“So?” he said. It seemed routine to him, the usual used car pitch.
Pat said, “But that’s yours. For the dinner music stretch. Between the Romeo and Juliet Overture”—she looked at the evening programming—“and Till Eulenspiegel—”
Picking up the phone, Jim dialed Ted Haynes’s home number. Presently Haynes’s measured voice was heard saying, “Who is calling?”
“This is Jim Briskin,” he said.
“On your phone or the station phone?”
“Tell him about the laugh,” Pat said.
“What?” he said, putting his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. And then he remembered the laugh.
The laugh was Looney Luke’s trademark. The sound truck carried it about town, and the loudspeakers in the illuminated towers of the car lot blasted it at the cars and pedestrians. It was a crazed laugh, a fun-house laugh; it went around and around, rising and falling, getting down into the belly in a slowed-down manner and then shooting up into the sinuses, all at once a sharp laugh, very shrill, a giggle. The laugh bubbled and simpered; something was wrong with it, something terrible and basic. The laugh became hysterical. Now it could not contain itself it burst frothily, fragmenting itself. Collapsing, the laugh sank down, winded, gasping, exhausted by the ordeal. And then, dragging in deep breaths, it started over. On and on it went, fifteen hours without letup, rolling out above the shiny Fords and Plymouths, over the Negro in knee boots who washed the cars, over the salesmen in their pastel suits, over the fiat lots, the, office buildings, the downtown business district of San Francisco, and ultimately over the residential sections, over the apartment houses with their single walls joining them in rows, over the new concrete houses near the Beach, over all the houses and all the stores, all the people in the town.
“Mr. Haynes,” he said, “I have some Looney Luke material here for the dinner music program. This stuff isn’t going to go over, not with the kind of audience I have. The old ladies out by the Park don’t buy used cars. And they turn this stuff off as fast as they can get to the radio. And—”
“I see your point,” Haynes said, “but it’s my understanding that Posin agreed to air Sharpstein’s material straight across the board each half hour. And anyhow, Jim, this is in the nature of an experiment.”
“Okay,” he said. “But when we’re through, we won’t have any old ladies or any other sponsors. And by that time Luke will have dumped his ninety carloads of ‘55 Hudsons or whatever it is he’s pushing, and then what? You suppose he’s going to keep this stuff up after he breaks the back of the other lots? This is just to knock them off.”
“You have a point,” Haynes said.
“Darn right I have.”
“I suppose Posin bit on this.”
“Afraid so.”
Haynes said, “Well, we’ve signed the contract. Let’s go ahead and finish out our commitment to—”
“But,” Jim said, “you mean you want me to go ahead and give this on the dinner music? Listen to this.” He reached for the script; Pat handed it to him.
“I know how it reads,” Haynes said. “I’ve caught it on the other independents. But I feel, considering the signed contract, we’re really obliged to go ahead with it. It would be bad business to back out.”
Jim said, “Mr. Haynes, this will kill us.” It would kill sponsorship of the classical music, anyhow. The little restaurants who supported classical music would back off, would vanish.
“Let’s give it a try and see,” Haynes said, with the tone of judgment. “Okay, boy? Maybe it’ll work out to the good. After all, this is currently our heaviest advertising account. You must take the longterm view. Now perhaps a few of those little fancy restaurants will act huffy for a while . . . but they’ll be back. Right, boy?”
They argued a little longer, but in the end Jim gave up and said goodbye.
“Thanks for calling me,” Haynes said. “I’m glad you feel you want to discuss this sort of problem with me, out in the open where we can talk about it.”
Putting the phone down, Jim said, “Luke’s cars are clean cars.”
“It’s on, then?”, Patricia said.
He took the script into the recording studio and began putting the “2A (Echo)” part onto tape. Then he switched on the other Ampex and taped “1A” also, and combined both so that at program time he had only to start the transport going. When he had finished, he rewound the tape and played it back. From the speakers his own professional announcer’s voice said: “The car you buy today from Looney Luke . . .”
While it played, he read over his mail. The first cards were requests from kids for current pop tunes, which he clipped to his continuity for the afternoon. Then a complaint from a businessman, a practical outgoing individual protesting that too much chamber music was being played on the dinner music program. Then a sweet note from a very gentle little old lady named Edith Holcum, who lived out in Stones-town, saying how much she enjoyed the lovely music and how glad she was that the station was keeping it alive.
Blood for his veins, he thought, putting her letter where he could refer to it. Something to show the advertisers. On went the struggle . . . five years of work, keeping up the pretense that this was his interest in life. He was devoting himself to this, to his music and programs. His cause.
From the doorway, Pat said, “You going to play the Fantastic Symphony tonight?”
“I thought so.”
She entered the room and seated herself across from him, in the comfortable armchair. Light flashed, a spark of yellow, as she lit a cigarette with her lighter. A present from him, given three years ago. Her legs rustled as she crossed them, smoothed her skirt. At one time she had been his wife. A few trivialities still connected them; the Berlioz symphony was one. An old favorite, and when he heard it, the whole background swam up: smells, tastes, and the rustle, as now, of her skirt. She liked long heavy colorful skirts and wide belts and the kind of sleeveless blouse that reminded him of the chemises of the girls on the covers of historical novels. Her hair, too, was that flowing uncombed mass, dark, soft, and always amiably in her way. Actually she was not large; she weighed exactly 111 pounds. Her bones were small. Hollow, she had once informed him. Like a flying squirrel’s. There had been a number of such similes tying them together; when he remembered, he was vaguely embarrassed.
Their tastes did not basically differ, and it was not on that account that the marriage had collapsed. The inside story he kept to himself, hoping that she had done the same; as office gossip it would have yielded indefinite harvest. They had wanted kids, right away and plenty of them, and when no kids appeared they had consulted specialists and discovered—lo!—that he, of the two of them, was sterile. But that had not been as bad as the next part, which involved Pat’s desire to locate what was ingenuously called a donor. The bickering over that had split them up. In all seriousness—but with overtones of self-contempt and rage—he had suggested that she get herself a lover; an affair, with emotional involvement, had seemed more acceptable to him than the science fiction device of artificial insemination. Or, he had suggested, why not simple adoption? But the donor idea intrigued her. His theory—and it had not gone over well with Pat—was that she yearned for parthenogenesis. And so they had gradually lost any real understanding of each other.
Now, glancing up at her, he saw this attractive woman (she was still not over twenty-seven or twenty-eight) and made out, as easily as ever, the qualities that had excited him in the first place. She had a genuine feminineness about her, not merely a daintiness, or a diminutiveness, or even a gracefulness; those were present, but in addition he recognized in her a basically active spirit.