The Nude Wore Blaсk

"I was so!" Wisdom insisted hotly. "In my prime I shot it out and won showdowns with more Death Valley villains than that Birch-y buffoon ever did."

"But he got the nod and you didn't." It came out to the tune of "Ring-around-a-Rosy."

"I should have had my teeth capped," Wisdom reflected to himself. "I'll bet I could have scored a write-in in the primary if I had. With the right image-"

"You'd have had to go pretty far right to beat Rough-Rider Ronnie," the first old man reminded him.

"At my peak I foiled more Commie plots than he ever dreamed existed! And I wasn't any nicey-nice anti-Commie when those cameras started rolling, either. I didn't grin and crinkle up my baby-blues. I took them on with good old-fashioned righteous American anger. And off the set I never played footsie with the liberals the way he did. I was out campaigning for General Doug while that young pup was still licking the hand of the New Deal."

"They probably figured you couldn't get the women's vote," his roommate sniped.

"Ridiculous! I was a matinee idol when he was simpering his way through second leads. How many pictures did he play the Good Guy who didn't get the girl? In my pictures, I always got the girl! I would have had the women's vote in my hip pocket."

"I always thought it was a little bit crazy for an actor to go into politics," Sammy Spayed ruminated meekly.

"It is!" The taunting oldster cackled. "That's why he's here!"

"It is not!" Wisdom objected. "If that were the case, then how come Twinkletoes and that Late Show lemon aren't here too? Answer me that!"

"Not all the Filberts are in the nut-hatch. Plenty of them are running around loose."

"In the U.S. Senate?" Llona was shocked.

"Why not? And in higher places, too. Look at our for eign policy. Viet Nam's right out of a Grade D Hollywood screenplay. I'll deny it if you quote me, but I've always suspected that John Wayne had a hand in formulating that policy. And it's worldwide. Look at De Gaulle. There's a bad actor if I ever saw one."

"But he's not era- I mean mentally ill," Llona objected.

"Everything's comparative. A man starts blowing off H-bombs the way things are today, how are you going to define the line between psychosis and politics? Actually, of course, that line doesn't exist. If it did, either this place would be full of statesmen, or Wisdom there would be sitting in the White House."

"If it wasn't for Wall Street, I'd be sitting there right now," Wisdom said in a voice tinged with sadness.

"What did Wall Street have to do with it?" Llona wanted to know.

"Years ago, would-be President Wisdom there made a movie about the nineteen-twenties," the needier explained. "It ended with the stock-market crash and him taking a stockbrokers' swandive out of an eighteenth-story window. Wall Street took umbrage, and they never forgot. When he began sucking around and making public statements about how he had absolutely no presidential ambitions, they put the kibosh on him."

"If the Eisenhower faction could forgive Reagan for going to V.M.I, in that Brother Rat flick, I don't see why the money boys couldn't forgive my youthful indiscretion," Wisdom said plaintively.

"It broke his heart," the other old man said with relish. "Destroyed all his political ambitions. Something must have snapped inside him. That's when he decided that if he couldn't be Governor, or Senator, or President, he might as well be God. And he thinks he's been God ever since. Actors' conceit! It knows no limits."

"Actors' conceit has nothing to do with it." Wisdom withdrew from the argument into himself and became portentous again. "I am God. If you weren't such a heathen, you'd recognize Me."

"I'm not a heathen. I'm a realist. There's no security in God. Even if you were God, there's no security. The only thing that offers security is-"

"Yes?" Llona and Sammy Spayed spoke together.

"My security blanket!"

"Oh, Me. There he goes again. For My sake, don't start."

"I want my security blanket!" His voice rose to a high, ear-piercing whine. "Where is it? They promised they'd bring it! Where's my security blanket?"

"It's on the way," Llona remembered.

"And we'd better be on ours." Sammy Spayed remembered something else. "Of all the rooms to pick, why did we have to come in here? We'd better get out fast. I can't imagine how Hannah's kept him out of here this long."

"But how?" Llona asked anxiously. "We don't dare go out in the hall again."

"There must be another way out of here," Sammy hoped.

"I want my security blanket!"

"There's a sort of balcony right outside that window." Wisdom pointed. "You can get into the next room from there."

"Thanks." Sammy hustled Llona over to the window and helped her through it.

"Pax vobiscum." Wisdom gestured at Sammy's back as he climbed over the sill.

Turning around, Sammy was just in time to see the door to the room open. "My grandfather was a garbage-man," the white-coated attendant waas saying over his shoulder. "And his father and my father, too. So it was sort of like letting the whole family down when I flunked out."

"I see." Hannah's voice floated over his shoulder. "That's really very fascinating, George."

Sammy silently slid the window shut to cover their means of exiting. It also shut out the voices in the room behind them. The balcony was very small. There was only one window off it besides the one by which they'd come out. There was no choice. With Sammy leading the way, they climbed over the sill and into the room.

There was a night light on beside the bed, and there was only one bed in the room. A rather pretty woman in her mid-thirties was propped up on the pillows, reading. She had silver-blonde hair, worn in the Marienbad style which had been so popular two or three years back. She didn't notice Sammy and Llona as they hovered undecidedly in the shadows alongside the windows. She was too intent on her book.

Sammy motioned to Llona to crouch. Then he started waddling across the floor, ducklike, toward the door leading from the room. He hoped they'd be passing beneath both the perimeter of the light splash from the nightstand lamp and the range of vision of the woman in the bed. Llona waddled along behind him. They were almost at the door when the woman stretched, turned over on her side, and changed the angle of the lamp to suit her new position. It worked like a spotlight catching the two of them full in the face.

The woman stared a moment before she reacted. Then-"Quack-quack," she said.

"Quack-quack." Not knowing what else to say, Sammy responded in kind-albeit feebly-and reached for the doorknob. He had a dim hope that perhaps this patient's delusion was such that she really had mistaken him for a duck. The hope was only slightly misplaced, at that.

"You are the fattest duck I've ever seen," the woman remarked.

"Quack-quack," Sammy replied, an edge of annoyance to his quacking.

"Quack-quack," Llona echoed.

"Truth and illusion, George," the woman said. "Illusion and truth. If you want to don the fagade of a duck, who am I to say no?"

"His name isn't George," Llona corrected her.

"And I suppose your name isn't Martha, either?" Her tone said she didn't believe Llona.

"No, it isn't."

"Very well. I accept that. If my pretense is to lie here having a nervous breakdown, why should I doubt your pretense of not being George and Martha?" She paused to think about it and then nodded to herself. "Do you like being ducks?" she asked after a moment.

"Not particularly," Llona admitted.

"It must put quite a strain on your haunches."

"It does," Sammy grunted.

"Then why don't you change your reality? Stand up and be apes or something."

"Thank you." Llona got to her feet, and Sammy followed suit.

"Are you apes now?" the woman wanted to know.

"I don't think so," Llona replied.

"Oh? But your mate is scratching himself," she pointed out.

"That's only because I itch," Sammy said.

"Ah. But apes scratch themselves. How do you explain that?" She turned to Llona. "Your mate must be an ape," she decided. "And you must be an ape, too."

"I'm not an ape!" Llona insisted.

"Really? Then yours is a mixed marriage," she concluded. "That must be it. Tell me, does it give you many problems?"

"We're not married," Llona said firmly.

"Oh? Oh! I see. Then you just stay with him because he makes those colored lights spin for you. Woman always loses to the animal inside her. And she always responds to the beast in man. That's one thing I learned from Tennessee."

"Tennessee?" Llona was confused. "Is that where you're from?"

"Oh, no. I mean Tennessee Williams. The playwright. He's one of the reasons I'm here. He and Albee and Ionesco and Genet and all the rest. No one of them, you understand. All of them. Although you might say it started with Arthur Miller."

"Why Arthur Miller?"

"My husband was a shoe salesman, and his territory was Boston. I found out he was having an affair with some woman up there."

"I'm sorry," Llona said. "Did it break up your marriage?"

"No. I thought of that. I thought of divorcing him. But then I saw this Miller play and I realized he was only a victim of our false values. It wasn't his fault. Society imposed them on him. The play gave me insight. I never let my husband know I knew. I just kept mending stockings in front of him every chance I got. That was how it began."

"How what began?"

"My nervous breakdown. You see, to get my mind off his infidelity, I took up mah-jong. I used to play twice a week with these girls. It was a sort of club. And once a week we all went into New York together and took in a matinee. I never guessed what a dangerous course that was."

"Dangerous?"

"Yes. You see, certain things have always been true about myself, but it wasn't until I began getting the playwrights' messages that I knew they were true. Facts become very dangerous when they're exposed. I've always been a conformist, and yet I've always been alienated. Communication has always been a problem to me, but it's also true that when I chatter there's an undertone to the words that reaches people on a Freudian symbolic level that destroys their defenses. I'm both politically aware and aware that political action is fruitless. My femininity is aggressive but easily overpowered by masculinity at the same time that it's destroying masculinity. I have many masks to hide layer upon layer of reality, but when each of my fa?ades is stripped away, it reveals only another fa§ade. I've spent all of my life yearning for Godot, and I'm terrified that he might show up. All of this is true, but what's important is that I never realized it until the theatre brought it home to me. And so I blame Broadway, Off-Broadway and many a European playwright for my downfall. Do you understand?"

"No," Sammy admitted succinctly.

"Then let me try to explain," she continued. "O'Neill warned me, you see, but I was too dense to catch it. Iceman demonstrated the danger of stripping a person of his illusions. It makes the beer taste flat. Remember? Anyway, in my case, it went further. I began to identify. I identified with the slut in The Balcony. When my husband climbed into bed and pawed at me, I whinnied, leaped from the bed, and began trotting around the room like a horse. I identified with Jerry in The Zoo Story. I be gan waving knives at people-milkmen and salesgirls and insurance brokers and such-and demanding that they communicate with me. I identified with Marat in Marat-Sade, joined a militant peace movement, and spent all my spare time in the tub. In the end, I refused to be a rhinoceros, and the rest of the herd banded together and exiled me to this place. That's why I'm glad to see you two. You may be ducks or apes; I'm not sure. But at least you're not rhinoceroses."

"Rhinoceri." Llona corrected her.

"Really?" the woman sneered. "How semantical we are. Why don't you just shave your head and sing soprano, dearie? Poof!" She waved her hand. "You're vanished!"

"But we haven't," Llona pointed out. "The reality is that we're still here."

"The reality is shades that come in the night and insist on their existence. Shades that waddle like ducks and scratch like apes. One man's reality is another man's delusion. The politician's reality leads to the absurd. The playwright's absurdity may lead to reality, but who can bear it? Who in their right mind would want to be right-minded? Who wants the crystal clarity of absurd reality? Believe me, existentialism made me what I am today. If I can recapture my fantasies, I may get out of here yet. So the hell with reality. I say you're not here. You don't exist. Poof! You're vanished!" ^v

Llona and Sammy took the hint and went out the door. They were indeed vanished. But they reappeared in the hallway beyond, re-created themselves so to speak, and cautiously headed back toward the stairway. They were almost there when the sound of a door opening behind them made them both turn around. It was the door to the room of the two old men, and Hannah was standing outside it waving frantically to them to get out of sight. Just as the attendant emerged behind Hannah, Sammy and Llona ducked into yet another room.

"Aha!" The man sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room wore an expensive lounge robe with conspicuously narrow lapels. "Aha!" He stared at them through horn-rimmed glasses, and his blond crewcut seemed to stand on end. "Aha!" He extended his arm, and an impeccably manicured finger pointed at Sammy. "Don't let her do it to you," he advised. "There's still time to save yourself. Fire the maid, and force her to wash the diapers. Had I been strong, Mrs. Karp would not have succeeded. Beware the ids of Marsha!"

"Who is Marsha? Who is Mrs. Karp? And what did she succeed at?" Sammy asked.

"Marsha is Mrs. Karp, my wifey-image. And she succeeded in driving me-overdrive all the way, that is- into this nut-hatch. Which I presume is what your spouse-type there is about to do to you." He leveled the manicure accusingly at Llona.

"I'm not his wife," Llona protested for the second time that night.

"Silence!" Mr. Karp thundered. He turned his attention to Sammy and spoke more gently. "Learn from my experience," he counselled. "You are looking at the remnants of a very successful man. You are looking at the ultimate fulfillment of feminine unfulfillment. You are looking at a disaster area leveled by the shot and shell of a female mystique turned cannibalistic. You see before you the result, the casualty I should say, of wifely potential realized at last and to the utmost."

"I don't understand," Sammy said truthfully.

"You don't understand? Then let me elucidate. One short year ago I was a very successful businessman with a house in the suburbs, an attractive and industrious wife, and two normal children. I was thirty-three years old. My wife was twenty-nine. We lived an ideal life in an idyllic setting. The world was our oyster, ripe, zesty, filling. And now look at me!"

"But what happened?" Llona wondered.

"Quiet, Lilith! You know very well what brought about my destruction. Don't play innocent with me. Every woman is in on the plot. It's to your man that I speak. To warn him of your perfidy, of the perfidy all women hold in common, before it's too late. Now listen to me!" he urged Sammy.

"I'm listening."

"Very well! As I was saying, our life was ideal, mine and wifey's. Until one day she decided she was a cultural under-achiever. I will never forget that day. The scene is etched clearly in my mind. We were seated at the breakfast table and the toast was burning. 'I am a cultural under-achiever,' she said to me. 'Marsha, the toast is burning,' I replied. 'I have never had the opportunity to realize my full potential as a human being,' she said. 'The kitchen is filling up with smoke,' I pointed out. 'I am a prisoner in this house, a serf, a servant to wait on you and the children, a lackey with no outlet for my creativity!' Marsha complained. 'If you don't take the toast out, crumbs will get in the filament and we'll have to throw the toaster away and get a new one,' I chided her gently. It was at that point, if memory serves me correctly, that she threw the toaster at me."

"I don't blame her," Llona murmured.

"You wouldn't," young Mr. Karp sneered at Llona. "Conspirator! Provocateur! Woman!" He took a breath and regained control. "Anyway," he continued to Sammy, "when the smoke cleared-literally-we talked it out. That's Marsha's expression: ''talk it out.' The result of that talk was a sleep-in maid. Well, we could afford it. I didn't begrudge Marsha the help. And I saw no harm in her using the time it afforded her in furthering the development she felt had been stifled by me. Ha! Little did I know!"

"What happened?" Sammy asked.

"Ceramics! That's what happened first. She took an adult-education course at the local community center. She started expressing herself with ceramics. And before she was through, she'd tiled over our entire front lawn. I had to fire the gardener and hire an expert to care for it. Of course, Marsha wouldn't let the kids or me walk on it. We had to use the back door. All of that I would have put up with cheerfully, but when she petitioned the village in my name to let her ceramic over the sidewalk to match the lawn, I began to get my back up. We fought about it, but in the end I lost. So did the village. Marsha had organized the other wives to back her up. So she tiled the sidewalk. And when it was done she asked me how I liked it. I told her. As it turned out, that was a serious mistake."

"You could have been tactful," Llona remarked.

"Oh? Could I now? Bah!" Mr. Karp dismissed her with a wave of his hand. "Would you have been tactful?" he asked Sammy, a note of pleading in his voice. "If you came home and found that the sidewalk in front of your house had been transformed into a multi-colored representation of a phallus, would you have been tactful? And if you said mildly that you thought it was a bit much and your wife replied that your inferiority complex was showing, would you have been tactful? And if she further informed you that she had to have some outlet for her libido which you were incapable of satisfying -which was news to you, by the way-would you have been tactful?"

"No, I wouldn't have been tactful," Sammy granted. "I would have belted her," he added. (Considering Sammy's own home background, Llona decided his affair with Hannah was really changing him.)

"I should have. She told me that herself later. It was during one of those discussions where she was proving to me that the trouble with me is that I'm overcivilized. Okay. I am. Which is why I indulged her ambition to realize her potential even further. She gave up the ceramic bit because she concluded it wasn't truly widening her horizons. She needed a more direct means of expression, she said. And that's when the curtain went up on Little Theatre. My wife, with a voice that can throw the entire stadium off key when 'The Star-Spangled Banner' is sung, was given the lead in our local thespian production of My Fair Lady. Inside of a week both kids were talking with cockney accents. A singing teacher appeared on the scene with cotton in his ears, and the scales were scalily scaled from morn to night including Sundays. As the big night came closer, the he-she who was playing Professor Higgins all but moved in with us. It was one long rehearsal with me banished from the premises so they could practice perfecting the kiss for that final clinch scene. Seems I made the Professor nervous. I can't imagine why. I sure wasn't jealous of him. He fluttered too much for that. But then that was a mistake on my part, too. I let Marsha know I wasn't jealous. Which led to the question of why I wasn't jealous. Which led to my pointing out that Higgins was more than somewhat effeminate. Which led to her pointing out my lack of sensitivity, et cetera. Higgins, it seems, was very long on sensitivity, understanding, rapport, et cetera, et cetera. I was an unfeeling clod. And besides that, I had no musical sense. No rhythm-in or out of bed. At which point I gave her back her knife, hilt first, and retired to the bathroom to nurse the rather large wound it had left. Marsha continued on her merry way with a solid week of all-night rehearsals climaxing with the performance itself. The sensitive swish playing Higgins is so damn sensitive that he comes down with psychosomatic laryngitis just before the curtain is set to go up. Panic. But he does have an understudy. Local druggist with a baritone voice and eight hands. Right up on stage where there wasn't a helluva lot she could do about it, Marsha haitch-drops her way into this guy's clutches. All but rapes her in full view of one hundred roped-in playgoers. Very embarrassing. 'Why didn't I do something?' Marsha wants to know later while she's crying her eyes out. 'Didn't want to spoil the show for her,' says I. I'm more concerned with appearances and with what people think than I am with her honor, she tells me, and besides that, I'm a coward. Since this roamin'-fingered druggist is maybe one-ten pounds wringing wet and flabby besides, I object to this. Not that it does me any good. Marsha insists I lack aggression-and again it's both out of and in bed. This time, though, she doesn't even give me time to latch onto some umbrage before she's hitting the hysterical high-C's and swearing she'll never set foot on a stage again."

"Well? Wasn't that just what you wanted?" Llona asked accusingly.

"Ah, feminine intuition," Karp answered witheringly. "Brilliant deduction! Well, yes, I suppose I did. But if I'd had any idea what was coming, I would gladly have settled for Marsha being a crabgrass thespian for life. What followed, you see, was far worse."

"What was that?" Sammy asked.

"She decided that it was the suburban environment itself that was frustrating the fulfillment of her potential. Marsha reached the conclusion that the only way she'd be able to develop would be by getting away from the house and going to work. I protested. We didn't need the money, I said. Her presence was necessary to the children's welfare, I pointed out. But in the end I lost. She hit me over the head with the idea that I was reacting the way I was because my masculinity was threatened by the thought of her competing with me by going out into the business world. The argument confused me. I just wasn't sure myself whether it was true or not. So I gave in."

"Which was a tacit admission that it was true," Llona pointed out.

"Maybe. I don't know. I just don't know. All I know is that it became o.bvious very quickly that the family budget just couldn't afford for Marsha to work."

"I don't understand that." Llona was puzzled. "If she worked, then she certainly must have earned money, and that should have been a boon to your budget."

"Typical feminine logic! You sound just like Marsha. Some boon! Let me just give you the cold, hard figures. The job Marsha landed paid her ninety a week. Which, I must admit, was about thirty more than I thought anybody would pay her. Anyway, to make sure the kids would be looked after, we had to replace the sleep-in maid with a housekeeper at almost double the salary. That cost an extra thirty-five a week. Then there was Marsha's commutation and subway fare. That ran twenty dollars and some cents a week. Lunches out with a daily cocktail or two to relax her and maybe one more on the bar car coming home accounted for another thirty. Plus, because of the bracket I'm in, all she really realized on her ninety bucks was sixty-odd. So, as you can see, already I was behind the eight-ball. But the real bill-buster was Marsha's insistence that, if she was going to be a career girl, she had to dress the part. She needed travelling suits and office frocks and all the accessories that go with them. By the time I averaged all this out over the course of a year, it was costing me ninety a week over and above what she was earning. All of which I might have stood still for if Marsha had been satisfied. But she wasn't. The job bored her. Her stultified creativity was still stultified, her unrealized potential still unrealized. So, on top of everything else, I also had to foot the bill for her to see a shrink twice a week."

"Did he help her?" Llona asked sympathetically.

"Well, you might say he clarified her problem. Narrowed it down, you might say. Narrowed it down to me. It seems all Marsha's frustrations were due to my insensitiv-ity and lack of willingness to let her fulfill her potential. My resistance to her ambitions was a sickness, according to this couch-cutie. Ergo! The only way to cure her symptoms was to treat my mental ailment. Lots of brouhaha, but I finally agreed. And now I was paying double to this psyche-smoother. Still, truth is I needed it. I was starting to crack under the pressure of Marsha's demands. The shrink isolated this symptom, and I admitted it to him. The next thing I knew, he and Marsha were having conferences to decide what to do about me. And what they finally decided was that I needed a nice, long rest in the nut-hatch. And that's how come I'm here."

"But why did you go along with it?" Sammy wondered.

"Futility. Just plain futility. The more Marsha realized her potential, the more my own potential shrank. I began to doubt my own sense of reality. They gave me a whole new vocabulary with Freudian terms replacing the dollars-and-cents common-sense language I'd always accepted. I began to seem a monster in my own eyes. Every time I looked at Marsha, I saw the victim of my sadistic symptomology. It was too much for me. I yearned for some nice, quiet place to have a nice, uncomplicated nervous breakdown. And here I am. The living result of abject defeat by the new feminine mystique."

"Well that's all very sad," Sammy said. "And very interesting, too. But I'm afraid we have to be going now."

"Too bad. I was enjoying this little chat. But remember what I said. Beware the potential of that woman!" Karp pointed at Llona. "In the end it will destroy you as I've been destroyed. Beware!"

"I'll beware," Sammy promised as he led Llona out of the room.

Hannah was standing by the entrance to the stairwell. "I was beginning to give up on finding you again," she greeted them. "I got rid of George twenty minutes ago. What kept you so long?"

"Never mind that," Sammy answered. "Is the coast clear now? Can we get in to see Ogilvie?"

"I think so. We'll just have to play it by ear." Hannah let the way up the stairs.

At the top she motioned to them to wait while she stuck her head out into the hallway and looked both ways. Then she beckoned them to follow her to the end of the passageway. There was a barred gate there to set off the security ward from the rest of the sanitarium. Hannah produced a key, unlocked it, ushered Sammy and Llona through, and then locked it behind them. Doors lined the hallway they were in now. And each of the doors had a padlocked bar across it.

Halfway down the hallway, Hannah paused in front of one of the doors. "This is Ogilvie's room," she told the other two. "I'm going to let you in there, but I won't go in with you. I'll go find the doctor on duty and talk to him or stall some other way to make sure he doesn't interrupt you. Figure you've got ten minutes. Then come out and wait for me inside that linen closet over there." She pointed. "I'll fetch you when it's safe."

"I think I should wait there now," Sammy said tactfully. "I think Mrs. Rutherford would prefer to see Mr. Ogilvie alone."

"Suit yourself." Hannah watched as Sammy walked to the linen closet, entered, and closed the door behind him. Then she unlocked the door for Llona and removed the bar. "Go on in," she told the anxious girl.

Llona turned the knob, and the door slid open. The room beyond was dark except for a small night light. Llona entered, her heart pounding. Would she find her Archer within? Would this at last be the end of her quest? Would the man of her dreams be waiting there?

The answers were within her grasp. Alas! That grasp turned out to be more slippery than Llona could have guessed!