by Daniel Klein
To top things off, putting together his first issue of Cogito is feeling more and more like a personal mission, one for which not only Felicia Hastings had chosen him, but the Fates themselves. So it is this morning as he enters Hastings Towers after his now-routine morning ramble to and from Uncommon Grounds where he downs three cups of locally roasted coffee along with a marmalade scone, that there is a bounce of exuberance in his step. He is still bouncing when he enters his office and sees Madeleine Follet perched on the Victorian settee across from his desk.
“Good morning, good morning, it’s a beautiful day.” Digby surprises himself by unconsciously mimicking the cheery tones of Mr. Rogers, whose kiddy show reruns he had watched religiously during his stoned sojourn on Bleecker Street.
“Now he’s lost his GPS,” Madeleine says.
“Is there a GPS finder?” Digby asks jauntily, but he sees immediately that he is not taking this crisis seriously enough, so he goes on, “Actually, maybe it would be a good idea to attach one of those finder things to Rosti. You know, like you put on your reading glasses or your dog.”
“He’d lose that too.”
“Isn’t there something he always has on him? A watch? His passport?”
“Well, there is his notebook. He never goes anywhere without it.”
“Bingo!” Digby says, and Madeleine rises, full of purpose.
Digby smiles. Whatever his faults may still be, he has always prided himself on being helpful.
“Oh, somebody called this morning,” Madeleine says in parting. “Somebody named Binx Berger. I left his number on your desk.”
Binx Berger? Head writer for Saturday Night Live? How many Binx Bergers could there be?
Digby remains standing as he dials the number.
“Binx here.”
“Digby Maxwell returning your call.”
“Hi guy.” Guy? Digby has never met this guy, just spied him once or twice at cocktail and book parties in his heyday.
“Listen, there’s some buzz going around about your magazine,” says Binx.
Buzz? About Cogito? In the Big Apple?
Digby becomes giddy; giddiness becomes him.
“Down there in my old hometown, eh?” Digby says as casually as his outbreak of delirium permits.
“In the Waverly Inn to be exact. Ran into Tommy Gasparini at one end of the bar, Chuck Jones at the other.”
Digby suddenly remembers how small a town New York actually is: two different people whispering about the same thing in the same tony bar can create a gale wind of scuttlebutt. The word ‘edgy’ is uttered, then the phrase ‘outside the box,’ then, sotte voce, the topper of all toppers, ‘this is definitely the very next thing.’ Come to think of it, it was in just such a way that Digby used to detect subject matter for New York Magazine.
“How can I help you, Binx?” Digby says.
“I’d like to take a crack at a piece about heaven.”
“For Cogito, right?”
“Gesundheit.”
Digby laughs politely. Then, “Funny stuff?”
“No, deep. Deeply funny.”
“Sounds promising. Any ideas?”
“Just a title. But it says it all.”
Binx pauses, so Digby says, “I’m all ears, Binx.”
“ ‘Your Afterlife Has Been Pre-Recorded.’ ”
Digby has no idea what Binx Berger has in mind with this title, but this is of little import because all Digby can see is his byline, ‘Binx Berger, Head Writer, Saturday Night Live.’ In the old days at New York Magazine, the likes of Binx never even responded to Digby when he floated an article idea in their direction.
Yes, I am the Phoenix, rising from the ashes of failure. My life does have a second act!
“Wow, Binx! That’s fabulous.”
“Say, fifteen hundred words?”
“Perfect.”
“By when?”
“Two weeks?”
“Done.”
“Binx, I should tell you that I’m working on a restricted budget here.”
He laughs. “You mean I’m not going to get rich off your philosophy magazine?”
“Not in this life,” Digby says.
Binx offers the indulgent snicker of a highly paid funnyman and they bid their farewells. Still standing, Digby experiences a rush of empowerment over his coup and, as is his wont, immediately casts about for someone to whom to display his surge of self-confidence before it dissipates. So he decides to personally deliver the news of the Binx Berger plum to his resident backbiters, June MacLane and Elliot Goldenfield. Actually, he has not exchanged a word with either of them in weeks; it has been like sharing an apartment with an ex-wife during a housing shortage.
As Digby prepares to knock on their office door, he hears June’s voice rising; she apparently is in the midst of a testy telephone conversation. Digby does what any man who is deeply interested in the lives of other people would do: he lowers his hand and eavesdrops.
“I don’t give a shit what he thinks,” Ms. MacLane is saying. “I’m just not daddy’s little girl anymore. I’m my own person.”
Pause.
“He can’t do that! He gave that stock to me! I have the certificate.”
Pause.
“That’s legal mumbo-jumbo. I’m still me. I am who I am and I own what I own.”
Pause, during which Digby finds himself admiring June’s locution for combining biblical cadences with capitalist ideology.
“Mom, please. We need the money. Listen, I wasn’t going to tell you this way, but we’re having a baby. That’s why we need that money.”
With this last, June’s voice has not only changed tone but register, creeping up to the pitch of somebody’s little girl. Another pause and then, “No, I’m pregnant. But it’s her egg.”
Digby suddenly senses a presence behind him. He turns to see Elliot Goldenfield’s glare.
“Oh, am I in your way?” Digby asks ingenuously.
“You have no shame at all, do you, Maxwell?” Goldenfield simpers. “Apparently you haven’t read Hobbes on the sanctity of privacy.”
“Afraid I’m stuck in my natural state,” Digby replies, pretty sure there is a philosophy joke buried in there somewhere.
Goldenfield pushes by Digby, opens the door, slips in, and slams the door in front of him.
Digby’s sense of empowerment feels flimsy.
CHAPTER 12
Unbidden, a fully illuminated memory comes: Digby is lying spread-eagle on his back on the banks of Yantacaw Pond in Passaic. In his mouth is the Hohner Blues Harp harmonica he has recently received for his eleventh birthday. With an unfocused gaze, he is staring at the cloudless sky. He breathes through his mouth through the harmonica, evoking a simple triad followed by the same triad a half tone lower. In, out; major, minor.
Then, from out of the blue, his mind jumps out of his head. He sees himself lying there. He hears his simple chords. He has an astounding thought—the sound he is producing by simply breathing is part of All Sound, part of the Sound of the Universe. This effortless epiphany fills him with sublime joy. He is at one with Oneness. It is his Buddha moment. And then, of course, it is gone in a minute and he is just a boy dawdling on his way home from school and he had better get moving or Mom will be mad.
In real time, Digby is sitting at his kitchen table in his apartment in Hastings Towers. The vivid Blues Harp memory, submerged for three decades, tingles both mind and body. He had been reading theologian Paul Tillich’s essay “The Eternal Now” in a collection of essays titled The Meaning of Death, and had become mesmerized by these lines: “There is no other way of judging time than to see it in the light of the eternal. In order to judge something, one must be partly within it, partly out of it.” That is when this boyhood moment came flying back to him.
The essay was part of his homework for his upcoming meeting with Mary, but this cannot wait. He dials her number.
Only after her phone has rung several times does he check his watch: it is almost
midnight. He decides to hang up, but then Mary answers with a sleepy, “Hello?”
Digby’s first impulse is to hit the End-Call button on his phone so he can escape without embarrassment, but the sound of her voice trumps that urge.
“It’s Digby. I’m sorry, Mary. I lost track of the time. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Hey, I had to get up to answer the phone anyhow,” Mary says. It’s an old gag and Digby loves it.
“I only wanted to tell you that I think I finally get that Eternal Now thing. Or at least something like it.”
“Are you serious?” She is clearly fully awake now.
“Yup. But I’ve got to warn you, it’s pretty banal.”
“Those are my favorite kind.”
Digby tells Mary his Sound of the Universe memory. She says nothing.
“Did I put you back to sleep?” he asks.
“No. Just the opposite. Do you want to have a drink? Louden Clear is still open.”
Mary is already standing outside the bar when Digby arrives. She wears a well-tailored trench coat over what are obviously pajamas. The Unitarians are a casual sect. They greet each other and head inside. They both order brandies before they speak to one another again.
“I love your harmonica story,” she says, finally.
“It was buried pretty deep. Didn’t have a clue it was in there. I was reading Tillich when it popped up.”
“Only the very best theology can do that,” Mary says. She laughs and Digby joins in just for the sheer pleasure of laughing with her.
“But here’s the puzzle,” he says. “That insight—or whatever—came and went, you know? No traces left behind. It’s probably the only transcendental moment I’ve ever had and I was eleven years old at that. And I’ve been slogging along in the everyday world ever since.”
Mary says nothing, simply gazes with her brilliant blue eyes into Digby’s. It takes him a moment before he sees the tears collecting in the inner corners of these wondrous eyes. She wipes them with the sleeve of her coat, then says, “Me too. Ain’t that the shits?”
“Yup.”
“If we were really brave or committed or something, we’d just cut out for a Bodhi tree somewhere and sit under it until we heard the cosmic music again,” Mary says.
“Who’s got the time?” Digby says and they both smile.
“At least with forty days and forty nights on the desert, you have some parameters. You know, you could save up vacation time for that,” she says.
They laugh, raise their snifters, and clink.
“To the blessed moments,” Mary says.
“All one of them,” Digby replies.
Finally, Digby asks the question that had been troubling him in his late-in-life, late-at-night philosophy studies.
“This stuff you’ve got me reading is awfully hard, Mary. Tillich, Kierkegaard, Buber. Really and truly, I can’t begin to grasp most of it and I used to be a fairly decent student. So what about other people, people who just don’t get the hang of abstract thinking? Do they get left out in the cold?”
“You mean, is it just another brand of elitism?”
“Well, now that you mention it.”
Mary closes her eyes and shakes her fine-featured face back and forth a couple of times before responding. “You, Mr. Maxwell, have just asked the sixty-four thousand dollar question. The one that finally made up my mind about going to graduate school. Not going, that is. If there is one thing in the world that should not be reserved for the select few, it’s the philosophical underpinnings of faith, for God’s sake.”
“Amen,” Digby says and Mary laughs. She reaches across the table and takes his hand in hers, squeezes it, and then, embarrassed, lets it go.
“You know, I’m starting to think that Bonner Hastings was on to something with the magazine,” she says. “Make this stuff available to everybody. Even make it funny. Why not, for God’s sake? To tell you the truth, Digby, I’ve been racking my brain day and night about how to make my article funny. But I simply don’t have the gift.”
“Funny isn’t everything,” he says. He means it for a change.
Mary responds by digging around in the side pockets of her trench coat. She withdraws a folded piece of paper, unfolds it, and sets it on the table in front of her.
“I’ve been carrying this around everywhere I go for a few days,” she says, her expression somewhere between sheepish and giddy. She nervously presses out the creases in the paper before she goes on, “I can’t be funny myself, but I do know funny when I see it. Anyway, just for fun, you know, I started keeping a list of clever things people have said about heaven.”
Digby smiles and nods encouragingly.
“This one’s from Tom Stoppard,” Mary says. “ ‘Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, when’s it all going to end?’ ”
They both giggle.
“Next?” Digby says.
“Okay, this one’s from Mark Twain. ‘When I think about the number of disagreeable people that I know who have gone to a better world, I am sure hell won’t be so bad at all.’ ”
More giggles.
“Okay, here’s my absolute favorite. Woody Allen. ‘I do not believe in an afterlife, although just in case I am bringing a change of underwear.’ ”
With this one, their giggling gets out of hand, edging ever so closely to hysteria.
Indeed, it is not simply the Woody Allen line that sends their laughter in the direction of hysteria. For both of them, if for different reasons, it is the raucous laughter of long-suppressed and just-released anxiety, their existential corks popping.
Around them, other Louden Clear customers go quiet and gaze at them, most of them smiling. Only now does Digby take in the other late-night denizens of the college hangout, mostly students in groups of two or three gulping down beer, many of them with open books on the tables in front of them. In the far corner, near the kitchen door, he spots his original Louden Clear mates, Winny and her glum professor cadre. Of this group, only Winny smiles. She offers Digby a little trill of her fingers. He nods back, looking a little more shamefaced than intended and she looks away.
“Unfinished business?” Mary says. Their laughter vacation is over.
“Nope, finished. That may be the problem.”
“I’m sorry. None of my business. Louden’s a small town, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I’d noticed. No problem.”
A few minutes later, they are silently walking the Louden campus. The willows are now leafy enough to rustle as they mosey by. From an open dorm window, they hear Miles Davis’s “Flamenco Sketches” from his masterful Kind of Blue sessions. There’s hope for these Louden kids yet. Mary takes Digby’s hand.
I am eleven years old! The second time today! Actually, it seems like a good age to start my life over again, especially with its pre-puberty clarity.
Digby squeezes her hand. Mary lets go.
“I’m not going to sleep with you,” she says.
Digby’s heart momentarily ceases functioning. “Ever?”
“Probably not.”
Funny, be funny, goddamn it! “Was it something I said?”
“It’s not a joke, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t need to rush things, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Mary says. “A whole lot more.”
Their gait has slowed to half time, but neither of them has the strength or the bravery to look at one another. There are obvious questions: Is she still in mourning for Reuben? Has she taken a vow of some sort? Is she involved with someone else? Is Digby still more of an obvious shithead than he thinks he is or wants to be? But before he can select which question comes first, Mary says, “I’m afraid I’ve gotten myself into one hell of a pickle.”
“Does this pickle have a name?”
“I can’t say. Not now. Probably not ever. I’m sorry. I think I’ll go on alone now, okay? Good night, Digby. This has been the loveliest evening.”
&n
bsp; Her words are swallowed up in the Silence of the Universe.
CHAPTER 13
“This is crazy!” is Digby’s greeting from Madeleine as he returns from his morning coffee ramble. Digby keeps moving. He is far too preoccupied with Mary’s inscrutable pickle to wish to hear the latest move in Madeleine’s game of hide-and-seek with the sour Russian.
“They want the entire back page and both inside cover pages. I didn’t even know what price to give them,” Madeleine says.
“Who does?”
“Saatchi.”
“Who?” Digby stops in his tracks.
“I don’t know. It’s an advertising agency. Or at least that’s what they said they were.”
“Saatchi & Saatchi?”
“That’s what I said.”
Digby circles back and sits down across from Madeleine. She pushes a sheet of paper across her desk to him. On it are her phone notes: “Clive Bosnoglian. Account executive. Sachy × 2. NYC. 3 full-page ads (bk + inside covers). Cost? RSVP ASAP 212-228-3895”
The mind reels. Digby’s. “This is a gag, right?”
“That’s what I thought. I kept telling this Clive person that this is a philosophy magazine. Circulation two thousand. All university types. Maybe there’s another Cogito somewhere. But he says, No. He knows who we are. Then something about wanting to get in on the ground floor.”
“Binx!” Digby yelps.
Madeleine gives him a look that encompasses her current assessment of him, to wit, that he is actually the Tom Hanks character in Big, a twelve-year-old outfitted in a middle-aged man’s body. She sighs and says, “So how much do we charge them?”
“I have no idea. What did Duke pay?”
“Nine hundred.”
“Dollars?”
Madeleine indulges the twelve-year-old with a strained smile.