Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) (12 page)

“When we got out of there I said ‘Dad, could you please lay off the Bulge? You know I didn’t go through the Bulge.’

“He said ‘They gave you the star for it, didn’t they?’

“And the point is, Doctor, I’d told him time and again, time and again they gave the damn star to everybody within a hundred
miles
of the Bulge. So I said ‘Look: it may not matter to you but it matters to me. Can’t you see that?’

“And the little bastard just walked along – he
was
little, even smaller than me, with a face like a walnut and this old-timey, pearl-grey hat pulled down hard over his eyes – just walked along and said I had a lot to learn about the business world. Jesus.

“But I did go to Yale; that was the college they’d picked for me, and they’d been careful to send me the application forms the minute the war was over so I’d beat the big rush of GI Bill students. I still don’t understand how I got in and I was scared shitless of flunking out. The reading assignments almost killed me – I’d be up reading all night while everybody else was out drinking and screwing around – but I made it through freshman year, and by then my parents were in business. They had a little factory up in Stamford with about six employees; they’d paid some designer a lot of money for the most elegant-looking
package you ever saw; they were turning out honest-to-God chocolates every day and they had my own summer’s work cut out for me: I was the assistant to an older guy who took ‘the line’ around to wholesalers all over New York.

“ ‘Taste one – just taste one,’ the older guy’d say. ‘Be our guest.’ And I’d sit there smiling like a clown in my J. Press suit, wondering what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life.

“Well, it didn’t last long; my sophomore year was a disaster. Barely made it through the first semester, and along about April I sort of gave up. Went to the movies all the time, quit studying, quit trying, and I flunked out that June.

“And my God, talk about family tragedies! They seemed to think I’d done it on purpose, just to thwart them. Started bringing home armloads of other college catalogues, and I’d throw ’em away. Oh, I’ve always regretted that – there must’ve been plenty of colleges with remedial reading programs – but the thought of any college made me sick; besides, I knew they only wanted me to graduate for the sake of Marjorie Wilder’s fucking Chocolates. Quarrels, recriminations, fights, tears – Finally I said ‘I don’t owe you people
anything
,’ and I took off.

“Got a room in the city and answered a help-wanted ad for an outfit called Films for Industry: ‘Learn the ropes of motionpicture production.’ Paid me thirty-five a week to carry lights and drag cables around the floor and get sandwiches for the actors and the camera crew, and I mean that might’ve been okay if they’d been making halfway decent movies, even industrial movies, but they weren’t. I remember one they made for Meade Record-keeping Systems; the title was
It Must Be Somewhere
– twenty minutes of unfunny slapstick about what happens in the office when an important paper gets lost. Bosses blowing their tops, secretaries crying, file cabinets dumped out on the floor;
then the man from Meade comes in and saves the day. Finds the paper, says ‘Record-keeping is my business’ and goes into his sales pitch. The End.

“And the worst part, all those Films for Industry people were happy as clams – none of them ever thought of getting into real movies, even the girls. I took one girl out to lunch, tried to get her talking about movies and she looked at me like I was some dopey little kid: ‘You mean
consumer
films?
Feature
films?’ Didn’t consider herself an actress at all; couldn’t have cared less. Then it turned out she was shacked up with one of the Films for Industry executives; soon as his divorce came through she’d quit working and they’d settle down in Forest Hills.

“… Oh, if I’d had any guts I’d have hitchhiked out to Hollywood and hung around the studios until somebody hired me as a grip or even a mail clerk – if I’d done that I might even have
become
a producer by now – but I didn’t. Maybe I wasn’t ready to make that big a break with my parents; I don’t know. Anyway I didn’t.

“Then somebody told me the
Herald Tribune
was taking on space salesmen, paying good money, not too fussy about college degrees. So I said I’d had three years at Yale instead of two, and that’s how I got started in this racket. That’s how I met Janice too – she worked there. We got married within a year and then we had our boy. By that time I was working for a trade journal,
Chain Store Age;
then I moved over to a magazine called
Vanguard
and then to
The American Scientist
, and somewhere along the line the whole movie-producer idea evaporated. Oh, don’t worry, doctor, I’m not saying marriage tied me down; you won’t catch me blaming my wife for everything I can’t blame on my parents or any neurotic horseshit like that. The ambition just went away, that’s all. It’s come back now and then over the years – usually when I’ve been drinking, I guess – but it’s gone.
Nobody’s fault but mine. You want to hear what happened to my parents?”

“Mm.” And the doctor inspected his watch.

“Well, we had a halfhearted reconciliation after the baby was born, but in the meantime they’d found what I suppose you guys would call a surrogate son: another Ivy League type, only this one had his diploma, and he really did take over the business and build it up, just the way they’d always thought I would. They were rich as hell by the time they retired. My father died four years ago and my mother’s in a nursing home now – she had a brain hemorrhage and she’s pretty much a vegetable – but son of a bitch, you can’t walk into any supermarket in America today without bumping into this big-assed revolving rack: Marjorie Wilder’s Chocolates. Six bucks a box. How about
that
?”

“Mm. Yes. Well, I’m afraid our time is—”

“Not so fast, Doctor.”

“Mm?” Blomberg blinked up through his pink-tinted glasses.

“You know something? You’re the only dead-silent bullshit artist I’ve ever met. I tell you the whole God damned story of my life; you sit there saying absolutely nothing and hauling in a hundred a week of my money, and you know what that’s called? That’s larceny.”

They were both on their feet. “I have another patient waiting, Mr. Wilder.”

“Let ’im wait. You’ve kept
me
waiting often enough. I’ve got one question: When the hell are you gonna start talking? When’s all this famous ‘work’ and ‘help’ and ‘therapy’ supposed to begin? Huh?”

“Mr. Wilder, I don’t know what’s brought on this hostility, but perhaps it’s something we can discuss Thursday.”

Then a line of Spivack’s in Bellevue seemed appropriate: “Yeah, well, don’t hold your breath.”

“Do you plan to cancel your Thursday appointment?”

“It might just be,” Wilder said, trembling at the door, “that ‘our time is up’ in more fucking ways than one.”

“Do you want to terminate your association with me?”

“Suppose we let you sweat that one out. I’d like to picture you all alone here twice a week, watching all my money float away. So long, pink-eyes.”

And jolting home on the subway he kept thinking of embellishments he might have put on that final speech: he might have said “… all alone here twice a week with your finger in your mouth, or up your ass – depending, of course, on whether you’re an oral- or an anal-fixation type …” But then he began to wonder if Blomberg might pick up that avocado-green, snotgreen phone and call Paul Borg with the news of his outburst. Well, hell. What if he did?

“Dear?” Janice said when they were alone that night, and at first he thought it might be about Blomberg and Borg, but it wasn’t. “I’ve been looking through some of the AA leaflets – That doesn’t upset you, does it?”

“Course not.”

“The thing is, they say it’s often helpful for a member’s wife or husband to go along to the meetings, and I was wondering if – I mean I’d really like to. Especially the one you told me about, where the man said he’d rather light one candle than curse the darkness.”

“Well, I don’t know, I – okay. Sure.”

They were climbing the stairs to the loft before it struck him that he might well be called on to speak tonight; and toward the end of the meeting Tony’s index finger swung straight at his face.

“I see a man back there’s been with us a few times lately; want to say a few words, sir?”

Blood beat in his ears all the way to the rostrum, and the voice that addressed the group through hanging veils of smoke didn’t sound like his own at all. “My name’s John and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, John!”

“I haven’t been in the Program very long, but I’ve gone to meetings all over town and this one’s the best I’ve found. Trouble is, it’s the first time I’ve been asked to talk and that’s a little embarrassing because my wife’s here with me as a guest tonight – but what the hell, she’s seen me make a fool of myself plenty of times before.”

There was some laughter – not much – and he wondered if it might be bad manners in this group even to hint at being securely married, or to bring any kind of “guest.”

“I’m a salesman, and I guess I always thought heavy drinking was part of a salesman’s life. Well, that idea went down the drain a while back when I was locked up for a week in Bellevue …” He didn’t know how to finish: he heard himself saying “still scared” and “grateful” and “with your help” until he found his way through a clumsy final sentence that allowed him to say “Thank you.” He couldn’t tell if the clapping was tepid or hearty or even if it lasted until he was back in his chair, where Janice made a display of squeezing his hand.

“You were wonderful,” she said when they were out on the street again.

“The hell I was. All that self-pitying shit about Bellevue; all that false humility. I felt like an idiot.”

“I thought you did very well. Besides, what does it matter? This isn’t show business, after all.”

He almost stopped on the sidewalk to turn her around and shout that it
was
show business – the whole God damn “Program” was show business, from Bill Costello to Sylvester Cummings;
that psychotherapy was show business too, with an inattentive, pink-eyed audience of one – but this was no night for another quarrel.

“Oh, let’s just walk a while,” she was saying. “I love this old part of town; I don’t think I’ve been down here for years and years. Remember all the walks we used to take around here before we were married?”

“Yup.”

“Houston and Canal and Delancey, and we’d go to the Fulton Fish Market early in the morning, and we’d walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Mm.”

“That’s odd,” she said at an intersection. “This ought to be Seventh Avenue, but the sign says something else; I can’t quite make it out.”

“I think it’s Varick Street. Turns into Seventh Avenue a few blocks uptown.”

“You really are remarkable, John,” and she clung to his arm in an affectionate, almost flirtatious way as they turned the corner. “You know
all
the streets.”

Well, no; not all; but he did happen to know a few. And well within a block of the secret cellar he saw lamplight flooding up from its clean, closed Venetian blind. Whatever Paul Borg was doing down there tonight, with whatever girl, he sure as hell wasn’t cursing the darkness.

“Seen the
Times
yet?” George Taylor inquired, easing one haunch onto Wilder’s desk. “Bad news.”

Like everything else concerning work these days it took a little while to sink in. He heard Taylor say “McCabe’s lost the Northeast account” and watched his mouth labor through many other words of supporting information. He said “Damn”
because it seemed appropriate, but then he had to hang his head, pretending to think it over while he tried to puzzle out what Taylor had told him. His brains seemed filled with sand.

Northeast Distillers was a giant of the liquor industry; through the giant advertising agency of McCabe-Derrickson they had bought the full-color back cover of
The American Scientist
every month for years, providing one of the mainstays of Wilder’s income, so it was indeed bad news. “And what’s the new agency again? Hartwell and who?”

“ ‘Hartwell and Partners.’ I never heard of ’em. Prob’ly about six months old, one of these damn little ‘creative’ shops. Anyway you better get on the horn, try to set up a presentation.” And Taylor slid heavily off the desk with the look of a bewildered old man. “I just don’t get it – a staid, conservative outfit like Northeast pulling a switch like this. Whole thing’s crazy,” he said as he turned away. “Seems like now Kennedy’s in, everybody wants to be some kind of a swinger.”

There was some confusion at the Hartwell and Partners switchboard when he asked for the Northeast account executive; he talked with several impatient voices before he found the man, whose name was Frank Lacy and who sounded less than thirty years old.

“A ‘presentation’?” Frank Lacy said as if the very word had gone out of style – and maybe it had. “Well, I don’t see why not, Mr. Wilder. Things are fairly hectic around here now, but I think we can fit you in. Hold on a sec. How about Wednesday at ten?”

And so he found his way to the thirty-ninth floor of a steel-and-glass tower, lugging the briefcase that contained his presentation in a sweaty hand.

WE HATE TO PRY

That was the heading of the big cardboard flip chart he propped on the central table of the meeting room, after making his own nervous opening remarks, and beneath it ran the words:

His audience consisted of five or six young men and three or four girls, all semi-collapsed in deep sofas and chairs; they didn’t look bored but they were hardly spellbound, and that prompted him to risk a little extemporaneous talk. “I’m supposed to read this thing aloud to you,” he said, “and I think I’m even supposed to underscore each line with my finger, but I’ll spare you that. I mean the
Scientist
is a great magazine but I’ve never figured out where they hire the people who write this flip-chart stuff; at least I don’t think I could get my mouth around ‘a man’s communion with his favorite tipple.’ ”