The major must have read me. I remember Jordan and Cully in Las Vegas kidding me about how anybody could tell what I was thinking. Because the major had a look of pity when he said, “I’m telling you for your own good. The brass will have their CID people all over this armory. The FBI may keep snooping around. All the kids in the Reserve will still try to use you, try to get you into deals. They’ll keep the pot stirring. But if you quit, everything should blow over pretty quick. The investigators will cool off and go away with nothing to focus on.”
I wanted to ask about all the other civilians who had been taking bribes, but the major anticipated me. “I know of at least ten other advisers like you, unit administrators, who are going to resign. Some have already. Believe me, I’m on your side. And you’ll be OK. You’re wasting your time on this job. You should have done better for yourself at your age.”
I nodded. I was thinking that too. That I hadn’t done much with my life so far. Sure, I’d had a novel published, but I was making a hundred bucks a week take-home pay from Civil Service. True, I earned another three or four hundred a month with free-lance articles for the magazines, but with the illegal gold mine closed down, I had to make a move.
“OK,” I said. “I’ll write a letter giving two weeks’ notice.”
The major nodded and shook his head. “You have some paid sick leave coming.” he said. “Use it up in those two weeks and look for a new job. I’ll stand still for it. Just come in a couple of times a week to keep the paperwork going.”
I went back to my desk and wrote out my letter of resignation. Things weren’t as bad as they looked. I had about twenty days of vacation pay coming to me, which was about four hundred dollars. I had, I figured, about fifteen hundred dollars in my government pension fund, which I could draw out, though I’d forfeit my rights to a pension when I was sixty-five. But that was more than thirty years away. I could be dead by then. A total of two grand. And then there was the bribe money I had stashed with Cully in Vegas. Over thirty grand there. For a moment I had an overwhelming sense of panic. What if Cully reneged on me and didn’t give me my money? There would be nothing I could do about that. We were good friends, he had bailed me out of my troubles, but I had no illusions about Cully. He was a Vegas hustler. What if he said he had my money coming to him for the favor he had done me? I couldn’t dispute it. I would have paid the money to keep out of jail. Christ, would I have paid it!
But the thing I dreaded most was having to tell Valerie I was out of a job. And having to explain to her father. The old man would ask around and get the truth anyway.
I didn’t tell Valerie that night. The next day I took off from work and went to see Eddie Lancer at his magazines. I told him everything and he sat there, shaking his head and laughing. When I finished, he said, almost wonderingly, “You know, I’m always getting surprised. I thought you were the straightest guy in the world next to your brother, Artie.”
I told Eddie Lancer about how taking the bribes, becoming a half-assed criminal had made me feel better psychologically. That in some way I had discharged a lot of the bitterness I felt. The rejection of my novel by the public, the drabness of my life, its basic failure, how I’d always really been unhappy.
Lancer was looking at me with that little smile on his face. “And I thought you were the least neurotic guy I ever met,” he said. “You’re happily married, you have kids, you live a secure life, you earn a living. You’re working on another novel. What the hell more do you want?’
“I need a job,” I told him.
Eddie Lancer thought that one over for a moment. Oddly enough I didn’t feel embarrassed appealing to him.
“Just between you and me I’m leaving this place in about six months,” he said. “They’ll move another editor up to my place. I’ll be recommending my successor and he’ll owe me a favor. I’ll ask him to give you enough free-lance to live on.”
“That would be great,” I said.
Eddie said briskly, “I can load you up with work until then. Adventure stories, some of the love fiction crap and some book reviews I usually do. OK?”
“Sure,” I said. “When do you figure you’ll finish your book?”
“In a couple of months,” Lancer said. “How about you?”
It was a question I always hated. The truth was that I had only an outline of a novel I wanted to write about a famous criminal case in Arizona. But I hadn’t written anything. I had submitted the outline to my publisher, but he had refused to give me an advance. He said it was the kind of novel that wouldn’t make money because it involved the kidnapping of a child who was murdered. There wouldn’t be any sympathy for the kidnapper, the hero of the book. I was aiming at another Crime and Punishment, and that had scared the publisher off.
“I’m working on it,” I said. “Still a long way to go.”
Lancer smiled sympathetically. “You’re a good writer,” he said. “You’ll make it big someday. Don’t worry.”
– -
We talked awhile longer about writing and books. We both agreed we were better novelists than most of the famous novelists making their fortunes on the best-seller lists. When I left, I was in a confident mood. I always left Lancer that way. For some reason he was one of the few people I felt easy with, and because I knew he was smart and gifted, his good opinion of my talent cheered me up.
And so everything had turned out for the best. I was now a full-time writer, I would lead an honest life, I had escaped jail and in a few months I would move into my very own house, for the first time in my life. Maybe a little crime does pay.
– -
Two months later I moved into my newly built house on Long Island. The kids all had their own bedrooms. We had three bathrooms and a special laundry room. I would no longer have to lie in my bath while newly washed clothes dripped down into my face. No longer have to wait for the kids to finish. I had the almost excruciating luxury of privacy. My own den to write in, my own garden, my own lawn. I was separate from other people. It was Shangri-La. And yet it was something so many people took for granted.
Most important of all, I felt that now my family was safe. We had left the poor and desperate behind us. They would never catch up; their tragedies would never cause ours. My children would never be orphans.
Sitting on my suburban back porch one day, I realized I was truly happy, maybe happier than I would ever be in my life again. And that made me a little pissed off. If I was an artist, why was I so happy with such ordinary pleasures, a wife I loved, children who delighted me, a cheap tract house in the suburbs? One thing sure, I was no Gauguin. Maybe that was why I wasn’t writing. I was too happy. And I felt a twinge of resentment against Valerie. She had me trapped. Jesus.
Except even this couldn’t keep me feeling content. Everything was going so well. And the pleasure you took in children was so commonplace. They were so disgustingly “cute.” When my son was five years old, I had taken him for a walk through the streets of the city and a cat had jumped out of a cellar and almost literally sailed in front of us. My son had turned to me and said, “Is that a scaredy-cat?” When I told Vallie about it, she was delighted and wanted to send it in to one of those magazines that pay money for cute little stories. I’d had a different reaction. I wondered if one of his friends had taunted him with being a scaredy-cat and he had been puzzled by what the phrase meant rather than insulted. I thought of all the mysteries of language and experience my son was encountering for the first time. And I envied him the innocence of childhood as I envied him the luck he had in having parents he could say that to and then have them make a fuss over him.
And I remembered one day when we had gone out for a family Sunday-afternoon walk on Fifth Avenue, Valerie window-shopping for dresses she could never afford. Coming towards us was a woman about three feet tall but dressed elegantly in suede jerkin and white frilly blouse and dark tweed skirt. My daughter tugged at Valerie’s coat and pointed to the dwarf lady and said, “Mommy, what’s that?”