There Should Have Been Castles

by Herman Raucher

  Harvey came over to me and asked me what I thought of the show. I told him I thought it was a fine show. A photographer took some flash photos as we all stood around and babbled in Sanskrit. The room cleared, only Jerry Kaplan and myself remaining. He sat down next to me, the both of us looking at the silent monitors.

  “I was worried,” said Jerry.

  “So was I.”

  “With the dress rehearsal going so well, I figured, for sure, we’d bomb on the air.”

  “The dress went well?”

  “Weren’t you watching?”

  “I got here too late. I was having dinner with some friends.”

  “It went great. But when the cast peaks for the dress, they usually collapse on the air.”

  “Yeah. We have to be careful about that.”

  “Harvey did a fine job.”

  “Yes, didn’t he?”

  “Want me to be honest with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “He was better than your script. We offered it to five other directors. They wouldn’t touch it.”

  “Too hot to handle?”

  “No. They just didn’t like it. Harvey thought he could make it work. I tell you this so’s you won’t get a swelled head when I also tell you that Brokaw wants to contract you to write three more originals for next fall. Will you do it?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ll get a little more each script. Anyway, if I were you, I’d make certain to thank Harvey. I’d also give him first crack at your next scripts. The two of you work well together, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yes. Hand in glove.”

  “I’ll call your agent. We’ll set up a meeting. Talk over subjects that might interest you. I think we should get started right away. It’ll fill out your summer.”

  “Check.”

  Kaplan left and I was alone in the viewing room, wondering where my play had gone and how come I hadn’t seen it leave. I sat there until someone came in and said that the studio was closing up. I left the RCA Building and I was shaky. The show, I guessed, went well. They weren’t jumping up and down yelling “Emmy!” but I gathered that they were satisfied. Also, they wanted me to write more. Fantastic.

  I walked back to my apartment, a million miles, wondering how many of the people I passed had seen my play, wanting to ask them, “Sir? Lady? Doggie? Did you see my play? It was about my friend, Tony, and how he got killed. Some people think I killed him like they think I killed my girl. Her name was Ginnie. Danced like a cat. Moved like a dream. I’m going to do three more plays for NBC. Do you think I’ll get away with it?”

  The apartment was barren. I had survived the show, would I survive the night? Doubts flew in through every window, rabid creatures sucking on my confidence. The provocative playwright was at home, entertaining his vamoosed friends, toasting them in absentia. A glass to Don Cook in California, another to Jessica in flight. A snifter to Alice, a jigger to Susan, and a bottle to Maggie from Boston. And to sweet Ginnie, a magnum of kisses and a case of what might have been. For the Great Traffic Cop in the Sky had fucked up our stars, colliding them with the comet that was her mother, and the firmament would never again be the same.

  When I was halfway between Schlitz and Dewars, the telephone rang. I groped for it and fell into the table, but I had the damned thing by the throat. “Yeah?”

  “Ben?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Great show. Arlene and I loved it. You’re on your way.” It was Barry.

  “Really like it?”

  “Like it? I even understood it. No shit, it was great.”

  “They want me to do three more.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No. Jerry Kaplan’ll be calling you.”

  “My first writer and he turns out to be George Bernard Shore. I sure can pick ’em.”

  “Wouldn’t happen to know if Ginnie saw it, would you?”

  “Well—I don’t think so.”

  “You mean you don’t know, don’t you?”

  “No. I mean I don’t think so. They left for St. Louis today. I don’t know what time.”

  “You said you’d tell me.”

  “They didn’t tell me until late last night. They found a girl to take Florrie’s place and the Bryant Hotel was still holding their booking, so—”

  “Richie said he’d tell me when they were leaving. The sonofabitch lied, Barry! Why’d he lie?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t think it was time.”

  “He’s sure been doing a lot of thinking when it comes to Ginnie. Barry, what the hell is going on?”

  “What the hell is going on is life. I can’t keep up with you young people. You tell me what’s going on, okay? So then maybe I’ll understand.”

  “You’re sure they’re gone?”

  “Yes. Positive.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t get depressed. You should be on the top of the world. Don’t let a little tiff with your girlfriend ruin your evening. Ben? Ben, you listening! Ben?”

  I hung up and dove for the bottom of the world. Not only had Ginnie left me, but she hadn’t even seen my play. She had typed it. She was as much a part of it as I was. She had midwifed it and nursed it, and she was gone. Cleared out. Lock, stock, and Richie. Christ, I hated that bastard. My first instincts had proven correct: he was worried about Richie and not Ginnie, and he certainly didn’t give a damn about Ben.

  I drank more, mixing my drinks and not caring. Anything in a bottle or a can was a target for my despair. I played the radio, getting a station as depressed as I was. Delius, “Two Pieces For Small Orchestra.” Then Mahler, “Second Movement of Symphony Number Seven”—“Lied Der Nacht.” After that, “The Lark,” by Vaughn Williams, properly ascended only I didn’t see it because I was in Ginnie’s room, parading my misery, wallowing in the absence of her and, I think, crying just a little—as she might have done, had the situation been reversed.

  Shit, but I wanted her with me. And, shit, did I hate Maggie, for the irresistibility of her cunt and the inconceivability of her being Ginnie’s mother. Her mother! Christ, was there ever a more implausible wrinkle in the unraveling of a tragi-comic love story? Why couldn’t Maggie have been Ginnie’s cousin, or even her maiden aunt? Or how about her wicked stepsister, going out to ball while Ginnie had to stay at home and sweep the hearth? Her mother?

  I stood in the middle of that room that was empty of everything but curtains. All things Ginnie I had witlessly allowed Richie to cart away. I had nothing of hers. Nothing but a number to call in St. Louis that I didn’t have yet but that Barry would give me on the morrow of my life, provided God picked up my option and allowed me a morrow because, despite the anguish, I did not wish myself dead. I did not wish myself unborn and unknown and therefore unremembered. I wished myself hanging in and pressing on and scaling heights—and showing them all that I was of substance and had a talent and could fill a place and make a name.

  Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all. Fuck the unreachable and the unattainable. Fuck Elizabeth Satterly in sparkling yellow, forever adrift in my uncompleted youth. Fuck the invisible Alice, balancing my balls before taking my innocence. And the fattish Jessica, bigger than Oklahoma and housing the loosest box to ever host the Pittsburgh Kid. And Susan, the orange-squeezer, who could squeeze more juice out of the man of the hour than Bing Crosby could squeeze out of a regiment of Minute Maids. And fuck Pat Jarvas, the Brooklyn Bang, fastest fuck in the East. Fuck her even as she called on the phone to tell me how much she loved my play, even as I ripped the brown paper off the “thing” in Ginnie’s closet and found Maggie Barringer smiling me in the face.

  “Hello? Ben? It’s Pat, okay? I know it don’t mean much to you but I loved your play, okay?”

  “Pat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get over here and bring your cunt.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Get over here—please.”

  “I want you, Ben.”

  “Yeah?”

&n
bsp; “Remember I told you I was gonna give you French?”

  “Talk, talk, talk. Jesus Christ, Pat, when are you gonna come through?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  She was there in under a half hour. Almost before she could catch her breath from all those flights of stairs, I had her clothes off and her on her skinny back. And, pretending she was Ginnie, I went at her as if it were my last turn at bat and I was shooting for the Hall of Fame.

  Her words, so Brooklyn, came out all broken—no sentences, not even phrases, just obscenities and directives, imperatives and utterances, and descriptions of what she felt and what she wanted to do and how she wanted it done.

  We fucked upside down, banging against the wall, eating on the kitchen table, bellowing in the hall. Gutter talk and animal moans, a balancing act in the center ring. Bang, bang, bang, the confrontation went. Labia major thwucking, labia minor clutching like a milking fist. Penis drilling for oil, buttocks hammering home. I started out screwing Ginnie but ended up nailing Richie, and Pat was bloodied and bruised because I was using my fist as well as my phallus.

  And when it was over, when it was packed in and zipped up for the night because to go further would have been to kill her, neither of us knew the time or had a hint as to who the other one was. The bed was soaked and tilted, one leg coming undone beneath its task. Pat had orgasmed so often and so mightily that she could no longer abide my touch. I had deliberately bent my lance on her, clanging it continuously against her thin flanks and pointy bones, hoping to dent it irreparably, to splinter it beyond restoration. I didn’t want it anymore and wished it would go away.

  The phone rang but I was fast asleep, so Pat answered. Whoever it was hung up. It happened again fifteen minutes later, with the same result. Somewhere—in the morning, who knew when—the inane chatter began. Peculiar to the female, incumbent upon the male—we jousted verbally, because Pat felt loved and I was too much of a gentleman to tell her she’d merely been fucked.

  And when she had gone, stuffed into a cab like a laundry sack by yours truly, I looked again at that portrait of Maggie. Ginnie had brought her mommy to New York with her and I composed a greeting card to honor the occasion:

  Mommy in the closet,

  Baby on the bed;

  Bang the two together—

  And wish that you were dead.

  Best wishes on your nervous breakdown—

  Ben

  And now the both of them were gone from my life, Maggie humping in hotel rooms, the quintessence of Room Service, and little Ginnie—

  Somewhere in St. Louis,

  Dancing in the sky;

  Laugh the wildest laugh,

  Wink the bluest eye.

  Congratulations on your triumphant return to the Midwest—

  Ben

  Next morning I looked for the reviews of my play. There were none. Channel Five, WABD, a local New York channel, had carried the presentation of the coveted Antoinette Perry Awards “for creative excellence in theatre” opposite Theatre 60, so that, as far as New York was concerned, my play had been wiped out in the ratings.

  Oh, they had seen it in Dayton, Toledo, and Dubuque; and maybe some viewers had seen it in New York, but no critics. The critics had all watched Channel Five and their columns said as much. I had climbed the highest mountain but no one had seen me plant my flag. No one had seen Leif Ericson either, or Abner Singleday or the Left Brothers or Mae East. All that there was of my play in the morning papers was a photo of “playwright Ben Webber and Mrs. Jason Kimbrough”—a swell thing for Ginnie to have seen had she been in New York, and a mean jolt for Jason Kimbrough who had been neatly cropped out of the photo by some zealous newspaper makeup man.

  NBC and Kemper Aluminum were quick to make a deal with Barry Nadler. It occurred to me that that could only mean that my play had gone well and that I should have held out for more. But I was so happy to not have been thrown out on the street that I accepted their offer before a cigarette had been flicked. It was $3,000 for the first of three new scripts. $3,500 for the second. And $4,750 for the third. $11, 250 for the lot, almost as much as it would have taken me three years to earn at 20th. And so, with a minimum of fanfare, I phoned in my resignation to Buddy Connors and everyone was happy for me for a variety of reasons.

  I met with Brokaw and Kaplan to discuss subjects that might be of interest to the client. And then I began to work with a rage. One of my objects was to avoid, for as long as possible, calling Ginnie, hoping that before it would ever come to that, she would have already called me. Surely she knew that I’d tried to reach her. If Richie hadn’t told her then Barry certainly had. And if she chose not to return the attempted contact, then she was very sick and simply couldn’t or very well and simply wouldn’t. In either case, any further moves by me in her direction could only weaken my cause and diminish myself in my own eyes. And I did not care to be diminished in my own eyes as I needed all the assurance I could assemble if I was to truly develop into a Number-One TV Playwright.

  I realized how much of my life was accident and how little prepared I had been for any of it. A few months before, writing was as foreign to me as Pago-Pago, and Ginnie Maitland was as much in my thoughts as Vasco Da Gama. You walk down a street and make a left turn instead of a right and you’re a dentist instead of a lumberjack. Had I never worked in Patterson’s tobacco place in Pittsburgh and stolen 100 fine cigars and walked down a certain street in New York smoking one of those stolen stogies, Don Cook would never have walked up to me to guess at the cigar’s brand, and nothing that had happened to me from that point on would ever have happened at all.

  Life was not preordained. It was not scripted and cast ahead of time and allowed to play out to predictable reviews. Au contraire, it was a blind crapshoot with the dice having been rolled years before, in Cuba, in a field where Maugham’s tobacco grew, the dice-roller being a cordovan-skinned man in a straw hat and wicker sandals, who lived in a hut with his wife, Maria, and seven babies and who picked leaf for Alfred Dunhill, who, himself long dead, had no idea that I was alive.

  Brokaw, Kaplan and I fixed on the three subjects for my three plays. One—“The Magic Horn”—would be a jazz fable in which the leads would be played by jazz musicians and during which jazz would play continuously. The second, “The Fair-Haired Boy,” would be about internecine politics in the advertising department of a pseudonymous movie company. And the third, “The Lonely Look,” would be a love story about a young writer and a young dancer.

  I began work on the first, establishing a routine, writing in long-hand in the morning, typewriting self-taught from twelve thirty till two thirty, and back to writing for the remainder of the day—or until I ran out of ideas, dialogue, and steam.

  I phoned Arnie Felsen to tell him that his script was good. He was such an odd little guy and so eager to be praised that I couldn’t let him down. If God had been watching and listening he would have had to have given me good points for my bad lies to Arnie.

  Pat Jarvas became a regular thing. She was a most avid lover, always coming to the apartment whenever I called, no matter the hour, which was invariably after midnight. We’d make love. She’d tuck me in. And she’d disappear—I never asked to where.

  I began to use the anguish of Ginnie as a negative drive, a desire to punish her for having left me without facing me building up in me to the point of its taking over. It drove me to my work earlier than scheduled and kept me there later than usual. “I’ll show her” became the legend on my banner. Not “In God We Trust” or “Don’t Give Up the Ship!” but “I’ll Show Her.” I truly believe that such negative drives are always more powerful than the so-called positive ones, that men driven by rejection, revenge, and injustice go further and accomplish more than men motivated by such generic propulsions as success, fame, and happiness. All the girls you may fuck tomorrow are not as strong a goad as the girl who fucked you yesterday. Not something you’ll find in a book of proverbs but valid nevertheless if you are of a mind t
o wrest triumph from despair and turn manure into melody.

  My work was proceeding well. I had established a good regimen to go along with my passion. The times I discussed Ginnie with Barry became fewer, and usually the discussion was in a professional sense, about the Pickering Trio and not about Ginnie and Ben. It was clear that Barry had no taste for the subject, though I did, on one occasion, point-blank ask him if there was another man in her life. After taking a long time to answer, he said “Yes.” And I knew that I had lost her and that I would continue to use her as negative fuel to power my rocket. I could understand the way she felt—I always could. My problem was that she had never faced me, which, in my then condition, translated into “She never loved me” and from there into “And I never loved her.”

  My schedule was my own. No one was around to crack a whip or point to the descending sands in the hourglass. Brokaw and Kaplan were somewhere out on Long Island for the summer. Occasionally one of them would call, never really inviting me out for the weekend, only suggesting that if I was ever out on the island I should drop in. Drop in what—the ocean or their lives? It didn’t matter as I never found myself out on Long Island and therefore never had to tangle with the Sphinxian riddle.

  I was a hermit in Manhattan, wandering out of my cave only for food and drink, exercise, and a newspaper. The television was rarely turned on and the electric fan rarely off. I worked on my three scripts in sequence, doing a first draft on all before doing a second draft on any. “The Magic Horn” was fun, all Dixieland and Southern, with my dialogue (at least to me) sounding like Tennessee Williams on a New Orleans zephyr. “The Fair-Haired Boy” was intriguing, populated with characters derived from the people I had worked with at 20th. Pat Jarvas was in it, and Bob Steinman, and myself, of course. But the one I most wanted to write about was Sam Gaynor because he was bigger than life and ten times more intolerable.

  “The Lonely Look,” about me and Ginnie, came out of my gut and hurt like hell. But by turning that lost love affair into something as alive as a newborn play, the pain slowly dispersed, scattered by dialogue through which I reshaped remorse into the stuff of love. Lies, all lies, of course, but what a way to beat the blues and sweep away bad dreams.