‘Perhaps I shouldn’t say any of this,’ he went on after a moment, ‘but I’ve got to blame someone for what I’m like, haven’t I?’ Helene was gazing at him. He reached for the top of the sheet that covered her and her hands went there too for a moment, then released it. He pulled it away. There was an interval before he continued: ‘Will you come away with me next week-end? To New York. Or anywhere you like.’
She was silent for so long that he suspected sleep or the feigning thereof, but finally her voice came from above his head: ‘Do you really want me to?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘You know, I think I might just manage it. I do believe I might just swing it. I have an aunt in Cincinnati.’
‘Have you really?’
‘Well, I did ten years ago. There’s Arthur, though.’
‘So there is.’
‘But then I’ve done a lot for Sue Green recently and she felt bad about today. But then why can’t Arthur go to Cincinnati?’
‘Your aunt’s very eccentric. She doesn’t like children.’
‘Well, it’s more she’s a little feeble and frail. Be asking a lot to expect her to put up with someone like Arthur.’
‘Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?’
‘You never had any children, did you, Roger?’
‘Darling, I wish you’d give these ghastly American idioms a rest. The way you put it makes me sound ninety years old or dead. No, I have never had any children. The question has simply never arisen.’
‘I guess not. All right, where can I call you when I’ve fixed things?’
‘You’ve got my New York number.’
‘Do I? You better give it to me again.’
‘I’ve given it you before.’
‘Never mind. Give it to me again.’
‘Shall I?’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘I suppose I could.’
‘If you tried. Oh, Roger.’
‘I love you, Helene.’
‘We mustn’t be too long.’
In the Bangs’ bedroom next door the telephone rang, or rather set up its puny jangle. Helene sprang out of bed. ‘I have to answer it.’
‘Nonsense, my sweet, let it ring.’
‘No, you never know, it’s no good.’
Roger lay back and began to luxuriate slightly. By now it appeared to him that his behaviour to Helene over the last half-hour or so was a masterly feat of conscious policy, all of it successfully directed at getting her to come away with him in a week’s time. He was too old a hand to exult prematurely – no roars of triumph until he bolted the door after them in the apartment bedroom – but conservative appraisal now put the chances at about sixty to forty in his favour, a miraculous recovery after the fifty-to-one-against assessable this morning. Hearing her voice on the telephone in the next room brought an unwelcome reminder of the small hours, and he even wondered momentarily whether he had done as much for her as Ernst had. But of course he must have done. The energy he had expended guaranteed that.
She reappeared now in the doorway, smoothing her hair back. In this attitude she looked as if she had recently grown a little in certain respects, which was remarkable. She said: ‘It’s for you.’
‘For me? Who the devil wants me?’
‘He wouldn’t give his name. Just a friend, he said.’
‘A friend? Well, that certainly narrows it down.’
‘Don’t be long.’
‘You can rely on me.’
‘I know.’
First carefully wrapping a sheet round himself, he went and picked up the telephone. ‘Micheldene.’
‘Mr Micheldene?’ The voice was American and so gave no clue.
‘Micheldene.’
‘Mr Micheldene, I’m glad to have reached you. I called to inquire after your health.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Not your physical health, you understand, though I certainly trust that this continues satisfactory. I should like you to tell me how in your own personal view you rate your spiritual health as of this moment.’
Roger pulled his gaze away from the top of a near-by dressing-table on which, among pots and tubes and bottles of female stuff, he could see a man’s necktie, neatly rolled up, and an empty plastic case of the kind used to transport electric razors. ‘Whoever you are,’ he said loudly, ‘my spiritual health, like my genital and excretory health, is no concern of yours. Now just you—’
‘Permit me to correct you, sir. As a priest of your Church your spiritual health is of peculiar and immediate moment to me. This is Father Colgate speaking. If you recall, the last time we made personal contact I expressed myself as having detected in you the infallible signs of a soul at variance with God. And now from the very tone of your voice over this telephone wire I find myself inescapably drawn toward the same conclusion. The unrest of a soul at variance with . . .’
Most of this passed Roger by. The reason he had not cut it short at once was that he had suddenly become very interested in the sound of a motor engine approaching the far side of the house. It stopped. There was the clumping noise of a door, followed by footsteps. He put the receiver down next to the telephone and ran out. In the passage there was a traditional moment when he and Helene, coming the other way, dodged and jostled like wrestlers, then he was in his own room snatching on clothes. The front-door buzzer buzzed, restoring perhaps a third of his calm, but he went on dressing while Helene’s footsteps receded and paused. When he heard them returning unaccompanied he sat down on the bed in shirt, trousers and socks.
Helene came in wearing her housecoat and a pair of gold slippers and carrying a large fat envelope. ‘It’s for you,’ she said. ‘Special delivery. But don’t—’
‘What? Has everybody gone mad?’
‘Don’t open it now – wait till I have to go fetch Arthur.’
‘What next? Chap driving a herd of cattle into the garden and saying they’re for . . .’
He stopped speaking as he uncovered and recognized his lecture material and unfolded a note that read:
Dear Mr Micheldene:
I took a look through some of this (hope you don’t mind) and found it pretty interesting. It’s quite an industry, isn’t it? Not for me, though.
I guess I owe you an apology for not telling you ahead of time what I was going to do, but then that would have ruined the whole idea. I’m sure you understand.
Sincerely,
Irving Macher
PS: Watch out for Treatment no. 2!
‘What’s the matter?’ Helene asked.
‘Nothing. Excuse me a minute.’
He took a notebook from the breast pocket of his coat and went back to the telephone, which to his surprise was still talking with all its old authority.
‘. . . process of education in remorse,’ it said. ‘But first, the freshman programme: horror, grief and fear. And there are no grades, my son. Here’s one course of study where it takes no more than a heart honestly desiring to know—’
Roger spoke three words into the mouthpiece, of which two were ‘the Pope’, rang off hard, looked through his notebook and dialled.
At his shoulder, Helene said: ‘Who are you calling? What’s this all about?’
Without turning or speaking he passed the contents of the envelope up to her. Then he said: ‘Oh, good afternoon. May I speak to Professor Parrish, please? Oh, could you tell me where I might reach him? Have you the number? Thank you, I’ll try there.’
Helene tried several times to break in during this and while he re-dialled and he had to shake his head and make beating-off motions with his left arm to prevent her. Finally she got in with: ‘This is this lecture of yours, right?’
‘Yes yes, and Macher stole it. Fellow’s a raving lunatic and I’m going to do something about . . . – Hallo, Budweiser College? The library, please.’
‘But what can you do about it now, honey? Why does it have to be now? And anyway, wouldn’t you do better to hold it until you’ve calmed down?’
He stared at her. ‘I don’t want to calm down. – Hallo, Professor Parrish, please. Well, could you go and see? Yes, of course.’
‘Roger, look now.’
‘Yes?’
‘Isn’t this what we called you being awful?’
‘Yes, perhaps it is, but I’m afraid in the present situation that’s neither here nor there.’
‘The present situation? That’s interesting. What is the present situation as you see it?’
‘Helene dear, I’m not telling you to mind your own business, believe me, but you must recognize that this is a private matter between myself and this . . . Jewish paranoiac. I’m sorry, but—’
‘If it’s between the two of you why are you bringing Parrish into it?’
‘Kindly allow me to be the judge of—’
‘Will you listen to me, Roger?’
‘What is it?’
‘We have about ten minutes at the outside before I have to go fetch Arthur. I shouldn’t really have—’
‘Hallo, yes? – All right, darling, see you later, then. – Are you sure? Bock 22? Would you put me back to the switchboard, then? Thank you.’
‘At least you’re convinced it wasn’t Arthur now.’
‘Just half a second, my dear, will you? – Switchboard? Bock 22, please.’
The bedroom door slammed. Roger made the beginnings of a movement towards it, then turned away and said into the telephone: ‘English office? Professor Parrish, please. I don’t care if you’re the State Governor, I want to speak to Professor Parrish.’
It took several minutes for Roger to be convinced that he was not going to be able to do that. By the time he got back to his bedroom Helene and her clothes had gone, and almost at once he heard her drive away.
Twelve
‘Before we get on to any of that, there is just one minor point I’d like to clear up, if I may.’
‘I’ll be glad to help in any way I can.’
‘How did you get your hands on the stuff in the first place?’
‘Oh, that was the most delightful part of it. I didn’t have any ideas in advance, you understand, just a general policy. What happened, I went to hang up my hat in the cloakroom—’
‘Your hat?’
‘Yes. To be absolutely precise – since I own more than one hat – one of my hats. The hat I was wearing yesterday evening.’
‘What sort of hat is it?’
‘Well now, I guess you’d call it a dark olive-green in colour, made of some sort of felt, tapering somewhat from brim to crown but not too much, retailing at around—’
‘Has it got bells and little bugles and brushes and stuff on it?’
‘No, not this one, but I have one that does.’
‘Why do you wear hats?’
‘I like them. You like cigars, I like hats.’
‘Yes, all right, go on with your story.’
‘The first thing I saw in the cloakroom was this briefcase with these great golden initials on it. R.H.St.J.W.M., or something of that order of complexity. An Englishman, I said to myself. And which Englishman? The Englishman who was going to give a lecture. I got all that at a glance without having to go into the R. and the M. part of it.’
‘Brilliant.’
‘No, I think that’s overstating it – just alert, you know. One thing, this St.J. interested me. Would that be Saint John?’
At another time Roger would have confessed his inability to see something, or have had to say he found himself at a loss to comprehend something (or have given Macher a left and right to the diaphragm). But with Suzanne Klein, all snow-white hair-parting and vigorous black eyelashes and scarlet linen dress, sitting on the other side of Macher and evidently listening, that kind of stuff seemed ruled out. Roger said airily, in the tone of one making a free gift of half his attention: ‘Well, yes, roughly, yes.’
‘But isn’t there something funny about the way you pronounce it in England? Like Sunjohn?’
Roger articulated the name at him as if orally carving it out of the air.
‘Sinjurn . . . no. Sinjun. Rhymes with Honest Injun. That’s the way to remember it. Well, I shan’t go wrong in future, shall I?’
‘Perhaps we could get on to the main point now,’ Roger said. He was not at all happy about the mood of chummy collaboration which had spread across the discussion of Macher’s enormity, but information was needed and punching time was still some hours off. ‘Why did you steal my lecture?’
‘Temporarily remove it? It might be easier if I simply explained my role.’
‘I’m ready.’
‘My role – in your life, that is – is to give you chances of behaving naturally, that’s to say not in prefabricated sections, not out of some shooting script but off the cuff. I told you some of this last evening, when you made your show of tangling with that fool of a priest. I was interested to see that just afterward you got annoyed enough to remind me I’m a Jew. I liked that – it was a clumsy enough blow to show me you hadn’t thought it out. And when you found your notes weren’t there . . . Oh. You exceeded my best expectations. Like the first strong heartbeat after a man’s pulled out of the water.’
‘I think I understand you,’ Roger said, nodding slowly. ‘You’re a divinely appointed scourge.’
For the first time since he had met him Macher showed some irritation. ‘Not at all. You misunderstand me completely. This is what I do, not what I’m sent here to do. I’m your unsteadying influence, the flint in the road that gives your car a flat. No mission about it.’
‘Our common destiny.’
‘Wrong again, I’m sorry. It’s what’s happening, can’t you see? It’s how it is. If you say two people are made for each other you don’t mean someone drew up specifications and built them, do you? Didn’t you ever say to yourself, of course this had to happen this morning, this was all the situation needed, this girl I met last year was my undoing, this guy coming up just then with his offer was my salvation though I didn’t know it then? If you can see this kind of thing afterward why can’t you see it at the time?’
‘I think because usually it isn’t there to see,’ Roger said as if choosing between half a dozen reasons. ‘Most patterns are illusions based on insufficient evidence. An observer seeing red and black at roulette coming up alternately six times each might conclude he’d found a pattern, this was how it always went. Then red comes up twice running. End of pattern.’
‘Intellectualist screen against phenomena,’ Macher said, getting to his feet. ‘I’ll see you later.’
‘I’ll let you know when I’ve decided what my role is in your life.’
‘Do that,’ Macher yelled back over his shoulder, ‘but don’t force it. Let it emerge.’
Macher had yelled not out of fury or sudden derangement but out of necessity. The noise aboard the barge was vast. In the bow a group of men in variegated orange or violet shirts blew and banged with what must be most of their strength at musical instruments. Roger had been told, he could not imagine why, that they were all advertising or insurance executives. The fifty-odd people on the benches along the gunwale talked and laughed in a roar that fluctuated little. The diesel engine aft kept up its shuddering rumble, constantly sounding on the point of shearing its bolts and flying through the side of the hull. Apart from an overhead awning it was an open boat but sonically there was a marked tunnel effect. It was a bring-your-own party (with five dollars a head for the barge) and most people seemed to have brought plenty of their own.
Roger’s own was a bottle of whisky, half of it transferred to another bottle and both filled up with water. He poured some into the paper cup held out to him by Suzanne, who had moved up to fill Macher’s place, and who now said: ‘Second quarter, both teams no score.’
As far as he could remember these were her first words to him. Their relations had been confined to some vaguely amatory quizzing on his part and a few go-thither looks on hers. He soon decided what he would be with her. He would be marvellous. He wa
s always at his best, or least bad, with new people, who could not have heard any of his stories before; not from him, anyway. He said: ‘What’s it like, being his girl friend?’
‘I can’t imagine. Oh, I’m not his girlfriend. Not especially, that is. I go around with Prince Castlemaine too, and Shumway and Hubler and that bunch? A girly girl, that’s me.’
‘Oh, really?’ This might mean several things short of what he hoped it meant but surely not a preference for her own sex. ‘Is Macher always like that?’
‘Oh no, this is him being serious. He can be really wild. Likes to drink.’
‘Does he mean all this stuff he talks?’
‘Of course – he’s terribly bright. Reads and thinks a lot.’
‘Who does he read?’
‘You know, these French writers, Sartre and Laclos?’
‘I know. Look, Suzanne, about this little jest of his, one thing does strike me as slightly odd, two things rather. Anyway: why wasn’t he afraid I’d report him to the College authorities, Maynard Parrish or someone?’
‘You’re not going to, are you?’
‘Certainly not.’ Roger could not now remember exactly why he had tried to telephone Parrish four hours earlier and did not try to do so. If he ever did it would appear to him that he had intended to express thanks for the dinner, exchange renewed commiserations about the undelivered lecture and announce without explanation that the script had been recovered. ‘But how could he know I wouldn’t?’
‘He didn’t, but he figured you’d show up as too much of a fool if you did. In a way he was hoping you would. He’s getting tired of Budweiser and to get expelled for a thing like this would be a great send-off for him and if it didn’t come to that he’d still have a wow of a time over it. Couldn’t lose, any way around.’
‘Don’t you think – this is the other thing – don’t you think this approach of his to life, these pranks and so on, don’t they strike you as just a little, unbalanced shall we say?’
‘Hell no, Roger, he got it out of one of these French guys. Last year it was marijuana and mescalin. He doesn’t do it all the time. Like once or twice a semester he gets kind of restless. They all do. John Page gets drunk and with Pitt Hubler it’s finding a masseuse in Ammanford, and Irving . . . the last time he got restless he pretended to have a brainstorm and started yelling and trying to strangle the instructor who precepts in Jacobean Drama 311.’
One Fat Englishman Page 13