“Zib, darling.” Cathy Hearn, associate editor, standing in the doorway. “How can you be so calm? The building that neat husband of yours designed is coming apart at the seams. It’s on the radio and on Jim’s desktop TV, and you sit here actually working! Honestly. Have you flaked out?”
Cathy, Zib thought, was a smalltown cornfed Midwest girl loving every moment of the big city. She was plump and perpetually worried about it; brighter than bright and forever trying to conceal it; as intimate with sex as a doe rabbit and yet forever exuding an aura of fresh virginity. “Maybe I have at that,” Zib said.
Cathy perched an ample haunch on the corner of Zib’s desk. “Trouble, hon?” She paused. “Man trouble, of course. It always is.” She shook her head. “There are rules,” she said. “If your man walks in and finds you balling someone else, he is supposed to say, ‘Ah, pardon! Continue!’ And if you can continue, that is savoir-faire.” Picture Nat in that role. No way. Face it, Zib told herself, you are married to a square, a real, honest-to-God, Herbert Hoover collar, McKinley morality, home-and-motherhood square. For a moment anger rose, flickered, and then died.
“Are you stoned?” There was concern in Cathy’s voice. Zib shook her head. The long hair covered her face. She brushed it back angrily. “I don’t even have that excuse.”
“Then,” Cathy said judiciously, “I’d suggest a witchdoctor, either the pill man or the shrink.” She paused. Then, incredulously, “You aren’t pregnant or any ridiculous thing like that?”
Again the headshake. Again the angry brushing motion. Why did she wear her hair long like this anyway? Why did anyone? Because it was the in thing to do? Because current fashion so decreed? How ridiculous. “I’m not pregnant. Stop worrying, Cathy.”
“My problem,” Cathy said, “is that I’m a mother at heart. I was a Four-H’er when I was a kid. Fact. I had chicks and lambs and calves coming out of my ears. And I worried about them. I canned vegetables and baked cakes and I just knew that one day HE would ride by on his white horse and scoop me up—if he could lift me—and we would ride off into the sunset to breed a family, and that would give me real scope for worrying. Instead, here I am, giving free analysis—”
“Cathy, go away.”
It was Cathy’s turn to shake her head. She brushed her own long hair back from her face with both hands. “And leave you here to meditate? No way. You stare inward long enough and you find you don’t like anything you see, not anything at all. Your whole life is a living sham, a real mess. You’ve spent all these years trying to find out who you are, as they do in novels, snuffing around in the damnedest places, and what you finally do find is a little shriveled-up id that couldn’t screw its way out of a loose nightie, that’s what you find, and what’s worse, what’s far worse, the damn little thing is laughing at you.” She paused for breath.
Zib said slowly, solemnly, “Yes, you’re right. It is laughing at me.”
Cathy was silent for a few moments. “You’ve got it bad, hon. You patrician types aren’t supposed even to take a look at yourselves, let alone feel accountable for any troubles you may find. You—”
“Is that how you see it, Cathy?” It was her own voice, but it sounded like a stranger’s, and it asked a question Zib had never even thought of before. “Is it?”
“It isn’t that bad.” Cathy was smiling, mocking herself, her exaggeration.
“But there is something to it?” Was that what Nat saw too?
“Look,” Cathy said, “girlish discussions—” She smiled again. “We fought those out after Taps at Camp Kickapoo back when ‘When are you going to start wearing a brassiere?’ was the big question.”
“I’m asking, Cathy,” Zib said. “Tell me how it looks from where you stand.”
Cathy hesitated. “You’re backing me right up to it, aren’t you?” She paused. “All right. It goes like this. I went to a country grade school and the local high with a student body of one hundred bused in—dirty word, but it wasn’t dirty to us: it was the only way to get there—bused in from a hundred square miles of countryside. You went where? Miss This’s or Miss That’s? I went to a college you’ve never heard of. You went where? Vassar, Smith? Wellesley? Radcliffe? My father got partway through that same high school, only there was a depression then, and he had to quit to go to work at whatever he could find, which wasn’t much, because Grandfather had been laid off by the railroad. Your father was Harvard? Or was it Yale? And maybe the Depression hurt you too, took you right down to your last yacht, I shouldn’t be surprised, but your people knew that it was only a temporary embarrassment, and mine thought the end of the world, not the prosperity some people were talking about, was just around the corner. The basic difference between you and me is that you know whatever you do is right, because how could it be otherwise? And I have to wonder and worry every step of the way, because as far back as anybody knows the Hearns have been born losers, and maybe I’ve broken the mold, but maybe the genes are still there too, just waiting to pounce.” Cathy paused. “That’s the difference between background and cultural emptiness.”
“I didn’t know, Cathy. I never even thought.”
“And the last thing I want to hear you say,” Cathy said, “is that you’re sorry.”
“I won’t say it.” Zib paused thoughtfully. “You know Nat. You say he’s neat. He—”
“He finally spit in your eye?” What was in Cathy’s tone said far more than the words.
Zib looked up. “You’ve been waiting for it? Watching?” But how could it be that she felt no resentment?
“We haven’t been making book in the office,” Cathy said, “but we’ve followed the score as best we could.”
She stood up from the desk. “What confuses me is that with what’s happening downtown you’re sitting here reading slush-pile gleanings.”
So here at last was what it came to, the basic truth, uncovered. “I’ve been thinking about myself,” Zib said, and found no pain in the saying. “I haven’t even been thinking about what is happening downtown.” She paused. “I guess thinking about myself is a habit I have.”
“Could be,” Cathy said, and walked out.
18
It was a neat little house in Garden City; green lawn, white petunias in bloom, a basketball backboard and hoop mounted on the garage door, an enormous television mast aimed at the city, clinging to the brick chimney and dominating the roof.
Mrs. Pat Harris answered the door in tight peach-colored jeans, matching sneakers, and a striped tank top. Her hair was in blue plastic curlers. She was young, attractive, and thoroughly conscious of it. “Well,” she said, “this is a surprise, Mr. Simmons. You want to see Pat?”
“If I may.” Paul wore his actor’s smile and his easy manner.
“He’s downstairs watching TV.” The girl paused. “We thought you would be at the World Tower opening, Mr. Simmons. I haven’t seen it, but I know it’s going on. I have, you know, things to do around the house even when Pat’s home. You go on down. He’ll be awful glad to see you.”
I doubt it, Paul thought, but the smile remained unchanged-as he walked down the stairs into the paneled game room. On the massive color television console screen the fire trucks crowding around the Tower Plaza, looked the color of blood. The volume was turned low, and the announcer’s voice was almost inaudible: “We have a report, ladies and gentlemen, that the fire is spreading inside the building. This entire disaster—because it is beginning to look like almost certain disaster—is incredible. Every safety factor known to architects—”