by Mark Harris
“Answers to anything and everything,” she said. “Paprika. Male thoroughbred German Shepherd. He’s two years old and has bad breath,” she added, caught up in James Berberick’s rhythm.
“In what vicinity was he lost?”
“Say Eagle and Yukon,” she said.
“What’s a big cross street near there?”
“Maybe Eighteenth,” she said.
“Vicinity Eighteenth and Yukon?” he asked.
“Yukon doesn’t go through,” she said. “Say Market and Short, that’s better.”
“Terrific,” he said. “Lost. German Shepherd. Male. Vicinity Market and Eighteenth, I’ve decided. Answers to Paprika. Reward. Phone 431-9949.”
“Thoroughbred,” said Lala. This man’s voice produced ripples upon her skin. It was a far more genuine rippling than the rippling of the recorded voice of Lost Dog, and she was eager to test its staying power. Let it develop. She hoped it would not fade or fail. If it were promising she’d hold him on the line as long as possible.
“You didn’t say reward but I’m saying it. O.K.?”
“Say thoroughbred,” she said.
“Yes,” he evasively said.
“Will you put thoroughbred in?” she asked.
“Put thoroughbred in?” he inquired. “It’s redundant. Don’t you hate redundancy really? It will cost more, too, it’ll probably push you over on another line.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Put it in.” Talk more and ripple me, she thought.
“I really deplore doing so,” he said. He was a bit impatient with her, and he was firm, too, as if he had a right to say how the wording of an advertisement must be handled. He was something of an artist — not averse to pleasing the customer, but filled also with the desire to live according to his own best standards. This little corner of the world he could control. If the newspaper as a whole was slovenly, so be it, everybody knew it, but in that way it was only like the whole world itself, of which he had seen more than serenity required, which had corrupted him, caused him to lose his own control, caused him to destroy, kill, be man-killer, woman-killer, child-killer, and finally remorseful. Here at least he reigned, and he would therefore eliminate the word thoroughbred altogether. That’s what he’d do. Let her beef later. Often he changed the wording of things slightly to suit his idea of perfection, and he very rarely heard of any customer’s complaining; people tended to lose interest in an advertisement once it had worked its purpose. She was debating this thing overlong, he felt.
“Explain why,” she insisted. Make me ripple, she thought.
“Either an ad works or it doesn’t work. I don’t see why we’re talking all this super-much about it,” he said. “If you say that your dog is a German Shepherd then he already is a thoroughbred, so you don’t need to add to it.”
“You’re a perfectionist,” she said.
“You’re stuck with my perfectionism,” he cheerfully said, who was a mass-murderer, too, perhaps not “the greatest mass murderer of recent time,” but nevertheless a man with a score. On that side of himself he was less than perfection. “All right, I’ll put it in, but very reluctantly.”
“Read it back to me,” she said.
In the form he read it back to her it contained the word thoroughbred. But he’d not keep it there. “How’s that?” he asked.
“Then we’re set to go ahead?” she asked.
“All set,” he firmly said.
Fearing that their business together was done she hurriedly said, “Explain to me about rewards. How much is an appropriate reward?”
“How big is your dog?” he asked.
“Do you know a lot about rewards?” she asked.
“I know a lot about a lot of things,” he replied, hearing in her voice a touch of desperation.
“Aren’t you just a little bit conceited?” she asked, but she asked it with a smile in her voice which he could easily see (so to speak) at his end of the line; and he, after all, claiming to “know a lot about a lot of things” (which was true, for he lived intensely, fiercely, and fast), had been smiling, too, and being very sweet to her, and meanwhile with a dark pencil scratching out the word thoroughbred and rehearsing to himself his courtroom reply, “Your Honor, I had thought we agreed to delete the redundancy. Sir, I saved the lady money. . . .”
“I’ve been called conceited,” he said, “but I’d rather be called ‘James.’”
“James what?” she asked. Certain men’s voices did this to her, causing her skin to ripple — certain men’s voices pitched at just the perfect level, the absolute timbre. Of course they didn’t know that they were doing it, and she didn’t dare tell them, but when they did it — ah, what rippling! all up and down her back and around between her thighs, it was a regular figure eight you might say if you remember your ice-skating days; some men’s voices just had that perfect touch, and this man was one, and Lala rippled all up and down and around in a figure eight, thinking as fast as she could of some way to induce this man to talk further. “Tell me more,” she said. “Recite the Gettysburg Address.”
He laughed. “I can see that you’re in a good humor this morning.”
“I’m not really,” she said. “I’m in a miserable humor. The dog . . . my daughters . . . my husband’s unlocatable on Tuesday . . . anonymous calls in the night . . . and we have a homeless waif on the street locked out of his house.”
“We become personally fond of our pets,” said James. “Maybe your husband ran off with your dog.”
“Expand,” she said. Let it ripple. “Do you have any pets?”
“I don’t have any pets to speak of,” he said by way of expansion, “because I’m away from my apartment all day and I think it’s wrong to keep an animal cooped up. That’s why they bark all day. Have I expanded enough?” She was an odd one, this one, just plain lonely out there at Number Five Eagle Street, just killing the morning on the telephone, that’s how they do, these ladies, machines do all the work.
“Where is your apartment?” she asked. A kind of tingling deliciously joined the rippling. “Go on, go on.”
“You’re a great listener,” he said, searching the streets for an apartment house he’d like to live in. “I have a nice little set-up, nothing grand, in the Fox Plaza.”
“There’s a certain time of day,” she said.
“When what?”
“When I love to listen,” she said.
“Love?” he asked.
“Love to listen to certain people’s voices,” she confessed.
“If it does all this for you,” said James, “I ought to make you an album so you can hear my voice over and over.”
“It does do something for me,” she said.
“Such as what?” he asked, very assiduously writing words of no consequence on his order pad so that he might appear to his associates to be accepting classified advertising over the telephone. “In what way does it do anything for you?”
“It soothes me,” Lala said.
“In what way does it soothe you?” James asked.
“Don’t you think you’re getting rather personal?” Lala asked, but this displeased her, it sounded virtuous, girlish, it reminded her of her fat childhood; she wanted to get him “talking a blue streak” as her mother might say, get him really off on some long harangue, and soon, too, for in a few minutes it would all have passed because her special sensitivity to certain voices was often of short duration: she believed it was related to sleep and arising, bloodstream, blood sugar, and metabolism. Breakfast killed it. Harold in the house killed it. Fright or distraction killed it. “Read something to me,” she said. “I sneaked out to a protest one day and a minister read the names of the dead. It took several hours.”
“That must have been soothing,” James said. “These are the war dead? I’m glad my name wasn’t on it. Luckily I didn’t die. I kil
led instead.”
“Were you there?” she asked. “Soothing is the word, I’ll say. Tell me about your war experiences from beginning to end.”
“You must be kidding,” he said.
“Read something to me,” she said. “Read me the speeches of Senator Fulbright, talking about soothing voices. Were you over in the battle zone?”
“I almost won the Medal of Honor,” he said.
“Tell me the story of your life,” she said.
“I was born,” he began . . . but at this point a cautionary idea came to him, a fear overtook him, really: he oughtn’t to be doing this, you know. He was supposed to be taking advertisements on the telephone, not speaking with ladies irrelevantly by way of soothing them. Let them go get a massage for that. That wasn’t what he was paid for — to soothe the lonesome ladies — although he might start getting paid for it soon, if things went right. He had a few grand fantastic immediate prospects, or at any rate one grand fantastic immediate prospect. Berberick, he thought, your fortune is made with your magical telephone voice, or else (he thought) you have simply run into an exceptionally horny, hard-up, and desperate lady. For as long as James could remember girls had been reticent, but now they seemed to be “coming out of their shells,” so to speak. Times were changing. Religion was declining. Or perhaps it was these powerful colognes he wore. “I really shouldn’t be talking to you like this,” he said, abruptly assuming a most businesslike voice. “I shall insert your advertisement, madam. I hope that will be satisfactory. This is a company telephone, you know. Thank you for calling the Chronicle.”
“Don’t hang up,” she said. “Keep going.”
“Yes, they’ll keep me going right out of this office in a minute,” he said. “My supervisor is watching me right now. He’s looking at me suspiciously.”
“Who’s your supervisor?” Lala inquired. “What kind of man is he?”
“He’s very decent,” said James, “but he keeps us working hard, and we’re not supposed to chat with customers socially like this, we’re supposed to take their ads and get off.”
“Then I have another ad to put in,” said Lala.
“Keen,” he said. “That’s different. In what classification?”
“Suggest a classification,” she said.
“You’re mad,” he said.
“Don’t hang up,” she said.
“We never do,” he said. “We’re supposed to let the customer hang up first.”
“Suppose I never hang up.”
“I never encountered that problem,” he said.
“You’re encountering it now,” she said.
“It’s a new experience,” he said. “I never had this happen before and I don’t know what to do about it. I could call my supervisor.”
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“I won’t,” he said.
“Tell me about your supervisor,” she said. “Describe him for me.”
“He’s got sort of straight hair, slightly wavy,” said James, even now, as he talked, passing his hand through his own hair for a sense of it. This lady wanted to hear a voice. All right, he’d supply that little thing for her. “He’s a very neat-looking person and he always smells terrific. He has a smooth but rugged skin. He used to shave with an electric razor but now he finishes up with a blade followed by the best after-shave lotion he can afford, going as far as Caswell-Massey if he’s in the mood. Jade East Coral? Why not? You only live once. Squirt a little on your handkerchief, too. Ask the woman who kisses your cheek. He used to have . . .” but here he checked himself.
“Used to have what?” Lala inquired.
James Berberick deeply hesitated. “He used to have a somewhat bad odor,” he timidly said. “I realize that now,” touching here upon an experience he had never related to anyone before, for it had been mean, shattering, exhausting. In the end, of course, he emerged better for it — that is to say, James emerged better for it; no “supervisor” existed. “I was out of a job for a year right after the military, not that I looked awfully hard for one. I didn’t mind taking it easy for a while. But after a while you yearn for more money. If I had a job I’d have had the Medal of Honor, too, by the way, but old President Johnson at that time, before he’d give me the Medal of Honor he sent out a little expedition to check up on me to see if I’d embarrass him in any way, and they ended up refusing to give me the Medal of Honor because I was unemployed at the time.” Was this narrative soothing to her? At her end of the line she was silent. “Are you there?” he asked.
“You bet I am,” said Lala.
“Anyhow,” he said, “I went to the newspaper and got a job in the city room, and it was a good job, too, as copy boy, work your way up, be a reporter one of these days, editor, advertising executive, magnate, own an international chain, but for some reason or other I just wasn’t doing well, and they were about to fire me. You can guess how they felt about that — about to fire a war hero, virtually a winner of the Medal of Honor, right? But they just couldn’t keep me there, and I’ll tell you why.” He spoke softly now, intimately with the mouthpiece of the telephone. “Because I smelled bad,” he said.
“You’re making it up,” she said.
“I wish I were,” he said, “but it must have been true. My smell was acceptable to myself, but repugnant to others. Instead of firing me they sent me to Classified. Classified’s in another building altogether, that’s how bad I smelled; at Fifth and Mission they preferred I work at Third and Market, Medal of Honor candidate or not. A bad smell is a bad smell. Well, I wouldn’t have lasted long here, either, I’d have been bounced upstairs and down except one day I received a letter in the mail.”
“This is all you?” Lala asked. “Or your supervisor?” She wasn’t inquiring, really, she was only punctuating him, stimulating him, keeping him going, for his voice was marvelously affecting her, soothing her, producing wave upon wave of rippling around and around and around in figure eights.
“My supervisor,” he said. “Smelly Leo we called him, when all of a sudden one day the crisis was over. He found out about himself when he received the letter in the mail.”
“What letter?” she naturally asked.
“Telling him he smelled bad.”
“From whom?” Lala asked.
“I never found out,” said James.
“What did it say?” she asked.
“I have it home,” he said. “I live in your neighborhood, I’ll drop around and show it to you.” He lived three houses from the house where he was born, at Eureka & Twenty-Second Streets.
“I thought you lived in the Fox Plaza,” she said.
“You’d have to see it to believe it,” he said.
My Very Dear James Berberick:
I noticed that you’ve been transferred down to Classified. I don’t know if you know why, but I like you very much so I’ll tell you something about yourself. You smell bad. People call you “Smelly Jim.” You are having on-the-job trouble now, getting bounced around from department to department, and you will have such troubles forever unless you take some precautions against your bad B.O. (Body Odor.) In the old days Lifebuoy Soap was recommended. I don’t know what they recommend now. Heed me. This letter may save you many years of personal frustration.
AN ACQUAINTANCE
“Just summarize it,” she said.
“It simply said, ‘Jim old boy, stop smelling, take precautions, or you’ll never hold a job,’ and I began to realize that that was what the trouble was, and why I was getting bounced around from floor to floor and building to building.”
“You were?” Lala asked. “Or your supervisor?”
“I were,” he said. His error twisted his tongue. “I mean he decided — my supervisor decided — if he wanted the job he’d better start smelling better. The job requires a lot of talking to the public, and you better start smelling decen
t when you do.”
“How can they smell you over the telephone?” she asked.
“It isn’t all telephone,” he explained. “It’s at the counter, too. People come in. It doesn’t matter if they smell bad. After all, they’re the customer, right? The customer can smell bad if he wants to. Some of them, though, you wonder, you really do, how in hell are they going to find a job, smelling as bad as they do. You want to tell them, ‘Don’t take an ad, take a bath,’ and once in a while I do because somebody was kind enough to tell me once. But it hurt. It really did hurt. I’ll never forget the day I got that letter. I still can’t open up that mailbox without thinking, ‘Save me from another bombshell like that, because if it’s in there, never mind, I don’t want it, I don’t need it, right?’ One of the most significant sentences in that letter — it just floored me when I came to it: ‘You smell bad.’ You know, that’s not exactly a flattering thing to read about yourself when you get home from work and open up your mail.”
“You?” she asked.
“Supervisor,” he said.
“I keep getting mixed up,” Lala said.
“Slips of the tongue,” said James. He had never told anyone of this amazing event in his life, and he was stunned that he had told it now. She had said, “Tell me the story of your life,” and this was it, he supposed. Not long ago he had killed many people, wandered through the jungle, suffered hunger, kept his wits about him, and narrowly survived, but the really big thing about him, in his own estimation, was his one-time bad smell. “All right, you wanted it,” he said.
“It’s your voice,” she said.
“I really do turn you on,” he said, laughing in a pleased way.
“Then you got the letter from the company,” she said.
“Not from the company,” he said. “I don’t know who it was from. Whom. I don’t know whom it was from to this day. That’s the agony of it. If I knew whom it was from I wouldn’t know whether to kill him or kiss him.”