Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "You'll see," said the lawyer.

  "I broke a date for you monkeys," said Ubriaco.

  "Yes--and Mr. Leen broke a date for you," said the lawyer. "His daughter is having her debut at the Waldorf tonight, and he won't be there. He'll be talking to you gentlemen instead."

  "Fucking crazy," said Ubriaco. Nobody else had anything to say. As we crossed Central Park to the East Side, Ubriaco spoke again. "Fucking debut," he said.

  Clewes said to me, "You're the only one who knows everybody else here. You're in the middle of this thing somehow."

  "Why wouldn't I be?" I said. "It's my dream."

  And we were delivered without further conversation to the penthouse dwelling of Arpad Leen. We were told by the lawyer to leave our shoes in the foyer. It was the custom of the house. I, of course, was already in my stocking feet.

  Ubriaco asked if Leen was a Japanese, since the Japanese commonly took off their shoes indoors.

  The lawyer assured him that Leen was a Caucasian, but that he had grown up in Fiji, where his parents ran a general store. As I would find out later, Leen's father was a Hungarian Jew, and his mother was a Greek Cypriot. His parents met when they were working on a Swedish cruise ship in the late twenties. They jumped ship in Fiji, and started the store.

  Leen himself looked like an idealized Plains Indian to me. He could have been a movie star. And he came out into the foyer in a striped silk dressing gown and black socks and garters. He still hoped to make it to his daughter's debut.

  Before he introduced himself to us, he had to tell the lawyer an incredible piece of news. "You know what the son of a bitch is in prison for?" he said. "Treason! And we're supposed to get him out and give him a job. Treason! How do you get somebody out of jail who's committed treason? How do we give him even a lousy job without every patriot in the country raising hell?"

  The lawyer didn't know.

  "Well," said Leen, "what the hell. Get me Roy Cohn again. I wish I were back in Nashville."

  This last remark alluded to Leen's having been the leading publisher of country music in Nashville, Tennessee, before his little empire was swallowed up by RAMJAC. His old company, in fact, was the nucleus of the Down Home Records Division of RAMJAC.

  Now he looked us over and he shook his head in wonderment. We were a freakish crew. "Gentlemen," he said, "you have all been noticed by Mrs. Jack Graham. She didn't tell me where or when. She said you were honest and kind."

  "Not me," said Ubriaco.

  "You're free to question her judgment, if you want," said Leen. "I'm not. I have to offer you good jobs. I don't mind doing that, though, and I'll tell you why: She never told me to do anything that didn't turn out to be in the best interests of the company. I used to say that I never wanted to work for anybody, but working for Mrs. Jack Graham has been the greatest privilege of my life." He meant it.

  He did not mind making us all vice-presidents. The company had seven hundred vice-presidents of this and that on the top level, the corporate level, alone. When you got out into the subsidiaries, of course, the whole business of presidents and vice-presidents started all over again.

  "You know what she looks like?" Ubriaco wanted to know.

  "I haven't seen her recently," said Leen. This was an urbane lie. He had never seen her, which was a matter of public record. He would confess to me later that he did not even know how he had come to Mrs. Graham's attention. He thought she might have seen an article on him in the Diners Club magazine, which had featured him in their "Man on the Move" department.

  In any event, he was abjectly loyal to her. He loved and feared his idea of Mrs. Graham the way Emil Larkin loved and feared his idea of Jesus Christ. He was luckier than Larkin in his worship, of course, since the invisible superior being over him called him up and wrote him letters and told him what to do.

  He actually said one time, "Working for Mrs. Graham has been a religious experience for me. I was adrift, no matter how much money I was making. My life had no purpose until I became president of RAMJAC and placed myself at her beck and call."

  All happiness is religious, I have to think sometimes.

  Leen said he would talk to us one by one in his library. "Mrs. Graham didn't tell me about your backgrounds, what your special interests might be--so you're just going to have to tell me about yourselves." He said for Ubriaco to come into the library first, and asked the rest of us to wait in the living room. "Is there anything my butler can bring you to drink?" he said.

  Clewes didn't want anything. Edel asked for a beer. I, still hoping to blow the dream wide open, ordered a pousse-cafe, a rainbow-colored drink that I had never seen, but which I had studied while earning my Doctor of Mixology degree. A heavy liqueur was put into the bottom of the glass, then a lighter one of a different color was carefully spooned in on top of that, and then a lighter one still on top of that, and on and on, with each bright layer undisturbed by the one above or below.

  Leen was impressed with my order. He repeated it, to make sure he had heard it right.

  "If it's not too much trouble," I said. It was no more trouble, surely, than building a full-rigged ship model in a bottle, say.

  "No problem!" said Leen. This, I would learn, was a favorite expression of his. He told the butler to give me a pousse-cafe without further ado.

  He and Ubriaco went into the library, and the rest of us entered the living room, which had a swimming pool. I had never seen a living room with a swimming pool before. I had heard of such a thing, of course, but hearing of and actually seeing that much water in a living room are two very different things.

  I knelt by the pool and swirled my hand in the water, curious about the temperature, which was soupy. When I withdrew my hand and considered its wetness, I had to admit to myself that the wet was undreamlike. My hand was really wet and would remain so for some time, unless I did something about it.

  All this was really going on. As I stood, the butler arrived with my pousse-cafe.

  Outrageous behavior was not the answer. I was going to have to start paying attention again. "Thank you," I said to the butler.

  "You're welcome, sir," he replied.

  Clewes and Edel were seated at one end of a couch about half a block long. I joined them, wanting their appreciation for how sedate I had become.

  They were continuing to speculate as to when Mrs. Graham might have caught them behaving so virtuously.

  Clewes mourned that he had not had many opportunities to be virtuous, selling advertising matchbooks and calendars from door to door. "About the best I can do is let a building custodian tell me his war stories," he said. He remembered a custodian in the Flatiron Building who claimed to have been the first American to cross the bridge over the Rhine at Remagen, Germany, during World War Two. The capture of this bridge had been an immense event, allowing the Allied Armies to pour at high speed disguised as a man, though. "I sometimes think that the custodian could have been Mrs. Jack Graham, though.

  Israel Edel supposed that Mrs. Graham could be disguised as a man, though. "I sometimes think that about half our customers at the Arapahoe are transvestites," he said.

  The possibility of Mrs. Graham's being a transvestite would be brought up again soon, and most startlingly, by Arpad Leen.

  Meanwhile, though, Clewes got back on the subject of World War Two. He got personal about it. He said that he and I, when we were wartime bureaucrats, had only imagined that we had something to do with defeats and victories. "The war was won by fighters, Walter. All the rest was dreams."

  It was his opinion that all the memoirs written about that war by civilians were swindles, pretenses that the war had been won by talkers and writers and socialites, when it could only have been won by fighters.

  A telephone rang in the foyer. The butler came in to say that the call was for Clewes, who could take it on the telephone on the coffee table in front of us. The telephone was black-and-white plastic and shaped like Snoopy, the famous dog in the comic strip called "Peanuts." Peanuts
was owned by what was about to become my division of RAMJAC. To converse on that telephone, as I would soon discover, you had to put your mouth over the dog's stomach and stick his nose in your ear. Why not?

  It was Clewes's wife Sarah, my old girl friend, calling from their apartment. She had just come home from a private nursing case, had found his note, which said where he was and what he was doing there and how he could be reached by telephone.

  He told her that I was there, too, and she could not believe it. She asked to talk to me. So Clewes handed me the plastic dog.

  "Hi," I said.

  "This is crazy," she said. "What are you doing there?"

  "Drinking a pousse-cafe by the swimming pool," I said.

  "I can't imagine you drinking a pousse-cafe," she said.

  "Well, I am," I said.

  She asked how Clewes and I had met. I told her. "Such a small world, Walter," she said, and so on. She asked me if Clewes had told me that I had done them a big favor when I testified against him.

  "I would have to say that that opinion is moot," I told her.

  "Is what?" she said.

  "Moot," I said. It was a word she had somehow never heard before. I explained it to her.

  "I'm so dumb," she said. "There's so much I don't know, Walter." She sounded just like the same old Sarah on the telephone. It could have been Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five again, which made what she said next especially poignant: "Oh, my God, Walter! We're both over sixty years old! How is that possible?"

  "You'd be surprised, Sarah," I said.

  She asked me to come home with Clewes for supper, and I said I would if I could, that I didn't know what was going to happen next. I asked her where she lived.

  It turned out that she and Clewes lived in the basement of the same building where her grandmother used to live--in Tudor City. She asked me if I remembered her grandmother's apartment, all the old servants and furniture jammed into only four rooms.

  I said I did, and we laughed.

  I did not tell her that my son also lived somewhere in Tudor City. I would find out later that there was nothing vague about his proximity to her, with his musical wife and his adopted children. Stankiewicz of The New York Times was in the same building, and notoriously so, because of the wildness of the children--and only three floors above Leland and Sarah Clewes.

  She said that it was good that we could still laugh, despite all we had been through. "At least we still have our sense of humor," she said. That was something Julie Nixon had said about her father after he got bounced out of the White House: "He still has his sense of humor."

  "Yes--at least that," I agreed.

  "Waiter," she said, "what's this fly doing in my soup?"

  "What?" I said.

  "What's this fly doing in my soup?" she persisted.

  And then it came back to me: This was the opening line in a daisy chain of jokes we used to tell each other on the telephone. I closed my eyes. I gave the answering line, and the telephone became a time machine for me. It allowed me to escape from Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-seven and into the fourth dimension.

  "I believe that's the backstroke, madam," I said.

  "Waiter," she said, "there's also a needle in my soup."

  "I'm sorry, madam," I said, "that's a typographical error. That should have been a noodle."

  "Why do you charge so much for cream?" she said.

  "It's because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles," I said.

  "I keep thinking it's Tuesday," she said.

  "It is Tuesday," I said.

  "That's what I keep thinking," she said. "Tell me, do you serve flannelcakes?"

  "Not on the menu today," I said.

  "Last night I dreamed I was eating flannelcakes," she said.

  "That must have been very nice," I said.

  "It was terrible," she said. "When I woke up, the blanket was gone."

  She, too, had reason to escape into the fourth dimension. As I would find out later, her patient had died that night. Sarah had liked her a lot. The patient was only thirty-six, but she had a congenitally defective heart--huge and fatty and weak.

  And imagine, if you will, the effect this conversation was having on Leland Clewes, who was sitting right next to me. My eyes were closed, as I say, and I was in such an ecstasy of timelessness and placelessness that I might as well have been having sexual intercourse with his wife before his eyes. He forgave me, of course. He forgives everybody for everything. But he still had to be impressed by how lazily in love Sarah and I could still be on the telephone.

  What is more protean than adultery? Nothing in this world.

  "I am thinking of going on a diet," said Sarah.

  "I know how you can lose twenty pounds of ugly fat right away," I said.

  "How?" she said.

  "Have your head cut off," I said.

  Clewes could hear only my half of the conversation, of course, so he could only hear the premise or the snapper of a joke, but never both. Some of the lines were highly suggestive.

  I asked Sarah, I remember, if she smoked after intercourse.

  Clewes never heard her reply, which was this: "I don't know. I never looked." And then she went on: "What did you do before you were a waiter?"

  "I used to clean birdshit out of cuckoo clocks," I said.

  "I have often wondered what the white stuff in birdshit was," she said.

  "That's birdshit, too," I told her. "What kind of work do you do?"

  "I work in the bloomer factory," she said.

  "Is it a good job in the bloomer factory?" I inquired archly.

  21

  OH," SHE SAID. "I can't complain. I pull down about ten thousand a year." Sarah coughed, and that, too, was a cue, which I nearly missed.

  "That's quite a cough you have there," I said in the nick of time.

  "It won't stop," she said.

  "Take two of these pills," I said. "They're just the thing."

  So she made swallowing sounds: "gluck, gluck, gluck." And then she asked what was in the pills.

  "The most powerful laxative known to medical science," I said.

  "Laxative!" she said.

  "Yes," I said, "now you don't dare cough."

  We did the joke, too, about a sick horse I supposedly had. I have never really owned a horse. The veterinarian gave me half a pound of purple powder that I was to give the horse, supposedly. The veterinarian told me to make a tube out of paper, and to put the powder inside the tube, and then to slip the tube into the horse's mouth, and to blow it down its throat.

  "How is the horse?" said Sarah.

  "Oh, the horse is fine," I said.

  "You don't look so good," she said.

  "No," I said, "that is because the horse blew first."

  "Can you still imitate your mother's laugh?" she said.

  This was not the premise of yet another joke. Sarah genuinely wanted to hear me imitate my mother's laugh, something I used to do a lot for Sarah on the telephone. I had not tried the trick in years. I not only had to make my voice high: I also had to make it beautiful.

  The thing was this: Mother never laughed out loud. She had been trained to stifle her laughter when a servant girl in Lithuania. The idea was that a master or guest, hearing a servant laughing somewhere in the house, might suspect that the servant was laughing about him.

  So when my mother could not help laughing, she made tiny, pure sounds like a music box--or perhaps like bells far away. It was accidental that they were so beautiful.

  So--forgetful of where I was, I now filled my lungs and tightened my throat, and to please my old girl friend, I reincarnated the laughing part of my mother.

  It was at that point that Arpad Leen and Frank Ubriaco came back into the living room. They heard the end of my song.

  I told Sarah that I had to hang up now, and I did hang up.

  Arpad Leen stared at me hard. I had heard women speak of men's undressing them mentally. Now I was finding out what that felt like. As things tu
rned out, that was exactly what Leen was doing to me: imagining what I would look like with no clothes on.

  He was beginning to suspect that I was Mrs. Jack Graham, checking up on him while disguised as a man.

  22

  I COULD NOT KNOW THAT, of course--that he thought I might be Mrs. Graham. So his subsequent courting of me was as inexplicable as anything that had happened to me all day.

  I tried to believe that he was being so attentive in order to soften the bad news he had to give me by and by: that I was simply not RAMJAC material, and that his limousine was waiting down below to take me back, still jobless, to the Arapahoe. But the messages in his eyes were more passionate than that. He was ravenous for my approval of everything he did.

  He told me, and not Leland Clewes or Israel Edel, that he had just made Frank Ubriaco a vice-president of the McDonald's Hamburgers Division of RAMJAC.

  I nodded that I thought that was nice.

  The nod was not enough for Leen. "I think it's a wonderful example of putting the right man in the right job," he said. "Don't you? That's what RAMJAC is all about, don't you think--putting good people where they can use their talents to the fullest?"

  The question was for me and nobody else, so I finally said, "Yes."

  I had to go through the same thing after he had interviewed and hired Clewes and Edel. Clewes was made a vice-president of the Diamond Match Division, presumably because he had been selling advertising matchbooks for so long. Edel was made a vice-president of the Hilton Department of the Hospitality Associates, Ltd., Division, presumably because of his three weeks of experience as a night clerk at the Arapahoe.

  It was then my turn to go into the library with him. "Last but not least," he said coyly. After he closed the door on the rest of the house, his flirtatiousness became even more outrageous. "Come into my parlor," he murmured, "said the spider to the fly." He winked at me broadly.

  I hated this. I wondered what had happened to the others in here.

  There was a Mussolini-style desk with a swivel chair behind it. "Perhaps you should sit there," he said. He made his eyebrows go up and down. "Doesn't that look like your kind of chair? Eh? Eh? Your kind of chair?"

  This could only be mockery, I thought, I responded to it humbly. I had had no self-respect for years and years. "Sir," I said, "I don't know what's going on."

  "Ah," he said, holding up a finger, "that does happen sometimes."