Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (26 page)

·    ·    ·

Within two hours of the time that the power and the euphio went off, the house was warm and we had eaten. The serious respiratory cases—the parents who had sat near the broken window for twenty-four hours—had been pumped full of penicillin and hauled off to the hospital. The milkman, the Western Union boy, and the trooper had refused treatment and gone home. The Beaver Patrol had saluted smartly and left. Outside, repairmen were working on the power line. Only the original group remained—Lew, Fred, and Marion, Susan and myself, and Eddie. Fred, it turned out, had some pretty important-looking contusions and abrasions, but no concussion.

Susan had fallen asleep right after eating. Now she stirred. “What happened?”

“Happiness,” I told her. “Incomparable, continuous happiness—happiness by the kilowatt.”

Lew Harrison, who looked like an anarchist with his red eyes and fierce black beard, had been writing furiously in one corner of the room. “That’s good—happiness by the kilowatt,” he said. “Buy your happiness the way you buy light.”

“Contract happiness the way you contract influenza,” Fred said. He sneezed.

Lew ignored him. “It’s a campaign, see? The first ad is for the long-hairs: ‘The price of one book, which may be a disappointment, will buy you sixty hours of euphio. Euphio never
disappoints.’ Then we’d hit the middle class with the next one—”

“In the groin?” Fred said.

“What’s the matter with you people?” Lew said. “You act as though the experiment had failed.”

“Pneumonia and malnutrition are what we’d
hoped
for?” Marion said.

“We had a cross section of America in this room, and we made every last person happy,” Lew said. “Not for just an hour, not for just a day, but for two days without a break.” He arose reverently from his chair. “So what we do to keep it from killing the euphio fans is to have the thing turned on and off with clockwork, see? The owner sets it so it’ll go on just as he comes home from work, then it’ll go off again while he eats supper; then it goes on after supper, off again when it’s bedtime; on again after breakfast, off when it’s time to go to work, then on again for the wife and kids.”

He ran his hands through his hair and rolled his eyes. “And the selling points—my God, the selling points! No expensive toys for the kids. For the price of a trip to the movies, people can buy thirty hours of euphio. For the price of a fifth of whisky, they can buy sixty hours of euphio!”

“Or a big family bottle of potassium cyanide,” Fred said.

“Don’t you see it?” Lew said incredulously. “It’ll bring families together again, save the American home. No more fights over what TV or radio program to listen to. Euphio pleases one and all—we proved that. And there is no such thing as a dull euphio program.”

A knock on the door interrupted him. A repairman stuck his head in to announce that the power would be on again in about two minutes.

“Look, Lew,” Fred said, “this little monster could kill civilization in less time than it took to burn down Rome. We’re not going into the mind-numbing business, and that’s that.”

“You’re kidding!” Lew said, aghast. He turned to Marion. “Don’t you want your husband to make a million?”

“Not by operating an electronic opium den,” Marion said coldly.

Lew slapped his forehead. “It’s what the public wants. This is like Louis Pasteur refusing to pasteurize milk.”

“It’ll be good to have the electricity again,” Marion said, changing the subject. “Lights, hot-water heater, the pump, the—oh, Lord!”

The lights came on the instant she said it, but Fred and I were already in mid-air, descending on the gray box. We crashed down on it together. The card table buckled, and the plug was jerked from the wall socket. The euphio’s tubes glowed red for a moment, then died.

Expressionlessly, Fred took a screwdriver from his pocket and removed the top of the box.

“Would you enjoy doing battle with progress?” he said, offering me the poker Eddie had dropped.

In a frenzy, I stabbed and smashed at the euphio’s glass and wire vitals. With my left hand, and with Fred’s help, I kept Lew from throwing himself between the poker and the works.

“I thought you were on my side,” Lew said.

“If you breathe one word about euphio to anyone,” I said, “what I just did to euphio I will gladly do to you.”

·    ·    ·

And there, ladies and gentlemen of the Federal Communications Commission, I thought the matter had ended. It deserved to end there. Now, through the medium of Lew Harrison’s big mouth, word has leaked out. He has petitioned you for permission to start commercial exploitation of euphio. He and his backers have built a radio-telescope of their own.

Let me say again that all of Lew’s claims are true. Euphio will do everything he says it will. The happiness it give is perfect and unflagging in the face of incredible adversity. Near tragedies, such as the first experiment, can no doubt be avoided
with clockwork to turn the sets on and off. I see that this set on the table before you is, in fact, equipped with clockwork.

The question is not whether euphio works. It does. The question is, rather, whether or not America is to enter a new and distressing phase of history where men no longer pursue happiness but buy it. This is no time for oblivion to become a national craze. The only benefit we could get from euphio would be if we could somehow lay down a peace-of-mind barrage on our enemies while protecting our own people from it.

In closing, I’d like to point out that Lew Harrison, the would-be czar of euphio, is an unscrupulous person, unworthy of public trust. It wouldn’t surprise me, for instance, if he had set the clockwork on this sample euphio set so that its radiations would addle your judgments when you are trying to make a decision. In fact, it seems to be whirring suspiciously at this very moment, and I’m so happy I could cry. I’ve got the swellest little kid and the swellest bunch of friends and the swellest old wife in the world. And good old Lew Harrison is the salt of the earth, believe me. I sure wish him a lot of good luck with his new enterprise.

(1951)

G
LORIA
H
ILTON
and her fifth husband didn’t live in New Hampshire very long. But they lived there long enough for me to sell them a bathtub enclosure. My main line is aluminum combination storm windows and screens—but anybody in storm windows is practically automatically in bathtub enclosures, too.

The enclosure they ordered was for Gloria Hilton’s personal bathtub. I guess that was the zenith of my career. Some men are asked to build mighty dams or noble skyscrapers, or conquer terrible plagues, or lead great armies into battle.

Me?

I was asked to keep drafts off the most famous body in the world.

·    ·    ·

People ask me how well did I know Gloria Hilton. I generally say, “The only time I ever saw that woman in the flesh was through a hot-air register.” That was how the bathroom where they wanted the enclosure was heated—with a hot-air register in the floor. It wasn’t connected to the furnace. It just bled heat from the ceiling of the room down below. I don’t wonder Gloria Hilton found her bathroom cold.

I was installing the enclosure when loud talk started coming out of the register. I was at a very tricky point, gluing the waterproof gasket around the rim of the tub with contact cement, so I couldn’t close the register. I had to listen to what wasn’t any of my business, whether I wanted to or not.

“Don’t talk to me about love,” Gloria Hilton said to her fifth husband. “You don’t know anything about love. You don’t know the meaning of love.”

I hadn’t looked down through the register yet, so the only face I had to put with her voice was her face in the movies.

“Maybe you’re right, Gloria,” said her fifth husband.

“I give you my word of honor I’m right,” she said.

“Well—” he said, “that certainly brings the whole discussion to a dead stop right there. How could I possibly argue with the sacred word of honor of Gloria Hilton?”

I knew what he looked like. He was the one who’d done all the negotiating for the bathtub enclosure. I had also sold him two Fleetwood Trip-L-Trak storm windows for the two bathroom windows. Those have the self-storing screen feature. The whole time we were negotiating, he called his wife “Miss Hilton.” Miss Hilton wanted this, and Miss Hilton wanted that. He was only thirty-five, but the circles under his eyes made him look sixty.

“I pity you,” Gloria Hilton said to him. “I pity anybody who can’t love. They are the most pitiful people there are.”

“The more you talk,” he said, “the more I’m convinced I’m one of them.”

He was the writer, of course. My wife keeps a lot of Hollywood stuff in her head, and she tells me Gloria Hilton was married to a motorcycle policeman, then a sugar millionaire, then somebody who played Tarzan, then her agent—and then the writer. George Murra, the writer, was the one I knew.

“People keep wondering what the matter with the world is,” said Gloria. “I know what the matter is. It’s simple: most men don’t know the meaning of the word love.”

“At least give me credit for trying to find out what it means,” said Murra. “For one solid year now, I haven’t done a single, solitary thing but order a bathtub enclosure and try to find out what love means.”

“I suppose you’re going to blame me for that, too,” she said.

“For what?” he said.

“The fact that you haven’t written a word since we’ve been married,” she said. “I suppose that’s somehow my fault, too.”

“I hope I’m not that shallow,” he said. “I know a plain, ordinary coincidence when I see one. The fights we have all night, the photographers and reporters and so-called friends we have all day—they have nothing to do with the fact I’ve dried up.”

“You’re one of those people who enjoys suffering,” she said.

“That’s a smart way to be,” he said.

“I’ll tell you frankly,” she said, “I’m disappointed in you.”

“I knew,” he said, “that sooner or later you would come right out and say it.”

“I might as well tell you, too,” she said, “that I’ve decided to bring this farce to an end.”

“It’s nice of you to make me among the first to know,” he said. “Shall I notify Louella Parsons, or has that already been taken care of?”

I had the gasket glued onto the bathtub rim, so I was free to close the register. I looked straight down through the grating, and there Gloria Hilton was. She had her hair up in curlers. She didn’t have any makeup on. She hadn’t even bothered to draw on eyebrows. She had on some kind of slip and a bathrobe that was gaping open. I swear, that woman wasn’t any prettier than a used studio couch.

“I don’t think you’re very funny,” she said.

“You knew I was a serious writer when you married me,” he said.

She stood up. She spread her arms like Moses telling the Jews the Promised Land was right over the next hill. “Go on back to your precious wife and your precious son,” she said. “I certainly won’t stand in your way.”

I closed the register.

·    ·    ·

Five minutes later, Murra came upstairs and told me to clear out. “Miss Hilton wants to use her bathroom,” he said. I never saw such a peculiar expression on a man’s face. He was all red, and there were tears in his eyes—but there was this crazy laugh tearing him apart, trying to get out.

“I’m not quite finished,” I said.

“Miss Hilton is completely finished,” he said. “Clear out!”

So I went out to my truck, and I drove into town, had a cup of coffee. The door for the bathtub enclosure was on a wooden rack on the back of my truck, out in the open—and it certainly attracted a lot of attention.

Most people, when they order an enclosure door, don’t want anything on it unless maybe a flamingo or a seahorse. The plant, which is over in Lawrence, Massachusetts, is set up to sandblast a flamingo or a seahorse on a door for only six dollars extra. But Gloria Hilton wanted a big “G,” two feet across—and in the middle of the “G” she wanted a life-size head of herself. And the eyes on the head had to be exactly five feet two inches above the bottom of the tub, because that’s how high her real eyes were when she stood up barefoot in the tub.

They went crazy over in Lawrence.

One of the people I was having coffee with was Harry Crocker, the plumber. “I certainly hope you insisted on measuring her yourself,” he said, “so the figures would be absolutely accurate.”

“Her husband did it,” I said.

“Some people have all the luck,” he said.

I went to the pay telephone, and I called up Murra’s house to see if it would be all right for me to come back and finish up. The line was busy.

When I got back to my coffee, Harry Crocker said to me, “You missed something I don’t think anybody’s ever liable to see in this town ever again.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“Gloria Hilton and her maid going through town at two hundred miles an hour,” he said.

“Which way were they headed?” I said.

“West,” he said.

·    ·    ·

So I tried to call Murra again. I figured, with Gloria Hilton gone, all the big telephoning would be over. But the telephone went right on being busy for an hour. I thought maybe somebody had torn the telephone out by its roots, but the operator said it was in working order.

“Try the number again, then,” I told her.

That time I got through.

Murra answered the phone. All I said to him was, “Hello,” and he got very excited. He wasn’t excited about getting the bathtub enclosure finished. He was excited because he thought I was somebody named John.

“John, John,” he said to me, “thank God you called!

“John,” he said to me, “I know what you think of me, and I don’t blame you for thinking that—but please listen to what I have to say before you hang up. She’s left me, John. That part of my life is over—finished! Now I’m trying to pick up the pieces. John,” he said, “in the name of mercy, you’ve got to come here. Please, John, please, John, please.”

“Mr. Murra—?” I said.

“Yes?” he said. From the way his voice went away from the telephone, I guess he thought I’d just walked into the room.