He thought of getting his car from the garage under the apartment building and driving to the station. Leaving the drugstore, he started back up the sidewalk.
A small grocery store was open. Inside, a radio played. The owner and his wife were at the counter listening to Marimba music. Bob Posin stopped at the doorway and yelled, “Hey, can I get something on your radio? I have to hear something; It’s important.”
The owner and his wife, old people, stared at him.
“This is an emergency,” he said, going inside, past the sausages and bins of peas, to the counter. The radio was a tiny wooden Emerson with a trailing antenna. He rotated the knob until he had found KOIF. The owner and his wife, both of them dressed in wool coats, withdrew in an injured fashion, leaving him alone with the radio. They pretended to be doing something else. They did not care what he did.
Still music, he thought. The goddamn music.
“Thanks,” he said, hurrying past them, out of the grocery store, and onto the sidewalk. Then he ran back to his own apartment. Panting, he reached his floor and searched in his pockets for his key.
His Magnavox remained on. He paced back and forth as the music finished itself out. During the final coda his impatience became a frenzy. He went into the kitchen for a drink of water; his throat was dry, burned by his agitation. He thought of all the people he could ring up: Sharpstein; Ted Haynes; Patricia Gray; the station’s attorney, who was on vacation in Santa Barbara.
The music ceased. He ran back into the living room.
Jim Briskin’s cultivated voice came on. “Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra, in Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspigel From a Columbia Masterworks long-playing record.”
Then a pause, a mind-wracking pause.
“I guess,” Jim Briskin said, “most of you have been over at Domingo’s lately. You’ve seen the new arrangement of the tables so you can look out over the Golden Gate while you’re eating. But I can’t help mentioning . . .” He went on, describing, in his usual manner, the restaurant.
Bob Posin picked up the telephone and called Patricia Gray. “Listen,” he said. “Did you hear Briskin tonight? Do you have your radio on?” Now the music had returned.
Patricia said, “Yes, I was listening.”
“Well?”
“I listened.”
“Did you hear anything?”
Her tone was obscure: he could not pin it down. “I guess I heard.”
“The Looney Luke commercial!” he shouted into the phone; his voice bounced back at him, deafening him. “Oh,” she said.
“Did you hear it? What the hell was he doing? Is it my imagination? That’s what he said, isn’t it? He said he was fed up and he wasn’t going to read it, he was tired of reading it.”
He got nothing out of her. Disgusted, he slammed down the phone and went back to pacing in front of the radio.
But still the music continued, and still he had to phone somebody. He tried the station again, without results. In his mind he pictured Jim Briskin at the microphone, in the green swivel chair, with the records, turntables, scripts, and tape transport before him, showing no emotion as the red light that indicated the phone blinker! on and off.
Standing before his Magnavox radio, Posin realized that he was never going to find out, never going to be sure; he would never get hold of Briskin if he phoned and waited a thousand years. The radio would continue playing music, and he would never hear Looney Luke mentioned again, and it would be nothing but a conjecture of his memory. Already he was losing the sense of conviction.
“Goddamn,” he said.
The telephone at station KOIF was still ringing as Jim Briskin shut the equipment down for the night. The time was twelve midnight. The street outside was less active; many of the neon signs were off.
The stairs were dismal as he descended floor by floor to the lobby of the McLaughlen Building. Under his arm was his regular packet of records; they had been borrowed from record shops, and tomorrow they went back into stock.
The night air was thin and cold. He took a full breath.
On the sidewalk he started in the direction of the station’s parking lot. But a car at the curb honked. The door opened, and a woman’s voice said from far off, “Jim—over here.”
He walked toward the car. Drops of night mist gleamed on the fenders and hood. “Hello,” he said to her.
Patricia switched on the headlights and started up the engine. “I’ll drive you,” she said. She had her heavy cloth coat bundled around her, buttoned and tucked under her legs. In the cold, her face was pinched.
“I have my own car. It’s in the lot.” He did not feel like company.
“We can just drive around, then.”
“Why?” But he got in. The upholstery was icy as he adjusted his packet of records beside him.
She drove the car out into traffic among the other cars. Neon signs and headlights sparkled, colors in a variety of sizes. Words flashing on and off. “I phoned the station,” she said presently. “But you didn’t answer.”
“Why should I answer? It’s either somebody complaining or somebody with a request. I only have the records I brought; I have to play what I planned to play.”
She listened to his short burst of resentment without visible reaction; he saw no response. What a bleak expression, he thought. How set her face was.
“What’s with you?” he said. “Why this?”
“I listened,” she said. Now her eyes were fixed on him, unwinking, wet. “I heard what you said about the Looney Luke commercial. You must have practiced a long time to say it like that.”
“I didn’t practice. I started to read it, and then I gave up.”
She said, “I see.”
“It’s the only way I know,” he said. “These guys who work in factories throw their shoes into the machinery.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“I guess it’s lousy.”
“I wouldn’t say lousy. Dangerous is what I would say. Fatal, if you want to know what I think.”
He said, “You were the one who didn’t want me to read the thing.”
“I—” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Watch the traffic,” he said.
“That’s not what I wanted you to do. I wanted you to make some sort of rational protest. Well, it doesn’t matter now.”
“No,” he said. “I guess it doesn’t.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I can get a job easily enough. I know people in the area. If I have to, I can go to the East Coast.”
“You don’t think this will follow you.”
“There’s an announcer,” Jim said, “who today has a half-hour TV show coast to coast, who once on a network radio show told his listeners to pour Jergens’ lotion in their hair. He was so crocked he could barely stagger through the show. And it was only a fifteen-minute show.”
“What are your plans? Do you have anything worked out?”
“I just want to go home and go to bed.”
She made a right turn and brought the car around in front of the McLaughlen. Building once more. “Look, go get your car and follow me. And we’ll both go have a drink at your place or my place.”
“You think I’m going to go berserk?” he said.
“And maybe listen to old Mengelberg records,” she went on, as if he had not spoken.
“What old Mengelberg records? Those old worn-out clunks we built our marriage on?” Broodingly, he said, “I guess you did get most of them.”
“You kept Les Preludes,” she said, “which was the only one either of us really wanted.”
Arid he had kept the Leonore No. 3, but she didn’t know about that. During the vindictive days of dividing up their possessions—under the California Joint−Property Settlement Acthe had told her fables, and one of the fables was that the records in the album were broken. Sat on, he had said; one night, at a party, she had done the sitting on a whole chairful of albums.