by Daniel Quinn
Ginny nodded bleakly. “I wanted it to happen, and that was my fault.”
“I don’t understand, Ginny. You say you can’t accept what I want to give you. What does that mean? Do you mean you don’t want to be loved?”
She leaned over the table and touched the rim of her glass with her fingers but didn’t pick it up. “No,” she whispered.
“Then you mean . . . you don’t want to be loved by me.”
She answered with a slight shake of her head. A tear dropped onto the back of her hand, and she wiped it away. “I don’t mean that either,” she said.
“For God’s sake, Ginny, I don’t understand. I’m trying, but I don’t understand.”
She nodded and wiped her eyes. “I know. You can’t understand, and I can’t explain.” She stuffed the tissue into her purse and stood up. “And neither one of us can do anything about it.”
“God, Ginny, don’t leave now,” he pleaded, but she was already walking away. He followed her with his eyes till she was out of sight, then glanced dismally down at her untouched drink, thinking: not even that much of me can she accept. It seemed a perfect token of her rejection of him. Empty of feeling he looked around the deserted room.
The bartender pointedly turned his back.
IX
FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS Greg haunted his apartment like a ghost. Drained of all substance but grief, he found himself pausing in front of mirrors to confirm his reality. His reflection stared back at him like that of a corpse.
A phone call from Ted Owens on Monday morning forced him back to work. An editor had expressed an interest in seeing a sample of Bizarre, and when did Greg think he could get it together?
“It’s coming along well,” Greg lied. “Another three weeks should do it.”
“Editors have short memories, Greg. Could you make it in two?”
“I’ll do my best,” Greg said vaguely, to get rid of him.
He spent the day at the library and that night took Agnes to dinner at Freddie’s to tell her his troubles. She listened gravely and when he was done reached across the table to pat his hand.
“Greg, dear, you are a gorgeous man,” she said, “but you have a hell of a lot to learn about women.”
“I believe it,” he replied. “What did I do wrong?”
“Basically, you overwhelmed her. It’s all very well for you to let yourself go the way you did. To lose your mind over a woman after knowing her for a few hours. In fact, it’s sort of charming. But a woman learns early on that she can’t afford to respond to a man the way a man responds to a woman.”
“What do you mean?”
Agnes raised her brows. “Maybe you don’t understand men too well either.” She thought for a moment. “Let’s suppose you’re a woman instead of a man. You run into a man who turns you on, and after an hour you tell him, ‘Wow, I’m already three-quarters in love with you.’”
Greg blushed.
“Now maybe you don’t know it, honey, but nine-tenths of all men in this situation are going to say to themselves, ‘Oh ho! What have we here? An easy lay!’ Nothing whatever to do with love. A gorgeous woman throws herself at a man and nine men out of ten will gladly take her. They may think she’s dumb as a horse or as boring as Pilgrim’s Progress, but a free ride with a beautiful girl is not to be passed up. You can’t be so innocent that you don’t know this.”
Greg nodded. “True.”
“And surely you can see the potential for disaster for the woman who behaves this way.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. But you didn’t hesitate to proclaim your love for Ginny. You knew you didn’t have to Hesitate, because women aren’t like men in this regard. Unless they’re nymphomaniacs or damned hard up, very few women will take a man just because he’s available. They generally want something more than an easy lay.”
“Also true.”
She shrugged. “So what you were asking Ginny to do was to throw caution to the winds and make herself completely vulnerable to a man she’s barely met, a man who, for all she knows, might leave her emotionally ravaged in a week.”
“I didn’t ask that of her.”
“Don’t be a klutz. Your behavior asked it of her. Demanded it of her.”
He nodded glumly. “So what do I do, Agnes?”
“I don’t know. Snag us some more coffee and another drink, and I’ll think about it.”
When he’d done that, she said, “I really don’t know what you should do, Greg. If it were me instead of Ginny, I’d be able to advise you. But I don’t know this woman.”
“What would you advise me to do if it were you?” Agnes tugged on an earlobe and stared into space for a while. “I’d advise you to think of something.”
Greg laughed. “That’s a big help.”
“I mean it. If I were Ginny, I’d put you right out of my mind. Not because I don’t like you, but because you’re just too damn dangerous to fool around with.”
“So what are you saying? That I should somehow make myself seem less dangerous?”
She shook her head. “No, you could never manage that. Let me see if I can explain. What I sensed in you almost instantly, and I’m sure Ginny did too, is that you have . . . wonderful instincts. The instincts of a wonderful fool.”
“Terrific.”
“Let me finish. These instincts make you attractive—very attractive—but they also make you dangerous. Okay. Following your instincts got you into trouble. But you’ve got nothing else to follow to get you out of trouble. Don’t give up on being Greg. Keep on following those instincts. That’s what I meant when I told you to think of something. Keep on being Greg, and do what Greg would do. I don’t have any idea what that might be. Only you can figure that out, following your instincts.”
Greg looked at her thoughtfully. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t give up. I shouldn’t accept that good-bye as final.”
“I’d be a fool to tell you that, Greg—or to tell you the opposite. I don’t know Ginny. I only know you, and I trust you. All I can tell you is to trust yourself.”
And Greg had to settle for that.
In sleep that night, he wandered endlessly through the corridors of the dwelling that had been made of the abandoned subway station. Sometimes overhead, sometimes in a parallel corridor, he heard Ginny’s footsteps. Sometimes he heard whispered conversations nearby and paused to listen; but these were only impossibly muddled echoes, and he could neither understand them nor trace them to their source.
The corridors formed a tortuous and endless maze, and he often suspected he was traveling the same route over and over, but the walls and the countless empty rooms he passed were so featureless that he couldn’t be sure. He sometimes heard his follower’s footsteps as well, but they inspired no terror in him now. They seemed almost jaunty, carefree. Having herded Greg into the labyrinth, the follower no longer needed to pursue him and was free to go about his own business.
In the end, the walls, doorways, and corners began to stream past him monotonously, at an unvarying speed, and Greg lost all sensation of walking.
The next morning he woke up exhausted and vastly depressed.
X
GREG SCANNED A PAGE of the New York Times and thought, Follow your instincts.
A newspaper in Tennessee had won a libel suit, ending a decades-old feud between the publisher and a city official. Nothing there. More on the eight thousand dollars the Defense Department had spent on a pair of pliers. Everybody had worked that one over.
He turned the page and thought, Follow your instincts. He had several, the first being to continue to sink into depression and self-pity till he drowned in it, till one day someone would discover him sitting in his apartment, a mindless vegetable.
That would show her. Childish.
A gunman had held up a bank and eluded the whole Akron police force by escaping on a bicycle. It needed something else, some capper that wasn’t there.
What would happen, he wondered, if he pretended their last c
onversation had never taken place, if he just called Ginny up and asked her out? He decided that was just an impulse, not an intuition, and his intuition told him it was a rotten impulse.
He paged through the business section without much hope. There was another story in the continuing financial misfortunes of the Hunt heirs. The head of a bank observed, “It’s been a tough year for Texas billionaires.” Bizarre. Something could be done with it, but Greg didn’t feel like lugging it over to the duplicating machine.
Bombard her with flowers, books, boxes of candy, funny little gifts? Incredibly stupid. Completely brainless.
He discarded the sports section unread. He didn’t know the names and backgrounds well enough to recognize a bizarre event when he saw one, and if it ever came to the real thing, he’d subcontract the sports side of it. Reassembling the paper, he concluded he knew only one thing for sure: he was wasting his time and Ted Owens’s money.
Guiltily, he dug out the story about the Hunt heirs and took it to the duplicator. Then he packed up and headed for home.
It was on the bus, in a window seat facing the lake, that he realized what his intuition was, and it brought a crooked smile to his face. Agnes had been right. He had to go on being Greg. That was all he could do and the best he could do. He couldn’t become a figure from a romantic novel, brooding away into a heartrending decline. He couldn’t become a whacky buffoon from a Frank Capra comedy. He had to go on being Greg.
And he had to go on hoping. Something would happen. There’d be a day when it suddenly made sense to call Ginny. Or there’d be a day when it suddenly made sense for Ginny to call him. It couldn’t possibly be over. On that, his intuition was un-wavering. The happy ending would be there, but he couldn’t bash his way through to it. He simply had to let it come. And with that conclusion, he heaved a deep sigh of relief.
Free to think of something besides his grief, Greg considered Mitzi. She had called twice in the past week to see if his shoulder was available for crying on, and, pleading a lot of work, he had turned her down.
Interesting, he thought. In a way, her dream had been prophetic. If she had come to his apartment, she would have found him deeply asleep, completely absorbed in self-pity, lifeless. He would call her when he got home and tell her his shoulder was back in working order.
And he thought: Greg is also back in working order.
By Thursday afternoon, fed up with the library, Greg decided he had enough stories to finish the promised sample, and he was back in his apartment by four o’clock —in time for a frantic call from Ted Owens.
“For Christ’s sake, Greg, where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all week.”
“I’ve been at the library,” Greg replied coolly, “working on a goofy book for Ted Owens.”
“Oh. Well, great. Look, the editor I talked to has talked to his people, and I think they’re all looniest. They think the Bizarre book could be another Book of Lists, which is absurd, and they’re wetting their pants to have a look at it. Do you think you could get me that sample by next Friday?”
Greg spent a few moments calculating. “I could get it in the mail by next Friday. What the hell, you wouldn’t do anything with it if you got it Friday anyway.”
“I’d give it to the editor if I got it Friday.”
“Don’t kid me, Ted. All you can do with an editor on Friday is haul him away in a basket.”
Ted chewed it over for half a minute. “You’ll put it in the mail Friday without fail?”
Greg paused, smiling. “Have you ever thought carefully about that locution, Ted? Without fail? Fail is strictly a verb. To do something without fail is like doing something without spend or without destroy.”
“Come on, Greg. You’ll put it in the mail Friday?”
“Without fail.”
After he hung up, Greg did some real figuring and concluded that, at his current production rate, the work he’d promised in a week would take a month. He was going to have to put his back into it: no more leisurely dinners with Agnes, no more evenings frittered away with Mitzi. In the week ahead, Gregory would have to become a very dull boy.
Looking at his desk, he winced. For a year or more he’d been pushing back the jungle of manuscripts, files, half-read books, notes, unfinished letters, and magazines turned open to unread articles. Now he was in for it. Before undertaking this miracle of productivity, he was going to have to waste an hour clearing it off down to the bare wood, a task he considered the most gruesome of his professional life.
After an hour he’d worked his way down, like an archaeologist, to the neat stack of file folders that had remained after his last bout with the jungle. Wondering why he’d thought they deserved a permanent place on the table, he began to go through them. In a file of biographies he’d done for an encyclopedia two years ago, he found an item that gave him an idea. Deciding the idea deserved consideration and that he’d earned a break, he went into the kitchen for a drink and then returned to study what he’d found.
It was an eight-by-ten glossy publicity still of Benny Goodman tilted back in a plain wooden chair while tootling away on his clarinet. Greg didn’t have even the faintest recollection of how it had come to be in this file. Probably he’d seen it in the editor’s office and asked if he could have it. Possibly he’d swiped it—for what reason he couldn’t imagine.
None of this had anything to do with his idea, which he had to admit was an impulse. He spent several minutes studying the photo. It was meant to look like a casual, unposed shot: just Benny Goodman savoring his own music all by himself in an off moment. What the hell, he thought as he reached for a pen and scrawled across the bottom:
To Ginny—
Still tootling away and thinking of you.
Your pal, Benny
And what, he asked, does my intuition have to say about that? Finally he decided. This is the truth I want Ginny to know about me right now, and there’s no other way to give it to her. I am still tootling away. I’ve recovered from her inexplicable rejection and am still here, thinking about her. She’s the tune I’m playing, and if she looks at this picture a month from now or a year from now, I’ll still be playing it. No reply is asked for or needed; I’m not asking her to change her mind. I’m just telling her about me.
His intuition told him to send it, and, so as to give himself no time for second thoughts, he slipped it into an envelope with a backing of cardboard, sealed it, addressed it, and carried it out to the mailbox in time for the last pickup. Then, in a giddy mood, he went back to work.
XI
BY TEN O’CLOCK SUNDAY NIGHT, Greg was beginning to believe he might actually meet the deadline. Ted had asked for fifty pages, not because it would take that much to give someone the idea but to demonstrate that there was plenty of good material available. Greg judged that what he’d produced so far, when typed up, would come to about twenty pages. By Wednesday he’d be ready to have a typist in from one of the temporary services to produce a rough draft while he went on writing. Though he hated the damn things, he made a mental note that this was the last project he was going to start without a word processor.
He had the project on track at last, and, pouring his first drink of the day, he wondered why he didn’t feel better about it. Up until ten he’d felt fine. The changing of the hour had been like crossing a border into sudden, bleak depression. Then, with a twinge of self-disgust, he realized what it was.
For the past three days, without thinking about it at all, he had begun to build a fantasy: Ginny would get the photo by Saturday. Although he’d told himself that no reply was asked for or needed, she would call. Maybe not immediately, not on Saturday.
On Sunday.
And when ten o’clock—the last of the “civilized hours” for calling—had come and gone, Greg knew he had betrayed himself. It was true that no reply to his message was asked for, but he’d sent it hoping to get one. Now, instead of that, he had an image of Benny Goodman’s photo lying in Ginny’s wastebasket, buried b
eneath superfluous dupes, stats, and proofs. By sending it, he’d given her another chance to reject him, and she’d taken it.
For nearly a week, Greg had dammed up his anguish with hope. Now it engulfed him in a flood, and he let himself drown. He went into the kitchen and filled a glass with bourbon. Normally he drank for relaxation; tonight he would drink for stupefaction. It took him less than an hour to achieve it. He staggered out of his clothes and fell into bed like a corpse.
Greg’s journey through the subterranean maze was endless, and his body ached to be free of it. He was certain now that he was following the same route, passing the same blind walls, the same corners, the same empty rooms over and over again. But there didn’t seem to be any help for it; every turning was forced.
Then he paused to listen. The labyrinth, which before had been alive with echoed footsteps and whispered conversations, was now utterly silent. This meant Ginny and the pursuer had known or found a way out. He closed his eyes and thought, Of course. I’ve been following the corridor and it leads nowhere. The way out must be through one of the rooms. He turned into the nearest—a windowless box with a closet at the left near the back. The closet was empty and led nowhere. The next two rooms were identical. But the closet in the fourth seemed deeper than the others—deep enough so that its back wall, if it had one, was lost in shadow.
He walked in and after a few steps stumbled over a box. Squatting beside it, he saw it was filled with old toys: a Raggedy Ann doll, a teddy bear, some boxed games, a jump rope, a few coloring books, and a flashlight. Rummaging through them, he felt a sudden certainty that he was touching relics of Ginny’s childhood. He picked up the flashlight and switched it on. Directing its feeble yellow glow to the back of the closet, he discovered a narrow staircase leading up.
And overhead he heard the low tones of a muffled conversation. Looking at the stairs, he wondered if he’d be able to climb them at all. Only a foot wide, they seemed to belong to a child’s playhouse. He’d have to attack them sideways. Sending the dim glow of the flashlight upward, he saw that the stairs turned crazily every few feet: It was a tower of some sort.