Vonnegut, Kurt - Player Piano (v5.0)

by Player Piano [lit]

  "They might as well," said Martha. "Some of the kids that come over from across the river - you'd think they were."

  "After our time," said Finnerty. "I meant they didn't use to."

  To build up more of an atmosphere of intimacy, rapport, Paul casually picked up one of the shot-glasses before Barbara and sipped at it. It then dawned on him that the shots of expensive Scotch, which had been arriving as though by bucket brigade, were no more than brown water. "Smooth," he said.

  "So what am I supposed to do, have a nervous breakdown?" said Barbara. "Let me out."

  "No, please, that's all right. Just talk to me is all. I understand."

  "What'll it be?" said the waitress.

  "Scotch, double, with water," said Paul.

  "Trying to make me feel bad?"

  "I want you to feel good. If you need money, I want to help." He meant it with all his heart.

  "Suit yourself, plunger," said Barbara. She looked restlessly about the room.

  Paul's eyelids grew heavier and heavier and heavier as he tried to think of the phrase that would break the ice with Barbara. He folded his arms on the table top and, for just an instant's rest, he laid his head on them.

  When he opened his eyes again, Finnerty was shaking him, and Barbara and Martha had gone. Finnerty helped him out onto the sidewalk for air.

  The out-of-doors was a nightmare of light and noise, and Paul could see that some sort of torchlight parade was under way. He burst into a cheer as he recognized Luke Lubbock, who was being borne by in a sedan chair.

  When Finnerty had established him back in the booth, a speech, the nugget of the whole evening's nebulous impressions, composed itself in Paul's mind, took on form and polish inspirationally, with no conscious effort on his part. He had only to deliver it to make himself the new Messiah and Ilium the new Eden. The first line was at his lips, tearing at them to be set free.

  Paul struggled to stand on the bench, and from there he managed to step to the table. He held his hands over his head for attention.

  "Friends, my friends!" he cried. "We must meet in the middle of the bridge!" The frail table suddenly lurched beneath him. He heard the splitting of wood, cheers, and again - darkness.

  The next voice was the bartender's. "Come on - closing time. Gotta lock up," said the bartender gently.

  Paul sat up and groaned. His mouth was dry, and his head ached. The table was gone from the booth, and there were only cracked plaster and boltheads to show where it had once been moored to the wall.

  The saloon seemed deserted, but the air was filled with a painful clangor. Paul peered out of the booth and saw a man mopping the floor. Finnerty sat at the player piano, savagely improvising on the brassy, dissonant antique.

  Paul shuffled over to the piano and laid his hand on Finnerty's shoulder. "Let's go home."

  Finnerty continued to lash at the keys. "Staying!" he shouted above the music. "Go home!"

  "Where you going to stay?"

  Then Paul saw Lasher, who sat unobtrusively in the shadows, leaning against the wall in a chair. Lasher tapped his thick chest. "With me," he said with his lips.

  Finnerty shook off Paul's hand and wouldn't answer.

  "O.K.," said Paul fuzzily. "So long."

  He stumbled into the street and found his car. He paused for a moment to listen to Finnerty's hellish music echoing from the façades of the sleeping town. The bartender stood respectfully at a distance from the frenzied pianist, afraid to interrupt.

  CHAPTER TEN

  After the night with Finnerty and Lasher, and with the good little people, Alfy, Luke Lubbock, the bartender, and Martha and Barbara, Doctor Paul Proteus slept until late in the afternoon. When he awoke, Anita was out of the house, and with a dry mouth, burning eyes, and a stomach that felt as though it were stuffed with cat fur, he went to his responsible post in the Ilium Works.

  The eyes of Doctor Katharine Finch, his secretary, were bloodshot for another reason, a reason so all-consuming that she took little note of the condition of Paul.

  "Doctor Kroner called," she said mechanically.

  "Oh? He wants me to call back?"

  "Doctor Shepherd took the message."

  "He did, eh? Anything else?"

  "The police?"

  "Police? What did they want?"

  "Doctor Shepherd took the message."

  "All right." Everything seemed hot and bright and soporific. He sat on the edge of her desk, and rested. "Get Dog-Eat-Dog on the phone."

  "That won't be necessary. He's in your office now."

  Wondering bleakly what grievance or slight or infraction of rules Shepherd wanted to see him about, Paul pushed open his office door gingerly.

  Shepherd sat at Paul's desk, absorbed in signing a stack of reports. He didn't look up. Briskly, his eyes still on the papers, he flicked on the intercom set. "Miss Finch -"

  "Yessir."

  "On this monthly security report: did Doctor Proteus tell you how he planned to handle Finnerty's admission without escort yesterday?"

  "I planned to keep my big mouth shut about it," said Paul.

  Shepherd looked up with seeming pleasure and surprise. "Well, speak of the Devil." He made no move to get out of Paul's chair. "Say," he said with hearty camaraderie, "I guess you were really hung over, eh, boy? Should have taken the whole day off. I know my way around well enough to fill in for you."

  "Thanks."

  "No trouble. There really isn't a heck of a lot to the job."

  "I expected Katharine to watch over things for me, and call for help if she needed it."

  "You know what Kroner would think of that. It doesn't take a whole lot more trouble to do things right, Paul."

  "Do you mind telling me what Kroner wanted?"

  "Oh, yes - he wants to see you tonight instead of Thursday. He's got to be in Washington tomorrow night, and for the rest of the week."

  "Wonderful. And what's the good news from the police?"

  Shepherd laughed richly. "Some foul-up. They were all excited about a pistol they found down by the river. They claimed the serial numbers were for a gun checked out to you. I told them to check again - that no man who's bright enough to be manager of the Ilium Works is dumb enough to leave a pistol around loose."

  "That's a nice tribute, Shep. Mind if I use my phone?"

  Shepherd pushed the phone across the desk and went back to signing: "Lawson Shepherd, in absence of P. Proteus."

  "Did you tell him I had a hangover?"

  "Hell no, Paul. I covered up for you all right."

  "What did you say was wrong?"

  "Nerves."

  "Great!" Katharine was getting Kroner's office on the line for Paul.

  "Doctor Proteus in Ilium would like to speak to Doctor Kroner. He's returning Doctor Kroner's call," said Katharine.

  It wasn't a day for judging proportions. Paul had been able to take the disturbances of Kroner, Shepherd, and the police with something bordering on apathy. Now, however, he found himself enraged by the ceremony of official telephone etiquette - time-consuming pomp and circumstance lovingly preserved by the rank-happy champions of efficiency.

  "Is Doctor Proteus on?" said Kroner's secretary. "Doctor Kroner is in."

  "Just a moment," said Katharine. "Doctor Proteus, Doctor Kroner is in and will speak to you."

  "All right, I'm on."

  "Doctor Proteus is on the line," said Katharine.

  "Doctor Kroner, Doctor Proteus is on the line."

  "Tell him to go ahead," said Kroner.

  "Tell Doctor Proteus to go ahead," said Kroner's secretary.

  "Doctor Proteus, please go ahead," said Katharine.

  "This is Paul Proteus, Doctor Kroner. I'm returning your call." A little bell went "tink-tink-tink," letting him know his conversation was being recorded.

  "Shepherd said you'd been having trouble with your nerves, my boy."

  "Not quite right. A touch of some kind of virus."

  "Lot of that floating around. Well, do
you feel well enough to come over to my house tonight?"

  "Love it. Is there anything I should bring - anything in particular you want to discuss?"

  "Like Pittsburgh?" said Shepherd in a stage whisper.

  "No, no, purely social, Paul - just good talk is all. We haven't had a good, friendly talk for a long while. Mom and I would just like to see you socialwise."

  Paul thought back. He hadn't been invited to Kroner's socialwise for a year, since he'd been sized up for his last raise. "Sounds like fun. What time?"

  "Eight, eight-thirty."

  "And Anita's invited too?" It was a mistake. It slipped out without his thinking about it.

  "Of course! You never go anywhere socially without her, do you?"

  "Oh, no, sir."

  "I should hope not." He laughed perfunctorily. "Well, goodbye."

  "What did he say?" said Shepherd.

  "He said you had no damn business signing those reports for me. He said Katharine Finch was to take off your name with ink-eradicator at once."

  "Say, now just hold on," said Shepherd, standing.

  Paul saw that all of the desk drawers were ajar. In the bottom drawer the neck of the empty whisky bottle was in plain view. He slammed each of the drawers shut in quick succession. When he came to the bottom one, he took out the bottle and held it out to Shepherd. "Here - want this? Might be valuable sometime. It's got my fingerprints all over it."

  "Are you going to get me canned - is that it?" said Shepherd eagerly. "You want to make an issue of it in front of Kroner? Let's go. I'm ready any time. Let's see if you can make it stick."

  "Get down where you belong. Go on. Clear out of this office, and don't come back unless I tell you to come back. Katharine!"

  "Yes?"

  "If Doctor Shepherd comes in this office again without permission, you're to shoot him."

  Shepherd slammed the door, railed against Paul to Katharine, and left.

  "Doctor Proteus, the police are on the phone," said Katharine.

  Paul stalked out of the office and went home.

  It was the maid's day off, and Paul found Anita in the kitchen, the picture, minus children, of domesticity.

  The kitchen was, in a manner of speaking, what Anita had given of herself to the world. In planning it, she had experienced all the anguish and hellfire of creativity - tortured by doubts, cursing her limitations, at once hungry for and fearful of the opinions of others. Now it was done and admired, and the verdict of the community was: Anita was artistic.

  It was a large, airy room, larger than most living rooms. Rough-hewn rafters, taken from an antique barn, were held against the ceiling by concealed bolts fixed in the steel framing of the house. The walls were wainscoted in pine, aged by sandblasting, and given a soft yellow patina of linseed oil.

  A huge fireplace and Dutch oven of fieldstone filled one wall. Over them hung a long muzzle-loading rifle, powder horn, and bullet pouch. On the mantel were candle molds, a coffee mill, an iron and trivet, and a rusty kettle. An iron cauldron, big enough to boil a missionary in, swung at the end of a long arm in the fireplace, and below it, like so many black offspring, were a cluster of small pots. A wooden butter churn held the door open, and clusters of Indian corn hung from the molding at aesthetic intervals. A colonial scythe stood in one corner, and two Boston rockers on a hooked rug faced the cold fireplace, where the unwatched pot never boiled.

  Paul narrowed his eyes, excluding everything from his field of vision but the colonial tableau, and imagined that he and Anita had pushed this far into the upstate wilderness, with the nearest neighbor twenty-eight miles away. She was making soap, candles, and thick wool clothes for a hard winter ahead, and he, if they weren't to starve, had to mold bullets and go shoot a bear. Concentrating hard on the illusion, Paul was able to muster a feeling of positive gratitude for Anita's presence, to thank God for a woman at his side to help with the petrifying amount of work involved in merely surviving. As, in his imagination, he brought home a bear to Anita, and she cleaned it and salted it away, he felt a tremendous lift - the two of them winning by sinew and guts a mountain of strong, red meat from an inhospitable world. And he would mold more bullets, and she would make more candles and soap from the bear fat, until late at night, when Paul and Anita would tumble down together on a bundle of straw in the corner, dog-tired and sweaty, make love, and sleep hard until the brittle-cold dawn. . . .

  "Urdle-urdle-urdle," went the automatic washing machine. "Urdle-urdle-ur dull!"

  Reluctantly, Paul let his field of vision widen to include the other side of the room, where Anita sat on a ladder-back chair before the cherry breakfront that concealed the laundry console. The console had been rolled from the breakfront, whose facade of drawers and doors was one large piece, making the breakfront sort of a small garage for the laundry equipment. The doors of a corner cabinet were open, revealing a television screen, which Anita watched intently. A doctor was telling an old lady that her grandson would probably be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.

  "Urdle-urdle-urdle," went the console. Anita paid no attention. "Znick. Bazz-wap!" Chimes sounded. Still Anita ignored it. "Azzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Froomp!" The top of the console popped open, and a basket of dry laundry burst from it like a great chrysanthemum, white, fragrant, and immaculate.

  "Hello," said Paul.

  Anita motioned for him to be silent, and wait until the program was over, which meant the commercial too. "All right," she said at last and turned down the volume. "Your blue suit is laid out on the bed."

  "Oh? What for?"

  "What do you mean, what for? For going over to Kroner's."

  "How did you know that?"

  "Lawson Shepherd called to tell me."

  "Deuced nice of him."

  "Nice of someone to tell me what's going on, since you won't."

  "What else'd he say?"

  "He supposed you and Finnerty must have had a wonderful time, judging from how terrible you looked this afternoon."

  "He knows as much about it as I do."

  Anita lit a cigarette, shook out the match with a flourish, and squinted through the smoke she let out through her nose. "Were there girls, Paul?"

  "In a manner of speaking. Martha and Barbara. Don't ask me who had who."

  "Had?"

  "Sat with."

  She hunched in the chair, looked out the window soberly, and kept her cigarette hot with quick, shallow puffs, and her eyes watered in the dramatic gusts from her nose. "You don't have to tell me about it, if you don't want to."

  "I won't, because I can't remember." He started to laugh. "One was called Barbara, and the other was called Martha, and beyond that, as the saying goes, everything went black."

  "Then you don't know what happened? I mean, anything could have happened?"

  His smile withered. "I mean everything really went black, and nothing could have happened. I was clay curled up in a booth."

  "And you remember nothing?"

  "I remember a man named Alfy, who makes his living as a television shark, a man named Luke Lubbock, who can be whatever his clothes are, a minister who gets a kick out of seeing the world go to hell, and -"

  "And Barbara and Martha."

  "And Barbara and Martha. And parades - my God, parades."

  "Feel better?"

  "No. But you should, because I think Finnerty's found a new home and a new friend."

  "Thank God for that. I want you to make it clear to Kroner tonight that he forced himself on our hospitality, that we were as upset by him as anyone was."

  "That isn't quite true."

  "Well then, keep it to yourself, if you like him so much."

  She lifted the lid of the schoolmaster's desk, where she made out the daily menus and compared her stubs with the bank statements, and took from it three sheets of paper. "I know you think I'm silly, but it's worth a little trouble to do things right, Paul."

  The papers contained some sort of an outline, with major divisions set off b
y Roman numerals, and with sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-divisions as small as (a). At random, and with his headache taking on new vitality, he chose item III., A., I., a.: "Don't smoke. Kroner is trying to break the habit."

  "Maybe it would help to read it aloud," said Anita.

  "Maybe it'd be better if I read it alone, where there aren't any distractions."

  "It took most of the afternoon."

  "I expect it did. It's the most thorough job you've done yet. Thanks, darling, I appreciate it."

  "I love you, Paul."

  "I love you, Anita."

  "Darling - about Martha and Barbara -"

  "I promise you, I didn't touch them."

  "I was going to ask, did anybody see you with them?"

  "I guess they did, but nobody of any importance. Not Shepherd, certainly."

  "If it ever got back to Kroner, I don't know what I'd do. He might laugh off the drinking, but the women - "

  "I went to bed with Barbara," said Paul suddenly.

  "I thought you did. That's your affair." She was tiring of the conversation, apparently, and she looked restively at the television screen.

  "And Shepherd saw me coming downstairs with her."

  "Paul!"

  "Joke."

  She put her hand over her heart. "Oh - thank the Lord."

  " 'Summer Loves,' " said Paul, looking at the television screen judiciously.

  "What's that?"

  "The band - they're playing 'summer Loves.' " He whistled a few bars.

  "How can you tell, with the volume off?"

  "Go ahead, turn it up."

  Apathetically, she turned the knob, and "Summer Loves," as sweet and indigestible as honey cake, oozed into the air.

  Humming along with the orchestra, Paul went up the steps to his bedroom, reading the outline as he went:

  "IV., A., I. If Kroner asks you why you want Pittsburgh, say it is because you can be of greater service . . . a. Soft-pedal bigger house and raise and prestige."

  Fuzzily, Paul was beginning to see that he had made an ass of himself in the eyes of those on both sides of the river. He remembered his cry of the night before: "We must meet in the middle of the bridge!" He decided that he would be about the only one interested in the expedition, the only one who didn't feel strongly about which bank he was on.