Two Much!

14

Buzz.

“Hah?”

“Linda Ann Margolies is here.”

For just a second I was a complete blank. Linda what? Then my eye drifted past my desk clock, and I saw it was five after one, and it all came back to me: the Columbia gem, the master’s thesis on comedy. “Right,” I said, stuffing the rest of my pastrami-on-rye into a desk drawer, and hung up. I swigged down my coffee, underhanded the cup into the wastebasket, patted my mouth with the paper napkin, pocketed the napkin, got to my feet, and smiled a welcome as Gloria ushered in Linda Ann Margolies.

And when I saw her, I multiplied the smile by two.

Ah, yes, there are moments when I understand cannibalism. Food imagery kept filling my head as I looked at this lush morsel: home-baked pastry, crepes suzette, ripe peaches. If she were any shorter it would be too much, overblown, fit for a gourmand rather than a gourmet, but she was just tall enough to cool the effect slightly and thereby become perfect. Sex without loss of status, how lovely. “Come in, Miss Margolies,” I said, and ignored the jaundiced lip-curl of Gloria in the background.

Gloria left us, I gestured the student into the Volpinex-Hillerman Memorial Chair, and she said, “I do thank you for your time, Mr. Dodge. I know you’re a busy man.”

“Up with the sun and on the run,” I said, dropping back into my own chair.

She flashed a quick surprised smile. “Oh, yes! That’s the one from the prune advertisement.”

I was flabbergasted. “How in God’s name did you know that?”

“Just part of my thesis,” she said. Modest dimples parenthesized her modest smile. “I know them all.”

“I bet you don’t.”

“I’d love to hear a new one,” she said.

Frowning, I said, “Barbasol shaving cream. Woman in an evening gown holding a giant mock-up of the product.”

But she was already nodding and grinning. “Is your can too small? Try mine for size.”

“Wall Street Journal,” I challenged her.

“I upped my income five percent last year. Up yours.”

“Woman’s clothing store, um, uh, Peck and Peck.”

“There is a kind of woman,” this calm marvel said, “who would like to have a chauffeur six times a day.”

“Right,” I said. “So I’m here to interview you about comedy, is that it?”

She laughed: modest, polite, friendly. “I’ve been doing my homework.”

“I can see that. You sure you’re in the right place, lady?”

“Don’t downgrade yourself,” she told me. “Folksy Cards is at the top of its field.”

“The motto around this joint,” I said, “is Don’t Shit A Shitter. I know what field I’m in. Sex and violence tied to festive occasions.”

Pencil and steno pad appeared from her knapsack-size purse. “The interview has started.”

“Humor is like a fountain,” I said.

“That’s life. Are you a native New Yorker?”

I frowned at her. “What’s that got to do with comedy?”

“There are theories about the humorist as the outsider,” she said. “We can make it work both ways. If you were born and raised in New York City, you must feel isolated from the rest of the country: ergo, comedy. If you came from Kansas or somewhere, you feel isolated and rootless here in New York: ergo, comedy. I just want to know whether you go under Column A or Column B.”

“I go with the West Lake Duck.”

“Foreign or domestic?”

She was hard to shake. Shrugging, I said, “I grew up all over. You’ve heard the term Army brat?”

“Father a career man?”

“Right”

“Officer or enlisted man?”

“Another theory?”

“Of course.”

“Enlisted man,” I said.

“Of course,” she said, and wrote something down.

I glowered at her. “What do you mean, of course?”

“Those tied in to the power structure,” she told me, “don’t need comedy. That’s the theory, anyway. Parents alive or dead?”

“Ask me questions about comedy.”

She gave me a sharp, and then a very soft look. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she sounded like she meant it. “It’s easy to get lost in words, and lose the faces. All right, we’ll talk—”

“My father’s dead,” I said. “Coronary in a rowboat in Vermont, fishing, two years after he finished his thirty and retired. Mother hasn’t been heard from since fifty-nine, when she ran off with the Danish xylophonist from the NCO Club dance band at Vogelweh, Germany, taking Dad’s fifty-four Volkswagen but leaving behind her silver pumps.”

Miss Margolies studied me for a long silent moment of uncertainty, and then said, “Was all that on the level?”

“You’ve just learned something else about comedy,” I told her. “It causes paranoia.”

She was too cool to be surprised. She nodded, her mouth smiling while the frown line remained between her eyes. “All right,” she said. “Let’s talk about comedy. What is comedy, really?”

“Making people laugh.”

“Below that,” she said “What is comedy really all about?”

“Acceptance,” I said. “The comic makes them laugh, so they don’t kill him.”

When she frowned, she looked like a daughter in a television commercial, learning about deodorants. “I know about that, too,” she said. “But there has to be something underneath it, something specific that makes this person or that person choose comedy instead of some other defense. So what is it?”

She was repeating herself, and boredom produces irritation. Taking a deep breath, I said, “Because the comic is a killer himself, that’s why. The comic is the last civilized man to feel the killer inside himself. We’re omnivores, little girl, and that means we’ll eat anything that stands still, we’ll eat anything that doesn’t have flashing lights. ‘Comedy instead of some other defense,’ you said, and that’s right. Comedy is surprise. I make you laugh, that means I surprise you, that means you’ll keep your distance, you won’t attack. Laugh meters should record in mega-deaths, because that’s what comedy is all about; I kill you for practice to keep you from killing me for real.”

She nodded, watching her pencil skate across the surface of the steno pad. Smiling to herself she said, “Well, it works.”

I frowned at her. “What works?”

Ignoring the question, she looked up at me again and said, “You’re saying the comic is a killer among killers, and he uses comedy both to hide his deadliness for social reasons and to show his deadliness as protection. And of course in your greeting cards the sharpened teeth show very clearly in the smile, don’t they?”

I said, “What works?”

She gave me a mock simper, the crowing of the smartass. “Ask the same question three times,” she said, “and the third time you’ll get the truth.”

“Very cute,” I said. But I hadn’t agreed to this interview to be annoyed.

Her smarmy grin went on and on. “The last civilized man to feel the killer alive inside himself,” she read, from her no-doubt perfect fucking shorthand. “Is that you?”

I walked around the desk, and her smile said she knew I would. I put her on the floor, and her smile said she’d known about that one, too. I played boy-girl upon her there, and twice I had the pleasure of seeing her look surprised.