by Max Shulman
“What do you want?” she inquired from within her bedroom.
“I thought you might like something before you retired.… I know I would.”
“Get the hell out of here,” said my wife.
With a brave little smile, I turned and went downstairs. Three months married, and, except for the first night, still an unkissed groom. In fact, I remembered ruefully, there had been no kissing on the first night either. The other, yes; kissing, no.
Suddenly depressed, I went into the kitchen to fix myself a snack. When I am low in my mind, nothing cheers me up like food. I poured a jar of anchovies over a beef tongue and fell to. As always, food helped. By the time I finished the beef tongue, my heart had stopped aching. After eating a bottle of maraschino cherries and a tin of pork shoulder, my melancholy was quite dissipated.
I opened a can of pearl onions and reflected calmly. I took, you might say, an inventory. What had I had three months ago? What did I have today?
The first advantage was staring me in the face. Through the open door of the refrigerator I could see bottles of milk and cream, slabs of cheese, platters of meat, cans of beer, condiments and relishes, appetizers, vegetables, desserts, juices, fruits, preserves. And what had there been in my father’s refrigerator? I’ll tell you what: caps.
Take clothes. Three months ago I had owned a single suit, a factory reject. Today the abundant wardrobe of Dad Geddes was all mine. I had suits for every conceivable occasion—lounge suits, business suits, sports suits, formal suits, even a Tyrolean suit with short leather britches. (For a while I thought I’d never have occasion to wear the Tyrolean outfit, but I finally did get a chance. The Civic Opera Company put on William Tell, and I wore it to the performance.)
Today I had a waterproof room. Today I had money in my pocket. Today I had a cigarette lighter with a pencil on the other end. Had any of these conditions obtained three months ago? They had not.
And consider my professional status. For the first time I was a busy and successful attorney. Of all the lawyers in town, Payson Atterbury had chosen me to copy Webster’s New International Dictionary and count all the blocks in the city. It was a massive undertaking, and I could not but feel proud that Mr. Atterbury had considered my legal talents sufficient for the task.
I opened a can of pie cherries. In three short months tremendous gains had accrued to me. The credit side of my ledger was loaded. On the debit side there was only one entry: my wife denied me her bed.
I do not mean to minimize this fact. Make no mistake: it troubled me, some nights acutely. On one such night I conceived a desperate plan. Putting on false whiskers and disguising my voice, I knocked on my wife’s door and told her I had come to read her meter. Unfortunately, my ruse was doomed to failure; the real meter reader was already in bed with her.
Unarguably my love life was unsatisfactory. But, I asked myself as I munched a cold ear of corn, was that much of a price to pay for what I had gained? It was not. Never had one man got so much for so little. Besides, I could always call on Wrose Wrigley. Or, better still, take cold showers.
And anyhow, who knew what might happen? Miss Geddes might suddenly change toward me. Living under the same roof as we were, she could not continue to ignore my not inconsiderable charms. Admittedly I still had some rough edges, but they were daily fewer. I was steadily becoming more poised, more suave, more full of graces. Surely my wife would have to notice it.
And I would cultivate additional talents that were certain to please her. I would take up the mandolin. I would learn the maxixe. I would memorize Kipling’s If. I would buy a gold-headed walking stick. The woman was only flesh and blood; could she resist all this?
Where there’s a will, I told myself, opening a jar of Maatjes herring, there’s a way.
CHAPTER 15
“Zyzzogeton,” I said and smiled at Mrs. Hargreaves.
“The last one?” she asked.
I nodded. We had at length reached the last word in Webster’s New International Dictionary.
She sighed. “All right,” she said, “give me the definition.”
As I read her the definition of zyzzogeton, a South American leaf hopper with grooved tibiae, I could not help thinking how attractively grooved Mrs. Hargreaves’ own tibiae were, but I put the thought resolutely from my mind. There was work to be done; I still had to count all the blocks in the city. This was no time for dalliance. Anyhow, all my attempts to couple with Mrs. Hargreaves had met with a conspicuous lack of success. I have described my first vain foray; there were many others, all failures. Although my persistence was not unaccompanied by ingenuity, her reactions were always negative. Even when I read aloud to her from This Is My Beloved, she remained unmoved.
But, like I said, this was no time for dalliance; there was work to be done. Mr. Atterbury had been patient—not to say uninterested—so far, but one never knew when he might pop in and expect his job to be done. And when one has a client as good as Mr. Atterbury, one tries to please him as well as one can. Especially when one has no other clients.
So without delay I put on good English walking shoes and a pair of tweed knickerbockers and set out on the second half of my assignment—counting all the blocks in the city. I started on the outskirts. My plan was to walk in concentric circles, spiraling inward until I had reached the center of town. For the first day or two I walked through almost rural surroundings. The houses were few and widely scattered, the streets were unpaved, wildflowers were rife, and dogs bit me freely. As my circles narrowed, the terrain became more and more citified. I was soon walking through streets of suburban houses. There was an occasional store, a hospital here and there, a few schools—including Wellfleet College. I single out Wellfleet College because of a curious story connected with that institution.
It seems that several years ago there was a young instructor at Wellfleet whose name was Selby Lake. Lake taught a course called psychology laboratory. The work in this course consisted of running white mice over mazes to see how rapidly they could learn to get from one end of the maze to the other. Students would stand by with notebooks and record the running time of the mice. Afterward the students would correlate and graph the data. This kind of work is something less than exciting, and anybody who had anything better to do kept away from psychology laboratory. Enrollment normally came to about twelve students.
In American colleges instructors who conduct popular and well-attended classes sometimes are paid as much as fifteen hundred dollars a year. Since Lake did not fall into this golden circle, he had to get along on far less. His wife, an attractive and economical young woman, did the best she could with her meager budget. Each night for dinner she served a meat loaf which was made with a large proportion of corn flakes. Often the meat loaf was all corn flakes and they ate it with sliced bananas.
Underpaid, undernourished, ill-clad, and ill-housed, Lake had still another cross to bear. His boss, Dean Stryker of the psychology department, was a man with a conviction that the only way to get good work out of his faculty was to keep them in constant terror of losing their jobs. Consequently, he never had a kind word for any of his instructors. In fact, he seldom spoke to them at all, but would just scowl and rumble in his throat when he met them.
One day—it was the beginning of a new semester—Lake stood in front of his class and tried to keep his teeth from chattering while he lectured. He was cold. Underneath his threadbare tweed jacket he was practically naked; his wife had made a dickey out of his frayed shirt and he had no underwear. Moreover, he was scared. Dean Stryker had just rumbled at him in the corridor before class. He was hungry, too. His breakfast had consisted of licking the tops of his neighbors’ milk bottles.
But he steeled himself and went on to explain to his yawning audience of twelve what psychology laboratory was all about. Then he took six white mice out of a cage and marked each of them with a different colored dye—red, blue, green, black, yellow, and brown—so that the students could tell them apart. He put each mouse on th
e starting end of a maze. “The mice,” he said, “have been trained to start running the mazes when I ring this bell on my desk. Are your notebooks ready? Here we go.”
He struck the bell sharply and the mice scurried down the mazes.
Just as the mice began to run, one of the students nudged another one and said, “Hey, Bill, I’ll bet you a dime on the red.”
“You got a bet,” replied the other.
Lake overheard this wager and made a mental note to tell his wife about it when he came home that evening, in the hope that it might brighten her bleak day. She was not, however, perceptibly cheered. “I wish I had a dime,” was all she said.
Lake lay awake on his pallet far into that night. An idea had occurred to him—a wild, reckless, dangerous idea. At first he told himself that it was insane, that it could result only in catastrophe. But then he surveyed his current situation. “Could I,” he asked himself, “be any worse off than I am now?” The answer, of course, was no.
So on the following morning, when his class was assembled, Lake cleared his throat nervously, and, with many misgivings, started to describe his plan. “Yesterday,” he said, “I noticed that some of you were making bets on the mice. How would you like to make this practice a regular part of the curriculum?”
“Oh, marvy!” cried the students.
Encouraged, Lake went on. “I have known these mice for some time, and I am familiar with their running characteristics. Therefore I feel qualified to establish the odds on their chances of victory.” He took a slip of paper out of his pocket and read from it. “I believe the following odds to be equitable: Red, 11 to 5; Blue, 3 to 1; Green, 8 to 1; Black, 8 to 5; Yellow, 17 to 20; Brown, 15 to 1.”
“Oh, terrif!” cried the students.
“If any of you should care to place a small bet before we start the first race—I mean experiment—will you kindly come up to my desk?”
As a man the students rose and rushed to the desk, waving handfuls of money. Lake gave each bettor a slip recording his choice, took the mice out of the cage, placed them on the mazes, and rang the bell.
They broke fast. Green took an early lead but was passed by Blue and Yellow at the halfway mark. Blue and Yellow ran neck and neck almost to the home stretch. Then suddenly Black started coming up fast on the outside. He caught up with the leaders on the last turn and pounded down to the finish line ahead by a whisker.
Lake made $6.85.
Lake’s plan had been originally conceived as only an occasional thing. But when the students reported for class the next day, they insisted on doing it again. Nothing loath, Lake complied.
From that day on the psychology lab became a kind of indoor Hialeah. There were four races daily. Odds were posted on the blackboard before each race. Betting was expanded to include place and show wagers. An automatic camera was installed at the end of the mazes to record photo finishes. There were saliva tests, daily doubles, and tip sheets. Lake bought a checked suit.
News about Lake’s class traveled quickly around the campus—not to the faculty, but to the other students. When the new semester rolled around, more than two hundred students registered for psychology laboratory. The lab was jammed to the walls, and the money rolled in.
One day shortly after the new semester had begun, Dean Stryker happened to glance at the enrollment figures for psychology laboratory. “By George,” he said to himself, “this is odd. I think I’ll drop in at young Lake’s class and see what’s going on.”
He went out of his office and down the corridor to the lab. Just as he opened the door he heard a great shout of “They’re off!” The students were crowded around the mazes, so engrossed in the race that they did not notice the dean’s entrance. Nor did Lake.
The dean stood on tiptoe, craning his neck and watching the proceedings in openmouthed astonishment. The students’ yells were deafening. “Come on, Red!” they shouted. “Come on, Blue!” “Come on, Yellow!” “Come on, Brown!” They leaped up and down in a frenzy.
“By George,” said the dean to himself, “no wonder enrollment is up. What a brilliant way to teach psychology laboratory—pretending that it’s a horse race. I think I’ve underestimated young Lake.”
The race ended. There were anguished howls from the losing bettors, cries of exultation from the winners. Above the din, Lake’s voice could be heard: “Hurry, hurry, hurry! Place your bets. Next race goes on in ten minutes.”
“By George,” said the dean to himself, “this is remarkable. He’s even got them pretending to make bets.” Shaking his head in wonderment, the dean slipped from the room before the betting began. Nobody saw him go; nobody had seen him come.
Back in his office, the dean continued to shake his head. This, he thought, was far and away the most brilliant example he had ever seen of how to make a dull course interesting. What an inspiration! Pretending it was a horse race! With make-believe bets, yet!
“By George,” said the dean to himself, “this Lake is a genius. Maybe, for once, I’ll break my rule about never saying a kind word to the faculty. Yes, by George, I’ll do it. I’ll call Lake in here this afternoon and say something nice to him.
“But not too nice,” added the dean to himself. “Can’t have him getting cocky.”
So that afternoon the dean called Lake into his office. Lake stood in front of the dean’s desk, his heart beating wildly. Never before had he been called into this august chamber. It could only mean trouble.
“Lake,” said the dean, “I looked in on your class this morning.” He paused for a moment, thinking of something nice to say, but not too nice. At length he had it. “Mighty interesting,” he said.
The dean leaned back in his swivel chair and folded his hands over his paunch. That ought to do it, he thought. Nice, but not too nice.
The color drained out of Lake’s head. The worst had happened; the dean knew his secret. He trembled at a sudden vision of prison gates and rock piles. He looked at the dean, and his trembling increased. No hope of mercy in that hard, silent face. The jig was up.
“Well?” croaked Lake.
The dean blinked. “Well what?”
“What else are you going to say?”
“That’s all,” replied the dean angrily. He cursed himself for having broken his rule. See what happens? You give these fellows one kind word and they want a testimonial. “Go,” he commanded.
Lake scratched his head. This made no sense whatever. Bewildered, he turned away. As he took his first step his shoe became entangled in a worn spot in the rug. He tripped and almost fell.
“Confound that rug!” shouted the dean. “I’ve been after the college for ten years to get me a new one. I’d buy it myself if I could afford it.”
“Ah,” said Lake.
Everything was suddenly clear to him. So that was the dean’s game, was it? Well, he’d play along. He flashed the dean a quick wink. “Got you,” he said and went out of the office.
“Did that fellow wink at me?” the dean asked himself incredulously. “No,” he replied firmly. “He wouldn’t dare.”
A day later the dean received a beautiful Persian rug. Attached was a card that said simply, “Compliments of a Friend.” The dean, of course, could not imagine who had sent it, but he was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth. He had the rug laid and said no more.
Several weeks later—it was a freezing-cold winter afternoon—the dean went out to the campus parking lot to get his car and go home. It was a very old car; and when the dean tried to start it, the motor wouldn’t even turn over. Raging, he got out and began to crank. Vainly he spun the crank over and over, his anger mounting with each turn.
He was standing and kicking his car in a fury of frustration when Lake happened to walk by. “Hiya, Dean,” said Lake pleasantly. “Anything the matter?”
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter,” roared the dean, his eyes blazing at Lake. “I’ve got to have a new car.”
Lake paled. “Gee, I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “T
hat’s a lot of money.”
“I know it’s a lot of money, you idiot,” thundered the Dean. “But I’ve got to have one.”
Lake shrugged. “Okay, okay,” he muttered and walked away. So it’s a car now, he thought unhappily. And what will it be next time? Still, what could he do? So the following morning there was a brand-new sedan in front of the dean’s house. “Compliments of a Friend,” said a card on the steering wheel.
Again the dean chose not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
This whole singular combination of circumstances came to a head on New Year’s Eve at the Faculty Club Ball. It was a tradition of the college for all members of the faculty and their wives to attend this annual event. The Lakes had never been able to afford it in previous years, but this time they made a truly splendid appearance—Lake in faultlessly tailored tails, Mrs. Lake in gold lamé, a diamond choker, and an ermine wrap.
Dean Stryker had never before seen Mrs. Lake, and he was impressed. At first he admired her in silence, but later in the evening, made genial by several drinks, he decided to speak. He lifted a finger and beckoned Lake to his side.
“Excuse me,” said Lake to his wife. “I’ve got to go talk to the dean.”
“What do you suppose he wants?” asked Mrs. Lake.
“Plenty, if I know the old hog,” answered Lake bitterly. “I’ll be right back.”
He crossed the room to the dean’s side. “Well, what now?” he asked uneasily.
“That wife of yours,” said the dean. “Mighty attractive woman.”
Lake’s eyes popped out in horrified disbelief. “No!” he whispered hoarsely. And then the whisper became a roar of rage. “No, damn you! This time you’ve gone too far!”
With that he smote the dean on the nose with all his force, wheeled, went back to his wife, took her by the arm, strode out, and was never heard from again.
Years have gone by since the disappearance of Selby Lake. Psychology laboratory is again a dull, ill-attended class. The dean’s new car is old, and his rug is getting threadbare. He has long since stopped wondering who gave him the car and the rug; he is satisfied now that the mystery will never be solved. But he still thinks occasionally about Selby Lake. He blames himself for Lake’s insanity. (Insanity is the only reason the dean can imagine for Lake’s conduct.) “I should never,” says the dean frequently to himself, “have spoken kindly to him. He went crazy with joy.”