“Hassles seem easily come by these days.”
“All right,” Paul said, “they do, they are. I’m uptight. I admit it. I’m right in the middle of the biggest job I’ve ever had, the biggest job of its kind anybody has ever had—do you realize that? There has never been a building like the one we’re building.”
“Is that all it is?” Patty said. “Just the job?” Make it so, she told herself, and knew that she would not believe it even if he said it was true.
But all Paul-said was, “It gets to you. That’s all.”
“In what way?”
“I told you I didn’t want to talk about it. You say you don’t hold with Women’s Lib. Okay, let’s stay traditional.
You run the house. I’ll take care of earning our living. You told me once you’d follow wherever I led. Okay, follow.”
Figures do not lie. Oh, there are jokes about liars, damn liars, and statisticians. But when the figures were Paul’s own, computer-verified, there was no point in arguing with them. And what the figures he sat staring at demonstrated brought a feeling of near-nausea to his stomach and to his mind.
He had figured too close in his original bid. Weather had been against him. Material delays had thrown all labor-cost computations into chaos. Accidents had slowed the job, and there had been a larger than usual incidence of work rejected and thus done over. He, Paul Simmons, wasn’t as good at this business as he had come to consider himself. He had had sheer bad luck. God was against him. Hell, he could lay his hands on a hundred reasons (excuses) and none of them mattered a damn.
The facts stared him in the face, and the facts were that when he set percentage of the job on the World Tower completed against cost of the job so far, it was evident that he was not going to come out of the total job even financially alive, let alone showing a profit.
It was five o’clock. His own office seemed larger than usual, and very still. The outer offices would by now be deserted. Distant sounds of traffic reached him from the street thirty stories below. THINK, the IBM signs said. And some place he had seen a sign that read: Don’t Think, Drink. Why should that kind of nonsense run through his mind at a time like this?
He pushed back his chair, got up, and walked to the windows. It was an automatic reaction of McGraw’s too; and why should that come to mind? That question at least he could answer. Because McGraw himself, big, rough, tough, unyielding, godlike McGraw was rarely out of the back of Paul’s mind. Face it: I live in his goddam shadow; and unlike Diogenes, I am afraid to say, “Get out of my sunlight, Alexander.”
He could see people walking, hurrying on the sidewalks below. Going home? Happily? Reluctantly? Angrily, after a day of frustration? What difference? They are not a part of me; no one is a part of me. Not Patty, not Zib, nobody. I am me and—what was McGraw’s phrase?—life has leaned on me this time and squashed me flat. And who cares, except me?
He found himself looking at the solid windows as if he had never seen them before. In air-conditioned buildings you aren’t supposed to be able to open windows. It is partly at least to keep people from jumping out of them as they were supposed to have done back in Twenty-nine? Was he, for God’s sake, even thinking of—that? Nonsense. You’re playing to an audience—of one. Knock it off.
He walked back to his desk and stood for a little time looking down at the figures neatly written, impeccably aligned, like little soldiers marching along—where? To the edge of a high cliff, that’s where—and then right over the edge. The sound of Pete Janowski’s screams came to mind again, and the sickening thunk that had ended them. Once again the nausea rose. He fought it down with effort.
It was then that the phone had rung and he had stared at it for some time before he made any move to pick it up.
It was Zib’s voice. “Hi.”
“You,” Paul said. “Hello.” His eyes were still on the marching figures.
“That overwhelms me with its enthusiasm.”
“Sorry. I was—thinking.”
“I’ve been thinking too.”
He and Zib, so much alike: her thoughts were of herself, his turned inward too. It was almost an effort to say, “About what?”
Zib’s voice was carefully unconcerned. “I’ve been thinking that I’d like to be laid. Do you know any male who might be interested?”
Who arranged these things anyway? Who planned this juxtaposition of lighthearted bawdiness and tragedy, real tragedy? Sex was the last thing he was in the mood for now. Why couldn’t the silly woman have chosen another time?
“Do I hear a bid?” Zib said.
And yet, why not, why the bloody hell not? Why not lose himself in her slim softness, listen to her sounds and smile to himself that he was their cause, find his own concentration, not on despair, but on pure sheer animal enjoyment? What better answer? “The bid was made silently,” he said. “The hotel in twenty minutes.”
Her voice was amused now. “You sound actually interested.”
“Living,” Paul said, “beats dying. And don’t even try to figure that one out. Just come prepared for a romp.”
Naked, relaxed, “I’m supposed to be having dinner with a writer who suddenly arrived in town,” Zib said. “Nat didn’t even question it. There are benefits to being an editor.”
Paul was silent, staring at the ceiling. His mind, alive again, was probing strange, tortuous thoughts. What if—?
“Did you hear me, darling?” Zib ran her forefinger lightly down his chest. “Hmmm?”
“I heard.”
“Then why so quiet?”
“I’m thinking.”
“At a time like this,” Zib said, “that is the hell of a thing to do.” She sighed. “All right, you’re a male chauvinist pig, so what are you thinking about?”
“Nat.”
Zib frowned. Her forefinger was still. “What on earth for? What about him?”
“Why,” Paul said, and suddenly he was smiling, decision made. “I think he’s going to do me some favors.”
“You’re mad.” Zib paused. “Why should he do you favors?”
“Well,” Paul said, “he isn’t even going to know that he’s doing them.” He reached for her then, and she came to him willingly. “Any more,” Paul said, “than he knows that he lends me his wife on occasion. Like right now.”
It was a modern insurance-company-built high-rise apartment building for middle-income tenants. Technically, the building inspector’s income was above the upper limit, but, then, a considerable portion of his income was never reported.
The windows were closed and the air-conditioning made scarcely any noise. On the playground below children were playing, but their sounds were muffled, comfortably shut out. The building inspector was relaxed with a beer in his reclining chair, facing the twenty-five-inch color television set complete with one-button tuning, magic brain, and remote control, all housed in a Mediterranean-style console cabinet of vast brooding magnificence.
The inspector was in his forties, no longer able even to pretend that he could get into his Korean War uniform and no longer caring about it. “What the hell,” he was fond of saying, “live it up and take all you can get because when you’re gone there isn’t any more. That’s what I always say.”
His wife was in her smaller reclining chair, also watching television, also drinking beer. She had worked hard beneath the sunlamp and with the application of several lotions to retain some of her early-year Florida tan. At supermarket and hairdresser’s the neighbors always remarked it with envy. Her hair was red, matching her fingernails and toenails. “We’re missing the Family Fun Show,” she said.