by John O'Hara
Then this morning he had gone to that office for the first time in nearly two years. He had asked for his old friend and had been told that the friend was in Hollywood. Then could he see someone in the department? Yes, he could see the man in charge of the art room. The man in charge of the art room listened with a mystifying respect to Eddie’s account of his experience of two years ago. The man said: “Oh, I see. You were a personal friend of Mr. De Paolo’s?”
“Yes, I knew him in college. That’s what I was saying.”
“Have you heard from him lately?”
“Well, no, not lately. I understand he’s in Hollywood,” said Eddie.
“Yes, but we expect him back in a day or two. Thursday or Friday.”
“Well, then I’ll come in and see him then. Will you tell him Eddie Brunner was in? Tell him I have some ideas for him.”
“For Benny the Beetle?” the man said.
“No.”
“He needs some for Benny.”
“No, these are just some of my own drawings I thought he could use.”
“Oh, do you draw?”
“Yes.”
“Mm,” said the man, and put on his thinking look. “Just a minute, Mr. Brunner.” The man left the office and was gone five minutes. He came back with a batch of rough advertising lay-outs. “Could you do something with these?”
“Jesus, yes. That’s just my stuff,” said Eddie. The lay-outs were for a campaign advertising a college picture. “Do you want me to try?”
“Sure do. I think these are lousy, and the boys in the department just don’t seem to get the right angle. No yoomer. They can draw tits till I want to chew the paper, but these girls are not supposed to have that kind of tits, you know what I mean. What I want is more on the order of John Held Jr. You know. Comedy girls. I want them female, but I don’t want to stress the sex angle.” He smiled and shook his head. “We did a campaign, God damn, boy, we had everything but the old thing in every paper in town. The picture was a terrible turkey, ‘Strange Virgin,’ but they almost held it over the second week it did such business, and every other company in town was bellyaching to the Hays office about our ads, so we got the credit for whatever business the picture did. Maybe you saw the campaign?”
“I sure did.”
“The one where she’s lying with her legs out like this, and the guy! I did that one myself. We even had squawks from Andre Jacinto on that. He happened to be in town making personal appearances when the ads came out and oh, he called up and he blew the house down, he was that sore. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘maybe I am like that and maybe I’m not, but you got no God damn license to put something in the ads that ain’t in the picture.’ That gave me a laugh, because when you take into consideration what that ad looked like he was doing, it’ll take a long time before they put that in any picture they make in Hollywood. Maybe over West Forty-six Street, that kind of a picture. But for the time being. Well, anyway, that was some campaign. The other companies squawked to the Hays office, but I don’t mind telling you I got myself two very nice offers from the companies that squawked the loudest. But with such a college picture we require an altogether different technique. You know? Dames, but cute, and comedy. Stress the comedy angle. I tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Brunner. I’ll take the responsibility on my own head. You go on in and sit down and just give me all you got on a couple roughs like what I have in mind, and if I like them I’ll give you twenty-fy dollars top price for all we use, then if I like them maybe we can come to some kind of an arrangement about more work in the future.”
Eddie did some drawings and the man said they were sensational. He’d take one anyway. Mr. De Paolo would be proud, he said. He made out a voucher for $25 and told Eddie to come back next Friday. “Oh, of course if you were going to see Mr. De Paolo maybe I’ll see you before that.” There was just a chance that there might possibly be a regular job there for Eddie.
Before he left the place Eddie of course had found out that his old friend De Paolo had struck it rich; he was in charge of the work on Benny the Beetle, the company’s own plagiarism of Mickey Mouse. . . .
On twenty-five a week Eddie figured he could even go to a movie now and then and get a load of Benny the Beetle. It was too much to hope for a steady job in an art department, where they certainly would pay more than twenty-five a week, but if the friendship with De Paolo had got him this far, no telling how far he would get when Polly—De Paolo—came to town, always providing Polly hadn’t gone high-hat and wouldn’t pass him up. But he didn’t think Polly would go high-hat. High-powered, maybe, but not high-hat.
And so Eddie breathed in streams of tobacco smoke, tobacco that he had dug out of the luxurious bottom of the can, where it was still faintly moist and had a flavor. He had $23 and some change, he didn’t know how much, in his kick right now. Five dollars for canned goods would leave $18 plus, and would assure him of food for at least a week. Take Norma to a show, tickets at Joe Leblang’s. Explain the situation to Norma, whom he had permitted to pay his rent on a loan basis, in return for which he put up her kid brother, a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, who came to town every other week-end to see a girl friend of Norma’s. Norma had her own money, left her by a grandmother, and she also had a job as secretary to an assistant professor at N. Y. U. She and her brother were orphans and her brother had his own money too, but in trust until he was twenty-one years old.
What about Norma, anyway? Eddie now asked himself. He had the feeling that his troubles were over, temporarily, and he wondered if it wouldn’t be a good idea to marry Norma. He thought back over the years, and it might as well have been Norma all along. His succession of girls always had been about the same general type; smallish, usually with breasts rather large for the girl’s height; sometimes the girl would be chunky. They had to have a feeling for jazz that was as good as you can expect in a girl. They had to be cute rather than blasé, a little on the slangy side, and come to think of it, all of them including Norma had to go to bed for one day out of every twenty-eight. They were all fundamentally the same, and probably they were all fundamentally Norma.
About love Eddie was not so sure. The thing that he supposed existed, that kept together a man and woman all their lives and made them bring up children and have a home and that kept them faithful to each other unquestioningly and apparently without temptation—he had not seen that in his own home and so he was not personally acquainted with it. He was not sure that he ever had seen it, either. He knew, for instance, that he saw the parents of his friends in a way that was totally unlike the way his friends saw them. All through his adolescence he practically took for granted that Mr. Latham and Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Dominick and Mr. Girardot, fathers of his closest friends of that period, were unfaithful to Mrs. Latham and Mrs. O’Neill and Mrs. Dominick and Mrs. Girardot. He never spoke of it, because his friends never did, but if they had he was sure he would have come right out and said what he thought. He had it thought out beyond that: he believed that those fathers were human, and subject to desire, a thing which did not have to be forgiven except in the case of his own father. His own father had inadvertently taught him to accept infidelity in all other fathers but himself. On the other hand Eddie liked absolute faithfulness in a wife, not so much because his own mother practiced it, but because as a result of her practicing it she became finally a much better person in his eyes than his father. The years of being constant were a lot like years of careful saving, compared with years of being a spendthrift. It was just that it was easier to be a spendthrift than to save. Of course sometimes you saved for nothing better than a bank crash, but even though you lost everything that was in the bank, you still had something around the eyes, something in the chin, that showed you had been a saver. Sometimes he would say to himself: “Yes, but your mother was pretty stupid.” All right, what if she was? She had kept her promise, which was more than his father had done. Eddie had no liking for the fello
ws in college who thought it would be swell to have a father who was more like an older brother. If his father had been an older brother Eddie would have been likely to give him a punch in the nose. Not that he idealized any other father he knew, but because he never met a father whom he regarded as the ideal did not mean that none such existed. Psychology and the lines of thought it indicated mildly fascinated Eddie, and he approved some of it; but he was not willing to ascribe, say, fidelity to a weakness or a dishonesty. Maybe it all did come down to the value of a promise. You gave your word that you would not sleep with another woman; in either case it was a promise, and if you couldn’t depend on a promise then nothing was any good.
He was always telling himself that when he got older and knew more he would take up the subject of promises. But he hoped the day never would come when he did not believe a promise—just a promise, and not all the surrounding stuff about Gentleman and Honor—was a good and civilized thing.
He was lying on his bed, thinking these things, and he suddenly felt disgust with himself. For only yesterday he had come within inches of laying Gloria, and months ago he had promised Norma that he would not stay with anyone else. All his self-satisfied introspection went away and he could not find anything anywhere in his thoughts that would justify what he had all but done. It was not his fault that it had not been done. There it was, the first time his promise to Norma had been put to a test, and right away, without even thinking about it, he was ready for Gloria, very God damn ready; and it was worse because he had come so close without thinking about it. It was possible that if he had thought it out he would have found a reason, if no other reason than that he would stay with Gloria and stop staying with Norma. Then next he was thinking the thing he always thought when he was getting out of one romance and beginning another: the self-reproach that he was no better than his father; that he was his father’s son. Maybe the psychoanalysts would tell him that that helped to explain how he would be faithful to a girl for months, then get another girl and be faithful to her until he was unfaithful. That’s the way it had been, and almost the way it was this minute, with Norma and Gloria. But he had not stayed with Gloria; for that break he thanked his luck. If he had he would have had to tell Norma. But he hadn’t. That seemed to him an important thing, one of the most important things in his life, and at that moment he decided he had found the girl he wanted to marry. A laundry called him on the telephone, and that prevented his having an affair with Gloria. Good. Something beyond his understanding had intervened, he was sure of that; maybe it was only his luck. Well, he wasn’t going to fool with his luck. When he saw Norma tonight he would ask her to marry him. No money, no job, no nothing. But he knew she was the one he wanted to marry. He laughed a little. He was pretty proud of Norma, and he loved her very much. He was already loyal to her, too; in the sense that in his mind he could defend her against the kind of thing Gloria might say about her: he could hear Gloria calling Norma a mouse-like little creature (although Norma was the same size girl as Gloria, and, speaking of mice, it was not hard to imagine someone saying Norma had a mind like a steel trap). Eddie let his loyalty go to Norma and did not try to deny to himself that this probably was at the expense of his loyalty to Gloria.
It was strange about Gloria, how he always had had this feeling of loyalty to her. Offhand he could not recall a time when there had been any need for it; yet he knew that with the life Gloria led there probably were dozens of people who said things about her that, if he heard them, would evoke a loyal response and some kind of protective action on his part. He had been ready to defend Gloria at any time when he might meet someone who said things about her or did things to her. By God it was an instinctive thing: that first night he saw her he lent her money when money was life to him. It saddened him to think of the things implicit in his decision to marry Norma. One of these things was the giving up part. Maybe he was wrong (he admitted) but always it seemed to him as though he and Gloria were many many times on the verge of a great romance, one for the ages, or at least a match for the love and anguish of Amory and Rosalind in “This Side of Paradise” and Frederick and Catherine in “A Farewell to Arms.” He nodded to an undefined thought: that yes, to marry Norma was a sensible thing and if out of the hundred pounds of the relationship between himself and Norma there was one ounce sensible thing, that one ounce was an imperfect, unromantic thing. All right; what of it? There never had been much romance in his past romances, and he distrusted romance for his own self; in a sort of Elks-tooth way his father had been a romantic guy, and he was not going to have any of that. He was in no danger of it, either, he was sure; his mother had not been like Norma. Disconnectedly he found himself off on a tangent, realizing how awful parturition must have been for his mother, all that stuff about getting up on a table and having a doctor look her over, and her realization that “the little one” she talked about and thought about and felt, also was a hideous little thing called a foetus. (He was able to think of this without any identification of the foetus as himself. You may say, “That was me,” but you cannot imagine yourself as being no bigger than the present size of your foot.) No, it wasn’t so disconnected as he called it; Norma never would speak of “the little one.” If she were pregnant she would know beforehand what was going on inside her, and she would know about the placenta and all that. He hoped Norma would not have much pain. But what stuff this was! this thinking about Norma deliberately having a baby when he had not yet seriously asked her to marry him. She might fool him and say no; there was that chance. “A celluloid cat’s in hell,” he assured himself, but a chance.
He was already as married as though he were half of Mr. and Mrs. Eddie Brunner. Did babies sometimes come out upside down because that was the position of their parents when the baby was conceived? Could parents tell which lay had made the baby? How long did the husband and wife have to stop sleeping together when the wife was pregnant? (He had heard the story about an artist who tried to stay with his wife when she was being wheeled into the delivery room.) What if Norma had a dwarf: would the doctors let it live? What if they had a baby and it turned out to be an hermaphrodite? Would Norma’s beautiful breasts get so painfully sensitive that he would not be able to touch them while she was pregnant? Did they always lose their firmness after pregnancy? What was this stuff about tearing? Did it mean literally tearing? ripping open when she did not stretch enough? Could doctors keep the size of the baby down so it would not endanger the mother’s life? How much did a baby cost?
Well, it cost more than he would be able to pay for a long time, so he might as well stop thinking about it. He ought to be glad he had enough money to take Norma to a show tonight, that’s what he ought to be.
EIGHT
Wednesday passed for all those living in the world at that time, and it was Thursday. It was for instance payday for James Malloy, who had been living since Monday on borrowed dollars. For Gloria Wandrous it was all of a sudden the day on which she would give up Liggett. She had had a good night’s sleep. Wednesday evening she had spent in the bosom of her family, after trying without success to talk to Eddie on the telephone. She had a good dinner at home, of things she liked: her mother’s cream of tomato soup with just a touch of sherry in it; roast beef, scalloped potatoes, succotash, lettuce and mayonnaise (homemade), ice cream with strawberries, coffee and a lick of Curaçao. Her uncle had to go uptown after dinner and Gloria was left with her mother. Her mother had not been so bad. They talked about the clothes she had bought that day, and Mrs. Wandrous, who knew something about women’s clothes, reaffirmed her trust in Gloria’s taste. She said Gloria had clothes sense. “That’s one thing about you I never had to teach you even as a little girl. You always had good sense about clothes. Oh, so few girls have it these days. Sunday before last, you know when I went for a drive with Mrs. Lackland, we drove past Vassar College. Now you’d think those girls would know how to dress, at least have sense enough to put on something decent on Sunday. But no. Sweater and skirt
, sweater and skirt, all the way up and down the street from Poughkeepsie proper to the college. And the same sweater, and the same skirt. I said to Mrs. Lackland, if those girls were told they had to wear a uniform the way girls have to in preparatory school, why, they’d yell and scream and have school strikes and everything. But there they were, just the same, wearing a uniform. And it isn’t as though they dressed any better when they came to New York. But I suppose they have no style. You have. You have style. I noticed those things you bought today. I was afraid for a minute when you asked to try on that one dress at Altman’s. I knew it was wrong for you but I didn’t want to say anything till after you tried it on.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t have bought it.”
“I know.”
“I just wanted to try it on. They’re handy.”
“Well, I don’t think so, Gloria. When I’m tempted to buy a dress because I think it’s going to be handy, I think twice about it. Those handy dresses, so-called, I should say a woman won’t get as much out of one of those as she will out of a really frivolous dress. I mean in actual number of hours that they’re worn. Take your black satin . . . ”
Clothes, and cooking, and curiously enough the way to handle men, were matters in which Gloria had respect for her mother’s opinions. Packing, housecleaning, how to handle servants, what to do for blotches in the complexion, kitchen chemistry, the peculiarities of various fabrics—Mrs. Wandrous knew a lot about such matters. It occurred to Gloria that her mother was a perfect wife. The fact that her husband was dead did nothing to change that. In fact that was part of it. And any time anybody had any doubt about how well her mother could manage a house, all they had to do was count up the number of times Gloria’s uncle had had to complain. No, her mother was a fine housekeeper, and she knew how to handle men. Gloria often would hear her mother say that if So-and-So did such and such she’d be happier with her husband. What Gloria meant was that her mother, dealing with her kind of man in her kind of life, was just as capable as she was with baking soda in the kitchen. Mrs. Wandrous knew what baking soda could be made to do, and she knew what the kind of man she would be likely to have dealings with (who bored Gloria to death) would do. It was almost a good life, Gloria decided. Without regret she recognized the impossibility of it for her; but a pretty good life for someone like her mother.