Anyone Got a Match?

by Max Shulman

  Virgil had been only twenty-three years old when he assumed his instructor’s duties at Acanthus, and being only twenty-three he was full of burning zeal to raise the level of scholarship. The burning zeal underwent an instant hosing upon encountering Nineteen Meyers’ book-proof athletes. He could not teach them, nor could he expel them because they were protected by Nineteen, who was, in turn, protected by Jefferson. Nor could Virgil leave town because he was the only family Jefferson had, as Jefferson never tired of reminding him. Nor could Virgil quit his job because he had chosen to devote his life to learning, and in Owens Mill, Acanthus College, save the mark, was it.

  So Virgil stayed, and as his aged colleagues on the faculty were called, row on row, to Abraham’s bosom, Virgil perforce climbed up the academic ladder. It was not Jefferson’s influence that raised Virgil from instructor to prexy with such rapidity; it was a simple failure of geriatrics.

  Through all his tenure at Acanthus Virgil never stopped making sorties against the minds of the undergraduates. His record of failure was perfect. But even now as he stood in the kitchen of the hunting lodge loading a platter with Camembert, Oka, Brie, and Huntley and Palmer’s Export Assortment, he still nursed a tiny, faint, flickering hope that somehow, someday, he would pry loose the brute grip of Nineteen Meyers and turn Acanthus into a sure-enough temple of higher education.

  He carried the cheese and crackers into the living room, placed them on a coffee table, and sat down to resume riffling through the tragedies in his life. Abruptly he stopped. “That,” he said sternly to himself, “will be enough of that!” Self-pity begets self-pity, and it was definitely not Virgil’s line of work. Resolutely he put misfortune out of his mind and picked up a volume of James Conant. After a moment he laid the book aside. As long as he was doing a census of his traumas, he thought, he might as well do it properly. He had not yet touched the biggest setback of all, the crowning disappointment in a career of disappointments: the lady known as Boo.

  Boo was the great and only love of Virgil’s life. Naturally, with his kind of luck, she did not love him back. She was called Boo because she had been born Barbara Ogilvie Owens, a member of the Owens family and vaguely a second cousin to Virgil on his mother’s side. It was not, however, consanguinity that made Boo reject Virgil; she just plain did not want him.

  For a long time the feeling had been mutual. Boo was a few years younger than Virgil, and as children in this family-minded community they had, of course, seen one another often. Virgil had not then regarded her as a love-object. He had, in fact, thought of her more as a jockey. She owned a horse from whose back she would descend only at bedtime; even her meals were taken in the saddle; when she forgot to bring along a sandwich, she simply grazed with the horse.

  To the undisguised relief of her immediate and distant kin, she went away to school in her teens. She was spindly, pimpled, and bustless when she left; she returned transfigured—tall, slender, elegant, rounded, gracious, poised, and, most important, dismounted.

  Virgil looked upon the new Boo and was instantly smitten. She, on her part, was friendly to Virgil, even cordial, but she dated him no more often than she did a dozen other eager swains of the town.

  Even after Pearl Harbor when the young men of Owens Mill enlisted wholesale and Virgil, 4-F because of his leg, had Boo all to himself, he made no perceptible progress. “I love you, Virgil,” she kept saying, “but not that way.” (She was still saying it.)

  But Virgil, back in those first months after Pearl Harbor, was not dismayed. He clung to the conviction that if he could keep courting Boo without competitors for just a little while longer, he would surely wear her down.

  It was not to be. Competitors appeared in droves around the beginning of 1943. The Army Air Force set up a base outside Owens Mill, and luckless, dauntless Virgil again became one among many.

  Virgil still pursued Boo, and so did an impressive number of the officers and men of the Army Air Force, but in the end it was a rank outsider who lapped the field. The Okinawa campaign was raging in the Pacific, and news arrived that Owens Mill had its first war hero. A local attorney’s son, poor but of good bloodlines, by name Gabe Fuller, a lieutenant commander in naval aviation, won a posthumous Navy Cross for knocking a kamikaze out of the skies at the cost of his own life. The town buzzed with tales of Gabe’s gallantry. The town buzzed even louder when Boo made the astonishing announcement that she had quietly gone to San Francisco and married Gabe just before he sailed overseas to meet a hero’s death. By way of proof she produced a gold wedding band and a marriage license. If further proof were needed, she produced a baby boy some months later.

  The baby boy—Gabriel, as Boo named him—in no way dampened Virgil’s ardor. “It doesn’t matter about the baby,” he declared. “I will cherish him and raise him as my own. Boo, listen, you just got to marry me.”

  “I love you, Virgil,” she said, “but not that way.”

  Today Gabriel was eighteen years old, and Boo, though still a beautiful woman, was no longer a prime target for the blades of Owens Mill. Only Virgil remained constant, and no amount of discouragement could extinguish his hopes. Just as he believed he would one day infuse culture into Acanthus College, he believed that he would finally lead Boo to the altar. A stubborn man.

  He stirred now in the chair before the fireplace in the hunting lodge. He uttered a four-letter word and then he said it louder. He poured a stiff jolt of bourbon and knocked it back. At the moment he disapproved thoroughly of himself, not for playing a mugg’s game with Boo, or with Nineteen Meyers either, but for letting himself wallow so long in the slough of self-pity. Insidious, that’s what it was. Habit-forming. Fiber-destroying. Had blind Homer whimpered and whined? Or epileptic Caesar? Or stumpy Napoleon? Of course not. Well, neither would lame Virgil.

  Feeling better, he went to the window. The snow had stopped falling. The sky was washed bright, and on the horizon there suddenly appeared a long, white, double-rotored, banana-shaped helicopter. It approached rapidly, hovered for a moment directly overhead, whirring and beating, and then it descended to a clearing in front of the lodge.

  The Owenses had arrived.

  Chapter 2

  Flint Granite was a cowboy star who had played the lead for five years in one of America’s most beloved television series, Gut-Shooter. Flint was six feet, eight inches tall, all of it sinew.

  Ira Shapian was five feet, seven and one-quarter inches tall, and nearly strong enough to swim two laps in a forty-foot pool—sidestroke. Ira was a television executive, the West Coast vice-president of the Star Spangled Broadcasting Network.

  They sat now, Ira and Flint, in Ira’s Hollywood office, a room thirty by thirty, handsomely furnished in Early American chromium. Ira sat on one side of his spirochete-shaped desk, Flint on the other.

  “Stand up, Ira,” said Flint.

  Ira rose.

  “Take off your glasses,” said Flint.

  Ira removed his black-rimmed spectacles.

  Without haste, Flint reached across the desk and punched Ira in the nose.

  Ira sighed.

  “Think I broke it?” asked Flint.

  “I don’t think so,” Ira answered. “You usually hear kind of a cracking sound when it breaks. This was more like a splat.”

  “You’re bleeding pretty bad,” said Flint. “Want my handkerchief?”

  “No, thank you,” said Ira. “Just tell Miss Goldberg when you leave.”

  “Right, pardner,” said Flint. He walked out of Ira’s office, and within seconds Miss Goldberg entered, carrying a basin of ice cubes and several hand towels. Ira stretched out on a sofa, his head hanging over the edge. Miss Goldberg, a stocky, gray-haired spinster of sixty, knelt beside him and went to work without comment or delay.

  “It’s stopped,” she said after five minutes of applying ice.

  “Thank you,” he said and stood up.

  “He should of killed you,” said Miss Goldberg.

  “Yes,” Ira agreed. “Get
me Clendennon in New York.”

  Miss Goldberg nodded. She made a quick survey of the bloodstains on Ira’s clothes. “Better you should change the whole garments,” she said.

  “Good thinking,” said Ira, and when Miss Goldberg left to place the phone call, he walked into his executive dressing room that led from his executive office to his executive bathroom. Here was a fully stocked wardrobe containing a wide selection of shirts, all of them white; a large gallery of neckties, all of them black; a generous assortment of cashmere hose, all black; and a half-dozen suits, all with vests, all with jackets having two vents in the rear and vestigial lapels in the front, all in various shades of black: dark black, coal black, total-eclipse black, Stygian black, pitch black, and stove black. Ira’s employer, Mr. Harry Clendennon, president of the Star Spangled Broadcasting Network, cherished a conviction that people are more inclined to believe you when you lie to them in black.

  Ira stripped to his shorts, which were made of peach-colored nylon and embroidered with a flight of monarch butterflies. “Oy!” said Miss Goldberg, who had appeared unannounced at the dressing room door. “Would Mr. Clendennon ever give it to you if he saw those drawers!”

  “A man’s crotch is his castle,” said Ira with dignity. “Is Clendennon on the line?”

  “In conference. Call you back in half an hour,” she answered. “But hurry up dressing. Scarpitta is waiting outside.”

  “Oh, God!” groaned Ira.

  “Well, at least he only cries,” said Miss Goldberg philosophically. “That’s better than hit.”

  “I wonder,” mused Ira. “Okay, tell him I’ll be right with him.”

  She walked out and Ira began to dress. Despite Mr. Scarpitta waiting in the outer office, Ira dressed slowly, pausing often to ruminate while he buttoned buttons. Once, as he was thinking, a little smile flitted across his face. He was remembering a question Ezra and Leo had asked him long ago. Ezra and Leo were Ira’s twin sons, and normally he did not smile when he thought about them. They were eighteen years old now, and they passed their days chiefly in lifting. They lifted barbells, girls, friends, acquaintances, passersby, boulders, small automobiles, and most anything else that came to hand. Occasionally they stopped lifting long enough to go surf-riding or scuba diving, or to kick sand in the faces of ninety-seven-pound weaklings—not maliciously, let it be emphasized, only playfully. It never occurred to Ezra and Leo to be malicious. In fact, almost nothing ever occurred to them. They were dumb as a set of matched posts and beautiful as a brace of Greek gods. They were large, bronzed, vacuous, untroubled, muscular, and semiaquatic, as endemically Californian as the dateburger.

  When the twins had been small boys, before Ira realized the Los Angeles sun was baking their brains out, he had doted on them. It was those days Ira was thinking of now as he dressed in his executive dressing room. He was recalling an evening he had come home from work, and the twins had looked up at him trustingly with their lovely, liquid Armenian eyes, and they had asked, “Daddy, what do you do at the office?”

  “I nice,” he had answered.

  “Oh,” they had said, satisfied.

  Ira selected a black necktie and knotted it. “Yeah,” he said to himself grimly, “and that’s what I still do: nice.”

  In television to nice is a verb, generally transitive. It means to inspire confidence, which is no small thing in television because, in the main, actors are paranoiac, agents are mendacious, and advertising men are haunted by the harrowing knowledge that if they should disappear, nobody would notice it.

  To deal with this distrustful lot, tv producers search diligently for somebody who can nice. Producers, of course, cannot do it themselves, for who would trust a producer? Therefore they must seek out men so shiningly honest, so unchallengeably aboveboard—in short, so nice—that their statements will be accepted on faith even by actors, agents, and ad men.

  Ira Shapian was such a man. He never lied. That is to say, he lied all the time, but he never knew he was lying while he lied. The punch in the nose by Flint Granite, described earlier, will serve to illustrate.

  Every television series, even one so dear to the hearts of the nation as Gut-Shooter, must someday reach the end of the trail. A year ago Gut-Shooter was canceled after five seasons on the Star Spangled Broadcasting Network, and Flint Granite found himself at liberty, much to the delight of ABC, CBS, and NBC. ABC offered Flint the role Robert Horton had left on Wagon Train; CBS offered him the deputy’s part in Gunsmoke; NBC proposed writing him in as a fourth son in Bonanza.

  While big Flint mulled these mighty attractive offers, Harry Clendennon, president of Star Spangled and a much better muller, did some mulling of his own in his New York headquarters. He rapidly broke the problem into its two component parts: first, he had to keep Flint at Star Spangled because it was flatly not thinkable to let a rival network grab off such a valuable piece of flesh; second, Star Spangled was completely booked for the year and consequently Clendennon had no series to offer Flint.

  What, then, was the solution? Why, it was simplicity itself, thought Clendennon, cackling in his black suit, and he picked up the phone and called Ira Shapian in Hollywood.

  “Ira baby, it’s Harry,” said Clendennon, smiling over three thousand miles of AT&T wire. “How does it march?”

  “Just peachy-keen, Harry baby,” said Ira. “Just ticketyboo.”

  “How’s that lovely Molly of yours, you lucky dog?” asked Clendennon.

  “Also peachy-keen,” said Ira, “but I think her name is Polly. I’ll ask when I get home.”

  “You stone me!” cried Clendennon, laughing silverly. “You’re a regular Joe Penner!”

  “Flatterer!” said Ira.

  “Ira, I’m calling about the big horseapple kicker. How do you stand with him—still A-OK?”

  “Flint Granite? Well, sure, we’re friends, I guess.”

  “Friends?” said Clendennon deprecatingly. “He loves you!”

  “All right, he loves me.”

  “And who does not?… Now, listen, doll buggy, I want you to tell Flint to say no to the other networks and sign with us.”

  “Why?” asked Ira sharply. “We have no series for him—none that I’ve heard about, anyhow.”

  “I’m sorry, Ira. I’d give my left gonad to tell you what we’ve got, but when you luck onto something this big, it’s lock-and-key time.”

  “Harry, one favor. Please, please don’t ask me to give the cowboy a finger. It’s shooting birds on the ground.”

  “Finger, he says! All my friends and loved ones should get such a finger! This just happens to be the biggest thing that ever hit television, that’s all.”

  “Harry, you’re lying. You and I both know there’s no time left on the network.”

  “For this one, chickie, we’ll make time.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Pal, I swore I wouldn’t breathe a—oh, hell, who can hold out on a pussycat like you? All right, I’ll give you two words, but that’s all: John Steinbeck.”

  “John Steinbeck is going to write a series for Flint Granite?” shouted Ira.

  “Cool it, cool it!” Clendennon whispered urgently. “The walls have ears.”

  “Sorry,” said Ira. “John Steinbeck? The Nobel Prize? Wow!”

  “I leave it to you, sweetie-face,” said Clendennon and hung up the phone softly.

  First thing next morning Ira met with Flint and proposed the deal. “Pardner,” said Flint, his blue eyes looking straight into Ira’s black ones, “I never heard tell of this here Mr. Steinbeck, but if’n you say I should do it, why, that’s good enough for me.”

  So Flint signed Ira’s contract, never so much as glancing at it, and he notified ABC, CBS, and NBC to make other plans because he was not available.

  For the next thirteen weeks Flint called Ira daily to find out how Mr. Steinbeck was progressing with the scripts. Ira, in turn, called Clendennon, who reminded Ira that Mr. Steinbeck was, after all, a genius and could not be chivied li
ke some television hack. Ira then relayed this information to Flint, who said he reckoned it must be so.

  At the end of thirteen weeks, Flint’s first option came up. Clendennon phoned Ira and announced sadly that Mr. Steinbeck had bowed out of the project in order to travel with Charley through Mexico and Yucatán. Nobody could be sorrier than Clendennon, said Clendennon, but in view of the circumstances, there was nothing except for Ira to notify Flint that his option had been dropped.

  “You bastard,” said Ira, and then he said other things, about a half-hour’s worth, but finally he summoned Flint and broke the bad news. The punch in the nose followed immediately.

  During his years at Star Spangled, Ira had received a round dozen punches in the nose. There had also been a sizable number of kicks in the shin. From female stars there had been cascades of tears, sometimes followed by fingernails in the face. On one gaudy occasion involving a Parisian chanteur, Ira had even been challenged to a duel.

  It may be fairly asked why Ira, if he were such a nice man, allowed himself to be used so wickedly. The answer is quickly given: Ira was paid $3,000 a week.

  He loathed himself for what he was doing. He felt like a man swimming through a sewer. But all the same, he kept swimming because three thousand a week, after taxes, was not quite enough to cover his house and pool in Bel Air, his house and pool in Palm Springs, his Negro butler, his Japanese gardener, his Jaguar Mark VII, his wife’s Buick station wagon, his twins’ Austin-Healey, his Chagall, his Rouault, and a Beverly Hills dentist who had somehow persuaded him that uncapped front teeth were infra dig.

  About these accretions—the houses, pools, servants, cars, paintings, and porcelain jackets—Ira’s feelings were ambivalent. Or perhaps tri-bivalent. Possibly even quadri-bivalent.

  There were times when he surveyed his possessions and was suffused with a glow of pride. “Not bad for an Armenian kid from Tenth Avenue,” he would tell himself, swelling. At other times, looking over the very same possessions, he would actually tremble with rage. “Chains!” he would yell, silently or aloud. “Diamond-studded chains—that’s what I got!” Then there were times when he felt both pride and rage simultaneously, often accompanied by an obbligato of disgust, desolation, and spastic colon.