"Have you anyone in mind you can recommend to take your place?" he asks me pleasantly enough on moving day, but with a taint in his manner that puts me on guard. "I'd like someone better than you," he adds with breezy malice the moment I nod.
"You'll have to pay him much more," I joke.
"I'll be happy to," he scores. "He'll be worth it."
Green is not afraid of me at all yet, and I may have to handle him, for a while, by groveling.
"What about Kagle?" he inquires sweetly. "Do you think he'd be good enough to take your place?"
"He wouldn't want to. I'm afraid he'd interpret it as a big step down."
"Not from where you're planning to put him."
"Special projects?"
"For you?"
"Of course."
"After working for you he'd interpret it as a big step up."
"Jack," I entreat him in a conciliatory tone, "you're supposed to be afraid of me now. At least a little."
"You knew about this when I was threatening you last time. Didn't you?"
"It had to be quiet."
"And you were afraid of me anyway."
"I wasn't afraid."
"My judgment may be bad but my eye isn't. I couldn't be that wrong about you."
"You had the whammy on me then."
"There was all that sweat. And you're afraid of me now. Right now."
I grin submissively. "You've got the whammy on me still."
"And you always will be."
"I'm not sure about that. I won't have to go to meetings with you alone. I can criticize you to others. I can kill your projects and reject your work."
"Would you?"
"I'd rather not. I'd rather have your help. Just don't make a fool of me."
"It will be hard to resist, with someone like you."
"I know. You're tempted right now. Fly into somebody else's face if you want to be squashed. Try Lester Black. He'll do it quickly enough."
Green is not able to keep the flush of anger from climbing into his cheeks. "If I did," he retorts hotly, "I'd probably find you in the way, anointing his cheeks."
And for a moment, I am the one with superior poise. "You're starting," I chide gently.
"It's hard not to."
"Now you're starting again."
"It gets harder. How will you treat me?"
"With deference. Better than Kagle did. With fear — I don't want to fight with you yet, not this year. I'll be very nice to you with everyone, if you don't make me look ridiculous for being so."
"You'll be nice? That's a humiliation for me right there."
"That's a part I'll enjoy," I agree affably. "I'm smiling now because I know it's true. Not because I'm enjoying it yet. Jack, there's been a big change. I don't work for you anymore. You have to be afraid of me now," I remind him. "You know that."
"I'm afraid I can't be."
And Green still has the whammy on me! I can stomp all over him, spit in his eye, beat him down into nervous collapse, send him, clutching his bowels, into a hospital bed with his spastic colitis; I am younger, stronger, bigger, and in better health than he is and can punch him in the jaw as easily as Johnny Brown can give me my punch in the jaw — and he still has the whammy on me. I am still afraid of him and perspiring copiously under the arms again. No wonder I am more and more prey to weird visions and experiences. (Some tickle my fancy. Some do not.)
The day before yesterday, I walked into a luncheonette for a rare roast beef sandwich on a seeded roll and thought I found my barber working behind the counter.
"What are you doing in a luncheonette?" I asked.
"I'm not your barber," he answered. I was afraid I was losing my mind. A week ago I looked out a taxi window and saw Jack Green begging in the street in the rain, dressed in a long wet overcoat and ragged shoes. He was a head taller, thinner, pale, and gaunt. It wasn't him. But that's what I saw.
I was afraid I was losing my wits. Yesterday I looked out the window of a bus and thought I saw Charlie Chaplin strolling along the avenue and believed I knew him. It wasn't Charlie Chaplin and I didn't know him.
My memory may be starting to fail me. I have trouble with names now and with keeping in correct order the digits of telephone numbers that have long been familiar to me. Pairs of digits from other telephone numbers push their way in. After all these years, I am not always certain anymore whether the seven-seven belongs in the first segment of Penny's phone number and the eight-seven in the latter or vice versa. I don't know every time if Red Parker's phone number is two-eight-o-two or two-o-eight-two. I do know Penny is pregnant again — not by me. I have given her money for the abortion. She will insist on paying me back when she's saved enough from the money she receives monthly from her parents in Wilmington. It used to be that every cocktail waitress I ran into had one divorce and two children who lived outside the city with the girl's mother. Now they've had two abortions. College students and young models, secretaries, stewardesses, and acting students have had one. Graduate students may have two, depending on their field of study. Jane is gone, along with the entire Art Department. (It was unprofitable.)
"Call me," I asked her. "As soon as you're settled. Or even before."
She did. When she called, I said I was busy and would call her back. I haven't. Sometimes when I'm asleep, I try to wake up and can't. Sleep has me in its grip, and that is my dream.
I am trying to get my affairs in order. I have written a list.
"Listen," I say to my wife one day in a quietly decisive manner. "We're going to have to sit down together soon and do some serious thinking about Derek. We're not going to be able to keep him forever, you know."
"I don't want to talk about it."
Neither do I.
I think I'm in terrible trouble. I think I've committed a crime. The victims have always been children.
"Are you angry with me?" I inquire of my boy with an appraising smile, in a voice I keep as bland as possible.
"No. I'm not angry."
A flicker of some kind has crossed his face. My question is disturbing him. I'm almost afraid to go on.
"You don't talk to me much anymore."
"I talk." He shrugs. "I'm talking now." He wiggles with unease, a downcast mood darkening his features. He will not look at me.
"Not as much as you used to. You're always in your room."
He shrugs again. "I like it there."
"You don't like me to ask you questions, do you?"
"Sometimes."
"What do you do in there?"
"Read. Watch television. I do my homework. Think."
"Alone?"
"I like it."
"You didn't use to."
"Now I do."
"Are you always able to do all of your homework without me?"
"Not always."
"What do you do?"
"It's all right if it's wrong."
"Wouldn't it be better, though, if it were always correct?"
"The teachers don't care. Can I go now?"
"Where?"
He smiles apologetically, anticipating the humor of his reply. "To my room."
"Sure," I consent genially, with a heartiness that is false. "I just wanted to make sure you weren't angry with me."
"You stay in your room a lot," he pauses near the staircase to argue over his shoulder defensively. "Mommy stays in her room. You don't think there's something wrong with me, do you?"
"But I always let you come into mine."
Oh, God — here he is, a sensitive, candid, alert little boy, no larger now, it seems, than he was as a toddler; and I am quarreling with him, near tears (and with a lump in my throat), as though I were a rejected suitor, fencing with him selfishly as I would with my wife or my daughter.
How shall I die? Let me count the ways. (No, I won't.) I've been through that juvenile exercise before and won't waste time. None is good. I'm unable to eradicate from my mind the image of that vigorous, prosperous, large, handsome man who fell dead in the lobby of my office building a few weeks ago as we were nearly abreast of each other. I saw him clearly as he fell forward. Even as he was doubling over and crumpling he looked the epitome of radiant and robust indestructibility until his face hit the floor with a soggy whack and blood from the impact shot out of his mouth. I continued walking past him without a hitch in my stride. I made believe I didn't see. When I got back from lunch, he wasn't there. He had been taken away. I was disappointed. Someone had distorted reality for the sake of neatness. (I have things organized very neatly now upstairs.) I still catch myself looking for him in the spot where he fell. I still remember him falling. This morning on my way to work I saw an unconscious derelict lying on the steps of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, staining the stone platforms with a fluid that could have been urine or whiskey. Policemen were there and had the situation in hand. They didn't need my help.