“Including Mr. Downey, sir?”
“Yes.”
“And Mr. O’Neil, sir?”
“Everyone! Anyone! Can you get that through your heads?”
“Heads, sir? I have one head, sir.”
“I’m sure,” Raymond snapped. “Then are you able to get it through your head? No calls. Do you understand?”
“Bet on it, sir. Everything. Bet your house, your clothes.”
“Bet? Oh. One moment, there. I will revise my orders. I will take any calls from Buenos Aires. You probably pronounce that Bewnose Airs. I will accept calls from there.”
“Which, sir?”
“Which what?”
“Which city?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Buenos Aires or Bewnose Airs, sir?”
“It’s the same place!”
“Very good, sir. You will accept calls from either or both. Now, would you like to revise those orders, sir?” Raymond hung up his phone as she was speaking.
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” the operator said to the girls working on either side of her. “Am I gonna get that one someday. I wouldn’t care if I was offered four times the money on some other job which had half the hours. I would never leave this here job as long as he works here. Someday, I may be a liddul old lady sittin’ at this switchboard, but someday—the day will come—an’ oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!” She was grinding her teeth as she talked.
“Who? Shaw?” the girl on her left asked.
“What’s the use?” the girl on her right said. “If you get that offer for four times the money you take it. Nobody is ever gonna be able to do anything about Shaw.”
Dear Jocie:
This is a difficult letter to get written. It is nearly an impossible letter for a w
eak and frightened man to write, and I have surprised myself with that sentence because I have never thought that of myself and I have never said anything less than a sufficiency about myself. I will set down at the outset that I am going to open myself up to you and that it will probably be a long, long letter so that, should it hurt you to read any such things any further, you may stop now and it will all be over. To have to love you as much as I do (as I
did
was what I had started to write, so that I could plot its progression and its growth over the nine empty and useless years without you) and to feel my love for you grow and grow and grow and to have no place to store this enormous harvest within the emptiness, I have found that I must carry it ahead of me wherever I go, bundled in my arms like old clothes which no one else can use and no one wants but which have warmth in them still if someone, as bleakly cold as I have been, can be found to wear them. You will return to New York next month. I have started this letter almost thirty times but I cannot postpone writing it and mailing it for another day because if I do it may not reach you. I cannot write this letter but I must write this letter because I know that I have not got the character nor the courage, the habit of hope nor the assurance that comes from having a place in a crowded world, and I could never be able to speak to you about this long pain and bitterness which—
He stopped writing. He had smudged the paper with several genuine tears.
Nineteen
THE FIRST BREAK IN THE LONG, LONG WAIT through dread, even though it was a totally incomprehensible break, came in May, 1960. It happened when Marco was late for a two o’clock date with Raymond at Hungarian Charlie’s booze outlet, across the street from the flash shop.
It was a fairly well-known fact to practically anyone who did not lack batteries for his hearing aid that Hungarian Charlie was one of the more stridently loquacious publicans in that not unsilent business. Only one other boniface, who operated farther north on Fifty-first Street, had a bigger mouth. Charlie talked as though Sigmund Freud himself had given permission, nay, had urged him, to tell everyone everything that came into his head, and in bad grammar, yet. Ten minutes before Marco got to the saloon, with Raymond seated at bar center staring at a glass of beer on a slow afternoon, Charlie had pinned a bookmaker at the entrance end of the bar, a man who would much rather have talked to his new friend, a young, dumpy blonde with a face like a bat’s and the thirst of a burning oil field. Charlie was telling them, loud and strong, hearty and healthy, about his wife’s repulsive older brother who lived with them and about how he had followed Charlie all over the apartment all day Sunday telling him what to do with his life, which was a new development brought on by the fact that he had just inherited twenty-three hundred dollars from a deceased friend whom he had been engaged to marry for fourteen years, which was a generous thing for her to have done when it was seen from the perspective, Charlie said, that this bum had never given the broad so much as a box of talcum powder for Christmas, it having been his policy always to pick a fight with her immediately preceding gift-exchanging occasions.
“Lissen,” Charlie yelled, “you inherit that kinda money and you naturally feel like you know alla answers and also it puts me in a position where I can’t exactly kick him inna ankle, you know what I mean? So, wit’ the new pernna view, I say tuh him, very patient, ‘Why don’t you pass the time by playing a liddul solitaire?’ ”
Raymond was on a bar stool twelve feet away from Charlie and had in no way been eavesdropping on the conversation, as that could have been judged suicidal. He rapped on the bar peremptorily with a half dollar. Charlie looked up, irritated. One lousy customer in the whole lousy joint and he had to be a point killer.
“What, arreddy?” Charlie inquired.
“Give me a deck of cards,” Raymond said. Charlie looked at the bookmaker, then rolled his eyes heavenward. He shrugged his shoulders like the tenor in Tosca, opened a drawer behind him, took out a blue bicycle deck, and slid it along the polished surface to Raymond.
Raymond took the deck from its box and began to shuffle smoothly and absent-mindedly, and Charlie went back to barbering the bookmaker and the young, dumpy blonde. Raymond was laying down the second solitaire spread when Marco came in, ten minutes later. He greeted Charlie as he passed him, ordering a beer, then stood at the bar at Raymond’s elbow. “I got held up in traffic,” he said ritualistically. “And so forth.” Raymond didn’t answer.
“Are you clear for dinner, Raymond?” Marco wasn’t aware that Raymond was ignoring him. “My girl insists that the time has come to meet you, and no matter how I try to get out of it, that’s the way it’s got to be. Besides, I am about to marry the little thing, ringside one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, and we would like you to be the best man.”
The queen of diamonds showed at the twenty-third card turn. Raymond scooped the cards together, ignoring Marco. Becoming aware of the silence, Marco was studying Raymond. Raymond squared the deck, put it facedown on top of the bar, placed the queen of diamonds faceup on top of the stack, and stared at it in a detached and preoccupied manner, unaware that Marco was there. Charlie put the glass of beer in front of Marco at the rate of one hundred and thirty-seven words a minute, decibel count well above the middle register, then turned, walking back to the bookmaker and the broad to punctuate his narrative by recalling the height of the repartee with his brother-in-law: “Why don’t you take a cab quick to Central Park and jump inna lake, I says,” and his voice belted out loud and strong as though a sound engineer were riding gain on it. Raymond brushed past Marco, walked rapidly past the bookmaker and the girl, and out of the saloon.
“Hey! Hey, Raymond!” Marco yelled. “Where you going?” Raymond was gone. By the time Marco got to the street he saw Raymond slamming the door of a cab. The taxi took off fast, disappearing around the corner, going uptown.
Marco returned to the saloon. He sipped at his beer with growing anxiety. The action of the game of solitaire nagged at him until he placed it in the dreams. It was one of the factors in the dreams that he had placed no meaning upon because he had come to regard the game as an aberration that had wriggled into the fantasy. He had discussed it because it had been there, but after one particularly bright young doctor said that Raymond had undoubtedly been doing something with his hands which had looked as though he were playing solitaire, Marco had gradually allowed the presence of the game in the dream to dim and fade. He now felt the conviction that something momentous had just happened before his eyes but he did not know what it was.