Career in C Major: And Other Fiction

by James M. Cain

  I wanted to get out of there. I could smell trouble, especially after that crack about getting even. I said something about going, but there was as much chance of getting Doris out of there with that singing going on as there would have been of getting a rat away from a piece of cheese. All I could do was sit there.

  After the Mignon, Cecil sang a little cradle song that’s been written on Kreisler’s Caprice Viennois, and then she came over to Doris. “How was I?”

  “Marvelous! I never heard you better.”

  “I thought I was a little off myself, but they seem to like it, so I guess it was all right. Do a duet with me?”

  Now I ask you, was that being nice to Doris, or wasn’t it? Because that was letting her right into the big league park, it was treating her as an equal, and in front of all her friends. Doris looked scared, and stammered something about how she’d love to, if only there was something they could get together on, and Cecil said: “How about La Dove Prende?”

  “Why—that would be all right, but of course I only know the first part, and—”

  “Fine. I’ll do the second.”

  “If you really think I can—”

  “Come on, come on, it’ll do you good. You’ve got to ride the horse that threw you, haven’t you? We’ll knock ’em for a loop, and then good-bye to all that business this morning, and you’ll feel fine.”

  “Well—”

  Cecil went back to the piano and Doris put down her handbag. Her face was savage with jealousy, rage, and venom. She whispered to me: “Show me up, hey? We’ll see about that!”

  Wilkins took the piano, and they started. It was terrible. Mozart has to be sung to beat, and I think I told you Doris’ ideas on rhythm. I saw Wilkins look up, but Cecil dead-panned, and they went on with her. She could have sung it backwards and that pair would have carried her through, so it got a hand. They had a little whisper, and then they sang the Barcarolle from the Tales of Hoffman. That was a little more Doris’ speed, and a little more that mob’s speed too, so they got a big hand on it, and started over to me.

  As they left the piano, Doris put her arm around Cecil’s waist, and I had a cold feeling that something was about to pop. They got to me, and I started to talk fast, about how fine they had sounded, anything I could think of. They laughed, and Cecil turned to Doris. “Well—how was the support?”

  “Oh fine—even if you do try to steal my men.”

  Doris laughed as she said it, and it wasn’t supposed to be such a hell of a dirty crack. It was just a preliminary. I could give you the rest of the talk, almost word for word, the way she intended it to go. First Cecil was supposed to look surprised, and then Doris would apologize, and laugh some more, and say it was only intended as a joke. Then it would come out about Lorentz, and Doris would say please, please, he didn’t mean a thing to her—really. And then would come the real dirty crack, something that would mean Lorentz wasn’t really worth having, and if Cecil was interested in him she could have him, and welcome.

  That was how it was supposed to go, I can guarantee you, knowing Doris. But it never got that far. Cecil winced like she had been hit with a whip. Then she looked me straight in the eye, the first time she had, all day. “Leonard, why did you lie to me?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did. You let me go to her, and you swore you hadn’t told a word—”

  She tried to bite it back. It wasn’t what I said. It was the look on Doris’ face that stopped her. She knew, then, what Doris had really meant, but it was too late. We all three stood there, and Doris looked first at Cecil, and then at me. Then she gave a little rasping laugh, and her eyes were as hard as glass. “… Ah—so that was what you were doing in Rochester, and Syracuse, and Columbus, and Chicago, and—”

  “I—”

  “Don’t give me that foolish story again, about looking things over. I’ve followed her. I’ve followed her whole career since—I know everything she’s done! She sang in all those places, and you—! The fool that I was! I never once thought of it!”

  Cecil licked her lips. “Mrs. Borland, I’m sure I’ve never meant a thing to your husband—”

  “Miss Carver, I don’t believe you.”

  Cecil closed her eyes, opened them again, grabbed for the one last thing she could say. “We saw quite a lot of each other, that’s true. We could hardly help that. We were singing together. We were singing in the same opera company, and—”

  Doris gave a shrieking laugh, and half the room stopped talking and turned around. Gwenny came up, Doris put her head on her shoulder and kept on with that laugh. Then she turned to them all. “Oh my—isn’t that funny? If they took a trip together—I don’t mind. It means nothing to me—let them enjoy life while they’re young. But darlings! Singing together! In the same—I can’t stand it! Imagine Leonard—singing—ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

  Gwenny decided to play it funny. She laughed too. A few others laughed. Then she decided to get witty. “Perhaps he’ll sing us something!—From Pagliacci!”

  If that was what she said, I think I could have stood it. But that wasn’t it. That was only what she thought she said. What she really said was, “From Polly-achy,” and at the dumb, ignorant way she pronounced that word, something in me cracked. All the rotten, phoney, mean, cruel stuff I had taken off Doris, and all the stuff I had taken off Gwenny and her kind, came swelling up in my throat, and I knew I was going to kick over the apples or bust. I turned to Gwenny. “Since you ask me, I think I will.”

  I went in the dining room and found Wilkins. He hadn’t heard any of it. “Feeling like playing for me?”

  “Sure. What’ll it be?”

  “How about the Prologue from Pagliacci?”

  “The Prologue it is.”

  We went in and there was a laugh, and they all started to whisper. He started the introduction, and they looked at each other, and looked at me, and looked at Doris. They were her friends, remember, not mine. Cecil came over. “I wouldn’t, baby. It was awful, but—I wouldn’t. You’ll regret it.”

  “Maybe.”

  She went away, and I started to sing. At the first Si può Doris sank into a chair. She didn’t turn white. She turned gray. I went on. Maybe Tibbett can do it better than I did it that day, but I doubt it. He couldn’t take the interest in it, you might say, that I took. I rolled it out and my head felt light and dizzy, because I could see every note of it going like a knife into her heart. When I got to the andante I gave it the gun, and when I reached the high A flat I stepped into it with a smile on my face, and held it, and swelled it, until the room began to shake, then I pulled it in, and cut. I closed it out solemn as I knew, as though a real performance was about to start, and I wanted them to get it all straight.

  Wilkins played the finish, and waited. Nothing happened. They sat there like they were frozen, and then they began to talk, as if I wasn’t there. He looked up at me, like he was in a madhouse or something. I smiled at him, and bowed three times, the way I was taught, center, left and right. Then I went over and poured myself a drink. When I turned around, Doris was leaving the room. She walked like she had just gone blind.

  9

  I don’t know how I got out of there. But pretty soon I was down on the twelfth floor, where you change from the private elevator that runs up to the penthouse, to the main cars. Cecil was there, with Wilkins. She was leaning against the wall talking, with her head back against it, and her eyes closed, and he was standing close, listening to her like he thought somebody must be crazy. When they saw me they stopped. We went down, and when we got on the street a cab came up. He offered us a lift, but he had a dinner date uptown instead of down, so I told him to take the cab and I sent the doorman after another one. He went off, and I stood there looking Cecil up and down, and decided she was what I wanted in the way of a woman, and that I was going to hook up with her for the rest of my life. Maybe the love part wouldn’t be so hot, anyway on my part, but I had had all I wanted of that. She was decent and you could stick to h
er, and not feel you had a viper on your chest every time you put your arms around her. I hooked my arm in hers, and pressed it, and tried to get over what I felt.

  The doorman came, riding the running board of the cab, and I put her in. I fished in my pocket to tip him, but when I tried to get in, the cab was moving away, and all I could see was a gloved hand waving at me from the window. In another second it was gone.

  I started down the street. Then I wondered where I was going. Here I had just made a decision that was to change my whole life, and now it seemed to have evaporated into thin air. I crossed Park, and headed for home. My legs felt queer, and I couldn’t seem to walk straight. I remembered I had had four drinks. Then I heard myself laugh. It was like hell the four drinks.

  I let myself in, and the hall was dark, and upstairs I could hear Evelyn crying. I opened my mouth to call, and nothing came out of it. I groped for the switch. Then I heard a rustle behind me. I half turned, and felt something horrible coming at me. It hit me. She was panting like an animal, and got my face with both hands at once, I went down, and those claws raked me. I must have let out some kind of a yell, because one hand grabbed my mouth, and the other hand raked me again. I tried to throw her off, and couldn’t. She held me, and pounded my head against the floor. Then I felt myself being beaten with something. The marks afterward showed it was the heel of her shoe. And all the time she was talking to me, not loud, but in a terrible whisper: “… You would do that to me … You beast … You swine … You can have her … What do I care who you have … But that … But that… Get out of here … Get out of here! Get out of here!…”

  Her voice rose to a scream at that, and upstairs both children began to wail, and I threw her off, and got the door open, and staggered down the steps to the street.

  Next thing I knew, I was in Central Park, on a bench. I still had the light topcoat on, that I had worn to the party, but I didn’t have my hat. The coat sleeve was down over my hand. I felt the shoulder. It was torn. Something tickled my mouth. I brushed it off, and it was blood. Then I saw blood on the coat. I took out my handkerchief, and my whole face was running blood. I wiped it, and wiped it again, until the whole handkerchief was nothing but a red rag, and it kept on bleeding. I tried to think where I was going to go. I couldn’t go to a good hotel. I remembered a dump on Twenty-third Street, where I had once made a speech to a banquet of equipment manufacturers, flagged a cab, and went down there.

  I pushed through the revolving door, and hated to cross the lobby. The clerk looked up, with his plastered-on smile, and it stayed plastered on, when he saw me, like in one of those movies where they stop the camera a second, to get a laugh. He swung his turntable around, but slow, like he hated to do it. I registered:

  Leonard Borland City

  While I was writing, his hand wandered to the key rack, and then it wandered to a button, and pressed it. In a second a big gimlet-eyed guy was standing beside me, and everything about him said house detective. They looked at each other. The clerk swung the turntable around again, read my card, and spoke mechanically, while he was blotting it, like an announcement on an old-time phonograph record: “Single room, Mr. Borland? We have them at a dollar-and-a-half, two and two-and-a-half. With bath, three, four and five.”

  “I want a bedroom, bath and sitting room.”

  I needed a sitting room about as much as an ourang-outang does, but I had to say something to take them off guard. I was in terror they’d give me the bum’s rush across the lobby. If they tried that, I didn’t know what I would do. I might take the joint apart, and I might do nothing, and just land in the gutter, and that was what I dreaded most of all.

  They looked at each other again. “We have a very nice suite on the tenth floor, outside—bedroom, bath, sitting room, and small kitchenette with ice box—seven dollars.”

  “That’ll be all right.”

  “Ah—have you luggage, Mr. Borland?”

  “No.”

  I took out my bill-fold. I still had a hunk of cash that I’d brought back from the trip, and I laid down a $50 bill. They relaxed, and so did I, and began to talk like myself. “Have you a house doctor?”

  “No, but we have one on call.”

  “Will you get him, and send him up to me as quick as you can? I’ve—been in an accident.”

  “Yes, sir. Right away, Mr. Borland.”

  The house dick took charge of me then. He put his arm around me like I could hardly walk, and called a boy, and took me up to my room, and talked like I had been in a taxi accident, and said it was a crime the way those guys drove. If anybody could get a face like mine in a taxi accident, it would be a miracle, but it was his way of saying everything was O. K., that there would be no questions asked, that he’d take care of me. “You haven’t had dinner yet, Mr. Borland?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “I’ll send the waiter up right away.”

  “Fine.”

  “Or maybe you’d rather wait till you’ve seen the doctor? Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll send the waiter up now, and after the doc gets through, you ring room service and tell them you’re ready. I recommend the turkey, sir. They’ve got nice roast turkey on the bill tonight, fine, young, Vermont turkey, from our farm up there—and the chef has a way with it. He really has, sir.”

  “Turkey sounds all right.”

  They sent the coat out to be cleaned and fixed up, and had a boy go down and buy me pajamas on Fourteenth Street, and the doctor came and plastered me up, and I had the turkey and a bottle of wine with it. I kept the waiter while I ate, and we talked and we got along fine. But then he took the table down, and I was alone, and I went in and had a hot bath, and by then it was about half past nine, and there wasn’t anything to do but go to bed. I took off my clothes, and put on the Fourteenth Street pajamas, and got in bed, and pulled up their sleazy cotton blankets, and lay there looking at the paper, where it was beginning to peel off the walls. I tried to think what there was funny about that paper. Then I remembered that paper hadn’t been used on hotel walls for fifteen years. Only the old ones have paper.

  I turned out the light and tried to sleep. I didn’t seem to be thinking about anything at all. But every time I’d drop off I’d wake up, dreaming I was standing there, bellowing at the top of my lungs, and nobody would even turn around and look at me. Then one time this horrible thing was coming at me in the dark, and I woke up moaning. I tried to get to sleep again, and couldn’t. I told myself it was just a dream, to forget it, but it wasn’t just a dream. I must have dropped off, though, because here it was, coming at me again, and this time I wasn’t moaning. I was sobbing. I quit kidding myself then. I knew I’d give anything to have it back, what I had pulled at the party that afternoon. It wasn’t brave, it wasn’t big, it was just plain silly. I had made a jackass of myself, and put something terrible between me and Doris. I began thinking of her, then, and knew it didn’t make any difference what she had done to me, or anything else. I wanted her so bad it was just a terrible ache, wanted her worse than ever. And here I was, I had no wife, I had no home, I had no kids, I had no work, I didn’t even have Cecil. I was in this lousy dump, and had just made a mess of my life. I think I hit an all-time low that night. I never felt worse. I couldn’t feel worse.

  10

  Three days later, when I could leave, I went up and took a suite at a hotel in the fifties. I took it by the month. I didn’t hear anything from Doris. I began reading the society pages after a couple of days, and she was in. Every time I saw her name I saw Leighton’s. On the singing, I never opened my trap. One day a guy showed up at the office by the name of Horn. He sat down, and kept looking around kind of puzzled at the drafting room, and in a minute I asked him pretty sharp what he wanted.

  “You’re Mr. Borland? Mr. Leonard Borland?”

  “Yes, I’m Leonard Borland.”

  “Well—I got the address out of the phone book, but it certainly doesn’t look like the right place, and you don’t look like the right guy. What are
you, in the construction business?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m looking for the Leonard Borland that sang with the American Scala Opera Company under the name of Logan Bennett. Anyway, I hear he did.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “I was in Pittsburgh last week. I heard it from a friend of mine. Giuseppe Rossi.”

  “… Well? What of it?”

  He knew then he had the right guy, and kept looking me over. “I tell you what of it. I’m connected with this outfit that’s giving opera over at the Hippodrome, and—”

  “Not interested.”

  “Rossi said you were pretty good.”

  “Nice guy, Rossi. Remember me to him if you see him.”

  “I need a baritone.”

  “Still not interested.”

  “If you’re as good as he says you are, I could make you a pretty nice proposition. You understand, a singer’s no draw until he gets known, but I could offer you $125 a night, say, with three appearances a week guaranteed. That’s a little more than Rossi was paying you, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, quite a little.”

  “Well—will you think it over?”

  “No, I won’t think it over.”

  “Listen, I need a baritone.”

  “So I judge.”

  “I got a couple of good tenors, and another one coming. I got a couple of sopranos I think are comers. But in opera, you’ve got to have one good baritone before you’ve got a show.”

  “You certainly have.”

  “All right then, I’ll come up a little. How about a hundred and fifty?”

  “Maybe you didn’t understand what I said when you came in here. I appreciate what you say, I’m grateful to Rossi,—but I’m just not interested.”

  The idea of singing made me sick. He went and I put on my hat and engaged in my favorite outdoor sport, about that time. That was walking around the Metropolitan Opera House hoping I’d see Cecil. A couple of days after that I did see her. I raced back to the office as fast as I could get there, and put in a call for her at her hotel. They said she wasn’t in. I knew she wouldn’t be. That was why I had been watching. I left word that Mr. Borland called. Then for a week I stuck at my desk from nine to six, hoping she would call back. She never did.