The End of the Night

Three

I, Kirby Palmer Stassen, stood last February — sixteen thousand years ago? — at a window on the second floor of a fraternity house, looking out at the curiously warm, mild rain that misted Woodland Avenue. I was wearing a dark-gray cashmere cardigan and gray flannel Daks. I was smoking a cigar. The window was open a few inches. I felt the damp breath of the day against the back of my hand. It was the best layout in the house, a two-bedroom suite, handy to the shower room. I shared it with Pete McHue. We were both seniors. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Pete was spread out on the couch behind me, wearing an old terry robe, plodding his way through an assigned book, spooning all that dead dry stuff into his head where it would remain forever.

I remember that I’d put some Chavez on the machine. I can’t remember the name of the symphony, but it’s the one Clare Boothe Luce commissioned him to write as a memorial to her daughter who got killed in an automobile thing, in California, I believe. If I’d put on the Chavez Toccata for Percussion it would have fitted my mood better, but Pete wouldn’t have gone along with that. On the far sidewalk, headed east, was a dumpy little girl in a red sweater, walking in slow defiance of the rain, hugging books with both arms, her rump jutting, damp brown hair bouncing. I wondered what she was thinking about.

When you look back on the moments that change your life, you get good recall. I was thinking about that good Spanish word Hemingway used a lot. Nada. Nothing. Pronounced with accent on first syllable. First syllable is dragged out, sneered, with a lift of the lips. The d is soft — halfway between a d and the th sound. Naaaada. Truly, Mother, it is nothing. En su leche. And that day, that week, that month of my twenty-second year, the word could have been suitably embroidered across my groin.

My college career made a nice, neat chart. I’d come busting onto the scene as a hotshot from Hill, ready to slay the university, but nobody seemed to appreciate my significance and importance. So I went after them, buckety-buckety. So draw the chart in a nice upward curve from the base line, right up to a peak that comes about the middle of the junior year. Kirby Stassen, large man on campus. Background sounds of continuous applause.

Then sag it off. No more honors. No athletic participation. Maximum cuts, and then some. And, for the first time, I found myself on academic probation. And it was raining. And in the rain was a ghostly whiff of spring. Chavez rounded off the coda and the player clacked off, and let some of the sounds of the world come into the room. Traffic on the avenue. Underclassmen horsing around downstairs.

“It’s all crap,” I said.

“What?” Pete asked vaguely.

“Nada. Zero times zero equals square root of minus zero.”

“For Chrissake, Stass, stop standing around here fingering yourself. Go get drunk. Go get banged. You’ve been a drag for weeks.”

“I bother you?” I asked him politely.

“You bother everybody,” he said, and plunged back into his book.

And exactly at that moment is when it happened. For the first time in a long gray time there was a little queasy wiggle of excitement way down there on the floor of my soul. What the hell was keeping me there? What was the Christ name good of coasting through to a degree, which I could manage to do, and then signing up for that Executive Training Program the old man had all lined up for me?

It is like something going click in your head. I had been part of it — part of Pete, part of the guys horsing around downstairs, part of the traffic on Woodland, part of the strange girl in the red sweater. And all of a sudden, without having made a move, I was on my way. I had peeled myself loose from my environment. Once it was done, in that instant, I knew I couldn’t ever go back. I even had a feeling of nostalgia. Good old Pete. It was as if I’d come back to visit one of the places where I had grown up. I stood like a stranger in the middle of my own life, with that excitement coiling and uncoiling way down inside me, making my breath a little short.

I went up into the storage place in the attic and located my foot locker and suitcases and brought them down to the room.

“Now what the hell are you doing?” Pete asked.

“Taking off.”

“You look like you’re planning one hell of a long weekend, old buddy.”

“As long as they come. I’m off for good.”

“With only four months to go? You’re nuts!”

“I’m off to seek my fortune, sir.”

He went back into his book, but I was aware of him pausing from time to time to stare at me. I was very neat. I would take one suitcase. I tagged the locker and the other suitcase for express shipment to 18 Burgess Lane, Huntstown. I sorted books, clothes, records, and made a discard pile. Four years of frivolous accretion.

“Pete? Come here and pay attention.” He ambled over and saluted. “Please have Railway Express pick these up and ship collect. Take first choice of anything you want in this pile, and distribute the balance among the needy brothers.”

He squatted and pulled out a white cablestitch sweater. “We po’ folk are humbly grateful, squire.”

I shook hands with him. When I left the room he was once again squatting, prodding at the pile. It was my intention to go from room to room and exchange the fraternity grip and bid a sturdy masculine farewell to the brotherhood in residence. But instead I went right down the stairs and out the back of the house, got into the Impala and drove away from there. My checking account was down to about eighty dollars. So, on a slow circuit of the commercial strip next to the campus, I cashed three twenty-five-dollar checks at places where I was known and, ninety minutes after the moment of decision I was clear of the city, singing right along with Doris Day on the car radio as I made a hundred and ten feet a second on the way to New York.

That’s what the newspaper types have kept asking me — how did this all start? How did such a clean-cut, privileged, American youth embark upon such a career of violence? The women — do they call them sob sisters still? — are the worst. They are getting a sexual whee out of it. You can tell from their eyes. To the very best of my knowledge, sob sisters, it started that February day, with rain and Chavez and nada.

It is strange that while I am trying to fit my mind around the enormity of what they are going to do to me — strap me down and turn out all my lights — precious, unique, irreplaceable little ole me — I can still feel intense indignation toward whatever newspaper clown invented that Wolf Pack designation. How banal and tiresome and inaccurate can you get?

It is as though I expected more dignity out of electrocution, which is in itself a drab and tragicomic thing. It is the suitable terminal incident in the lives of people named Muggsy Spinoza — or Robert “Shack” Hernandez? — but seems unsuitable for a Kirby Palmer Stassen. I resent my pending abrupt demise being labeled a Wolf Pack Execution.

Perhaps any attempt to comprehend what they are going to do to me is as footless as a chipmunk trying to tuck a coconut into his cheek. Objectively I know it is going to happen. But subjectively I know the cavalry will ride over the hill, the red-skins will skulk off into the brush, the warden will give me a new suit, a train ticket and a handshake, and I will stride off into the sunset as noble music swells and rises on the sound track.

Another sore point in the newspaper coverage — should I have hired a public relations specialist? — has been the half-ass attempts at amateur psychoanalysis. The favorite conclusion has been to label me a constitutional psychopath. Obviously this takes society off the hook. If I can be labeled as something different — a deviation from the norm — then it is evident that the culture is not at fault. I am sick, they say. I have been sick from the beginning. I hid all my wicked violence behind the bland mask of conformity. I was an impostor. That is the implication. And so all the schools and group adjustment programs and cultural advantages are blameless.

I never felt like an impostor.

I have tried to go all the way back through my years, and down into myself, to see if I can find any stray morsel of proof of the correctness of their classification. I find no thirst for blood. I have nearly racked up an automobile trying to avoid a chipmunk, and once I drove behind a car which swerved deliberately to hit a farm dog, and it filled me with a sick, helpless anger.

I can find but one incident I do not clearly understand, and it was buried deeper than it perhaps should have been.

I am twelve. It is late summer. Ever since my birthday I have owned a 22-caliber rifle, but it has been taken away from me by my father because I lied to him. He is angry at me this year. I lost a fight and came home weeping and so he whipped me and ordered me to stay in the house for a week. My mother hugs me and says he is too hard on me. I think I hate him this year. He seems to be cruel to both of us, to my mother and to me. My friends are out somewhere in the sunshine. I am alone in the house. I am restless. I do not know what I was pretending, but I hid in my mother’s closet, and I fell asleep on the closet floor, with one of the sliding doors open a few inches.

I am awakened by nearby sounds. I know at once that it is late afternoon. The blinds are closed. The bedroom is filled with a strange golden light. I know I should not be where I am. I get up onto my knees. I look through the crack where the door is open, and look across into the mirror of her dressing table and see reflected there the two of them, and see that they are making the sound which awakened me and which I could not identify. At first I am stunned with horror, believing that he is killing her in some horrible way, that she is fighting for her life, that they are gasping and writhing in mortal struggle. She makes a long, sighing moan, and I come dangerously close to screaming in panic, believing that she is resigning herself to death.

But the dirt-talk of the playground and the boys’ room is forcing itself into my mind. As my eyes become more accustomed to the golden light, and the mists of sleep burn off my brain, I see how they match the sniggering descriptions I have been given. They told me that my mother and father did it, but I could not believe they could secretly indulge in such a nastiness.

They are still. I can sense her horrible shame. She is the most beautiful woman in the world and, being his wife, she must submit to his vileness, to this naked degradation. I vow that when I get my rifle back I will kill him and she will be forever free of the pain that made her cry out.

To my astonishment she gets up from the bed and bends to kiss him lightly and tells him in a teasing way that she loves him. She is smiling. She gets cigarettes and gives him one, and lights his and her own, and then comes toward the closet. In silent panic I move back into the farthest corner, beyond the silk and scent of her dresses. She slides the door open, takes a dressing gown from a hanger and closes the door. I cannot hear them as clearly but I hear casual talk — about a party, about repairs the car needs and about me — about my disobeying by leaving the house. Later I hear them calling me outside, calling my name into the dusk, and so I go downstairs, pretending great sleepiness, telling them I fell asleep under my bed while pretending I was in a cave. I cannot look directly at either of them. My face burns with their shame. My father gives me back the confiscated gun and rubs my head with his knuckles.

The next afternoon I go into the woods behind the house with my rifle. I stretch out, face down, in an open place, and I try to stop thinking about It, but it is there, golden pictures in my head, a dirty, naked plunging. The grass is a jungle. Ants are the size of lions. I look at the box of shells. Dangerous up to one mile. The Club is less than a mile away. The pool will be full. I know the exact direction of the invisible Club. I aim the gun at a high angle. I empty the clip, reload, fire, reload, fire — panting, my hands trembling, until the last bullet is gone. I see them falling, screaming, drowning, turning the blue water to bright-red. I hurl the new gun into the brush. I am crying. I bruise my fists on a tree, then fall to my knees and vomit.

I am sick when I go home. She puts me to bed. I wait for them to come after me. Nothing happens. The next day I talk to a boy who was at the pool. Nothing happened there. Two weeks later I look for the rifle and find it, ruined by rust. I bury it. When he asks what happened to it, I tell him I loaned it to somebody. By the time school starts, he has stopped asking. For a long time I dream about him. He is standing naked on the high board, his back to the pool. Little black holes appear in his back. He shudders as each one appears. I wait for him to fall. But he turns slowly and laughs at me, and makes a gesture, and I see that where his penis should be, there is a big bullet, the brass casing shining in the sun, ready to kill anybody.

The memory was far down, covered by the careless debris of eleven years, but I excavated it intact, using all the care of an archeologist, the lens, the soft brush, the ancient writings. I do not know that strange small boy. He moves through his own world, playing his secret games. The Freudian dream is ludicrously obvious. I understand all of it. But I do not understand the attempt to kill. I wonder where the small bullets went... a whole half box of .22 long rifle arcing across an August afternoon.

The light in this cell is never extinguished. It is countersunk in the ceiling, shielded by heavy wire mesh. I have been told by one of the guards — a curiously clerical-looking fellow who spoke with professional pride — that in the event of power failure a standby generator cuts in automatically, and should that fail to kick over, a second generator will assume the load.

A death cell should be a dungeon, with black sweating walls and phrases of despair carved by those who have waited for execution. But this is a bright, clean, sterile place, functional, efficient. One could assume it has never been used before, but the clerkly guard assures me that it has, many times.

Under past administrations, prisoners under sentence of death lived under much the same conditions as the prisoners in the other cell blocks, except for living one to a cell and having no work assignments. But since the completion of the new execution area we, the condemned, inhabit — at the expense of the taxpayers — these special cells. We have soft bunks, books, writing materials, television, radio, good food from a special kitchen, regular medical and dental examinations. I have gained eleven pounds since I have been in this place. We live under continual light, without contact with each other, with a guard always on watch. There are eleven of us here, filling one more than half of the twenty special cells.

It amuses me to imagine a Martian sociologist studying this place, reaching erroneous but plausible conclusions. He might well imagine that we are individuals of great value and importance. He might assume we are being conserved for some superstitious and barbaric sacrifice. For one full year the Aztecs fattened and pampered their sacrificial virgins before taking them one by one to the top of a pyramid and cutting out their pulsing hearts with the obsidian knife at sunrise. I believe these maidens were selected by chance. I cannot avoid feeling that I have been selected in some random irrational manner for this questionable honor.

I have learned what they will do with Nan Koslov. She is being held in isolation in a women’s prison a hundred miles away. All the rituals of preparation will be performed there. When it is time to destroy the four of us, she will be brought to this place and, if the scheduling is efficient, will arrive minutes before her important appointment. My clerkly guard smirks and says, “Ladies first.”

I now return to the February day when I left the university. I drove into New York at about six o’clock in a heavier rain that was just beginning to turn to sleet. I put the car in a garage on 44th Street and started phoning hotels. There were conventions and the city was loaded. I gave up after a dollar’s worth of dimes, and phoned Gabe Shevlan.

Gabe sounded cordial but preoccupied. I told him the hotel problem. He said I had caught him on the way out, but come on over. I could bunk on the couch. He’d phone the apartment later on, and I should wait there for the call.

It was on 77th, near Second Avenue. I pushed random buttons until somebody buzzed the front door open. I went up to 3B and Gabe had left it unlocked as he said he would. It was a smaller, dingier place than I expected.

Gabe had been a fraternity brother. He had graduated a year ago last June, and had worked with CBS for a while and then gone with an advertising agency. He looks like an underfed Lincoln without the beard. He is highly nervous and ambitious, and always has a dozen projects going at once.

After I’d gotten organized and built a drink, I called home long distance and got hold of Ernie. I could tell from the background noise they were having a big cocktail party. She sounded slightly loaded.

“What are you doing in New York? Darling, I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Hang on while I go take this in the bedroom.” I heard her ordering somebody to take the phone and hang up after she got on the other extension.

“Kirby? Now what’s this all about, dear?”

I told her I’d quit. She didn’t like it. It didn’t fit her maternal ideas of how my life should be regimented. She kept pounding at me to get at some reason that would make sense to her. Was it because of a girl? I kept telling her I was tired of it, and so I’d quit. What was I going to do? Look around and find something to do. She said the old man could line up people for me to see in New York. I said the hell with that. I didn’t want any part of that routine, thanks. She asked me about money. I said a check would help, and I gave her Gabe’s address. She had me hang on while she went and got the old man. From the time it took, I guessed she was briefing him.

I was right. He came on big and ugly. “What kind of goddam childish nonsense is this, son?”

“I felt like quitting so I quit.”

“You felt like it. That’s great!”

All I could do was let him rave. I was spoiling the big plans he had for me. I was letting him down. I was letting the Executive Training Program down. I was going to be a bum. Well, by God, no more gravy for me. No more feather-bed. I wasn’t going to get one dime from him. A fool who quits four months before his degree doesn’t deserve any kind of a break. Now what did I have to say for myself?

“Goodbye,” I said, and hung up.

Incidentally, the check came from Ernie two days later, on Thursday. Airmail. Five hundred, accompanied by a rambling letter in her angular backhand, telling me how hard this was on the old man. They didn’t know what to tell people, and so on, and so on. One reading was all I could give it.

Gabe phoned at eighty-thirty and asked me to come right along and join them at an Italian restaurant in the sixties. When I got there he was pacing back and forth in front of the hat check booth.

After we shook hands I started to thank him and brief him on why I was in New York, but he broke in and said, “Time for that later, Stass. I can use you. There’s three at the table. The guy is John Pinelli. The blonde is Kathy Keats, an actress — Pinelli’s wife. The little brunette is Betsy Kipp. She’s a special friend of mine. I had to stab Pinelli in the heart tonight. He’ll want to cling to me like a Bandaid. I want to peel off alone with Betsy, so when any chance comes, you help out.”

I agreed. He gave me an extra key to the apartment and said we could talk later, maybe tomorrow. We went to the table. It was a corner table, not far from the bar. A place had been made ready for me. Gabe introduced me around. Pinelli was a big, soft, pink-and-white man who looked more like a Swede than an Italian or a Spaniard or whatever he was. The two women were gorgeous. Betsy was younger and had a special glow. I knew I’d seen Kathy Keats before and heard her name before. I knew I’d seen her in the movies and on television. Her hair was dyed a beautiful silverblond, and done up in a regal and intricate way. She was on my left. Her shoulders were smooth and bare.

She has a Dietrich face, long, slightly Slavic, a long throat, erect carriage, so that at a distance she looks tall. But close up you realize she is a small woman, about five four, a hundred and ten. I never found out how old she is. On that first night I would have guessed twenty-five. Since then I have guessed as high as thirty-seven. She gives an impression of terrible control. Every movement is slow and graceful. When her smile comes, it is slow in coming, and it flowers to great brilliance, but you feel she is back there behind that smile, watching you, watching everybody.

John Pinelli was stupidly drunk, and drinking steadily. But there was more than that wrong with him. He was lie an ox who had been clubbed on the head. He kept shaking his big head in a bewildered way. Two conversations went on at once. One was between Gabe, Betsy and Kathy, bright talk about people I didn’t know, none of whom seemed to have last names. John Pinelli carried on a monologue, most of it so slurred you couldn’t understand it, all of it ignored by the other three, as thoroughly as they ignored me. From the little I heard of Pinelli’s ramblings, he was telling himself about the great, important, sensitive, significant things he had directed.

The food that came was wonderful. Betsy Kipp and I were the only ones who ate it. Pinelli ignored his. Kathy Keats ate a few small bites with slow precision. Gabe has always been too jittery to eat much.

The whole evening was unreal. At about eleven Gabe said, “I’m sorry, but we have to be running along.”

Pinelli fixed him with a heavy, bleared eye and said, “Got to talk to you, my boy. Got to explain why you need me...”

I felt a touch on my right knee. I reached down and took folded bills from Gabe.

Gabe stood up and took hold of Betsy’s chair and said, “Settle with you later, Stass. Have fun, kids.” And they were gone.

I paid the check. It was over sixty dollars. Gabe had passed me two fifties.

I said to the Pinellis, feeling awkwardly out of my depth, “I guess I’ll say good night and...”

“Stay with us,” she said. It was an order.

“Flamenco guitars,” Pinelli rumbled. “Flamenco guitars, darling.”

She knew where he wanted to go. She gave the name to the cab driver. It was a dark place. The three of us sat at one side of a round table, and looked at the small stage where a man sat in a kitchen chair under a very bright spotlight and played intricate Spanish music on the gaudiest guitar I have ever seen. He had fingernails longer than any woman’s. Under the music I could hear Pinelli muttering to his wife. We drank white wine there, a lot of it.

At two-thirty, when there was no more guitar, and Pinelli was slumped with his eyes closed, she worked his wallet out of his pocket, took two twenties out of it, wedged the wallet into her small gold evening bag, handed me the forty dollars and said, “I’ll have the cab wait for you.”

I helped her get him up. Once he was on his feet he walked well enough. The cab was waiting. We went back up to the seventies, this time off Fifth. The little elevator was just big enough for the three of us. It climbed very slowly. Just as it stopped at their floor, Pinelli slid slowly down the elevator wall and sat on the floor like a fat child, his chin on his chest. We couldn’t waken him. She held his head up and slapped his face until the corner of his mouth started to bleed. He was too big to carry. I took him by the wrists and dragged him. She went ahead and opened the door, shut it when I had dragged him inside, and then went ahead, leading the way to the bedroom.

She turned the bed down. We undressed him on the floor, down to his shorts. He breathed little pink bubbles of blood out of the corner of his mouth. I sat him up against the side of the bed and then, kneeling, got my shoulder under his flexed knees and with one great heave, got him up onto the bed.

“I’ll do the rest,” she said. I went out to the living room. It was a spacious apartment, high enough so that the big windows looked toward the lights of downtown. The apartment had a hotel flavor about it, as though nobody ever lived in it very long.

I was looking at the lights when she said, “Oh, I’d thought you’d left.”

I turned. She looked exactly the same as when I had first met her. Glamorous, chic, controlled. Nobody could have guessed she had just put a drunk to bed. “I’ve got your change, Kathy.”

“Put it on the table.”

“You’ve got a beautiful place here.”

“Have we? It’s borrowed, for Chrissake. Every goddam place we live is borrowed. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Kirby Stassen.”

She gave me a tilted look of a special insolence. “All this courtesy, motivated by guilt. Get used to it, Stassen. You did well tonight. You might even be human enough to feel sorry for John. But I didn’t know that son of a bitch Shevlan ever hired anybody human.”

“I don’t work for Gabe.”

“So did he borrow you from Stud Browning? Don’t crap me about a technicality, darling. It doesn’t make you any cleaner.”

“I don’t know what this is all about, Mrs. Pinelli. Yesterday I was a senior in college. Today — I guess I should say yesterday — I quit. I drove to New York. I knew Gabe in school. The hotels are full. I’m staying with him. I’ve hardly had a chance to say hello to him.”

She stared at me. “For the love of God, he’s telling the truth!”

“I haven’t understood very much of what’s been going on this evening. I’m sorry, but nobody has explained anything.”

“Sit down, darling, and hear the facts of life.” She took my hand and led me to a long, low couch. “Gabe is on leave of absence from the agency. He’s been assembling a package for a great big television series. Stud Browning is the producer. Gabe calls himself the unit manager. Gabe came after John to direct. I told John not to trust the mealy little bastard, but John went ahead with it on spec, getting everything lined up for the two pilots they’re going to shoot. My God, he’s been in on the casting and the story editing, everything. It’s a big deal for John. He’s had bad luck. I was going to be in it. They claim they still want me. Tonight, Gabe, after using John all these months for free, kicked him off the team. Stud is going to be producer-director and Gabe Shevlan is going to be assistant director. That cuts the nut. And Gabe has milked John for all the ideas he’ll need. You’re in bad company, Stassen. You have a reasonably clean look. Do you want to be an actor?”

“God, no!”

“You don’t know how refreshing that is, sweetie.”

She smiled at me. She was close to me. I was full of wine. I felt very loose and sophisticated. So I took hold of her and kissed her. Her back felt lean and fragile under my hands. It was like kissing a corpse. When I released her she yawned and said, “Go the hell home, will you, before you really begin to bore me, Stassen.”

I walked home. It was a clear night. There was a light on. The bedroom door was closed. The daybed had been made up for me. I was touched. I hadn’t thought Gabe would go to the trouble.

I heard him leave in the morning. I looked at my watch. Twenty to ten. When I opened my eyes again it was noon. I padded, naked, through the bedroom and stopped with a grunt of shock and surprise in the doorway. Betsy Kipp, in bra and panties, was leaning toward the mirror over the basin, painting herself a new mouth with a small brush.

“I’ll be out in one minute, Kirby,” she said sweetly. “Gabe has some robes in the closet there.”

I put on a robe and sat on the double bed. She had a fresh outfit laid out on the bed, a pale blouse and a tweedy green suit.

“Sleep well?” she called to me.

“Pretty good.”

“That couch is lumpy. I’ve slept there a few times. I made it up for you.”

“Thanks.”

She came out of the bathroom. “All yours. Eggs, toast and coffee okay by you?”

“Fine.”

“They’ll be ready in a hurry because I’ve got a rehearsal at two, so don’t stay in there forever.”

When I came out, breakfast was ready. From the tiny table for two you could reach the small sink, stove and icebox.

“Sit down, Kirby. There’s sugar but no milk for the coffee. How did you like Kathy? Isn’t she a miraculous old broad?”

“She’s unusual, I guess.”

“Oh, I don’t know as she’s unusual. She’s got a nice little talent. And, of course, those marvelous looks. She’s fading now, of course. But I’d say she’s done as much as she can with what she’s got. People wonder why she didn’t dump John ages ago. There’s a word he has a hold over her or something. But Kathy never says much about herself. And when she does live it up, she never gets conspicuous.”

“She’s pretty sore at Gabe, apparently.”

“That’s stupid! Gabe does what he has to do. His job isn’t easy. He takes horrible abuse. And they give him the dirty jobs to do, like last night. Lord, I’ve got to run! Kirby, dear, would you mind cleaning the joint up? No maid service. We’re all meeting at the Absinthe on West 48th at six-thirty tonight. I’m bringing a girl for you. Doxie Weese. She’s lovely, and she’s a very sensitive little actress, and she’s been terribly hurt, and she hasn’t been out with anyone in ages. So be tender with her, will you? Thank you, darling.”

After she left, the apartment seemed exceptionally empty. I cleaned the place. Some of her clothes hung in the closet. I killed what was left of the afternoon. I got to the Absinthe early and was on my second drink when the three of them came in. Gabe looked weary. Doxie had brown hair, sleepwalking mannerisms, and looked about thirteen years old. Betsy was in a bad mood, something about the stupidity of some new choreographer.

Late that evening I got a chance to ask Gabe about John Pinelli.

“We tried to give him a break,” he said. “Old John just hasn’t got it any more. Too bad. He was eager, but we couldn’t take the risk. We’re playing with other people’s money.”

“What will he do?”

“Are you in a sweat about John, or about Kathy?”

“Just curious.”

“Maybe he’ll find something and maybe he won’t. Don’t mess with them, Stass. Kathy is a thousand years older and a thousand times rougher than you are.”

“I keep wondering how they’ll make out.”

“And I keep wondering if you had any change left from last night, buddy. Come up with it.”

Three days later I got a job, through Gabe. Office boy at the agency. I sorted and delivered mail and memos, and ran errands. Because of Gabe’s relationship with Betsy, I got stuck with the chore of squiring Doxie Weese around. She was a zombie. She could cry oftener and harder and for less reason than any girl I ever met. Betsy was very concerned about her. Betsy suggested to me that it might help Doxie if I slept with her. I said I was willing, but I couldn’t even take her arm to cross a street without she started crying her heart out. Betsy said try, so I tried, and I did. It didn’t help Doxie, and it wasn’t worth it.

I began to get restless again, so restless that I said the wrong thing to the wrong man at the agency, and was out on the street ten minutes later, with a pay check in my pocket. I looked for work in a halfhearted way. All of a sudden Gabe went off to Portugal with the unit to shoot the pilots. Doxie went along with the unit. Betsy, two days later, went out to the Coast. Gabe said I could use his apartment while he was gone.

And I kept thinking of Kathy Keats and how her back had felt under my hands, as if I could snap it like a stick. I looked in the phone book. They weren’t listed. I found the apartment house. The card under the right button had Pinelli written on it. I didn’t have the guts to push the button. She came out at four o’clock the next day, and she was trying to look through me and beyond me, trying to spot a cab.

“Hello!” I said.

She focused on me, and frowned. “Oh, it’s the schoolboy. What’s your name again, dear?”

“Kirby Stassen.”

“Get me a cab, dear.”

I hailed one and got into it with her. She looked slightly startled. “What in the world are you doing?”

“Nothing at the moment. I wanted to know how... your husband is doing.”

“That’s sweet of you, Stassen,” she said, “but I’m going to have my hair done.” She gave the driver the address.

“I’ll go along and buy you a drink afterward,” I said.

“I won’t be out until six anyway.”

“I can wait.”

“Suit yourself, dear.”

We both got out at the hairdresser’s. She pointed out a hotel diagonally across the street and told me to wait there, in the lobby or the bar. I waited in the bar and then in the lobby. I wanted courage but not too much. When she came in, she spotted me and gave me that smile when she was forty feet away. She came, walking tall, giving me that smile, and I knew as she did it that it wasn’t for me. It was for the people watching her come to me.

The bar didn’t get much trade. We had a banquette table, very alone.

“Why do you give a goddam about John?” she asked me.

“I don’t really know. But I do.”

“Are you working for Gabe now?”

“He left for Portugal. I’m living in his apartment. I’m looking for work. I had a job for a while. It wasn’t something I’d want to do forever, but I shouldn’t have gotten fired. Is John working?”

“No. I’ve been doing some commercials, for some nasty goo that takes hair off your legs. My legs are still good, thank God.”

“All of you is good, Kathy.”

“You’re a brave child, Stassen, aren’t you?”

“I’m dauntless. Do you have any plans?”

“Oh, we always have plans.”

“Your eyes are just the color of violets.”

“A deathless line, indeed! We’re going to Mexico, Stassen. To another borrowed place to live. A beach place at Acapulco. John has some old friends who are setting up a company to make movies down there. He thinks he can get into the act.”

“I’d like to go to Mexico.”

“Why do you keep reminding me of a cocker spaniel?”

“When are you going?”

“It will have to be soon. The Burmans are coming back from Italy this month. They’ll want the apartment. And I think it’s time to get John out of this town. All the goddam doors are closed. All the secretaries have the word to give him the brush job. Show biz, darling. Kick the wounded. Direct forty pictures that pay off, and you can crush people under your wheels. Add two turkeys and you’re dead.”

“It’s time for me to get out of this town too.”

She started to say something, stopped, and looked intently at me. I had the odd feeling that it was the first time she had looked directly at me and seen me. “Of course you can drive a car, Stassen.”

“Yes.”

“John is a horrible driver. I despise driving. We were going to fly. But this way... I could take everything. Would you drive us down? It would be a business deal, Stassen. We’ll pay all your expenses plus... oh, a hundred dollars at the end of the trip.”

“I’ll do it for nothing.”

“Thank you, no. We don’t need a pal, Stassen. We need a driver. Then everybody will know where everybody stands.”

I agreed to do it. Their car was in dead storage. It was a lot of car, a two-year-old Chrysler Imperial, black, loaded with every power gadget there is, plus air conditioning. It had six thousand miles on it. The California tags had run out. I found out that a friend had driven it east for them.

I had it checked over for the trip, and I arranged for new tags. I took my Chev over to Jersey and peddled it for thirteen hundred. It was a horrible whipping, but the best I could do. So I was able to start off with about sixteen hundred bucks, all but two hundred in traveler’s checks.

They had a lot of stuff. Most of it was hers. I took it over to the apartment and loaded it the day before we left, a snowy day in mid-March. I packed the big rear trunk right to the eaves, and packed the rear seat to the roof, leaving space for one person back there. She had a lot of ideas about what should go where, and she kept changing her mind.

Finally I said, “Kathy, maybe I should get a chauffeur hat and uniform. To go with all the orders.”

She straightened and gave me as cold and flat a look as I have ever received from anybody. “Just do your job, Stassen, without bickering about it, and we’ll all get along a lot better.”

We stood beside the car with the snow coming down, big wet flakes that caught in her hair. I was close to walking away. I didn’t have to take abuse from a little broken-down actress. It was a showdown. She was establishing the relationship right there. A flake caught in her eyelashes. It didn’t melt. I wanted to take her by her childish shoulders and kiss that eye and feel the ice of the snowflake against my lips, and the warm round violet eye.

“Yes, sir, Mrs. Pinelli, sir,” I said.

There was a slight lift of the corners of her mouth. “Take that big blue one off the bottom and put this leather one there, please. I’ll have to get into the blue one when we get into warmer weather.”

So I unloaded and reloaded again. “What time should I bring it around in the morning, Kathy?”

“Let’s get an early start. Ten o’clock.”

So I drove the brute away. It was crouched on its haunches because of the weight. I garaged it and locked it myself, and spent my last night in Gabe’s apartment, laying out the route. I figured it for a seven-day trip. I didn’t know how naïve my guess was. I thought of sending them a card at home to let them know what I was doing, but I decided it would be more interesting to send the card from Acapulco. It would do more wondrous things for the old man’s blood pressure.

By quarter of eleven the next morning, we were through the tunnel and heading down the Jersey Pike. It was a clear, metallic morning, with a dry road and light traffic. I kept the needle locked on seventy. Kathy was beside me, John Pinelli in back. They both acted morose about the whole thing. There wasn’t any excitement or anticipation in them. But I felt like singing.

I felt I should report on the route. “I decided the best thing to do is go right down 301, then cut west on 80 until we...”

“That will be fine,” Pinelli said.

“I don’t know how many miles you want to make a day.”

“Every day at four o’clock, Stassen,” she said, “start looking for a nice place. We’ll stop between four and five. I won’t ride beyond five o’clock. Lunch between one and two, please. Try to find nice places for lunch.”

And that’s the way it went. When you’re lucky to get on the road before eleven, and you have to get off the highway a little after four, even in a brute like that Chrysler, it’s a good trick to do two hundred and fifty miles a day. At each motel stop she would hand me the money, and I would go in and register, a single for me, and a twin-bed double for them. Then I would drive to their unit and carry their baggage in. I was privileged to eat with them at lunch, but not at dinner. They had a fitted liquor case, and each night he would get smashed, and they would eat as late as the nearest restaurant would serve them. They never changed seats. She stayed up front beside me. About once an hour she would turn the radio on and hunt the whole length of the dial and turn it off. I could never figure out what sort of program she was looking for. Every day she spent at least an hour working on her nails. When she had a chance, she would buy a half dozen magazines. She would leaf through them very quickly, like an illiterate looking at the pictures, and drop them out the window one at a time as she finished them. Sometimes she would sleep, but for not more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. John Pinelli slept oftener, longer and heavier — slumped against the luggage, snoring resonantly.

As far as they were concerned, I was a part of the machine. It irritated me, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I kept trying to figure out their relationship. Sometimes they would have savage arguments. She would turn around and kneel on the seat. They acted as if I were stone-deaf. Those two would say anything to each other. Some of the arguments were about money. I’d wondered how they were fixed. They weren’t hurting as much as I had thought. He’d owned a piece of a couple of profitable movies, and he owned a piece of the producer’s end of a television show that had been running for three years and looked as if it would run forever. And he had stashed some into an annuity back in his fat days. I estimated they had thirty thousand a year coming in. But that was a tenth of the income he used to make, and so they felt impoverished. And they wouldn’t cut any corners. They schemed to live in borrowed houses, but in a motel he’d give the boy who brought the ice a five-dollar bill. Some of those kids looked like they’d been hit on the head. There was a flossy gift shop connected with one motel where we stayed. She bought two skirts of handwoven fabric, sixty bucks each.

The biggest money fight was about whether he should sell his piece of the television show and reinvest it in the Mexican movie venture. Every time they argued about it, they switched sides. And they would say things to each other I wouldn’t say to a weasel. She, in particular, had the foulest mouth I’ve ever heard on a woman. She said things to him worth killing her for, and fifteen minutes later they’d both be napping.

Sometimes they fought about how talented they were. He told her once that if she had fifty times the acting ability, he wouldn’t use her in a mob scene. She told him if he had a chance to direct the rape of the Sabine women, he’d turn it into a box-office dog. He told her the mares in Westerns had more talent. She told him he was the joke of the industry. Twenty minutes later they’d be telling each other how great they were. She had more than Hayes and he had more than Huston.

But the worst scraps were about cheating. Then the language was so choice I wondered why I didn’t run the car off the road. He’d tell her she made any honest tramp look like Joan of Arc, that if she’d kept score, her diary would look like a phone book. She’d tell him that he’d spent forty years proving he had no discrimination. If it was warm and wore a skirt, that was all he needed. Then they would start throwing names, dates and places at each other, but what it always came down to was that neither of them had any real proof. He’d call her an ice-cold scrawny, ridiculous bitch. She’d call him a fat, impotent old man. Once, when they were going it so hot and heavy I thought he was coming over the seat after her, a spark from her cigarette stung her wrist. From the way she carried on, you would have sworn she had just lost the arm. He cooed at her and petted her, and she whimpered and yowled until I located a drugstore. He hurried in and came out with four different kinds of burn remedies, and fixed her up with a bandage big enough for a fractured wrist.

It was a weird marriage.

A strange thing happened at a motel just west of Montgomery, Alabama. It was unseasonably warm. The pool was drained, but there were chairs around it. I sat out in the warm dusk, thinking about going and getting something to eat. She came up behind me, touched me on the shoulder in a friendly way, and sat in the chair next to mine. She said John was taking a nap. She called me Kirby for the first time. She turned on so much warmth and charm, it was like standing in a hot-chocolate shower. We sat there for at least two hours. She drew me out. She made me feel like the most interesting man in the world. I gave her the full report on Kirby Palmer Stassen, from high chair to office boy.

“What do you want, Kirby? Where are you heading?”

“I don’t know, Kathy. There’s all the pressure to conform. I’m not ready to play on the team.”

“Kicks? Is that what you want?”

“That’s a word for it, maybe. I want to... do everything there is to do. I don’t want to go down a tunnel.”

Like a damn fool I thought we’d gotten onto a new basis. But the next day I was Stassen, part of the Chrysler. It gave me the feeling she’d used me for some kind of practice session, like a hell of a wing shot getting his eye ready for the season by trap shooting.

We went down 79 and 81 and crossed at Laredo. We stayed at Laredo one night and a half a day. Something happened to them there. Something private and significant and deadly. I don’t know what it was, what they did to each other. But it was the end of something between them. You could sense that. I didn’t see how it could be anything they said to each other. Nothing could have been more unforgivable than all the things they’d already said.

The change was abrupt. All of a sudden they were painfully polite to each other. They made comments on the road and the weather. No more battles. Something started to end right there at Laredo. And I was in at the finish. Some unknown incident gutted the relationship, and suddenly they had begun to be strangers.

I am treating my relationship with John and Kathryn Pinelli in such great detail because I suspect that it bears a significant relationship to all that came later. I know that on the basis of timing it was significant, because if I hadn’t gone to Mexico with them, I’d never have met Sandy, Nan and Shack at that beer joint on the outskirts of Del Rio. On another level, if it hadn’t been for the Pinellis and what happened, I wouldn’t have been ready to meet Golden, Koslov and Hernandez. I wouldn’t have had that special attitude which helped the four of us fit together like the fingers on a glove.

Once you have destroyed somebody, and there’s no way to put the pieces together, and you know you’re going to live with a funny kind of remorse the rest of your life anyway, you can maybe dilute remorse through more destruction.

So maybe what happened to me is suicide.

I wish that Kathy could have a chance to read this. I wouldn’t expect her to understand it, or make any attempt to try. If I could write it as a play, and if she could be given the chance to read it, then she would come alive, frowning in pretty concentration, fitting her mouth silently around her lines. But I know what would happen to this kind of a journal. She would riffle it, see there was no art work, and drop it out the car window and go to work on her nails, or pick a fight with John, or curl into a tiny and fragrant cat nap.