Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker

by Finder, Henry

  “How much what?” he asked woodenly.

  I explained that I was prepared to buy it, to buy the whole warehouse if necessary. He uttered a sharp, sardonic hoot and bade me wipe my chin. “Not for sale, Buster,” he said, replacing its shroud. “You know what this thing brings in every year in rentals? Why, last month alone it worked in ‘Addled Saddles,’ ‘Drums Along the Yazoo’—”

  Short of manacling myself to the chair, I used every inducement I could marshal to obtain it, including bribery, pleas of medical need, and threats of legal duress, but the man was intractable. I retired so crushed in spirit that I inclined to be somewhat paranoid about the subject over the ensuing decade. The world supply of tufted black leather, I frequently told my friends, was being manipulated by a small ring of interior decorators, men who would stick at nothing to bilk me. I was telling it to one of them, an advertising nabob and self-admitted expert in arranging the impossible, at a Turkish bath, when he brought me up short.

  “Wait a minute,” said Broomhead imperiously. “Outside of Hollywood or the Reform Club, are any of these chairs still extant?”

  “Yes, in Washington,” I said. “They’ve some honeys in the Senate corridors—the real McCoy, so to speak—but nobody could ever wangle—”

  He produced a solid-gold pencil the diameter of a needle from his towel and scrawled a note on a masseur. “Relax,” he commanded. “Your worries are over. I happen to know a politico or two down there who’d go pretty . . . far . . . out of his way to accommodate Curt Broomhead.”

  I automatically dismissed the assertion as bluster, until his secretary phoned me a month later. A certain Mr. X, whom it was inadvisable to identify, in an equally mysterious government bureau, was laid up with croup. On his recovery, he would promptly expedite the item requested by Mr. Tuftola, which, she whispered, was the pseudonym her boss had adopted for the transaction. While elated at the news, I experienced a vague malaise. It bothered me that some fine old lawgiver, a chivalrous Southerner out of George Cable, with a white imperial and arthritis, might be unceremoniously deposed from his chair because of my whim. I was also positive that I had heard a muffled click during our phone conversation, as though the line were bugged. Before I could cry peccavi and tout Broomhead off, however, the affair took on juggernaut momentum. Telegrams and messages proliferated, warning me that Mr. X’s favor was in transit, and I received unmistakable assurance from a Chinese fortune cookie that destiny was arranging a surprise. A fortnight thence, two orangutans in expressmen’s aprons dumped a formidable crate on the sidewalk outside our New York brownstone. After an ugly jurisdictional squabble, they departed, leaving the handyman and me to wrestle the shipment up three flights; after an uglier one, we did so, and he departed, leaving me to open it. I was ablaze with fever and salivating freely as I hacked through the excelsior wrappings, but I cooled off fast enough. Inside was a stiff and dismal board-room chair, welted with tacks, that belonged in a third-rate loan shark’s office. The sticker on the reverse, however, implied otherwise. It read, “Property of U.S. State Dept.”

  To adduce proof that the husky, straw-hatted young man in gabardine who tailed me the whole next month was an F.B.I. operative is impossible, nor can I swear that my mail was fluoroscoped during that period. I do know that for a while I underwent all the tremors of a Graham Greene character on the run, even if it had no purificatory effect on my religious views. When my funk abated sufficiently to donate the chair to a charity bazaar, I arrived at a decision. The only way I could possibly attain my ideal was to have it custom made, and to that end I embarked on a secret layaway plan at the Coiners’ and Purloiners’ National. Early last summer, I took the accrual to a wholesaler friend in the Furniture Design Center, along with a steel engraving that embodied every curlicue I lusted for. He examined it tolerantly.

  “It’s your money, Sidney,” he said, “but if I were you, I’d look around the auction rooms—”

  I flung my hat on his showroom floor and stamped on it like Edgar Kennedy. “Stop!” I screamed. “Duplicate that chair and keep your goddam advice to yourself! If I need advice, I’ll go to a shrinker!”

  “You’re overdue now,” he observed, picking up a hassock to ward me off. “Okey-doke. It’ll take six weeks. And don’t call for it,” he added quickly. “We’ll deliver.”

  The result was not a masterpiece, as one applies the term to a floral group by Odilon Redon or the Khmer sculptures in the Musée Guimet, but it ran a close second. It was a paragon of cozy chairs, a marvel of the most intricate tufting, a monument to the upholsterer’s art. You sank into its refulgent black bosom and were instantly permeated with douceur de vivre such as you had never known. Apothegms worthy of La Rochefoucauld tumbled from your lips, full-fashioned epigrams pleading to be encased in boxes in McCall’s and Reader’s Digest. True, it was a difficult chair to slumber in; at the beginning, its magnificence overawed me and I sat gingerly in it, holding at eye level a copy of Sir Samuel Baker’s “The Albert Nyanza” in crushed levant. I then tried browsing through the latest English review, but somehow couldn’t get past the adverts for Ovomalt and thermal underwear. At last, I found the key in Max Lerner’s windy periods, and, lapped in his peristaltic rhetoric, slept like a baby. Once inside that chair, Lerner in hand, I was as remote from hypertension as from the Asiatic capitals where he bombinated.

  When Buddha smiles and all is cotton candy, though, it is axiomatic that one edges toward the nearest cyclone cellar. Following a blissful week, my wife and I motored off to Willimantic to pick up a few spools of vintage thread. En route, she informed me that in our absence a new domestic had been instructed to give the flat a thorough cleaning. The place fairly gleamed when we tottered in the door; the rugs had been shampooed, the silver was burnished to diamond brilliance, and the furniture sparkled with a million highlights. As I stood openmouthed, like one of the carp at Fontainebleau, my wife issued from the kitchen, brandishing a note and a clotted paintbrush.

  “A treasure! A dreamboat!” she chortled. “Guess what that girl did! She shellacked all the tables, even the breadboard and the stepladder! She worked two whole nights—”

  “W-why is that sheet draped over my comfy chair?” I quavered.

  “To protect it, stupid,” she said impatiently. “I’m going to double her salary tomorrow, sign her to a lifetime contract—”

  I leaped past her, whisked away the sheet, and was presented with a spectacle beyond description, beyond contemplation. The leather was piebald, marbleized with a scaly armor plate or orange-and-gray shellac bonded onto its surface for eternity. Never, even among the tortured vinyl-and-zebra abominations in the lowest borax showroom on East Eighth Street, had I beheld anything so loathsome. With a great cry, I sank to my knees, and, nuzzling one bulbous armrest, burst into racking sobs. Half an hour afterward, I slung a five-gallon can of kerosene into the rear of our wagon unmindful that it splattered the aspiration of a lifetime. Then I slammed up the tailgate and headed grimly downtown toward the Holland Tunnel.

  1960

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  PNIN

  THE elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving railway coach, next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor Timofey Pnin. Ideally bald, suntanned, and clean-shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man torso in a tightish tweed coat, but ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flannelled and crossed) and frail-looking, almost feminine feet.

  His sloppy socks were of scarlet wool with lilac lozenges; his conservative black oxfords had cost him about as much as all the rest of his clothing (flamboyant goon tie included). Prior to the nineteen-forties, during the staid European era of his life, he had always worn long underwear, its terminals tucked into the tops of neat silk socks, which were clocked, soberly colored, and held up on his cotton-cla
d calves by garters. In those days, to reveal a glimpse of that white underwear by pulling up a trouser leg too high would have seemed to Pnin as indecent as showing himself to ladies minus collar and tie, for even when decayed Mme. Roux, the concierge of the squalid apartment house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris where Pnin had lived for a score of years after escaping from Leninized Russia, happened to come up for the rent while he was without his faux col, prim Pnin would cover his front stud with a chaste hand. All this underwent a change in the heady atmosphere of the New World. Nowadays, at fifty-five, he was crazy about sunbathing, wore sports shirts and slacks, and when crossing his legs would carefully, deliberately, brazenly display a tremendous stretch of bare shin. Thus he might have appeared to a fellow-passenger, but except for a soldier asleep at one end and two women absorbed in a baby at the other, Pnin had the coach to himself.

  Now a secret must be imparted. Professor Pnin was on the wrong train. He was unaware of it, and so was the conductor, already threading his way through the train to Pnin’s coach. As a matter of fact, Pnin at the moment felt very well satisfied with himself. When inviting him to deliver a Friday-evening lecture at Cremona—some two hundred versts west of Waindell, Pnin’s academic perch—the vice-president of the Cremona Women’s Club, a Miss Judith Clyde, had advised our friend that the most convenient train left Waindell at 1:52 P.M., reaching Cremona at 4:17. But Pnin—who, like so many Russians, was inordinately fond of everything in the line of timetables, maps, catalogues, and collected them, helped himself freely to them with the bracing pleasure of getting something for nothing, took especial pride in puzzling out schedules for himself—had discovered, after some study, an inconspicuous reference mark against a still more convenient train, “Lv. Waindell 2:19 P.M., Ar. Cremona 4:32 P.M.;” the mark indicated that Fridays, and Fridays only, the two-nineteen stopped at Cremona on its way to a distant and much larger city, graced likewise with a mellow Italian name. Unfortunately for Pnin, his timetable was five years old and in part obsolete.

  He taught Russian at Waindell College, a somewhat provincial institution characterized by an artificial lake in the middle of a landscaped campus, by ivied galleries connecting the various halls, by murals displaying recognizable members of the faculty in the act of passing on the torch of knowledge from Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Pasteur to a lot of monstrously built farm boys and farm girls, and by a huge, active, buoyantly thriving German Department, which its head, Dr. Hagen, smugly called (pronouncing every syllable very distinctly) “a university within a university.”

  The enrollment in the Russian Language course consisted of three students only: Josephine Malkin, whose grandparents had been born in Minsk; Charles McBeth, a graduate student, whose prodigious memory had already disposed of ten languages and was prepared to entomb ten more; and languid Eileen Lane, whom somebody had told that by the time one had mastered the Russian alphabet one could practically read “Anna Karamazov” in the original. As a teacher, Pnin was far from being able to compete with those stupendous Russian ladies scattered all over academic America who, without having had any formal training at all, manage somehow, by dint of intuition, loquacity, and a kind of maternal bounce, to infuse a magic knowledge of their difficult and beautiful tongue into a group of innocent-eyed students in an atmosphere of Old Mother Volga songs, red caviar, and tea; nor did Pnin, as a teacher, even presume to approach the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics—that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself but the method of teaching others to teach that method. No doubt Pnin’s approach to his work was amateurish and lighthearted, depending as it did on a book of exercises in grammar brought out by the head of the Slavic Department in a far greater college than Waindell—a venerable fraud whose Russian was a joke but who would generously lend his dignified name to the products of anonymous drudgery. Pnin, despite his many shortcomings, had about him a disarming old-fashioned charm, which Dr. Hagen, his staunch protector, insisted before morose trustees was a delicate, imported article worth paying for in domestic cash. Whereas the degree in sociology and political economy that Pnin had obtained with some pomp at the University of Prague around 1920 had become by mid-century a doctorate in desuetude, he was not altogether miscast as a teacher of Russian. He was beloved not for any essential ability but for those unforgettable digressions of his, when he would remove his glasses to beam at the past while massaging the lenses of the present. Nostalgic excursions in broken English. Autobiographical tidbits. How Pnin came to the Soedinyonnïe Shtatï (the United States). “Examination on ship before landing. Very well! ‘Nothing to declare?’ ‘Nothing.’ Very well! Then political questions. He asks: ‘Are you Anarchist?’ I answer [time out on the part of the narrator for a spell of cozy mute mirth]: ‘First, what do we understand under “Anarchism”? Anarchism practical, metaphysical, theoretical, mystical, abstract, individual, social? When I was young,’ I say, ‘all this had for me signification.’ So we had a very interesting discussion, in consequence of which I passed two whole months on Ellis Island [abdomen beginning to heave; heaving; narrator convulsed].”

  But there were still better sessions in the way of humor. With an air of coy secrecy, benevolent Pnin, preparing the children for the marvellous treat that he had once had himself, and already revealing, in an uncontrollable smile, an incomplete but formidable set of tawny teeth, would open a dilapidated Russian book at the elegant leatherette marker he had carefully placed there; he would open the book, whereupon as often as not a look of the utmost dismay would alter his plastic features; open-mouthed, feverishly, he would flip right and left through the volume, and minutes might pass before he found the right page—or satisfied himself that he had marked it correctly after all. Usually, the passage of his choice came from some old and naïve comedy of merchant-class habitus rigged up by Ostrovski almost a century ago, or from an equally ancient but even more dated piece of trivial Leskovian jollity dependent on verbal contortions. He delivered these stale goods with the rotund gusto of the classical Alexandrinka Theatre in Petersburg, rather than with the crisp simplicity of the Moscow Artists, but since to appreciate whatever fun those passages still retained one had to have not only a sound knowledge of the vernacular but also a good deal of literary insight, and since his poor little class had neither, the performer would be alone in enjoying the associative subtleties of his text. The heaving we have already noted in another connection would become here a veritable earthquake. Directing his memory, with all the lights on and all the masks of the mind a-miming, toward the days of his fervid and receptive youth (in a brilliant cosmos that seemed all the fresher for having been abolished by one blow of history), Pnin would get drunk on his private wines as he produced sample after sample of what his listeners politely surmised was Russian humor. Presently, the fun would become too much for him; pear-shaped tears would trickle down his tanned cheeks. Not only his shocking teeth but an astonishing amount of pink upper-gum tissue would suddenly pop out, as if a jack-in-the-box had been sprung, and his hand would fly to his mouth while his big shoulders shook and rolled. And although the speech he smothered behind his dancing hand was now doubly unintelligible to the class, his complete surrender to his own merriment would prove irresistible. By the time he was helpless with it, he would have his students in stitches, with abrupt barks of clockwork hilarity coming from Charles, and a dazzling flow of unsuspected lovely laughter transfiguring Josephine, who was not pretty, while Eileen, who was, dissolved in a jelly of unbecoming giggles.

  All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

  HOW should we diagnose Pnin’s sad case? He, it should be particularly stressed, was anything but the type of that good-natured German platitude of last century, der zerstreute Professor (the absent-minded professor). On the contrary, he was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the lookout for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully on the alert lest his erratic surroundings (unpredictable America) inveigle him into some bit of prep
osterous oversight. It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence. He was inept with his hands to a rare degree, but because he could manufacture in a twinkle a one-note mouth organ out of a pea pod, make a flat pebble skip ten times on the surface of a pond, shadowgraph with his knuckles a rabbit (complete with blinking eye), and perform a number of other tame tricks that for some reason or other Russians have up their sleeves, he believed himself endowed with considerable manual and mechanical skill. On gadgets he doted with a kind of dazed, superstitious delight. Electric devices enchanted him. Plastics swept him off his feet. He had a deep admiration for the zipper. But after a storm in the middle of the night had paralyzed the local power station, the devoutly plugged-in clock would make nonsense of his morning. The frame of his spectacles would snap in mid-bridge, leaving him with two identical pieces, which he would vaguely attempt to unite, in the hope, perhaps, of some organic marvel of restoration coming to the rescue. The zipper a gentleman depends on most would come loose in his puzzled hand at some nightmare moment of haste and despair.

  And he still did not know that he was on the wrong train.

  A special danger area in Pnin’s case was the English language. Except for such not very helpful odds and ends as “The rest is silence,” “Never more,” “weekend,” “Who’s Who,” and a few ordinary words and phrases like “cat,” “street,” “fountain pen,” “gangster,” “the Charleston,” and “marginal utility,” he had had no English at all at the time he left France for the States. Stubbornly he sat down to the task of learning the language of Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Edison, and thirty-one Presidents. In 1945, at the end of one year of study, he was proficient enough to use glibly terms like “wishful thinking” and “okey-dokey.” By 1946, he was able to interrupt his narrations with the phrase “To make a long story short.” By the time Truman entered his second term, Pnin could handle quite a number of elegant clichés, but otherwise progress seemed to have stopped despite all his efforts, and in 1953 his English was still full of flaws. That autumn, he supplemented the usual courses of his academic year by delivering a weekly lecture in a so-called symposium (“Wingless Europe: A Survey of Contemporary Continental Culture”) directed by Dr. Hagen. All our friend’s lectures, including sundry ones he gave out of town, were edited by one of the younger members of the German Department. The procedure was somewhat complicated. Professor Pnin laboriously translated his own Russian verbal flow, teeming with idiomatic proverbs, into patchy English. This was revised by young Miller. Then Dr. Hagen’s secretary, a Miss Eisenlohr, typed it out. Then Pnin deleted the passages he could not understand. Then he read it to his weekly audience. He was utterly helpless without the prepared text, nor could he use the ancient system of dissimulating his infirmity by moving his eyes up and down—snapping up an eyeful of words, reeling them off to his audience, and drawing out the end of one sentence while diving for the next. Pnin’s worried eye would be bound to lose its bearings. Therefore he read his lectures, his gaze glued to his text, in a slow, monotonous baritone that seemed to climb one of those interminable flights of stairs used by people who dread elevators.