Patrons of the Goose’s Neck were treated to a startling sight this a.m. when Vincent (The Duke) Voisier came tearing into the place, literally bowling over a table-full of customers—and their table—in the process of hauling Vic Hill, song writer extraordinary, out to the curb. The center of attention out there seemed to be a tousle-headed character by the name of Robin English, who told this snooper mildly that Mr. Voisier was going to produce his show. At that moment The Duke and Hill came sailing out of the bistro, scooped up this Robin English and hurled him into a taxicab, leaving your reporter in a cloud of carbon monoxide and wild surmise. Now followers of this column know that Brother Voisier is usually as excitable as the occupant of Slab 3 at the City Morgue. My guess is missed if show business isn’t about to be shown some business. Voisier is a rich man because of his odd habit of taking no wild chances…
And then there was a letter from a book publisher tactfully asking for a character reference prior to giving one Robin English an advance on an anthology of poems. She answered immediately, giving Robin an A-l rating, and only after sending it off did she realize that a few short weeks ago she would not have considered such a thing. Robin’s reliability was a strange and wonderful structure, and his record likewise.
At long last, then, came his phone call.
“Peg?”
“Wh… oh, Robin! Robin, how are you?”
“Sharp as a marshmallow, and disgustingly productive. Will you come over?”
“Come over?” she asked stupidly. “Where?”
“Robin’s Roost,” he chuckled. “My McGee hall closet and bath. Home.”
“But Robin, I… you—”
“Safe as a tomb,” he said solemnly.
“Don’t intimate anything otherwise,” she said as sharply as she could; but something within her rose delightedly at the overtones of amusement in his voice.
“I’m a big grown-up man now,” he said. “Restrained, mature, reliable and thoroughly unappetizing. Come over and I won’t be anything but repulsive. Impersonal. Detached. No… say semi-detached. Like a brownstone front. A serious mein. Well, if it’s before dinner I’ll have a chow mein.”
“Stop!” she gasped. “Robin, you’re mad! You’re delirious!”
“Delirious and repressing, like a certain soft drink. Four o’clock suit you?”
It so happened that it did not.
But “All right, Robin,” she said helplessly, and hung up.
She discovered that she had cleared her afternoon so efficiently that she had time to go home and change. Well, of course she had to change. That princess neckline was—not daring, of course, but—too demure. That was it; demure. She did not want to be demure. She wanted to be businesslike.
So she changed to a navy sharkskin suit with a wide belt and a starched dicky at the throat, the severest thing in her wardrobe. It was incidental that it fitted like clasped hands, and took two inches off her second dimension and added them to her third. As incidental as Robin’s double-take when he saw it; she could almost sense his shifting gears.
“Well!” said Robin as he stepped back from the door. “A mannequin, kin to the manna from heaven. Come in, Peg!”
“Do you write your scripts out, Robin? You can’t generate those things on the spur of the moment!”
“I can for moments like this,” he said gallantly, handing her inside.
It was her turn for a double-take. The little apartment was scrupulously clean and neat. Books were in bookcases; it had taken the addition of three more bookcases to accomplish that. A set of shelves had been built in one corner, very cleverly designed to break up the boxlike proportions of the room, and in it were neatly stacked manuscripts and, up above, musical instruments. There was more livestock than ever, but it was in cages and a terrarium—she wondered where the white rats had been on her last visit. Imprisoned in the bathtub, no doubt. There was a huge and gentle pastel of a laughing satyr on the wall. She wondered where the big oil was.
“I painted ol’ Splay-foot over it,” said Robin.
“You include telepathy among your many talents?” she asked without turning.
“I include a guilty conscience among my many neuroses,” he countered. “Sit down.”
“I hear you’re getting a play produced,” she said conversationally, as he deftly set out a beautiful tray of exotic morsels—avocado mashed with garlic juice on little toast squares; stuffed olives sliced paper-thin on zwieback and chive cheese; stems of fennel stuffed with blue-cheese; deviled eggs on rounds of pimento, and a strange and lovely dish of oriental cashews in blood-orange pulp.
“It isn’t a play. It’s a musical.”
“Oh? Whose book?”
“Mine.”
“Fine, Robin. I read that Vic Hill’s doing the lyrics.”
“Well, yes. Voisier seemed to think mine were—Well, to tell you the truth, he called in Hill for the name. Got to have a name people know. However, they are my lyrics.”
“Robin. Are you letting him—”
“Ah—shush, Peg! No one’s doing anything to me!” He laughed. “Sorry. I can’t help laughing at the way you, looking like a Vassar p.g., ruffle up like a mother hen. The truth is that I’m getting plenty out of this. There just don’t seem to be enough names to go around on the billing. I wrote the silly little thing at one sitting, and filled in the music and staging just to round it off—sort of an overall synopsis. Next thing you know this Voisier is all over me like a tent, wanting me to direct it as well; and since there’s a sequence in there—sort of a duet between voice and drums in boogie-beat—that no one seems to be able to do right, he wants me to act that part too.” He spread his hands. “Voisier knows what he is doing. Only you can’t have one man’s name plastered all over the production. The public doesn’t take to that kind of thing. Voisier’s treating the whole deal the way he handles his trucking concern and his insurance business and his pharmaceutical house—like a business. Show business is still business.”
“Oh—that’s better. And what about this anthology of poems?”
“Oh, that. Stuff I had kicking around the house here.” His eyes traveled over the neat shelves and bookcases. “Remarkable what a lot of salable, material I had here, once I found it by cleaning up some.”
“What else did you find?”
“Some gadgets. A centrifugal pump I designed using the business end of a meat grinder for the impeller. A way to take three-dimensional portraits with a head clamp and a swivel chair and a 35 mm camera, A formula for a quick-drying artist’s oil pigment which can’t contract the paint. A way to drill holes through glass—holes a twenty-five thousandth of an inch or less in diameter—with some scraps of wire and a No. 6 dry cell. You know—odds and ends.”
“You’ve marketed all these?”
“Yes, or patented or copyrighted them.”
“Oh Robin, I’m so glad! Are you getting results?”
“Am I?” The old, lovely, wondering look came into his face. “Peg, people are crazy. They just give money away. I honestly don’t have to think about money any more. That is, I never did; but now I tell people my account number and ask them to send their check to it for deposit, and they keep piling it in, and I can’t cash enough checks to keep up with it. When are you going to ask me why I’ve been keeping away from you?”
The abruptness of the question took Peg’s breath away. It was all she had been thinking about, and it was the reason she had accepted his invitation. She colored. “Frankly, I didn’t know how to lead up to it.”
“You didn’t have to lead up to it,” he said, smiling gravely. “You know that, Peg.”
“I suppose I know it. Well—why?”