The Dick Gibson Show

Part II

Hartford Daily Intelligencer

Tuesday, March 3, 1959

12:00 Midnight

WGR Witching Hours (Music & News)

WHCN The Dick Gibson Show (Talk)

WLLD The World Tmrw

Dick’s guests that night were Dr. Jack Patterson, Associate Professor of English at Hartford Community College; Bernard Perk, a pharmacist, probably the ablest proponent of fluoridation in all New England; Pepper Steep of the Pepper Steep Charm School; and rounding out the panel, Mel Son, the Amherst disc jockey whose experiences with the powerful Democratic machine when he’d tried to run for state office had once earned him Special Guest status. They’d all been on the show before but only Mel had ever been the Special Guest, it being a principle with Dick to choose his panels from the community — panelists were, after all, something like jurors and, as such, surrogates for the audience — but to import his Special Guests from outside.

Tonight his Special Guest was the psychologist Edmond Behr- Bleibtreau. Behr-Bleibtreau did the flying saucer bit from the mass- hysteria angle but was also known for his advocacy of the psychic phenomena people, as well as for some of the new things. As Dick understood it from the little of Behr-Bleibtreau’s book that he had read, the man’s major emphasis was the old business of mind over matter, though Behr-Bleibtreau called mind “will.” Dick had heard that he was a very forceful man, as formidable as any guest on late- night radio. It was also said that he sometimes used his knowledge of psychology in unusual, if unspecified, ways. Despite the expense, Dick considered himself lucky to get him. Special Guests were not paid, but some of them, though they probably collected again from the organizations they represented or from their publishers, insisted on “expenses.” Behr-Bleibtreau had presented the station with a bill for his first-class air fare from Los Angeles, and even though the man had been with Long John Nebel on WOR in New York the previous night, WHCN had agreed to pay it. They were also picking up the tab for his Holiday Inn suite. Everything would come out of Dick’s tiny budget for the show. For a month or so there’d probably be nothing left over for the loners, those characters who’d written no books and represented no organizations and who really needed to be helped out with expenses. When he’d told Behr-Bleibtreau this, the man had patted his arm to reassure him. “In that case,” he said, “I shall have to give you a good show. Something very special.”

Several others, guests of the guests, were in the studio. They had begun to gather about a half-hour before air time. Jack Patterson had left his wife, Rose, at home to listen to him on the radio and had a girl friend with him, one of his students probably, an Annette something. One reason he came on the program was that it gave him someplace to go when he was deceiving Rose. Bernard Perk had brought his son and daughter-in-law, in from Chicago on a visit. Pepper Steep came with her sister and Mel Son had brought Victor Ash, the man who had defeated him in the primary. After the election they had become good friends. Even Edmond Behr-Bleibtreau had brought guests, a man and a middle-aged woman in an enormously long fur coat which looked as if it might have been made up for someone a full foot taller than herself. Neither of Behr-Bleibtreau’s guests had been introduced to Dick. They were all seated in a single row of theater seats along the wall opposite the control booth.

“Do you think anyone else will drop in?” Dick asked his panel. “I have to know so Jerry can phone in the order for our sandwiches.”

Behr-Bleibtreau held up his hand. “I expect someone.” He hesitated. “He may come and he may not.”

Dick opened his microphone and told his engineer to order for fifteen people. Then he explained the ground rules to his guests and obtained mike levels from each of them. “Bernie Perk,” he said, “you don’t speak that softly. Let’s hear your reaction to Jack Patterson here when Jack says that fluoridation not only doesn’t prevent tooth decay but causes cancer of the jaw.” Bernie Perk gave an exaggerated groan and the panel laughed, even Behr-Bleibtreau. “The most important thing,” Dick said, “is that you don’t all speak at once. I’ll recognize you either by looking at you directly or by calling your name. These mikes compensate for the different power levels of your voices, so everything comes at the listener at equal strength. If you speak when someone else is talking, it just sounds like babble. Nothing’s more frustrating for the listener.”

The panel knew all this, but he went through it for his guests’ guests, owing them insights. He was only sorry that the show was so much what it seemed. Those who came to the house of magic were entitled to secrets. Besides, he loved the people who saw him work. The capsule-like character of the studio, the heavy drapes hung down over solid, windowless walls, and the long voyage to dawn created in him a special sense of intimacy, as though what they were about to do together was just a little dangerous. Even more than the people who watched him work he loved the people he worked with. They were comrades. For him it was as if all place—all place — was ridiculous, a comedown, all studios makeshift, the material world itself existing only as obstacle, curiously unamiable, so that, remembered later, the night they worked together became some turned corner of the life. (A sense, up all night, of emergency, national crises kicked around the anchor desk.) There had been a thousand such comrades in the fourteen years since the war, the seven years he had been doing late-night talk shows. And all place was ridiculous, wayside, all towns tank, for him anyway. Though his voice had been heard everywhere by now, he had never been network (unless you counted the small, queer regional networks: the Billy Lee Network in Texas and the Southwest, Heartlands Broadcasting, the Mid-Atlantic Company, Gulfcoast Broadcasting System, the Northwest’s Big Sky Company), never coast-to-coast.

“We’ll be here five hours,” he said. “It’s a long time till five o’clock.” He turned to Behr-Bleibtreau. “The world looks strange when you’ve been in a studio all night and go outside. If we all last, I’ll take you to breakfast.” Now he turned to his guests’ guests. “As I say, it’s a long time till five o’clock. If any of you absolutely has to sack out there’s a cot in my office, and another in Jerry’s. Some nights I wish I could go lie down.” This wasn’t true; there had never been a show which he hadn’t wished would go on longer. Babble or not, for him the greatest moments had been when, losing their tempers or caught up in their ideas, they all spoke at once; in that instant he would feel himself physically touched by their speech, centripetally held by their cross-talk. Nor was he ever nervous, save in some impersonal sense, as now, anxious for the chemistry to be correct, like someone hoping that the fish are biting. If it all went well, if Behr-Bleibtreau found the panel to his taste — not provincial, sufficiently challenging to bother with— something could happen. A truth, or something better than a truth. “I’m here merely to moderate,” he said. “I myself am not controversial.” He was, to use Madam Modred’s term, “a control.”

And wasn’t that a night? WVW, Lockhaven, Pennsylvania. The night of the seance. The medium was the Reverend Abner Ruckensack. Shakespeare had come, the Bard of Avon. A lugubrious Shakespeare, plain-talking, curiously shy. He called Dick Mr. Gibson. It was down in the log. (He still couldn’t bear to think of his logs, tapes of all his programs. Fourteen years, seven of them doing these late-night talk shows, almost five thousand tapes. His spoken history of some of the world. The expense enormous, to say nothing of the time that went into indexing them. All but a hundred or so burned to a crisp in the fire. Dick Gibson’s burned logs.) He could still remember one part. It must have been about three in the morning. All of them tired, impatient, the Reverend Ruckensack producing dud after dud — farmers he’d known, children he’d baptized, a sinner, an enemy — and the panel sending them back, shade after shade, like failed auditioners, until he came, the Bard himself, the Divine Will:

DICK: You don’t sound like Shakespeare.

SHAKESPEARE: I’m him, all right, Mr. Gibson.

DICK: You are, eh?

SHAKESPEARE: You bet your boots, Mr. Gibson.

DICK: Well, if you’re Shakespeare, how come you don’t speak in blank verse? I always associated Shakespeare with blank verse.

SHAKESPEARE: We’re white men here, Mr. Gibson. That blank verse was just for the niggers. So’s they wouldn’t understand.

He still remembered it, and here and there other passages, but without the logs one day it would all be gone, as all conversation was always going, the word disintegrate, busted, and the air come in like a draft. Or all that remained would be the conclusions, with none of the wonderful linkings and marvelous asides. The wisdom forgotten and the madness gone, and only the silence for punctuation.

He could not depend upon his listeners; he had no notion of them. They were as faceless to him as he to them. (They didn’t even have a voice.) His panels, his Special Guests were more real. As for his listeners, he guessed they were insomniacs, cabbies, enlisted men signed out on leave at midnight driving home on turnpikes, countermen in restaurants by highways, people in tollbooths. Or he saw them in bed — they lived in the dark — lumps under covers, profiles on pillows, their skulls beside the clock radio (the clock radio had done more to change programming than even TV) while the dialogue floated above their heads like balloon talk aloft in comic strips. Half asleep, they would not follow it too closely.

No, he knew little about his listeners. They were not even mysterious; they were there, but distant as the Sioux. He knew more about the passionate extremists who used his microphones in the groundless hope of stirring those sleepers, and winning over the keepers of the booths — the wild visionaries, opponents of fluoride, palmists, astrologers, the far right and far left and far center, the dianeticians, scientologists, beatniks, homosexuals from the Mattachine Society, the handwriting analysts, addicts, nudists, psychic phenomenologists, all those who believed in the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman and the Communist Conspiracy; men beyond the beyond, black separatists who would take over Idaho and thrive by cornering the potato, pretenders to a half-dozen thrones, Krebiozonists, people from MENSA, health-food people, eaters of weed and soups of bark, cholesterolists, poly-unsaturationalists, treasure hunters, a woman who believed she held a valid Spanish land grant to all of downtown San Francisco, the Cassandras warning of poison in the white bread and cola and barbecued potato chip, conservationists jittery about the disappearing forests and the diminishing water table (and one man who claimed that the tides were a strain on the moon), would-be reformers of a dozen industries and institutions and a woman so fastidious about the separation of church and state that she would take the vote away from nuns and clergymen, capital punishers, atheists, people who wanted the abortion laws changed and a man who thought all surgery was a sin and ought to carry the same sentence as any other assault with a knife, housewives spooked by lax Food and Drug regulations, Maoists, Esperantoists, American Nazis, neo-Jaegerists, Reichians, juvenile delinquents, crionics buffs, anti-vivisectionists, witches, wizards, chief rabbis of no less than three of the twelve lost tribes of Israel, and a fellow who claimed he died the same year Columbus discovered America.

DICK: Do you mean to sit there and tell me you’ve actually been to Saturn on a flying saucer? Come on now, Mr. Beckendienst.

HERMAN BECKENDIENST: I have too. I have. The Martians chose me. They come down to my field while I was plowin’ and taken me aboard. Then, whoosh, up we went to Saturn. I’d say it taken ’bout half an hour. We didn’t land. I ain’t claimin’ we ever landed. Not on Saturn proper we didn’t. But we set down on one of the rings. The blue one. Yes sir.

DICK: Well why? Why did they choose you, Mr. Beckendienst?

HERMAN BECKENDIENST: Well, I don’t know why.

DICK: Didn’t you ask them?

HERMAN BECKENDIENST: No sir. They don’t have our language.

DICK: Then how do you know they were from Mars?

HERMAN BECKENDIENST: Well, I seen their license plates.

And when Dick leaned over and hugged the farmer, the man had been more startled by Dick’s embrace than by the approach of the Martian saucer itself. He could have hugged all of them — all the zealots and crusaders and saints to obsession, as well as the reasonable ones, the juristic Bernie Perks. Ah, God, would there were an auditorium to hold them all, to always be there with them, to keep them forever talking.

He received the signal from his engineer. “A minute to air time, people,” he said. They all stopped chatting and looked at him. A couple of the panelists coughed. Behr-Bleibtreau smiled. Dick rubbed the skin along his throat, and watched for Jerry — there was something vaguely athletic about the gesture, his engineer’s arm up like an official’s with a gun above runners — to throw his finger at him. “Thirty seconds,” he said on his own. “All right, be ready.”

In his head he knew the exact instant that Jerry would signal, and was already talking before the finger came down the full arc of his engineer’s arm.

DICK: Good midnight. I’m Dick Gibson. Till dawn us do part. Forgive the glibness, please. I’ve been in radio practically since it was invented, but I’ve never been comfortable about introductions. There’s just no appropriate style. UNH UNH UNH, DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL! You see? I don’t know you, you don’t know me. We’re strangers. One of us has to make a beginning. Why don’t I just give you the lineup? My colleagues and comrades tonight are Professor Jack Patterson, Pepper Steep of the Pepper Steep Charm School, Bernard Perk of the corner drugstore, and Mel Son of Amherst.

JACK: Mel, son of Amherst. (laughter)

MEL: Jack patter, son. (laughter)

DICK: Come on, you guys. I haven’t introduced our Special Guest. Who is—

BERNIE: Boy, with jokes like that I’d give up.

DICK: … the noted psychologist, Edmond Behr-Bleibtreau. Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau is an author who has written extensively on the problem of Will — not as a philosopher but as someone pragmatically concerned with the problems of people.

JACK: That’d be like Will’s will.

DICK: If my panel will restrain itself long enough for me to get through this introduction, we can find out about it from the guest himself. Oh. Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau, one of the things we do on this show is to invite the audience to send in telegrams to the station. We accept about half a dozen collect wires a night, so I have to ask those people who won’t be paying for them to keep their messages within a ten-word limit. Later on we’ll discuss their comments on the air.

Dick gave his listeners his cable code; then, displeased with his voice — he thought it too high-pitched tonight — and to calm down his panel, he talked some more about the program’s format. He watched Behr-Bleibtreau for signs of irritation, but the man merely smiled and seemed to follow everything that was said with great attention. Sometimes a guest tried to make an alliance with Dick against the panel, but Behr-Bleibtreau seemed perfectly at ease, more so even than the people in the theater seats.

Still distrustful of the panel’s mood, Dick made some further summary statements about Behr-Bleibtreau’s work, for though it was true that he had not read Behr-Bleibtreau’s books he had the public person’s superficial grounding in all things; he could have gone on for fifteen minutes or so giving his creditable layman’s presentation of the psychologist’s position. He knew, however, that he was boring his listeners. (The thing about me, he thought even while still speaking, is that I have no humor. And that’s because I like being where I am and doing what I do. Why, then, am I so unhappy?) He knew he had to bring his speech to an end, but he saw Jack Patterson’s lips pursing for a joke. (They were skitterish tonight; he didn’t know why.) Anything was better than this, however, and he addressed himself directly to Behr-Bleibtreau, making it seem at the last moment as if his remarks had all been part of a dialogue.

DICK: … by which I take it you mean the mind. Every day in every way I get better and better. That sort of thing.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Yes. But not so piecemeal. I would take the element of time out of it. We are too patient.

JACK PATTERSON: I’m surprised to hear you say that, Dr. Behr- Bleibtreau. As patient as you were during Dick’s program notes. As positively benign as the guest of honor at a banquet.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: I’m not in favor of rudeness, Mr. Patterson.

JACK PATTERSON: I think I must call you on that, Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau. I don’t wish to be stuffy, but I’m as much Ph.D. as you are, and if I’m going to address you as Doctor, I think I deserve the same courtesy.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: And shall our druggist friend here insist on being called Doc?

BERNIE PERK: Hey, wait a minute, I’m out of this.

JACK PATTERSON: That was meant for me, Bernie.

PEPPER STEEP: Oh good. Two Doctors and a Doc.

MEL SON: And a Dick.

Dick broke in to introduce a commercial. As Jerry put on the loop in the control booth Dick asked, “What’s wrong with you people? Come on, Jack, stop being so damned snotty. You’ve been horsing around since the program went on the air. Be professional, for God’s sake.” He looked apologetically at Behr-Bleibtreau. (Guests had walked out. It was not unheard of.) “We’re going on again now, and I’m going to try to draw you out, Edmond, about some of your ideas. All right everybody. Here we go.”

DICK: I’d like to get down to something a bit more specific, sir.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Yes.

DICK: What troubles me is the role of determinism in all this. You don’t seem to leave any room for it.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: I prefer to use the word “determination.” It’s—

JACK PATTERSON: Oh, please.

DICK: Jack, let the man finish his sentence, will you? I don’t know how this hostility built up, but I want to tell you I think you’re sabotaging the program.

JACK PATTERSON: Do you want me to leave?

DICK: No, of course not. I just want you to calm down a little — that goes for all of you — and give Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau a chance to explain himself.

JACK PATTERSON: Because all you have to do is say the word and I’ll get the hell out of here.

BERNIE PERK: Come on. Jack. Dick isn’t saying anything like that.

MEL SON: Of course not.

PEPPER STEEP: And they say women are temperamental.

JACK PATTERSON: Don’t give me any of that cant, you.

PEPPER STEEP: Well, I beg your pardon, I’m sure.

JACK PATTERSON: Big charm school operator. Charming.

BERNIE PERK: Please, everybody.

JACK PATTERSON: Because that’s how the hostility built up. Cant. Cant and crud. I think this is Jack Patterson’s farewell appearance on these shows. Either you get the goofs who think all the world has to do is sit around listening to how they were carved out of wood by elves in the forest, or quick-buck artists like the Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau here who make their pile out of positive thinking or some other such claptrap. Nothing real happens. You’ve got the extremists on the one hand and the self-taught, gift-from-the- sea people on the other. I’m thirty-eight years old. I’m a Ph.D. from Harvard. Harvard! And all I am is an Associate Professor at Hartford Community College. Oh, God.

DICK: Ladies and gentlemen — a commercial.

He got up and walked around the long table to where Jack Patterson was sitting, his forehead pressing against the microphone in front of him. “Jack, are you okay? Are you? Are you feeling all right?”

“I think the man’s having a nervous breakdown,” Pepper Steep said.

“Give him room.”

“Is he all right? Should we call his wife?”

“Annette, was Jack unwell this evening?”

“Why are you all picking on him?”

“Oh boy, two of a kind.”

Only Behr-Bleibtreau’s people remained seated. The others had all come up to the table.

“I’ll have to ask the guests in the audience to take their seats.”

Sitting modestly in his place, Behr-Bleibtreau stared placidly at Jack’s slumped figure.

“We’re on again. We’re on the air.”

“What’s going to happen about Jack?”

“Shh.”

“Well, we can’t just do nothing. Isn’t it dangerous for him to be touching a live microphone like that?”

“Shh,” Mel Son said, “be quiet.”

DICK: Uh — Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Yes?

DICK: I was wondering …

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: … if I could develop the point I was making about determination?

DICK: Yes.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: I think our friend Patterson here could do that even more effectively than I.

BERNIE PERK: Perhaps I might. I’ve been rather deeply involved with the fluoridation campaign here in New England. The average person doesn’t realize it, but there’s an awful lot of money spent by the anti-fluoridation people on this. Those of us who favor a program of caries prevention, and who have nothing like the funds of those who oppose it, sometimes wonder—

JACK PATTERSON: It’s okay, Bernie. I can handle this.

MEL SON: Perhaps Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau—

JACK PATTERSON: No, Mel, really, I’m fine. I apologize to our audience and our guest as well as to the rest of you for flying off the handle like that. Why don’t we put it down to a bad kipper? I only hope I haven’t embarrassed Annette.

PEPPER STEEP: Uh oh.

DICK: I think we ought to—

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: I would be interested in exploring what Dr. Patterson meant before when he spoke disparagingly about autodidacts.

JACK PATTERSON: Well, I’m afraid I have to stand by that. Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau. It takes all kinds, and we get all kinds.

BERNIE PERK: That’s true.

PEPPER STEEP: Tell him about the memory expert.

JACK PATTERSON: I’ll tell him about Laverne Luftig. Do you remember Laverne Luftig, Bernie? Were you on that show?

BERNIE PERK: No, I don’t think so.

JACK PATTERSON: You do, Dick.

DICK: The child star.

JACK PATTERSON: That’s the one.

BERNIE PERK: I couldn’t have been on that night or I’d remember.

MEL SON: That’s right, I played her record a few times.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on, Jack.

JACK PATTERSON: Well, as Dick says, she was a child star — not an actress, a singer. And not a star, I guess, just someone who cut a few records. The thing about this little girl, though, was that she wrote her own material.

BERNIE PERK: Does she sing under another name?

JACK PATTERSON: No.

BERNIE PERK: I don’t think I ever heard her.

JACK PATTERSON: Well, you mightn’t have done. She was just starting out in the business, and to tell you the truth I don’t really know what’s happened to her.

MEL SON: “The Orphan’s Song.”

JACK PATTERSON: Yes. That’s how she came to be on Dick’s program.

DICK: I got a call from New Jersey, and was told that Laverne was going to be in Hartford. They played the record for me right on the phone, and when I learned the kid was only ten and a half years old I said she could come on the program.

JACK PATTERSON: Then Dick had some trouble or something—

DICK: There’d been a fire in my apartment.

JACK PATTERSON — and couldn’t meet her the day she came in. He asked if I’d go down to the train and pick her up. This was on a Thursday and I didn’t have any classes. Anyway, I agreed to go down to the terminal. I’d been on the show often enough by then so I could fill her in on anything she needed to know, or what she might expect from the panel.

DICK: This program is unrehearsed, so I don’t usually do that, but this was a little girl. I wasn’t even sure she could stay up all night.

JACK PATTERSON: Have you been to the Hartford railroad station, Professor Behr-Bleibtreau?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: No, Jackie.

JACK PATTERSON: It’s very difficult to find a place to park down there. There’s a lot of reconstruction going on, everything’s all broken up. I asked one of my students — Miss Tabisco; you know her, Annette — if she’d come down with me and sit in the car while I went into the station. If a cop asked her to move she could drive around the block till we came out.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Someone in this studio is carrying a gun.

JACK PATTERSON: I don’t know what I was expecting, possibly a Shirley Temple type — you know, all dimples and ante-bellum curls. Anyway, when the train from New York arrived I didn’t see the little girl anywhere. I stood right on the platform when the passengers came out of the train, but I suppose I must have missed her. I had just decided to have her paged when this very strange- looking little girl came up and asked if I were Mr. Gibson.

I say she was strange-looking, but I don’t really mean that exactly. It was summer, so of course she wore no coat. One could see that she was … well, that she was a child. Still, her face, all beauty and bone and intelligence, was all that it would ever be. The face of a woman, you see, with less baby fat on it than Annette’s. Most kids in show business — particularly if their acts are adult, if they’re singers, say, or they play the drums— dress like children, and the reason they look so awful is that their clothes are costumes. I mean, they’re not dressed like children so much as dressed up as children. Or they go the other way. You’ve seen the kid tap dancers with their top hats and canes. This little girl was different, though. I don’t recall what she was wearing, but there wasn’t any … well, there wasn’t any starch in it. I didn’t see petticoats. When she went up the stairs I didn’t see underwear.

I suppose another reason I may not have noticed her was that instinctively I had been looking for her mother, some stage-aunt or stage grown-up, but she’d come alone.

“No, honey,” I told her, “Mr. Gibson couldn’t come, and he sent me to look after you. I’m Professor Patterson.” I asked if she’d brought luggage, and she told me that all she had was the overnight bag she was carrying. When I reached out to take it she said she could manage.

We went to the car. Which was gone. I figured a cop had made Miss Tabisco drive it around the block, and I stood in the street so she’d be sure to see me when she came past. We waited about seven minutes, and I found myself explaining about the parking arrangements — as one would to an adult, you see. I apologized for the snag, but though she didn’t say anything and was very polite, I sensed she was annoyed. Finally Miss Tabisco arrived on foot to tell us that the car had been towed away. She’d tried to explain I’d only be in the station a few minutes. “Trains are late,” the tow man said; the space was needed for the mail trucks. She said she’d drive around the block, but the fellow told her he’d already been called out by the cops. It’s a racket. She could see he meant business, that if she stayed with the car she’d just be towed off in it. The man gave her a card where the car could be picked up.

“Well, this is a damn nuisance,” I said. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I told the girl.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Which girl? Miss Tabisco? Laverne?

JACK PATTERSON: Oh, I’m sorry. Laverne. Miss Tabisco gave me the card and I saw that the garage was all the way across town. When I mentioned this, Laverne looked at her watch. “Listen,” she said, “I feel pretty grubby after that train ride. I think I’ll just get into a cab and go to my hotel.”

“Well, I can’t just let you go off by yourself like this,” I said.

“Look, really,” she said, “don’t bother. You’d better go and reclaim your car. They charge for storage after the first hour. I’ll manage. Perhaps I’ll see you afterward. I see the taxi stand.”

“At least let us drop you,” I said. “I need a cab myself.”

“Very well,” she said.

I wanted to go into the hotel with her but she assured me it wasn’t necessary. “Goodbye, Miss Tabisco, Professor.”

“So long honey,” Miss Tabisco said.

DICK: I hadn’t heard any of this.

JACK PATTERSON: It took longer than I thought to get my car, and Miss Tabisco had an exam that afternoon and had to leave. Incidentally, they do charge for storage. Well, anyway, it was almost five o’clock before I got the car business straightened out, and after the kind of day I’d had I was really tired. The idea of going home and eating and having to come back downtown for the program … Well, suddenly I thought of Laverne Luftig registered in her room in her hotel and I was envious. I mean, it had all gone so smoothly for her and so badly for me. I was the one who’d been inconvenienced; it was as if I was the stranger in town.

I can’t explain this part very well, but the fact that I knew someone who was registered in a hotel downtown made me very nervous, very edgy. Do you understand?

PEPPER STEEP: Sure I understand. This is disgusting.

JACK PATTERSON: No, you don’t. I’m talking about hotels. You sign the register, but you’re anonymous. This isn’t very clear, but nothing is ever yours so much as the room you rent. God, the assumptions a hotel makes about you! All the towels they give you. I mean, you’d have to take eight baths a day to use them up. The clean sheets and the Gideon Bible and the whisky mode. The Western Union blanks! As if all one had to do all day was fire off telegrams to people. Oh, the civilization! Everyone there — do you realize this? — everyone there will be dining out that night! And the bed like a lesson in function—

BERNIE PERK: (softly) Jack—

JACK PATTERSON: No, Bernie, it isn’t what you think. I registered in the hotel. I asked the desk clerk where Laverne Luftig was, and I took a room on the floor beneath hers. Later I called her up. “Hello, honey,” I said. “It’s Uncle Jack, sweetheart. How are you?”

“You got me out of the shower,” she said. “I thought you were Ben Meadows.”

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ben Meadows?

MEL SON: He’s a d.j. here in Hartford. The kid was probably after him to play her record.

JACK PATTERSON: “I just called to find out if you’re all settled, Laverne. I’m sorry about the car.”

“It wasn’t your fault. Did you have much trouble?”

“No.”

“How’s Miss Tabisco?”

“She had an exam. She had to leave.” I had just come from the shower myself and was lying in my shorts on top of the bedspread. The air blowing through the air conditioning had a lemony scent. Laverne’s voice on the telephone was lower than Annette’s. “We never did get a chance to speak about the show tonight,” I told her. “I thought we ought to do that.”

“Where are you now?”

“Well, I’m still downtown.”

“Can you come to my room for a drink? Are you near the hotel?”

“Close by.”

MEL SON: Hard on.

JACK PATTERSON: “Use their underground garage,” she said.

“I will, Laverne.”

“Give me thirty minutes,” she said, and hung up.

I hate waiting. I have the impatience of a better man. The hour before an appointment is a torment for me. I have no skill for slowing down the shave or drawing out the combing of my hair. At the Modern Language Association conventions the same. I go down to the lobby for newspapers I don’t have the patience to read, or into bars and finish my drink as soon as it’s brought. I never learned to nurse a drink or brood over the salted peanuts. I gulp my food and burn my cigarettes as in a high wind. I get no value from these ceremonies.

After I dressed I still had twenty minutes. I sat for two and went up early. Laverne came to the door in towels.

“There’s scotch on the desk,” she said, and disappeared back into the bathroom. “Pour yourself a drink. I’m sorry, but there isn’t any ice.”

When she came out, in exactly the thirty minutes she had asked for, she was wearing a sort of shift, very stylish. Her hands were in her hair, fixing it, and there were hairpins in her mouth. “Meadows called just after you did,” she said. “He said he didn’t have the record, so I sent one over by messenger in a cab. What time is it?”

“Just past seven.”

“He’ll play it in the segment after the 7:30 news. We’ll listen to it here.”

DICK: This story, Jack, is it—?

JACK PATTERSON: Oh, yes. Don’t worry. It’s okay.

I told Laverne pretty much what she might expect on the show that night, and we ordered dinner from room service. She just wanted to go down to the coffee shop and grab a bite; it was for me. I wanted to eat off the cart with the big wheels and the white-on-white linen thick as blanket and spoon my fruit from the glass dish in the packed ice. I wanted napkin under my chin and the high luxury of sitting in socks and drinking scotch out of a water tumbler.

Laverne put the radio on, turned down low so we could talk while waiting for Meadows to play her song.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: What did you talk about, Jackiebunch?

JACK PATTERSON: Well, nothing. Doctor. We just talked.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Just talked.

JACK PATTERSON: Well, I guess I told her about my job, Professor Behr-Bleibtreau.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: You were boasting?

JACK PATTERSON: Well, no, I wouldn’t say I was boasting.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Was it the way you talk to Annette, to Miss Tabisco?

JACK PATTERSON: Yes, I guess. In a way. Yes.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: You were boasting to a ten-year-old girl?

JACK PATTERSON: Yes, sir.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Bragging about Harvard?

JACK PATTERSON: Yes, sir.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on.

JACK PATTERSON: Suddenly she hushed me. “Shh,” she said, “the news is finished. He’ll play it after this commercial.” She was very excited, on the edge of her chair, leaning forward, one hand above the table and making rapid motions as if bouncing a ball — you know, the way policemen hold back one line of traffic while signaling the other line to go through — and talking softly to the radio. “Come on, Meadows. Say something nice. Put it on the charts here in Hartford. Get in how I’m only ten years old.”

But Meadows only gave the title and her name.

“The fool’s never heard it,” she said. “He’s listening to it for the first time.”

Her voice was good, stronger even than her speaking voice.

“You sing very beautifully, Laverne.”

“Be quiet. I want to hear this passage. The trumpet cuts into the words. I knew I should have made him use the mute.”

We listened to see if Meadows would make any comment after the song was finished, but all he did was give the title again.

Laverne turned off the radio. “The d.j.’s aren’t playing it in the East,” she said. “I think we’re in trouble.”

“It’s a fine tune, Laverne. Did you do the words and the music?”

“What? Oh. Yeah.”

“Which do you write first, dear, the lyric or the melody?”

“The lyric, the melody. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“You certainly are an ambitious little girl. I don’t think I ever met anyone like you.”

“What’s wrong with ambition?”

“Nothing, dear.”

“Do they give concerts at your school, Professor? Do they ever bring in singers from the outside?”

“Well, they do, Laverne, but I’m afraid I have no influence with the Concert Committee.”

“What did you think of the song?”

“I enjoyed it very much.”

“Do you think it will be a hit?”

“A scholar doesn’t really have much knowledge about these things. Is that very important, Laverne?”

“Well, they don’t give out gold records for duds, kiddo.”

“Is that what you want out of life, Laverne? A gold record?”

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: You talked about life with a ten-year-old? Life?

JACK PATTERSON: Yes, sir.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on.

JACK PATTERSON: “Of course I want a gold record,” Laverne said. “That’s one of the things I want. Most of the others will have to wait. They don’t write leading roles for ten-year-old girls. What can a person like myself expect on Broadway? One of the brats in Sound of Music? ‘Do a deer, a female deer, re a drop of golden sun.’”

“Why are you in such a hurry, Laverne?”

“‘Cause I’m dying of cancer, kiddo. I’ve got twenty-seven minutes to live.”

“Laverne!”

“Pour yourself another scotch, Professor.”

“Well, thank you very much, Laverne. I think I will. I just wish there were some ice.”

“Take it out of my root beer.”

“Well, that’s very sweet of you, Laverne, but if I do your root beer will be warm.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a broken heart for every light on Broadway.”

“I think I’m getting a little tipsy, Laverne dear.”

“The schmuck didn’t even tell them I’m ten years old.”

“Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

“He didn’t even announce the label I’m with.”

“What grade are you in?”

“The Hartford market is one of the biggest in New England. I think I’m a dead duck. What are you giggling about?”

“This is the way I talk to the baby-sitter.”

“You’re married, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s Miss Tabisco, your chauffeur?”

“Miss Tabisco is one of my pupils. She’s one of the scholars here at HCC.”

Laverne shrugged. “Listen, I’ve got to make some phone calls,” she said. “Just hand me that little address book, would you, the one on the desk.” I gave her her book. It was opened to her page on Hartford. In it she had written down the names and phone numbers of about two dozen people here — the editors of the high-school and junior-high-school newspapers, chairmen of dance committees, even the entertainment editors on the Courant and the Intelligencer. I lay back on her bed and listened to her on the phone. “Hi,” she’d say, “this is Laverne Luftig, the ten-year-old singer. I sent you a letter about two weeks ago, and I’m calling to remind you about my press conference tomorrow morning. Don’t forget now, I’m looking forward to meeting you personally and presenting you with an autographed copy of my new recording.” Then when she finished with the list, she called the manager of the hotel to double-check the arrangements for the hospitality suite for the press conference. She was wonderful.

“What do your parents think about your career?” I asked her. Then it suddenly occurred to me that her song might be autobiographical. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “are your parents living, Laverne?”

“Yeah,” she said, “but my manager died. Listen, it was sweet of you to pick me up and fill me in about tonight, but don’t you think you ought to be getting back? I mean, won’t Miss Tabisco and your wife be wondering what’s happened to you?”

“Shall I tell you a little secret, Laverne?”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve checked into the hotel. My room is just below yours.”

It was time for station identification and a commercial. During the break Bernie Perk told Jack Patterson that he thought he’d better not go on with his story, but Jack didn’t seem even to hear him. He had stopped obediently for the commercial break and now seemed as remote as when he had slumped in his chair earlier. Then, two seconds before being given their cue, Behr-Bleibtreau said again that someone in the studio was carrying a gun.

DICK: What was that? What did you just say?

JACK PATTERSON: “Look, Professor—” Laverne said.

“Don’t send me away, Laverne. I just want to look at you. Make some more calls. I like to watch your face when you’re on the phone.”

DICK: Professor Behr-Bleibtreau, what was that you said?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: A ten-year-old girl? A ten-year-old girl’s face? Is that what you’re telling us?

JACK PATTERSON: Yes, sir.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on.

JACK PATTERSON: “Yeah, well, it’s time for my nap.”

“Don’t give me that, Laverne.”

“I’m ten years old, for God’s sake.”

“Juliet was thirteen.”

“I may be hip but I’m just a kid.”

“Dante fell in love with Beatrice when she was only eleven.”

“Just because I’m in show business, don’t think I’m loose.”

“Lord Byron loved Haidée when she was barely twelve.”

“I’m ten.”

“You’re ten and a half.” “You’re mussing my hair.”

“Helen of Troy was nine. So was Héloïse when Abelard fell for her. Psyche was six, Laverne. And what about Little Red Riding Hood? When you come right down to it, how old could Eve have been — a day, two days?”

“My dress, you’re mussing me. My dress is all the way up.”

PEPPER STEEP: This is incredible. You — you—

JACK PATTERSON: All I did was kiss her, I tell you. It was her face. This wasn’t adultery. I swear, Annette. I swear, Miss Tabisco. It was her face. I mean, she wasn’t even well developed. Where was the sex? She had no bust, no hips. I never even looked at her legs. All I did was kiss her. The bones and intelligence and beauty. My tongue like a red ribbon in her mouth.

PEPPER STEEP: Disgusting!

MEL SON: Where were your hands?

JACK PATTERSON: In her hair, in her ears. Vaulting her teeth. In her syrups and salivas.

BERNIE PERK: Oh, Jack.

PEPPER STEEP: What did she say after all this?

JACK PATTERSON: That I couldn’t come to her press conference.

PEPPER STEEP: Now I’ve heard everything.

MEL SON: I think so.

BERNIE PERK: Jack, you shouldn’t have told that story on yourself. Why did you tell such a story?

DICK: I would have stopped him, but he said it would be all right.

PEPPER STEEP: The man’s a slime.

BERNIE PERK: What’s the matter with you, Pepper? It was a joke. Ladies and gentlemen, I knew Professor Patterson since he first moved into the Hartford area, and believe me he is not the type of person he describes in this story.

PEPPER STEEP: I wish he’d told Professor Behr-Bleibtreau about the memory expert.

BERNIE PERK: Is he all right? Why’s he smiling like that?

MEL SON: What’s she doing?

BERNIE PERK: That’s right, Annette. There, that should make him feel better. His color’s coming back. Good. I think he’ll be okay.

DICK: You can sit there beside him, Annette.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: The memory expert?

PEPPER STEEP: Maybe Jack wasn’t on that panel. Were you, Jack? Was he, Dick?

DICK: I don’t know, I don’t recall … Jack — do you want Annette to take you home?

BERNIE PERK: Mrs. Patterson, it was all a joke. Your husband is a very good man. I have been with him when he has fought the anti-fluoridation people to a standstill with the force of his powerful logic. I don’t know why he would tell such a joke on himself. There is absolutely nothing to worry about. He’s resting quietly.

PEPPER STEEP: Were you on the panel with the memory expert, Mel?

MEL SON: I don’t — ha ha — I don’t remember.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: It’s loaded.

PEPPER STEEP: He was on the show because of me. I mean, Dick was just doing him a favor. He needed the exposure at the time.

You have to understand something about my school, Professor. We’re not a modeling agency — that is, not exactly. In your large cities where a real advertising industry exists — New York, of course, Chicago, L.A., a few others — there are schools which specialize in training girls to be models. A lot of these places are just phony, you understand, but some of them are quite good. I myself am a graduate of one of the better agency schools in San Francisco and had a pretty good career as a model in New York during the war.

Anyway, when age, ahem, withered and custom staled my infinite variety, when I entered my thirties, that is — I’m thirty- eight now—

MEL SON: A perfect thirty-eight—

PEPPER STEEP: Thank you, love — and saw that the demand for Miss Steep’s services was falling off rather too dramatically, I reverted to type, for I’m not a perfect thirty-eight, and I do not, whatever my charms of face and figure, exude riches, which is what’s called for today — I mean that 5th Avenue look that speaks of a four- year-old boy in the Central Park sunshine with his nanny, I mean that Biarritz aura. It is nature’s way. At any rate at thirty-one and a half I reverted to type, which in my case is Big Boned Northern California Rain Forest, and I knew that if I were to keep body and soul together I would have to leave New York. Well! What could a thirty-one-and-a-half-year-old gal do who all her working life had done nothing but watch the birdy? The birdy had flown. To start up a modeling agency or a modeling school in New York or any of those other places I mentioned and hope to make a go of it was simply out of the question. To be myself on the staff of such a school was inside the question but out of the answer. I’d earned too much big money in New York to take that kind of cut. But I had saved some of this money, and I thought I might start up an agency school in some smaller city. She’s an honest wench, however. She knew the market, knew the teensy-weensy demand for the graduates of such schools in such places. She would not have been giving full dollar value. The solution was the Charm School. A charm school in a town like Hartford has some tie-in with advertising. The big stores will use its girls for their Christmas brochures and ads. The developer may put one of its blondes up on water skis for the Hidden Lakes Estates billboard. (Forgive me my style as you did Dick’s. Probably as I go on I will work myself out of it. It’s just the way those of us who have been around, and are not perhaps too intelligent, talk.) But mostly the function of the Charm School is to teach charm, i.e. (very rapidly), “(1) a power of pleasing or attracting, as through personality or beauty; (2) a trait or feature imparting this power; (3) attractiveness—”

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: “(4) a trinket to be worn on a chain bracelet, etc.; (5) something worn for its supposed magical effect; amulet; (6) any action supposed to have magical power; (7) the chanting or recitation of a magic verse or formula.”

PEPPER STEEP: Yes. “—vt (8) to delight or please greatly by beauty, attractiveness, etc.; enchant.”

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: “(9) to act upon someone or something with or as with a compelling or magical force!”

PEPPER STEEP: Yes. I don’t do that.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on, please.

PEPPER STEEP: We aren’t a college, or even a finishing school. We’re not accredited. Our girls aren’t wealthy, they don’t come out of or go back into what is called polite society. You might be amused if you saw some of the things we do, there are books in our school, for instance, but we balance them on our heads. You’d be amused, but you’d need some charm yourself if you laughed. We render a service, you see. To the clumsy we do, the shy, the unconfident, to the ungraceful and ungainly and maladroit, to the bunglers and klutzes, the tongue-tied of body and spirit. Oh, we get them — all the wallflowers and fatties, all the unpopular, cripples to acne and dandruff. And I’m not just talking about teen-agers. There are housewives too. I mean the timid, I mean the terrified. There are women — a lot of them mothers — whose husbands have never seen them naked, who undress in closets and bathe only when they’re alone in the house — with the bathroom door locked and the radio off. They don’t go to doctors and they can’t purchase sanitary napkins in a drugstore, or bring themselves to buy a roll of toilet paper. I know one too shy to try on a dress in the curtained booth at the back of the department store, and another who won’t stand in front of a three-way mirror. Oh, the terror in Hartford! You just don’t know.

We have a winding staircase in my studio. Especially constructed; it cost me two thousand dollars. They come down the staircase with a book on their head. Making their entrances. At the level of the eighth stair they must begin to speak. “How do you do, Mrs. Powers? I’m so pleased you could come. Uncle Jim will be down in a moment. He asked me to take your coat and to see if there’s anything you’d like.” And they have to finish just as their foot touches the last tread. “Oh! Mr. Strong. I didn’t know you’d been admitted. Clotilda didn’t tell me. Would you like a cucumber sandwich in the library?” “Bless me, it’s Roger Thunder. How are you, Roger? Back from Persia already? How did you leave the Shah?” Don’t laugh — it’s true. The girls invent the speeches. And the names — I don’t make those up. They always use names like Powers and Strong and Thunder. They’re afraid, you see, and invest all other humans — even those of the mind: there’s no one at the bottom of the staircase — with strengths and fiercenesses.

“Hello, Mr. Lamb. Leave your umbrella outside, please. You’re dripping water on the rug.” Only the advanced ones say things like that.

MEL SON: What about this memory expert?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: She’s coming to that.

PEPPER STEEP: I’m coming to that.

We have toy telephones. They talk to tradesmen, to people who’ve invited them to parties. Or they call up the most distinguished people in Hartford and invite them to parties. They speak to the accounts department of stores to straighten out incorrect billings. Or I give assignments. I tell a woman that her lover is on the line but that her husband is standing in the room. Or that she must speak to the doctor in the middle of the night. “Yes, Doctor. Thank God your answering service was able to reach you. My breasts feel funny. My nipples have turned the color of root beer. I’ve a pimple suppurating in my behind. My vagina is steaming.” We teach them diets and care of the skin, grooming of the hair they learn, what cosmetics to use, the juice of which fruits for complexion. Clothes and color scheme and scents and polite conversation and how to bend to pick up a fallen glove and get in and out of cars.

And we offer instruction in courage and indifference. I take them with me to restaurants and have them return their steak or their soup while I sit by silently. Or we’ll go to waiting rooms in lawyers’ offices and when no one is looking they’ll take a tin of condoms from their purse and ask aloud, “Excuse me, who dropped this?” We—

MEL SON: Dick, she’s got to be one of your sponsors. This is the longest plug I’ve ever heard.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Be quiet.

MEL SON: I … I …

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on, Miss Steep. I want to hear about the memory expert now.

PEPPER STEEP: The memory expert. Yes. Arnold. He wrote me a letter. He wanted to enroll in the Charm School. I had been thinking for some time of admitting boys. They do in the dancing classes. Isn’t all the terror sexual, anyway? I agreed to see him and we set up an appointment for the following week. He came on a bus from Springfield. As soon as I saw him I knew it couldn’t work. I had expected a young man, a teen-ager, but he was older than me, in his early forties.

“Won’t the charm schools in Springfield have you?” I asked. “There’s Miss Doris’s, and a branch of Lovely Young Thing.”

“I never looked into them.”

“Let’s be frank with each other, shall we, Mr. — what is it? — Menchman?”

“Ma’am?”

“Are you straight? Or are you looking for some kind of … well—thrill?”

“Oh, no, ma’am.”

“Well, then?”

“I saw your presentation on television.”

Sometimes I’m asked to bring over some of the younger girls to one of the local stations. They act out social situations, do tea parties, that sort of thing. You remember this, Mel; you were on one of those shows.

MEL SON: I–I—

PEPPER STEEP: “You saw my presentation on television. Yes?”

“They were so poised. They were just children, but they were so poised.”

“Well, that’s very nice. Thank you, but I don’t—”

“Mignonne Gumbs, 13, Sheila Smith, 12, Pamela Fairfife, 14—I never saw composure like that in such young children. When Pamela Fairfife spilled tea on Mignonne Gumbs — that wasn’t planned, was it?”

“No. The tea was too hot. She couldn’t hold the handle.”

“I thought not. It looked too real. The way Mignonne Gumbs reassured her — telling her that the fabric was stain-resistant, and that she needn’t worry about having scalded her because the tea had landed on old scar tissue. She made up that part about the scar tissue, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Ah.”

“Miss Gumbs had a lot of confidence by the time she graduated.”

“I could see that.”

“Those three particular students — that program was more than a year ago. How do you remember their names?”

“Oh, well, I remember.”

“I see,” I told him. “I really don’t think there’d be much for you in our school. You don’t want to learn to pour tea or come down steps.”

“From behind curtains.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“From behind curtains … onto a stage. Down into the audience. I — um … to talk … in front of people.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t understand.”

“I’m clumsy, Miss Steep. Your secretary, Miss Ganchi, let me into your office before you arrived or you would have seen. I tripped. I can’t even walk into a room. It’s as hard for me to cross a threshold as it might be for someone else to step from one car to another in a moving train. I don’t know how to stand, what to do with my hands — anything. People laugh.”

“I’m sorry. Your presence would be disruptive in our classes. You’d embarrass the girls.”

“They were wonderful.”

“Yes, well—”

“If it’s a question of money …”

“It’s not.”

“I need the training.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m — I’m a memory expert. I’m in show business. Or rather, I would be if I weren’t so clumsy. Listen, my act is the greatest in the world. I know that sounds very bold, but it’s true. I … I’m a freak, you see.”

“Please, Mr. Menchman.”

“No, it’s so. I am. I mean, there’s no trick to what I do. I do it. It’s not even talent. I have an eidetic imagination.”

“An eidetic—?”

“It’s called that. There are only about a hundred of us in the whole world. Maybe three — I’m one — are true eidetics.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s very simple. You’ve heard of a photographic mind?”

“Yes, of course.”

“There is such a thing. Nobody understands how it works, really, but it’s visual. Somehow, whatever I look at registers on the retina and on the mind simultaneously. In other people the mind receives the impression a zillionth of a fraction of a moment late, but with an eidetic there’s no lag. At least that’s what the theory is now. Anyway, when an eidetic tries to recall something he sees this picture. All he has to do is look at it. He can even close his eyes — as a matter of fact, he has to close his eyes or it would be like a double exposure — and the picture is right there on the eyelids.”

“Fascinating.”

“Oh, I’m a freak is all.”

“Do you remember things forever?”

“No. The pictures fade after a time. Just as a photographic proof will. They even turn that same murky purple. But it lasts for a couple of years at least. Even then I don’t forget everything; I just remember the way normal people do.”

“Well, I must say … Still, I don’t see how I’m the person to help you.”

“Oh, you are, Miss Steep. I’ll never forget how grand those children were. Sheila Smith lived next door to me before her family moved to Hartford. She was the sloppiest little girl I’d ever seen. There wasn’t a time when her nose wasn’t running. When I saw her on television … she’s so changed. Change me, Miss Steep. Teach me my body. I know I could be great — my act—but my body … People laugh. They don’t even pay attention to the feats I do; they think I’m a comic. You have to be in control of your body to be in the show business.”

“All I could teach you is to move like a woman. They’d still laugh.”

“No. You’d teach me grace.”

“It’s impossible, Mr. Menchman. The girls would be too embarrassed.”

“Then take me as a special student. I have money. Charge what you want. … Maybe you don’t believe me. Is that it? This is what is behind me in this room: To the right of the door as one enters — eidetics see from right to left, thus giving substance to the speculation that the idiosyncrasy is passed on through a Semitic gene; my grandfather on my father’s side was Jewish — are three blue bookshelves about five feet wide and held on the wall by twelve brackets, four brackets to a shelf, with three screws in each bracket. One bracket, the second from the right on the highest shelf, has Phillips head screws. On the top shelf are seventeen books, on the middle twelve, on the bottom fourteen. If you pick a shelf I will give you the titles, authors, publishers and colors of the spines or book jackets.”

“This isn’t necessary.”

“You think it’s a trick. I work with no assistant. Your trickster has an assistant.”

“I don’t think it’s a trick. It simply isn’t necessary.”

“It is necessary. I want you to know what I can do. Before you turn me down, you must see.”

“Please, Mr. Menchman. I believe you … Very well, what’s the fourth book from the left on the bottom shelf?”

“Titles and Forms of Address: A Guide to Their Correct Use. Armiger. A. and C. Black. Buff … Am I correct, madam?”

“Oh, I suppose so. I can’t see from here. Anyway, that isn’t the point.”

“The fifth book—”

“Really, Mr. Menchman—”

“The fifth book is Manners and Conduct by the Deans of Girls in Chicago High Schools. Allyn and Bacon. Mauve. The sixth—”

“You could have memorized all that before I came in. Turn around in your chair. Go on. Swivel about and face the bookshelf, please.”

“Are you—?”

“Just do it … Watch out!”

“What happened? What was that?”

“You knocked over an ashtray. Never mind, it didn’t break. Now keep your back to me.”

“Is this a test?”

“There are file cabinets behind my chair—”

“Two stacks, each containing four drawers. Am I correct, madam?”

“On the front of each drawer there’s a small frame with a manila card in it. What do the cards say?”

“A-Do. Dr-Hes. Hest-Q. R-Shipman. Shir-V. W-X-Y-Z. Two drawers have no cards. Do I have it right, madam?”

Well, I won’t go on about it. There are hundreds of things in even the emptiest of rooms. Looking only once, only casually, Arnold saw and registered them all. Every detail made its impression on him. At first only mildly interested but gradually fascinated, I led him about the Charm School — it was after hours by now — took him into rooms, turned on the lights and let him look briefly. Then he gave me back all of it. All of it. The thousand things, the million details. And it was just as if I were blind and he was giving me sight. Naming everything, hearing my inventory called off — the precise placement of the furniture, bare spots in the rugs, the patterns in the drapes, the number of holes in the speakers of the toy telephones — I had it all for the first time. I hadn’t known how much there was before.

By the time we’d finished our tour I had decided to help him. I could see he’d been telling the truth, both as to his gifts and his drawbacks. He was immensely clumsy — a stumbler, a toe stubber, a lumbering blunderer — and immensely excited. His excitement fed his clumsiness. Those pathetic flourishes, his corny “Am I correct, madam?” learned from some old fraud in a tent show. But his mind! His mind was a gallery of the world, of everything he had ever seen. Stuffed to bursting it was with all the odd-lots of memory, a warehouse of surfaces. No wonder he couldn’t move! So I agreed to work with him, though for the sake of the girls it had to be after hours.

We used my studio, and after great effort I got him first to the point where he could stand in place without falling, then to where he didn’t knock telephones from desk tops when he sat down, and at last to move across a room without tripping. I didn’t dare try him on the stairway, of course, but after two or three weeks, he became relatively adroit in the simple conquest of ordinary human space. We still had no idea how he would behave on a stage — the equipment in my studio was limited — so neither of us really knew whether he was making any practical progress. We devised a curtain, however — that is, I did; Arnold was a long way off from doing any work with his hands — the area in front of it became Arnold’s “stage.”

Arnold would stand behind the makeshift curtain and I would introduce him, adopting what I took to be the styles of the various MC’s he might encounter. Thus a late night television show: “This next guest is one who’ll give pause to any of us who’ve ever had to take out our Social Security card to look at before writing down the number. He’s a memory expert who calls himself an eidetic — a man with a photographic mind. Let’s bring him out and have him take some pictures. Ladies and gentlemen — Arnold Menchman.” Or: “Mr. Sy Tobin and the management of the Sands Hotel present … ‘The Great Arnold’!”

Sometimes Arnold would just be standing there, as in a tableau, when I drew the curtain. Other times he would run out from between the curtains in that snappy locomotive jog entertainers do, their heads down, their hands balled into fists at the level of their chests, the orchestra playing “Fine and Dandy.”

After a while we saw the limitations of our makeshift stage. Though Arnold could have gone on right then if there had been an audience. He knew every square inch of that room, at home as a blind man in his square yards of familiar darkness. We had to try him in other environments, for place — mere place — was our problem. Arnold wasn’t stupid. Unlike other “mentalists” he enjoyed what he knew; the things he saw when he closed his eyes were full of wonder for him. And he was selective: he didn’t get any pleasure out of such stunts as memorizing whole Sears and Roebuck catalogs.

DICK: Does he listen to the radio?

PEPPER STEEP: What? Wait. Or pages from telephone directories, or timetables. Though he knew these too. Knew the Yellow Pages, knew the City and Town Indexes on the back of the Shell Oil Company roadmaps for every state. But encyclopedias, tracts on gardening, rock formations — these were his forte. The positions — listen — he knew the positions of the stars! But it is one thing to know a principle, another to apply it. For instance, Arnold knew dexterity — whole books of the dance he knew; he could have given you by heart the choreography of a hundred ballets — but he wasn’t dexterous. So place was our problem, the threat of place.

Then I thought of the local television station. After all, this was how Arnold first knew about me, wasn’t it? As I told you, I’d done some things for them with my girls. Whenever there was a telethon I volunteered my students to handle the phones. For favors rendered I presumed to ask the station manager to let Arnold and me — after hours, of course: everything we did that year (giggling) was after hours, everything we did required keys — use his station.

In the empty studio I would introduce Arnold. I wanted him to learn to step over the cables, you see, to get used to moving across a cluttered floor. Slowly Arnold learned to thread his way between cameras and light stands, to step over coaxial lines thick as roots. Then I would rearrange these, Arnold not looking, so that when he came from behind the Japanese screen where I made him wait before I announced him, it was into a new arena that he stepped each time. At first it was as if he was walking in a minefield. He was that cautious, picking his way, high stepping as a man in heavy weather.

We made it into a game. If he brushed against anything he lost a point. “No, Arnold,” I’d call. “You’re still too tense. Try to relax. If you do collide with something, personify it. Keep it from falling. Brace its shoulders, smile at it.” With practice he became more natural, but it was slow work. When he could finally get through an evening at the TV studio without a serious blunder it was time to start all over somewhere else.

Next we used the auditorium of a high school — the father of one of my girls was the principal — and Arnold came down from the stage into the audience and moved gingerly through a row of seats to wherever I happened to be sitting. This was particularly good practice, because half these acts are audience participation. Then one night I shouted up to him to pretend that there were no steps leading down from the stage and to negotiate the four- and-a-half-foot space to the auditorium floor in some other way. It was awful — as if our weeks of practice had never happened. You’d think I had asked him to jump from an airplane. He got down on his hands and knees and backed tentatively toward the apron of the stage. He looked ridiculous. He pushed a foot out behind him and groped with it for the edge. When he found it, he stuck out the other foot and waved it about, as if seeking some purchase in the air itself. Another time he lay prostrate on the stage, belly down, arms straight out in front of him and hands joined, exactly like someone doing a belly flop. He couldn’t move. I finally had to take his legs and actually pull him down from the stage. I felt like a fireman taking a housepet out of a tree. When he was on the ground again he slumped down on the piano bench, his head in his hands.

“I never crawled,” he said finally.

“What’s that, Arnold?”

“I never crawled. My mother tells me I never crawled. Proper crawling is very important.”

“Of course you crawled. All babies crawl.”

“No. ‘Odd as it may seem to parents for whom the clumsy crawling maneuvers of a toddler are “cute” and often comic, the act of crawling is a sine qua non of proper locomotor development. Studies have shown a close relationship between later athletic development and efficient crawling.’” Arnold quoted letter-perfect from one of his many sources.

“Then let’s teach you to crawl,” I said.

“I’d feel funny,” he said. “You’d laugh. No, it’s no good. I’m too clumsy. I’m just wasting your time, Miss Steep.”

“You aren’t wasting my time.”

“No,” he said, “it’s no use.”

“Are you going to give up now, Arnold? After we’ve made so much progress? Am I wrong about you? Are you a coward? Is that it? Maybe you haven’t got the guts to be in show business. Maybe your guts are as undeveloped as your grace. Because believe me, Arnold, there are going to be places where the stages aren’t equipped with stairs and it’s a bigger jump than a lousy four and a half feet.”

“I can’t.”

“These are bad times, Arnold. Everywhere our foreign relations are deteriorating. The Middle East, the Far East, Europe. Our neighbors north and south. Wars are coming, Arnold. The USO is going to be bigger than ever. Do you think the theaters in a theater-of-operations are going to have stairways? You’re going to have to make up your mind, Mr. Menchman.”

“You’ll laugh.”

“Did I laugh when you fell out of chairs?”

“No.”

“Or when you tripped over your shadow that time in the studio?”

“No.”

“Well then?”

“Teach me to crawl,” he said.

So I did.

We crawled together across the stage all night. We played follow the leader on our hands and knees. It was exactly what was missing in Arnold’s locomotor development! Before we left that night Arnold had learned not only to crawl but to negotiate that jump. He could have leaped from any stage in the world. It was our single most productive session.

Now Arnold could move almost as well as your average man on the street, and in the next two weeks he made even greater progress. Inside a month we were able to make a stage of everything, anything. We drove into deserted parking lots at supermarkets and Arnold burst out of the window of my automobile nimble as Houdini. He climbed the hood and jumped up onto the roof of the car like Gene Kelly. He scrambled up the pedestal of a statue in the park and, holding onto the horse’s leg, swayed far out over its base, cocky as a ballet sailor in a dance. He was beautiful, suddenly lithe as a cat burglar. I couldn’t have taught him another thing about movement … It was at about this time, incidentally, that Dick had him on the show.

“I guess we won’t be seeing each other much from now on,” I told him one night when we got back to my studio.

“You’re a marvelous teacher.”

“You’re an apt pupil.”

“I’m very confident about my appearance. I owe you a lot.”

“You worked hard.”

“I still really haven’t got much of an act, though.”

“Oh, well,” I said, “your act. Your act is your mind.”

“I guess so … But a person’s act has to be structured. There has to be a patter. You know. Style is important, delivery is.”

“You’ll work it out.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know so much about these things.”

“I don’t either.”

“Oh, you do. Miss Steep?”

“Yes?”

“If I gave you more money, could you … do you think—?”

“What?”

“Could you be my audience for a bit? Just for as long as it takes me to work out my routines?”

“I couldn’t take money for watching you perform, Arnold.”

“I’d be taking up your time.”

“I’d love to watch you, but not for money. I’ve become very interested in your career,” I said.

So that’s what I did. We still used the makeshift curtain, but the way he moved now it could have been the handsomest setting in show business. He invented his routines right before my eyes. All I did was teach him a few flourishes. Not very good ones, I’m afraid — just that kind of handling themselves that professionals do. You know what I mean — a hand clasping the forehead in concentration, or two fingers buttering the right eyebrow, chin cuppings, scowls to make what he did look difficult. Later we discarded even these. He didn’t need them; he was too good. His memory should seem to be what it was: a function as naturally available to him as touch. What was wanted was ease, the juggler’s divided attentions, his camouflaged concentration, to be centerless, detached, incorruptible. BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Just so, Pepper.

PEPPER STEEP: I had never seen anything so fine. He must have known this, though he still needed assurances.

“Will I be good, do you think?”

“Perfect.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I have every confidence.” We laughed together at the word.

“Still,” he said, “I’m a naturally clumsy man, Miss Steep. My smoothness is only a veneer. Just tonight, getting off the bus to come here, I tripped and almost fell.”

“An accident.”

“Yes, but suppose I do something like that when I’m onstage?”

“Onstage, Arnold, you’ll be magnificent. You move like a dancer.”

“On our stages. Bare floors, familiar terrain, tamed place.”

“Anywhere. Everywhere.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Arnold, I’d like to see one last performance.”

“Oh?”

“A final dress rehearsal.”

“But it’s not here I’m worried about. This”—he gestured about him— “this is like singing in the bathtub.”

“I don’t mean here.”

“You don’t?”

“The staircase.”

“The winding staircase?”

“Yes.”

“The whole act?”

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tonight. Now.”

“But I—”

“Come.”

We went to the high room where the staircase wound its wide barber’s spiral to within six feet of the ceiling. Standing at the bottom and shading his eyes, Arnold leaned his head back and looked up to the top step. “Go on,” I said. He glanced at me for a moment and began to move up the stairs, at first holding on to the rail, then letting it go. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced, “it’s with great pleasure and pride that we now present one of the most amazing performers in the world. The man you are about to see isn’t an actor, for an actor, properly speaking, is one whose dramas are inflexible and fixed. There is nothing inflexible and fixed about the drama you will now witness. Nor do I now introduce a man who is a mere adept in some unvarying physical routine which, though impossible for average muscles and ordinary limbs, is simply the product of repetitive exercise. Like the actor, however, and like the acrobat as well, he is about to face an extraordinary challenge — a challenge which each of us sitting here tonight faces daily. Ah, but we fail. This man won’t. It is a challenge of getting and a challenge of having, of keeping and possessing — of reach and embrace itself. For he pits himself not as the stand-in actor against the poet’s contrived pressures, nor as the proven tumbler against a previously conquered gravity, but as the one man in the world against — simply—everything! To have it all at once, easier than Atlas, bearing all the awful tonnage of impression — the juggler of the living world …”

Yes, Dick Gibson thought, yes. Yes.

PEPPER STEEP: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … the one and only Arnold Menchman!”

Arnold stood on the top step, less than an inch between the ceiling and his head. He seemed colossal. He poised there for a moment. His hands—his hands were in his pockets! He looked directly at me. Then he closed his eyes, removed a hand from his jacket pocket and put it across his eyelids in a gesture I thought we had agreed to abandon.

“There are thirty-seven steps in this staircase,” he said softly, “one hundred and eleven balusters. The stairs are covered by an Oriental-type carpeting about four feet wide. Seven basic colors predominate. In the descending order of their quantitative representation they are: red, dark blue, light blue, rose, white, grayish green and black.

“Pick a number from one to thirty-seven, from one to one hundred and eleven.”

I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know that he meant me to. In the past he had often repeated something he pretended had been called up from the audience.

“A number from one to thirty-seven, please. From one to one hundred eleven. I’m waiting.”

“Fourteen, Arnold.”

“Fourteen, good. From one to one hundred and eleven. If you will, madam.”

“Eighty-three.”

“Eighty-three, excellent. Fourteen would be the fourteenth stair, balusters forty, forty-one and forty-two. Eighty-three would be the eighty-third baluster, or the highest baluster on the twenty- seventh stair. Choose right or choose left, madam.”

“Left.”

“My left or yours?”

“Your left, Arnold.”

“Thank you, madam. By the fortieth baluster—my left — you will find a rose-tinted curvilinear intersected at three angles by wormlike tendrils of grayish green, the tendrils given a slight suggestion of depth by being outlined on their right sides in a thin black. By the forty-first baluster — my left — you will have a small white snowflake shape sketched within a just larger but less rigid version of itself done in light blue. The forty-second baluster on my left is a simple run of red interrupted by four narrow, thrusting fingers of dark blue. You will have to check this information for yourself, madam, for you will of course have noticed that my eyes are shut!”

“That’s marvelous, Arnold. You’ve memorized the Oriental rug!”

“Am I correct, madam?”

“Bravo, Arnold. Bravo. The ninetieth baluster. My right.”

“A light blue bell.”

“The fifty-second. Your right.”

“A breast. White. A rose nipple.” He opened his eyes. “Oh, Pepper,” he said. He ducked his head shyly for a moment and then looked at me. Then he came down the stairs, his body sinking out of sight each time the stairway turned and reappearing as it opened out, his gaze still locked in mine. At the eighth step he spoke. “Oh Pepper,” he said again, reaching his hands out to me. “I’m so pleased.” At the bottom step he took my hands and held them.

“You were grand, Arnold,” I said. I had to look away.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. You were superb, immense.”

“No, please. What?”

“Nothing, Arnold. I’m being a little selfish.”

“You, Pepper? Oh, no.”

I tried to smile. “Well, you don’t need me any more — you know that, don’t you? Your performance just now. Even the way you came down those stairs, you could have been Fred Astaire. You just graduated from the Charm School.”

“Pepper, don’t talk like this.”

“No, really. Fred Astaire himself. You don’t need me any more.”

“I wanted to be good for you.”

“Well, you were. Very good.”

“Pepper?”

“What is it, Arnold?”

“Will you be my … manager?”

”I don’t know anything about managing anybody, Arnold.”

“Well, I don’t either. I need to be managed.”

I didn’t argue. I was honored that he’d asked me, and it must be pretty clear by now that we were in love.

BERNIE PERK: This is the darndest program.

PEPPER STEEP: You have to understand something. I had been a model. A model — a glamour girl. You’ve seen our outlandish postures in the ads, our arrogance of shoulders and our hips off plumb. You’ve seen us standing on the public monuments and barefoot in cathedrals and lying in our spread gold hair on beds. Have you been so cool in jungles or had such bearing among the bearers? You’ve seen our faces, the mouths we make, like people photographed speaking French. Our eyes those of queens and courtesans. What persuades has never been your innocence or virginity. Contempt and scorn, disdain and contumely, and experience in the hatbag with the cosmetics and conditioners. But in bed less than waitresses, less than office girls or schoolteachers, so virgins of a sort still, drivers of harder bargains than those others. And anyway there are just not that many bigshots to go around.

So, I had been a glamour girl. I forgot to tell you — at one point I was a Goldwyn Girl. Do you know what it cost to feed and liquor me in those days? Four hundred dollars a week, and often more. I’m talking about glamour, I’m talking about being waved in ahead of the people in nightclubs behind those velvet ropes like a plush corral, about the high cost of living at Trocadero and Bill Miller’s Riviera and 21. Nothing’s a quarter at the Latin Quarter.

So, I’ll be frank, I had had men. Do you know something? Most of the men one sleeps with are called Jimmy, or Coco, or Johnny, or Chuck: glamour boys with yellow hair, big spenders on a first name basis not just with the maître d’, but with the kid in the parking lot as well. The tall and the fit — good crawlers, every mother’s son of them. To the victors belong the spoiled. But never an Arnold, not one, not once. Even at the end, at the time of his triumph on my staircase, Arnold might have played in nightclubs but couldn’t have gotten a good table in one. He was doomed to wait for his car in parking lots, to be seated behind the pillars in theaters, to read in barber shops while men without appointments took the chair ahead of him. And it wasn’t as if Arnold didn’t mind. He minded. Often, perhaps, there was murder in his heart, but what could he do? If you’re not born with prerogative you never have it. What could he do? Recite by heart the New York Times, or call off, down to the last item in column four, a thousand menus from a thousand Chinese restaurants?

We won’t talk of what I felt now, but of what I meant to Arnold. Imagine what it must have been like for him to have me, a Goldwyn Girl! Never mind that he was served last again, or that I was already a decade past my prime. He loved and desired me more than any man had ever loved and desired me even when I was still really something.

BERNIE PERK: I never knew she was a Goldwyn Girl. I remember those girls from the musicals. They were terrific.

PEPPER STEEP: So … two things had happened. We were in love, and Arnold was ready to go into show business. I still had one or two contacts in New York and we agreed that I should go down and see what could be done about getting Arnold work. Of course we both knew that once he started getting some dates we wouldn’t be seeing each other as much as before. I couldn’t leave the Charm School, and naturally Arnold would have to go where his bookings took him.

I allowed myself a week to get him some engagements. I was very lucky. Inside of four days I had him booked in three spots — one of them a two-week run in an important lounge in Las Vegas. When I came back and told Arnold of our good fortune I expected him to be overjoyed, but instead he seemed worried, and I noticed that he avoided looking at me.

“That’s just butterflies, Arnold. All performers have them. You’ll be fine … You do understand why I won’t be able to go with you?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“Well, then. I think we’d better get started. We’ve got a lot of rehearsing to do. Your first date is just three weeks off.”

“Would you mind, Pepper, if I worked the routines out on my own in Springfield?”

“No, Arnold, of course not.”

“If you’re not going to be there with me, maybe it’s a good idea to get used to performing by myself.”

“Certainly, Arnold. If that’s what you want.” I sounded wounded, I suppose, but frankly I saw his point, and besides, I’d been neglecting the Charm School since I started working with Arnold.

His first booking was a club date at a convention in Atlantic City. At the last minute I decided to take time off and go down with him, but when I told him he said I’d just make him more nervous than he already was. He had to do it on his own, he said. I made him promise to call me just as soon as he got offstage, and I sent him a good-luck telegram at the hotel where he was to appear.

I knew he was supposed to go on at about ten o’clock, and so when I still hadn’t heard from him at midnight I called him.

“How did it go, sweetheart? Were you marvelous?”

“It was all right.” He didn’t sound as if it really was. He’s probably tired, I thought. I asked him for details, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it. Indeed, I could almost see him frowning into the phone — a funny little squint which I had seen often in the past few weeks, the sign of his tension, I’d felt.

When he returned to Springfield the next day, again it was I who called him.

“What’s wrong, Arnold?”

“Nothing. Nothing is, Pepper.”

“Well, it doesn’t sound that way. It’s almost as if you’re avoiding me.”

“I love you, Pepper.”

“Well,” I said, “glad to hear it. You had me worried there. I thought that now you’ve made it into the big time—”

“I haven’t made it into the big time, Pepper.”

“You will, darling. Do you know what I thought?”

“What?”

“That maybe … maybe you’d fallen onstage.”

“No,” he said, “I moved very well.”

What I really thought was what I’d started to tell Arnold: that he was just another bastard who uses people. Why, he hadn’t even paid me, I remembered. We’d fallen in love before that became a point. But it was so absurd to think of Arnold in this light that I was ashamed of myself. I reminded him that his next performance was in two weeks. We saw each other in the interval almost as much as we had when we were still working together, though Arnold still insisted on working on his act alone. And though he was just as sweet as he had ever been, sometimes when he didn’t think I was looking I would catch him frowning. Was it possible that having achieved his goal it was no longer attractive to him? I didn’t ask, but I decided to wait until after his next engagement before making any additional dates for him.

There was no question about my seeing him work that booking. It was for a week at the Fox Theater in St. Louis, one of the last motion picture houses in America where they still had a variety show between features. This time I waited three days for him to call. Finally he did.

“How is it, Arnold? Are the audiences responsive?”

“They’re very kind.”

“How do they like the part where you have the houselights turned up and you memorize the first fifteen rows of the audience? Did they go wild for that?”

“I don’t do that part.”

“Arnold, it’s the most exciting thing in the act.”

“I don’t do that part.”

When he came back from St. Louis he was as gloomy as ever. Now he always wore that odd squinting frown of his, even when he knew I was watching. It was very strange because he had never looked so good. Evidently he had bought a whole new wardrobe in St. Louis — everything in the latest fashion, the best taste. A couple of his suits looked as if they’d been custom-made. Nor had he ever been so ardent, so clever a lover. But he continued to rehearse alone, and each day he seemed more despondent. By the time he went to Vegas anyone could see that he was miserable.

I had to know what was going on, so without telling Arnold I flew out to Las Vegas on a different plane and dropped into the lounge where he was performing. I took a table in the back, as far from the small stage as possible. When he was introduced and the spotlight hit him, I gasped. He took my breath away — I had never seen him during an actual performance before — so beautiful was he. He seemed magnificent in the new tuxedo he had bought for the engagement. I was reassured at once, but then, when he began his act, it was all I could do to keep from fleeing from the room. He was terrible! He moved splendidly, better than I had ever seen him, but when it came time to give them what he had memorized he seemed confused. He stammered and hesitated, he faltered, he stuttered and sputtered. One didn’t know if his memory or his speech had given out. He did only a few of the routines we had worked out together, and these badly. For the rest he substituted halting recitations of poems he had memorized in his childhood, violating the first principle of such acts — audience participation. And with his constant frown he seemed almost angry at the audience. It was awful. It was dull. It was so bad that the audience took a sort of pity on him and were more patient and attentive than they might have been with an act two or three times better than his. When he was finished they generously applauded.

I hadn’t wanted him to know I was there; he would have guessed that I’d come to spy and not to surprise him. But he looked so miserable when he was through that I had to go to his dressing room.

He didn’t seem surprised to see me. “Did you see it, Pepper?”

“Oh, Arnold, I’m so sorry.”

“I didn’t want you to know,” he said. “I’m so ashamed.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “So you’ve got a little stage fright. We can lick that. Remember how frightened you were when you were clumsy? We worked on that and today you’re one of the most graceful men in show business.”

“But I don’t have stage fright. I was cool as a cucumber up there.”

“But, Arnold, the way you stammered, your confusion—”

“It wasn’t stage fright. It’s my damn eyes.”

Arnold told me that ever since he had become graceful his vision had begun to deteriorate. For two months, he said, he had been becoming increasingly far-sighted; each day what he could see moved a little farther off. Since he had an eidetic imagination and could remember only what he saw, and most of what he saw was a blur, his photographic memory had inevitably been affected — even the beloved poems from his childhood. When he closed his eyes the print was indistinct. That’s why he squinted; he was trying to make things out.

“But surely you’ve been to an eye doctor,” I said.

“Yes. It’s severe astigmatism.”

“Well, then, he can prescribe glasses.”

“He made a pair up for me. They’re thick, Pepper. They’re awful.”

“Well, so what about it?”

“If I wore them, anybody could tell I’m far-sighted. Since you taught me to move so well I just couldn’t; they’d detract from my appearance. I’d only be clumsy Arnold again. I even tried contact lenses, but they hurt my eyes and made them water. Onstage I looked like I was crying.”

So he was vain. That was what had been underneath the clumsiness we’d rubbed off. I’d taught him to move and now he couldn’t stand not to be graceful, glassless Arnold.

I’ll say this much: he didn’t give up. He was determined to stay in show business. That must have been part of his vanity too, even in the beginning. I mean, maybe the idea of show business didn’t even have anything to do with his talent. Maybe his memory was just a lucky excuse he could use to justify being on a stage. By now, he was terribly far-sighted but he decided to make a strength of his weakness, and he conceived a plan to move his act outdoors. He went into the desert around Las Vegas and started to memorize larger and larger objects further and further off. He began with cactuses a hundred yards away and ended with a mountain range twenty miles in the distance. Arnold had become a living map!

BERNIE PERK: Incredible!

PEPPER STEEP: It was impractical, of course. He couldn’t get a good crowd to come with him into the desert, and even if he had only someone as far-sighted as himself could have appreciated his accomplishments. We gave it every chance. While in the West we went to Arizona, and Arnold committed to memory the entire south rim of the Grand Canyon, and every bend and twist of the Colorado River for two hundred miles. The Forest Ranger was very impressed and offered him a job. He might have taken it, but the Park Service wouldn’t let him wear his tuxedo.

It was all absurd, of course, but Arnold was as determined to work up his new act as he had been to learn how to move well. It was all he could think of. He had an idea that he needed to be in a dependable climate, one where it was always clear, and so he chose Palm Springs. He asked me to come with him, but I told him I couldn’t. It broke my heart to have to leave him, but I had my career in Hartford — and frankly, I couldn’t see abandoning it in order to chase a will-o’-the-wisp. I tried to talk him into coming back with me, but he was obsessed with his act. I tried to persuade him to sacrifice a little of his appearance, but he was convinced he could still have both.

I saw Arnold only once more. About a year after Las Vegas he sent me a wire saying that he was returning to Hartford and asking me to meet his plane. For old time’s sake I did.

When he appeared in the doorway of the big jet he looked like a movie star. He was wearing one of those cream trenchcoats and a smart little cap. Though it was winter and already past nine o’clock in the evening, he had on huge green sunglasses and carried a chic airline suitcase of olive green leather — one of those things with enormous bulging zippered pockets. Somehow I knew that his sunglasses were not prescription lenses.

We went back to my studio.

“I’ve given up the idea for the act, Pepper,” he said.

“Oh?”

“It was silly. I’ve enormous land masses in my head, but it could never come to anything as an act.”

“It was too ambitious, Arnold.”

“Yeah. When I was still in California I took a plane up to Seattle. I’ve got the shoreline of practically the entire West Coast memorized — except for cloud cover and fog banks.”

“I see.”

“There’s no way to use it.”

“You still won’t wear glasses?”

“No.”

“What happened to the things you used to know? What happened to the carpet on my staircase?”

“Gone. All gone, kid. I can’t see it. The light that failed.”

“Oh, Arnold.”

“What the hell? Let’s not be so gloomy. How d’ya like my shirt? I had about a dozen of them made up in Springs. In pastels, stripes. No breast pocket, did you notice? That’s one of the latest wrinkles.”

“Oh, Arnold.”

“The shoes are reindeer suede. Handmade, of course. The heels are meerschaum.”

“What’s the lettering on my card index file?”

He closed his eyes and opened them again. “Can’t make it out, Pep.”

“Oh, Arnold.”

“That’s all over. I’ve given up the act. I’ve come back, sweetie. We’re together again.”

“No, Arnold. We’re not. I met your plane, but it’s over between us. You’d better leave now. My friend is terribly jealous.”

“Oh, Pepper.”

“Please go, Arnold. I’d prefer there were no scene.”

At the door Arnold turned once and shrugged. He tipped his funny little hat forward on his head and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his raincoat. He was the elegant lonely man, like Frank Sinatra on an album cover.

There wasn’t anyone else, of course … There isn’t anyone else. And all Arnold had meant to do in the doorway was make me love him. He thought I would love him if he was handsome and graceful, but I’d loved him for what was in his mind, for what he could remember. He was a peacock now, the world as much a blur to him as it is to the rest of us.

I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m sorry I’m crying. I don’t mean to cry. Please. I’m sorry.

BERNIE PERK: Oh, Pepper.

DICK GIBSON: Ladies and gentlemen, we pause now for station identification.

Among the guests in the studio all hell broke loose during the station break. They talked excitedly to one another, and called back and forth along the row of theater seats like picnickers across their tables. Though they had nothing to say themselves, Behr-Bleibtreau’s people turned back and forth trying to follow the conversation of the others. Indeed, there was a sort of lunatic joy in the room, a sense of free-for-all that was not so much an exercise of liberty as of respite— as if someone had temporarily released them from vows. School was out in Studio A, and Dick had an impression of its also being out throughout the two or three New England states that could pick up the show. He saw people raiding refrigerators, gulping beers, grabbing tangerines, slashing margarine on slices of bread, ravenously tearing chicken wings, jellied handfuls of leftover stews.

Pepper Steep had joined Jack Patterson in exhausted detachment; though he said nothing, Mel Son looked animatedly from one to the other. Behr-Bleibtreau also seemed exhausted.

Of the members of his panel, only Bernie Perk seemed keyed up. He jabbered away a mile a minute, so that Dick couldn’t really follow all that he was saying. The druggist wanted to know what had happened to everyone. “What’s got into Pepper?” he asked. “What’s got into Jack?”

Dick couldn’t tell him. He had no notion of what had gotten into his comrades. All he knew was that he was impatient for the commercial to be finished and for the show to go back on the air. He couldn’t wait to hear what would happen next, though having some dim sense of the masquelike qualities of the evening, and realizing that thus far his guests had “performed” in the order that they had been introduced, he had a hunch that it would involve Bernie.

It did.

BERNIE PERK: May I say something?

DICK GIBSON: Sure thing.

BERNIE PERK: Okay, then. What’s going on here? What’s got into everyone? What’s got into Pepper? What’s got into Jack? I came here tonight to talk about psychology with an expert in the field. But all anyone’s done so far is grab the limelight for himself. Everyone is too excited. Once a person gets started talking about himself all sorts of things come out that aren’t anybody’s business. I understand enough about human nature to know that much. Everybody has his secret. Who hasn’t? We’re all human beings. Who isn’t a human being? Listen, I’m a mild person. I’m not very interesting, maybe, and I don’t blow my own horn, but even someone like myself, good old Bernie Perk, corner druggist, “Doc” to one and “Pop” to another, could put on a regular horror show if he wanted to. But it isn’t people’s business.

Look, my son and his charming wife are guests in the studio tonight. Pepper Steep’s sister is here. How do you think it must be for them when an intimate relative sticks his foot in his mouth? If you love people you’ve got to have consideration.

DICK GIBSON: Bernie, don’t be so upset. Take it easy.

BERNIE PERK: Dick, I am upset about this. No, I mean it. What’s it supposed to be, “Can You Top This?”

DICK GIBSON: Come on, Bernie—

BERNIE PERK: Because the temptation is always the one they yielded to. To give up one’s secrets. La. La la. The soul’s espionage, its secret papers. Know me. No, thank you. I’m pretty worked up. Call on Mel.

DICK GIBSON: Take it easy.

BERNIE PERK: Call on Mel.

DICK GIBSON: Mel? (no answer)

BERNIE PERK: Mel passes. (He giggles.) Well, that’s too bad, for thereby hangs a tale, I bet. The truth is everybody likes to see his friends with their hair down. Well, okay, I’ll tell the audience something maybe they don’t know. We don’t see each other off the air. The illusion is we’re mates. You want us to be, but we’re not.

JACK PATTERSON: Here goes Bernie.

BERNIE PERK: (fiercely) You had your turn. You were first. Don’t hog everything. You had your turn. Just because you couldn’t do any better than that canned ardor, don’t try to ruin it for everyone else.

The truth of the matter is, I had to laugh. The man’s a schoolteacher. Big deal. He sees up coeds’ skirts. Big deal. He has them in for conferences, he goes over their papers with them, he bends over the composition and her hair touches his cheek. Enormous! Call the police, passion’s circuits are blown. I know all that, I know all that. But if you want to see life in the raw, be a pharmacist, buy a drugstore. You wouldn’t believe what goes on. It’s a meat market. No wonder they register us. Hickory Dickory “Doc.” Let me fill you in on the prescription. Yow. Wow.

You know what a drugstore is? A temple to the senses. Come down those crowded aisles. Cosmetics first stop. Powders, puffs, a verb-wheel of polished nails on a cardboard, lipstick ballistics, creams and tighteners, suntan lotions, eyeshadow, dyes for hair — love potions, paints, the ladies’ paintbox!

Come, come with Pop. The Valentine candy, the greeting cards, the paperbook racks and magazine stands. The confessions and movie magazines dated two months beyond the real month because time, like love, is yet to be. Sit at the fountain. See the confections — banana splits and ice cream sundaes like statues of the sweet, as if sweetness itself, the sugary molecules of love resided in them. The names — like words for lyrics. Delicious the syrups, the salty storm of nuts and tidal waves of spermy cream. Sing yum! Sing yum yum!

All the shampoos, all the lotions and hair conditioners proteined as egg and meat. Files and emery boards, the heartsick gypsy’s tools. Sun lamps, sleep masks, rollers, bath oils and depilatories, massaging lotions. Things for acne, panty hose — the model on the package like a yogi whore. Brushes, rinses, bath oils and shower caps like the fruits that grow on beaches.

To say nothing of the Venus Folding Feminine Syringe, of Kotex in boxes you could set a table for four on. Liquid douches — you can hear the sea. Rubber goods, the queer mysterious elastics, supporters, rupture’s ribbons and organ’s bows. Now we’re into it, hard by diarrhea’s plugs and constipation’s triggers. There’s the druggist, behind the high counter, his bust visible like someone on a postage stamp, immaculate in his priest’s white collar. See the symbols — the mortar and pestle and flasks of colored liquid. Once I sipped from the red. the woman’s potion. I had expected tasteless vegetable dye, but it was sweet, viscous, thick as oil. There are aphrodisiacs in those flasks to float your heart.

And there I am, by the refrigerated drugs, the druggist’s small safe, the pharmacopoeia, the ledger with names and dates and numbers. A man of the corner and crossroads, scientist manqué, reader of Greek and Latin, trained to count, to pull a jot from a tittle, lift a tittle from a whit, a man of equilibriums, of grains and half-grains, secret energies locked in the apothecary’s ounce.

Fresh from college I took a job — this was the depression — in another man’s store. MacDonald’s. Old MacDonald had a pharmacy, eeyi eeyi o! An old joke but the first I ever made. “I’ll fill the prescriptions,” MacDonald told me. “You’re a whipper-snapper. You’ll wait on trade and make the ice cream sodas. If that isn’t satisfactory, go elsewhere. If I’m to be sued for malpractice I’ll be the malpracticer, thank you very much.” It was not satisfactory, but what could I do? It was the depression. How many young men trained for a profession had to settle in those days for something else? And do you know what I found out? (What’s got into Bernie?) I found out everything!

The first week I stood behind the counter, smiling in my white lab jacket, and a lady came in. A plain woman, middle-aged, her hair gone gray and her figure failing. “Doctor, I need something for my hemorrhoids,” she said. “They are like to kill me when I sit. It burns so when I make number two that I’ve been eating clay to constipate myself.”

I gave her Preparation H. Two days later she came back to the store and bought a birthday card for her son. Somehow the knowledge that I alone of all the people in the store knew something about that woman’s behind was stirring to me. I was married, the woman was plain; she didn’t attract me. I was drawn by her hemorrhoids, in on the secret of her sore behind. Each day in that novice year there were similar experiences. I had never been so happy in my life. Old MacDonald puttering away in the back of the store, I up front — what a team we made.

A young woman came in. Sacrificing her turn she gestured to me to wait on the other customers first. When the store was empty she came up to me.

“I have enuresis,” she said.

I gave her some pills.

“Listen,” she said, “may I use your toilet?”

I let her come behind the counter. She minced along slowly, her legs in a desperate clamp. I opened the door of the small toilet.

“There’s no toilet paper,” I said. “I’ll have to bring you some.”

“Thank you,” she said.

I stood outside the door for a moment. I heard the splash. A powerful, incredible discharge. You’d think she’d had an enema. But it was all urine; the woman’s bladder was converting every spare bit of moisture into uremic acid. She could have pissed mud puddles, oceans, the drops in clouds, the condensation on the outside of beer bottles. It was beyond chemistry, it was alchemy. Golden. Lovely.

I got the paper for her.

”I have the toilet tissue, miss.” Though she opened the door just enough for me to hand the roll in to her, I saw bare knees, a tangle of panties.

Her name was Miss Wallace, and when she came into the store for her pills — need is beyond embarrassment: only I was embarrassed — I grew hard with lust. I made no overtures, you understand; I was always clinical, always professional, always offhand.

“Listen,” I told her one day, “I suppose you have rubber sheets.”

“No good,” she said.

“You’ll ruin your mattress.”

“It’s already ruined. When I tried a rubber sheet, the water collected in the depression under my behind. I lay in it all night and caught cold.”

The thought of that pee-induced cold maddened me. Ah God, the bizarre body awry, messes caught in underwear — love tokens, unhealth a function of love.

There were so many I can’t remember them all.

I knew I had to leave Old MacDonald. I was held down, you see. Who knew what secrets might not be unlocked if I could get my hands on the prescriptions those ladies brought in! When my father died and left me four thousand dollars, I used it to open the store I have now. I signed notes right and left to get my stock and fixtures together. My wife thought it was madness to gamble this way in the depth of the depression, but I was pining with love.

There were so many …

Let’s see. These have been a few of the women in my life:

Rose Barbara Hacklander, Miss Hartford of 1947, 38–24—36, a matter of public record. What is not a matter of public record is that she had gingivitis, a terrible case, almost debilitating, and came near to losing the title because of her reluctance to smile. She wanted to shield her puffy gums, you understand. Only I, Bernie Perk, her druggist, knew. On the night before the finals she came to me in tears. She showed me — in the back of the store— lifting a lip, reluctant as a country girl in the Broadway producer’s office raising the hem of her skirt, shy, and yet bold too, wanting to please even with the shame of her beauty. I looked inside her mouth. The gums were filled, tumid with blood and pus, enormous, preternatural, the gums of the fat lady in the circus, obscuring her teeth, in their sheathing effect seeming actually to sharpen them, two rings of blade in her mouth. And there, in the back of her mouth at the back of the store, pulling a cheek, squeezing it as one gathers in a trigger — cankers, cysts like snow- flakes.

“Oh, Doc,” she cried, “what will I do? It’s worse tonight. The salve don’t help. It’s nerves — I know it’s nerves.”

“Wait, I can’t see in this light. Put your head here. Say ‘Ah.’”

“Ah,” she said.

“Ah,” I said. “Ah!”

“What’s to be done? Is there anything you can give me?”

“Advice.”

“Advice?”

“Give them the Giaconda smile. Mona Lisa let them have.”

And she did. I saw the photograph in the newspaper the morning after the finals. Rose Barbara crowned (I the Queenmaker), holding her flowers, the girls in her court a nimbus behind her, openly smiling, their trim gums flashing. Only Miss Hartford of 1947’s lips were locked, her secret in the dimpled parentheticals of her sealed smile. I still have the photograph in my wallet.

Do you know what it means to be always in love? Never to be out of it? Each day loving’s gnaw renewed, like hunger or the need for sleep? Worse, the love unfocused, never quite reduced to this one girl or that one woman, but always I, the King of Love, taking to imagination’s beds whole harems? I was grateful, I tell you, to the occasional Rose Barbara Hacklander for the refractive edge she lent to lust. There were so many. Too many to think about. My mind was like the waiting room of a brothel. Let them leave my imagination, I prayed, the ones with acne, bad breath, body odor, dandruff, all those whose flyed ointment and niggered woodpile were the commonplace of my ardor.

Grateful also to Miss Sheila Jean Locusmundi who had corns like Chiclets, grateful to the corns themselves, those hard outcroppings of Sheila Jean’s synovial bursa. I see her now, blonde, high-heeled, her long, handsome legs bronzed in a second skin of nylon.

I give her foot plasters. She hands them back. “Won’t do,” she says.

“Won’t do? Won’t do? But these are our largest. These are the largest there are.”

“Pop,” she whispers, “I’ve got a cop’s corns.”

A cop’s corns. A cornucopia. I shake my head in wonder. I want to see them. Sheila Jean. I invite her behind the counter, to the back of the store. If I see them I might be able to help her, a doc like me. Once out of view of the other customers Sheila Jean succumbs: she limps, I feel the pinch. That’s right, I think, don’t let them see. In my office she sits down in front of my rolltop desk and takes off her shoes. I watch her face. Ease comes in like the high tide. Tears of painless gratitude appear in her eyes. All day she waits for this moment. She wiggles her toes. I see bunions bulge in her stockings. It’s hard for me to maintain my professional distance. “Take off your stockings, Miss Locusmundi,” I manage. She turns away in my swivel chair and I hear the soft, electric hiss of the nylon. She swings around, and redundantly points.

“I see,” I murmur. “Yes, those are really something.” They are. They are knuckles, ankles. They are boulders, mountain ranges.

“May I?” I ask.

She gives me her foot reluctantly. “Oh, God, don’t touch them, Pop.”

“There, there, Miss Locusmundi, I won’t hurt you.” I hold her narrow instep, my palm a stirrup. I toss it casually from one hand to the other, getting the heft.

“Ticklish,” Sheila Jean says. She giggles.

I peer down closely at the humpy callosities, their dark cores. There is a sour odor. This, I think, is what Miss Hartford’s gingivitis tastes like. I nod judiciously; I take their measure. I’m stalling because I can’t stand up yet. When finally I can, I sculpt plasters for her. I daub them with Derma-Soft and apply them. When she walks out she is, to all eyes but mine, just another pretty face.

Grateful too — I thank her here — to Mary Odata, a little Japanese girl whose ears filled with wax. I bless her glands, those sweet secretions, her lovely auditory canal. Filled with wax, did I say? She was a candle mine. I saved the detritus from the weekly flushings I administered.

Her father took her to live in Michigan, but before she left she wrote me a note to thank me for all I had done. “Respected R. Ph. Perk,” she wrote, “my father have selectioned to take me to his brother whom has a truck farm in the state of Michigan, but before I am going this is to grateful acknowledgment your thousand kindnesses to my humble ears. In my heart I know will I never to find in Michigan an R. Ph. as tender for my ears as you, sir. Mine is a shameful affliction, but you never amusemented them, and for this as for your other benefits to me I thank. Your friend, M. Odata.”

When I closed the store that night I went into my office and molded a small candle from the cerumen I had collected from her over the months, ran a wick through it, turned off the lights, and reread Mary’s letter by the glow of her wax until it sputtered and went out. Call me a sentimental old fool, but that’s what I did

Not to mention Mrs. Louise Lumen, perpetual wetnurse, whose lacteal glands were an embarrassment to her three or even four years beyond her delivery, or flatulent Cora Moss, a sweet young thing with a sour stomach in the draft of whose farts one could catch cold. There were so many. There was Mrs. Wynona Jost whose unwanted hair no depilatory would ever control. Her back, she gave me to understand, was like an ape’s. Super-follicled Mrs. Jost! And psoriatic Edna Hand. And all the ladies with prescriptions. I knew everybody’s secret, the secret of every body. And yet it was never the worm in the apple I loved but only a further and final nakedness, almost the bacteria itself, the cocci and bacilli and spirilla, the shameful source of their ailment and my privilege. I was deferential to this principle only: that there exists a nudity beyond mere nudity, a covertness which I shielded as any lover husbands his sweet love’s mysteries. I did not kiss and tell; I did not kiss at all. Charged with these women’s cabala I kept my jealous counsel. I saved them, you see. Honored and honed a sort of virginity in them by my silence. Doc and Pop. And knight too in my druggist’s gorget. I could have gone on like this forever, content with my privileged condition, satisfied to administer my drugs and patent medicines and honor all confidences, grateful, as I’ve said, for the impersonal personality of the way I loved, calling them Miss, calling them Missus, protecting them from myself as well as from others, not even masturbating, only looking on from a distance, my desire speculative as an issue of stock.

But something human happens.

One day … Where’s my son going? Why’s he leaving? Edward? Connie, don’t go. Youth should have a perspective on its parents … Well, they’ve gone. I must have shamed them. Isn’t that the way with the young? They think the older generation is stodgy and then they’ve no patience with confession. Oh well, let them go. Where was I?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: “One day—”

BERNIE PERK: Yes, that’s right. One day a woman came into my drugstore I’d never seen before. She was pretty, in her early or middle twenties perhaps, but very small. Not just short — though she was, extremely short; she couldn’t have been much more than five feet — but small. Dainty, you know? Maybe she wore a size six dress. I don’t know sizes. She could probably buy her clothes in the same department school girls do. What do they call that? Junior Miss? Anyway, she was very delicate. Tinier than Mary Odata. A nice face, sweet, a little old-fashioned perhaps, the sort of face you see in an old sepia photograph of your grandmother’s sister that died. A very pretty little woman.

I saw her looking around, going up and down the aisles. Every once in a while she would stoop down to peer in a low shelf. I have these big round mirrors in the corners to spy on shoplifters. I watched her in the mirrors. If I lost her in one mirror I picked her up again in another. A little doll going up and down the aisles in the convex glass.

I knew what was up. A woman knows where things are. It’s an instinct. Have you ever seen them in a supermarket? They understand how it’s organized. It has nothing to do with the fact that they shop more than men. A man goes into a grocery, he has to ask where the bread is. Not a woman: she knows where it’s supposed to be. Well, this woman is obviously confused. She’s looking for something which she knows is always in one place, whatever store she goes into. So I knew what was up: she was looking for the sanitary napkins.

Most places they keep them on the open shelves to spare the ladies embarrassment. I don’t spare anyone anything. I keep them behind the counter with me. I want to know what’s going on with their periods. They have to ask.

Finally she came over to me. “I don’t see the Kotex,” she says.

“This is the Kotex department,” I say, and reach under the counter for a box. “Will there be anything else? We have a terrific buy on Midol this week. Or some girls prefer the formula in this. I’ve been getting good reports; they tell me it’s very effective against cramps.” I hand her a tin of Monthleaze. “How are you fixed for breath sweetener?” I push a tube of Sour-Off across the counter to her.

She ignores my suggestions but picks up the box of Kotex and looks at it. “This is Junior,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I give her Regular.

“Don’t you have Super?”

“I thought this was for you,” I tell her, and give her the size she asks for.

A month later she came in again. “Super Kotex,” she said. I give her the box and don’t see her again for another month. This time when she comes in I hand her the Super and start to ring up the sale.

“I’d better take the tampon kind too,” she says. She examines the box I give her. “Is there anything larger than this?”

“This is the biggest,” I say, swallowing hard.

“All right.”

“Tell me,” I say, “are these for you?”

She blushes and doesn’t answer.

I hadn’t dared to think about it, though it had crossed my mind. Now I could think of nothing else. I forgot about the others. This girl inflamed me. Bernie burns. It was astonishing — a girl so small. My life centered on her center, on the prodigious size of her female parts.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Say “cunt.”

DICK GIBSON: Wait a minute—

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: It’s all right. Say “cunt.”

BERNIE PERK: … Cunt. The size of her cunt. The disproportion was astonishing to me. Kotex and Tampax. For all I knew, she used the Kotex inside. I did know it. I conceived of her smallness now as the result of her largeness. It was as if her largeness there sapped size from the rest of her body, or that by some incredible compensation her petiteness lent dimension elsewhere. I don’t know. It was all I could think of. Bernie burns.

I had to know about her, at least find out who she was, whether she was married. I tried to recall if I had seen a wedding band, but who could think of fingers, who could think of hands? Bernie burns. Perk percolates.

That night I counted ahead twenty-eight days to figure when I might expect her again. The date fell on September 9, 1956.

She didn’t come — not then, not the next month.

Then, one afternoon, I saw her in the street. It was just after Thanksgiving, four or five days before her next period. I raised my hat. “Did you have a pleasant holiday?” I asked. My face was familiar to her but she couldn’t place me. I counted on this.

“So so.” The little darling didn’t want to embarrass me.

“I thought you might be going away for Thanksgiving,” I said.

She looked puzzled but still wanted to be polite. “My roommate went home but I stayed on in Hartford,” she said. “Actually she invited me to go with her but my boss wouldn’t give me Friday off.”

Ah. I thought, she has a roommate, she’s a working girl. Good.

“I’m very sorry,” I said, “but I find myself in a very embarrassing position. I don’t seem to be able to remember your name.”

“Oh,” she said, and laughed, “I can’t remember yours either. I know we’ve seen each other.”

“I’m Bernie Perk.”

“Yes. Of course. I’m Bea Dellaspero. I still don’t—”

“I don’t either. You see what happens? Here we are, two old friends and neither of us can—Wait a minute. I think I’ve got it. I’ve seen you in my store. I’m the druggist — Perk’s Drugs on Mutual.”

“Oh.” She must have remembered our last conversation for she became very quiet. We were standing outside a coffee shop, and when I invited her to have a cup with me she said she had to be going and hurried off.

Her number was in the phone book, and I called right from the coffee shop. If only her roommate’s in, I thought, crossing my fingers for luck.

“Where’s Bea? Is Bea there?”

“No.”

“Christ,” I said. “What’s her number at work? I’ve got to get her.”

I called the number the roommate gave me; it was a big insurance company. I told them I was doing a credit check on Bea Dellaspero and they connected me to personnel. Personnel was nice as pie. Bea was twenty-four years old, a typist in the claims department and a good credit risk.

It was something, but I couldn’t live on it. I had to get her to return to the store.

I conceived the idea of running a sale especially for Bea. My printer set up a sample handbill. Across the bottom I had him put in half a dozen simple coupons, with blank spaces where she could write in the names of the products she wanted to exchange them for. She could choose from a list of twenty items, on which I gave about a 90 percent discount. I sent the flier in an envelope to Bea’s address.

Normally I’m closed on Sunday, but that was the day I set aside for Bea’s sale. I opened up at ten o’clock, and I didn’t have to wait more than an hour. When she came in holding the pink flier we were alone in the store.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Fine, thank you.” She was still uneasy about me. “I got your advertisement.”

“I see it in your hand.”

“Oh. Yes.”

She went around the store picking up the items she wanted and brought them to the counter. When she gave me her coupons, I saw that she’d chosen products relating to a woman’s periods or to feminine hygiene. She’d had to: I’d rigged the list with men’s shaving equipment, pipe accessories, athletic supporters — things like that.

“What size would these be, madam?”

“Super.”

“Beg pardon, I didn’t hear you.”

“Super.”

Super duper, I thought. I put the big boxes on the counter and added two bottles of douche from the shelf behind me. It won’t be enough, I thought. She had a pussy big as all outdoors. Imperial gallons wouldn’t be enough. “Let me know how you like the douche,” I said, “I’ve been getting some excellent reports.”

God, I was crazy. You know how it is when you’re smitten. Smitten? I was in love. Married twenty-three years and all of a sudden I was in love for the first time in my life. Whole bales of cotton I would have placed between her legs. Ah love, set me tasks! Send me for all the corks in Mediterranea, all styptic stymies would I fetch!

In love, did I say? In love? That’s wrong. In love I had been since Old MacDonald’s. In love is nothing, simple citizenship. Now I was of love, no mere citizen but a very governor of the place, a tenant become landlord. And who falls in love? Love’s an ascent, a rising — touch my hard-on — a soaring. Consider my body, all bald spots haired by imagination, my fats rendered and features firmed, tooth decay for God’s sake turned back to candy in my mouth. Heyday! Heyday! And all my feelings collateral to a teen-age boy’s!

So I had been in love and now was of it. Bernie burns, the pharmacist on fire. I did not so much forget the others as repudiate them; they were just more wives. Get this straight: love is adulterous, hard on the character. I cuckold those cuties, the Misses Odata and Locusmundi. Horns for Miss Hartford! Miss Moss is dross. Be my love, Bea my love!

I bagged Bea’s purchases, punched the register a few times to make it look good, and charged her fifty-seven cents for the ten dollars’ worth of stuff she’d bought.

“So cheap?”

“It’s my special get-acquainted offer,” I said. “Also I knocked off a few dollars because you mentioned the secret word.”

“I did? What was it?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

“You know, it’s really a terrific sale,” she said. “I’m surprised more people aren’t here to take advantage of it.”

“They’re coming by when church gets out.”

“I see.”

As she took the two bags in her thin arms and turned to go, it occurred to me that she might never come back to the store. I raced around the counter. I had no idea what I would do; all love’s stratagems and games whistled in my head.

“I’ll help you,” I said, taking one of her bags.

“I can manage.”

“No, I couldn’t think of it. A little thing like you? Let me have the other one as well.”

She refused to give it up. “I’m very capable,” she said. We were on the sidewalk. “You better go back. Your store’s open. Anyone could just walk off with all your stock.”

“They’re in church. Even the thieves. I’ll take you to your car.”

“I don’t have a car. I’m going to catch the bus at the corner.”

“I’ll wait with you.”

“It’s not necessary.”

“It isn’t safe.”

“They’re all in church.”

“Just the thieves, not the rapers.”

“But it’s the dead of winter. You don’t even have a coat. You’ll catch cold.”

“Not cold.”

“What?”

“Not cold. Bernie burns.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not cold. The pharmacist on fire.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m hale.” I jumped up and down with the bag in my arms. “See?” I said. “See how hale? I’m strong. I huff and I puff.” I hit myself in the chest with my fist. “Me? Me sick? There are things on my shelves to cure anything.”

Bea was becoming alarmed. I checked myself, and we stood quietly in the cold together waiting for the bus.

Finally I had to speak or burst. “‘There’s naught so sweet as love’s young dream,’” I said.

“What was that?”

“It’s a saying. It’s one of my favorite sayings.”

“Oh.”

“‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s another saying.”

“Do you see the bus coming?”

“‘Love makes the world go round.’”

“I’ve heard that one.”

“‘Love is smoke raised with the fume of sighs.’” The fume of size: super. “‘Take away love and earth is tomb.’ ‘Love indeed is anything, yet is nothing.’”

“I think I hear it coming. Are you sure you can’t see it?”

“‘Love is blind,’” I said gloomily. She had heard it; it lumbered toward us irresistibly. Soon it would be there and I would never see her again. She was very nervous and went into the street and began to signal while the bus was still three blocks off. I watched her performance disconsolately. “‘And yet I love her till I die,’” I murmured softly.

When the driver came abreast, Bea darted up the steps and I handed her bag to her. “Will I see you again?” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Will I see you again? Promise when you’ve used up what you’ve bought you’ll come back.”

“Well, it’s so far,” she said. The driver closed the door.

“I deliver!” I shouted after her and waved and blew kisses off my fingertips.

DICK GIBSON: Remarkable!

BERNIE PERK: So’s love, so are lovers. Now I saw them.

DICK GIBSON: Saw whom?

BERNIE PERK: Why, lovers. For if love is bad for the character it’s good for it too. Now that I was of love, I was also of lovers. I looked around and saw that the whole world was in love. When a man came in to pick up penicillin for his wife — that was a love errand. I tried to cheer him. “She’ll be okay,” I told him. “The pills will work. She’ll come round. Her fever will break. Her sore throat will get better.” “Why are you telling me this?” he’d ask. “I like you,” I’d say. “‘All the world loves a lover.’”

For the first time I saw what my drugstore was all about. It was love’s way station. In free moments I would read the verses on my greeting cards, and my eyes would brim with tears. Or I would pore over the true confessions in my magazine racks. “Aye aye, oy oy,” I’d mutter, “too true this true confession.” I blessed the lipstick: “Kiss, kiss,” I droned over the little torpedoes. “Free the man in frogs and bogs. Telltales be gone, stay off shirt collars and pocket handkerchiefs.” All love was sacred. I pored over my customers’ photographs after they were developed. I held a magnifying glass over them — the ones of sweethearts holding hands in the national parks or on the steps of historic buildings, the posed wives on the beach, fathers waving goodbye, small in the distance, as they go up the steps into airplanes. People take the same pictures, did you know that? We are all brothers.

Love was everywhere, commoner than loneliness. I had never realized before what a terrific business I did in rubbers. And it isn’t even spring; no one’s on a blanket in the woods, or in a rowboat’s bottom, or on a hayride. I’m talking about the dead of winter, a high of twenty, a low of three. And you can count on the fingers of one hand the high-school kid’s pipedream purchase. My customers meant business. There were irons in these lovers’ fires. And connoisseurs they were, I tell you, prophylactic more tactic than safeguard, their condoms counters and confections. How sheer’s this thing, they’d want to know, or handle them, testing this one’s elasticity, that one’s friction. Or inquire after refinements, special merchandise, meticulous as fishermen browsing flies. Let’s see. They wanted: French Ticklers, Spanish Daggers, Swedish Surprises, The Chinese Net, The Texas Truss and Gypsy Outrage. They wanted petroleum jellies smooth as syrups.

And I, Pop, all love’s avuncular spirit, all smiles, rooting for them, smoothing their way where I could, apparently selfless— they must have thought me some good-sport widower who renewed his memories in their splashy passion — giving the aging Cupid’s fond green light. How could they suspect that I learned from them, growing my convictions in their experience? Afterward, casually, I would debrief them. Reviewing the troops: Are Trojans better than Spartans? Cavaliers as good as Commandos? Is your Centurion up to your Cossack? What of the Mercenary? The Guerrilla? How does the Minuteman stand up against the State Trooper? In the end, it was too much for me to have to look on while every male in Hartford above the age of seventeen came in to buy my condoms.

Bea never came back — I had frightened her off with my wild talk at the bus stop — yet my love was keener than ever. I still kept up my gynecological charts on her, and celebrated twenty-eighth days like sad festivals. I dreamed of her huge vaginal landscape, her loins in terrible cramp. Bernie burns.

I formed a plan. The first step was to get rid of her roommate. I made my first call to Bea that night.

Don’t worry. It’s not what you think. I didn’t disguise my voice or breathe heavily and say nothing, nor any of your dirty-old-man tricks. I’m no phone creep. When Bea answered I told her who it was straight off.

“Miss Dellaspero? Bernie Perk. I don’t see you in the drugstore anymore. You took advantage of my bargains but you don’t come in.”

Embarrassed, she made a few vague excuses which I pretended cleared matters up. “Well that’s okay, then,” I said. “I just thought you weren’t satisfied with the merchandise or something. You can’t put a guy in jail for worrying about his business.”

In a week I called again. “Bea? Bernie.”

This time she was pretty sore. “Listen,” she said. “I never heard of a respectable merchant badgering people to trade with him. I was a little flustered when you called last week, but I have the right to trade wherever I want.”

“Sure you do, Bea. Forget about that. That was a business call. This is social.”

“Social?”

“That’s right. I called to ask how you are. After our last conversation I thought I’d be seeing you. Then when you didn’t come in I got a little worried. I thought you might be sick or something.”

“I’m not sick.”

“I’m relieved to hear it. That takes a load off my mind.”

“I don’t see why my health should be of any concern to you.”

“Bea, I’m a pharmacist. Is it against the law for a pharmacist to inquire after the health of one of his customers?”

“Look, I’m not your customer.”

“Your privilege, Bea. It’s no crime for a man to try to drum up a little trade. Well, as long as you’re all right. That’s the important thing. If we haven’t got our health, what have we got?”

A few days later I called again. “Bernie here. Listen, Bea, I’ve been thinking. What do you say to dinner tonight? I know a terrific steakhouse in West Hartford. Afterward we could take in a late movie.”

“What? Are you crazy?”

“Crazy? I don’t get your meaning. Why do you say something like that?”

“Why do I say that? Why do you call me up all the time?”

“Well, I’m calling to invite you to dinner. Where does it say a man can’t invite a young lady to have dinner with him?”

“I don’t know you.”

“Well, sure you know me, but even if you didn’t, since when is it illegal for a person to try to make another person’s acquaintance?”

“Don’t call any more.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Bea.”

“Don’t call me Bea.”

“That’s your name, isn’t it? You don’t drag a person into court for saying your name. Even your first name.”

“I don’t know what your trouble is, Mr. Perk—”

“Bernie. Call me Bernie. Bernie’s my first name.”

“I don’t know what your trouble is, Mr. Perk, but you’re annoying me. You’d better stop calling me.” She hung up.

I telephoned the next night. “My trouble, Bea, is that I think I’m falling in love with you.”

“I don’t want to hear this. Please get off the line.”

“Bea, dear, you don’t lock a fellow up for falling in love.”

“You’re insane. You must be at least twenty-five years older than I am.”

“There is a difference in our ages, yes. But they don’t arrest people for their birthdays.”

She hung up.

My plan was going according to plan. “Bea?”

“I thought I convinced you to stop calling me.”

“Bea, don’t hang up. Listen, don’t hang up. If you hang up I’ll just have to call you again. Listen to what I have to say.”

“What is it?”

“One of the reasons you’re hostile is that you don’t know anything about me. That’s not my fault, I don’t take any responsibility for that. I thought you’d come into the store and gradually we’d learn about each other, but you didn’t want it that way. Well, when a person’s in love he doesn’t stand on ceremonies. I’m going to tell you a few things about myself.”

“That can’t make any difference.”

“‘That can’t make any difference.” Listen to her. Of course it can make a difference, Bea. What do you think love between two people is? It’s knowing a person, understanding him. At least give me a chance to explain a few things. It’s not a federal offense for a fellow to try to clear the air. All right?”

“I’ll give you a minute.”

“Gee, I’d better talk fast.”

“You’d better.”

“I want to be honest with you. You weren’t far off when you said I was twenty-five years older than you are. As a matter of fact, I’m even older than you think. I’ve got a married son twenty- six years old.”

“You’re married?”

“Sure I’m married. Since when is it a crime to be married? My wife’s name is Barbara. She has the same initial you do. But when I say I’m married I mean that technically I’m married. Babs is two years older than I am. A woman ages, Bea darling. All the zip has gone out of her figure. Menopause does that to a girl. I’ll tell you the truth: I can’t stand to look at her. I used to be so in love that if I saw her sitting on the toilet I’d get excited. I couldn’t even wait for her to wipe herself. Now I see her in her corsets and I wish I were blind. Her hair has turned gray — down there. Do you know what that does to a guy?”

“I’m hanging up.”

“I’m telling the truth. Where’s it written it’s police business when someone tells the truth?”

I sent over a carton of Kotex and a carton of Tampax, and called her the following week. “Did you get the napkins?”

“I didn’t order those. I don’t want them.”

“Order? Who said anything about order? You can’t arrest a man for sending his sweetheart a present. It wouldn’t stand up in court.”

And again the next night.

“It’s you, is it? I’m moving,” she said. “I’m moving and I’m getting an unlisted number. I hope you’re satisfied. I’ve lost my roommate on account of you. You’ve made her as nervous as me with these calls. So go ahead and say whatever you want — it’s your last chance.”

“Come out with me tonight.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I love you.”

“You’re insane.”

“Listen, go to bed with me. Please. I want to make love to you. Or let me come over and see you naked. I want to know just how big you really are down there.”

“You’re sick, do you know that? You need help.”

“Then help me. Fuck me.”

“I actually feel sorry for you. I really do.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not hiding in any bushes. You know who I am. You know all about me. I’m Bernie Perk. My place of business is listed in the Yellow Pages. You could look me up. It isn’t a crime to proposition a woman. You can’t put a man behind bars for trying.”

“You disgust me.”

“Call the police.”

“You disgust me.”

“Press charges. They’ll throw them out.”

Her threat about an unlisted number didn’t bother me; a simple call to the telephone company the following afternoon straightened that out. I gave them my name and told them that Bea had brought in a prescription to be filled. After she’d picked it up I discovered that I had misread it and given her a dangerous overdose. I told them that if I were unable to get in touch with her before she took the first capsule she might die. And they’d better give me her new address as well so that I could get an ambulance to her if she’d already taken the capsule and was unable to answer the phone. Love always finds a way!

I gave her time to settle herself in her new apartment and get some of her confidence back. Then, a week later — I couldn’t wait longer: it was getting pretty close to her period — I took the package I had prepared and drove to Bea’s new address. Her name on the letter box had been newly stenciled on a shiny black strip of cellulose, the last name only, the little darling — you know how single girls in big cities try to protect themselves by disguising their sex with initials or last names: the poor dears don’t realize that it’s a dead giveaway — along with her apartment number. I walked up the two flights and knocked on her door.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Giddons from Tiger’s.” The building was managed by Tiger’s Real Estate and there’s actually a Mr. Giddons who works there.

“What do you want?”

“We have a report there’s some structural damage in 3-E. I want to check the walls in your apartment.”

She opened the door, the trusting little cupcake. “It’s you.”

“‘All’s fair in love and war.’”

“What do you want?”

“I’m berserk,” I said, “amok with love. If you scream I’ll kill you.”

I moved into the room and closed the door behind me. What can I say? In the twentieth century there is no disgrace. It happened, so I’ll tell you.

I pushed her roughly and turned my back to her while I pulled on the rubber. As I rolled it on I shouted threats to keep her in line. “One false move and I’ll kill you. I’ve got a knife. Don’t go for the unlisted phone or I’ll slit you from ear to ear. I’ll cut your pupick out. Stay away from the window. No tricks. I love you. Bernie burns, the pharmacist on fire. Don’t double-cross me. If I miss you with the knife I’ll shoot your head with my bullets.” At last it was on. Still with my back to her I ordered her to stand still. “Don’t make a move. If you make a move I’ll strangle you with my bare hands. Don’t make a move or you die. I’m wearing a State Trooper. They’re the best. I’m smearing K-Y Petroleum Jelly on me. Everything the best, nothing but the best. All right,” I said, “almost through. I just have to take this box of Kleenex out of my package and the aerosol douche. I’m unfolding the Venus Folding Feminine Syringe. There: these are for you. Now.” I turned to her.

“My God!” I said.

She had taken off her dress and brassiere and had pulled down her panties.

“Oh God,” I gasped. “It’s so big!”

“I didn’t want you to rip my clothes,” she said softly.

“But your legs, your legs are so thin!”

“Pipestems.”

“And your poor frail arms.”

“Pipecleaners.”

“But my God, Bea. Down there! Down there you’re magnificent!”

I saw the vastnesses, the tropical rain forest that was her pubes, the swollen mons like a freshly made Indian tumulus, labia majora like a great inverted gorge, the lush pudendum.

“Fantastic!”

“I’ve the vulva of a giantess,” she said sadly.

I reached out and hid my hands up to the wrists in her pubic hair. As soon as I touched her I felt myself coming. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. I love you — oo — oo — oo!” It was over. The sperm made a warm, independent weight in the bottom of my State Trooper. It swung against me like a third ball. “Oh God,” I sighed. “Oh dear. Oh my. Let me just catch my breath. Whew. Holy Cow! Great Scott!

“Okay,” I said in a few moments, “now you listen to me. I’m at your mercy. How can you throw a man in the hoosegow when you know as much about him as you do? I didn’t jump out at you from an alley or drag you into a car. Look—” I turned my pockets inside out— “I’m not armed. There’s no knife. I don’t carry a gun. These hands are trained. They fill prescriptions. Do you think they could strangle? Granted I threatened you, but I was afraid you’d scream. Look at it this way. I was protecting you. You’re just starting out in the neighborhood. It’s a first-class building. Would you want a scandal? And didn’t I take every precaution? Look at the douche. Everything the best that money can buy. And what did it come to in the end? I never even got close to you. To tell you the truth I thought it might happen just this way. It’s not like rape. I love you. How can you ruin a man who loves you? I’m no stranger. You know me. You know my wife’s name. I told you about my son. I’m a grandfather. Take a look at these pictures of my grandchildren. Did I ever show you these? This one’s Susan. Four years old and a little imp. Boy, does she keep her parents hopping! And this is Greg. Greg’s the thoughtful one. He’ll be the scholar. Are you going to put a grandfather in jail? You got me excited. Perk perks, the pharmacist in flames. I love you, but I’ll never bother you again. I had to, just this once. Give me a chance. It would break my wife’s heart to find out about me. Okay, they’d try to hush it up and maybe the grandkids would never hear about it, but what about my son? That’s another story.

“I’ll tell you something else. You’re the last. A man’s first woman is special, and so’s his last. He never gets over either of them. And how much time do you think I have left? You saw how I was. I can’t control it. I’ve had it as a man. I’m through. Give me a break, Bea. Don’t call the police. I love you. I’m your friend. Though I’ll let you in on a secret. I’d still be your friend in jail. All I really wanted was to see it. I still see it. I’m looking now. No, I’ll be honest: staring. I’m staring because I’ve never seen anything like it, and I want to remember it forever. Not that I’ll ever forget. I never will. Never.”

I was weeping. Bea had started to dress.

“There are jokes,” I said when I’d regained control, “about men on motorcycles disappearing inside women, or getting lost. There’s this one about a rabbi married to a woman who’s supposed to be really fabulous. One day the cleaning lady comes into the bedroom where the rabbi’s wife is taking a nap. She’s lying on the bedspread, all naked except where she’s covered her genitals with the rabbi’s skullcap, and the maid says, ‘Oh, my God, I knew it would happen one day. The rabbi fell in.’ I used to laugh at stories like that, but I never will again. You’re so beautiful.”

“I didn’t scream,” she said, “because it was my fate.”

“What?”

“People find out about me. In high school, in gym, the girls would see me in the shower, and they’d tell their boyfriends. Then the boys would humiliate me. Worse things were done than what you’ve done. We had to leave town. In the new high school I got a note from the doctor so that I could be excused from gym, but they still found out. Maybe someone from my old town knew someone in the new town, maybe the doctor himself said something — I don’t know. Boys would take me out and … want to see. When I graduated I moved away and started all over in a different state. There was a boy … I liked him. One day we made love — and he told. It was terrible. I can’t even wear a bathing suit. You know? Then I came to Hartford. And you found out. I didn’t scream because it was my fate. At least you say you love me—”

“Adore you,” I said.

She said something I couldn’t quite hear.

“What was that?”

“I said it’s my burden. Only it carries me. It’s as if I were always on horseback,” she cried, and rushed toward me and embraced me, and I held her like that for two hours, and when I was ready we made love.

During the commercial break Dick discovered that apparently his guests had lost their voices.

After his confession the druggist had slumped in his chair, his hands in his lap, his mouth slack-jawed. His eyes were glazed, stunned by the violation of his character. Dick murmured his name and shook him gently, then turned to the others. “Do you think he’s okay?” he asked. But Jack Patterson and Pepper and Mel were as somnolent as the pharmacist. The cat had their tongues. Behr-Bleibtreau was smiling. “Listen,” Dick told his panel, “you can’t poop out on me. We’ve got almost two hours to go.” Pepper Steep’s eyes were closed. Jack Patterson was catatonic. Bernie was off in some private world. “You’ve got to be able to talk,” he said. “It’s bad radio.” He turned to Mel Son. “Come on, Mel, you’re the professional. Give us some help here. When we go back on the air, get with it.” Mel scowled; he winced and blinked. He seems alive, Dick thought, but helpless, like someone gagged by robbers.

Meanwhile the commercial tapes were being played over the loudspeaker in the studio. At this time of night there were only the public service spots: enlistment pitches for the Naval Air Reserve, appeals for Radio Free Europe, “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires,” “Watch Out for the Other Guy.” Dick loved the ragged shrillness of these messages, their martial musical backgrounds, the sense they gave of a low budget and a moribund style: the sound man’s cellophane fires, more cozy than ominous, the long scream of a car horn gone awry that was, in these pieces, an inevitable signal of an accident proclaiming itself, a fanfare of the accomplished fact. He loved the starched treble of the announcer’s anti-Communist voice, and enjoyed — the discount for broadcasting public-service messages was enormous at this time of the morning — the sense the commercials created that his show was self-sustaining, a public service itself, that the equipment operated for him, existed to carry his voice out over the mysterious air incredible distances, into receivers (those strange extensions of his mouth), a sign in the night that there was no death.

Ordinarily he had to shush his guests who, suddenly relaxed, chattered nervously during these commercial breaks, annoying to him as if they drowned out the strains of some favorite song. Now he began to panic as the commercials came toward their end. Hurriedly he opened the key on his mike and spoke to his engineer. “Put up another commercial. Give me some time here.” He looked at Behr-Bleibtreau. If his panelists wouldn’t talk he’d be alone with him. He was getting scared.

Then Vendler came in with the sandwiches.

“Vendler,” Dick said, “where’ve you been? We’re all starving.”

From time to time Dick had attempted to put Vendler on the air, but the man wasn’t interested. The popular late-night television shows all had their Max Asners and Mrs. Millers and pet bartenders, even their favorite barbers and regular cab drivers: fans who never missed a night, who out of some inexplicable urgency were always in the studio audience and were never surprised when they were called on. But Dick had never been able to draw this man out. Probably he did not even listen to the show. He was content merely to wait around until Dick mentioned his delicatessen and then would pick up the empty lazy susan from the previous night and depart.

This time Vendler wouldn’t get away so easy. Dick pulled a chair up for Vendler and sat him down in it. Grabbing Bernie’s microphone, he put it in front of the man, gave him one of his own sandwiches and took one himself. Quickly he removed it from the wax paper envelope and took a great bite, pantomiming monumental chewing, holding it up in front of him and waving it about like a man eating on the run. Though he hadn’t said a word, it was as though he was speaking to them with his mouth full. He spun the lazy susan as if it were a roulette wheel and pointed to it with his sandwich hand inviting everyone in the studio to partake. No one made a move except for Jerry, his engineer, who came out of the control booth, grabbed some sandwiches and coffee and rushed back into the booth.

They were on the air.

DICK GIBSON: [In a split second balancing these factors: he was no longer alone with Behr-Bleibtreau. Vendler was with him. A laconic man but a presence from the outside, one of the best he could have right now. Yes. Vendler from Vendler’s 24-Hour Kosher-Style Delicatessen, with the smell of lox on his fingers, a suggestion of the briny deeps of pickle jars, his hands red from frankfurter dyes, dark bits of pastrami herb on his white shirt, a vaguely kosher-style lint. A man refulgent with the fluorescent light from his massive delicatessen cases, a solid fellow, full as salami casing, smooth as the formica tabletops he rubbed with damp rags. A generous man with cardboard placards for the Sisterhood Lecture Series using up the precious space in his windows, with slotted collection cans all along the top of his white cases, for Leukemia, Heart Fund, obscure agencies in Israel. A man with a bread-slicing machine, with the butt ends of corned beefs and bloody, delicious ropes about roasts, with sliced lox spread out on oily paper like cards in a card trick. Such a bright, glowing guy! And he wouldn’t be tainted by what had gone on that night. Yes! It was Vendler he would use against Behr-Bleibtreau.

But his habit was to leave right after his name was mentioned. So here was Dick’s problem: Should he guarantee the man’s staying on by never mentioning his name, or should he risk it and even throw in the plug? Vendler was in the chair, the mike in front of him. He had never been this close to being on the air before; he might even like it. If Dick was skillful enough, he might even forget they were talking on the radio after the first five minutes. Subjects, subjects, he needed subjects.

Subjects? He had a ready-made one: It was a family joke among those who listened to the program regularly that Dick’s engineer had a voracious appetite. Indeed, it was Jerry — whom the audience never heard — who was the center of the feast. His appetite was the only legend attached to the show, its single myth. (Why was that?) He got fan mail, requests for pictures, recipes, actual cakes, diets, pennies to weigh himself. Dick sometimes read Jerry’s mail over the air or repeated certain comments he had made about the food. The audience pictured the engineer chewing his way through the night as he turned his various dials. It was as good for the program as Jack Benny’s feud with Fred Allen, Phil Harris’s drinking, Don Wilson’s weight, Crosby’s sport shirts, Jessel’s girls. It neither added to nor detracted from the legend that his engineer’s appetite was real, that the man was a pig and, further, a cheap pig who ate this much every night only because it was free. So there was his subject: Vendler meets Jerry, the King of Breakfast confronts the Emperor of Freeloaders.

All this in that split second between the red illumination of the On the Air sign and Dick’s opening his mouth to speak. And then this: Because my character is my mind. Bernie’s is his obsession, Pepper’s her generosity. Jack’s his meanness, Jerry’s his freeloader’s appetite. God knows what Behr-Bleibtreau’s is, maybe his mystery, but mine’s my mind, what I think and nothing else. And this: He was a character as other people were amoral.]

Vendler is with us, ladies and gentlemen.

[Surprised because he felt no resistance when he reached out to hold the man in place. Then, realizing that it was because he had not yet mentioned the delicatessen, that the one required the other, that he’d clicked only one tumbler in the lock, he gives the plug to get the resistance over with at once.]

Of Vendler’s 24-Hour Kosher-Style Delicatessen.

[And there was a shiver, thinner even than the faint, indecisive shift of the body that signals someone’s intention to rise from a table after a meal has been eaten. So Vendler had a character too, or at least habits. But he was still fixed by Dick’s stiff, outstretched arm.]

Just exactly what is kosher style, Arthur? Some of our listeners might not know.

ARTHUR VENDLER: Chopped liver. Lox — that’s smoked salmon. Kosher pertains to the dietary laws.

DICK GIBSON: [Not bad, actually, for a man who didn’t know this was going to happen to him. His voice a little loud, though; probably raised because he’s uncertain about the equipment— look at the way he bends down and brings his mouth right up to the microphone. I have no character; I am what I think. And what I say on the radio. What I think and what I say. My voice.]

ARTHUR VENDLER: Very few people keep kosher any more. You have to be a fanatic. Even most rabbis don’t keep kosher except on the high holidays. It’s a style. Kosher style is a style. It’s not actually kosher, just the kind of things people like to eat. I don’t know if I can explain it. Rye bread, herring, smoked white fish. If you’ve ever been to the mountains, they serve it in the mountains. I guess the best way I can put it is New York style. What you get in your New York delicatessens.

DICK GIBSON: Well, it’s delicious. Look at Jerry, will you? That’s called Jerry-Style 24-Hour Eating. How would you like a guy like that for a steady customer?

[How’s Behr-Bleibtreau taking all this?]

Wouldn’t he run up a tab? Maybe he doesn’t swallow, what do you think?

[’Tain’t funny, McGee. Get into this, Vendler, please. Help me out.]

He eats for a whole town.

[Behr-Bleibtreau is frowning. He shifts in his chair and looks toward the control booth. What is this? What’s he doing? He points his finger at Jerry. Jerry puts down his sandwich. He puts down the cream soda. My God, he spits out what’s in his mouth! He pushes the food away from him. There goes that subject.] How’s business, Vendler?

ARTHUR VENDLER: Business is good. I can’t complain.

DICK GIBSON: You can’t complain, eh?

ARTHUR VENDLER: No.

DICK GIBSON: No, eh?

ARTHUR VENDLER: No.

DICK GIBSON: Well, that’s good that business is good.

ARTHUR VENDLER: Yes.

DICK GIBSON: [Getting mad at him: there is no reason for grown men to clam up before a microphone. He imagines Vendler in his delicatessen, kibitzing the customers, his mouth going a mile a minute as he slices meat at the machine, the authority of the merchant on him. What was there to fear from a microphone? He spent too much time reassuring his guests, talking them down from where they were treed in their shyness. Damn their timidity, their deference. Then, when they finally did speak out — just look at Jack and Pepper and Bernie — they went around with a hangover from their words.]

Yes, eh?

ARTHUR VENDLER: (nervously) Sure.

DICK GIBSON: You know what I’m thinking?

ARTHUR VENDLER: What’s that?

DICK GIBSON: [Terrific — a regular Mr. Show Business, this Vendler.]

It must cost you twenty-five to thirty dollars a week to make up these trays for us. That’s four weeks a month, twelve months a year. You’d be better off taking a regular spot on the show, buying time and letting us do a commercial for you. You’d be surprised how low the rates are this time of night.

[Mad at Jerry too, now.]

Of course Jerry might quit if you didn’t bring the sandwiches around, but maybe not. He seems to have lost his appetite anyway. Think it over. Of course you might be doing something on the tax angle. I didn’t think of that aspect of it.

ARTHUR VENDLER: Listen, I don’t—

DICK GIBSON: Sure. What do I know about it?

ARTHUR VENDLER: I’ve got to be getting back.

DICK GIBSON: Haban Nagila, kid.

ARTHUR VENDLER: Where’s my lazy susan?

DICK GIBSON: Lying down.

[Vendler leaves the studio. Dick Gibson thinks, I am cutting my losses, and stares at Mel Son—this is air-time, this is while they are on the air, no one is saying anything, their silence is being sent out over the ether—and scowls Behr-Bleibtreauly. He has some hope. Mel’s uneasy. His eyes dart angrily. His behavior isn’t the withdrawal of the others, but seems, rather, an effort to keep control of himself. Perhaps Mel is Jewish; maybe he resents the way Dick has treated Vendler. But the man won’t talk. Dick gives him every opportunity. Well, Mel, tell, he thinks. But it’s hopeless. Perhaps three minutes have gone by since they came back on the air. And then he thinks — the guests in the studio. He announces their names, making up one for those he has forgotten or never knew. Then he makes up other names and gives their place of business. Then he thinks: the telegrams.]

We should be getting some telegrams about now.

[He looks at Jerry.]

No? Nothing in yet? Well, the lines are open. If anyone has a question for Professor Behr-Bleibtreau, send us a telegram at WHCN, Hartford, Connecticut. I’ll accept collect wires. Please keep your messages under ten words. Ask the Professor. Or, if you have questions for one of the panel members—Mr. Son, for example—we’ll entertain those as well. Or perhaps you don’t have a question at all. Maybe you just want to make a comment. Make it at our expense.

[Interrogatives. Declaratives. Let’s see, that leaves exclamatives.]

Just tell the operator you want to send a collect wire to me, Dick Gibson — that’s D-i-c-k G-i-b-s-o-n — care of WHCN — W- H-C-N — Hartford — H-a-r-t-f-o-r-d — Connecticut — C-o-n- n-e-c- t-i-c-u-t. Or, if you’d rather abbreviate it, C-o-n-n. Talk it over with the Western Union operator; see what she says.

[Okay, that’s another minute. Only a hundred and five to go. Now what?]

But he knew now what. Behr-Bleibtreau, that’s what. Behr-Bleibtreau knew too. The man still smiled, but Dick sensed that the smile had shifted, amusement no longer but something preceding damage. Perhaps he sensed Dick’s dread and was annoyed that it had not been enough to silence him. (Though in a way he had been silenced; he could think of no more ways to kill time.) Looking at his panel, Dick was suddenly consumed with sympathy for them. The professor had their tongues, and now he was after his. He thought of signing off early, declaring the evening at an end, paying the lost revenues from the remaining commercials out of his own pocket. But then the professor would have his tongue too. Dick, who had no character, wanted to beat him.

The mistake the others had made was that they had gone too far. He would keep it down. He would ask Behr-Bleibtreau how he liked Hartford, to compare it with other places he had been. Behr-Bleibtreau was waiting to see what he would do. Just keep cool, Dick warned himself, small talk, everything low key and easy, no more drama. Just relax and say—

DICK GIBSON: (almost shouting) All right, Professor, what the hell’s all this crap about a loaded gun?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Please pass the sandwiches.

DICK GIBSON: The sandwiches? I’m talking about loaded guns.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: I’m talking about sandwiches. Is there turkey? Is there dark meat?

DICK GIBSON: [Grabbing his microphone suddenly. If they saw him his radio audience might think he was an ace reporter, urgent, shirt-sleeved, like someone on the radio in the movies with a scoop.]

Ladies and gentlemen, you don’t know what’s been going on here tonight! My panelists are unable to speak! This man has something to do with it. It’s a trick. Perhaps they’re hypnotized. I don’t know how he does it, he doesn’t touch them, he swings no pendulum, but something’s happened, something’s up! He’s after me too. (to Behr-Bleibtreau) Is that it?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: I don’t see the bottle opener. Would you swing the lazy susan around this way, please? Perhaps it’s on your side of the tray. Oh, never mind. Here it is.

DICK GIBSON: Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t have a bottle opener. He’s not looking for one. There isn’t even any soda in his hand. I don’t know what his game is, but he’s giving you a false picture.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: No more turkey? I’ll take the corned beef. I’m asking for indigestion, I think, but it looks marvelous.

DICK GIBSON: Don’t believe him. He’s not asking for indigestion. He’s not eating!

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: The bread’s stale. Where’s the mustard? Would you pass me that plastic knife?

DICK GIBSON: The bread’s fresh! There’s already mustard on the sandwiches!

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: It’s rather warm in the studio. May I take off my jacket?

DICK GIBSON: He’s wearing a sweater.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Whoops, sorry. That was clumsy of me. I seem to have smeared some ketchup on my glasses while I was getting out of my jacket. Could you hand me one of those paper napkins?

DICK GIBSON: He’s still in his sweater. He doesn’t wear glasses. The napkins are right in front of him.

JACK PATTERSON: Here you are. Doctor.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Thank you. Professor Patterson.

DICK GIBSON: Patterson never opened his mouth. Behr-Bleibtreau’s a ventriloquist! What’s going on here? Why are you lying to my listeners?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: But it’s you who are lying, Mr. Gibson. I must confess I don’t understand what you hope to accomplish.

DICK GIBSON: What do you want?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: I want a napkin. I want the mustard. I want the plastic knife.

DICK GIBSON: What color are the walls in this studio?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: The walls? Pale yellow, aren’t they?

DICK GIBSON: They’re white! What color’s my tie?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Well, it’s all colors. There’s red and there’s green. It’s a pattern. It’s all colors.

DICK GIBSON: It’s blue, it’s solid blue! What are you doing? I’ll ask the people in the studio. What color is this tie I’m wearing?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: All right, there’s no point in that. Leave it alone. All right, I’ll confess. I’ve been having some fun with you.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Very clever imitation of my voice, Mr. Gibson. You ought to do this sort of thing professionally — in nightclubs.

DICK GIBSON: Thank you very much, Doctor.

DICK GIBSON: You mean you ought to. Ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t imitate him. He imitated me.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Look out!

DICK GIBSON: He also imitated me saying “Ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t imitate him. He imitated me.” I haven’t said anything since I asked the studio audience about the color of my tie.

DICK GIBSON: He said that too.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Look out! He’s got a gun!

DICK GIBSON: Oh, ho! That was a mistake, Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau. I think I’ll just sit this one out. I don’t see any gun. If he has one — whoever he may be — he should be making some demands along about now. He should be saying “Hands up! Give me your money and nobody’ll get hurt,” or “Don’t anyone move, I’m taking the woman with me.” People with guns can be very articulate about what they want.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: What if they’re suicidal?

DICK GIBSON: What are you talking about? What do you mean?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: What if they intend to kill themselves? What if the gun is still concealed and they intend to shoot themselves?

DICK GIBSON: Look, come on. Who’s supposed to have this gun? If someone really has a gun—

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Tell him. (silence) Go ahead, tell him. I release your tongue. You may speak, (silence)

DICK GIBSON: There. You see? I don’t deny, of course, that Mr. Behr-Bleibtreau could come up with an appropriate voice, but I wonder how convincing his bang bang would be.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Tell him!

DICK GIBSON: Tell me.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ncy chymyc Tell him.

MEL SON: What do I have to lose? It’s almost all up with me anyway. Gibson’s tie is brown and yellow stripes. The walls are green.

DICK GIBSON: Mel? Is that you, Mel? Is he doing your voice?

DICK GIBSON: (whispering) (I didn’t ask that.)

MEL SON: It’s me.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Show him the gun, why don’t you?

[Mel Son takes a revolver out of his pocket.]

DICK GIBSON: What is this? Mel, what’s happening?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Does he have a gun?

DICK GIBSON: Yes.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Did you say yes or was that me imitating your voice?

DICK GIBSON: I said yes.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Speak up. Will Dick Gibson deny that Mel Son has a weapon in his hand? Supposing for a moment that the audience has been hearing two Dick Gibsons, a real one and an imposter — which is not the case — that would still leave the real Dick Gibson to deny the existence of the gun. Does he deny it?

DICK GIBSON: I already said he has a gun. I already said so.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: There are no disclaimers? It’s not too late.

DICK GIBSON: The gun’s real. The real Dick Gibson says the real gun is real.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Very well, then.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: You really are a superb mimic, Mr. Gibson.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Stop that.

DICK GIBSON: Is that loaded?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Show him.

[Mel Son holds the gun out and Dick Gibson peers into the chambers of the revolver. The leaden tips of the bullets resemble dull stones in a bracelet.]

DICK GIBSON: (softly) You want to put that back, Mel. What would you need a thing like that for?

MEL SON: I’m hunting. I’m a hunter.

DICK GIBSON: (to Behr-Bleibtreau) Why don’t you talk to him? Can you talk to him?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Me? Shall I hypnotize him?

DICK GIBSON: Why would a man bring a gun into a radio station? He’s supposed to be a professional. That’s got to be against FCC regulations. I just hope this program isn’t being monitored. There’d be one hell of an investigation.

[There is a click.]

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: He’s cocked it.

DICK GIBSON: Listen, I don’t like what’s happening here. I think we need the police, (to the listening audience) Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dick Gibson, WHCN, Hartford, Connecticut. There’s a man in my studio waving a revolver around. If the police are listening, would you get over here, please? Maybe one of you listeners ought to phone them and tell them what’s happening.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Do you think that was wise? He could kill half a dozen people before the police even got close to him. He means to die. anyway.

DICK GIBSON: We don’t know that.

MEL SON: We know it.

DICK GIBSON: (to the listening audience) Forget what I said. Don’t phone the police. (to Behr-Bleibtreau) If the police heard me they’ll be coming. They’d have to; it’s their duty. There’s no way to stop them.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: They didn’t hear you.

DICK GIBSON: They didn’t? (suspiciously) They didn’t, eh? (whispering now) (Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dick Gibson, WHCN, Hartford, Connecticut, the Qui Transtulit Sustinet State. A fantastic thing is going on at this station. I’m sitting in Studio 2A, where several people have gathered for an informal midnight-to- dawn talk program called The Dick Gibson Show. The guests, Jack Patterson, Bernard Perk. Pepper Steep and our Special Guest, Psychologist Edmond Behr-Bleibtreau, together with Jerry the engineer and yours truly, Dick Gibson, the show’s host who is wearing a solid blue tie, are being held virtually at bay in the white-walled studio along with several of their guests by Mel Son, an Amherst, Massachusetts, disc jockey and former unsuccessful candidate for the Massachusetts State Assembly. I don’t know how long I’ll be permitted to speak into these microphones, ladies and gentlemen, but as long as I’m able I’ll try to give you a picture of what’s happening here. There are, of course, several eyewitnesses to these events, and I’d put them on the air to let them describe in their own words all that’s occurred, but unfortunately, all their voices seem to have been stolen, with the exception of my own, Mel Son’s, and Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau’s. The pussycat’s got their tongues. Dr. Jack Patterson of Hartford Community College made a brief remark a little over an hour ago to Bernie Perk, the registered pharmacist, but since then has lapsed back into silence. Listeners to the program heard Patterson’s voice again a few moments ago when he reputedly handed Behr- Bleibtreau a napkin to wipe some ketchup off his glasses, but both the remark and the ketchup incident itself have been challenged by your reporter who believes the learned psychologist to be some kind of hypnotist/ventriloquist. At any rate, the three principals seem to be Behr-Bleibtreau, Mel Son and Dick Gibson. Wait, Behr-Bleibtreau is about to speak. Let’s listen …)

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ncy chymyc.

DICK GIBSON: (Did you get that, folks?)

MEL SON: I … My …

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ync hcmyc.

DICK GIBSON: It’s really kind of wonderful the way you guys worked all this out between you to take over my program. It’s really very funny.

MEL SON: [He brings the barrel of the gun down heavily across the bridge of Dick’s nose, drawing blood.]

My name is Mel Son. I’ve been in a trance, but I’ve just been released — I get the feeling temporarily — in order to tell my story. I’ve never been in a trance before. It’s queer. It gives you a funny feeling. Everything in the trance but Dick’s tie was sort of blue — oo — oo and soft. Your eyes are blue, Dick.

DICK GIBSON: My eyes are blue.

MEL SON: Your blood — where I cut you — your blood is blue … gee, I just can’t get over this trance business. Once I was hypnotized in a nightclub. There were fifteen of us and we all went under, but this was nothing like that. This was like being sick or something. I don’t really mean sick — nothing hurts or anything like that — but it’s … well, dreamy, as if you were heavily medicated or just beginning to come down with something. It’s like the way you’re sensitized sometimes in a barber’s chair getting a haircut in winter. The back of your head gets all prickly. It’s terrific. I mean, I was really getting excited. And I’ll tell you something else. I never felt — this is important — I never felt humble. I mean, you’d think if a guy’s in a trance his will would be rendered helpless, that he’d be going around. Yes, Mastering everything in sight. But it isn’t like that at all. As a matter of fact, you feel very proud in a trance, almost stuck-up. You have a lot of confidence. It’s all very dignified. That’s the truth about trances. If you want my honest opinion, I think you’re making a mistake to waste your pity on enchanted princes locked up in trees. I can’t get over it. It’s really fantastic. I tell you, there’s more than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

DICK GIBSON: Less.

MEL SON: No, Dick, more — much more.

DICK GIBSON: Why don’t you put the gun down, Mel?

MEL SON: Not just yet, Dick. I’ve got to shoot myself with it. I’m going to put the barrel in my mouth and blow my head off. Brr. What a way to go! That’s a phrase that’s always gotten to me— you know what I mean? Another one is — you get this on the news wire every once in a while— “So-and-so killed his wife and three children and then turned the rifle on himself.” That sounds horrible, but I don’t get the logistics of it. A man would have to have incredibly long arms to turn a rifle on himself. “He put a bullet through his brain”: that’s another one. How discrete that sounds. So definitive. That’s the sort of thing I’m after. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons I chose to do it on the radio. It’d be a different thing altogether if I snuck off in a corner by myself. I’d have done it on my own show but I don’t reach the market you do.

To tell the truth, I haven’t settled how I’ll do it yet. I thought I might sit on the pistol. Or stick it in my ear. Or against the part in my hair. Or through my eye. Or inside my shirt, or under my arm. Or against my heart. Or across my Adam’s apple. Do you get what I’m aiming at? Ha ha. Ignition, explosion, obliteration, smear. Something really dirty: he died as he lived. Before and After — that’s it. Here today, gone tomorrow. And a stain that won’t wash out. Something in me green or blue in the woodwork like grain. My nostrils divorced and my eyes disappeared, hair in the wound and skin on the floor. Bone around like shattered glass. Pieces of tooth, and my ingrown toenails out. My sideburns on fire and a hole in my birthmark. My death archeological, my corpse my body’s palimpsest. Mel melded. Jigsaw Mel the Sonsaw puzzle. Mosaic me. Blood and blood. Mel Sundry. Mel the Sonset, Mel the Melted. Molten Mel the Sonburned. The Sonspot.

DICK GIBSON: [Upset. His wound, where Mel struck him with the revolver, is throbbing. Fantastically, it occurs to him that if Mel kills himself or if Behr-Bleibtreau takes his voice, he will never have done a quiz show.]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to … Night School! This is your host on the college of knowledge, quizzer whizzer Dick Gibson. Tonight’s contestant is Mel Son the Suicide, Amherst d.j. and d.o.a. Let’s try to get some answers — Mel?

MEL SON: Quizzer whizzer?

DICK GIBSON: Yez zir, yez zir. Are you ready for the first question?

MEL SON: I am. For the time being I am. But hurry, hurry. I’ll plug my pulse and blast my blood. I’ll shoot my shirt and kill my collar. I’ll—

DICK GIBSON: All righty. (to his mute guests) No coaching from the audience. The question is … Why? Do you have that? Would you like me to repeat the question?

MEL SON: Would you repeat the question?

DICK GIBSON: Surely. Why?

MEL SON: Sin.

DICK GIBSON: Sin?

MEL SON: Sin, sir.

DICK GIBSON: Sincerely?

MEL SON: Sine qua nonly.

DICK GIBSON: Could you develop that a little? This is an essay question.

MEL SON: Well … because. Let’s just say that I’m petitioning for an undress of griefiness.

Mel Son’s Story:

Mel Son was a normal child, no more curious than any other child his age — and no less. His hands had spent time in his mother’s brassieres; he’d fingered Dad’s jock and spied on Sis. But necessity wasn’t involved. It was just that same neutral obligation that makes an older boy smoke his first cigarette or one ten years younger sit behind the steering wheel of the family car while his mother shops.

Puberty hit him as hard as it does others, but if he was uncomfortable he was no more so than anyone else. It was as normal as the day is long. There were wet dreams — I don’t remember them, only the sensations — and some masturbation — I found it difficult; I could never really decide what to think about — and once in a while dates. It was a routine adolescence, steady as she goes.

Then, one night when I was fifteen years old, an old man sat next to me in a movie theater. He put his hand on me and stroked me till I came. It felt good and I let him. Maybe it was because there was a girl with me and my senses were already aroused, or that I knew that there was no chance, absolutely no chance in the world, that this girl would do to me what the old man was doing. Or it may have been something else, something about the old man’s surreptitious skill. Sly and smooth he was as a pickpocket … Whatever, I let him.

Do you see what I’m driving at? Do you know what I’m saying? That I’m queer? No! It was normal. That the pressures I felt, the feelings I had — they were mine, my own. What did they have to do with girls or women? What did they have to do even with that old man in the theater? Do you see? It was my thigh, my neck, my cock, my balls. Not pussy, not tits. It was my young man’s own ass I sat on, my skin I lived in, my reflexive flesh. I never made the leap of sex.

And how is it made? What round peg/round hole argument in sex waiting on puberty like the plain geometry? How does it happen? What Noah instinct is it — in me omitted — that drives us two by two to beds like polite company approaching table? By what inevitable degrees does bent become inclination, inclination tendency, tendency penchant, penchant disposition, disposition fate? Is there glue in those brassieres? What lodestar astrology shoves our lives? Where’s it written, eh? As if love could only be the prescribed friction! Hah! I’ll write you a new prescription! Why, love machines! Marry the bus that takes you to town, that throbbing thing! Embrace wind, kiss the earthquake, hold the sea! Make up to gravity! To all the physics of adversity!

Feelings’ other was never for me. Erection was extension, not tropism. I was born sexually intransitive, a sort of mule, but complete too. Or now complete — since that old man complete. Anyone would have done: the girl I was with that night, men, whores, boys, wives — anyone. Or anything: my prick lapped by dogs, flies walking the white underside of my arm, tight squeezes, the warm pressure of the bathwater, Foot-Eeze machines, spot- reducing machines, whirlpool baths, a fast trot on a warm day on a good horse over rough ground!

And I was no more grateful to the man than I would be to the fly or the horse! And I wasn’t reciprocal; I have never wished to hold or mount or touch or taste another human being. Oh my body’s buttons, oh its levers, oh its zones! I want hands on me, in me, breath in my ears, fingernails on my back, a tongue at my toes, cunning massage. And I’ll tell you something else: it’s too damn much work to jerk off. Though after the old man I at last knew what to think of: why me, why myself! After the old man I couldn’t look at my naked reflection in the full-length mirror in the bathroom without getting excited!

So that’s about it, quizzer whizzer. I’ve lived with bad men, men so bad they’ve never wanted anything from me in return.

[He winks at State Assemblyman Victor Ash.]

DICK GIBSON: You’re killing yourself for your sins?

MEL SON: Foo on my sins. Nah, what do they amount to? Lust and sloth. Nah. I’m killing myself because my gloss is going, because I’m heavier, because my hair’s falling out, because my teeth are rotten and my breath is bad. Even dirty old men draw the line somewhere. I will not live without pleasure. Where’s the solace, eh? I’ll put a ball in my balls. That’s it! Up my testicles to death. Whoops, confession’s over. I’m back in the trance.

DICK GIBSON: This is terrible. Will he do it?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Of course he’ll do it.

DICK GIBSON: [There is still the possibility that it is all a joke, but he is caught up in the strange program, the strangest he’s ever been on. Not really understanding how they’ve worked it, but suspecting — where were the telegrams? — that the show might not be going out over the air at all. (The engineer, given great powers, emergency powers, one of those like tugboat captains or bombardiers, say, who rise to command for brief interims, or secret servicemen who under certain conditions tell Presidents what to do, bishops crowning kings while the kingdom floats leaderless and unmoored — ultimate privilege hiding in them, all the more awesome for its ordinary invisibility and its provisional quality— could have cut all of them off the air whenever he chose.) But even if it wasn’t actually going over the air — and he still had the feeling that it was — it might be on tape, and even if it wasn’t on tape there was still the studio audience to think about, and even if they were all deaf as well as dumb, then there was still Behr- Bleibtreau and Mel and himself. The show must go on. And this, he thought, is all I have for principles.]

When? (softly) Shouldn’t we try to take the gun away from him?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: If you struggle with him you could be killed yourself.

DICK GIBSON: Mel? (no answer) Mel? (nobody home) Mel. (out to lunch) Mel, it’s Dick, (closed for the duration) Mel Son. (Nobody here by that name; try down the street.) Professor Behr-Bleibtreau. (This sotto voce: in the style of the outnumbered, the beleaguered, two pals in ambush) (This is serious, Professor. That gun could go off any minute. Maybe if we could get him to keep talking … Why don’t you release his tongue again?)

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: (It’s too late, but that gives me an idea. There may still be a way.)

DICK GIBSON: (Is it a long shot?)

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: (Yes.)

DICK GIBSON: (Is it risky?)

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: (Yes.)

DICK GIBSON: (Is it one chance in a million?)

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: (More or less.)

DICK GIBSON: (What is it? A man’s life’s at stake. It may be worth a try.)

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: His life for your silence!

DICK GIBSON: Hey, what is this?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Your silence for his life. An even trade.

DICK GIBSON: Hey, cut it out. Come on. Hey!

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Shh.

DICK GIBSON: (fiercely) The show must go on!

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: It will.

DICK GIBSON: I must be on it! The show must go on and I must be on it. I’m the show.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: But you’ve got nothing to show. I’m taking your voice.

DICK GIBSON: No.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Yes. I’m having it. I’m shoving it down your throat. Give it up. Let him live.

DICK GIBSON: What are you talking about? No!

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: They’ll board up your mouth like plate-glass smashed by the thieves. I’m taking your voice, I’m making you still.

DICK GIBSON: No. What do you think this is? No!

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Some reticence there.

DICK GIBSON: The show—

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Hold it down. People are sleeping.

DICK GIBSON: I will not hold it down.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Dummy up, Dicky.

DICK GIBSON: I will not dummy up.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Stow it. Break off.

DICK GIBSON: I will not stow it. I won’t break off.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Unutter! Muzzle! Give me your word you’ll give me your voice.

DICK GIBSON: [He means to speak but can’t think of anything to say. Perhaps he can do the alphabet, and go on to numbers. He can’t remember the alphabet. What’s the first number? That’s it: First is the first number.]

First!

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Be mute, you turtle. You giraffe.

DICK GIBSON: (faintly) First … and … another …

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: I have your voice. I almost have it. I have the others’ and I’m getting yours.

HENCEFORTH I CONTROL THE BROADCAST PATTERN OF THIS PROGRAM. I ENGINEER THE ENGINEERING. I USURP THE SIGNAL. I DIRECT IT AND REDIRECT IT. I WHISPER … (and we are blacked out in New England). (in a normal voice) I’m changing the sound patterns. I raise my voice … (He raises his voice.) AND I AM HEARD ACROSS THE MISSISSIPPI. COME IN KANSAS, COME IN CALIFORNIA. (to Dick Gibson) Now. Give me your voice, give up the rest of it. The voice is the sound—

DICK GIBSON: of the soul! (determined) You’ll never get it. Not as long as I wear this solid-blue tie in this white-walled studio. You ought to wear glasses; you’ve buttoned your sweater wrong.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: (ferociously) The Virgin Mary sucks!

DICK GIBSON: The opinions expressed on this program are those of Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau and not necessarily those of this station or of the sponsors. I repeat, Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau’s opinions are his own and not necessarily those of the Naval Air Reserve or Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: It’s useless, Gibson. I’ll have your silence. I’ll get your voice.

DICK GIBSON: Want to bet? (to the panel and guests in the studio) Let’s hear it. Everybody sing. Let’s hear it. You, Jack. One word. Say the word. Pepper? Come on, Pepper, old pep pot. You’re the lady. Ladies go first. A word. A noise. No? Not yet? Catch your breath, dear; I’ll get back to you. Bernie? Say something in Latin, Doc. Recite a prescription. Mel? Give us a sigh, Mel. Give us a lovegroan. Somebody cough, for Christ’s sake! What? No one?

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: They can’t help you. I’ve only been playing up to now. I’ve been teasing you. The rest is real.

Are you ready? Listen:

I do the sailors’ knot in your vocal cords. I twist your tongue, I tie it. I give you pause, lump in the throat, I give you stammer and smoker’s cough. I give you sore throat and ache your tooth. I give you harelip. I chap it. I huff and I puff and the roof of your mouth comes down. I murder your breath. Shush, man. Hush. Mum’s the word. Soft spoken, there. Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. Speak softly and carry a big stick. Still waters run deep. Quiet Please, Hospital Zone.

Now … Say “She sells seashells down by the seashore.” Say “The Leith police dismisseth us.” [Behr-Bleibtreau pauses. Gibson is silent. Then: ] Because I am perfect, because I am straight, because I am without flaw, because I am correct, because I am pure, because I am unblemished and upright, because I am without stain and without aberration, because I have never looked up a dress on the stairs or handled myself in the shower or stolen from dimestores or forged Mother’s name on a note from home; because I have never broken and entered or eaten between meals; because I have never fired a shot in anger or hoarded or said “ain’t” or gone on a binge or butt into line or chewed gum in class or overslept or failed to share; because I have never hit-and-run, told fibs, raped, played the radio loud while others were sleeping or stuck out my tongue or been a bad neighbor; because I have never picked my nose or thumbed it or sat while the old have stood or parked where I shouldn’t; because I’ve never cheated at cards, made rude noises, scrawled bad words on walls in toilets or kept books overdue from the library, lied to Customs, drunk while driving, fudged my taxes or broken windows with balls or stones; because I’ve never murdered or lived in sin; because I have never clipped, high-sticked, fouled the shooter, never talked back to the umpire or jumped the gun; because my backfield’s never been in motion and I’ve never not hung up my things— because of all this and more, I exercise my right to call on demons, spirits and avenging angels!

Solomon collected the demons in a bottle and sealed them with the Seal of Solomon — the six-pointed Star. We’ll need that. Wait. I have it.

[Behr-Bleibtreau reaches forward, takes the Hebrew National Salami from the lazy susan, turns the meaty cylinder in his hand and locates the trademark — a Star of David. Placing this face up on the table, he draws an imaginary circle around himself with his finger, then leans forward and touches the Star.]

This! We’ll use this! This will be the Seal of Solomon!

Calling the demons, thanking the demons, useful demons who teach us things — who put the new math in our heads, and help us with piano, French, the point of jokes.

Calling the demons, Lucifer’s demons, Lucifer’s troopers, Lucifer’s dead; calling the demons, praising the demons, nothing fulsome, nothing false, praising the demons, commending the demons, extolling the demons, giving dem demons all dere due. Giving them medals, honors, Hosannahs, giving them all that they deserve—

Calling the demons, needing the demons, up from the bottle where they are sealed, calling the demons, demanding the demons, up and up from the jar of hell. Come to us. Come now. No false alarms for demons, no crying wolf for demons, no dry runs at demons’ expense—

Calling the demons, paging the demons, inviting the demons, summoning them. Calling the demons, Lucifer’s demons, Lucifer’s sidekicks, Lucifer’s men:

In the name of the magician Moses, the magician Jesus and the magician Solomon, I call you forth.

Come incubus, come succubus, come Hell, come djin.

Here demons, here boys, darlin’ demons, demons dear.

I call on … Sordino. Sordino the Soundless. Sordino the Mute.

I call Sordino. Silent Sordino. Come, Sordino. Come to us now.

I offer you your sign. My finger’s at my lips.

(to Dick Gibson) Each demon has his own sign, like the hallmark on silver or the brand on a cow. This is Sordino’s:

I call Sordino, silent Sordino, pensive Sordino, taciturn one.

Come Sordino, come to us now.

Ncy cm jycm cym nc Ycn

Come sad, secret, silent fellow. Come to us, our melancholy baby.

(A pause. Then:) He’s here. Can you feel the pall? That’s Sordino’s doing. That’s Sordino. Pall’s his sign too. He’s with us in the studio. Can you sense the pall? He’s with us, all right. That’s him. (They each have something by which they’re recognized. This one has bad breath, that one breaks wind. One will appear as a naked child, another will stammer. One has loose teeth — they lie on his tongue or awash in his saliva — and another black and blue marks on his privates. The pall is Sordino’s.) Do you remember before the program when I told you I was expecting someone?

My God, what’s he doing? That’s rare. See. Look there — he’s materializing! In the corner. Sordino!

Take over Gibson’s voice, Sordino.

DICK GIBSON: There’s no one.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: That’s it, Sordino. You sound just like him. Was it you before too?

DICK GIBSON: There’s no one.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Perfect, Sordino. Now. Take it all. Take the rest of it. There was a fire. His tapes were consumed. So it’s all gone, all but your mimicry of his sound. Now. Take that too. Pull even that out of his throat. Take it with you down to hell. Wonderful, Sordino. Be careful. He’ll struggle. Take his rattle, his groans, get his gasps. Take it all.

DICK GIBSON: (choking) Don’t … What—

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: That’s it.

DICK GIBSON: (coughing now, sputtering) Please … You’re … I can’t … No … I can’t … breathe … He’s—

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Wonderful, Sordino.

DICK GIBSON — choking me!

[He tries to pull Behr-Bleibtreau’s hands off his throat, but the man has a stranglehold on him. With his teeth he tries to snap at Behr-Bleibtreau’s arms, but all he manages is to get a piece of Behr-Bleibtreau’s sweater in his mouth.]

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: (giggling, then recovering himself) That’s it, Sordino. That’s the way.

DICK GIBSON: (strangling, gasping for breath) Please … I’m … [With both hands he tries to bend back one of Behr-Bleibtreau’s fingers.]

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ow. Ouch. The pall. Sordino’s pall. The pull of the pall. You wouldn’t think a pall could hurt so much. Never mind, Sordino. Let the chips fall where they may.

DICK GIBSON: (hoarsely) Listen, you can’t …

[It is futile to struggle further. All Dick’s strength is gone; he has never felt such hands. He looks wildly at Jerry in the control booth, but the man is bent over his dials.]

(weakly) Help me. Jerry—

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Good, Sordino. Wonderful. You’re getting it.

DICK GIBSON: Oh God, somebody …

[His swivel chair is on casters, and in the struggle he has been turned violently about. As he renews his efforts to get away, he pushes forcefully against the floor with his foot and the chair swings around, temporarily upsetting Behr-Bleibtreau’s balance. One of Behr-Bleibtreau’s hands flies from Dick’s neck. Dick lunges forward and ducks his head; the other hand slips away. Out of the chair now, he runs around to the other side of the table. Standing behind Mel Son, he sees the gun in his lap. He reaches down for the gun — and misses; instead, he has grabbed Mel’s penis beneath the cloth of his trousers. At Dick’s touch Mel’s cock almost instantly hardens; he grabs Dick’s hand with both of his own and tries to keep it on his prick. Dick brings his other hand around and plucks the gun off Mel’s lap.]

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: [Coming around to the side of the table where Dick is standing.]

Watch it, Sordino. Gently. He’s got a gun.

DICK GIBSON: [Holding the barrel in his hand, Dick reaches out and hammers at Behr-Bleibtreau’s throat with the butt of the revolver. He chops wildly at the man’s neck, smashing at his Adam’s apple. Behr-Bleibtreau falls across the table and Dick Gibson hits him repeatedly in the throat.]

There. There.

[Behr-Bleibtreau, his breath knocked out of him, holds his throat. Mel Son rises and looks at Dick; he still has his erection. Dick shrugs and aims the pistol at Mel’s cock. Mel leaves the studio, and Assemblyman Ash follows him. Behr-Bleibtreau lays writhing on the floor. The woman in the long fur coat and her companion come up and help Behr-Bleibtreau to rise. They leave the studio. Dick looks around and sees that Jack Patterson’s coed has already left. He had not seen her go. Neither had Jack; coming out of his stupor, he looks toward where she had been sitting. Dick hears the man fart. Seeing her gone, Jack leaves too. Pepper Steep’s sister is sound asleep. Dick Gibson looks at Bernie Perk and sees him wink at Pepper. Pepper smiles and Bernie pats her arm and they go out together. Dick understands; Bernie is in love with the bad breath that Dick has noticed on other occasions when Pepper has been on the program. It is something that happens in her stomach at about three o’clock in the morning. Jerry has put on the last commercial of the evening — a one-minute spot for a dusk-to-dawn drive-in theater north of the city. It is played this late because it is an appeal to lovers, automobile-trapped kissers and huggers, lovers with roommates at home, or parents waiting up — bleary yearners domestic in cars. They cruise the highway. Perhaps they don’t have the money for a hotel room, or perhaps they are not yet at that stage. They have nowhere to go. For the first time, Dick understands that it is precisely his audience the message directs itself to, and so the spot depresses him. Perhaps Bernie will take Pepper there. He sits back down at his table and waits until the commercial is finished.]

Then he talks till 5 A.M., rambling, filling in, not always aware of what he is saying, or even if the program is still on the air, but using his voice because he still has it, because it’s still his—uniquely inflected, Gibson-timbreed, a sum of private frequencies and personal resonances, as marked as his thumbs — because the show must go on and he must be on it. As he speaks, it occurs to him that Behr- Bleibtreau could never have taken it, that poor Dick Gibson had nothing to confess; like Behr-Bleibtreau, his own slate is clean, his character unmarked, his history uneventful. But he has had a close call.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “there is no astrology, there’s no black magic and no white, no ESP, no UFO’s. Mars is uninhabited. The dead are dead and buried. Meat won’t kill you and Krebiozen won’t cure you and we’ll all be out of the picture before the forests disappear or the water dries up. Your handwriting doesn’t indicate your character and there is no God. All there is—” He looks over at Pepper Steep’s sister asleep in her chair and wants to cry. He wishes he had something with which to cover her to keep her warm, something to put over her shoulders. Somehow Jack Patterson’s fart still hangs in the air—“are the strange displacements of the ordinary.”