The Tower

by Richard Martin Stern

  Paul Simmons was standing outside the building, talking with one of his foremen, when Pete Janowski walked off the steel at floor 65. The Doppler effect accentuated the man’s screams until they ended abruptly with a sickening thunk that Paul, not ten feet away, would never forget. He tried not to look, found it impossible, and promptly vomited on his own feet.

  Was that the beginning of the end?

  “These things happen,” McGraw had said that night at the small house in Queens, Paul and Patty there for dinner. “I don’t like them a goddam bit better than you do, but they happen.”

  “It seems to me,” Paul said, “that there are too many of them, that’s all. I’ve been waiting ten days for transformers. Today we found them. Do you know where? Three thousand miles away in Los Angeles, don’t ask me why, and nobody even bothered to ask what they were doing there.” Men standing idle, because each day the transformers had been promised; labor costs mounting. “We order cable. It’s the wrong size. We check out an elevator installation, and the motor won’t start or the doors won’t open because they weren’t set right on the tracks. My top cable-splicer got tangled with his power lawnmower at home, for God’s sake, and cut off three toes.”

  “You sound like it’s getting to you,” McGraw said. His eyes were steady on Paul’s face.

  Paul made himself slow down. “It is,” he said, “and it isn’t.” The actor’s confident smile. “But you’ll have to admit, there have been a lot of strange ones on this job.”

  “I’ll admit it, boy. But I won’t let it grind me under either.”

  “It’s almost,” Paul said, “as if this were wartime with sabotage going on.”

  McGraw looked at him sideways. “You think that, do you?”

  “Not really.”

  “It has happened,” McGraw said. “I’ve known of it. And not in wartime either.” He shook his head. “But not this time.” He studied Paul carefully. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  Paul shook his head. He hoped his smile looked confident.

  “Because,” McGraw said, “if there is something on your mind, now, not later, is the time to bring it out.”

  “Nothing to confess,” Paul said.

  McGraw took his time. “You’re part of the family, boy, and kin have always had meaning to me. But we’re in business, a hard business, and we have a contract, you and I, and I’ll have to hold you to it. You know that.”

  “I never thought otherwise.” The hell you didn’t. But the actor’s smile never faltered.

  Patty had sensed that there were troubles, but she was unable to bring them to the surface. They were driving home from a Westchester dinner party one evening. “You and Carl Ross,” she said to Paul, “seemed to be having a little problem.” Their raised voices had dominated the evening.

  “Carl,” Paul said, “is pure unadulterated Westchester horse’s ass.”

  In a way it was amusing, Patty thought, and tried to ignore the deep bitterness in his voice. “Pure Westchester,” she said, “from Des Moines, Iowa.”

  “Everybody here comes from somewhere else. There’s nothing new about that. Either they come from Des Moines, like Carl, or from South Carolina, like Pete Granger, or from some Western mountaintop, like that cowboy Nat Wilson—” Paul’s voice stopped and they drove in silence.

  Patty said, “What has Nat done? I’ve always thought he was a good man. Daddy thinks so.”

  “That whole goddam Ben Caldwell office walks on water. It’s one of the requirements for employment.”

  Patty giggled. Keep it light, she told herself, but lightness was not easy these days. “If they get their socks wet, they’re out? What about hitting a stray ripple?”

  Paul’s thoughts were already back on Carl Ross. “He,” he said, “is one of those oh-by-the-way-today-I-heard-a-rumor boys. And the rumors are always vicious.”

  Patty said in a puzzled voice, “Nat?”

  “What about Nat?” Paul’s voice was sharp, defensive.

  Oh God, Patty thought, are we this far apart? “I didn’t know who you were talking about. Or is it whom? Who hears rumors?”

  “Carl Ross, goddammit. Nat doesn’t hear rumors. Not ever. All he ever sees is what’s under his nose, on paper, or built from drawings. He—”

  “I always thought you liked him,” Patty said. “And Zib.”

  There was a long silence. The night countryside swept past, a blur in the darkness. “People change,” Paul said at last

  It was a temptation to point out that cliches had not always been Paul’s stock in trade. Patty stifled the temptation. “So they do.” She paused. “Nat has changed? Zib?” And then, answering at least one of her own questions: “I don’t quite hold with the Women’s Lib bit Zib considers so sacred these days. Of course, she has the figure for no-bra, I’ll give her that. But so do I, for that matter, and I don’t choose to go around bouncing.”

  “Zib’s all right.” There was finality in the statement. It hung shimmering in the near-darkness.

  In Patty’s mind there was first stillness, then doubt, then sudden immediate conviction, almost a feeling of déja vu, a sense of I-have-been-here-before-but-only-in-bad-dreams; and finally, self-accusation, the charge of blindness, blame that she had not understood before that she had already joined the ranks of women with philandering husbands. Oh God, she thought, how—how dismal! But where was the deep hurt that should have been? Later, she thought, when I am alone and have time to absorb the enormity. Now she said, calmly enough, “So the change must be Nat.”

  “Yes.” Merely that.

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Why not, darling?”

  The temper of the evening revealed itself. “Goddammit, why the inquisition? If I don’t like the cowboy son of a bitch, do I have to give a bill of particulars to back it up?”

  She had her own temper too. “What have you done to him,” she said, “to make you dislike him so?”

  “And what does that mean?” Paul paused. “Psychological reasoning from you?”

  “You don’t dislike anybody quite as much,” Patty said, “as somebody you’ve done the dirty to.”

  “One of Bert’s maxims, I suppose.”

  “I doubt if Daddy has ever done the dirty to anybody.” Patty’s tone was reasonable, but there was no mistaking her conviction. “He’s beaten men into the ground. He’s out-drunk them, outworked them, outfought them, yes, and out-thought them. But it’s always been right out in the open. He’s never sneaked behind another man’s back.”

  “Are you saying I have? Is that what all this is about?”

  Patty took her time. She said at last in her calm voice, “Have you, darling? Is that where all the heat comes from?”

  In the semidarkness of the automobile Paul’s face was only a blur, all expression concealed. When he spoke at last, his voice was calmer. “Just how did we get into this anyway? I had a hassle with Carl Ross—”

  “Hassles seem easily come by these days.”

  “All right,” Paul said, “they do, they are. I’m uptight. I admit it. I’m right in the middle of the biggest job I’ve ever had, the biggest job of its kind anybody has ever had—do you realize that? There has never been a building like the one we’re building.”

  “Is that all it is?” Patty said. “Just the job?” Make it so, she told herself, and knew that she would not believe it even if he said it was true.

  But all Paul said was, “It gets to you. That’s all.”

  “In what way?”

  “I told you I didn’t want to talk about it. You say you don’t hold with Women’s Lib. Okay, let’s stay traditional. You run the house. I’ll take care of earning our living. You told me once you’d follow wherever I led. Okay, follow.”

  Figures do not lie. Oh, there are jokes about liars, damn liars, and statisticians. But when the figures were Paul’s own, computer-verified, there was no point in arguing with them. And what the figures he sa
t staring at demonstrated brought a feeling of near-nausea to his stomach and to his mind.

  He had figured too close in his original bid. Weather had been against him. Material delays had thrown all labor-cost computations into chaos. Accidents had slowed the job, and there had been a larger than usual incidence of work rejected and thus done over. He, Paul Simmons, wasn’t as good at this business as he had come to consider himself. He had had sheer bad luck. God was against him. Hell, he could lay his hands on a hundred reasons (excuses) and none of them mattered a damn.

  The facts stared him in the face, and the facts were that when he set percentage of the job on the World Tower completed against cost of the job so far, it was evident that he was not going to come out of the total job even financially alive, let alone showing a profit.

  It was five o’clock. His own office seemed larger than usual, and very still. The outer offices would by now be deserted. Distant sounds of traffic reached him from the street thirty stories below. THINK, the IBM signs said. And some place he had seen a sign that read: DON’T THIMK, DRIMK. Why should that kind of nonsense run through his mind at a time like this?

  He pushed back his chair, got up, and walked to the windows. It was an automatic reaction of McGraw’s too; and why should that come to mind? That question at least he could answer. Because McGraw himself, big, rough, tough, unyielding, godlike McGraw was rarely out of the back of Paul’s mind. Face it: I live in his goddam shadow; and unlike Diogenes, I am afraid to say, “Get out of my sunlight, Alexander.”

  He could see people walking, hurrying on the sidewalks below. Going home? Happily? Reluctantly? Angrily, after a day of frustration? What difference? They are not a part of me; no one is a part of me. Not Patty, not Zib, nobody. I am me and—what was McGraw’s phrase?—life has leaned on me this time and squashed me flat. And who cares, except me?

  He found himself looking at the solid windows as if he had never seen them before. In air-conditioned buildings you aren’t supposed to be able to open windows. Is it partly at least to keep people from jumping out of them as they were supposed to have done back in Twenty-nine? Was he, for God’s sake, even thinking of—that? Nonsense. You’re playing to an audience—of one. Knock it off.

  He walked back to his desk and stood for a little time looking down at the figures neatly written, impeccably aligned, like little soldiers marching along—where? To the edge of a high cliff, that’s where—and then right over the edge. The sound of Pete Janowski’s screams came to mind again, and the sickening thunk that had ended them. Once again the nausea rose. He fought it down with effort.

  It was then that the phone had rung and he had stared at it for some time before he made any move to pick it up.

  It was Zib’s voice. “Hi.”

  “You,” Paul said. “Hello.” His eyes were still on the marching figures.

  “That overwhelms me with its enthusiasm.”

  “Sorry. I was—thinking.”

  “I’ve been thinking too.”

  He and Zib, so much alike: her thoughts were of herself, his turned inward too. It was almost an effort to say, “About what?”

  Zib’s voice was carefully unconcerned. “I’ve been thinking that I’d like to be laid. Do you know any male who might be interested?”

  Who arranged these things anyway? Who planned this juxtaposition of lighthearted bawdiness and tragedy, real tragedy? Sex was the last thing he was in the mood for now. Why couldn’t the silly woman have chosen another time?

  “Do I hear a bid?” Zib said.

  And yet, why not, why the bloody hell not? Why not lose himself in her slim softness, listen to her sounds and smile to himself that he was their cause, find his own concentration, not on despair, but on pure sheer animal enjoyment? What better answer? “The bid was made silently,” he said. “The hotel in twenty minutes.”

  Her voice was amused now. “You sound actually interested.”

  “Living,” Paul said, “beats dying. And don’t even try to figure that one out. Just come prepared for a romp.”

  Naked, relaxed, “I’m supposed to be having dinner with a writer who suddenly arrived in town,” Zib said. “Nat didn’t even question it. There are benefits to being an editor.”

  Paul was silent, staring at the ceiling. His mind, alive again, was probing strange, tortuous thoughts. What if—?

  “Did you hear me, darling?” Zib ran her forefinger lightly down his chest. “Hmmm?”

  “I heard.”

  “Then why so quiet?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “At a time like this,” Zib said, “that is the hell of a thing to do.” She sighed. “All right, you’re a male chauvinist pig, so what are you thinking about?”

  “Nat.”

  Zib frowned. Her forefinger was still. “What on earth for? What about him?”

  “Why,” Paul said, and suddenly he was smiling, decision made. “I think he’s going to do me some favors.”

  “You’re mad.” Zib paused. “Why should he do you favors?”

  “Well,” Paul said, “he isn’t even going to know that he’s doing them.” He reached for her then, and she came to him willingly. “Any more,” Paul said, “than he knows that he lends me his wife on occasion. Like right now.”

  4:01P.M.-4:32P.M.

  QUEENS

  It was a modern insurance-company-built high-rise apartment building for middle-income tenants. Technically, the building inspector’s income was above the upper limit, but, then, a considerable portion of his income was never reported.

  The windows were closed and the air-conditioning made scarcely any noise. On the playground below children were playing, but their sounds were muffled, comfortably shut out. The building inspector was relaxed with a beer in his reclining chair, facing the twenty-five-inch color television set complete with one-button tuning, magic brain, and remote control, all housed in a Mediterranean-style console cabinet of vast brooding magnificence.

  The inspector was in his forties, no longer able even to pretend that he could get into his Korean War uniform and no longer caring about it. “What the hell,” he was fond of saying, “live it up and take all you can get because when you’re gone there isn’t any more. That’s what I always say.”

  His wife was in her smaller reclining chair, also watching television, also drinking beer. She had worked hard beneath the sunlamp and with the application of several lotions to retain some of her early-year Florida tan. At the supermarket and hairdresser’s the neighbors always remarked it with envy. Her hair was red, matching her fingernails and toenails. “We’re missing the Family Fun Show, ” she said.

  The last speech in the World Tower Plaza had just ended, and the television cameras followed the celebrities down from the platform and through the concourse doors.

  “Going up to the Tower Room,” the inspector said, “to drink bubbly and eat little things on toothpicks.” There was angry envy in his voice. “You see that one? That’s Senator Jake Peters, friend of the people. Hah! He’s been lining his pockets down in Washington for thirty years, more.”

  “Clara Hess is on the Family Fun Show today,” his wife said. “She really turns me on. I saw her one day last week, Tuesday, no, maybe Wednesday it was. Laugh? I thought I’d die. She was doing that, you know, Women’s Lib thing, really putting them down.”

  “And that one,” the inspector said, “he’s Governor Bent Armitage, a bag of wind if I ever saw one. And, look, there’s pretty boy, Mayor Bob Ramsay, the All-American jerk. Why don’t they have the guys there who built the building? Tell me that.”

  “What she said,” his wife said, “was that it hadn’t ought to be history, it ought to be herstory—do you get it? Oh, she was sharp, real quick, you never know what she’s going to say next.”

  “There’s Ben Caldwell,” the inspector said. “When he comes around you’re supposed to genuflect, you know, like in church. Well, goddammit, he puts his pants on same as me, one leg at a time, and I’ll bet he’s crooked
as a corkscrew too. He’d have to be to get where he is. They all have to be. Nobody’s that good and everybody’s got his hand out.”

  “You’d like Clara Hess,” his wife said, “you really would.”

  “Just who in the hell is Clara Hess?” Rhetorical question. The inspector finished his beer. “How about another brew?”

  “You know where it is.”

  “I got the last one.”

  “You did not. And you haven’t even been listening to me or you’d know who Clara Hess is.”

  “Oh Christ, all right,” the inspector said. He got out of his chair with effort and walked toward the kitchen. “Don’t touch that picture,” he said. “I got a right to look at a building I built with my own hands.”

  “You didn’t build it. You just watched.”

  “Same thing, ain’t it? Who else makes sure they do it right?”

  Or wrong, but those were the thoughts you kept submerged. Sometimes, usually at night, they surfaced, and those stupid childhood fears about God and Right and Wrong, like that, came out to torment you, but you were a grown man now, goddammit, and able to make decisions for yourself, and that childhood stuff was a lot of crap.

  If there was one thing the inspector had learned, it was that there were only two kinds of guys in this world—takers and losers—and the inspector had made up his mind a long time ago which category he preferred.

  The thing was that if you looked hard any place, any place, you saw that some guys had it and some, most, didn’t. In the Army, when he wasn’t much more than a kid, he learned how it worked. Some guys were always on KP or sent out on patrol, like that, always on somebody’s shit list, born losers. And other guys always slept in nice warm barracks at headquarters and pulled jobs like company clerk where nobody shot at you. What do you want to be, a dead hero?

  Building inspector now, same goddam thing. Some guys spent their lives doing just what the book said. And then what? A pension that wouldn’t cover your ass, let alone give you the things everybody had a right to, didn’t all those crooked politicians running for office say so?