Romance: Love, Lies & Insanity: Romance Novels, #2

CHAPTER ONE

I don’t know how other men feel about their wives walking out on them, but I helped mine pack. And she was the only human being I ever gave a damn about: I saw my mother buried with less feeling than the emotions that squeezed my heart when I would sometimes sit on the edge of the tub, watching June take her bath, her hair up in a Psyche knot, her face larded cold-cream white, a water-stained cigarette on her lip, a shy smile in her eye for me.

When I woke up that day, she was already dressed and making me coffee. She was pulling at a cigarette, taking a couple of bangs at it, stubbing it out, lighting a new one. Her eyes were red.

Christ, she said when she caught me watching her, when I woke up this morning, my throat felt so bad, I didn’t know how I was going to get through my usual two packs today. But I’m beginning to think I’ll make it. And she smiled, and then she cried, coming over to put her head on my shoulder, crying, kissing me on the cheek just below the eyes, whispering a name no one but the two of us has ever heard her call me. I don’t want to hurt you, she said. And then she told me she was leaving. That’s the kind of girl she was.

The survival machinery cut in, and without really knowing what I was doing I reached over for a paper napkin and made her blow her nose. She quieted under my hands, obediently blowing when I told her, allowing me to wipe her eyes; she wasn’t any more conscious of what I was doing than I was, she was just waiting for my stunned attention to come back to what she had to say.

I found myself unable to hear her out, interrupting with cold lunatic logic to ask if she wanted the apartment—it was a pretty good one as apartments go in New York, right on Lexington Avenue, five decent rooms, only $106 a month. (I don’t mean that wasn’t a lot of money to us then, but as rents go in the city, it was a good buy.) But she said she didn’t want the place.

You know where you’re going? I asked her.

No. I’ll call Marion. She can put me up till I decide.

Yeah.

It’s not as if we had a baby. It’s only me and you who have to be concerned.

You think this is for good? I asked.

She cried a little more at that. Don’t say that.

No.

She was trembling. So I helped her pack, telling her nice things all the while, comforting her, telling her she’d be all right. If you’d been there, you’d think I was trying to leave her.

Then a funny thing happened.

We were going to the door, my arms full of books and a suitcase and a crazy big leather portfolio that held something like eighteen pictures of her brother and two sisters (she had a mink coat her mother had given her, but she didn’t take that). I let her get ahead of me to open the door. She squeezed past, opened it, turned around, and looked at me.

Do you know why we’re doing this? she asked.

No. Maybe.

Would you do something for me? she asked. Would you tell me something? It can’t matter now; you don’t have to lie to me anymore. Tell me—did you ever love me?

Sure, I said, but I wasn’t paying attention to what she had asked. I felt myself shaking my head, as if in impatience, as if she hadn’t asked the right question.

Tell me one thing, I said. What are you really like?

Terror is a funny word, and you can hardly ever say it in a sentence and have it sound right. But if I had to tell you what the look in her face was when I said that, I’d have to say it was a look of terror.

That’s what I meant to ask you, she said in a hushed voice.

We’d been married three years, and I’d lived with her a year longer than that.

So I kissed her because I was frightened, opened the elevator door, put her bags in a cab, gave her all the money I had and made her take a check for the hundred or so we had in the bank. I told her friends often felt they had to choose sides in these things, so she could have all of ours; I wouldn’t be seeing them any more. Then I closed the cab door.

I don’t want to have to go into the way she looked back at me from the rear window as the cab pulled away. I tell you, she tried to smile.

The cab turned the corner and I was left alone with the morning. Before me stretched a silence I had spent my life trying not to face, a dead space in the center of my heart which no one had ever been able to cross, a short circuit in my contact with the human race.

But the survival machinery kept on working, and almost with a start I found I was sitting down to a breakfast I had just made myself, a jolly, hearty breakfast of sunny poached eggs, toast, and coffee.

God, I think that’s a rotten way to be.

My job was with a raggedy-assed advertising agency, Harry Loperto, Inc. It wasn’t a small agency, and for Loperto, it was like having a permit to smear himself with glue and roll through the U.S. Mint. But it sure was raggedy-assed. Loperto made so much money there; he’d gone in for polo (someone said the only reason he went riding so much was because he knew the horses didn’t like it) and politics. He even had a column going for him in some rat magazines that felt they would like to sell more pages of advertising to Harry Loperto, Inc.

Loperto. The only time we ever saw him was when he would get an itch to give a lecture. Then the weasel office manager would run around and tell us we were all privileged to have an all-office meet with Mr. Loperto. Work would stop and we’d shuffle into his suffocating oak-paneled office, where he’d sound off at us about the American Economy. He knew we didn’t give a damn about the American Economy, especially any part of it he cared about. But he went "ahead anyway. His excuse was that if we understood the Big Picture we’d make better advertising people. I still don’t know why he did it. Partly, I suppose, he felt the duty of the Rich Man’s Burden to spread culture, religion and enlightenment among the simple, primitive file clerks. Mostly he must have just wanted an audience for his sickening ego and didn’t care if we liked it or not.

It must be wonderful to be rich.

One of his favorite ideas was that a real depression was coming and that the only thing to do in a depression was to cut salaries. This, Loperto could logically prove to us, would make prices go down, and then people would buy more goods and start the U.S. back to prosperity. He actually said this to us. He was shameless.

The other thing he was always saying was that people should not have un-American prejudices—especially in the advertising business—and hire only white-shoe Yale boys. He lived up to this too. Our place looked like the UN.

Everyone worked there—colored boys, a sweet little Japanese girl, Italians, Jews, Australians, fairies, lesbians. We had paroled murderers there, one guy who barked like a fox terrier when he got nervous, even one or two Yale boys. It was like one of those songs that were popular right after the war, those songs about democracy. Yes sir, anyone who would work for seventy bucks a week could find a job at Harry Loperto, Inc.

I’m not sure why I’m telling you so much about Loperto—he’s not important in this story. But he was a pain in the ass, and I guess I would like to say that.

So anyway, there I was, at 9:15 on a cool Wednesday morning in September, coming in to work. Janice, the girl at the switchboard, told me Tom Rule wanted to see me right away. Tom was my immediate boss, what they call the creative director in the lovely language of the business. I was a writer—I wrote the ads.

I stopped at my desk, hung up my coat and loosened my tie. I phoned Marion’s house. No one answered. I picked up a bunch of paper and a pencil and walked into Tom’s office.

He was drinking iced Coke and black coffee and was smoking a cigar. He liked the big lights out in his office and kept the air conditioner on full blast, winter and summer. He was sitting behind his narrow glass-topped table as I came in, watching me.

You’re in early, I said.

He drew a square on the white layout pad in front of him and put his pencil down. Do you know what a psychoanalyst told me on the train this morning? He told me they have statistics, fifty per cent of firemen, they still wet their beds at night.

I laughed. I believe it.

He looked at me again. Sure you believe it. I just made it up and you believed it. People believe only what they want to believe, and don’t ever forget it. That’s what the advertising business is all about.

He leaned back. Tell me, he said, do you know what you want to be?

Sure. I want to be you. I want your job.

He looked disappointed. He couldn’t flunk me out on that one, but we both knew it wasn’t very good.

To begin with, he said, that’s a lie. You don’t know if you want to be me. You don’t think you want to be me.

He puffed on the cigar a little.

What you want to be, Tom said, is the man who screws the queen of England and wakes up king. Or the guy Sinatra calls up when he wants a fast beer and a hard time. Or the man who’s slept with the ten best dressed women of 1947. That’s what you should want to be.

I laughed, and he looked at me in his tough Marine Corps sergeant way; and then he laughed too. He offered me a cigar. He was feeling good that he could grind out these two and three-pointers so early in the day. He usually didn’t get in till ten or so, didn’t talk to anyone till about eleven. Then, on a good day, he’d look at some of the work we’d been doing and go out for something to eat. On a bad day he’d call me in and we’d have a drink and talk till about one, then phone down for sandwiches.

Listen, Tom said. Loperto called me last night at home. Tomlinson Distilleries just called him. They must have plugged the extension phone into some poor thoroughbred’s ass to reach him. They’re giving us the Vincent’s Crème de Menthe business. Then probably the whole Vincent’s Cordials line, if we do a good job. A million bucks more business.

We solicit it? I didn’t know we had.

Nah. Loperto told me he’s been working on it, but he’s just trying to put shit in my ear. We have been doing a job for them on that other cheap booze of theirs, and they like us. They give it to us. I bet Loperto didn’t even have to ask.

A million bucks. One hundred fifty more gross for the Lone Ranger. He talk to you about hiring any more guys to handle the business?

Tom looked at me.

No, I said.

No, Tom said.

And you’re putting it on my back.

You ought to bet on the races, Tom said, you’re so smart. You want to do it? Or you still making up your mind about this business?

Can you get me any more dough?

He looked at me tough again.

Well, it’ll look good on a resume when I wise up and get out of here, I said.

Or when I fire you.

Only my laundryman will know how much you just frightened me.

How come you never can write a line good as that in your ads?

Tell me one thing. How much does Loperto pay you?

If I told you, Tom said, with the lousy hundred ten you’re getting, you’d be sick. It’s a favor, I’m not telling you.

Sure. OK, OK, where do we start?

Sure you don’t want a cigar?

No.

How you feeling?

Fine.

You don’t look so good, Tom said, suddenly looking as if he were truly seeing me. And then he veiled his eyes. "Well, we need a theme, an idea for the campaign, the line, the words. The wrap-up. You know. This Vincent’s is a cordial just like all the others. If you work hard enough on it, it gets you drunk. If you drink enough, it kills you. It’s cheap. It comes in a bottle. It’s got a label. Go out and think about it. I’ll tell you what the story is. Put this in four words and you’ve got it.

It’s the kind of sauce a broad buys when she’s stoked up on Saturday Evening Post stories and she wants to live graciously one time. You know, she figures she’s going to cook Harry a special dinner, hide the kids, wear beads, turn off the lights. She sees it, she really sees it; she in the beads, QXR playing symphonies on the radio, candles on the table—don’t forget the candles—and them eating, and then this cordial, and there they are: they think they’re happy. That’s what we’re selling them. Put that in four words. Promise that poor broad that if she puts this green, too-sweet, tooth-rotting ink on the table, Harry won’t come to eat in his undershirt, that he won’t scratch his belly after the meal and run into the next room and look at the Yankees on TV and suck on a beer bottle. Promise her he’ll stay there and talk to her, talk to her. Promise her a moment of elegance, promise her what she thought she was going to get when she married the bastard. Find out how to say it, put it all in a four-word slogan—and you’ll make Loperto even richer. Give Loperto his pound of flesh."

He drew breath.

No wonder you never got married, I said.

It’s best to have loved and lost.

How about you, I asked, you feeling all right? I'll do. You going to be able to help us on this? Want some coffee?

No.

Fine. See you.

Yeah, he said. He was already looking down at the paper on his desk, at the page turned to the ball scores.

I went into the little armpit I used for an office and sat down. Hey, Wanda?

The secretary I shared with the two other writers hipped her way across the room to me. She didn’t have eyes for me, but she always gave it the full treatment anyway.

You want some coffee? I asked her.

Why thank you, she said in her big, throaty, controlled voice. Boy, was she a lady.

I came out the house this morning, I forgot my wallet. Lend me a buck till tomorrow, and ask Freddie to run down, buy us some coffee and cake or anything you like. Just coffee for me.

She didn’t like it, but she said OK and walked away, really giving it the big motion again. She went out the door to look for Freddie, our office boy.

I dialed Marion’s number again.

June answered.

How are you? I asked her. I remember thinking how dumb a line that was, but what else could I come up with? That’s what I wanted to know.

I’m OK, she said. I don’t really know. I’m OK. Just feeling a little funny. I can’t seem to sit down. I had to walk around and around the block awhile. I’m all right now.

You talk to Marion?

Yes. She says it’s all right with her. She’s very sweet. She’s got so much room here.

Tell her I’ll pay half the rent. Tell her you want to share the rent with her for the time you stay, and that I’ll pay it.

Bill?

Yeah?

Why weren’t you surprised?

When you walked out?

Yes. When I told you.

I was.

No, you weren’t. Why didn’t you ask me not to go?

I figured you knew what you were doing.

Did you want me to stay?

Not if you didn’t want to.

That’s not it. How did you feel? Did you have any feeling?

Sure.

Oh, Bill. You never can ask for anything you want, can you?

That’s a theory.

Please don’t be mad at me. If you could tell me you don’t really want to be like that it would make me feel better.

You figure it out for yourself. You stay over there, think things over, go to the movies, talk to Marion. I’ll talk to you about it later. Whenever you’re ready.

But do you want me back?

You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.

Lunchtime I went into Tom’s office and made him lend me ten till payday. I had a drink in a bar around the comer right after work and went into a phone booth.

Jerry, listen, I can’t come out tonight.

But Bill—we’re expecting you. What’s the matter? June all right?

Yeah. Sure. Sure, she’s fine. Her mother, though. Her mother had an attack or something. June took a plane back to Chicago this afternoon. She said to say she was sorry.

Gee, that’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear that. But you. What’s the fun of eating alone? Come on out anyway, he said, etc., etc. So I agreed.

I stopped off at a hardware store and then took the train out. Jerry was waiting for me at the station.

We were brothers-in-law. We’d been in the army together and had gotten discharged at the same time. He came home with me on our last furlough and I’d introduced him to my sister, May. He didn’t hold it against me, though, and after I got married myself, there was a certain amount of visiting back and forth. After they had the kid, though, Jerry and May had moved way out on Long Island, and I didn’t see him as much as I liked any more.

I put my hand out at him.

Yeah, Jerry said.

So.

Shaking hands embarrassed us both so we stopped it pretty quick. Jerry smiled. We got into the car.

How are you, Smash?