The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (10 page)

“Jingle Bells” ended inside, to muffled applause, and after a moment the program began in earnest. A few solemn chords sounded on the piano, and then the voices came through:

All at once Myra's throat closed up and the streetlights swam in her eyes. Then half her fist was in her mouth and she was sobbing wretchedly, making little puffs of mist that floated away in the dark. It took her a long time to stop, and each sniffling intake of breath made a high sharp noise that sounded as if it could be heard for miles. Finally it was over, or nearly over; she managed to control her shoulders, to blow her nose and put her handkerchief away, closing her bag with a reassuring, businesslike snap.

Then the lights of the car came probing up the road. She ran down the path and stood waiting in the wind.

Inside the car a warm smell of whiskey hung among the cherry-red points of cigarettes, and Irene's voice squealed, “Oo-oo! Hurry up and shut the
door
!”

Jack's arms gathered her close as the door slammed, and in a thick whisper he said, “Hello, baby.”

They were all a little drunk; even Marty was in high spirits. “Hold tight, everybody!” he called, as they swung around the Administration Building, past the Christmas tree, and leveled off for the straightaway to the gate, gaining speed. “Everybody hold tight!”

Irene's face floated chattering over the back of the front seat. “Myra, honey, listen, we found the most adorable little place down the road, kind of a roadhouse, like, only real inexpensive and everything? So listen, we wanna take you back there for a little drink, okay?”

“Sure,” Myra said, “fine.”

“'Cause I mean, we're way ahead of you now anyway, and anyway I want you to see this place . . . Marty, will you take it
easy
!” She laughed. “Honestly, anybody else driving this car with what he's had to drink in him, I'd be scared to death, you know it? But you never got to worry about old Marty. He's the best old driver in the world, drunk, sober, I don't care
what
he is.”

But they weren't listening. Deep in a kiss, Jack slipped his hand inside her coat, expertly around and inside all the other layers until it held the flesh of her breast. “All over being mad at me, baby?” he mumbled against her lips. “Wanna go have a little drink?”

Her hands gripped the bulk of his back and clung there. Then she let herself be turned so that his other hand could creep secretly up her thigh. “All right,” she whispered, “but let's only have one and then afterwards—”

“Okay, baby, okay.”

“—and then afterwards, darling, let's go right home.”

FOR A LITTLE
while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends. Having found that the only truly rewarding part of any cops-and-robbers game was the moment when you pretended to be shot, clutched your heart, dropped your pistol and crumpled to the earth, they soon dispensed with the rest of it—the tiresome business of choosing up sides and sneaking around—and refined the game to its essence. It became a matter of individual performance, almost an art. One of them at a time would run dramatically along the crest of a hill, and at a given point the ambush would occur: a simultaneous jerking of aimed toy pistols and a chorus of those staccato throaty sounds—a kind of hoarse-whispered “
Pk-k-ew! Pk-k-ew!
”—with which little boys simulate the noise of gunfire. Then the performer would stop, turn, stand poised for a moment in graceful agony, pitch over and fall down the hill in a whirl of arms and legs and a splendid cloud of dust, and finally sprawl flat at the bottom, a rumpled corpse. When he got up and brushed off his clothes, the others would criticize his form (“Pretty good,” or “Too stiff,” or “Didn't look natural”), and then it would be the next player's turn. That was all there was to the game, but Walter Henderson loved it. He was a slight, poorly coordinated boy, and this was the only thing even faintly like a sport at which he excelled. Nobody could match the abandon with which he flung his limp body down the hill, and he reveled in the small acclaim it won him. Eventually the others grew bored with the game, after some older boys had laughed at them; Walter turned reluctantly to more wholesome forms of play, and soon he had forgotten about it.

But he had occasion to remember it, vividly, one May afternoon nearly twenty-five years later in a Lexington Avenue office building, while he sat at his desk pretending to work and waiting to be fired. He had become a sober, keen-looking young man now, with clothes that showed the influence of an Eastern university and neat brown hair that was just beginning to thin out on top. Years of good health had made him less slight, and though he still had trouble with his coordination it showed up mainly in minor things nowadays, like an inability to coordinate his hat, his wallet, his theater tickets and his change without making his wife stop and wait for him, or a tendency to push heavily against doors marked “Pull.” He looked, at any rate, the picture of sanity and competence as he sat there in the office. No one could have told that the cool sweat of anxiety was sliding under his shirt, or that the fingers of his left hand, concealed in his pocket, were slowly grinding and tearing a book of matches into a moist cardboard pulp. He had seen it coming for weeks, and this morning, from the minute he got off the elevator, he had sensed that this was the day it would happen. When several of his superiors said, “Morning, Walt,” he had seen the faintest suggestion of concern behind their smiles; then once this afternoon, glancing out over the gate of the cubicle where he worked, he'd happened to catch the eye of George Crowell, the department manager, who was hesitating in the door of his private office with some papers in his hand. Crowell turned away quickly, but Walter knew he had been watching him, troubled but determined. In a matter of minutes, he felt sure, Crowell would call him in and break the news—with difficulty, of course, since Crowell was the kind of boss who took pride in being a regular guy. There was nothing to do now but let the thing happen and try to take it as gracefully as possible.

That was when the childhood memory began to prey on his mind, for it suddenly struck him—and the force of it sent his thumbnail biting deep into the secret matchbook—that letting things happen and taking them gracefully had been, in a way, the pattern of his life. There was certainly no denying that the role of good loser had always held an inordinate appeal for him. All through adolescence he had specialized in it, gamely losing fights with stronger boys, playing football badly in the secret hope of being injured and carried dramatically off the field (“You got to hand it to old Henderson for
one
thing, anyway,” the high-school coach had said with a chuckle, “he's a real little glutton for punishment”). College had offered a wider scope to his talent—there were exams to be flunked and elections to be lost—and later the Air Force had made it possible for him to wash out, honorably, as a flight cadet. And now, inevitably, it seemed, he was running true to form once more. The several jobs he'd held before this had been the beginner's kind at which it isn't easy to fail; when the opportunity for this one first arose it had been, in Crowell's phrase, “a real challenge.”

“Good,” Walter had said. “That's what I'm looking for.” When he related that part of the conversation to his wife she had said, “Oh, wonderful!” and they'd moved to an expensive apartment in the East Sixties on the strength of it. And lately, when he started coming home with a beaten look and announcing darkly that he doubted if he could hold on much longer, she would enjoin the children not to bother him (“Daddy's very tired tonight”), bring him a drink and soothe him with careful, wifely reassurance, doing her best to conceal her fear, never guessing, or at least never showing, that she was dealing with a chronic, compulsive failure, a strange little boy in love with the attitudes of collapse. And the amazing thing, he thought—the really amazing thing—was that he himself had never looked at it that way before.

“Walt?”

The cubicle gate had swung open and George Crowell was standing there, looking uncomfortable. “Will you step into my office a minute?”

“Right, George.” And Walter followed him out of the cubicle, out across the office floor, feeling many eyes on his back. Keep it dignified, he told himself. The important thing is to keep it dignified. Then the door closed behind them and the two of them were alone in the carpeted silence of Crowell's private office. Automobile horns blared in the distance, twenty-one stories below; the only other sounds were their breathing, the squeak of Crowell's shoes as he went to his desk and the creak of his swivel chair as he sat down. “Pull up a chair, Walt,” he said. “Smoke?”

“No thanks.” Walter sat down and laced his fingers tight between his knees.

Crowell shut the cigarette box without taking one for himself, pushed it aside and leaned forward, both hands spread flat on the plate-glass top of the desk. “Walt, I might as well give you this straight from the shoulder,” he said, and the last shred of hope slipped away. The funny part was that it came as a shock, even so. “Mr. Harvey and I have felt for some time that you haven't quite caught on to the work here, and we've both very reluctantly come to the conclusion that the best thing to do, in your own best interests as well as ours, is to let you go. Now,” he added quickly, “this is no reflection on you personally, Walt. We do a highly specialized kind of work here and we can't expect everybody to stay on top of the job. In your case particularly, we really feel you'd be happier in some organization better suited to your—abilities.”

Crowell leaned back, and when he raised his hands their moisture left two gray, perfect prints on the glass, like the hands of a skeleton. Walter stared at them, fascinated, while they shriveled and disappeared.

“Well,” he said, and looked up. “You put that very nicely, George. Thanks.”

Crowell's lips worked into an apologetic, regular guy's smile. “Awfully sorry,” he said. “These things just happen.” And he began to fumble with the knobs of his desk drawers, visibly relieved that the worst was over. “Now,” he said, “we've made out a check here covering your salary through the end of next month. That'll give you something in the way of—severance pay, so to speak—to tide you over until you find something.” He held out a long envelope.

“That's very generous,” Walter said. Then there was a silence, and Walter realized it was up to him to break it. He got to his feet. “All right, George. I won't keep you.”

Crowell got up quickly and came around the desk with both hands held out—one to shake Walter's hand, the other to put on his shoulder as they walked to the door. The gesture, at once friendly and humiliating, brought a quick rush of blood to Walter's throat, and for a terrible second he thought he might be going to cry. “Well, boy,” Crowell said, “good luck to you.”

“Thanks,” he said, and he was so relieved to find his voice steady that he said it again, smiling. “Thanks. So long, George.”

There was a distance of some fifty feet to be crossed on the way back to his cubicle, and Walter Henderson accomplished it with style. He was aware of how trim and straight his departing shoulders looked to Crowell; he was aware too, as he threaded his way among desks whose occupants either glanced up shyly at him or looked as if they'd like to, of every subtle play of well-controlled emotion in his face. It was as if the whole thing were a scene in a movie. The camera had opened the action from Crowell's viewpoint and dollied back to take the entire office as a frame for Walter's figure in lonely, stately passage; now it came in for a long-held close-up of Walter's face, switched to other brief views of his colleagues' turning heads (Joe Collins looking worried, Fred Holmes trying to keep from looking pleased), and switched again to Walter's viewpoint as it discovered the plain, unsuspecting face of Mary, his secretary, who was waiting for him at his desk with a report he had given her to type.

“I hope this is all right, Mr. Henderson.”

Walter took it and dropped it on the desk. “Forget it, Mary,” he said. “Look, you might as well take the rest of the day off, and go see the personnel manager in the morning. You'll be getting a new job. I've just been fired.”

Her first expression was a faint, suspicious smile—she thought he was kidding—but then she began to look pale and shaken. She was very young and not too bright; they had probably never told her in secretarial school that it was possible for your boss to get fired. “Why, that's
terrible,
Mr. Henderson. I—well, but why would they
do
such a thing?”

“Oh, I don't know,” he said. “Lot of little reasons, I guess.” He was opening and slamming the drawers of his desk, cleaning out his belongings. There wasn't much: a handful of old personal letters, a dry fountain pen, a cigarette lighter with no flint, and half of a wrapped chocolate bar. He was aware of how poignant each of these objects looked to her, as she watched him sort them out and fill his pockets, and he was aware of the dignity with which he straightened up, turned, took his hat from the stand and put it on.

“Doesn't affect you, of course, Mary,” he said. “They'll have a new job for you in the morning. Well.” He held out his hand. “Good luck.”

“Thank you; the same to you. Well, then, g'night”—and here she brought her chewed fingernails up to her lips for an uncertain little giggle—“I mean, g'bye, then, Mr. Henderson.”