Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

THE GUEST

On Sunday, Bertie walked into an apartment building in St. Louis, a city where, in the past, he had changed trains, waited for buses, or thought about Klaff, and where, more recently, truckers dropped him, or traveling salesmen stopped their Pontiacs downtown just long enough for him to reach into the back seat for his trumpet case and get out. In the hallway he stood before the brass mailboxed wall seeking the name of his friend, his friends’ friend really, and his friends’ friend’s wife. The girl had danced with him at parties in the college town, and one night — he imagined he must have been particularly pathetic, engagingly pathetic — she had kissed him. The man, of course, patronized him, asked him questions that would have been more vicious had they been less naïve. He remembered he rather enjoyed making his long, patient answers. Condescension always brought the truth out of him. It was more appealing than indifference at least, and more necessary to him now. He supposed he didn’t care for either of them, but he couldn’t go further. He had to rest or he would die.

He found the name on the mailbox — Mr. and Mrs. Richard Preminger — the girl’s identity, as he might have guessed, swallowed up in the husband’s. It was no way to treat women, he thought gallantly.

He started up the stairs. Turning the corner at the second landing, he saw a man moving cautiously downward, burdened by boxes and suitcases and loose bags. Only as they passed each other did Bertie, through a momentary clearing in the boxes, recognize Richard Preminger.

“Old man, old man,” Bertie said.

“Just a minute,” Preminger said, forcing a package aside with his chin. Bertie stood, half a staircase above him, leaning against the wall. He grinned in the shadows, conscious of his ridiculous fedora, his eye patch rakishly black against the soft whiteness of his face. Black-suited, tiny, white-fleshed, he posed above Preminger, dapper as a scholarly waiter in a restaurant. He waited until he was recognized.

“Bertie? Bertie? Let me get rid of this stuff. Give me a hand, will you?” Preminger said.

“Sure,” Bertie said. “It’s on my family crest. One hand washing the other. Here, wait a minute.” He passed Preminger on the stairs and held the door for him. He followed him outside.

“Take the key from my pocket, Bertie, and open the trunk. It’s the blue convertible.”

Bertie put his hand in Preminger’s pocket. “You’ve got nice thighs,” he said. To irritate Preminger he pretended to try to force the house key into the trunk lock. Preminger stood impatiently behind him, balancing his heavy burdens. “I’ve been to Dallas, lived in a palace,” Bertie said over his shoulder. “There’s this great Eskimo who blows down there. Would you believe he’s cut the best side ever recorded of ‘Mood Indigo’?” Bertie shook the key ring as if it were a castanet.

Preminger dumped his load on the hood of the car and took the keys from Bertie. He opened the trunk and started to throw things into it. “Going somewhere?” Bertie asked.

“Vacation,” Preminger said.

“Oh,” Bertie said.

Preminger looked toward the apartment house. “I’ve got to go up for another suitcase, Bertie.”

“Sure,” Bertie said.

He went up the stairs behind Preminger. About halfway up he stopped to catch his breath. Preminger watched him curiously. He pounded his chest with his tiny fist and grinned weakly. “Mea culpa,” he said. “Mea booze, Mea sluts. Mea pot. Me-o-mea.”

“Come on,” Preminger said.

They went inside and Bertie heard a toilet flushing. Through a hall, through an open door, he saw Norma, Preminger’s wife, staring absently into the bowl. “If she moves them now you won’t have to stop at God knows what kind of place along the road,” Bertie said brightly.

Norma lifted a big suitcase easily in her big hands and came into the living room. She stopped when she saw Bertie. “Bertie! Richard, it’s Bertie.”

“We bumped into each other in the hall,” Preminger said.

Bertie watched the two of them look at each other.

“You sure picked a time to come visiting, Bertie,” Preminger said.

“We’re leaving on our vacation, Bertie,” Norma said.

“We’re going up to New England for a couple of weeks,” Preminger told him.

“We can chat for a little with Bertie, can’t we, Richard, before we go?”

“Of course,” Preminger said. He sat down and pulled the suitcase next to him.

“It’s very lovely in New England.” Bertie sat down and crossed his legs. “I don’t get up there very regularly. Not my territory. I’ve found that when a man makes it in the Ivy League he tends to forget about old Bertie,” he said sadly.

“What are you doing in St. Louis, Bertie?” Preminger’s wife asked him.

“It’s my Midwestern swing,” Bertie said. “I’ve been down South on the southern sponge. Opened up a whole new territory down there.” He heard himself cackle.

“Who did you see, Bertie?” Norma asked him.

“You wouldn’t know her. A cousin of Klaff’s.”

“Were you living with her?” Preminger asked.

Bertie shook his finger at him. The Premingers stared glumly at each other. Richard rubbed the plastic suitcase handle. In a moment, Bertie thought, he would probably say, “Gosh, Bertie, you should have written. You should have let us know.” He should have written! Did the Fuller Brush man write? Who would be home? Who wouldn’t be on vacation? They were commandos, the Fuller Brush man and he. He was tired, sick. He couldn’t move on today. Would they kill him because of their lousy vacation?

Meanwhile the Premingers weren’t saying anything. They stared at each other openly, their large eyes in their large heads on their large necks largely. He thought he could wait them out. It was what he should do. It should have been the easiest thing in the world to wait out the Premingers, to stare them down. Who was he kidding? It wasn’t his forte. He had no forte. That was his forte. He could already hear himself begin to speak.

“Sure,” he said. “I almost married that girl. Klaff’s lady cousin. The first thing she ever said to me was, ‘Bertie, they never build drugstores in the middle of the block. Always on corners.’ It was the truth. Well, I thought, this was the woman for me. One time she came out of the ladies’ john of a Greyhound bus station and she said, ‘Bertie, have you ever noticed how public toilets often smell like bubble gum?’ That’s what it was like all the time. She had all these institutional insights. I was sure we could make it together. It didn’t work out.” He sighed.

Preminger stared at him, but Norma was beginning to soften. He wondered randomly what she would be like in bed. He looked coolly at her long legs, her wide shoulders. Like Klaff’s cousin: institutional.

“Bertie, how are your eyes now?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said, “still seeing double.” He smiled. “Two for one. It’s all right when there’s something to look at. Other times I use the patch.”

Norma seemed sad.

“I have fun with it,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference which eye I cover. I’m ambidextrous.” He pulled the black elastic band from his forehead. Instantly there were two large Richards, two large Normas. The Four Premingers like a troupe of Jewish acrobats. He felt surrounded. In the two living rooms his four hands fumbled with the two patches. He felt sick to his stomach. He closed one eye and hastily replaced the patch. “I shouldn’t try that on an empty stomach,” he said.

Preminger watched him narrowly. “Gee, Bertie,” he said finally, “maybe we could drop you some place.”

It was out of the question. He couldn’t get into a car again. “Do you go through Minneapolis, Minnesota?” he asked indifferently.

Preminger looked confused, and Bertie liked him for a moment. “We were going to catch the Turnpike up around Chicago, Bertie.”

“Oh, Chicago,” Bertie said. “I can’t go back to Chicago yet.”

Preminger nodded.

“Don’t you know anybody else in St. Louis?” Norma asked.

“Klaff used to live across the river, but he’s gone,” Bertie said.

“Look, Bertie…” Preminger said.

“I’m fagged,” Bertie said helplessly, “locked out.”

“Bertie,” Preminger said, “do you need any money? I could let you have twenty dollars.”

Bertie put his hand out mechanically.

“This is stupid,” Norma said suddenly. “Stay here.”

“Oh, well—”

“No, I mean it. Stay here. We’ll be gone for two weeks. What difference does it make?”

Preminger looked at his wife for a moment and shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “there’s no reason you couldn’t stay here. As a matter of fact you’d be doing us a favor. I forgot to cancel the newspaper, the milk. You’d keep the burglars off. They don’t bother a place if it looks lived in.” He put twenty dollars on the coffee table. “There might be something you need,” he explained.

Bertie looked carefully at them both. They seemed to mean it. Preminger and his wife grinned at him steadily, relieved at how easily they had come off. He enjoyed the idea himself. At last he had a real patron, a real matron. “Okay,” he said.

“Then it’s settled,” Preminger said, rising.

“It’s all right?” Bertie said.

“Certainly it’s all right,” Preminger said. “What harm could you do?”

“I’m harmless,” Bertie said.

Preminger picked up the suitcase and led his wife toward the door. “Have a good time,” Bertie said, following them. “I’ll watch things for you. Rrgghh! Rrrgghhhfff!”

Preminger waved back at him as he went down the stairs. “Hey,” Bertie called, leaning over the banister, “did I tell you about that crazy Klaff? You know what nutty Klaff did out at U.C.L.A.? He became a second-story man.” They were already down the stairs.

Bertie pressed his back against the door and turned his head slowly across his left shoulder. He imagined himself photographed from underneath. “Odd man in,” he said. He bounded into the center of the living room. I’ll bet there’s a lease, he thought. I’ll bet there’s a regular lease that goes with this place. He considered this respectfully, a little awed. He couldn’t remember ever having been in a place where the tenants actually had to sign a lease. In the dining room he turned on the chandelier lights. “Sure there’s a lease,” Bertie said. He hugged himself. “How the fallen are mighty,” he said.

In the living room he lay down on the couch without taking off his shoes. He sat up and pulled them off, but when he lay down again he was uneasy. He had gotten out of the habit, living the way he did, of sleeping without shoes. In his friends’ leaseless basements the nights were cold and he wore them for warmth. He put the shoes on again, but found that he wasn’t tired any more. It was a fact that dependence gave him energy. He was never so alert as when people did him favors. It was having to be on your own that made you tired.

“Certainly,” Bertie said to the committee, “it’s scientific. We’ve suspected it for years, but until our researchers divided up the town of Bloomington, Indiana, we had no proof. What our people found in that community was that the orphans and bastards were sleepy and run down, while the housewives and people on relief were wide awake, alert, raring to go. We can’t positively state the link yet, but we’re fairly certain that it’s something to do with dependency — in league perhaps with a particularly virulent form of gratitude. Ahem. Ahem.”

As he lectured the committee he wandered around the apartment, touring from right to left. He crossed from the living room into the dining room and turned right into the kitchen and then right again into Preminger’s small study. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” Bertie said, glancing at the contour chair near Preminger’s desk. He went back into the kitchen. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” he said, looking at Norma’s electric stove. He stepped into the dining room and continued on, passing Norma’s paintings of picturesque side streets in Mexico, of picturesque side streets in Italy, of picturesque side streets in Puerto Rico, until he came to a door that led to the back sun parlor. He went through it and found himself in a room with an easel, with paints in sexy little tubes, with brushes, with palettes and turpentine and rags. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” Bertie said and walked around the room to another door. He opened it and was in the Premingers’ master bedroom. He looked at the bed. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” he said. Through a door at the other end of the room was another small hall. On the right was the toilet. He went in and flushed it. It was one of those toilets with instantly renewable tanks. He flushed it again. And again. “The only kind to have,” he said out of the side of his mouth, imagining a rental agent. “I mean, it’s like this. Supposing the missus has diarrhea or something. You don’t want to have to wait until the tank fills up. Or suppose you’re sick. Or suppose you’re giving a party and it’s mixed company. Well, it’s just corny to whistle to cover the noise, know what I mean? ’S jus’ corny. On the other hand, you flush it once suppose you’re not through, then what happens? There’s the damn noise after the water goes down. What have you accomplished? This way”—he reached across and jiggled the little lever and then did it a second time, a third, a fourth—“you never have any embarrassing interim, what we in the trade call ‘flush lag.’ ”

He found the guest bedroom and knew at once that he would never sleep in it, that he would sleep in the Premingers’ big bed.

“Nice place you got here,” he said when he had finished the tour.

“Dooing de woh eet ees all I tink of, what I fahting foe,” the man from the Underground said. “Here ees eet fahrproof, aircondizione and safe from Nazis.”

“Stay out of Volkswagens, kid,” Bertie said.

He went back into the living room. He wanted music, but it was a cardinal principle with him never to blow alone. He would drink alone, take drugs alone, but somehow for him the depths of depravity were represented by having to play jazz alone. He had a vision of himself in a cheap hotel room sitting on the edge of an iron bedstead. Crumpled packages of cigarettes were scattered throughout the room. Bottles of gin were on top of the Gideon Bible, the Western Union blanks. His trumpet was in his lap. “Perfect,” Bertie said. “Norma Preminger could paint it in a picture.” He shuddered.

The phonograph was in the hall between the dining room and living room. It was a big thing, with the AM and the FM and the short wave and the place where you plugged in the color television when it was perfected. He found records in Preminger’s little room and went through them rapidly. “Ahmad Jamahl, for Christ’s sake.” Bertie took the record out of its sleeve and broke it across his knee. He stood up slowly and kicked the fragments of the broken recording into a neat pile.

He turned around and scooped up as many of Preminger’s recordings as he could carry and brought them to the machine. He piled them on indiscriminately and listened with visible, professional discomfort. He listened to The New World Symphony, to Beethoven’s Fifth, to My Fair Lady. The more he listened the more he began to dislike, the Premingers. When he could stand it no longer he tore the playing arm viciously away from the record and looked around him. He saw the Premingers’ bookcase.

“I’ll read,” Bertie said.

He took down the Marquis de Sade and Henry Miller and Ronald Firbank and turned the pages desultorily. Nothing happened. He tried reading aloud in front of a mirror. He went back to the bookcase and looked for The Egg and I and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. The prose of a certain kind of bright housewife always made Bertie feel erotic. But the Premingers owned neither book. He browsed through Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with his fly unzipped, but he felt only a mild lasciviousness.

He went into their bedroom and opened the closet. He found a pair of Norma’s shoes and put them on. Although he was no fetishist, he had often promised himself that if he ever had the opportunity he would see what it was like. He got into drag and walked around the apartment in Norma’s high heels. All he experienced was a pain in his calves.

In the kitchen he looked into the refrigerator. There were some frozen mixed vegetables in the freezer compartment. “I’ll starve first,” Bertie said.

He found a Billie Holiday record and put it on the phonograph. He hoped that out in Los Angeles, Klaff was being beaten with rubber hoses by the police. He looked up at the kitchen clock. “Nine,” he said. “Only seven in L.A. They probably don’t start beating them up till later.”

“Talk, Klaff,” he snarled, “or we’ll drag you into the Blood Room.”

“Flake off, copper,” Klaff said.

“That’s enough of that, Klaff. Take that and that and that.”

“Bird lives!” Bertie screamed suddenly, invoking the dead Charlie Parker. It was his code cry.

“Mama may have,” Billie Holiday wailed, “Papa may have, but God Bless the child who’s got his own, who — oo — zz—”

“Who — oo — zz,” Bertie wailed.

“Got his own,” Billie said.

“I’ll tell him when he comes in, William,” Bertie said.

He waited respectfully until Billie was finished and then turned off the music.

He wondered why so many people felt that Norman Mailer was the greatest living American novelist.

He sat down on the Premingers’ coffee table and marveled at his being alone in so big and well-furnished an apartment. The Premingers were probably the most substantial people he knew. Though plenty of the others wanted to, Bertie thought bitterly, Preminger was the only one from the old crowd who might make it. Of course he was Jewish, and that helped. Some Jews swung pretty good, but he always suspected that in the end they would hold out on you. But then who wouldn’t, Bertie wondered. Kamikaze pilots, maybe. Anyway, this was Bertie’s special form of anti-Semitism and he cherished it. Melvin Gimpel, for example, his old roommate. Every time Melvin tried to kill himself by sticking his head in the oven he left the kitchen window open. One time he found Gimpel on his knees with his head on the oven door, oddly like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Bertie closed the window and shook Gimpel awake.

“Mel,” he yelled, slapping him. “Mel.

“Bertie, go way. Leave me alone, I want to kill myself.”

“Thank God,” Bertie said. “Thank God I’m in time. When I found that window closed I thought it was all over.”

“What, the window was closed? My God, was the window closed?”

“Melvin Gimpel is so simple

Thinks his nipple is a pimple,”

Bertie recited.

He hugged his knees, and felt again a wave of the nauseous sickness he had experienced that morning. “It’s foreshadowing. One day as I am shoveling my walk I will collapse and die.”

When the nausea left him he thought again about his situation. He had friends everywhere and made his way from place to place like an old-time slave on the Underground Railway. For all the pathos of the figure he knew he deliberately cut, there were always people to do him favors, give him money, beer, drugs, to nurse him back to his normal state of semi-invalidism, girls to kiss him in the comforting way he liked. This was probably the first time he had been alone in months. He felt like a dog whose master has gone away for the weekend. Just then he heard some people coming up the stairs and he growled experimentally. He went down on his hands and knees and scampered to the door, scratching it with his nails. “Rrrgghhf,” he barked. “Rrgghhfff!” He heard whoever it was fumbling to open a door on the floor below him. He smiled. “Good dog,” he said. “Good dog, goodog, gudug, gudugguduggudug.”

He whined. He missed his master. A tear formed in the corner of his left eye. He crawled to a full-length mirror in the bathroom. “Ahh,” he said. “Ahh.” Seeing the patch across his eye, he had an inspiration. “Here, Patch,” he called. “Come on, Patch.” He romped after his own voice.

He moved beside Norma Preminger’s easel in the sun parlor. He lowered his body carefully, pushing himself slightly backward with his arms. He yawned. He touched his chest to the wooden floor. He wagged his tail and then let himself fall heavily on one side. He pulled his legs up under him and fell asleep.

When Bertie awoke he was hungry. He fingered the twenty dollars in his pocket that Preminger had given him. He could order out. The light in the hall where the phone and phone books were was not good, so he tore “Restaurants” from the Yellow Pages and brought the sheets with him into the living room. Only two places delivered after one A.M. It was already one-thirty. He dialed the number of a pizza place across the city.

“Pal, bring over a big one, half shrimp, half mushroom. And two six-packs.” He gave the address. The man explained that the truck had just gone out and that he shouldn’t expect delivery for at least another hour and a half.

“Put it in a cab,” Bertie said. “While Bird lives Bertie spends.”

He took out another dozen or so records and piled them on the machine. He sat down on the couch and drummed his trumpet case with his fingers. He opened the case and fit the mouthpiece to the body of the horn. He put the trumpet to his lips and experienced the unpleasant shock of cold metal he always felt. He still thought it strange that men could mouth metal this way, ludicrous that his professional attitude should be a kiss. He blew a few bars in accompaniment to the record and then put the trumpet back in the case. He felt in the side pockets of the trumpet case and took out two pairs of dirty underwear, some handkerchiefs and three pairs of socks. He unrolled one of the pairs of socks and saw with pleasure that the drug was still there. He took out the bottle of carbon tetrachloride. This was what he cleaned his instrument with, and it was what he would use to kill himself when he had finally made the decision.

He held the bottle to the light. “If nothing turns up,” he said, “I’ll drink this. And to hell with the kitchen window.”

The cab driver brought the pizza and Bertie gave him the twenty dollars.

“I can’t change that,” the driver said.

“Did I ask you to change it?” Bertie said.

“That’s twenty bucks there.”

“Bird lives. Easy come, easy go go go,” Bertie said.

The driver started to thank him.

“Go.” He closed the door.

He spread Norma Preminger’s largest tablecloth over the dining-room table and then, taking china and silver from the big breakfront, laid several place settings. He found champagne glasses.

Unwrapping the pizza, he carefully plucked all the mushrooms from it (“American mushrooms,” he said. “Very square. No visions.”) and laid them in a neat pile on the white linen. (“Many mushloom,” he said. “Mushloom crowd.”) He poured some beer into a champagne glass and rose slowly from his chair.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “to the absent Klaff. May the police in Los Angeles, California, beat his lousy ass off.” He drank off all the beer in one gulp and tossed the glass behind him over his shoulder. He heard it shatter and then a soft sizzling sound. Turning around, he saw that he had hit one of Norma’s paintings right in a picturesque side street. Beer dripped ignobly down a donkey’s leg. “Goddamn,” Bertie said appreciatively, “action painting.”

He ate perhaps a quarter of the pizza before rising from the table, wiping the corner of his lips with a big linen napkin. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I propose that the ladies retire to the bedroom while we men enjoy our cigars and port and some good talk.”

“I propose that we men retire to the bedroom and enjoy the ladies,” he said in Gimpel’s voice.

“Here, here,” he said in Klaff’s voice. “Here, here. Good talk. Good talk.”

“If you will follow me, gentlemen,” Bertie said in his own voice. He began to walk around the apartment. “I have often been asked the story of my life. These requests usually follow a personal favor someone has done me, a supper shared, a bed made available, a ride in one of the several directions. Indeed, I have become a sort of troubadour who does not sing so much as whine for his supper. Most of you—”

“Whine is very good with supper,” Gimpel said.

“Gimpel, my dear, why don’t you run into the kitchen and play?” Bertie said coolly. “Many of you may know the humble beginnings, the sordid details, the dark Freudian patterns, and those of you who are my friends—”

Klaff belched.

“Those of you who are my friends, who do not run off to mix it up with the criminal element in the far West, have often wondered what will ultimately happen to me, to ‘Poor Bertie’ as I am known in the trade.”

He unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall to the floor. In his undershirt he looked defenseless, his skin pale as something seen in moonlight. “Why, you wonder, doesn’t he do something about himself, pull himself up by his bootstraps? Why, for example, doesn’t he get his eyes fixed? Well, I’ve tried.”

He kicked off his shoes. “You have all admired my bushy mustache. Do you remember that time two years ago I dropped out of sight for four months? Well, let me tell you what happened that time.”

He took off his black pants. “I had been staying with Royal Randle, the distinguished philologist and drunk. You will recall what Royal, Klaff, Myers, Gimpel and myself once were to each other. Regular Whiffenpoofs we were. Damned from here to eternity. Sure, sure.” He sighed. “You remember Randle’s promises: ‘It won’t make any difference, Bertie. It won’t make any difference, Klaff. It won’t make any difference, fellas.’ He married the girl in the muu-muu.”

He was naked now except for his socks. He shivered once and folded his arms across his chest. “Do you know why the girl in the muu-muu married Randle?” He paused dramatically. “To get at me, that’s why! The others she didn’t care about. She knew even before I did what they were like. Even what Klaff was like. She knew they were corrupt, that they had it in them to sell me out, to settle down — that all anyone had to do was wave their deaths in front of them and they’d come running, that reason and fucking money and getting it steady would win again. But in me she recognized the real enemy, the last of the go-to-hell-goddamn-its. Maybe the first.

“They even took me with them on their honeymoon. At the time I thought it was a triumph for dependency, but it was just a trick, that’s all. The minute they were married, this girl in the muu-muu was after Randle to do something about Bertie. And it wasn’t ‘Poor’ Bertie this time. It was she who got me the appointment with the mayor. Do you know what His Honor said to me? ‘Shave your mustache and I’ll give you a job clerking in one of my supermarkets.’ Christ, friends, do you know I did it? Well, I’m not made of stone. They had taken me on their honeymoon, for God’s sake.”

He paused.

“I worked in that supermarket for three hours. Clean-shaved. My mustache sacrificed as an earnest to the mayor. Well, I’m telling you, you don’t know what square is till you’ve worked in a supermarket for three hours. They pipe in Mantovani. Mantovani! I cleared out for four months to raise my mustache again and to forget. What you see now isn’t the original, you understand. It’s all second growth, and believe me it’s not the same.”

He drew aside the shower curtain and stepped into the tub. He paused with his hand on the tap. “But I tell you this, friends. I would rather be a mustached bum than a clean-shaved clerk. I’ll work. Sure I will. When they pay anarchists! When they subsidize the hip! When they give grants to throw bombs! When they shell out for gainsaying!”

Bertie pulled the curtain and turned on the faucet. The rush of water was like applause.

After his shower Bertie went into the second bedroom and carefully removed the spread from the cot. Then he punched the pillow and mussed the bed. “Very clever,” he said. “It wouldn’t do to let them think I never slept here.” He had once realized with sudden clarity that he would never, so long as he lived, make a bed.

Then he went into the other bedroom and ripped the spread from the big double bed. For some time, in fact since he had first seen it, Bertie had been thinking about this bed. It was the biggest bed he would ever sleep in. He thought invariably in such terms. One cigarette in a pack would suddenly become distinguished in his mind as the best, or the worst, he would smoke that day. A homely act, such as tying his shoelaces, if it had occurred with unusual ease, would be remembered forever. This lent to his vision an oblique sadness, conscious as he was that he was forever encountering experiences which would never come his way again.

He slipped his naked body between the sheets, but no sooner had he made himself comfortable than he became conscious of the phonograph, still playing in the little hall. He couldn’t hear it very well. He thought about turning up the volume, but he had read somewhere about neighbors. Getting out of bed, he moved the heavy machine through the living room, pushing it with difficulty over the seamed, bare wooden floor, trailing deep scratches. Remember not to walk barefoot there, he thought. At one point one of the legs caught in a loop of the Premingers’ shag rug and Bertie strained to free it, finally breaking the thick thread and producing an interesting pucker along one end of the rug, not unlike the pucker in raised theatrical curtains. At last he had maneuvered the machine into the hall just outside the bedroom and plugged it in. He went back for the Billie Holiday recording he had heard earlier and put it on the phonograph. By fiddling with the machine, he fixed it so that the record would play all night.

Bertie got back into the bed. “Ah,” he said, “the sanctum sanctorum.” He rolled over and over from one side of the bed to the other. He tucked his knees into his chest and went under the covers. “It makes you feel kind of small and insignificant,” he said.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Graham Macnamee speaking to you from the Cave of the Winds. I have made my way into the heart of this darkness to find my friend, Poor Bertie, who, as you know, entered the bed eight weeks ago. Bertie is with me now, and while there isn’t enough light for me to be able to see his condition, his voice may tell us something about his physical state. Bertie, just what is the official record?”

“Well, Graham, some couples have been known to stick it out for seventy-five years. Of course, your average is much less than that, but still—”

“Seventy-five years.”

“Seventy-five, yes sir. It’s amazing, isn’t it, Graham, when you come to think? All that time in one bed.”

“It certainly is,” Graham Macnamee said. “Do you think you’ll be able to go the distance, Bert?”

“Who, me? No, no. A lot of folks have misunderstood my purpose in coming here. I’m rather glad you’ve given me the opportunity to clear that up. Actually my work here is scientific. This isn’t a stunt or anything like that. I’m here to learn.”

“Can you tell us about it, Bert?”

“Graham, it’s been a fascinating experience, if you know what I mean, but frankly there are many things we still don’t understand. I don’t know why they do it. All that licit love, that regularity. Take the case of Richard and Norma, for example — and incidentally, you don’t want to overlook the significance of that name ‘Norma.’ Norma/Normal, you see?”

“Say, I never thought of that.”

“Well, I’m trained to think like that, Graham. In my work you have to.”

“Say,” Graham Macnamee said.

“Sure. Well, the thing is this, buddy, when I first came into this bed I felt the aura, know what I mean, the power. I think it’s built into the mattress or something.”

“Say.”

“Shut your face, Graham, and let me speak, will you please? Well, anyway, you feel surrounded. Respectable. Love is made here, of course, but it’s not love as we know it. There are things that must remain mysteries until we have more facts. I mean, Graham, checks could be cashed in this bed, for Christ’s sake, credit cards honored. It’s ideal for family reunions, high teas. Graham, it’s the kind of place you wouldn’t be ashamed to take your mother.”

“Go to sleep, Bert,” Graham Macnamee said.

“Say,” Bertie said.

Between the third and fourth day of his stay in the Premingers’ apartment Bertie became restless. He had not been outside the house since the Sunday he arrived, even to bring in the papers Preminger had told him about. (Indeed, it was by counting the papers that he knew how long he had been there, though he couldn’t be sure, since he didn’t know whether the Premingers had taken the Sunday paper along with them.) He could see them on the back porch through the window of Norma’s sun parlor. With the bottles of milk they made a strange little pile. After all, he was not a caretaker; he was a guest. Preminger could bring in his own papers, drink his own damn milk. For the same reasons he had determined not even to answer the phone when it rang.

One evening he tried to call Klaff at the Los Angeles County Jail, but the desk sergeant wouldn’t get him. He wouldn’t even take a message.

Although he had not been outside since Sunday, Bertie had only a vague desire to leave the apartment. He weighed this against his real need to rest and his genuine pleasure in being alone in so big a place. Like the man in the joke who does not leave his Miami hotel room because it is costing him thirty-five dollars a day, Bertie decided he had better remain inside.

With no money left he was reduced to eating the dry, cold remainder of the pizza, dividing it mathematically into a week’s provisions, like someone on a raft. (He actually fancied himself, not on a raft perhaps, but set alone and drifting on, say, the Queen Mary.) To supplement the pizza he opened some cans of soup he found in the pantry and drank the contents straight, without heating it or even adding water. Steadily he drank away at the Premingers’ modest stock of liquor. The twelve cans of beer had been devoured by the second morning, of course.

After the second full day in the apartment his voices began to desert him. It was only with difficulty that he could manage his imitations, and only for short lengths of time. The glorious discussions that had gone on long into the night were now out of the question. He found he could not do Gimpel’s voice any more, and even Klaff’s was increasingly difficult and largely confined to his low, caressing obscenities. Mostly he talked with himself, although it was a real strain to keep up his end of the conversation, and it always made him cry when he said how pathetic he was and asked himself where do you go from here. Oh, to be like Bird, he thought. Not to have to be a bum. To ask, as it were, no quarter.

At various times during the day he would call out “Bird lives” in seeming stunning triumph. But he didn’t believe it.

He watched a lot of television. “I’m getting ammunition,” he said. “It’s scientific.”

Twice a day he masturbated in the Premingers’ bed.

He settled gradually, then, into restlessness. He knew, of course, that he had it always in his power to bring himself back up to the heights he had known in those wonderful first two days. He was satisfied, however, not to use this power, and thought of himself as a kind of soldier, alone in a foxhole, in enemy territory, at night, at a bad time in the war, with one bullet in his pistol. Oddly, he derived more pride — and comfort, and a queer security — from this single bullet than others might have from whole cases of ammunition. It was his strategic bullet, the one he would use to get the big one, turn the tide, make the difference. The Premingers would be away two weeks. He would not waste his ammunition. Just as he divided the stale pizza, cherishing each piece as much for the satisfaction he took from possessing it during a time of emergency as for any sustenance it offered, so he enjoyed his knowledge that at any time he could recoup his vanishing spirits. He shared with the squares (“Use their own weapons to beat them, Bertie”) a special pride in adversity, in having to do without, in having to expose whatever was left of his character to the narrower straits. It was strange, he thought seriously, it was the paradox of the world and an institutional insight that might have come right out of the mouth of that slut in Dallas, but the most peculiar aspect of the squares wasn’t their lack of imagination or their bland bad taste, but their ability, like the wildest fanatics, like the furthest out of the furthest out, to cling to the illogical, finally untenable notion that they must have and have in order to live, at the same time that they realized that it was better not to have. What seemed so grand to Bertie, who admired all impossible positions, was that they believed both things with equal intensity, never suspecting for a moment any inconsistency. And here was Bertie, Bertie thought, here was Bertie inside their capitol, on the slopes of their mountains, on their smooth shores, who believed neither of these propositions, who believed in not having and in not suffering too, who yet realized the very same pleasure that they would in having and not using. It was the strangest thing that would ever happen to him, he thought.

“Are you listening, Klaff, you second-story fink?” Bertie yelled. “Do you see how your old pal is developing what is called character?”

And so, master of himself for once, he resolved — feeling what someone taking a vow feels — not to use the last of his drugs until the strategic moment of strategic truth.

That was Wednesday evening. By Thursday morning he had decided to break his resolution. He had not yielded to temptation, had not lain fitfully awake all night — indeed, his resolution had given him the serenity to sleep well — in the sweaty throes of withdrawal. There had been no argument or rationalization, nor had he decided that he had reached his limit or that this was the strategic moment he had been waiting for. He yielded as he always yielded: spontaneously, suddenly, unexpectedly, as the result neither of whim nor of calculation. His important decisions were almost always reached without his knowledge, and he was often as surprised as the next one to see what he was going to do — to see, indeed, that he was already doing it. (Once someone had asked him whether he believed in Free Will, and after considering this for a moment as it applied to himself, Bertie had answered “Free? Hell, it’s positively loose.”)

Having discovered his new intention, he was eager to realize it. As often as he had taken drugs (he never called it anything but drugs, never used the cute or obscene names, never even said “dope”; to him it was always “drugs,” medicine for his spirit), they were still a major treat for him. “It’s a rich man’s game,” he had once told Klaff, and then he had leaned back philosophically. “You know, Klaff, it’s a good thing I’m poor. When I think of the snobbish ennui of your wealthy junkies, I realize that they don’t know how to appreciate their blessings. God keep me humble, Klaff. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder, a truer word was never spoken.”

Nor did a drug ever lose its potency for him. If he graduated from one to another, it was not in order to recover some fading jolt, but to experience a new and different one. He held in contempt all those who professed disenchantment with the drugs they had been raised on, and frequently went back to rediscover the old pleasures of marijuana, as a sentimental father might chew some of his boy’s bubble gum. “Loyalty, Gimpel,” he exclaimed, “loyalty, do you know what that is?”

Bertie would and did try anything, though currently his favorite was mescaline for the visions it induced. Despite what he considered his eclectic tastes in these matters, there were one or two things he would not do, however. He never introduced any drug by hypodermic needle. This he found disgusting and, frankly, painful. He often said he could stand anything but pain and was very proud of his clear, unpunctured skin. “Not a mark on me,” he would say, waving his arms like a professional boxer. The other thing he would not do was take his drugs in the presence of other users, for he found the company of addicts offensive. However, he was not above what he called “seductions.” A seduction for him was to find some girl and talk her into letting him share his drugs with her. Usually it ended in their lying naked in a bed together, both of them serene, absent of all desire and what Bertie called “unclean thoughts.”

“You know,” he would say to the girl beside him, “I think that if all the world’s leaders would take drugs and lie down on the bed naked like this without any unclean thoughts, the cause of world peace would be helped immeasurably. What do you think?”

“I think so too,” she would say.

Once he knew he was going to take the drug, Bertie made his preparations. He went first to his trumpet case and took out the last small packet of powder. He opened it carefully, first closing all the windows so that no sudden draft could blow any of it away. This had once happened to a friend of his, and Bertie had never forgotten the warning.

“I am not one on whom a lesson is lost,” Bertie said.

“You’re okay, Bertie,” a Voice said. “Go save France.”

He placed the packet on the Premingers’ coffee table and carefully spread the paper, exactly like the paper wrapper around a stick of chewing gum, looking almost lustfully at the soft, flat layer of ground white powder. He held out his hand to see how steady it was, and although he was not really shaky he did not trust himself to lift the paper from the table. He brought a water tumbler from the kitchen and gently placed it upside down on top of the powder. He was not yet ready to take it. Bertie was a man who postponed his pleasures as long as he possibly could; he let candy dissolve in his mouth and played with the threads on his tangerine before eating the fruit. It was a weakness in his character perhaps, but he laid it lovingly at the feet of his poverty.

He decided to wait until sundown to take the drug, reasoning that when it wore off, it would be early next morning and he would be ready for bed. Sleep was one of his pleasures too, and he approved of regularity in small things, taking a real pride in being able to keep hours. To pass the time until sundown he looked for something to do. First he found some tools and busied himself by taking Norma’s steam iron apart. There was still time left after that, so he took a canvas and painted a picture. Because he did not know how to draw he simply covered the canvas first with one color and then with another, applying layer after layer of the paint thickly. Each block of color he made somewhat smaller than the last, so that the finished painting portrayed successive jagged margins of color. He stepped back and considered his work seriously.

“Well, it has texture, Bertie,” Hans Hoffman said.

“Bertie,” the Voice said suddenly, “I don’t like to interrupt when you’re working, but it’s sundown.”

“So it is,” he said, looking up.

He went back into the living room and removed the tumbler. Taking up the paper in his fingers and creasing it as if he were a cowboy rolling a cigarette, Bertie tilted his head far back and inhaled the powder deeply. This part was always uncomfortable for him. “Ooo,” he said, “the bubbles.” He stuffed the last few grains up his nose with his fingers. “Waste not, want not,” he said.

He sat down to wait. After half an hour in which nothing happened, Bertie became uneasy. “It’s been cut,” he said. “Sure, depend upon friends to do you favors.” He was referring to the fact that the mescaline had been a going-away present from friends in Oklahoma City. He decided to give it fifteen more minutes. “Nothing,” he said at last, disappointed. “Nothing.”

The powder, as it always did, left his throat scratchy, and there was a bitter taste in his mouth. His soft palate prickled. He seized the water tumbler from the coffee table and walked angrily into the kitchen. He ran the cold water, then gargled and spit in the sink. In a few minutes the bitter taste and the prickly sensation subsided and he felt about as he had before he took the drug. He was conscious, however, of a peculiar smell, unpleasant, unfamiliar, nothing like the odor of rotting flowers he associated with the use of drugs. He opened a window and leaned out, breathing the fresh air. But as soon as he came away from the window, the odor was again overpowering. He went to see if he could smell it in the other rooms. When he had made his tour he realized that the stench must be coming from the kitchen. Holding his breath, he came back to see if he could locate its source. The kitchen was almost as Norma had left it. He had done no cooking, and although there were some empty soup and beer cans in the sink he knew they couldn’t be causing the odor. He shrugged. Then he noticed the partially closed door to Preminger’s study.

“Of course,” Bertie said. “Whatever it is must be in there.” He pushed the door open. In the middle of the floor were two blackish mounds that looked like dark sawdust. Bertie stepped back in surprise.

“Camel shit,” he said. “My God, how did that get in here?” He went closer to investigate. “That’s what it is, all right.” He had never seen it before but a friend had, and had described it to him. This stuff fitted the description perfectly. He considered what to do.

“I can’t leave it there,” he said. He found a dustpan and a broom, and propping the pan against the leg of Preminger’s chair, began to sweep the stuff up. He was surprised at how remarkably gummy it seemed. When he finished he washed the spot on the floor with a foaming detergent and stepped gingerly to the back door. He lifted the lid of the garbage can and shoved the broom and the contents of the dustpan and the dustpan itself into the can. Then he went to the bathroom and washed his hands.

In the living room he saw the Chinaman. “Jesus,” Bertie said breathlessly.

The Chinaman lowered his eyes in a shy, almost demure smile. He said nothing, but motioned Bertie to sit in the chair across from him. Bertie, too frightened to disobey, sat down.

He waited for the Chinaman to tell him what he wanted. After an hour (he heard the chime clock strike nine times and then ten times), when the Chinaman still had not said anything, he began to feel a little calmer. Maybe he was just tired, Bertie thought, and came in to rest. He realized that perhaps he and the Chinaman had more in common than had at first appeared. He looked at the fellow in this new light and saw that he had been foolish to fear him. The Chinaman was small, smaller even than Bertie. In fact, he was only two feet tall. Perhaps what made him seem larger was the fact that he was wrapped in wide, voluminous white silk robes. Bertie stared at the robes, fascinated by the delicate filigree trim up and down their length. To see this closer he stood up and walked tentatively toward the Chinaman.

The Chinaman gazed steadily to the front, and Bertie, seeing no threat, continued toward him. He leaned down over the Chinaman, and gently grasping the delicate lacework between his forefinger and his thumb, drew it toward his eye. “May I?” Bertie asked. “I know a good deal about this sort of thing.”

The Chinaman lowered his eyes.

Bertie examined the weird symbols and designs, and although he did not understand them, recognized at once their cabalistic origin.

“Magnificent,” Bertie said at last. “My God, the man hours that must have gone into this. The sheer craftsmanship! That’s really a terrific robe you’ve got there.”

The Chinaman lowered his eyes still further.

Bertie sat down in his chair again. He heard the clock strike eleven and he smiled at the Chinaman. He was trying to be sympathetic, patient. He knew the fellow had his reasons for coming and that in due time they would be revealed, but he couldn’t help being a little annoyed. First the failure of the drug and then the camel shit on the floor and now this. However, he remained very polite.

There was nothing else to do, so he concentrated on the Chinaman’s face.

Then a strange thing happened.

He became aware, as he scrutinized the face, of some things he hadn’t noticed before. First he realized that it was the oldest face he had ever seen. He knew that this face was old enough to have looked on Buddha’s. It was only faintly yellow, really, and he understood with a sweeping insight that originally it must have been white, as it still largely was, a striking, flat white, naked as a sheet, bright as teeth, that its yellowness was an intrusion, the intruding yellowness of fantastic age, of pages in ancient books. As soon as he perceived this he understood the origin and mystery of the races. All men had at first been white; their different tints were only the shades of their different wisdoms. Of course, he thought. Of course. It’s beautiful. Beautiful!

The second thing Bertie noticed was that the face seemed extraordinarily wise. The longer he stared at it the wiser it seemed. Clearly this was the wisest Chinaman, and thus the wisest man, in the history of the world. Now he was impatient for the Chinaman to speak, to tell him his secrets, but he also understood that so long as he was impatient the Chinaman would not speak, that he must become serene, as serene as the Chinaman himself, or else the Chinaman would go away. As this occurred to him the Chinaman smiled and Bertie knew he had been right. He was aware that if he just sat there, deliberately trying to become serene, nothing would happen. He decided that the best way to become serene was to ignore the Chinaman, to go on about his business as if the Chinaman weren’t even there.

He stood up. “Am I getting warm?” Bertie asked.

The Chinaman lowered his eyes and smiled.

“Well, then,” Bertie said, rubbing his hands, “let’s see.”

He went into the kitchen to see if there was anything he could do there to make him serene.

He washed out the empty cans of soup.

He strolled into the bedroom and made the bed. This took him an hour. He heard the clock strike twelve and then one.

He took a record off the machine, and starting from the center hole and working to the outer edge, counted all the ridges. This took him fourteen seconds.

He found a suitcase in one of the closets and packed all of Norma’s underwear into it.

He got a pail of water and some soap and washed all the walls in the small bedroom.

It was in the dining room, however, that he finally achieved serenity. He studied Norma’s pictures of side streets throughout the world and with sudden insight understood what was wrong with them. He took some tubes of white paint and with a brush worked over the figures, painting back into the flesh all their original whiteness. He made the Mexicans white, the Negroes white, feeling as he worked an immense satisfaction, the satisfaction not of the creator, nor even of the reformer, but of the restorer.

Swelling with serenity, Bertie went back into the living room and sat down in his chair. For the first time the Chinaman met his gaze directly, and Bertie realized that something important was going to happen.

Slowly, very slowly, the Chinaman began to open his mouth. Bertie watched the slow parting of the Chinaman’s thin lips, the gleaming teeth, white and bright as fence pickets. Gradually the rest of the room darkened and the thinly padded chair on which Bertie sat grew incredibly soft. He knew that they had been transported somehow, that they were now in a sort of theater. The Chinaman was seated on a kind of raised platform. Meanwhile the mouth continued to open, slowly as an ancient drawbridge. Tiny as the Chinaman was, the mouth seemed enormous. Bertie gazed into it, seeing nothing. At last, deep back in the mouth, he saw a brief flashing, as of a small crystal on a dark rock suddenly illuminated by the sun. In a moment he saw it again, brighter now, longer sustained. Soon it was so bright that he had to force himself to look at it. Then the mouth went black. Before he could protest, the brightness was overwhelming again and he saw a cascade of what seemed like diamonds tumble out of the Chinaman’s mouth. It was the Chinaman’s tongue.

Twisting, turning over and over like magicians’ silks pulled endlessly from a tube, the tongue continued to pour from the Chinaman’s mouth. Bertie saw that it had the same whiteness as the rest of his face, and that it was studded with bright, beautiful jewels. On the tongue, long now as an unfurled scroll, were thick black Chinese characters. It was the secret of life, of the world, of the universe. Bertie could barely read for the tears of gratitude in his eyes. Desperately he wiped the tears away with his fists. He looked back at the tongue and stared at the strange words, realizing that he could not read Chinese. He was sobbing helplessly now because he knew there was not much time. The presence of the Chinaman gave him courage and strength and he forced himself to read the Chinese. As he concentrated it became easier, the characters somehow re-forming, translating themselves into a sort of decipherable Chinesey script, like the words “Chop Suey” on the neon sign outside a Chinese restaurant. He was breathless from his effort and the stunning glory of what was being revealed to him. Frequently he had to pause, punctuating his experience with queer little squeals. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Oh.”

Then it was over.

He was exhausted, but his knowledge glowed in him like fire. “So that’s it” was all he could say. “So that’s it. So that’s it.”

Bertie saw that he was no longer in the theater. The Chinaman was gone and Bertie was back in the Premingers’ living room. He struggled for control of himself. He knew it was urgent that he tell someone what had happened to him. Desperately he pulled open his trumpet case. Inside he had pasted sheets with the names, addresses and phone numbers of all his friends.

“Damn Klaff,” he said angrily. “Damn Second-Story Klaff in his lousy jail.”

He spotted Gimpel’s name and the phone number of his boarding house in Cincinnati. Tearing the sheet from where it was pasted inside the lid, he rushed to the phone and placed the call. “Life and death,” he screamed at Gimpel’s bewildered landlady. “Life and death.”

When Gimpel came to the phone Bertie began to tell him, coherently, but with obvious excitement, all that had happened. Gimpel was as excited as himself.

“Then the Chinaman opened his mouth and this tongue with writing on it came out.”

“Yeah?” Gimpel said. “Yeah? Yeah?”

“Only it was in Chinese,” Bertie shouted.

“Chinese,” Gimpel said.

“But I could read it, Gimpel! I could read it!”

“I didn’t know you could read Chinese,” Gimpel said.

“It was the meaning of life.”

“Yeah?” Gimpel said. “Yeah? What’d it say? What’d it say?”

“What?” Bertie said.

“What’d it say? What’d the Chink’s tongue say was the meaning of life?”

“I forget,” Bertie said and hung up.

He slept until two the next afternoon, and when he awoke he felt as if he had been beaten up. His tongue was something that did not quite fit in his mouth, and throughout his body he experienced a looseness of the bones, as though his skeleton were a mobile put together by an amateur. He groaned dispiritedly, his eyes still closed. He knew he had to get up out of the bed and take a shower and shave and dress, that only by making extravagant demands on it would his body give him any service at all. “You will make the Death March,” he warned it ruthlessly.

He opened his eyes and what he saw disgusted him and turned his stomach. His eye patch had come off during the night and now there were two of everything. He saw one eye patch on one pillow and another eye patch on another pillow. Hastily he grabbed for it, but he had chosen the wrong pillow. He reached for the other eye patch and the other pillow, but somehow he had put out one of his illusory hands. It did not occur to him to shut one eye. At last, by covering all visible space, real or illusory, with all visible fingers, real or illusory — like one dragging a river — he recovered the patch and pulled it quickly over one of his heads.

He stood stunned in his hot shower, and then shaved, cutting his neck badly. He dressed.

“Whan ’e iz through his toilette, Monsieur will see how much better ’e feel,” his valet said. He doubted it and didn’t answer.

In the dining room he tried not to look at Norma’s paintings, but could not help noticing that overnight many of her sunny side streets had become partial snow scenes. He had done that, he remembered, though he could not now recall exactly why. It seemed to have something to do with a great anthropological discovery he had made the night before. He finished the last of the pizza, gagging on it briefly.

Considering the anguish of his body, it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he was hooked. Momentarily this appealed to his sense of the dramatic, but then he realized that it would be a terrible thing to have happen to him. He could not afford to be hooked, for he knew with a sense of calm sadness that his character could no more sustain the responsibility of a steady drug habit than it could sustain the responsibility of any other kind of pattern.

“Oh, what a miserable bastard I am,” Bertie said.

In near-panic he considered leaving the Premingers’ apartment immediately, but he knew that he was in no condition to travel. “You wouldn’t make it to the corner,” he said.

He felt massively sorry for himself. The more he considered it the more certain it appeared that he was hooked. It was terrible. Where would he get the money to buy the drugs? What would they do to his already depleted physical resources? “Oh, what a miserable bastard I am,” he said again.

To steady himself he took a bottle of Scotch from the shelf in the pantry. Bertie did not like hard liquor. Though he drank a lot, it was beer he drank, or, when he could get them, the sweeter cordials. Scotch and bourbon had always seemed vaguely square to him. But he had already finished the few liqueurs that Preminger had, and now nothing was left but Scotch. He poured himself an enormous drink.

Sipping it calmed him — though his body still ached — and he considered what to do. If he was hooked, the first thing was to tell his friends. Telling his friends his latest failure was something Bertie regarded as a sort of responsibility. Thus his rare letters to them usually brought Bertie’s intimates — he laughed at the word — nothing but bad news. He would write that a mistress had given him up, and, with his talent for mimicry, would set down her last long disappointed speech to him, in which she exposed in angry, honest language the hollowness of his character, his infinite weakness as a man, his vileness. When briefly he had turned to homosexuality to provide himself with funds, the first thing he did was write his friends about it. Or he wrote of being fired from bands when it was discovered how bad a trumpeter he really was. He spared neither himself nor his friends in his passionate self-denunciations.

Almost automatically, then, he went into Preminger’s study and began to write all the people he could think of. As he wrote he pulled heavily at the whiskey remaining in the bottle. At first the letters were long, detailed accounts of symptoms and failures and dashed hopes, but as evening came on and he grew inarticulate he realized that it was more important — and, indeed, added to the pathos of his situation — for him just to get the facts to them.

“Dear Klaff,” he wrote at last, “I am hooked. I am at the bottom, Klaff. I don’t know what to do.” Or “Dear Randle, I’m hooked. Tell your wife. I honestly don’t know where to turn.” And “Dear Myers, how are your wife and kids? Poor Bertie is hooked. He is thinking of suicide.”

He had known for a long time that one day he would have to kill himself. It would happen, and even in the way he had imagined. One day he would simply drink the bottle of carbon tetrachloride. But previously he had been in no hurry. Now it seemed like something he might have to do before he had meant to, and what he resented most was the idea of having to change his plans.

He imagined what people would say.

“I let him down, Klaff,” Randle said.

“Everybody let him down,” Klaff said.

“Everybody let him down,” Bertie said. “Everybody let him down.”

Weeping, he took a last drink from Preminger’s bottle, stumbled into the living room and passed out on the couch.

That night Bertie was awakened by a flashlight shining in his eyes. He threw one arm across his face defensively and struggled to sit up. So clumsy were his efforts that whoever was holding the flashlight started to laugh.

“Stop that,” Bertie said indignantly, and thought, I have never been so indignant in the face of danger.

“You said they were out of town,” a voice said. The voice did not come from behind the flashlight, and Bertie wondered how many there might be.

“Jesus, I thought so. Nobody’s answered the phone for days. I never seen a guy so plastered. He stinks.”

“Kill him,” the first voice said.

Bertie stopped struggling to get up.

“Kill him,” the voice repeated.

“What is this?” Bertie said thickly. “What is this?”

“Come on, he’s so drunk he’s harmless,” the second voice said.

“Kill him,” the first voice said again.

“You kill him,” the second voice said.

The first voice giggled.

They were playing with him, Bertie knew. Nobody who did not know him could want him dead.

“Turn on the lights,” Bertie said.

“Screw that,” the second voice said. “You just sit here in the dark, sonny, and you won’t get hurt.”

“We’re wasting time,” the first voice said.

A beam from a second flashlight suddenly intersected the beam from the first.

“Say,” Bertie said nervously, “it looks like the opening of a supermarket.”

Bertie could hear them working in the dark, moving boxes, pulling drawers.

“Are you folks Negroes?” Bertie called. No one answered him. “I mean I dig Negroes, man—men. Miles. Jay Jay. Bird lives.” He heard a closet door open.

“You are robbing the place, right? I mean you’re actually stealing, aren’t you? This isn’t just a social call. Maybe you know my friend Klaff.”

The men came back into the living room. From the sound of his footsteps Bertie knew one of them was carrying something heavy.

“I’ve got the TV,” the first voice said.

“There are some valuable paintings in the dining room,” Bertie said.

“Go see,” the first voice said.

One of Norma’s pictures suddenly popped out of the darkness as the man’s light shone on it.

“Crap,” the second voice said.

“You cats can’t be all bad,” Bertie said.

“Any furs?” It was a third voice, and it startled Bertie. Someone flashed a light in Bertie’s face. “Hey, you,” the voice repeated, “does your wife have any furs?”

“Wait a minute,” Bertie said as though it were a fine point they must be made to understand, “you’ve got it wrong. This isn’t my place. I’m just taking care of it while my friends are gone.” The man laughed.

Now all three flashlights were playing over the apartment. Bertie hoped a beam might illuminate one of the intruders, but this never happened. Then he realized that he didn’t want it to happen, that he was safe as long as he didn’t recognize any of them. Suddenly a light caught one of the men behind the ear. “Watch that light. Watch that light,” Bertie called out involuntarily.

“I found a trumpet,” the second voice said.

“Hey, that’s mine,” Bertie said angrily. Without thinking, he got up and grabbed for the trumpet. In the dark he was able to get his fingers around one of the valves, but the man snatched it away from him easily. Another man pushed him back down on the couch.

“Could you leave the carbon tetrachloride?” Bertie asked miserably.

In another ten minutes they were ready to go. “Shouldn’t we do something about the clown?” the third voice said.

“Nah,” the second voice said.

They went out the front door.

Bertie sat in the darkness. “I’m drunk,” he said after a while. “I’m hooked and drunk. It never happened. It’s still the visions. The apartment is a vision. The darkness is. Everything.”

In a few minutes he got up and wearily turned on the lights. Magicians, he thought, seeing even in a first glance all that they had taken. Lamps were gone, curtains. He walked through the apartment. The TV was gone. Suits were missing from the closets. Preminger’s typewriter was gone, the champagne glasses, the silver. His trumpet was gone.

Bertie wept. He thought of phoning the police, but then wondered what he could tell them. The thieves had been in the apartment for twenty minutes and he hadn’t even gotten a look at their faces.

Then he shuddered, realizing the danger he had been in. “Crooks,” he said. “Killers.” But even as he said it he knew it was an exaggeration. He had never been in any danger. He had the fool’s ancient protection, his old immunity against consequence.

He wondered what he could say to the Premingers. They would be furious. Then, as he thought about it, he realized that this too was an exaggeration. They would not be furious. Like the thieves they would make allowances for him, as people always made allowances for him. They would forgive him; possibly they would even try to give him something toward the loss of his trumpet.

Bertie began to grow angry. They had no right to patronize him like that. If he was a clown it was because he had chosen to be. It was a way of life. Why couldn’t they respect it? He should have been hit over the head like other men. How dare they forgive him? For a moment it was impossible for him to distinguish between the thieves and the Premingers.

Then he had his idea. As soon as he thought of it he knew it would work. He looked around the apartment to see what he could take. There was some costume jewelry the thieves had thrown on the bed. He scooped it up and stuffed it in his pockets. He looked at the apartment one more time and then got the hell out of there. “Bird lives,” he sang to himself as he raced down the stairs. “He lives and lives.”

It was wonderful. How they would marvel! He couldn’t get away with it. Even the far West wasn’t far enough. How they hounded you if you took something from them! He would be back, no question, and they would send him to jail, but first there would be the confrontation, maybe even in the apartment itself: Bertie in handcuffs, and the Premingers staring at him, not understanding and angry at last, and something in their eyes like fear.