On the evening of the day he had accepted the new job, he had gone home with two bottles of champagne. He beamed at his Ginny and presented her with the champagne. She stared at him in blank confusion. He took the champagne out of her hands and kissed her with splendid emphasis and resounding duration.
When he released her, gasping, she said, “What is this all about?”
“It is because you are a woman of rare perception and intelligence. And if I have your solemn promise never to gloat, I’ll tell you it is because you were entirely right, and I was dead wrong, darling.”
“About the job?”
“What else, pray? I just got bumped ten thousand, baby.”
“Ben! I don’t know what to say! How incredibly wonderful!”
“And we’re going to live one mile in the air, woman. You are standing in the presence of the brand-new district manager, Southwest District, headquarters in Denver.” Even as he beamed at her proudly, he was watching her closely. It was the critical moment.
He saw the doubts go out of her eyes. “Then champagne is exactly the right thing, isn’t it?” she said.
“Please chill it immediately. And jump when I give an order. I expect more respect around here from now on.”
“Lord and master,” she said, smiling, and came into his arms again.
He held the flame of his lighter to read his watch. Another ten minutes and it would be time to start to the airport. You did what you felt you had to do, and when it was done, you lived with it.
They could be content here, secure and happy. Things might become as good as they had once been, before insecurity began to corrode their contentment.
But he knew, and he would always know, that he had once climbed to a high and lonely place, that with the climbing irons and the ropes he had reached the last sheer drop before the summit. He had swung there in the frosty gale until finally, too numbed to make the final effort, he had climbed back down the way he had come, back down to a niche where he could be warm and safe and out of the wind.
He knew he would read and hear about the ones who made it all the way to the high peaks. The lower slopes of the mountains were warm and easy, and the trails were marked. The high places were dangerous. He knew how close he had come, and he could read about the others who had made it. Their powers and their decisions would affect him. And all his life he would wonder just how it felt to be up there.
He stood up and snapped his cigarette into the night and walked back to the car. As he got behind the wheel he found himself wondering if it was a happy ending. He smiled with derision at himself as that ancient phrase came into his mind. Happy endings were reserved for stories for children. An adult concerned himself with feasible endings. And this one was feasible, as an ending or as a beginning. You had to put your own puzzle together, and nobody would ever come along to tell you how well or how poorly you had done.
Afternoon of the Hero
May 21, 1966, The Saturday Evening Post
He woke up quite alone in his half acre of bed, in the sealed, soundproofed, shadowy expanse of bedroom, measuring the bulge of pain behind his eyes, tasting the sourness of his tongue. Soon, willing himself to make the effort, he hitched to the side of the bed, swung his legs out, and sat up quite slowly, making a face, scrubbing at his thinning harshness of black hair. He wormed his bare toes into the fur of the big white rug beside the bed and saw himself indistinctly in a distant mirror, the round doll-man in the bright pajamas. He reached to the big button board set into the headboard and punched the one for the draperies. The electric motor whined into life and opened the heavy draperies that covered the big window wall, letting in the flood of mid-May sunshine.
He pantomimed an extreme agony, covering his eyes with a heavy forearm, holding the other hand out in defense, and saying in one of his Balkan accents, “No, Andreyev, not the torture of the lights, comrade, I beg you.” He peered over his forearm, blinking. “I did it! I did it! I sabotaged the hushpuppy production, you all.”
He sighed and pushed the button for the tape. After a few scratchy sounds the music came on with a depth and fidelity too impressive for the song. It started up in the middle of a ricky-tick version of the Bahamian ballad Yellow Bird, a girl singing the lyrics in a gassy mock-sensual way.
He hummed skillful harmony and stood up and became a mortally wounded fellow bent on reaching the bathroom before expiring. He burlesqued it, using all the ingrained art of that big fat spry useful body, faking the smack of forehead against doorframe, the dazed rebound.
The big bathroom opened into another room with matching tile, containing his exercise equipment, rubbing table, barber chair, and steam box. His spacious shower stall had six shower heads and a back wall mirror. After soap and heat, he danced and gasped for a time in the chill spray of ice water. He knotted a large coral towel around his belly and went back to the bedroom. He went directly to the button board to ring for Robbie but stopped just before his finger touched the button. Just one more time, he thought. He had been aware of the magazine over on his desk from the instant he was completely awake. The special messenger had brought it out to the house the previous evening. Today five or six million copies were going into the hands of the public.
He brought the magazine back to the bed and sat and read that part again.
It would be too trite to say that King Noonan, one of the most fabulously successful comics of our time, is, underneath his exuberant exterior, a lonely and complex fellow. And perhaps it is no longer fashionable to look for the basic motivating force. But, if backed into a corner, I would say that the King’s engine is fear. He is not lonely — not with that permanent retinue. Nor is he complex in the ordinary meaning of the word.
King Noonan runs scared, and thus he runs very hard indeed. He is afraid of the effects of the abuse he inflicts on his big durable body. He is terrified of death. He is afraid of being laughed at for the wrong reasons. He is afraid to think of the probable reasons for the failures of his marriages, the failures in friendship. Failure is indeed his demon. Failure professionally, personally, socially, emotionally. And so he drives himself in the pursuit of a perfection that will make failure unthinkable, and we are the ones who gain thereby.
One day one of the demons will catch him. But in the meantime we are privileged to watch the chase, and enjoy the by-product of his fear, that great comic art, sometimes vulgar, sometimes as sensitive and delicate as great theater, always competent. Fear is the engine, and laughter is the long bright road.
He slapped the magazine shut and scaled it across the room, pages rattling. He went after it and picked it up and put it back on the desk. He wandered to the window wall and looked down at the pool. There were a few swimmers, and all the others were stretched out, flesh oiled, in the sun. No sound of them came into the room, no splash or shout or girl laugh, though he could see their mouths. Like a film with the sound gone bad. An idea moved through the back of his mind, a skit where the sound came and went, the silent parts always giving the audience an incorrect and bawdy idea of what was going on. Could they fake running a film backward? Ask Jorgie about that. Maybe do the rubber cane bit in reverse pantomime.
Robbie appeared less than a minute after King punched his bell. He came in briskly enough, and the smile was there, but King sensed something tentative about the man. The narrow jockey-face looked closed and defensive. So maybe it had been a rougher night than he remembered.