by Peter Straub
Did ever a young mother go into a drugstore in search of a baby bottle for her new infant, and not find one?
Bunting arrived at the door of the Data Entry room just at the time that one of his fellow workers was leaving with orders for sandwiches and drinks. Few of Bunting’s fellow workers chose to spend their salaries on restaurant lunches, and nearly all of them ate delicatessen sandwiches in a group by the coffee machine or alone at their desks. Bunting generally ate in his cubicle or in Frank Herko’s, for Frank disdained most of their fellow clerks, as did Bunting. Though some of the other clerks had attended trade or technical schools, only Bunting and Frank Herko had been to college. Bunting had two years at Lansing College, Herko two at Yale. Frank Herko looked nothing like Bunting’s idea of a Yale student. He was stocky and barrel-chested, with a black beard and long, curly black hair. He generally dressed in baggy trousers and shabby sweaters, some with actual holes in the wool. Neither did Herko behave like his office friend’s idea of a Yalie, being aggressive, loud, and frank to the point of crudity. Bunting had been disturbed and annoyed by Herko during his first months in Data Entry, an attitude undermined and finally challenged by the other man’s persistent, oddly delicate deference, friendliness, and curiosity. Herko seemed to decide that the older man was a sort of treasure, a real rara avis, deserving of special treatment.
Bunting asked the messenger to bring him a Swiss cheese and Black Forest ham sandwich on whole wheat, mustard and mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato. “Oh, and coffee,” he said. “Black coffee.”
Herko was winding his way to the door, beaming at him. “Uh-huh, black coffee,” he said. “You look like black coffee today. Nice of you to make it in, Bunting, my man. I take it you had an unusually late night.”
“You could say that.”
“Oh yes, oh yes. And we show up for work right after getting out of bed, don’t we? With our beautiful suit all over wrinkles from the night before.”
“Well,” Bunting said, looking down. Long pronounced wrinkles ran down the length of his suit jacket, intersecting longitudinal wrinkles that matched the other wrinkles in his tie. He had been too disoriented to notice them when he had awakened from his nap. “I did just get out of bed.” He began trying to smooth out the wrinkles in his jacket.
Frank took a step nearer and sniffed the air. “A stench of alcohol is still oozing from the old pores. Had a little party, did we?” He bent toward Bunting and peered into his face. “My God. You really look like shit, you know that? Why’d you come to work anyhow, you dumb fuck? Why couldn’t you take a day off?”
“I wanted to come to work,” Bunting said. “I took the morning off, didn’t I?”
“Rolling around in bed with the beautiful Veronica,” Herko said. “Hurry up and get into your cubicle before one of the old cunts gets a whiff of you and keels over.”
He propelled Bunting toward his row and cubicle. Bunting pushed open his door and fell into the chair facing his terminal. A stack of paper several inches high had been placed beside his keyboard.
Herko pulled a tube of Binaca from his trousers pocket. “For God’s sake, give yourself a shot of this, will you?”
“I brushed my teeth,” Bunting protested. “Twice.”
“Use it anyhow. Keep it. You’re going to need it.”
Bunting dutifully squirted cinnamon-flavored vapor onto his tongue and put the tube in his jacket pocket.
“Bunting cuts loose,” Herko said. “Bunting gets down and dirty. Bunting the party animal.” He was grinning. “Did Veronica do a number on you, or did you do a number on her, man?”
Bunting rubbed his eyes.
“Hey, man, you can’t just show up in last night’s clothes, still wasted from the night before, on top of everything else three hours late!—and expect me not to be curious.” He leaned forward and stretched out his arms, enlarging the baggy blue sweater. “Talk to me! What the hell happened? Did you and Veronica have an anniversary or a fight?”
“Neither one,” said Bunting.
Herko put his hands on his hips and shook his head, silently pleading for more of the story.
“Well, I was somewhere else,” Bunting said.
“Obviously. You sure as hell didn’t go home last night.”
“Well, I was with someone else,” Bunting said.
Herko crowed and balled his fist and pumped his arm, elbow bent. “Attaboy. Attaway. Bunting’s on a roll.”
Again Bunting saw his parents posed before their peeling house like the couple in American Gothic, his father on the verge of uttering some banal heartlessness and his mother virtually twitching with anxiety. They were small, Bunting realized, the size of dolls.
“I’ve been seeing a couple of new people. Now and then. Off and on.”
“A couple of new people,” Herko said.
“Two or three. Three, actually.”
“What does Veronica have to say about that? Does she even know?”
“Veronica and I are cooling off a little bit. We’re creating some space between us. She’s probably seeing other people too, but she says she isn’t.” These inventions came easily to Bunting, and he propped his chin in the palm of his hand and looked into Frank Herko’s luminous eyes. “I guess I was getting a little bored or something. I wanted some variety. You don’t want the same thing all the time, do you?”
“You don’t want to be stultified,” Herko said quickly. “You get stultified, going with the same person all the time.”
“It was always hard for Veronica to relax. People like that don’t ever really slow down and take things easy. They’re always thinking about getting ahead, about how to make more money, get a little more status.”
“I didn’t know Veronica was like that,” Herko said. He had been given a very different picture of Bunting’s girlfriend.
“Believe me, it even took me a long time to see it. You don’t want to admit a kind of thing like that.” He shrugged. “But once she starts looking around, she’ll find somebody more suitable. I mean, we still love each other, but…”
“It wasn’t working out, that’s obvious,” Herko supplied. “She wasn’t right for you, she didn’t have the same values, it could never turn out happily. You’re doing the right thing. Besides, you’re going out and having fun, aren’t you? What more do you want?”
“I want my headache to go away,” Bunting said. The sensation of a slight, suspended drunkenness had passed, and with it the feeling of inhabiting an unfamiliar body.
“Oh, for God’s sake, why didn’t you say so?” asked Herko, and disappeared into his own cubicle. Bunting could see the top of his head floating back and forth like a wig over the top of the partition. Desk drawers moved in and out. In a moment Herko was back with two aspirin, which he set atop Bunting’s desk before going out to the water cooler. Bunting sat motionless as royalty. Herko returned with a conical paper cup brimming with water just as the woman came in with a cardboard box filled with the department’s order from the deli.
“Hand over our wonderful four-star lunches and leave us alone,” Herko said.
They unwrapped their sandwiches and began to eat, Herko casting eager and importunate looks toward the older man. Bunting ate with fussy deliberation, and Herko chomped. There was a long silence.
“This sandwich tastes good,” Bunting said at last.
“Yeah, yeah,” Herko said. “Right now, Alpo would taste good to you. What about the girl? Tell me about the girl.”
“Oh, Carol?”
“What’s this ‘Oh, Carol?’ shit, Bunting? You think I know the girl, or something? Tell me about her—where did you meet her, how old is she, what does she do for a living, does she have good legs and big tits, you know—tell me!”
Bunting chewed on slowly, deliberately, regarding Herko. The younger man looked like a large, shaggy puppy. “I met her in an art gallery.”
“You devil.”
“I was just walking past the place, and when I looked in the window I saw her sitting behind
the desk. The next day when I walked past, she was there again, so I went in and walked around, pretending to look at the pictures. I started talking with her, and then I started coming back to the gallery, and after a while I asked her out.”
“Those girls in art galleries are incredible,” Herko said. “That’s why they’re working in art galleries. You can’t have a dog selling beautiful pictures, right?” He shook his head. His sandwich oozed whitish liquid onto the thick white paper, and traces of the liquid clung to the side of his mouth. “You know what you are, Bunting? You’re a secret weapon.” A bit more white liquid squirted from the corner of his mouth. “You’re a goddamned missile silo.”
“Carol is more like my kind of person, that’s all,” Bunting said. Secretly, this description thrilled him. “She’s more like an artistic kind of person, not so into her career and everything. She’s willing to focus more on me.”
“Which means she’s a hundred percent better in bed, am I right?”
“Well,” Bunting said, thinking vaguely that Veronica had after all been very good in bed.
“It’s obvious, it goes without saying,” Herko said. “You don’t even have to tell me.”
Bunting shrugged.
“What’s her last name?”
“Even,” Bunting said. “Carol Even. It’s an English name.”
“At least English is her first language. She’s a product of your own culture, of course she’s more your type than some Swiss money machine. Tell me about the other two.”
“Oh, you know,” Bunting said. He sipped from the Styrofoam container of coffee. “It’s the usual kind of thing.”
“Do they all work in art galleries? Do you boff ’em all at once, or do you just take them one by one? Where do you go? Do you make the club scene? Concerts? Or do you just invite them back to your place for a nice soulful talk?” He was chewing frantically as he talked, waving his free hand. A pink paste filled his mouth, a pulp of compressed roast beef, mayonnaise, and whole-grain bread. “You’re a madman, Bunting, you’re a stone wacko. I always knew it—I knew you were gonzo from the moment you first walked into this place. You can fool all these old ladies with your fancy clothes, but I can see your fangs, my friend, and they are long, long fangs.” Herko swallowed the mess in his mouth and twinkled at Bunting.
“You could see that, huh?”
“First thing. Long fangs, my friend. Now tell me about these other women.” He suppressed a burp. “Go on, we only got a couple of minutes.”
Lunch ended twenty minutes later, and the day slid forward. Though Bunting felt tired, his odd exhilaration had returned—an exhilaration that seemed like a freedom from some heavy, painful responsibility—and as his fingers moved across the keyboard of his computer, he thought about the women he had described to Frank Herko. Images of the wonderful new baby bottles back in his room flowed in and out of his fantasies.
Late in the afternoon, Herko’s head appeared over the top of the partition separating their two cubicles.
“How’s it going?”
“Slowly,” Bunting said.
“Forget about it, you’re still convalescing. Listen, I had a great idea. You’re not really going out with Veronica anymore, right?”
“I didn’t say that,” Bunting said.
“You know what I mean. You’re basically a free man, aren’t you? My friend Lindy has this girlfriend, Marty, who wants to go out with someone new. Marty’s a great kid. You’d like her. That’s a promise, man. If I could, I’d take her out myself, but Lindy would kill me if I did. No kidding—I wouldn’t put you on about this, I think you’d like her a lot and you could have a good time with her, and if everything works out, which I don’t see why it should not, the four of us could go out somewhere together.”
“Marty?” Bunting asked. “You want me to go out with someone named Marty?”
Frank snickered. “Hey, she’s really cute, don’t act that way with me. This is actually Lindy’s idea, I guess I talked about you with her, and she thought you sounded okay, you know, so when her friend Marty started saying this and that, she was breaking up with a guy, she asked me about you. And I said no way, this guy is all wrapped up. But since you’re going wild, you really ought to check Marty out. I’m not kidding.”
He was not. His head looked even bigger than usual, his beard seemed to jump out of his skin, his hair foamed down from his scalp, his eyes bulged. Bunting had a brief, unsettling image of what it would be to be a girl, fending off all this insistent male energy.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“Great. Do I have your phone number? I do, don’t I?”
Bunting could not remember having given Herko his telephone number—he very rarely gave it out—but he recited it to the eager head looking down at him, and the head disappeared below the partition as Herko went to his desk to write down the number. A moment later, the head reappeared. “You’re not going to be sorry about this. I promise!” Herko disappeared behind the partition.
Bunting’s entire body went cold. “Now, wait just a second. What are you going to do?” He could feel his heart racing.
“What do you think I’m going to do?” Herko called over the partition.
“You can’t give anybody my number,” Bunting heard his own voice come up in a squeaky wail, and realized that everybody else in the Data Entry room had also heard him.
Herko’s upper body appeared leaning around the door to Bunting’s cubicle. He was frowning. “Hey, man. Did I say I was going to give anybody your number?”
“Well, don’t,” Bunting said. He felt as though he had been struck by a bolt of lightning a second ago. He looked down at his hands and saw that they, and presumably the rest of his body, had turned a curious lobster-red flecked with white spots.
“You’re going to piss me off, man, because you ought to know you can trust me. I’m not just some jerk, Bunting. I’m trying to do something nice for you.”
Bunting stared furiously down at his keyboard.
“You’re starting to piss me off,” Herko said in a low, quiet voice.
“Okay, I trust you,” Bunting said, and continued staring at his keyboard until Herko retreated into his own cubicle.
At the end of the day Bunting left the office quickly and took the staircase to avoid having to wait for the elevator. When he reached the ground floor, he sensed two elevators opening simultaneously off to his right, and hurried toward the door, dreading that someone would call out his name. Bunting spun through the door and walked as quickly as he could to the corner, where he turned off on a deeply shadowed crosstown street. He pulled his sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. Strangers moved past him, and even the Oriental rug outlets and Indian restaurants that lined the street seemed interchangeable and anonymous. His pace slowed. It came to him that, without consciously planning to do so, he was walking away from his bus stop. Bunting experienced every sensation of running away from something, but had no clear idea of what he was running from. It was all an illusion; there was nothing to run from. Herko? The idea was absurd. He certainly did not have to run from fuzzy, noisy Frank Herko.
Bunting ambled along, too tired to walk all the way back up to his building but aware of some new dimension, an anticipatory expectancy, in his life that made it pleasant to walk along the crosstown street.
He crossed Broadway and kept walking, thinking that he might even try to figure out which subway could take him uptown. Bunting had taken the subway only once, shortly after his arrival in New York, and on the hot, crowded train he had felt in mortal danger. Every inch of the walls had been filled with lunatic scribbling; every other male on the subway had looked like a mugger. But Frank Herko took the subway in from Brooklyn every day. According to the newspapers, all the subway graffiti had been removed. Bunting had lived in New York for a decade without getting mugged, walked all alone down dark streets, the subway could not possibly be so threatening to him now. And it was much faster than the bus.
Bunti
ng passed the entrance to a subway station just as he had these thoughts, and he paused to look at it. Stairs led down to a smoky blackness filled with noise; up the filthy steps floated a stench of zoo, of other people’s private parts.
Bunting twitched away like a cat and kept walking west, committed now to walking to Eighth Avenue. He suddenly felt nearly bad enough to hail a cab and spend five dollars on the trip home. It had come to him that Frank Herko and his friend Lindy were going to set about making him go out on a date with a girl named Marty, and that this must have been the vague pleasure that had lightened his mood only minutes ago.
Nothing was right about this, the whole idea was nightmarishly grotesque.
But why did the idea of a date have to be grotesque? He was a well-dressed man with a steady job. His looks were okay—definitely on the okay side. Worse people had millions of dates. Above all, Veronica had given him a kind of history, a level of experience no other data clerk could claim. He had spent hundreds of hours talking to Veronica in restaurants, another hundred in airplanes. He had traveled to Switzerland and stayed in luxury hotel suites.
Bunting realized that if something happened in your mind, it had happened—you had a memory of it, you could talk about it. It changed you in the same way as an event in the world. In the long run, there was very little difference between events in the world and events in the mind, because one reality inhabited them both. He had been the lover of a sophisticated Swiss woman named Veronica, and he could certainly handle a date with a scruffy acquaintance of Frank Herko’s. Named Marty.
In fact, he could see her. He could summon her up. Her name and friendship with Frank evoked a short, dark-haired, undemanding girl who liked to have a good time. She would be passably pretty, wear short skirts and fuzzy sweaters, and go to a lot of movies. A passive, good-hearted quality would balance her occasional crudeness. He would appear patrician, aloof, ironic to her—a sophisticated older man.