5:45 to Suburbia

by Packer, Vin

  “Some day,” Wally had concluded the fiasco with these words, “we’ll have to have a long talk about all these things you’ve revealed here, eh, Bruce?”

  “I’m not very good at games,” Bruce had answered.

  “Oh, it’s not a game,” Wally Keene had protested. And Bruce Cadence was horrified to perceive that Keene was quite serious.

  Even though Keene was more a maverick than anything else, Cadence kept the example of that luncheon front and center in his mind as concrete evidence that he had been right all along about not wishing to fraternize with his business associates.

  Because occasionally, Bruce Cadence wondered if he were wrong to stay aloof. He wondered — and he and Mildred had discussed it more than often — if it were a serious flaw in him, not simply as a businessman, but as a personality.

  One of the times he had pondered this was when Charlie was under the spell of Marge Mann, back in the early days of Charlie’s association with Cadence, when the rumors finally and inevitably rose to the top, like all warm air; and Bruce first heard of their affair, There were months then when Charlie was not himself, times when he seemed irritable and depressed — and other times when his euphoria kept him from working well. Cadence thought of talking with him; thought of asking him up to his office and saying something like, “Sit down, Charlie. Let’s have a chat …” But after that, what? What would he say after that? He realized Charlie and he had never once spoken of anything as personal as romantic interests. The likelihood that they ever would seemed somehow ludicrous.

  So he had merely worried that he ought to do more; and then, suddenly, one morning it had passed. The affair had not been terminated, but Charlie had come to grips with it. Charlie was himself again, the crisis was averted.

  Then Bruce prided himself on following the course most natural to Bruce Cadence, and upon handling the matter as he had felt he should. Or, in fact, not handling it at all. It was Charlie’s to handle, and so it should be, Bruce believed. Should always be a man’s own business.

  As he drove, remembering Townsend’s words and the recollections those words had invited, Cadence was more genuinely concerned about his world of business than he could ever remember being. Somehow what Townsend had said about a man “knowing everything about the fellow on his team” (even though Bruce was revolted by the way Townsend expressed himself) bothered Bruce, partly because he did not want to believe what he almost had to believe, that this time whatever it was with Charlie Gibson was not going to pass; and partly because Bruce Cadence wondered if he could have done anything, or said anything to Charlie, to prevent what now seemed inevitable — Bruce’s firing Charlie. Not tomorrow, not next week — but soon, Bruce knew, he would be obliged — forced, really — to ask Charlie Gibson for his resignation.

  He knew that was true, that it had to be so if he were to put Cadence Publications back on its feet, that he needed a more mature man than Wally Keene to temper Wally’s ideas, and that he needed a man like the old Charlie to direct Cadence, with the same stubborn fire Charlie had had. And he knew too that it would have to be done quickly, and that once he set the wheels in motion, once he told Charlie of this decision, he would be able to find such a man. They were not that rare, nor that unobtainable. Bruce might not find “a nice guy” like Charlie. He might, as in the case of Keene, really dislike Charlie’s replacement; still he could no longer afford to be sentimental. Cadence Publications could not afford it.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, he tried to frame with words what he would say to Charlie, how he would tell him, and yet before any one sentence could actually crystallize, he found himself in the same position he had been in during the afternoon with Keene in his office: saying, “I keep thinking Charlie will come through. I’ve known Charlie a long time.”

  And seeing, in his mind’s eye, Wally Keene’s smirk; hearing him remark wryly: “You’ve got to cut the umbilical cord some day.”

  Bruce began to believe for the first time that Wally Keene was right, that perhaps even Townsend was right — that all the streamliners and ballplayers and psychologists who had invaded the business world of nine-to-five-and-two-hours-out-for-lunch were right. Bruce Cadence was wrong, out-of-date, archaic. For now there was Freud, the Father; Gimmick, the Son; and Push, The Holy Ghost. This was the Trinity.

  MARCH 7, 1957

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AT TWO in the morning, Charlie Gibson slipped the key in the lock and fumbled for the light switch.

  The house was dark, silent. She had not left the porch light on for him. Warning enough. It made Charlie alternately angry and self-pitying to know that this reaction on Joan’s part was one upon which he could always count, that at the slightest provocation (those were the words he chose in his mind — the slightest provocation) she would shut him out from herself. All the thoughts that had come to him upon similar occasions came to him again as he felt the wall for the light button: that he had married badly, that while his marriage, he supposed with the sighing attitude of tired resignation, was average — indeed, typical — it needn’t have been so had he found a less selfish woman. A more selfless woman, one who lived for her man, catered to his moods and needs, understood him. Always when anything went wrong, any little thing, Charlie thought sadly, she withdrew from him. Was that what a wife was for? She had simply gone to bed and left him to stumble about blindly, turned the lights out in his own home — and who the hell paid the electric bills? Who had built this dark house, in the name of God? Was it hers or his? It wasn’t theirs. She had turned the lights out and gone to bed!

  Still he called, “Joan?”

  He slapped his hat to the chair and stood looking at the sampler on the wall of the entranceway.

  Home’s not merely four square walls,

  Though with pictures hung and gilded;

  Home is where Affection calls,

  Filled with shrines the Heart hath builded

  He said, “What a laugh!” tripped on the edge of the umbrella stand, cussed and went toward the staircase. On his way up the stairs he noticed the pictures hung there, the framed family photographs: Joan and he posing behind two cardboard donkeys at Coney Island; Janie’s first tooth; Joan and Janie and he on a picnic at Riis Park; Janie’s first day at school — Trite goddam garbage, he thought, years of monotony adding up to nothing. What the hell!

  He decided that when he went into the bedroom he would switch on the overhead light and play the radio, take his goddam time getting undressed, and not answer Joan. But when he got there, neither bed was occupied.

  “Jesus!” Charlie muttered. “If this one of her — ”

  He went down the hall to the guest room. The door was shut, and when he tried the knob, it did not give.

  Whose goddam guest room in whose goddam castle was it?

  Tomorrow he decided he would ask for a divorce. Janle was running off with some drugstore cowboy and there was absolutely no rapport any more between himself and Joan. Why hang on to something pointless and meaningless? He would simply say, “Joan, I’ve thought it all out …”

  “Joan?” he called.

  He waited, almost savoring the knowledge that she would not answer him; more proof. He was glad she hadn’t answered him — it would make it easier for him the next morning, when he would announce his decision after breakfast.

  He said, “Did you ever remember my mentioning a woman named Marge Mann?” Paused, imagining her raising her head from the pillow, attentive now, alert. His voice grew. “She tried to kill herself tonight…. Did you hear me? … She tried to kill herself!”

  He knew she heard him.

  This time he shouted, “I had to fire her today.” And again, Charlie shouted — louder, “I’ve been through hell!” There was silence.

  “And I’m going to pour myself a drink!” he bellowed, “a good stiff goddam drink, because I’ve been through hell!”

  Angrily he stormed down the hall, the stairs, past the family album hung there as though to shout t
he mediocrity of his existence, and he went into the living room.

  The bourbon in the cabinet was a brand he did not like, a brand Joan knew he did not like, and as he poured himself a double shot he felt martyred and abused. He wandered around the living room aimlessly, picking fault with everything in it — the splotchy flowered slipcovers (Christ, Joan had every goddam color in the rainbow jammed into four walls) and there was still no footstool before his chair. For years he had wanted a footstool, a simple goddam want — a footstool — but he didn’t even have a footstool; he had to put his feet up on the coffee table and she always said he was ruining the finish and he told her he wanted a footstool. Christ, he had begged her for a footstool, but there wasn’t any, wasn’t any. “Home’s not merely four square walls.” He could have been in a goddam accident for all she knew, and she was up there with her hair put up in pins, lollygogging around in the guest bed with Max Factor on her face, not giving a goddam.

  Then on the triangular end table by his reading chair, where there was no footstool, he saw a package — birthday-wrapped.

  He had forgotten about his birthday, forgotten that Joan had asked the Carrolls and the Tullets, and as he opened the box, fumbling with the ribbon, he remembered how he had cut her off over the telephone when she had started to say, “… but the guests are here and — ”

  He had snapped, “Tell me later!”

  But Charlie, though he remembered this, thought: Even does this to me on my birthday; and thought: Gives me a gift I can’t even open, ties the ribbons in knots.

  He had called Joan while he was waiting for the doctor, after he had broken the bathroom door in with the help of the elevator man. (The man had said, “This is a wild one, all right,” and Charlie had had a wretched reaction. He had retorted, “Is she?” as though he were surprised, as though he hardly knew Marge.) And Marge was lying across from him when he called Joan, like something dead under a sheet.

  Charlie remembered that he had had the cruel, impulsive thought at that moment: Well, I hope she is — one of those uncontrollable thoughts that a man is ashamed of thinking, one that made mockery of his concern, his pity. And Joan’s voice had come through the phone, “Later I won’t be interested in your story!”

  “Good!” he had said emphatically, thinking, No, I don’t want Marge to be dead.

  From the gift-wrapped box, after he had labored with the knotted pink and green ribbons, he lifted the shoes. The taps were on the toes and heels.

  Charlie looked at them blankly and put them back. He drank his bourbon, standing there, suddenly aware that he was fifty, aware perhaps for the first time that he had lived half a century.

  For some reason he thought of the words Marge had recited through the bathroom door:

  Christ have mercy upon us, Freud have mercy upon us,

  Life have mercy upon us.

  And he wondered why it was that suddenly the words no longer sounded tragic and sad; but silly, dreary, and sophomoric. And he poured himself more of the bourbon of the brand he did not like and Joan knew he did not like; and Charlie sank onto the couch.

  When he reached for a cigarette in his pocket, his hand touched the letter Janie had sent him. Charlie took it out and began to reread it.

  “… guess I’m not very much like either you or mother …”

  Was that true? Charlie didn’t know; what was she like?

  He remembered an afternoon when she was still in high school, when he had gone into the village for groceries, and Janie had asked him to pick up a particular brand and color of nail polish. Charlie had forgotten both the brand and the color, but he had bought polish at the drugstore.

  She had held it in the palm of her hand, regarding it with slight disdain. “I wouldn’t use this brand,” she had said, “and only a perfect goon-girl would use this color. Honestly, Daddy!”

  He remembered that he had thought it was curious and surprising that she had definite ideas about makeup, though he was not even sure why he had found it so peculiar. But he remembered that he had just stood there and wondered why he had never know that before about Janie, and he had clumsily tried to shut her palm around the bottle of polish, as though to wipe out the fact, and he had said with awkard hardiness, “Oh, come on now! That’s my girl! This’ll do!”

  Only to hear her insist, “But don’t be ridic, Daddy. It won’t at all! Take it back.”

  And for a moment he stood staring at her, before he felt her take his hand and put the polish back in it.

  It was such a small thing, such a little thing — and yet Charlie had often caught himself remembering it.

  Once, when Charlie was in college and Gussie was preparing for Princeton, his father had written him: “Thank God Gus is not one of these namby-pamby English majors, but entering business school, ready to enter industry, a man’s world! You’ll probably be an English teacher!” and Charlie reacted to the letter with contempt for his father, wrote him that he didn’t care to emulate him — or anyone like him — cheap moneymakers of the world.

  Was there the same gap between Janie and himself? Had it always been there without his knowing it? Always since the day he felt her put the bottle of polish back in his hand? Was that the beginning?

  “… Marriage is out!”

  Charlie thought of Marge Mann’s kneeling nude before him.

  “My God, Janie!” he said aloud. “Don’t screw yourself up like this! How can I tell you not to?”

  “You see, Dad, Dud is a writer … you deal with hacks who sell ideas down the river for three cents a word.”

  Otto Avery … Charlie could see in his mind Avery’s image on a television screen, then a blackout, and he remembered — very vaguely — a poem he had written in college, something about breakfast with Mitzie Thompson, and he remembered how she had told him she knew he’d be a writer, a famous one, an important one, and how he’d believed it. God, it was funny — Life was so different than you’d thought it would be.

  Charlie gulped his drink, got up and got another.

  “… life has to be meaningful to me, to Dud, to people like us, life has to have a message, something more than the business world step-on-toes-and-go-for-the-buck.”

  Whose toes had he ever stepped on reaching for the buck?

  He heard Avery’s voice? “This is the news and my views on the news.”

  And he thought, “Goddam pansy!”

  But he felt no satisfaction thinking that. And he was getting a little high. He thought that if he had married Mitzie Thompson, married someone like her, who had believed so in him, he would have been that writer, and that he ought to crash in the goddam door of the guest room and make Joan fix him something to eat; the least she could do. His gut was empty. He hadn’t eaten since lunch, and it occurred to him it was a corny thing for Joan to do, give him the shoes for his birthday. But she was kind of a corny woman; wouldn’t catch her swallowing pills in the toilet (age sixty, naked and begging for a drink; a C-cup bitch, all right — Wally Keene was right).

  “Ever hear of a C-cup bitch before, Charlie?”

  He saw Keene’s ugly face, remembered Marge crying, “I need love,” and thought vaguely of an inn in Vermont, coming from the cold window which he had rushed across the room to open, back into her arms; and the warmth, and the way he thought he loved her then.

  “… suburbia wear comfortable shoes; read Doctor Spock; play Scrabble after dinner monotony — ”

  Charlie folded the letter and put it in his pocket, got up, drank his whisky and went for more.

  Again he saw the shoes.

  He tried to remember what he had been like when Joan and he lived on Bleecker Street. It was funny the little things he could remember, the dank smell of cats in the halls, and the darkness of those halls, coming out from them into the sunlight of a warm day … and at night, tripping over the fat Italian mammas who sat fanning themselves on the stoops, shopping in the open market with Joan, the naive excitement of finding fruits and vegetables neither knew about, buyi
ng flowers from some old woman on a street corner, the glow they had from the small and the trivial, the everyday game of their routine. What had he been like? Ingenuous? Eager? Young? Sure?

  Yes. And had he changed so much?

  He was proud now, too proud to go up and tell

  Bruce that the Vile dummy is every bit that vile … And why proud?

  It was odd that he thought: Because of Gussie; caught himself in the slip; meant to think Wally Keene; would never have taken a back seat to Keene or anyone like Keene when he was younger. But now?

  He thought grimly, Keene is right about Marge; she had to go. Marge’s pride wrecked her too. Always too proud to admit the truth. Pull herself up by her own bootstraps. She always said she could.

  “Charlie,” she used to say, “I don’t have to answer to anyone, and the reason for that is I’ve never had to ask anyone for anything. I go on my own power. I have plenty of power!”

  Charlie got up and began to pace the room, mumbling to himself, feeling the bourbon inside of him now, faintly conscious of the fact he had told Joan not to buy the good bourbon for Manhattans … remembering that she had had people for dinner for his birthday and the good bourbon would be in the kitchen up on the shelf above the sink. But that was no excuse to lock him out when he was fifty years old. But as he thought this he talked about Marge, muttering to himself:

  “No, she didn’t want to depend on anyone, but she had to get plastered to show her feelings. She couldn’t ever say anything right out. Just like my mother used to be — exactly that way. Somehow they make you feel rotten. Waiting in that hospital corridor tonight to be sure she was all right — made me pay for firing her. Had that operation and didn’t tell anyone, but drank so goddam much in the end people had to take care of her. Proud bitch! Too proud! Aw, God, Marge messed herself up badly. A mess. Mess.”