Rock Wagram

by William Saroyan

  “When do you plan to leave, Mr. Murphy?” Fickett said.

  “Five,” Murphy said.

  “In the morning?”

  “Yes. It’s a hundred miles. I go and look things over and come back the same day. Why? Do you want to go?”

  “I’d like to very much,” Fickett said. “At five, then. In the lobby?”

  “Takes about two hours,” Murphy said. “We can have coffee before we leave, breakfast in Bakersfield.”

  “Very good,” Fickett said. “I look forward to meeting you.”

  Now, at half past five, Fickett had met Murphy, Murphy had met Fickett, and Rock Wagram was watching both of them in the rear-view mirrow of Murphy’s Cadillac, crossing the railroad tracks on the way to Highway 99.

  “I leave early,” Murphy said, “because it’s cool early in the morning. Also, I can’t sleep.”

  “Is that so?” Fickett said. “Have you tried a warm bath before bed?”

  “No. Is that good?”

  “I find it relaxing,” Fickett said. “I made the discovery thirty years ago. A bath before bed, a shower on rising.”

  It seemed to Rock that Murphy was trying to remember if he had taken a shower on rising, or if perhaps he smelled a little anyway.

  “That’s a lot of bathing,” Murphy said.

  “I find it well worth the time it takes,” Fickett said. “Ten minutes at night, ten minutes in the morning.”

  “What do you do?” Murphy said. “You take the bath and go to bed, and then you go to sleep? Is that it?”

  “Warm water,” Fickett said. “A tubful. Relax in it ten minutes.”

  “Warm water,” Murphy said.

  “Yes. Not hot. Not cold.”

  “Puts you to sleep?”

  “Relaxes you, so you can fall asleep.”

  “You sleep well?”

  “Quite well.”

  “Every night?”

  “Yes. I assure you it’s an excellent treatment for insomnia, Mr. Murphy.”

  “Maybe you haven’t got any worries,” Murphy said.

  “Oh, I have my responsibilities,” Fickett said. “I don’t take them to bed with me, though, because I’ve found that I can’t do justice to my work the next day if I lie awake all night. Work when it’s time to work. Play when it’s time to play. Sleep when it’s time to sleep.”

  “I work all the time,” Murphy said. “I work when it’s time to work, when it’s time to play, and when it’s time to sleep.”

  Murphy felt sure that Fickett had left his card in his box because he had a settlement of the damages to report, and he believed the amount of the settlement would be made known after a few minutes of small talk, but even after they had reached and passed Tulare the talk was still small, although it was no longer about bathing, sleep, work-time, and play-time.

  It was about the kinds of people in the world, as Fickett understood the matter, his voice calm and deep, his face clean and relaxed.

  Rock Wagram watched and listened.

  He watched the road carefully, too, because he was driving around seventy, but there was little traffic, except trucks loaded with grapes on their way to packing houses, so he was also able to watch the faces of the men as he saw them reflected in the rear-view mirror. They could scarcely notice that he was watching them. He listened very carefully.

  He still admired Fickett, but he found that as time went on he admired Murphy much more, a man it hadn’t until now occurred to him to admire, a man whose very nature seemed to insist on no admiration, seemed in fact to demand that there be none, a man for whom it was easy to work, whose presence it was inevitable to enjoy, whose swiftness and richness of mind it was refreshing to notice.

  Twenty or twenty-five miles past Tulare, Rock still admired Fickett, but it was nothing to the affection he felt for Murphy.

  “It takes all kinds to make a world,” Fickett said. “I have associates who have lost patience with this people or that, generalizing about all of them solely on the basis of experience with a handful of them—a hundred or so. The Italians, for instance. Hot-headed, excitable, emotional, overwrought, occasionally hysterical, but for all that, as far as my own experience has been, lovable, child-like, and deeply honest, however confusing some of their behavior may sometimes be. I have given this matter thought, and my conclusion is that this behavior is the result of high spirits, a love of fun and mischief, and nothing else. They don’t expect their demands to be met, and they only pretend to be astonished when their demands are not met.”

  “That’s the Italians?” Murphy said.

  “As far as my own experience has been,” Fickett said. “They are a people who sing. Hearty. Spontaneous.”

  It was here that the admiration Rock Wagram felt for Elton Fickett began to go.

  Who asked you? Rock thought. If you’re going to talk about people, talk about your own, whoever they are, because you know them, and don’t know other people.

  “The Scotch, on the other hand,” Elton Fickett said. “The popular misconception about the Scotch is that they are tight fisted, stingy, miserly, dour, severe, excessively money-loving, thrifty to the point of impracticality. My own experience with the Scotch, however, leads me to believe they are sober, serious-minded, dignified, and honorable.”

  “They’re nice people,” Murphy said rather pathetically, for it seemed to Rock that what Murphy really wanted to say was something dirty and accurate about Elton Fickett himself.

  “The French,” the man went on. “The absurd misconception here is that the Frenchman thinks of nothing but coarse pleasure, food, drink, and so on and so forth. My own experience with the French, however, tells me that they are cultivated, refined, and devoted to the highest ideals of western civilization.”

  Rock noticed that Murphy was becoming uneasy, waiting with apprehension for this authority’s verdict on the Jews.

  “I make it my business to find out the truth about people for myself,” Fickett said. “I’m not interested in what the majority of people think of one people or another. That’s their business. I will acquaint myself with what they think, solely as a guide, but that is all. The Jewish people, for instance. The vast majority of the public is convinced that the Jewish people are materialistic, clever, aggressive, overbearing, demanding, and so on and so forth. What nonsense!”

  Fickett smiled, then said, “My own experience tells me that the Jewish people are intelligent, quick to adapt themselves to a new environment, a new tradition, a new order, a new trade or profession. They have speed, plus patience, a rare combination. They love good things, the things money can buy. Good homes, good clothes, good cars, good investments. I have always admired the Jewish people. I marvel at their cunning in the achievement of good. I take off my hat to them.”

  He removed his hat, apparently by accident, and began to fan himself with it.

  Murphy, uncomfortable and bewildered, removed his hat, too, and also began to fan himself.

  What a crook! Rock thought. What a clean-cut crook!

  In the rear-view mirror he noticed that Murphy was dying like a dog, and in the airplane, more than a quarter of a century later, Elton Fickett long since dead, Murphy himself long since gone to the real city, Rock could not forget how, sooner or later, every man dies like a dog, moaning and wagging his tail.

  A man is a born liar who cannot tell a lie. A man can be a decent animal. His friends are meaningless unless they are decent animals. But a man’s friends are polite and lying animals, as a man himself knows. There is never a lie in the life of any animal that is worth being told, or any truth that is worth being concealed.

  Thus, in the end, a man’s best friend is his money, his tobacco, his whisky. A man’s best friend is his feet, his hide, and his head. A man’s best friend is his own time. His best friend is the sun, the very same which made light and heat for his father, and for his mother: the same that shined on him when he was no older than his son, on whom it shines now. A man is a born liar, born of liars, the father o
f them, and his best friend is his own animal which cannot lie, but may lie down in the heat of the afternoon, in the shade of a tree, and be there, be a friend there, be alive a moment there, half-asleep and half as if he had been there all the time. A man’s own brother cannot be his friend, but a man can be the friend of his poor world and time. There is no truth for a man, there is no friendship for him except the truth of the sun, the friendship of time, his own personal sun and his own personal time. There is nothing to say of these things. They are there and a man is there, and there’s his truth and there’s Us friendship.

  On the airplane, he woke up with a start and looked for somebody in uniform, for they were the ones who had the needed information. They were the ones who started elevators with castinets, who kept fools behind ropes outside moving picture theatres, who were members of the academy, who opened the doors of taxis at hotels, restaurants and fashionable saloons, who knew the answers. He saw one in uniform, and called to her.

  She came to him, beside him, upon him, as if to be embraced, her eyes and lips smiling a little, which is the way of them on airplanes, and she said, “Yes, Mr. Wagram.” She spoke softly, as if they were somewhere where this might be explored, worked upon, given any life it might be entitled to.

  “Will you tell me when we will reach San Francisco?” he said.

  “We’re on time,” she said.

  “Even so,” he said. “When will we reach there?”

  “At half past five,” she said. “It’s almost half past four now.

  You’ve had no lunch. You were asleep, and I thought it best not to disturb you.”

  “I had coffee and doughnuts in Chicago.”

  “Would you like something now?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Magazine?”

  “What magazine?”

  “National Geographic, Esquire, Secret Stories.”

  “They still publishing Secret Stories?” he said.

  “Somebody who got off at Chicago left an old one on his seat,” the girl said. “February, 1930. I’ve been looking through it. Would you like to look through it, too?”

  “No, I think I’d better not,” Rock said. “What sort of secrets were they?”

  “You know,” she said. “Love, marriage, lies, adultery.”

  “You like this work?” Rock said.

  “Love it.”

  “You like travel?”

  “People,” she said. “I’ll sit down a minute if you don’t mind.”

  “Please do,” Rock said. “What do you like about them?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I just like them. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t dislike them,” Rock said, “but mainly they break my heart.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “They’re always lying, or dying,” Rock said. “They tell lies all their lives, and then they die. As long as they’re alive, I don’t mind the lies, but when they die, the lies break my heart.”

  “What do you mean by lies?” she said. “Like a girl tells her boy friend she loves him, then two-times him?”

  “That example’s all right,” Rock said, “but it’s not what I mean. Have you had any experience at all with cerebral hemorrhage?”

  “What do you mean?” the girl said. “Have I had one?”

  “No,” Rock said. “Have you known anyone who’s had one? A grandfather, or somebody your father knew. How is your father?”

  “He’s fine,” the girl said. “No. We’ve had some experience with heart. Attacks, you know. On the plane, I mean. Had a man die on us one time between San Francisco and Chicago. We came down of course to get him to a doctor, but he was dead.”

  “Does he worry about you?” Rock said. “I mean, you’re not much more than twenty-one or twenty-two.”

  “I’m twenty-four,” the girl said. “Of course he worries about me. He thinks being a hostess on an airplane is a foolish career for a girl, but I don’t expect to be a hostess all my life.”

  “What do you expect?” Rock said.

  “You know.”

  “You mean to get married?”

  “Of course.”

  “To somebody you meet on an airplane?”

  “Just the first time on the airplane,” she said.

  “Oh yes,” Rock said. “Meet later on, off the airplane.”

  “Of course,” the girl said. “Although we did have a girl who got married on an airplane. Publicity, of course. Miriam.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Miriam. Hers was, too.”

  “Well, I guess if she could do it, you can do it, too. What’s your last name?”

  “Schwarzschild. Isn’t it awful?”

  “Not at all. You are a dark child.”

  “I’d love to change it, though. Miriam Merlin.”

  “You know somebody named Merlin?”

  “No, but I like to put Miriam with other names. You know.”

  “How about Miriam Morgenthau?”

  “All that money?” the girl said.

  “What money?” Rock said.

  “Wasn’t he Secretary of the Treasury?”

  “I guess he was at that,” Rock said, “but the money wasn’t his, was it?”

  “Well, he was near it,” the girl said. “Anyway, I don’t like Morgenthau with Miriam.”

  “Is your mother well?”

  “Oh, swell.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard anybody speaking about somebody who had had a cerebral hemorrhage and got over it all right?”

  “A cyst,” she said. “I heard about a cyst once.”

  “No, that’s something else,” Rock said. “The veins get brittle, or a vein is weak someplace, and if the blood pressure has been high, and then gets higher, well, wherever the vein is weakest it breaks.”

  “Do you want some gum?”

  “No. Why?”

  “It helps when you can’t hear,” the girl said. “I just said a cyst isn’t serious.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Rock said. “I guess I’ll have some gum, after all. I didn’t hear you.”

  He received the packet containing two Chiclets from the girl, removed the cellophane and began to chew, making a saliva he hadn’t tasted in years, a hot, sick saliva, and he knew instantly when it had been. He had come home from school to find his father consoling his mother because his brother Haig was dead. He went into the room in which they both slept, and looked at his brother, and saw that Haig was dead. His father was walking in and out of the rooms of the house with his mother, and his sister was following them. He sat on his own bed and looked at his brother in the other bed. He never did know how or why he took the wrapping away from the two sticks of gum and got them into his mouth and began to chew, making the hot, sick saliva, the same saliva that was in his mouth now.

  “Haig,” he said.

  He didn’t cry. His father didn’t, either. It was just his mother and his sister Vava crying. His father was saying her name to his mother again and again. Rock sat on his bed, looking at his brother’s face, chewing the gum, as he was chewing it now, swallowing enormous mouthfuls of hot saliva.

  “God damn you, Haig!” he said.

  “Araxi,” his father said.

  “What did you say, Mr. Wagram?” the girl said.

  “Oh,” he said. “I wonder if I might look at that copy of Secret Stories, after all?”

  “I’ll get it for you,” the girl said. “It’s a scream. All lust, adultery, and murder, you know.”

  She brought him the magazine and said, “It’s been awful nice talking to you, Mr. Wagram.”

  He took the magazine and opened it somewhere near the middle, looking at the print, but not reading. “Araxi,” he said, the hot saliva pouring down his gullet. He stepped out into the aisle to the open area just behind his seat, to the water tap. He filled a paper cup full of water and tried to drink away the taste of death in his mouth. He drank many cups of water, eight or nine at least, but when he sat down again the taste was still there,
for a man’s own brother cannot be his friend, and a man cannot be a friend to his own mother when she has reached the quarrel with her own time, a man is helpless and he can do nothing but chew gum, look at the blurred print of Secret Stories, and swallow as hot saliva the lie that was her life, the truth that is her death.

  The only thing a man does all his life is breathe. The instant he inhales he is alive, the instant he exhales but does not inhale again he is dead. A man is very nearly everything the first time he inhales, he is very nearly nothing the last time he exhales, but between the first inhale and the last exhale a man is many things, and the things he does are many and strange. A man is a breathing thing. He breathes all the time. No matter what else a man does he also breathes. Breathing’s what a man is. He is born to breathe. His life is a life of breathing. A man’s appetite for air is everlasting. He stops breathing with violence. A man wants air to breathe, he wants the ability to breathe to stay with him, but in the end, in the time of his own end, every man is denied, he is denied the air he wishes to breathe, he is denied the ability to breathe, he stops breathing, he can laugh no more. Never again can he look at something and see it: at a face and see a face: at a tree and see a tree: at a sky and see a sky: at the sun and see the sun. Never again can he reach out to the things which are and touch them. Never again can he listen and hear: the crying of his infant son, the laughter of his infant daughter, the speech and song of both of them, the whispering at night of his woman. Let him be denied air to breathe and it is never again for him. Let the miracle of breathing be denied him, and though the earth be filled with the scent of water, grass, leaf, blossom, bee, and butterfly, it is never again for him. There will be no more dandruff from his head, no more junk for him to accumulate, no more gadgets to operate. He will make no more debris, he will be debris, he will be the original debris, silver and gold in his dead teeth. Never again will he be a man who could stand on a street corner, look around, and speak to somebody. Never again will he be a king, a commander in chief, a millionaire, a vice-president in charge of production, a philanthropist, a labor leader, a locomotive engineer, a poet, an actor, a convict, a warden, a preacher, a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a schoolboy, a son, a brother, a father, a good man, a bad man, a man of truth, a man of honor, a man of dignity, a crook, a deceiver, a sneak, a liar. If he can’t breathe, he can’t be anything but debris. If he can’t breathe, he can’t love anyone or hurt anyone. He can’t get into a car and drive, he can’t take a train, he can’t get into an airplane, he can’t get aboard a ship, he can’t ride a bicycle, he can’t walk. He can’t stand to walk. He can’t sit. He can’t lie down. He can’t sleep, he can’t sleep worth a damn any more. His memory fails him. He doesn’t seem to remember anything any more. He has no taste for meat or bread or wine or water any more. He doesn’t care which pair of shoes he puts on his feet. He doesn’t even remember if he had feet. Didn’t he go another way than by foot? Worst of all he can’t laugh any more. He can’t joke any more. He can’t tell stories any more. He can’t talk any more. He can’t understand the alphabet any more. He can’t say cat. He can’t talk with words and be saying at the same time other things than what the words are saying, funnier things, better things, more loving things, kinder, gentler, more gently wicked than the violent wickedness of literalness. Something’s happened. He’s exhaled and he can’t inhale any more. It is the end. It is the end of the world he was. It is the end of being out of touch. That which he knew would happen has happened. A man is dead, he is dirt, he is given a funeral, he is buried, he is no more, and never again will he go there.