“They don’t need anybody.”
“Let me find that out for myself.”
“Anyway, they couldn’t give you the type of job you want.”
“But you don’t care what kind of job I want. It wouldn’t make any difference to you, what,” he said grinning. “Whether I became a dish washer or scavenger, or hired myself out as human bait.”
“No, it wouldn’t, that’s true,” Leventhal replied.
“Then why should you worry about the type of work they offer me at your place?”
“Didn’t I hear you talking about a deal?” said Leventhal. He went to the mantel, fumbled for a cigarette in a jar, and, sitting down, slid his hand across the window sill toward the packet of matches lying in the ash tray. Allbee watched him.
“You know, when I see how your mind works, I actually feel sorry for you,” he said finally.
Leventhal pulled deeply at the cigarette; it stuck to his lips and he plucked it away.
“Look, the answer is a straight no. Never mind the discussion. I have plenty of trouble as it is. Skip the discussions.” His self-possession was temporary, like a reflection in water that may be wiped out at the first swell.
“I understand. You’re afraid I’ll turn around and do to you what you did to me at Dill’s. You think I want to go there and retaliate by getting you fired. But your introduction isn’t necessary. I can make trouble for you without it.”
“Go ahead.”
“You know I can.”
“Well, do!” he began to be shaken by the swells. “You think the job is so valuable to me? I can live without it. So do your worst. Hell with it all!”
“I took Williston’s word about you. He said you were all right, so I made the appointment for you with Rudiger. See? I wasn’t suspicious. It’s not in my make-up, I’m happy to say. I didn’t even know who you were, except from seeing you a few times at his parties.”
“I feel too low to horse around with you, Allbee. I’m willing to help you out. I told you so already. But as far as having you in the same office where I could see you every day — no! As it is, there are plenty of people over there I don’t care to see every day. You’d fit in with them better than I do. I don’t have any choice about them. But I do about you. So it’s out of the question. No! — and finished. I couldn’t stand it.”
Allbee seemed to be considering something in Leventhal’s words that pleased him, for his smile deepened.
“Yes,” he admitted. “You don’t have to have me around. And you’re right. I think you really are right. You have a choice. I envy you, Leventhal. Because when it came to the important things in my life, I never had the chance to choose. I didn’t want my wife to die. And if I could have chosen, she wouldn’t have left me. I didn’t choose to be stabbed in the back at Dill’s either.”
“Who! I stabbed you in the back?” Leventhal furiously said, making a fist.
“I didn’t choose to be fired by Rudiger, do you like that better? Anyway, you’re in an independent position and I’m not.” He was already falling into that tone of speculative earnestness that Leventhal detested. “Now I believe that luck… there really is such a thing as luck and those who do and don’t have it. In the long run, I don’t know who’s better off. It must make things very unreal to have luck all the time. But it’s a blessing, in some things, and especially if it gives you the chance to make a choice. That doesn’t come very often, does it? For most people? No, it doesn’t. It’s hard to accept that, but we have to accept it. We don’t choose much. We don’t choose to be born, for example, and unless we commit suicide we don’t choose the time to die, either. But having a few choices in between makes you seem less of an accident to yourself. It makes you feel your life is necessary. The world’s a crowded place, damned if it isn’t. It’s an overcrowded place. There’s room enough for the dead. Even they get buried in layers, I hear. There’s room enough for them because they don’t want anything. But the living… Do you want anything? Is there anything you want? There are a hundred million others who want that very same damn thing. I don’t care whether it’s a sandwich or a seat in the subway or what. I don’t know exactly how you feel about it, but I’ll say, speaking for myself, it’s hard to believe that my life is necessary. I guess you wouldn’t be familiar with the Catholic catechism where it asks, ‘For whom was the world made?’ Something along that line. And the answer is, ‘For man.’ For every man? Yes, for every last mother’s son. Every man. Precious to God, if you please, and made for His greater glory and given the whole blessed earth. Like Adam. He called the beasts by their names and they obeyed him. I wish I could do that. Now that’s clever. For everybody who repeats ‘For man’ it means ‘For me.’ ‘The world was created for me, and I am absolutely required, not only now, but forever. And it’s all for me, forever.’ Does that make sense?”
He put the question with an unfinished flourish and Leven-thal looked at his sweating face and only now realized how drunk he was.
“Who wants all these people to be here, especially forever? Where’re you going to put them all? Who has any use for them all? Look at all the lousy me’s the world was made for and I share it with. Love thy neighbor as thyself? Who the devil is my neighbor? I want to find out. Yes, sir, who and what? Even if I wanted to hate him as myself, who is he? Like myself? God help me if I’m like what I see around. And as for eternal life, I’m not letting you in on any secret when I say most people count on dying. .”
Leventhal had an impulse to laugh. “Don’t be so noisy,” he said. “I can’t help it if the world is too crowded for you, but pipe down.”
Allbee also laughed, strenuously, with a staring expression; his entire face was distended. He cried out thickly, “Hot stars and cold hearts, that’s your universe!”
“Stop yelling. That’s plenty, now. You’d better go to sleep. Go and sleep it off.”
“Oh, good old Leventhal! Kindhearted Leventhal, you deep Hebrew..”
“Enough, stop it!” Leventhal interrupted.
Allbee obeyed, though he went on grinning. From time to time he released a pent-up breath and he sank deeper into the armchair.
“Are you really going to do something for me?” he said.
“You’ve got to stop the tricks, first of all.”
“Oh, I don’t want to see old man Beard,” Allbee assured him. “I won’t bother you up there, if that’s what you mean.”
“You’ve got to try to do something about yourself.”
“But will you really try? You know, use your connections for me?”
“For the love of Mike, I can’t do much. And as long as you behave the way you do…”
“Yes, you’re right. I’ve got to get next to myself. I have to change. I intend to. I mean it.”
“You see that yourself, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. Don’t you think I’ve got any sense at all? I must take myself in hand before everything wriggles away from me… get back to what I was when Flora was alive. I feel worthless. I know what I am. Worthless.” Delirious tears came to his eyes. “There were good things in me.” He struggled and fumbled, half revolting in the fervor of his self-abasement, but half — ah, half you could not help feeling sorry. “Williston will tell you. Flora would if she was here to speak and forgive me. I think she would. She loved me. You can see how I’ve come down if I talk to you like this. If she were alive, it wouldn’t hurt me so much to be a failure.”