Soon I had a nice fire going. Dan removed his suit coat and loosened his tie; the three of us sat around in attitudes of comfort, drinking beer, and my posturing entered a quiet, “interesting” new phase. Well, no, I told him, aiming a sad smile into the flames, I’d decided to shelve the novel I’d been working on since last spring. It didn’t feel right. “And if a thing doesn’t feel right,” I explained, “you’re better off leaving it alone.” I always tried to use short, cryptic phrases in discussing the craft.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I imagine it’s the same in painting, in a different way.”
“Well, sort of.”
“Besides, I’ve got a few old stories I want to fix up and send around. You have to fix them up, you know. You have to keep taking ’em apart and putting ’em together. They don’t write themselves.”
“Uh-huh.”
I held forth at some length, then, on how hard it was to get any real writing done when you were stuck in a full-time job. We’d been trying to save a little money so we could live in Europe, I explained, but now, with the baby coming, there wasn’t much chance of that.
“You want to live in Europe?” he asked.
“Well, it’s a thing we’ve always talked about. Paris, mostly.”
“Why?”
Like some of his other questions, this one was disquieting. There weren’t any real reasons. Part of it was the legend of Hemingway, and that of Joyce; the other part was that I wanted to put three thousand miles of sea between my mother and myself. “Oh, well,” I said, “it’s mostly just that the cost of living’s much lower there; we could probably get by on a lot less, and I’d have more time to work.”
“You speak any French?”
“No; still, I suppose we could learn. Ah, hell, it’s just—you know—the whole thing’s probably just a daydream.” From the very sound of my voice I could tell I was faltering, so I stopped talking as soon as I could.
“Dan?” Eileen inquired, and her face in the firelight was a masterpiece of innocent flirtation. Nobody ever had to tell her when she’d made a conquest. “Is it true that only one applicant out of ten is accepted at Cooper Union?”
“Well, you hear different figures,” he said bashfully, not quite meeting her eyes, “but it’s something like that.”
“That’s wonderful. I mean that’s really impressive. It must have made you very proud to go there.”
She had thoroughly destroyed my act, if not the whole of my weekend; even so, their talk gave me the beginnings of what seemed a pretty good idea.
There was a lot more talk, and more beer; then she said, “Will you stay and have supper with us, Dan?”
“Oh, that’s a very nice thought,” he said, “but maybe it’d better wait for another time; I should’ve been home long ago. Mind if I use your phone?”
He called his mother and talked agreeably for a few minutes; later, after he’d left with many thanks and apologies and promises to come again soon, Eileen said the phone call had sounded like a husband talking to his wife.
“Yeah, well, that’s the thing, you see,” I told her. “Ever since his father died he’s been acting sort of as if his mother were his wife. And he’s got a younger brother, seven or eight years younger, and now he acts as if the brother were their son.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s sort of sad, isn’t it. Does he have a girl?”
“I don’t think so. If so, he never mentions her.”
“I really like him a lot, though,” she said as she began to clatter pots and pans in the kitchen area of the room, getting dinner started. “I like him better than anyone I’ve met in a long time. He’s very—kind.”
It was such a carefully chosen word that I wondered why she’d chosen it, and I was quick to assume it was because that particular word could not, very readily, be applied to me.
But the hell with it. I could hardly wait to get into the alcove formed by a folding screen in the corner, where my worktable was. The partly typed, partly scribbled abortion of my novel lay there, as did the several stories I planned to take apart and put together, to fix up and send around. My new idea, though, had nothing to do with writing at all.
I had always had a knack for drawing simple cartoons, and that night I filled many sheets of typing paper with caricatures of people who worked on the eleventh floor at Remington Rand. They were people Dan and I had to be patient with and nice to every day, and I was almost certain, as I chuckled over a few of the better ones, that the pictures would appeal to him.
It took me several more nights to weed out the crude ones, and to clean up the better ones; then one morning, as casually as possible, I dropped the finished stack of them on his drawing board.
“What’s this?” he said. “Oh, I get it: Arch Davenport. And poor old Gus Hoffman. And who’s this? Jack Sheridan, right? Oh, and I guess this is Mrs. Jorgensen in the typing pool. . . .”
When he’d inspected them all he said, “Well, these are clever, Bill.” But I’d heard him use “clever” in a disparaging sense too many times to take it as a compliment.
“Ah, they’re nothing much,” I assured him. “I just thought they might—you know—give you a laugh.”
The truth was that I’d hoped they might do a great deal more. I had worked out a scheme in which these drawings were only the opening move, and now his lukewarm response seemed to prohibit telling him the rest of it. But my reticence didn’t last long. Before the day was over—even before lunch, I think—I’d spelled out the whole damned thing for him.
There were hundreds of Americans now enrolled in art schools in Paris on the GI Bill, I explained. Many of them were serious artists, of course, but many others weren’t artists at all: they met few if any academic requirements; they were openly exploiting the GI Bill to subsidize their lives in Paris. And the art schools didn’t care, because they were happy to have steady money coming in from the United States government. I had read about this in Time magazine, and the article had singled out one art school, by name, as being “perhaps the most casual of all in its handling of the matter.”
I had now decided to apply for admission to that school as a way of getting on with my writing, I told Dan Rosenthal, but I would need a letter of recommendation. So here was the thing: Would he write the letter?
He looked puzzled and faintly displeased. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Me write the letter? They’re supposed to’ve heard of me?”
“No. But you can be damn sure they’ve heard of Cooper Union.”
It didn’t go over very well—I’d have had to be blind not to see that—but he agreed. He wrote the letter quickly, using one of his drawing pencils, and passed it over to me for typing.
He had told the school authorities that I was a friend whose ability at line drawing showed promise, and that he wished to support my application; he had saved his Cooper Union credentials for the second and final paragraph.
“Well, this is fine, Dan,” I said. “Thanks a lot. Really. There’s just one thing: when you say I’m a ‘friend,’ don’t you think that might tend to weaken the whole—”
“Ah, shit,” he said without looking up, and I may have been wrong but I thought his neck was a darker pink than usual. “Shit, Bill. Come on. I said you were a friend. I didn’t say we were brothers under the skin.”
If he disliked me then, and I think he probably did, it wasn’t a thing he allowed to show. After that first embarrassing day it began to appear that everything was all right between us again.
And now that he’d met my wife there was a new litany in the ritual of our acquaintance. Every night, or at least on nights when we left the building together and walked to the street corner where we’d have to separate for our different kinds of public transit, he would give me a shy little wave and say, “Well. Regards at home.”
He said it on so many nights that after awhile he seemed to feel a need for variation: with a mock scowl he would say, “How about some regards?” or “Let’s have
some regards there, huh?” But those weren’t very satisfactory alternatives, so he went back to the original line. I would always thank him and wave back and call, “Same here,” or “You too, Dan,” and that small exchange came to seem a fitting conclusion to the day.
I never heard from the “casual” Paris art school—they didn’t even acknowledge receipt of my application—so I was left to assume that the Time story must have brought them an avalanche of letters from other no-talent applicants all over America, misfits and losers and unhappy husbands for whom “Paris” had come to mean the last bright hope.
Dan came home with me for dinner several times during the next few months, and Eileen soon discovered he could make her laugh. That was nice, but I could almost never make her laugh myself—hadn’t, it seemed, since the very early days of our time together—and so I was jealous. Then late one night after he’d gone and our place had grown uncomfortably quiet with only the two of us there, she pointed out that we had never really given a party. And she said she wanted to do it right away, before she got “too big,” so we went through with it—both of us, I think, in terror of doing everything wrong.
Dan brought along one of his Cooper Union friends, an impeccably courteous young man named Jerry, who in turn brought a lovely, dead-silent girl. The party was all right—at least it was noisy and rapidly revolving—so Eileen and I were able to tell each other afterwards that it had been fine. A week or two later, in the office, Dan said, “Know something? Jerry and his girl are getting married. And you want to know something else? It was your party that did the trick. I’m not kidding. Jerry told me they both thought the two of you were so—I don’t know; who knows?—so romantic, I guess, that they figured what the hell; let’s do it. And they’re doing it. Jerry’s taken a job I don’t think he ever would’ve considered otherwise, working for some commercial-art school way the hell up in the northern part of British Columbia. I don’t know what the hell he’ll be doing up there—teaching Eskimos how to hold a T-square, I guess—but there’s no turning back now. It’s done. The die is fucking cast.”
“Well, that’s great,” I said. “Tell him congratulations for me.”
“Yeah, I will; I will.” Then he turned his chair away from his drawing board—he didn’t often do that—and sat looking grave and thoughtful, examining the wet end of his cigar. “Well, hell, I’d like to get married too,” he said. “I mean I’m not really immune to it or anything, but there are a few obstacles. Number one, I haven’t met the right girl. Number two, I’ve got too many other responsibilities. Number three—or wait, come to think of it, who the hell needs number three?”
Soon after the year turned into 1950, and a few weeks before the baby was due, the National Association of Women Artists agreed at last to hire my mother at a starting salary of eighty a week. “Oh, Jesus, what a relief,” Eileen said, and I couldn’t have agreed more. Except for the smiling boredom entailed in having her over for dinner once, “to celebrate,” it seemed now that we could stop thinking about her almost indefinitely.
Then our daughter was born. Dan Rosenthal paid a surprise visit to Eileen in the hospital afterwards, bringing flowers, and that made her blush. I walked him out into the corridor for a window-view of the baby, whom he solemnly pronounced a beauty; then we went back and sat at Eileen’s bedside for half an hour or so.
“Oh, Dan,’” she said when he got up to leave, “it was so nice of you to come.”
“My pleasure,” he told her. “Entirely my pleasure. I’m very big on maternity wards.”
The famous Long Island housing development called Levittown had recently been opened for business, and some of the younger married men around the eleventh floor began discussing at length—each of them explaining to the others, as if to convince himself—the many things that made it a good deal.
Then Dan told me he too had decided to buy into Levittown, and I might have said, But you’re not even married, if I hadn’t checked myself in time. He and his mother and brother had gone out there last weekend.
What had won him over to Levittown was that the basement of the house they inspected was remarkably big and bright. “It might as well’ve been designed as a studio,” he said. “I walked around that basement and all I could think was Wow. I’m gonna paint my ass off down here. And I can even make prints, set up a lithograph stone, whatever the hell I want. You know all this stuff about the perils of suburbia? How your life’s supposed to fall apart when you move out of the city? I don’t believe any of that. If your life’s ready to fall apart, it’ll fall apart anywhere.”
Another time he said, “You know anything about Harvard?”
“Harvard? No.”
“Well, I think Phil’s got a fairly good chance of getting in there, maybe even on a scholarship. It sounds fine; still, all I know about Harvard is the reputation, you know?—the outside view. And that’s sort of like the Empire State Building, right? You see it from a distance, maybe at sunset, and it’s this majestic, beautiful thing. Then you get inside, you walk around a couple of the lower floors, and it turns out to be one of the sleaziest office buildings in New York: there’s nothing in there but small-time insurance agencies and costume-jewelry wholesalers. There isn’t any reason for the tallest building in the world. So you ride all the way up to the top and your eardrums hurt and you’re out there at the parapet looking out, looking down, and even that’s a disappointment because you’ve seen it all in photographs so many times. Or take Radio City Music Hall, if you’re a kid of about thirteen—same thing. I took Phil there once when I was home from the service, and we both knew it was a mistake. Oh, it’s pretty nice to see seventy-eight good-looking girls come out and start kicking their legs up in unison—even if they’re half a mile away, even if you happen to know they’re all married to airline pilots and living in Rego Park—but I mean all you ever personally find in Radio City Music Hall is a lot of wrinkled old chewing gum stuck up underneath the arms of your fucking chair. Right? So I don’t know; I think Phil and I’d better go up to Harvard for a couple of days and kind of snoop around.”
And they did. Mrs. Rosenthal went along too. Dan came back to the office overflowing with enthusiasm for everything about Harvard, including the very sound of its name. “You can’t imagine it, Bill,” he told me. “You have to be there; you have to walk around and look, and listen, and take it all in. It’s amazing: right there in the middle of a commercial city, this whole little world of ideas. It’s like about twenty-seven Cooper Unions put together.”
So it was arranged that Phil would be enrolled as a Harvard freshman the following fall, and Dan remarked more than a few times that the kid would certainly be missed at home.
One evening when we left the building together he held our walk down to a stroll in order to get something off his chest that seemed to have been bothering him all day.
“You know all this ‘need help’ talk you hear around?” he inquired. “‘He needs help’; ‘She needs help’; ‘I need help’? Seems like almost everybody I know is taking up psychotherapy as if it were the new national craze, like Monopoly back in the thirties. And I’ve got this friend of mine from school—bright guy, good artist, married, holding down a pretty good job. Saw him last night and he told me he wants to be psychoanalyzed but can’t afford it. Said he applied to this free clinic up at Columbia, had to take a lot of tests and write some half-assed essay about himself, and they turned him down. He said, ‘I guess they didn’t think I was interesting enough.’ I said, ‘Whaddya mean?’ And he said, ‘Well, I got the impression they’re up to their ass in overmothered Jewish boys.’ Can you understand something like that?”
“No.” We were strolling in the dusk past brilliant storefronts—a travel agency, a shoe store, a lunch counter—and I remember studying each one as if it might help me keep my brains together.
“Because I mean what’s the deal on being ‘interesting’ in the first place?” Dan demanded. “Are we all supposed to lie on a couch and spill our guts t
o prove how ‘interesting’ we are? That’s a degree of sophistication I don’t care to attain. Well.” We were at the corner now, and just before he moved away he waved his cigar at me. “Well. Regards at home.”
I had felt terrible all that spring, and it was getting worse. I coughed all the time and had no strength; I knew I was losing weight because my pants seemed ready to fall off; my sleep was drenched in sweat; all I wanted during the day was to find a place to lie down, and there was no place like that in the whole of Remington Rand. Then one lunch hour I went to a free X-ray service near the office and learned I had advanced tuberculosis. A bed was found for me in a veterans’ hospital on Staten Island, and so I retired from the business world, if not from the world itself.
I have since read that TB is high on the fist of “psychosomatic” illnesses: people are said to come down with it while proving how hard they have tried under impossibly difficult circumstances. And there may be a lot of truth in that, but all I knew then was how good it felt to be encouraged—even to be ordered, by a grim ex-Army nurse wearing a sterile mask—to lie down and stay there.
It took eight months. In February of 1951 I was released as an outpatient and told I could get continuing treatment at VA-approved clinics “anywhere in the world.” That phrase had a nice ring to it, and this was the best part: I was told my illness had qualified as a “service-connected disability,” allowing me to collect two hundred dollars a month until my lungs were clean, and that there was a retroactive clause in the deal providing two thousand dollars in cash.
The Collected Stories Page 38