Ding! goes the bell.
Kenyon Saint Claire, the first category is Newspapers. You’re correct and you have eight points!
—Camera Three we’re gonna stay with you on Winfeld—
Sid Winfeld, with your sixty-nine thousand five hundred dollars still at stake, now at twenty-five hundred dollars a point, the category is Newspapers. I beg your pardon? You have no idea?
—Close as you can Camera Three the guy’s just dyin’ show us the corpse now don’t let us off the hook—
You don’t wanna take a guess at it? Then I’ll have to give it to you, Sid. The title of the editorial was “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” I’m sorry you stay at Zero. Mister Saint Claire you have eight points.
—Camera Two—
Ding! goes the bell.
The category is Kings. Catherine Howard is correct, and what happened to her? He did divorce her, and you’ve got eighteen points! Sid Winfeld, the category is Kings. You’re right, you now have ten points!
—Camera Two Camera Three split screen, line the poor suckers up for me fellas—
Gentlemen, may I caution you now not to divulge your scores because you can hear each other. I’m going to give you some time and I’ll tell you when your time is up. Click. If either player stops the game right now, Mister Saint Claire will win back twenty-thousand dollars from Sid Winfeld. They don’t know each other’s scores, let’s see what happens…
COMMENTATORS
“The emcee is not precisely dishonest. … He’s not a fake but he is a bit artificial—in a nice way, of course. … Announcements are safe. Real talk is dangerous.”
SIDNEY
“Gentlemen,” says Mint’s voice in the earphones, “if one of you wants to stop the game you must tell me so right now.”
He’s hardly finished saying it when here comes the other voice: “I’ll stop.”
And just like that it’s over and Sidney can only shut his eyes. He stands in the hot booth with headset still on, eyes squeezed closed, shaking his head, as Mint’s voice declares You win twenty thousand dollars! He keeps his eyes shut even as the spokesmodels open the booths. He knew this was coming, sure, only how do you prepare for the moment itself? He opens his eyes, peels away the earphones, lays them down next to the snakelike wiring exposed on the backside of the scorebox, and steps numbly from the booth. Somehow, at the podium, he manages to shake Saint Claire’s hand, to listen to Mint’s obsequious little speech—we may have a lotta contestants in the future but I doubt that anybody will ever display … and to say his own little part when Mint gives him the cue: You’re going home with forty-nine thousand five hundred dollars, Sid, what’re you gonna do with your dough? “Well, Mister Mint, this all came so suddenly. The first thing I want to do is outfit my family … I would also like to make a small contribution to the City College fund … then I’m gonna guard the rest of my money, put it in the bank. And I would also like to thank you and the members of your staff for all the kindness and courtesy you’ve extended to me.”
“Thank you, Sid, for being a wonderful contestant. Sid Winfeld, ladies and gentlemen!”
Applause, applause, and Sidney is wheeling and heading toward the wings, toward the hard edge of the blazing stage light which is only shadows.
Q:
Mister Winfeld, you felt you had rightly
earned all that prize money and had
no obligation to give it back?
A:
May I say, I was not—in my opinion—
I was not a quiz contestant. I was an actor.
Q:
Mister Winfeld, does the kinescope
of the television quiz program which you have
just seen accurately reproduce the questions and
the answers given to you—and by you—
at that time?
A:
Yes sir, it does.
Q:
Does the kinescope also accurately reproduce
the mannerisms and acting gestures used by you?
A:
Yes sir.
Q:
Does it reproduce the perspiration coming off
your brow when you attempted to answer
what were theoretically most extremely
difficult questions?
A:
It does, sir.
Q:
Mister Winfeld, did that film reflect the condition
within the booth that made you apparently so warm?
A:
Yes sir. They have an air conditioning system in there,
but when I asked them to turn it on they gave the excuse
that it would make too much noise. Naturally, keeping it off
caused me to perspire profusely.
Q:
They do have air conditioning in the booths that they can
turn on or off as they desire?
A:
Yes sir. But at all times they refused to turn it on, claiming
it made too much noise and interfered with
the production of the program.
Q:
Being in such a closed space without any air at all,
you would naturally perspire quite extensively?
A:
Yes sir.
Q:
Were the booths locked?
A:
No sir. But you were not to leave the booth
until the door was opened for you from outside.
Q:
The door could be opened from the inside, though?
You could leave the booth at any time if you chose?
A:
Not exactly, sir. Doing so would greatly disrupt
the program, you understand.6*
KENYON
Come back next week, will you Mister Saint Claire, and tell us if you’d like to keep playing, said Fred Mint on the air. But they knew—everyone this side of the cameras knew—that Kenny would be back on Tuesday for the meeting in Lacky’s office. As for tonight, by 11:30 he’s out of the building, still made up, walking alone down West 50th. Good to be outside and in the dark—a profound relief, really, after the blinding lights, the blazing booth, the cameras’ red eyes, the answers at the ready but always swallowed down (count to four), the outrageous clarity and precision of it all.
Let us give thanks for shadows, goes a line in his head—is it a remembered line of poetry?—let us thank the edges unseen, the heights and deeps of the never revealed.
Has it really happened? he thinks. Did I really win twenty thousand dollars tonight?
And they tell him he’s safe to keep playing. So it’s to continue. There’s more to come.
But suddenly, somehow, his mind turns to his time in Europe—he is seeing Sidie’s low-ceilinged flat, and his crumbling room in the rue de Seine. Despite his efforts to write, he was an aimless, feeble thing in Europe. Plagued with anonymity. But how he’d felt his freedom then. He hardly even knew it at the time, but my god, how he’d felt it.
Tonight in the bright hall outside the studio, amid the bustle, the popping of flashbulbs, he shook Mr. Greenmarch’s hand and Mr. Greenmarch, smiling, said, “Fifteen million tonight. How’s that feel, Kenny?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Fifteen million. Viewers. Number of people watched you conquer Winfeld!”
Kenyon boards a train at Rockefeller Center, sits with the windows at his back. But there in the black window opposite he sees himself in the illumined car; his coarse and curly pompadour, the mask-like definition of the face in its makeup. Always now, every window a mirror. That booth most of all. And the cameras, always throwing you back at yourself.
Fifteen million—among them, he knows, were Maynard and Emily Saint Claire. Their neighbor Dr. Addison invited the
m over for the broadcast, knowing they had no TV set of their own. And surely what they saw on the screen will dismay them—a man so unlike their son, a mere performance. We help you be you. Oh, Kenyon can hardly borrow such an explanation for use with his father—I know I know it’s awfully false Dad but you see they’re helping me be my best television self. No, never. And so, what to say? He told his parents he’d call and he will, but best to listen, as always.
At Thirty-Fourth Street he changes trains—out the automated doors, up the grimy concrete steps, down again into stagnant brimstone air, onto another car.
He’s had to change his number, a personal visit to the telephone company. And still, somehow, his line kept ringing. So he unplugged the phone, and plugs it in only to call out. How strange, those first few days, the constant siren of that ring and no one there to get it but Kenny. This, and then the sacks and sacks of letters. He’s only one person, but now they’ll make him their own, in fifteen million ways.
Up the subway stairs into the night again, down along darkened storefronts, the overstuffed trashcans lining the curbs. And there ahead, outside his door, a small clump of people loitering in the streetlight—college kids, by the look of them. Kenyon stops, safe at his distance of half a block, and hears one of them—a girl—implore: “Knock again, Claudia.”
“This isn’t his place,” says another.
“I’m telling you it is. Go on, Claudia, knock.”
And so Claudia steps out and raps at his door.
Kenyon crosses the street, rounds the corner, and walks the two extra blocks to Bleecker.
The old house is—always was—narrow and deep. The close darkness of the hall is immediately a comfort. The stairs down which he tumbled. And up there his boyhood room, unchanged. Through the parlor doorway he passes into blackness. The curtains are shut. Fumbling, he finds the lamp and the light illumines—as if before anything else in the room—the shelves and shelves of books. He does not move through the other rooms, each one still dark. He does not take off his coat. He merely sits in lamplight, sinking into Dad’s armchair by the window, amid the books. The telephone, on its table beside the sofa, is silent. His parents, some years ago, nearly sold this house—put it on the market and allowed every interested party to traipse through. Someone even made an offer, which only had the effect of bringing Maynard and Emily to realize they didn’t want to sell at all. They apologized, took down the listing, settled back into having the old place on their hands. In all their time here the house has never proved much of an investment—they bought it just before the crash. Now it stands, whenever they aren’t staying in it, like a perfect time capsule, their always-home, ensphering the old furniture and belongings, unchanged from Kenny and George’s boyhood years. For Kenyon, alone though he is, to be in this parlor is to expect Mom or Dad’s voice to call out any moment. From where he sits he can hear Dad’s smoky murmur, the mysterious tobacco breath and the low words in Kenyon’s ear as they look together out the window. See them, Kenny, going by out there? It’s like a play, isn’t it, how they all go by. … The window a portal, the drama beyond it all three-dimensional, never just a mirror. Across the closed curtain now, in the valley of one of its heavy green folds, a little spider has started a web.
Kenyon stands and steps to the shelves and looks at the numerous spines labeled MSC. He lights a cigarette, the breathed smoke dispelling along the books. Praise little boys, he remembers, who think their father perfect. A line from one of Maynard Saint Claire’s contemporary Psalms. He turns to the wall clock in the corner above the upright, unlatches the glass door, sets the pendulum going. No need to move the hands to the proper hour—the ticking is enough.
Finally he shrugs out of his coat, sits at the sofa, takes up the phone and dials.
“Wonderful Kenny,” his father’s voice is saying, “oh, wonderful! But the intensity, I had no idea—I can’t imagine what you were feeling, my own heart was pounding the whole time we watched. Doctor Addison said, ‘Maynard, are you in need of medical attention?’ He was only half-joking.”
“Goodness, Dad. Maybe you shouldn’t watch.”
“That’s what your mother says—but oh, weren’t you wonderful!”
Kenyon’s been braced for their insights, their inevitable reaction to his performance, and now—rather than relieved, he’s purely confused. How could they see the man in that glass box and believe they saw their son? Do they know him so scarcely? Even to his own parents, is he to be a celebrity?
“Will you go on playing, Kenny?”
“I expect so, yes. And how did Mom take it?”
“Well, we clasped hands through it all, mother and I. But you know, she’s so very solid—a Gibraltar, she says in my ear now. Oh, and she—she says you must be very tired.”
“She’s right as usual. But guess where I’m calling from. I’m sitting in the parlor on Bleecker. I thought I’d sleep here tonight, would you mind?”
He’ll stretch out just here on the sofa. No going upstairs to the perfect, regressive room, the neatly tucked twin beds of yesteryear. When his parents inquire, he explains the conditions at his door.
“Oh,” says Dad, chuckling, “the liabilities of fame. Probably even those have their advantage. Your mother—your mother says maybe you’ll meet somebody.”
“Fame,” says Kenyon. “I don’t know. Celebrity, more like. But listen, Dad, how did you handle it?”
“I?”
“Yes. I mean—being famous.”
He listens as Maynard Saint Claire draws a long breath. “Ah well, what is it Montaigne says? They do not see my heart but only my demeanor. I exist only in myself.”
The phone in its cradle and their loving goodnights in his ear, Kenyon stands again at the shelves, his father’s Montaigne open in his hands. And here in solid type is the passage—“Of Fame”:
Everyone can make a good show outside, full within of trembling and terror. They do not see my heart, they only see my demeanor.
To be known is, in some sort, to have one’s life and its duration in others’ keeping. For my part, I hold that I exist only in myself.
To expect my name to acquire fame, in the first place—I have no name which is sufficiently mine.
TV NOW
A man in a wrestling suit, running at top speed, deliberately careens into a massive block of ice.
In slow motion, the sequence is replayed.
In slow motion, the sequence is replayed.
In slow motion, the sequence is replayed.
4.
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
January 1957
KENYON
A crowd, a crowd, and sunlight on the street—hard white Sunday sun like they haven’t seen for weeks—winter sun, it renders the stone of the NBC building a watery tan. Photographers move in the crowd. “Kenny! Kenny!” The police in their blues and brass buttons hold back the perimeter. His parents are somewhere there among the spectators.
On the red-carpeted sidewalk Kenyon stands alone, a zone of empty space between himself and everyone else. This kind of staging, this choreography for the cameras, it’s the nature of publicity. Just smile, Mr. Greenmarch told him. Smile, wave a bit to the girls and grandmas. That’s all. Won’t be hard. So Kenyon smiles.
Greenmarch himself stands back along the perimeter now, his face sternly managerial in sunglasses.
Kenyon, cast in the role of spectacle, goes on smiling despite the chill. It’s 28 degrees in the sun, and though all the onlookers are sensibly bundled up, he wears a thin suit jacket, asked by Greenmarch and the others to remove his overcoat—for the cameras.
And now the police bustle to divert the crowd. A barricade is carried away and through the opening, engine gurgling, sunlight flaring on glass, comes a glistening red convertible. The crowd applauds and so does Kenyon as the car is piloted along the curb just in front of him. Deep black tires suck beau
tifully at the pavement. From the white interior behind the wheel the driver, Mr. Masterson, unfolds himself, waggling the key in one hand. “Kenny,” he booms, turning about with Kenyon beside him, to better address the public. “In celebration of your great display of knowledge, it is the pleasure of the Mercedes-Benz Company to give you this 1957 190 SL convertible, complete with 104-horsepower engine, fog lamps, leather interior, and a three-piece white leather luggage set.” From the periphery comes a blonde spokesmodel in headscarf, sunglasses, and traveling coat, bearing in each hand a white suitcase and under each arm a large white vanity kit. These she places in photogenic arrangement on the red carpet beside the car, genuflecting, then turns to open the driver’s door for Kenyon.
And the keys are in Kenyon’s hand, and the crowd is roaring as he slides into that foamy interior behind the wheel, the seat cool beneath his legs.
“Kenny, for the sake of our New York traffic enforcement,” announces Masterson, “I shall hope your driving isn’t as fast as your brain!”
The Mercedes people, for the gift of the car, requested one dollar and, as they put it, “other considerations.”
What does this refer to? Kenyon had asked Greenmarch, looking at the contract of sale. Other considerations.
Greenmarch shrugged. Oh, public relations, et cetera. Pure boilerplate.
The engine rolls over and purrs again and the crowd rejoices anew. And now the photographers surge to encircle the car, Greenmarch conducting at their rear.
At the wheel with nowhere to go, the engine idling under him, Kenyon keeps on smiling.
Greenmarch was right. It isn’t hard at all.
Only last week did Kenyon buy a television set. Monday morning, coming past a department store window, there was his own face multiplied in bloodless black-and-white. He stopped before the display, a pyramid of identical screens. He had to look twice to be sure that was himself he saw. Shrunken, striated and wavering, gray as death, the kaleidoscopic image was nothing like a mirror. On the screens he furrowed his brow and gnawed his lips, head clamped in ridiculous black earphones. Then the picture cut to the man in the other booth, Clarence Holloway, the black social worker with whom he’d played a tie game the week before. Then Fred Mint’s face appeared, his mute mouth addressing the viewer—but Kenyon, looking on from the sidewalk, was not the viewer, no, the viewer was not the man who stood there now beyond the glass, deaf to Mint’s words amid the uptown traffic.
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