Please Write for Details

by John D. MacDonald

  She was perfectly willing to be kissed. In fact, she upheld her share of the ceremony with such practiced and hearty co-operation that she tended to give him temporary emotional asthma. But it was disconcerting to have her give him one brief dreamy look, wriggle away and say, “I sure don’t think that dress Mary Jane got yesterday is a good color for her, do you?” And such diversions left him feeling like the same old hound with one tail feather in his teeth and his heart heavy.

  A certain amount of manual liberty seemed to be permitted under some unwritten covenant, but the moment he exceeded the limit, she had a knack of turning into a bundle of elbows, chins and shoulder blades. There was never any sigh of annoyance. She just blocked him into the boards and skated away.

  Her background and education were curiously spotty. She knew the finest restaurants and hotels in the country the way most kids know the local drive-ins, and she had an equivalent attitude toward them. Mary Jane Elmore was the same. She had and used charge accounts in the most fabulous shops and department stores in Texas, but she would spend a half hour picking out a thirty-peso silver bracelet. She had hooked tuna off Bimini, traveling on a yacht out of Galveston, but she couldn’t remember just what year that was or who owned the boat. She could speak superbly colloquial French, but she had no more idea of the history and geography of the world than any sparrow.

  And she could so deftly avoid any serious conversation that he was in frequent despair, saying once, “Bitsy, my God, don’t you want to ever talk or think about life, or destiny or love? Do all the abstract words scare hell out of you? I don’t even know what you’re like inside. You don’t give me a clue.”

  “I’m just little old Bitsy, Park. Nothing very complicated. I just go to and fro for laughs. Let’s go dig up old Mary Jane for a gin session. It’s your turn to be captain.”

  “You play too damn steep for me. You scare me. Bitsy, honestly now, are we ever going to talk seriously?”

  “Well now, you just talk up a storm, and I’ll listen. I don’t have all those deep thoughts. I just go to and fro.”

  “I know. For laughs.”

  But he retained his hope that he could get her back onto the right lines in the script that seemed so inevitable.

  Until, alarmingly, the brand-new walls began to crumble. The letter from Trev Helding was the first tiny jar that started the flaking of the new plaster. Becky was doing well. It was too easy to remember all the evidences of her quickness, taste and intelligence. And, after all, Sessions and March was a business concern, not a charitable institution. They could damn well push Becky up into his job and send him a letter of regrets. Don’t come back. They could get Becky cheaper. And it would make sense for them to do so.

  It wasn’t so bad if you were in an agency and sensed that you were under the ax. You developed a sixth sense about such things. So you started wheeling and dealing first. You could either mend your position by finding out who was holding the knife and either dealing with him, or striking first, if he was vulnerable. If neither would work, you could set up some lunches here and there while you still had a job, and say the right things about the stifling of your creative talents, and your need for a job with more challenge. And then when they were ready to drop all the hardware on you, you walked out smiling and fat.

  But what the hell could you do from Mexico when you were on sick leave as the result of a well-known emotional disaster? Once they sent their regrets, you’d have to go back with your hat in your hand and hang around strange waiting rooms. You couldn’t bargain from power. You were scared. And if they wanted you, they could buy you cheap. Then the big drop in income would show on the records. It was all a carnival ride, and if you slipped off, you never got back to where you were. So maybe Suzie had been his luck. All his luck.

  He couldn’t keep it from going around and around in his head, and when he tried to write the necessary friendly notes to Herbie and John and Becky, the jitters kept showing. In the end he finally sent them off, but each one had required more thought and rewriting than any national budget. The savings that seemed so pleasant were curiously shrunken, even though the figure remained the same. It was the variation in the basic question—not what you could buy with it, but how long you could live on it? And what the hell was the point in buying a car he didn’t need just to come down here? And the new casual clothes he couldn’t use back on the Avenue?

  When that wall began to crumble, it seemed to set off another one. The painting. For some time he had detected within himself a little nibbling of dissatisfaction with the work he was doing. And finally he detected the reason. He had become far too glib and tricky. He could create effects very readily, but the effects were achieved through the use of too many of the artifices of commercial illustration. The work he had done long ago had been clumsier by far, but stronger and more honest. When he began to look at it that way he could see that even the work Ardos was doing was more valid than his own. It had strength. And his work had the careful illusion of strength, the sly imitation of honesty, the glib imitation of power. He had told himself for so long that one day he would paint again. Once security had been achieved he would find the privacy he wanted and paint. But he had worked too long with the superficial, with all the cloying indecencies of huckster art. And all its syrups had leaked down into his soul—so that now he spread them along with the pigments in every stroke of brush or palette knife. Once he was dismally aware of his skilled decadence, he seemed to see an expression in the eyes of John and Barbara and Gam that he had not noticed before. A mild and ironic pity. Poor little ad man, trying with such self-importance to make illustration look like art. He destroyed those few pieces he had set aside to take back.

  And it was shortly after Gam’s curiously humbling weekend in town, that the Bitsy arrangement began to crumble. When he had had her largely to himself, he could feel that somehow she would change and it would all be as planned. But Mary Jane, with constantly increasing efficiency, had begun to make a special talent of acquiring large, random young men, who were summering in Mexico. These young men stimulated by the proximity of the girls from Texas, could become uncommonly persuasive. And as Mary Jane’s deliberate acquisitions began to use up more and more of the girls’ time, they attended even fewer classes. It became most difficult for Park to keep track of Bitsy. He would be away from her for a half hour and return, only to find that the girls had left, accompanied by a pair of meaty, grinning young men who had come to El Hutchinson to pick them up.

  In the long stillnesses of the insomniac night he would hear the giggling return, the traditional fragments of “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You,” the chunk of car doors, the donkey bray of some young tower of muscles. And he would know that if either of the girls made breakfast, she would be drab with hang-over, husky with song, talk and cigarettes, and almost indetectably musky with the last exudations of alcohol through young pores.

  He found himself devoured by a jealousy of that special kind which has its roots in pride. And he wondered if he had gone about the whole thing wrong. Maybe his approach to her should have been to go about honking with laughter, making muscles, baking his hide brown in the sun and belaboring the obvious.

  It was disappointing to be able to spend less and less time with her, and see his emotional plan become ever more improbable, but it was considerably more wearing to join her group. They had an unconscious talent for shutting him out. He was with the group, but not of it. His most reliable conversational performances, when he could wedge himself into the conversations, were met with a rather blank stare from all the sets of young eyes, a certain amount of courteous attention, and that small and polite riffle of laughter which is the usual accompaniment to all lead balloons. Age seemed an insurmountable barrier. He kept telling himself that thirty-one was far from ancient. When he tried to talk and comfort himself in their fashion, he knew he struck all the wrong notes. Yet when he tried to be himself, that slight avuncular tendency he had shown toward Bitsy bloated itself into ridiculou
sness. He heard himself trying to make sage remarks, and could not stop. He began to feel like a philosophical filler on the bottom of a page of the Reader’s Digest. “Yessirree, you find that the grass, hit grows a sight taller in the valleys.”

  He carried his apartness around with him as they went from bar to bar, like an albatross around his neck. He would look at them with his mouth spread in an aching grin, and he would hear their bright babble and look at their smooth young faces, and sometimes he would get the impression that he sat there in pathetic senility with rheumy eyes and thread of drool and socially embarrassing incontinence. And wondered why they put up with him at all.

  And so he drank heavily when he was with them. His training had eliminated the normal antics of the sometime drunk. He went from glazed to wooden to incomprehensible, without ever losing the ability to add up the check and leave the proper tip and walk out in a straight line. He did not pass out, and he surrendered with an old-timey courtliness when it was decided by the group that somebody else should drive the wagon instead of good old Park Barnum.

  With a great deal more frequency, Suzie kept hopping over her fence and wading through his mind, picking up her skirts and stepping with a fastidious distaste for the goop underfoot.

  He knew that something was happening to him, and he knew it was not good, and he was scared. Somewhere he had once read that when a person is in free fall, if he shuts his eyes, he cannot tell up from down. He was being carried in some indefinable direction, with constantly increasing speed. He wanted to be able to reach out and grasp something, but he did not know where to reach. And he had begun to be afflicted with nervous involuntary movements of his hands and facial muscles.

  Something was going to happen and he could not imagine what it would be. It was just a terrible Something.

  And it happened in Mexico City on Saturday night, the twenty-second of July. The activities of the day had begun in a most dissatisfying way. Bitsy slept late. Mary Jane approached Park in the lobby at about eleven o’clock.

  “Park, honey, there’s two boys staying down at Las Mañanitas, and a friend of theirs at the Marik and the friend has to get up to Mexico City today. So we thought we’d all go in a bunch, and we sure can’t fit in my little bug, so we thought if you aren’t using your wagon.”

  “Just during the day?”

  “Well, no. We’re all going to stay on and barge around here and there and come back real late. I don’t know what time it would be.”

  “I’ve got a date with Bitsy tonight.”

  She looked uncertain and said, “I guess maybe there’s some little mixup about that. Because we planned this whole thing last night and Bitsy didn’t say anything, so I guess she thought it wasn’t definite or something.”

  “Well, if I’ve been canceled out, there’s no reason why I can’t come too, I guess. What time do we want to leave?”

  “I … I guess that would be all right,” she said. And then she laughed. “I swear, Park, if you keep tagging along all the time, you’re like to get wore down to a nub.”

  He stared at her coldly, and had the insane desire to kick her in the stomach. “Maybe if I grease the wheels on my wheel chair, doll, I’ll be able to keep up.”

  “Now don’t you go getting all scratchy, Park. I didn’t mean anything like that.”

  “With your permission then, I’ll tag along.”

  “Let’s get out of here right after lunch then.”

  He could detect no reaction when Mary Jane told Bitsy he was joining the group. No pleasure and no displeasure. The girls dressed up for night life in the capital. Furs and gloves and fragile pumps. They drove down into town and picked up the boys. Their names—the ones they collected at Las Mañanitas—were Tab and Wally. Park knew he’d have difficulty telling them apart. They were the approximate size of the average telephone booth. They had big brown muscles and big white teeth. They had brown brush cuts, lazy eyes, and a tender honeychile drawl. As soon as they picked up the third one at the Marik, Park knew that he would never be able to tell the new one—Chris—from the other two.

  He gathered that they were Texas Aggies, that the boys and the girls had twelve or thirteen thousand mutual friends, and that after a few weeks of muscular dissipation, they were heading back to Texas to harden themselves up for the football season with some exotic kind of manual labor that apparently had something to do with the oil fields. Park could not imagine why they had to be hardened. They looked as if they could snap chains with their biceps and dent oak with their massive fists.

  So they went up and over the mountains. Bitsy was between Park and Chris or Tab or Wally. Mary Jane sat in back between the other two. Bitsy sat for about ten minutes. From then on she knelt, facing the rear. And the hulk beside her was swiveled around. They all talked at once.

  “… and you remember that ole B. C., the way he strayed off and he got jumped that time over in Piedras Negras. He was doing just fine he said, until somebody come up behind him and peeled his head with a hunk of pipe. They threw B. C. in the little ole jail they got there, and the next day they put him to scrubbing a street with a raggedy old broom and him with a tequila head like a bongo drum …”

  “… bought that chute and had Dobie take him up and he jumped out. Scared the pure hell out of Dobie on account of Gus said it felt so good falling he waited long as he could before he opened …”

  “… married her when she was just thirteen damn years old, believe me …”

  “… after he got up about eleven times and got knocked down again, he stayed right down there and he looks up and says …”

  “… not enough left of that Ferrari to make you a bushel basket load, man …”

  Park sighed inwardly and drove the mountain road to the city. Once there it turned into the usual situation, a state of almost complete disorganization which, curiously, duplicated the pattern of other evenings so closely that the disorganization itself seemed to be planned with some subtle end in view. There was the usual routine of the old dear friend who was supposed to be in town. This involved many phone calls, some of them to Texas, several taxi rides, because it was simpler to leave the car parked near their base of operations, the Continental Hilton. Eventually it was discovered that good old so-and-so had left last week for Acapulco. The search was interspersed with pauses for refreshment. After that came an interval of serious drinking, and then another wide-ranging search for some special restaurant that nobody could quite remember the name of. And the inevitable decision, what the hell, let’s have another drink and go eat at the Hilton. And finally came another vague hunt for that place that had that hell of a good floor show that Dutch told us about.

  By that time Park was thoroughly blurred. But his orderly descent into wooden oblivion was marred by one little word that had somehow stuck itself to the inside of his skull. Silly. You, Parker Barnum, are a silly little man. You are silly to be traveling with this herd of muscles on the forlorn off chance of charming one lass with curly copper hair. Your painting is silly. Your job was silly and will be silly. And you made a silly mess of your marriage, old boy.

  Perhaps it was in some effort to divert himself from this unpromising line of self-castigation that Park made the decision to at last enlighten these young people by explaining them to themselves. He began in one of the succession of small cabarets. When he had a chance to slip into the conversation he stared at them severely and said, “You all got a bitched-up sense of values, every one of you. All you want outta life is a lotta motion and no significance.” His brain felt keen as scalpels.

  They stared at him. “Easy off, professor,” one of the hulks said.

  “Conversationally, buster, you all are dead wood, buster. You couldn’t entertain an original idea if it … bit on you. Just a lot of garbage about who did what to who when.”

  Mary Jane said, “What have they been putting in his liquor?”

  He felt firm and fatherly. He would not be distracted from this important mission. He would awaken th
em to all the terror and mystery of existence. He selected his next phrasing most carefully. As he got well into it, he suddenly realized that he was out of the conversation again. Nobody was listening. He raised his voice but he could not get their attention. So he let it fade off into a mumble. He leaned over and said the next important things directly down into his glass. It gave the words a hollow and portentous ring. The world rocketed toward oblivion and its prophets went unheard. It was a sad thing. It made his eyes sting.

  And suddenly, without transition, he was walking down a broad sidewalk. They were just ahead of him. Abreast, arms locked, singing. Boy, girl, boy, girl, boy. The girls looked tiny by comparison. Mary Jane lifted both feet free of the sidewalk and made running motions. Park trotted along behind them. He had to be heard. It was important. “Hey!” he said. “Hey!”

  Suddenly the broad unconscious backs infuriated him. He paused to let them get ahead, and then went forward at a dead run and slammed his shoulder into the small of the back of the big one on the end. Chris or Tab or Wally.

  It staggered the huge boy and he turned around and said softly, “Now you whoa!” They had all turned and they were looking at him.

  “You won’t listen!” Park yelled at them.

  “Ole buddy, you got a package on, and you’ve run out of anything worth talking. You’ve got took by the wobbles. Now you settle way way down.”

  Park had a sudden image of himself battered to bloody ruin by the big calm brown fists, lying broken in the gutter with Bitsy weeping over him. The vision made him want to try again.