink Safari. So far, it had been easy – perhaps too easy; I felt there was bound to be something much harder for me to do, and I was not disappointed. All I had achieved at this stage was to produce a bare blueprint of the linking material for the music and songs of the experts. This was, as they speedily showed me, only a dot on a chart, a point of departure.

  What I had done with Ex Afrika – and it was not by accident – was to simplify it, trim it down, switch on a few extra lights, and give it a transfusion of cheerfulness in place of foreboding.

  It was still the story of white South Africans having fun on top of their volcano, and Negroes, even in degradation, having fun in mockery of the whites. But this schism was not the end of the world for either – my picture was of two contrasting cultures, two kinds of life, which, when they met and touched, did not inevitably blast off into a dark orbit of hatred and contempt.

  The storyline was sad in parts, like life, and funny too; people struck noble attitudes and flourished weapons, but they also tripped over their own togas, and sometimes discovered that their weapons were toys from the wrong catalogue. Boy met girl, and made the most of it; and if, somewhere offstage, something sinister was smouldering, the smoke was not too acrid, the smell not too noisome.

  Life went on, for man, woman and dog, and it was never entirely futile, nor disgraceful, nor unbearable, at any level.

  ‘Keep it light,’ Erwin Orwin had cautioned, when we said goodbye after our first lunch. ‘We’re not solving any problems with this one. We’re setting them to music.’ I had stuck to this directive, and he liked what I had done so far. But it was only the beginning. From now on, I had to be on call, ready with the vast improvements which everyone seemed to take for granted.

  I enjoyed every moment of it, not least because – after many weeks of dolce far niente – it was just the sort of wit-sharpening process of which I stood most in need. We worked in a colossal barn of a studio, tacked onto the back of one of Erwin Orwin’s run-down, off-Broadway theatres; and, at this stage, everything to do with the production was centred upon this echoing foundry.

  There, Teller scribbled the lyrics, while Wallace hummed the tunes in a thin nasal baritone; a tireless man at a piano (he was actually Teller’s mother’s cousin) transcribed the result, and hammered it out for size. I was there myself, enjoying it all immensely, admiring the way these people could worry away at a bone until it was clean-picked and ready for inspection; but I was also there to be shot at, by anyone with my kind of gun.

  Sometimes Teller would say: ‘We want some diddle-diddle music in there,’ and Wallace, almost before the words were out of his partner’s mouth, would go ‘Diddle diddle diddle,’ mimicking a violin, and the man at the piano would jot it down, and stick in a few grace-notes and arpeggios, and incorporate it into the score.

  Sometimes, more alarmingly, they would both turn to me, and say: ‘Hold it! That needs two more lines, and a joke about the spear, and a song-cue for My Mother Bids Me Bare My Breast,’ and then they would wait, as everyone in the room would wait, from Erwin Orwin’s secretary to the man who had come to look at the humidifier, until I produced the right answer. There was never any question of my saying: ‘Let me think about it.’ People didn’t use that phrase any more.

  Erwin Orwin spent a great deal of time at the studio, stamping and wheezing his way in, manoeuvring his vast bulk behind a corner desk, and sitting down like an enormous spider come to inspect one of his chain of webs. I would have thought that Teller and Wallace might have objected to this invasion, but it seemed that they were used to it, and that this was the way an Erwin Orwin musical was always evolved, at this particular stage.

  There was no nonsense about the isolation of the artist, or the paramount necessity for cerebration in an ivory tower; we were producing a public spectacle, soon to be dissected by a thousand probing eyes, and it was taken for granted that the more people who crowded in at this formative moment, the better were our chances of shredding out the rubbish.

  If any other team worked like this, I had never heard of it. But that didn’t make any difference. These were the rules in this particular establishment, and anyone who objected to them was free to join another circus. Erwin Orwin did it this way, and so did Teller and Wallace, and so, at the tail-end of the comet, did I.

  Orwin came to see us; people came to see him. Stage designers arrived with miniature sets; dress-designers brought sketches, and slapped them down on the table in a petulant act of salesmanship. Agents bounced in, bearing fabulous package deals involving one girl-acrobat, one husband who played the bassoon like an angel, and one TV commitment which could be fixed. Mothers brought children, who stumbled through their tap-dance routines and were then hustled out again, to the sound of offstage slaps and wails. Men came, and took off their ties, and sang; girls came, and shed their furs like snakes in spring, and danced.

  The men would glower and flash their eyes, intent on projecting an image of the menace which a show such as this must surely demand; the girls, more realistic, darted fiery glances at Erwin Orwin, at Teller and Wallace, and even, as a last forlorn resort, at me. Men and women alike arrived in all shapes, sizes, and colours, since one half of the cast was to be Negro. But they all had one thing in common. They wanted to be in The Pink Safari.

  That fact itself would have been flattering, if I had had any time at all to be flattered. But I was low man on this totem, and working, harder than I had worked for many a long year, at an entirely new job which fascinated me. It was earn-while-you-learn at its most compelling; and as long as the day lasted, I could bear nothing else in mind, and did not want to.

  Grad
ually the show began to take shape, which made us all happy, and vaguely suspicious of our luck. But I could be happy in another way, without suspicion, since I had a dividend declared to no one else. When our work came to a weary stop, at each nightfall, and the team cast its slightly withered petals, I still had Susan Crompton.

  Like all intent romantics, we had settled down to the routine of our choice. Between six and eight each evening, depending on theatrical pressures, Susan would meet me, not too far from the studio, at a bar on 44th Street. There I would down the first recuperative drink of the day, and we would sit and hold hands, re-establishing the world of sensual contact. From then on, we would take the town for all it was worth.

  The things I liked to do, in these off-hours, were luckily the same as hers – or, if they were not, if she were ever tagging along in mutiny and despair, it never showed. We both enjoyed eating, and New York was made for such a hobby; there was better French, Italian, or German cooking to be discovered here, than in large tracts of the respective homelands.

  Of course, the sources needed tracing, but we were never in any hurry. We could afford to shop around, and we liked to wander.

  Our range of choice was fantastic, enough to enliven any conceivable mood, though we had our favourites, and they also became traditional. If we were monumentally hungry, we went downtown to Luchows, and gorged ourselves, like any Bavarian trencherman and his frau, on heavy slices of everything in sight, washed down by treacly draughts of Loewenbrau.

  If we were feeling elegant and Gallic, the Maison Basque or Maude Chez Elle stood with open doors, ready with anything to be found anywhere within the Dictionnaire Gastronomique of Larousse. If we felt – or wished to feel – like bulgy Italian peasants on the spree, we would dive into Romeo Salta’s, and there dive into the pasta.

  The kind of uninhibited lobster-gorge which called for a bib and a succession of finger-bowls was all ready for us, down at the King of the Sea. If we wanted food cooked by blowtorch, or Chinese mounds of this and that; or the roast beef of Old England (via Argentina), or goulash, or bouillabaisse, or clams steamed in Hawaiian seaweed, there were places for these, too. If we were lazy, or didn’t care much either way, we stayed where we were, and nibbled hot pastrami and dill pickles, and looked forward to starting all over again, the following week, with renewed appetite and another seven different places to choose from.