Abnormal Occurrences: Short Stories

by Thomas Berger

  “He’s even better than you said,” I told Wayne, who had broken out another pint. Maybe it was my heightened mood, but this stuff was a great improvement over the first version. I took a blast, and then Wayne wet his own whistle.

  “What do you think?” he asked, nodding toward Bobby. “Hasn’t he earned one?”

  I certainly agreed to that.

  Well, the bottle went around the three of us, and it wasn’t long before there was none left, so I went out and up the street to see a guy who owed me a favor, and brought back a treat of my own, and so we killed that Sunday afternoon.

  Next day I had a thick tongue and a head full of ache, and Fogarty is always in a foul mood on a Monday morning, after the bitching he takes from his ex when he returns the kids from his Sunday custody. Nevertheless, I told him my story.

  When I finished he simply stared at me, silently and without expression.

  “Mark my words,” I added, “Bobby will make it big one of these days. Just don’t forget you heard it here first.”

  “I’ll remember,” Fogarty said dully.

  “You’re being sarcastic, ain’t you?”

  “Not me.”

  But he was, I knew he was. He’s that contrary type who, if they really agree with you, won’t show it, but always say yes when they’re sure you have made a fool of yourself.

  I produced that blurred picture of Bobby in action, which I had begged off Wayne.

  “Looks like a cute pet,” said my partner, with phony solemnity, then going into the smartass mode, “But where would an old rummy get a diamond ring and a silver-headed cane?”

  I sighed, making my head throb. “Don’t try to take away the magic, Fogarty! This is the enchanted world of show business. Performing animals are a breed apart. They should be granted a little more latitude than your plow horse or milch cow.”

  His eyelids became heavy. “So what about the original charge?”

  “Huh?”

  “That this serpent was allegedly harassing some actress.”

  A tiny man was running back and forth inside my cranium, banging on the walls with a baseball bat. But I couldn’t claim this was my virgin hangover. Maybe I had been hitting the sauce a little too much lately. Was that what Fogarty was trying to tell me?

  But you get to thinking negative in my line of work and you’re on your way out.

  “Ever hear of a bum rap, Fogarty?” I shot a finger toward his big red nose. “Let’s face it, you’re jealous. When was the last time you discovered a headliner of the future?”

  “Sure you did, Vinnie. Sure you did,” said my partner.

  The trouble with Fogarty is that he came to me off the special task force against muggers. He spent too many nights wandering through the park as a decoy, wearing a dress, a wig, and a sock-stuffed bra. Say what you want, that kind of thing makes its mark on a man.

  Granted Wishes: Unpopular Girl

  THOUGH QUITE ATTRACTIVE PHYSICALLY, Janice Banning had a lackluster social manner, which she could do nothing about despite strenuous efforts. For example, she took up the raising of house plants and turned out to be very successful at it, but though this had become a popular hobby, claiming hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts, Janice never encountered a one of them. Instead she was always meeting people who when she sought to strike up a conversation by mentioning her Fica benjamina or asking for their solution to the mite problem, groaned and said in reply, “Gee, is that ever boring! Have a heart, Janice!” Or words to that effect.

  She had enough sense not to try to interest people in low-carbo diets, therapies that involved the laying on of hands, and film criticism, but she saw no reason why wine tasting should not be of interest to at least the members of a wine club, and she therefore read a lot about the subject and then joined an organization of oenophiles who met once a month to taste various vintages and compare notes. From her research Janice knew the right way to approach the wine for this sort of thing, and she knew the right things to say, for there is a vocabulary of precise terms that apply to serious tasting, and she was aware that unless she used it she would deserve to be spurned by the other members.

  However, she had the ill luck to have joined a group that was, at least in its serious devotion to wine, altogether bogus, being in truth a collection of crypto-alcoholics whose object in joining together was merely to get drunk in the company of kindred souls. Therefore when Janice began to speak of “excess tannin,” “volatile acidity,” and “an elegant nose,” the other members of the club responded with such complaints as, “God, is that ever dull! Come on, Janice, let’s get bombed.” Etc. It was clear that she still had not found the secret to popularity.

  But neither was she discouraged as yet. She was too clever to suppose that reading a lot of current books would get her anywhere socially. But she did have the bright idea that learning how to play pool might win her some friends, and she bought a professional-sized table and had it delivered to her apartment. The only room that was large enough to hold the table and still offer sufficient space for the players to manipulate their sticks was the living room, once it had been emptied of all other furniture.

  Before inviting anyone else to come and play, Janice studied the styles, as seen on television, of the Striking Viking and the Black Widows, and she practiced for many weeks until, playing against herself, she could regularly run the table.

  But when she began to have guests in to play pool they could seldom maintain their interest throughout even the first game. A typical comment was: “You’re too good, Janice! That makes it very boring to play against you. All we can do is stand there helplessly and watch you sink every ball. There’s no fun in that.” And pretty soon she didn’t know anyone who would accept her invitations.

  O.K., she had learned her lesson! She gave the pool table to a boys’ club, and she bought herself a tennis racket, a very short, pleated white skirt, and a pair of ruffled panties, and she loitered near the local public courts, her fine long legs, her best feature, on display until a handsome young man invited her to play a set with him. She felt safe in accepting, for she knew nothing at all of tennis and there was absolutely no possibility that she could drive him away by being the superior player.

  But after only a short time Lance, the young man, said, “I’m sorry, Janice, it’s really no fun at all to play with somebody who hasn’t any experience of the game. I’m sure you mean well, but think of how boring it is for me never to have a ball returned.”

  So Janice had failed, once again. By now she felt thoroughly cursed: no matter what idea she had, however reasonable, it wouldn’t work. She was destined always to be too good at what she took up, or too bad, and in consequence, whichever, she would never have any friends at all.

  Now, if you have no friends it is still possible to have a nice life, but you need lots of money, with which you can buy clothes and travel to fascinating places and be served by people who are necessarily gracious, and the rarest thing in the world if you are rich would be to hear anyone say you were boring—unless of course they have absolutely no hope of profiting by your association or are simply perverts of some sort.

  But Janice, who was a physiotherapist at a municipal hospital, had little hope of getting her hands on enough money to make her rich. So all she could do was shrug, roll her eyes at the ceiling, groan hopelessly, and say, “Gosh, if I only had a lot of money!”

  When she came home from work next evening and looked into her mailbox, she found a flyer for a new supermarket, put there illegally without a stamp; a dunning letter from a charity in which her name was ludicrously misspelled; a mail-order catalogue from a firm that sold power tools; and a cashier’s check for ten million dollars. Of course at first she assumed that the check had been sent in jest and, after smirking, was about to tear it up when she reflected that, having no friends, she was unlikely to be the target of jokes: people simply did not pull them on strangers.

  Therefore next morning she went to a branch of the bank that issued the
check. “Oh, that’s good as gold, all right,” said the teller to whom she presented it. He conducted her to the office of the branch manager, who was very obsequious, so there could be no doubt that the check was real.

  Janice put the bulk of the sum with a financial manager, who proceeded to increase it enormously through shrewd investments, and in no time she was one of the richest women in her part of the country and could quit her job and do anything she wanted with her life.

  But before she had spent a cent hordes of people began to apply for her friendship, and the remarkable thing was that most of them had a great deal of money themselves, as much as or even more than Janice. That is to say, the expected fortune hunter was notably absent. Her new friends certainly didn’t need her financial help. There was no getting away from accepting the fact that they found her well worth knowing for herself alone, insisting on entertaining her lavishly, even refusing, until she was at the point of being offended, to let her reciprocate, and when she finally was permitted to hold a dinner party at her new mansion, the guests brought housewarming gifts such as solid-gold teacups, real teardrop diamonds for the chandelier, and original canvases from the Venetian High Renaissance.

  Before long Janice had marriage proposals from the bachelor governor of a Midwestern state, a vintage motion-picture mogul, and several young leaders of industry. But she spurned them all for the moment. She enjoyed being in the world of money and power, but she concealed from her new friends her discreet practice of slipping out from time to time, dressed modestly and unaccompanied, for a few sets of tennis at the public courts, on which occasions she played well enough to hold her own with anybody. Or she dropped in at a unisex pool parlor, where she played badly, or perhaps loitered at the garden center, where she found all sorts of people who were interested in plants or at a wine shop, where she was asked her opinions of various bottles. And in all these places Janice was now extraordinarily popular. Certainly the men were wild about her, and even the women thought she was an intriguing person, and nobody among them suspected she had a dollar. But after charming all these people Janice found that she was terribly bored with them. They had served their purpose once they submitted to her. She certainly had no reason to feel beholden: what had they done for her when she needed friends? Therefore one day they saw her no more. She returned to the glittering realm to which she had been elevated by the granting of her wish. She only regretted that she had not asked sooner!

  Personal Power

  VICTOR DEVLIN HAD NEVER been able to understand why he so lacked in influence over other human beings. He was bright enough to have maintained a high B average through schools and college without exerting himself unduly, sufficiently amusing to have been on intimate terms with a sequence of attractive women, and in possession of endearing qualities that caused him to be thought of as a good friend by a host of persons of either sex. Yet no one in any of these venues or categories ever changed an opinion after listening to one of his arguments, or so much as took a casual suggestion of his (ate a meal at a restaurant he recommended, at his urging saw a movie, read a magazine article, bought a certain shirt), let alone honored his wishes in matters of enduring substance.

  By his mid-thirties he had married and divorced twice, both ruptures having been due, he really believed, to the inability of either wife to be persuaded by him to do or think, for a change, as he, and not she, wished. He might have accepted this state of affairs had it applied only to major projects, e.g., whether or not to have children now, whether to move to Hawaii or speculate in real estate, but when it came to a flat refusal to try, just once, salsa instead of mustard on a hotdog, or not immediately to press the mute button when a possibly witty TV commercial appeared on the screen, or to sleep late on Saturday morning for a change instead of always on Sunday, the domestic situation sooner or later became unbearable.

  At work and with his friends Devlin was, necessarily, more politic. He could hardly afford to change jobs merely because none of his ideas were accepted by his colleagues, a state of affairs that was pretty sure to be the same at any other place of business, and in social relations what mattered most was an atmosphere of good feeling: this was practically maintained by suppressing one’s own will rather than by seeking to impose it on others. Thus it seemed that his options in life were either compromise or failure. Which of course was true with most human beings. Why did he believe the situation should be otherwise for him? He could not explain it: it was just something he had always felt. That others did not share the feeling was what baffled him, but he could hardly confess as much to any of his fellow (and rival) laymen, and was well aware that if he did so to a professional he would be told, after going to considerable expense, simply to accept his lot.

  Yet had he been asked, Devlin would have called himself really not unhappy but rather perhaps unfulfilled, his conception of happiness being also a compromise and consisting, once he was past thirty, in a comfortable sense that without power one was virtually immune to the kind of disasters that result from serving as the object of others’ envy.

  Thus when one day he found, among the junk that clogged his mailbox, a pamphlet advertising a technique for the acquisition of personal power, how to dominate others in business, love, and recreational games, Devlin sniffed in amused contempt and dropped it into the trash along with the bogus notices that he had won (if certain conditions were met) vast sums of money, all-expenses-paid trips to Europe, and matched sets of luggage. But a moment later he retrieved the brochure, which might prove just the thing with which to divert the young woman he was currently dating. After seeing her on only two occasions he had utterly exhausted every subject for conversation that would not be certain to lead to an argument, for Annemarie took nonnegotiable positions on many matters and enjoyed wrangling. Whereas Devlin himself most definitely did not, to the degree that very little difference between him and a potential sexual partner was needed to extinguish his ardor. He had once lost his ability to perform when a woman with the most extravagant body he had ever seen in the flesh emerged from his bathroom with a mild complaint about the plumbing.

  He had not yet been to bed with Annemarie, in fact had not yet really made a move on her. He waited people out. Such was the technique he had formulated over the years, given his basic inability to work his will on others by direct means. This was somewhat more successful in affairs of the heart, for he frequented spirited women, than in his career, where an officeful of competitive colleagues, mostly male, were never impatient with his apparent lack of ambition. He had not risen far in seven years with the same firm, but neither had he had to leave, which could not be said of several aggressive hotshots. On the other side of it, however, most of his current superiors were persons who could be similarly characterized but were even more ruthlessly opportunistic.

  He remembered the pamphlet that evening. He had brought Annemarie to his apartment for the first time and had awaited her negative, perhaps even rude response to the decor or lack thereof, for his furniture consisted of what neither of his wives had wanted, along with an item or two from a nearby thrift shop operated by a religious charity, and the walls were bare, except for the calendar in the bedroom.

  The meanness of his abode usually evoked a response from the women he brought home. In fact, it was one of the things he counted on to break the ice. The apartment was an expensive one, in an upscale building, with an admirable view of the city. So much could have been made of it! Devlin of course was pleased to ask for assistance. The reason the place stayed eternally in the same shape, however, was that his affairs typically did not last long enough for him to acquire new furnishings or hang pictures reflecting the taste of any particular woman, and he had not succeeded in developing any general convictions about decor, given the diversity in the opinions of his advisors.

  But if Annemarie had a reaction, she failed to show it. She strolled to the sofa and sank down onto, into, its worst corner, where the upholstery of the arm was nearly threadbare and the spri
ngs within the cushion had long since subsided, and proceeded to stare neither at the room nor the spectacular skyline available through the wide window nearby, but rather at Devlin himself, who was thereby made very uneasy as to his appearance. He was never secure in his choice of clothing to begin with, and in recent months the principal garments had become too tight owing to his slow but relentless acquisition of excess poundage, despite the measures he took with his diet, though to be sure the latter were sporadic. When it came to exercise, he had to admit he was thoroughly delinquent, to the degree that when home alone he often lacked the energy even to consult the television program if it was not immediately at hand, and rather than rise and fetch it from across the room, would roam the channels with the remote, unless the batteries had died, in which case he might well stay in place, however deadly the program on the screen, making a mental note to buy replacements on his way home the following day.

  He now unfastened the middle button of his jacket, presumably removing the pinched look there, and asked Annemarie whether she would like a glass of white wine.

  She did not want any wine. She had drunk her fill at dinner, about half a glass. Nor did she wish to discuss the movie, the trashiness of which she pronounced undebatable. She had no interest in the view. She continued to fix him with what he assumed was a hostile stare. He sat down in dismay and, considering the frigid atmosphere, not on the couch but in the lone chair. He was preparing to ask about her childhood, a subject he had found appealing to those people who had had a happy one (though in a certain few cases it could be a disaster) when Annemarie, exasperated at his inability to intuit her wishes, made it clear what they were: to go to bed with him without further palaver.

  He was shocked, not by a boldness that in recent years had not been unprecedented, but rather by his own total failure to set any kind of pace or fashion any structure for the evening. The movie had been altogether her choice, apparently for no better reason than to confirm a presupposition that it had been universally overpraised, and at dinner he had ordered a seafood casserole only so as not to reject her forceful recommendation. The sexual encounter made it a clean sweep, and needless to say, it was she who orchestrated the procedure from start to finish.