They rehearsed for an hour, took a break, rehearsed another hour, took another break (for lunch, which nobody had), rehearsed again for a third hour, and then broke. I know of no athlete who could have gone through all that without incurring a coronary.
Ginnie was drenched, and afraid she’d catch cold. I poured her into a cab and we headed for home. I led her into the shower, first making certain that the water wasn’t too cold. Oh, yes—I was in the shower, too.
Not that that was all we did. We did do other things. We did go for walks, and we did take in a couple movies, and we did reconnoiter what was new at the Museum of Modern Art. But all of it became a contest called “How long can we go without making love?” And, all too often, we’d find ourselves racing home because we knew that doing it in the street was frowned upon, except for dogs. And even if it weren’t, the thought of someone coming over and throwing a bucket of cold water on us wasn’t terribly inspiring.
Once, running home from a Fritz Kreisler concert which drove Ginnie to hitherto unsealed heights of sensuality, we couldn’t quite make it to the apartment and began to make love as soon as we burst in off the street. I mean in the downstairs vestibule, and all the way up the stairs, breaking and resuming, fighting it and giving into it—the third floor landing being particularly critical in that most of our clothing was off and the bannister there quite unreliable and we were sure as hell testing it.
We broke clean, making it away from the third floor and were halfway up to the fourth floor when Mrs. Harkaday, a bovine fifty, came out of her fourth-floor apartment and stood staring at us in disbelief.
It was time for quick thinking because, though my trousers were still on, Ginnie was down to her bra and panties. “Quick,” I said to the lady, “take off your clothes and get downstairs!”
“What?” she said, her voice seeming to boom out from between her big brass knockers.
“They’ve opened up the fire hydrants and all the kids are playing in the water!” I said. “Jinkies, it’s fun!”
“Yeah,” said Ginnie, quick on the upbeat, “they’ve put a sprinkler on it! It’s sensational!”
Mrs. Harkaday stood blocking our way, seemingly thinking it over, then shrugging it off. “I’ve better things to do than shower in the street,” and she started to descend. We pressed ourselves out of the way because she had momentum on her side.
“Really, Mrs. Harkaday,” said Ginnie, inhaling as the barge blew by, “it’s just keen. Bring a piece of soap and you can kill two birds with one stone.”
“Indeed. Indeed, indeed,” she kept saying, as if it had great significance in the scheme of things. She in-deeded herself down all the stairs and out of the building. I hated to think of it but it did occur to me that if ever Mrs. Harkaday and dear old Jessica were to hit those stairs at the same time, the building would be a parking lot in no time.
When I looked up, Ginnie was already racing around the fourth floor landing, heading for the last flight of stairs. “Come on! Come on, Ben, I can’t stand it!” And she was pulling off her bra, wriggling out of it as she struggled up the stairs, looking like a combination stripper and Harry Houdini.
Halfway up the last flight she paused to step out of her panties and I caught her and wrestled her to the stairs. “Gotcha!”
“You’re crazy! On the stairs?”
“On the stairs.”
“Ben, no!”
“Yes, me proud beauty.”
“Ben, I don’t bend that way!”
“Try.”
“Ben!”
“Give it a chance.”
“Ben—look—four, five more stairs and we’re there! We’re almost at the top!”
“Almost is as good as a mile.”
“What? Ben, someone can come out of an apartment and see us!”
“Holler rape and you’ll be off the hook.”
“Ben, no!…Ben?”
“These steps—fourth, fifth, and sixth from the top—will be sanctified. I hereby sanctify these steps with a glorious fuck.”
“Oh, Jesus, you can’t. You’ve got to be—”
“A blessing on these steps. Hereafter, whenever people walk these steps, let them know that—”
“Ben…”
“—that here love once lay. Laid? Lain.”
“Ben…”
“Shut up. Just—”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“Wow.”
“Phew.”
“Boy do I love you, Ben.”
“I love you.”
“I said it first.”
“I mean it more.”
Sunday night we slept in Ginnie’s bed because that’s where we were at the time. I set the alarm clock for five A.M. so that we’d have plenty of time to say good-bye as I wasn’t due to be in the office until nine.
I arrived at 20th a little before nine, not expecting any great reception and not being disappointed. The first one I had gone in to see was Josh, but at his desk was this man of about sixty, grey-haired, dapper, gaunt, and short. He was wearing a double-breasted grey pinstripe suit with a red flower in its buttonhole. He was also flying a blue necktie of some iridescence so that, on my first look at him, I thought he was on blue fire.
He looked up at me and smiled, fifty-eight brilliant false teeth picking up the glow of his necktie and making him look like he was the cat who had just eaten the inkwell. “You’re Ben Webber, right?”
“Right.”
When he stood up he was shorter than when he was seated; and, as he came toward me, his hand outstretched in greeting, I could see the cushion on his chair. The man was no taller than five foot two. I could see him handling the advertising for short subjects, but full length films? “I’m Alan Morse. Come on in. Sit down.”
“Thank you.”
“You’ve been away how long?”
“Year and a half.”
“Kill any Japs?”
“That was the last war.”
“I meant Koreans.”
“I killed five Japs.” Careful, Ben. Watch it. Check the orneriness. This ain’t the Army. When they send you home from here it’s without a job, baby.
Alan Morse smiled. He smiled a lot. I had the feeling that, with his new teeth, he was making up for all the years he didn’t smile because of his old teeth. And I pictured his old teeth, tucked into the breast pocket of his old suit, hanging in his old closet—with his old brains.
“Josh is gone and I’m in charge.” He filled his pipe with tobacco that came out a very Abercrombie humidor. The rest of the office was done in that same woodsy style—early Men’s Club. There were no ads or layouts pinned up on bulletin boards, no feeling of busy-busy as it had been when Josh was running the show. Instead, beautifully framed pictures, of ducks. Ducks on the wing; ducks on the pond. And what wasn’t a duck was a goose. And what wasn’t either was a pheasant. Or an egret. Or maybe a platypus. Who gave a shit. The man was a gentleman sportsman, probably shot birds from the deck of the Mayflower. Precisely the kind of ad man who sold America the depression.
“Now then, I know that veterans get their old jobs back, so there’ll be no problem there. Your old job is waiting. It’s all yours.” He smiled blue.
“I was under the impression that someone else had my job.”
“Oh, no, no, no. That was only temporary, until you got back.”
“He’s been let go?”
“Not exactly. He’s been moved up to Jessup’s job. Roland Jessup has left us, you know. He’s out there beating the drum for jigaboo entertainers. Represents a whole slew of boogie acts. He’s now an entrepreneur. We’ll be looking to get two or three new Negroes of our own, so as not to give the company a black eye.” He laughed, evidently what he had said being very funny. “Anyway, we moved Sam Gaynor up to copywriter, so—your old job is all yours.”
“As office boy.”
“Yes. For the time being, of course. As soon as there’s an opening�
��”
“I was writing copy before I went into the Army. I was under the impression that—Josh had led me to believe that—”
“Meyerberg is no longer here. And at the time Jessup quit neither were you. Sam Gaynor was here. Sam Gaynor got the job. Simple?” The gloves were off. He was not going to take any shit from me.
I had to work at sitting on my temper. “Doesn’t seem fair.”
“Well, maybe not. But Sam is good and there’s only just so many copywriters I can keep. And I can’t exactly demote him back to office boy, can I?”
“Why not?”
He puffed his fucking duck-shooting pipe. “It’s not as though you came back a hero, fella. If you came back a hero you could have my job. But you didn’t. All you did was kill five Japs and, unless I’m mistaken, that was the last war.”
My smart-assedness had boomeranged. Chalk up one for General McArdle and Major Hochman. Still, I knew that, even if I had come in and groveled at his patent leather feet, Sam Gaynor would still have that job. Something else was at the root of it, not my behavior. “Maybe I should take it up with the Guild.”
“That’s already been done. Your friend, Mickey, he’s a real agitator, isn’t he? He threatened us with union action but, evidently, your union wasn’t all that anxious to go to war for you.” He turned on his blue smile again, not in triumph but as some kind of conciliatory gesture. “Ben, you have to hang in. Something will open up and, when it does, you’ll have your opportunity. I promise.”
“Should I still turn in my copy ideas?”
“Absolutely. But right now my inkwell’s empty and, for some reason, the cleaning crew didn’t empty my basket last Friday—would you take care of it, Ben? I’d appreciate it.”
I filled his inkwell and emptied his waste basket into the big barrel in the corridor. As I was doing it, Mickey Green came by. He saw me, only he didn’t want to, not that way, not with my head in the garbage barrel. But he saw me just the same and had to stop to say hello and tell me how glad he was to see me. He motioned for me to follow him on into the copywriter bullpen.
My old desk was there, a couple letters on it—cards of some sort. Mickey’s desk was the same trashpile it had always been. Dora’s desk had the same vase with the same flowers and the same box of Kleenex. Roland’s desk, however, was different because it wasn’t Roland’s anymore, it was Sam’s.
And Sam’s desk had all sorts of mementoes on it. Like a foot-high solid brass radio microphone. And some bronzed phonograph records pressed into separate mahogany settings. And on the wall—a cluster of silver framed photos of the immortal Skip Gaynor, songbird of the air waves, his mouth open in melody while four chins that would eventually strangle him gathered over his bow tie like the hand of God.
Mickey sat at his desk, watching me absorb the whole thing, after which he calmly said, “Makes you want to shit, doesn’t it?”
“Something like that.”
“We tried, Ben. Me and Dora and a couple others. But you weren’t exactly popular with the Guild. We tried to tell them not to think of it in terms of personalities but as a union matter. Ben, they’re glad to still have their own jobs. We all are. Everything’s moving to California. They’d fight for Herman Temple, for Joe Angrisani—they’d walk barefoot through snakes for Danny San Filippo and Lou Shanfield. But for you they won’t walk around the corner.”
“What do I do?”
“I don’t know. Give it a try. Look for something else. Kill yourself. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“What would you do?”
“I’d be a good union member.”
“A little late for that, no?”
“Maybe not.”
“Why don’t I kill myself and look for another job at the same time?”
“Might work. I don’t know.”
Dora came in and gave me a big hug and then ran to her Kleenex and honked into it a half dozen times, signifying nostalgia. Mickey filled her in on the discussion thus far and she could add nothing to what he had already said.
“Who’s Alan Morse?” I asked.
Mickey shrugged. “Some old-line ad man. Used to work in the silent era. He’s a hundred and eight years old and I think he died at a hundred and one.”
“He any good?”
“Not good enough. But neither is he bad enough. We think it’s some kind of power play.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the best he can be is stopgap. We think someone else’ll be brought is as soon as they settle on who he is. Meanwhile, old Blue Mouth sits on the throne.”
“I thought his teeth were reflecting his tie.”
“Maybe they are. All he wears are blue ties. When he starts wearing green ones, I’m leaving.”
“Okay. Who’s Sam Gaynor and why isn’t he in the Army?”
“Sam Gaynor is an egomaniac with a hernia, 4-F. He can’t write copy and he don’t plant cotton.”
“You don’t like him.”
“Anyone who likes Sam Gaynor has to be all bad.”
“When does he come to work?”
“When he remembers to.”
Sam Gaynor remembered to come to work that day at ten fifteen. We could hear his clubfooted whistling and feel his off-key clomp long before he ever reached the bullpen. And when he opened the door and stepped in, the door slammed against the wall as if the G-men had burst in. And I knew how the Lilliputians must have felt when Gulliver washed up on their beach. The large ox came right over to me and offered me his paw. It was gigantic and it swallowed mine. “Ben. It is Ben, right?”
“Right.”
“Gladda seeya.” He said it like Phil Silvers. The man stood about five foot six and seemed almost that wide. And his arms, extending to just above his knees, gave him the stance of an orangutan—the only thing human about them being gold cuff links, items not ordinarily found in the bush country. His face, a perfect moon with the beginnings of a double chin, seemed so round and so large as to better be the side blister of a Flying Fortress than the face of a human being.
And his mouth—ah, his mouth—and the teeth that came with it, they never stopped working, a perpetual spew of words pouring forth as though strung on a ticker tape. I had the image of his testicles unraveling and being pulled up through his innards, his throat, and then spinning out of his cavern of a mouth—thousands and thousands of yards of testicle strand, tripping lightly over his lips, springing alive with incalculable verbiage as if sluiced out of that gargoyle of a maw, splattering innocent bystanders with a Niagara of self-esteem that arrived doused in an ersatz southwestern drool, all of it invisible, of course, unable to be captured even by highspeed lens. But it was audible—shit, was it ever audible. I can hear it now.
“Man, ah have finished my film and it’s jes’ gonna knock ’em on their butts. It is so wild, I’ll want you ta see it, Ben, as ah value your opinion. It’s called The Color Is Red and it’s all about red in our daily lives—red socks, red sweaters, red balloons, red bicycles—ah even have spliced in some footage of a anal operation where red blood just shoots out of this ass! Red phonograph arm movin’ back an’ forth ’cause the records’s playin’ out, red fingernails on a cocktail glass so fuckin’ phallic, tomato juice pourin’, red paint pourin’. It’s all called The Color Is Red, all silent footage but ah’ll play it to some appropriate music when ah show it. Ah’ll have a private screenin’ to which you are all invited; you all come to it. Shit, ah better arrange for a room.” He picked up his phone and dialed while still talking. “You have to do these things in advance before some asshole moves in and—Deon? This is Sam Gaynor. Ah want to book the small screenin’ room for tomorrow afternoon about four. Who? Shit, Deon, you jest put him in at five and don’t worry about it. You tell him to talk to me and ah will explain it. You do that, Deon, and ah’ll take care of you good come the Italian Christmas.” And he hung up.
Sam Gaynor was a full-of-shit juggernaut that you either side-stepped or got run over by. He was as likable as
ptomaine and as narcissistic as a peacock in a pig pen. They had found antidotes for tuberculosis and diphtheria and small pox, surely they’d come up with one for Sam Gaynor before we all died of his plague. He left the bullpen without even having sat down, rumbling away like a downhill truck, and when he had truly gone, it was as though the air was breathable again.
I found myself gasping for breath and looked over at Mickey. “I’m not going to make it, Mickey. I’m not going to be able to live through that.”
Mickey said nothing because there was nothing to say, no platitude available to cover such a moment. Dora was equally mute. In the merciful silence I opened the envelopes on my desk. One was from Ginnie: “Congratulations on your Academy Award for Best Special Effects on a Flight of Stairs. I love you—Ginnie.”
Another was from Pat Jarvas. “Welcome back. You know where to find me. Love—Pat.”
And a third was from W. Charles Gruber. “See me.”
I figured I’d take care of the last two at the same time. Pat Jarvas was at her desk, looking as good as she skinnily could, obviously having taken great pains to do so. She looked up at me, pretending to be cross. “Bad. You never answered my letters.”
“I was very busy.”
She puzzled and then smiled. “It’s okay, I forgive you. Can we get together soon? I still like you.”
“I have to see him first. Is he in?”
“Yeah. He’s goin’ through his mail.”
“How long will that take?”
By way of answering, she buzzed the intercom. “Ben Webber would like to see you.”
And Gruber answered. “Send him in.”
I went in and he got up from behind his desk to shake my hand. It was the first time I had never touched the man, and, remembering what Maggie had told me about him, I took special note of the texture of his hand, expecting it to be soft and pudgy. It wasn’t. It was hard and rough, and I could see that, despite his roundness, old Charlie Gruber was nobody’s fag—at least, not to the touch.
“Welcome back, Ben. Here. Sit down. Talk to me. Tell me something about the Army.”
I sat. “The Army is made up of fools, idiots, and fags.” With that last one I was trying for a reaction.
There Should Have Been Castles Page 27