“Christine.”
“Christine,” he said.
“Christine Halverson,” the girl said. “It’s Norwegian.”
“Christine Halverson,” Rock said.
“What’s yours?” the girl said.
“Arak Vagramian,” Rock said. “It’s Armenian. Give my love to your family.”
“All right,” the girl said. “Give mine to yours.”
“I will,” Rock said. “So long.”
“So long,” the girl said.
He was ten minutes at lunch. When he got into his car, around the corner, he wrote her name on the back of his hotel bill.
He drove on to Newkirk, Santa Rosa, Moriarty.
“Whoever she is,” he said, “I’ve known her all my life, love her deeply, miss her painfully, and will never see her again.”
But in Moriarty he saw another one crossing the street in front of his car that he’d known all his life, too.
“You love them all,” the enemy said.
A man thinks he wants one thing but actually wants another, or wants both, or wants neither but can’t think of something else to want, or is too young to stop wanting at all, or too old, or too far from a particular place he thinks he longs for, or his liver’s enlarged, or his bile isn’t flowing properly, or his intestines are clogged, or his heart is murmuring, or cancer’s gotten a start somewhere, or the tissues of his brain are deteriorating, or something else mysterious and unaccountable is happening to him.
He thinks he wants a watermelon to eat in the evening, but what he really wants is to feel as alive as he once felt when he ate a watermelon in the evening. He thinks he wants shoes, but what he really wants is to be admired. Or he thinks he doesn’t want to be admired. He thinks he wants to be left alone, so he can keep his unhappiness to himself, but by the time he is alone, it’s no longer to keep his unhappiness to himself, it’s because he’s gotten used to wanting to be alone and now wants to keep his happiness (which used to be his unhappiness) to himself.
He thinks he knows when he’s happy and when he’s not happy, but he never knows, because most of the time he’s bored when he’s happy and bored when he’s unhappy, and he doesn’t want to be bored. But if he stopped being bored and thought he wanted to be something else, he would be mistaken. He wouldn’t want to be something else at all.
A man simply doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything. A man simply does not live, he is lived, and not simply. He is lived foolishly and in everlasting indefiniteness and confusion. He is lived as a tiger is, or a shark, or a hawk, or he is lived as each thing that lives is lived, by turns, now a tiger, now a hawk. Still, he is always a man, a thing in shoes, a better worshipper of shoes than of God, a pale hairless thing of anxious ill-health, made of poisons and dreams, quivering fear and roistering delusions.
Ho for tomorrow! is the cry of his heart, or, Ah for yesterday! Now is always his time of pain, torment, and torture. Today is the terrible time. This moment is hell. He is an in stantaneous thing which liveth in the insect’s instant, an instant at a time until it is the last instant and the loneliest. Ho for tomorrow! but tomorrow never comes. Ah for yesterday! but yesterday is always gone and always a lie. He is a son of a bitch, whoever he is, and the name of his family is no help. He is a born crook, and the calling he follows is no help. But every one of him is innocent, as he himself knows. Every one of him is alone in his innocence. Every one of him is righteous. For a moment at a time, every one of him is a comedian and maketh the others to laugh. That moment is the best he knows. The comic’s moment is a man’s greatest moment. When he maketh to laugh, a man is his own boy, and a hell of a fellow.
After dinner the night of the dinner at Romanoff’s, when they were at home, Vida Key said to her husband, “Has he got something?”
“You saw him,” Paul Key said. “You tell me. I’m not sure I know.”
“Is he laughing?” the woman said.
“I don’t know,” the man said. “Perhaps he is.”
“Still,” Vida said, “I didn’t feel that he was laughing at us, or at anybody else.”
“His face hardly ever smiles,” Paul Key said, “not even his eyes, and yet you get the feeling he’s laughing all the time.”
“Is it the way he speaks?” Vida said.
“The things he leaves unsaid?” Paul said. “Is that what you mean, Vida?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “He does leave a great deal unsaid that comes across, doesn’t he? Will that happen in front of a camera?”
“I don’t know,” the man said, “but we’ll soon know. My guess is that it will. If he were to read a dozen names out of the phone book, I think it would mean something more than if anybody else I know read Shakespeare. In fact, it might just mean a great deal that very little else has ever been able to mean.”
“Is he sad?” Vida said. “I mean, we seemed to be laughing all the time, but weren’t, and it was better than actually laughing. Is he as sad as all that?”
“They’re supposed to be a sad people,” Paul said, “but I don’t know. The drinkers at the bar where I found him weren’t sad. They laughed so much it was annoying. ‘The laughing lunatics,’ I said to myself. I am always jealous of those who laugh. It’s because I want to, too. He had them killing themselves with laughter. I could never do that. I mean, I could never laugh that way. The sound I’d make wouldn’t be anything like the sounds they made. Still, he’s had me laughing all night. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do. The professional comics have never made me laugh, outside or inside. They’ve annoyed me, or made me cry. I don’t know when I’ve felt better. I think it’s because—”
He stopped suddenly to see if he could get it straight.
“Is it because he’s on the level?” the woman said.
“Yes, that’s part of it, I suppose,” the man said. “He has no defenses and doesn’t want any. What does this do to others? They come out from behind their defenses. Selena liked him, didn’t she?”
“I liked him,” Vida said. “You talked about yourself as if you weren’t talking about yourself. I never saw you do that before.”
“You don’t do that with anybody,” Paul said. “He pays attention to whoever he’s with, and whoever he’s with always turns out to be somebody worth paying attention to. Do you think he liked Selena? I mean, enough?”
“Enough for what?” Vida said.
“You don’t think I had Selena there for nothing?” Paul said.
“Oh,” Vida said. “Well, of course he liked her. I think he likes people. You didn’t feel he was working on you because you can do him some good, the way everybody else does, did you? I know I didn’t, and I’m very sensitive to that. I’d feel it instantly. I don’t think he cares very much for things like that. I mean, he’s not respectful of your power, he likes you, but it wouldn’t matter if he never saw you again. He’d see somebody else. Of course he liked Selena. She’s a beautiful girl.”
“I was thinking she ought to be put to work again,” Paul said. “Do you know what just occurred to me?”
“What?”
“If he’s got something, how long can it last?”
“I don’t know,” Vida said, “but I don’t think it’s anything like that. I think we like him because as we go along we learn how like him we are.”
“In what?” Paul said.
“In being able to be so unimportant as to be more important than ever, for one thing,” Vida said.
“Oh,” Paul said.
“In being able to be so sad or so glad and at the same time so unimportantly at ease about it as to feel that we are laughing,” Vida said.
“He’ll change,” Paul said. “But I wish he wouldn’t. I’ll know a lot more about him tomorrow after he makes the test.”
Paul Key took the test home when it was ready and he and Vida looked at it together in their private projection room.
“Well?” the husband said.
“There it is,” the wife said.
“Will it last?” Paul said.
“A lot of it won’t,” Vida said, “but who knows? It may change to something even better. What did you tell him?”
“Before or after the test?” Paul said.
“What did you tell him to do?” Vida said.
“I said a few silly things.”
“Did he do them?”
“No,” Paul said. “Well, perhaps he did. I don’t know. But whatever he did, what I was hoping would come across has come across.”
“What is it?” Vida said.
“Shall we run it again?” Paul said. “Now, you know the lines we gave him to say are foolish. See if you can see for yourself what it is that comes across.”
After they had looked at it again, five minutes of film, Vida said, “I’ve got it.”
“What is it?” Paul said.
“He’s carrying a torch,” Vida said.
“For who?” Paul said.
“For me,” Vida said. “For any woman. What is it for you?”
“He’s myself,” Paul said. “He’s Paul Key himself.”
“What do they think up front?” Vida said.
“Slow and easy,” Paul said. “That’s the slogan. They’re scared to death he’ll lose it. It’s a week now and he’s talked to nobody but me. That’s part of the plan, too. We’re going to get him for nothing of course. He doesn’t have an agent and doesn’t want one. We’re going to give him the usual cut-rate seven-year contract.”
“Oh, Paul.”
“I’ll do what I can. He’ll start at two hundred and fifty a week.”
“Paul, you couldn’t.”
“I’ll think of something.”
“I’m going to talk to him myself,” the woman said. “I won’t let you do a thing like that.”
“I’m giving it a lot of thought,” the man said. “I’m thinking of him.”
“Yes you are.”
“I am.”
“Start him at a thousand at least,” Vida said. “Give him two-fifty for himself and put the rest aside for him, or something.”
“I’ll think of something,” Paul said.
A week later Paul Key said, “He doesn’t want a contract. He says he’ll work for two-fifty a week as long as we want him, or as long as he feels like it.”
“Did you tell him to do that?” Vida said.
“No.”
“I had hoped you had. Who did?”
“Nobody,” Paul said. “Everybody up front’s delighted, but at the same time they’re scared to death. One picture and you know what he’ll be worth.”
“Do you want him to sign?” Vida said.
“Of course.”
“How high will they go?”
“A thousand a week, seven years,” Paul said. “Or two-fifty the first year, five the second, seven-fifty the third, a thousand the fourth, and fifteen hundred thereafter, seven years.”
“Has he been told?”
“Not yet.”
“Shall I tell him?” Vida said.
“I wish you would, at dinner tomorrow,” Paul said. “Tell him to take the second schedule. It’s the best for him.”
A man is nonsense all his life, the impractical joke of unknown enemies and beloved friends, a fraud who only now and then suspects. He would be different, but truth will not permit it. He feeds his soul on the smiles of others for themselves, which he believes are for himself. He decorates it with shoes, hats, ties, shirts, trousers, jackets. He comforts it with numbers: numbers of money, numbers of women loved, numbers of friends, good things done, good times known, schedules effectively kept, accidents with pleasure in them. He asks his soul to be thankful for him, for having provided it with so much, so much more than it might have received, so much more than any other man in the world ever gave his soul. He carries his gifts and his losses to his soul and asks that they be noticed, cherished, treasured. He goes into the arena where his soul lies like a tiger to amaze it with his fearlessness and love. He goes as a child, a boy, a man, astonishing and loving. Or he is rude to his soul, passing it in a crowd and not even nodding. He is a lifetime joke, his borrowed soul a patient witness, but also a joke. He is nonsense, as he himself knows. His soul is nonsense, as he himself knows.
He drove through mountains now, on his way to Albuquerque, the sun dropping to evening. He had counted and remembered for many miles the number and nature of his girls: his mother’s mother; his father’s mother; his mother; his sister; his father’s and mother’s brother’s and sister’s daughters; the girls he knew as a child; the ones he knew as a boy; the ones he knew as a young man, the Fresno street girls, the ones who came late at night to Fat Aram’s, the working girls who were purified by their work, by failure and folly; the ones of the world, the named and famed ones, of Hollywood and New York, of London and Paris, Vienna and Moscow, and he showed them one by one to his soul, saying, “They had beauty when I saw them, did they not?”
He was glad about them, remembering the beauty of each of them, his mother’s mother a beauty as a girl in Bitlis, a woman of eighty-one now, but still in love with her husband, still in love with man, the smell of him, the innocence and inferiority and charm of him.
But now that he saw the sun far off over the mountains and felt the earth cooling and the light giving way, he put aside the business of numbering these things, and began to number the hours, days, months, and years of loneliness, of discontent, of boredom and anger, of desperation and despair.
“It was murder,” he said. “It was always murder, and it still is.”
He would spend the night in Albuquerque, he thought. He would go to his room and bathe, put on fresh clothes, have a drink, go for a walk, stop someplace for supper, look around. Around ten he would telephone Ann Ford in New York. It would be past midnight in New York and perhaps she would be home, finished for the night, or about to go out. He would hear her voice.
But it was night when he came to Albuquerque and he was terrified. An unnamed terror told him he must not stop, that he would be too alone, too cut off from speed, too far from too many things.
He sat in his speeding car, thirty-three years old, without wife, without son, without daughter, without house, without vineyard, without all the things he had always longed for. And now it was getting late. He just hadn’t found her, that’s all. He had found the others, but not her, not the one who was his. Not the one who was all of them held together in his own wife.
He drove through the city, looking at it, terrified by its night loneliness and despair, and he thanked God for his car, by which to hurry and leave it. He would drive all night. He wouldn’t stop until he got to Fresno, until he reached his birthplace. He would stop there a moment, lie down and sleep in the arms of his desolate past. A thousand miles away or more, it was where he’d been born, and he wouldn’t stop until he’d reached it again, for the haunting of death was intense now, and he wanted to be back where he began.
Every man is afraid. He is afraid of many things or of everything, but in the end they are all himself, as he himself knows. A man is afraid all his life, for every man is death given a face, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, and limbs, and every man is death given life, as he himself knows.
The night was terrifying. Highway 66 was death’s own highway. Haydn on the radio hummed death’s own song. The car slipped in deathly silence through the night and Rock’s own dream of life, which had always been a dream of death also. It was the Surprise Symphony, the symphony he had always liked so much, and still liked, but it wasn’t now what it had been before. The car and Haydn rolled along together, rolling over one another, and over and through Rock’s dream. He was hours and symphonies getting to Gallup where he had two cups of coffee while his car was attended to. And he was long hours of silence reaching and leaving Sanders, Navajo, Holbrook, Winslow, Winona, Flagstaff, Parks, Williams, Ashfork, Seligman, Hackberry, Kingman, Oatman, and Topock where he came at last to morning.
He crossed the Colorado into California, into Needles, and began
the tiring, tedious but magnificent drive through miles of winding mountain roads.
Then he escaped from the hills into the California desert, smooth, clean, and hot.
He came at length, as a man in a car must, to Ludlow, in the middle of the desert, to noonday itself, and to the very end of tiredness.
During the night, tailing the car in front of him, he stared at the orange license plate and saw its black numbers expand in open-eyed sleep into a painting of men working in sunlight as bright and dazzling as if the painter had stared straight into the sun. Several times he fell into actual sleep, dreaming of rest, of falling asleep, the car flying away from him as he was being lured by his weariness into flying away from wakefulness, but always he caught the car and the memory of fact in time, shaking his head, holding his eyes away from the dazzling and golden painting.
He got out of the car at the gas station in Ludlow and looked around.
He telephoned one of his cousins in Fresno, the one named Haig, after his own brother, a boy of nineteen, his mother’s younger brother’s son.
“Rock?” Haig said. “Where the hell are you?”
“Ludlow.”
“What are you doing in Ludlow?”
“On my way to Fresno.”
“What are you coming to Fresno for?”
“Coming home.”
“What’s the matter? You sound tired.”
“Been driving two days and two nights except for three hours of sleep in Amarillo.”
“Why don’t you go to sleep somewhere?”
“Don’t want to sleep until I get home.”
“Where is Ludlow?”
“On the way to Barstow.”
“Hell, man, you’re five hundred miles from Fresno. You better get some sleep.”
“Sleep when I get to Fresno,” Rock said. “How’s your father?”
“Well, I got away from him at last,” Haig said. “I got drafted. I’m in the Army. Been in three months. M.P. at Hammer Field. Motorcycle. I’m supposed to be on duty now. It’s only an accident I was home. You want to talk to Pop?”
“Let me say hello to him, but don’t go away,” Rock said.
The boy’s father came to the phone and spoke in Armenian, calling him Arak, and then the son came back and Rock said, “How’s the old lady on Winery Street?”
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