After exhausting the local orchestras, Mays progressed to the rarified atmosphere of chamber music. He’d go through the weekly performance listings in the papers, making a prepass for clarinets and a second search by gender. Although less expensive to attend, these concerts made him extremely claustrophobic. First the violin would go noodle, then the cello would go noodle, and by the time the clarinet got hold of the noodle and ran it over the goal line, Mays was humming the theme song from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and wondering nervously if the little hall held enough air for all the heavy breathers.
Besides these longhair recitals, he also frequented a brood of football halftimes, a brace of USO galas, a pride of nightclubs, a clatch of coffee houses, and an exaltation of church choirs. At the end, he was broke and exhausted, and had found no phantom. Twice he was almost arrested for charging through crowds after women with the right coloration. Ultimately, he would have doubted the figure’s existence in the light of so much statistical evidence if Delaney had not also seen, pointed out in fact, that upstream parade anachronism those months before.
Yet he still would have avoided Bullock, so great was his distaste for the man or so great his love for the impossible search, had not the matter been taken out of his hands. His eternal anticipating, attending, or recuperating from the latest concert caused his editing at Micro, which had never been much more than a euphemism, to settle a comfortable notch below travesty. Delaney, pleading altruism, squealed the matter to Caro. (“What’s more important, a minor friendship or the best goddamn electronics rag west of Bangor?”) It marked the third time Mays had been kept on the trail by well-meaning friends.
After Dougo told her what was up, Citizen Brink called Mays into the inner sanctum sanctorum for a little tête-à-tête. Throughout the whole hoopla, Peter began to develop a profound respect for Moseley simply because the old guy left him alone. During their closed conference, Caroline refused to take any phone calls, although the incessant ringing caused more distraction than taking the calls would have. She demanded to know what the big idea was.
—Could you be more specific?
—Don’t be evasive, Peter. You saw some woman out of a window, and have taken it into your head to hunt her down? A tad dime-storish, wouldn’t you say?
—Yes.
—Yes what?
—Yes . . . ma’am?
—Dash it, Peter.
Mays appreciated being present at the first use of the word “dash” since Kipling. Somehow, though, it fit Caroline better than her earlier forays into stronger profanity.
—Can you tell me what use such an escapade could possibly produce, I suppose?
Brink had the irritating habit of saying “I suppose” for “I wonder.”
—No use, I’m afraid.
In fact, his wayward salmon-woman made a fine triumvirate of the useless along with parsley and Fidelio.
—There’s no explaining it, chief.
—Everything has an explanation.
—Well then, the reason I’m chasing this stranger is because I refuse to believe everything has a reason.
Brink played with her paperweight, the world’s lightest, CMOS, nonvolatile, programmable computer. She’d picked it up at a press conference as a coverage bribe. Her whole office was swamped with such techno-memorabilia: silicon wafers embedded in plastic, posters of processor command sets, photos of Edison and Ford on camping trips.
—If you’re that desperate for human companionship, why don’t you take out a personal ad in the weeklies? A lot of losers do that. You know: Straight White Male looking for females, all races, colors, creeds, for meaningless relationships. Contact . . .
—I’ve tried that already: Redhead Clarinetist, Vets’ Day Parader, must meet. Name spot and time.
—Cripes. Couldn’t you have fixed on someone nearer at hand? You couldn’t even have seen this woman very well from up here. Did you notice the teeth? Teeth are very important. A lot of redheads fall down in the teeth department.
Peter was now nauseated. Caroline talked of sex with the same clinical curiosity and wholesome attitude with which she approached a product showcase. That was decidedly unhealthy. Mays was all for taking sex out of the classroom and putting it back in the cloakroom. Besides, his attraction to the figure was if anything collectorial, not sexual.
—Well, she’s thin, from what I could see. And she seemed, I don’t know, antique, somehow.
—Thin? Antique? Listen, there’s a nursing home up by Mass. General not four blocks from here . . .
—Not antique, then. Out of place. Like a memory that you can’t quite get a bead on.
And for some reason—there are always reasons that reason cannot comprehend—Mays imagined the same woman, in the same gathered skirts, stepping onto an entry dock somewhere in the last century.
—Now Peter, you’re putting me in a bind. I’m sure you see why I’d like to keep you on as an editor . . .
Mays distinctly did not see. The only explanation was that Caro had to settle for semicompetence, as all the truly competent were in industry, making the big bucks, instead of in trade journalism, writing about them.
— . . . but I really don’t need another Dougo.
The reason she needed the first was not entirely clear.
—Here. Take this eight dollars right now, get a cab to Lenny’s office in Cambridge, and have him straighten out this thing once and for all. I tell you he knows everyone in the Boston music industry. And I just hope you know what you plan to do when you find this woman.
Only now, staring down at the frenetic news ticker, did Mays realize that Caroline’s last question had been the clincher. Nothing cures longing like a dose of success.
The trip to Bullock’s office, admittedly a long shot, was no longer than many trips he had recently made. He brought along his parade manifest, a prime-number sieve on which he had penciled out each name as he eliminated it. Bullock might, at very least, help him eliminate a few more, bringing the total down to several hundred. The opiate spell of the Teletype clack was broken by a greeting from across the room:
—Nicky!
The reason Bullock insisted on calling Peter “Nicky” was lost in antiquity. Mays had only one suspect hypothesis: his last name reminded Bullock of a famous baseball player’s and, by free association, of this player’s only contemporary peer, whose first name sounded vaguely like Nicky. This tortuous synaptic route must have burned permanently into Bullock’s mind on their first meeting, for it now offered the neurological path of least resistance. Mays, long ago having elevated diffidence to the level of a cult, only smiled in recognition at the greeting, but retaliated by calling back:
—Leonard!
As with all overly fastidious people, Bullock was too compensatorily casual in public. His full name made him wince, and he put forward “Len” as if giving orders. Most of his friends compromised at “Lenny.” His was the miser’s generosity, the man who invites guests for dinner to show how magnanimous he can be over cigarette burns in the priceless Persian rug. He would, of course, have insisted on being addressed by his full title, complete with middle initial, if he thought he could get compliance. Barring that, he faked affability. As on the Exchange, he who conceals the most wins.
—Leonard, good to see you after all these . . . weeks. How are things going with you?
Mays had started adult life asking “How are you?” but this late in the century, had switched to the greeting that was each year earning more and more of the market share.
—Not too bad, Nicky. Of course, the market’s gone to hell in a half-track, and it’s been pretty rude about it, too. Bonds have saved my ass. I’ll tell you, my friend, I can give you the number of a great little convertible I’ve got a line on. Heavily discounted, a real bargain. It would break every exchange regulation for me to tell you, but four years from now you’ll be thanking me for buying you in at the bottom of this godforsaken slump.
—Four years from now, Leonard, we�
�ll both be dead.
—What are you talking about? Jesus, you haven’t gone and joined the doom patrol, have you?
Mays, as startled as Bullock by his own oracular pronouncement, did as he always did when the conversation turned serious. He clammed up.
—Look, Nicky. I’m talking nineteen, twenty, maybe twenty-two percent per annum. After taxes.
—Thanks, Leonard. I prefer to spend my money.
In the ensuing silence, both men realized they had gotten to the conflagration without first shaking hands. Bullock bluffed his way out of the deadlock by affecting extreme good humor.
—OK, friend. Who needs wealth beyond their wildest expectations anyway?
He pulled Peter away from the wire and ushered him unceremoniously into a combination salt mine/entertainment area. Bullock’s desk was impeccable: unbroken ranks of trust prospecti, Standard and Poor’s stock guides, and back issues of Certified Trader, a trade-press journal expressly for brokers. Mays recognized this rag as another of Powell’s magazine sectors, floor three.
If Brink did fire him, Mays could get Delaney to fake him a résumé and he could get on this other masthead. He’d already worked out the details of a great market system: buy low, sell high. Bullock could serve him up a steady source of speculation, innuendo, and blatant fabrication, the stuff the trade press thrives on and enshrines on the editorial page. The arrangement would benefit Bullock too, who could show himself and his clients confirmation of his own rumors in print. Brokers, like General Staffs, want nothing more than to be able to believe their own communiqués when they filter back to them through the chain of command. And rumors, once in trade print, tend to fuel themselves into fact. For if enough of the public believes the report that a given investment issue is about to fall, they will make it happen. Forget the bit about how no bear market is inevitable until it breaks out. Bears break out when the first fellow asks, “What if?”
Kitty-corner to the spotless desk was a suitably disheveled lounging cubicle consisting of an oval coffee table and two aggressively Scandinavian chairs. The office furniture, while not as progressively modular as Micro’s, nevertheless was designed to anticipate all considerations except the human body. Violent scoops of polyethylene might have passed for hardwood if it weren’t for a certain pattern of cross-graining that conspicuously repeated again and again in each chair. As Peter came down in one, his eyes caught a notepad on the table stamped with the Phillips logo and stenciled From the Desk of Len Bullock. In red-pen calligraphy, there appeared a flowery scrawl: “Shld be w. 250K min per an.” Bullock leaned over and snatched the pad nonchalantly.
He sat down affably and reached around to the file drawer on the bottom right of his desk. His hands still concealed in the drawer, he poured from a bottle, conjuring up two plastic cups. He served, and whispered:
—Kahlua. It can pass for coffee in these parts. It’s every able body for itself in this profession, so we’re safe.
Mays watched him slug the stuff down.
—Come on, drink up, drink up, ye Princeton men. Thiamine or something. Puts hair on your ass. It’s on-the-job description in this office. You think the rest of these goons could go day after day, watching their profit line crumble like the Maginot, without hitting up a bracer?
—How do you get it to steam like coffee?
—Trade secret. Nontoxic.
Mays drank, with the pleasure of calculating that Brink was now paying him in excess of $5.37 an hour to get stewed with her boyfriend. Unable to think of a way to get the conversation ramped back up, he reached back into racial memory and came up with:
—So, really Leonard. How are things with you? I mean really.
But Leonard did not answer at first. He had become engrossed with punching up stock quotations on a terminal that lodged itself on the table between the two. Mays had ceased to exist. In another minute Len lapsed into a simulated conversation that attested to a good deal of practice on his part.
—Pas mal. I mean, I don’t have cancer. And after cancer, what’s the number two killer? Everybody knows it’s boredom. And that only gets me a couple times a week. So I can’t complain. After all, there’s no known treatment for the big B, is there, Nicky? Nothing you can do except kill it by overfeeding.
—I’m glad to hear that you’re doing well. Are you doing anything with yourself, Leonard?
—Len. Doing? I make a living. Playing some hardball with the big boys. Let me tell you something, Nick. If you’re interested in becoming a big boy yourself, there are a lot of positions opening up. The way our nation’s finest industrials are going, more than a few of the big boys came to work on Monday and found their personal belongings in cardboard boxes in the hall.
Mays had nothing to say to this striking pronouncement, and said so emphatically.
—Yes, my friend, the little disturbances at the bottom produce large waves at the top. The upper branches start to wobble and the whole roost comes down. There’s a lot to say for being a little fish down at the bottom, wouldn’t you say?
Mays agreed without hesitation, though in his heart he believed that fish of whatever size did better in water than at any height in a tree. Bullock took a swig at his plastic cup, continuing to punch inquiries into the machine and to watch the readout intensely. As he spoke, his voice grew increasingly reminiscent of early Cagney. He sounded as if he wanted to take a grapefruit to the entire stock market.
Mays watched Lenny screw up his face into cheerful sadism with each piece of bad news that flashed across the screen. He tried to imagine the guy at Thursday night meetings of that group Caro had mentioned—the Cologne Chamber Music Society. Brink said he knew everyone in the music circuit; he probably sold them tax shelters between movements. The only explanation Mays could find for a person like Lenny being musical was that it kept him occupied one night a week, leaving only six more to kill. Lawn mowing by flashlight was good for another two, and he could always bring his work home with him.
But why music? It seemed so insubstantial a quantity for a man of Bullock’s obsession, so delicate, so few chances for spoils. Just then, Bullock must have punched up an issue that pleased him, because he began singing light opera. Mays knew the aria only from the old Warner Brothers cartoons—the tune they played whenever the rabbit tortured the bald guy with the speech impediment.
And at that, Mays hit on the connection between music and market mania. One dealt in bulls and bears, the other in crescendos and diminuendos. But both were about hidden movements, contexts, wordless proofs. Both made the small self feel part of something larger, companies on the one hand, an oceanic feeling on the other. Both dealt in cult objects, collectibles. Abstractions made the best purchasable commodities. And both could be played by the small investor.
—Dum, ditty-da dee, diggity. While the big boys fall, the little fish sometimes come up smelling like a rose. Look here, Nicky.
Bullock spun the lazy Susan that held the terminal until a stock summary sat staring Mays in the face. The neat columns and rows meant nothing to him. He was no good with foreign languages; he had failed his first year of French, not being able to repeat Je m’appelle Jacques for the simple reason that his name was Peter. In his first four weeks at Micro, he sat for days at a shot, looking at long articles he was supposed to edit, hoping Moseley could not hear him giggling in devastation. The same dissociation struck him if he said the word “couch” twenty times in rapid succession.
In a minute, he began to pick out stray shreds: YH and YL had to be year high and low; O for open, CL for closed; B, bid, A, asked. The issue was a certain Trans-Air Transport, up considerably since that morning. It had to be the item that Bullock had tried to sell him twice now. Mays looked up for confirmation, but Bullock had already gone off in search of other conquests and was now emptying the ashtrays.
—For every loser, there has to be a winner. It’s that simple. A buyer for each seller. Zero sum. Impossible to get anything more elegant, more moral.
Mays de
clined another Kahlua and wondered how Bullock could find anything on the impeccable desk to straighten further. Len put all the periodicals in razor-sharp formation, then carefully mussed one up.
—Viciously moral. Because two points down hurts you more than two points up helps. A big boy has to sink for a little fish to rise. Or to put it still differently . . .
—Leonard, I used to be in sort of a hurry . . .
—I was just going to ask you what I could help you with, Nick. I assume you came here for a reason, that Claire Booth Luce doesn’t pay your way over here to turn down sure-thing tips.
Nine dollars and eleven cents, thought Mays. Having lost his last chance to pace the thing properly, he rushed out his story. The feeling he got from blurting out the history of his construed fixation was similar to how it had always felt when peeing in his pants as a child: pleasant for the first few seconds, then decidedly uncomfortable.
As much as possible, he tried to tell the saga of red hair from the eighth-story window from the detached, dramatic view of a professional storyteller. Perhaps because the whole scenario seemed so ludicrous, it now seemed important to make the tale as interesting as possible. To seduce and hold Bullock’s interest was the main thing, and to do that, Mays embellished the plot, depersonalized the “I” until he appeared to be talking about someone else. He paid huge attention to details, which at times threatened to take over the story line. Carried away, he made his recent life come across like Moby-Dick, at least with regard to the love interest.
There is some stranger, someone with the aura of another time, he wanted to meet: was that all, was that the extent of it? Mays had no idea what story Bullock was hearing. Barring some hidden clap-, laugh-, or sob-o-meter, he had no idea of how things went over. For the time being, at least, Lenny had stopped his compulsive straightening and seemed mildly taken in. After finishing his elaborate plea for assistance, Mays sat in the storyteller’s shame.
—A red-haired musician? Not in any of the area’s regular ensembles? She marched in the Vets’ Parade, but is not in any of the bands listed on the roster. You’re sure you haven’t crossed any names off without more than probable cause? And you say she plays . . . ?
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 12