How the hell did I ever get into this racket?
It was a demoralizing question he had asked himself, and he put it from himself with a mental wrenching. It was a racket, like any other, and just because he was going to get dumped when Gogroth informed the boss young Spence was not thinking pro-Gogroth, was no reason to damn the entire industry.
Dumped …
Then an idea came to him, and he liked it even less than the concept of himself being fired.
The idea remained with him despite his attempts to drown it in a flood of scruples and morality.
There was Jean and her need for worldly possessions. That McCobb sofa and chair suite would run a good fifteen hundred, and a man out of work cannot afford to buy Paul McCobb furniture, or Saarinen chairs, or any of the other fantastic implements of what Jean called “the good life.”
Could he afford to lose Jean?
Because that would be one of the resultant consequences of telling old man Gogroth the truth. And if he didn’t — what then?
Why then, I’m compromising,he told himself acidly,and all the good nonfiction books on the subject say that is a moral sin for the thinking man in our time, as well as bad for the soul, the talent, and the complexion.
He didn’t give a damn about compromising, not really. It was something he could not afford to give a damn about. That was for guys with other problems, in other rackets. It was a tough life. All the similes about the Madison Avenue jungle. Other guys with other problems.
Not the problem of Mr. Gogroth and his rocks.
So there was another way out.
There was the simple way out of sharking someone else. Making someone else guilty. If the campaign went as it was planned — and there was no question it was a really bad , insulting campaign — Gogroth would lose a mint, and he was going to demand a head be chopped.
Again, Spence did not care if Gogroth lost his shirt, uppers, and lowers entirely. It might do the fat bastard some good at that to taste poverty.
But what about me?
He had known poverty, and Jean had left him nine times in three years. Okay, so she was mercenary, and the good life appealed more than the poverty. Was that a crime? He knew only that he could not live without her, and if it took lying a little, compromising a little, setting someone else up for the kill a little … that was the price one had to pay. Or make someone else pay.
So the idea clung like a porous plaster.
Make it Gerry Coogan’s idea, Gerry Coogan’s baby all the way. It was in the way you phrased it: “Our boy Gerry Coogan did all the prep work on this, F. J.” and “Remember that name, F. J.; Gerry Coogan’s the boy who set this up so beautifully for you.”
Sure it was a rat trick. That was the law of the jungle. Eat or — oh hell!
He knew he couldn’t do it. Coogan needed the job as badly as he did. He had two kids, and that extra after-hours work as a commercial artist wasn’t helping out as much as a man in Coogan’s position needed. Not with one of the kids being eaten by a tumor.
No, he decided, he couldn’t do it. Jean would just have to take their life together as he was able to provide it, or they’d have to part the ways. It was that simple.
The buzz startled him, and for a second after the receptionist’s dulcet tones advised him, “You may go in now, Mr. Spence,” he sat there.
Then, rising, he tucked the case under his arm and strode up to F. J. Gogroth’s door. That man could really throw the rocks …
“Good morning, F. J.” he chirped gaily, marching into the presence. “Say, this is one helluva wild promotion we’ve got shored up for you. One of our best men was the real brain behind it. A guy we’re really proud to have on the team …”
3. Payment Returned, Unopened
FOR HER IT HAD BEEN HALLEY'S COMET in her closed hand, sharp pinwheels of light and fire whirling. For him it had been a fast lay on a chick with a harelip. And from this union there came three: a sorrow burning steadily, a hag-riding guilt, and a foetus.
Claude Hammel was a first-year dental student; he waited tables at the ZBT house to make expenses (though working for all those yids bothered him), and he knew he could not marry her.
So, logically enough, he went to a fortune teller.
“Why do I have to tell you all that?” he asked, already firmly convinced she was a charlatan — so why the hell had he come here in the first place?
“I have to know what you consider the truth of it, so that I may more correctly interpret the future as it will affect you.” Her hair was caught up under a brightly colored babushka and the color of the cloth was challenged by the crimson that chain-reactioned in her wrinkled cheeks and her pipe-bowl nose. She drank, it was there in the wreckage of her face.
“But if I tell you why I came, what good can you do me … tell me that, will you?”
She spread her hands, and he felt trapped, somehow. “You came because you were walking and saw this place, and wanted an answer. Do you want the answer … or any answer?” So he told her about the rooming house where he lived, and about Ann. How she had been crying in her basement room and how he had taken advantage of it, telling her he loved her.
“I don’t know, it was just, it was, hell, I don’t know. I just did it!”
She stared at him levelly. “And now she is with child and the idea of marrying a harelipped girl repulses you. I can understand that.” Her gaze was cynical, mocking.
“That isn’t it at all,” he jumped to defend himself. “I just can’t, I mean, I can’t marry anyone right now. Not Princess Grace if I’d knocked her, I mean, excuse me, if she was available. I’ve got to finish school.”
The gypsy stared at him for a terrible moment.
“She might kill herself,” she ventured.
“Oh, come on! ” he derided the idea. No one took their life these days over something like that.
“All right, then,” she said, clasping her wrinkled fingers. He noticed her joints were arthritically swollen and somehow it disturbed him more than her gaze or words. “Here’s the answer to your problem … ”
He leaned forward. Oddly, he believed she might have a solution. It was cockeyed, but that was the way with life, and he was desperate.
“There is safety in numbers,” she said softly.
He waited expectantly, but she was finished.
“And?” he asked.
“Pay me now, then go away.” Her voice was very cool and businesslike. The conference was concluded.
“Hey, what the hell kind of a fortune is that? ” he demanded angrily. He felt cheated.
“Pay me and then go,” she repeated. There was something deadly in her tone. He reached into his pocket and brought out a dollar bill, almost without realizing he was doing it. Her eyes held him fascinated: cobra and mongoose.
When he was outside, walking the foggy night back toward the campus, he pondered what she had said. At first it made no sense whatever. Then it made a great deal of sense, and it frightened him so much he stopped and swallowed with difficulty.
It was a terrible thing to consider.
He stopped at the first liquor store he could find and bought a fifth of Black & White. He knew she would be at home; she lived alone and no one called her for dates.
She was pleased to see him, timorous at first, fearing her news of earlier that day would have driven him away.
Her hair was very soft, and brown, and reminded him in an obscure way of the robin’s wings. She wore it long, in a forties-style pageboy that flattered the long planes of her face. Her eyes were also very brown and moist. It was a nice face.
Except for the harelip, which he stared at in fascination. A fascination she took to be unconcern born of attraction for her as a whole. She thought he did not notice. She was wrong.