“I fly from pleasure,” said the prince, “because pleasure has ceased to please; I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others.”
—SAMUEL JOHNSON
It had been a usual sort of day, hectic, that is; also frustrating, nerve-racking, stomach-cramping, exhausting.... The children, luckily, were away at camp. After such a day, Josh couldn’t stand them—or, as he had once admitted in a moment of rare honesty, at any other time.
There was only Ethel to contend with.
“Josh—” she began.
“Ummmph!” he grunted and walked past her into the study, shut the door behind him, dropped his brief case on the desk, and mixed himself a tall, cool drink.
“To hell with the ulcer,” he muttered and tossed it down in three thirsty gulps.
After the second highball was well settled, he began to feel vaguely human once more. He settled himself into the cool, rich embrace of the red-leather easy chair—that was, for him, more a symbol of success than his home, his car, or his mahogany-dark office—and flipped open the evening paper.
This time it was on the front page in the form of a news item. That it was not particularly newsworthy did not matter; such items are the meat and potatoes of the suburban newspaper.
NEW BUSINESS TO MILLVILLE, the headline shouted. Beneath it was a glowing description of the new personal services corporation and the branch office it had opened in the suburb.
The address was familiar. It was in the industrial district, but Josh couldn’t quite pinpoint it.
It was a most incomplete and unsatisfying news story. It told everything except the service the new corporation sold. Several times mention of it seemed inevitable, but each time the reporter leaped away from it with admirable agility.
Dinner was silent. Afterward the food lay heavy in Josh’s stomach, undigested and indigestible. As he shuffled through the papers he had brought home in his brief case, he tried to dilute the misery with bourbon and soda.
By the time he was able to ignore it, he was unable to concentrate on the papers.
And then he found the card, and the evening was completely ruined. It glistened at him, a picture of a man prey to uncounted, nameless miseries, mouth drawn lower than his chin. Underneath was printed:
UNHAPPY?
Josh frowned and leaned forward to toss the thing away, wondering idly how it could possibly have got mixed among his papers. But as he moved, the picture, by some alchemy of printing, shifted.
The man was the same, but his woe had been exchanged for imbecilic bliss. The legend had changed, too. Now it was: Hedonics, Inc.
Josh brushed the card impatiently off the desk. It fluttered to the floor and landed face downward. As he leaned down to pick it up, he read the message on the back: Dial P-L-E-A-S-U-R.
For the first time since he had read the advertisement in the morning paper, Josh let himself think seriously about its meaning. What are they selling? he asked himself. He didn’t know. He wanted to know. It had been a very clever campaign.
The second question was: What is hedonics?
That, at least, seemed easy enough to answer. He leafed through Webster’s Dictionary. He found the word between hedonic and hedonism:
hedonics (-iks), n. see -ics. (a) Ethics which treats of the relation of duty to pleasure, (b) Psychology which treats of pleasurable and unpleasant states of consciousness.
He studied it thoughtfully. Ethics? Psychology? It’s hard enough to sell psychology, and you can’t sell ethics at all. You can scarcely give it away.
Whatever hedonics was, it wasn’t an ethics and it wasn’t a psychology. But it was logical to assume that it dealt with pleasure. You don’t sell pleasure, and you don’t sell happiness. You sell products or services and you hope they bring pleasure and happiness, but it isn’t the same thing.
Josh couldn’t define the service, but he could identify the business. It was a skin game. Josh could smell it a mile away. It was a business for suckers, and there was money in it. They don’t give newspaper and blotter advertising away; skywriting is steep; and this reversible image stuff should be even higher—if you could find a printer to do it.
Add them together and it made a tidy sum.
“Josh—” Ethel began as he climbed the stairs to his bedroom.
“Ummmph,” he said and shut the door behind him.
He stared at the night light for a long while before his mind stopped racing and his taut muscles relaxed. Skin game, he told himself. It had a comforting finality to it.
Let the police take care of it, he thought. It was, after all, none of his business.
On that note of forgetfulness came forgetfulness.
But Hedonics, Inc., refused to be forgotten. The morning paper had a display ad that drew Josh’s eye irresistibly. On his way to the office, he saw a billboard with a pure-white background. In the middle was a cage; it held a bluebird, singing happily. Beneath it were two words: Hedonics, Inc.
As Josh walked through the outer office, Marie looked up and said, “Joy, Mr. Hunt!”
Josh’s step faltered. “Joy?” he repeated.
Marie blushed prettily. “Good morning, I mean. It was on television last night—‘Joy’ that is—and it just slipped out.”
“What was on television?”
“A real happy story,” Marie sighed. “Everybody was happy. It was sponsored by that new business with the funny name—”
“Oh,” Josh said. “That. Anyone waiting for me?”
“Mr. Kidd and a salesman—”
“No salesmen today.” Josh shuddered. “I’d rather see Kidd...”
“Good morning, Mr. Hunt,” Kidd said as he came in. “Are you happy?”
“Am I what?” Hunt exclaimed.
“Sorry,” Kidd said sheepishly. “Don’t know what made me say that. Seems to be a new phrase that’s going around.”
They worked their way into the usual argument: job specialization versus job enlargement. Josh insisted that specialization had gone too far, that enlargement and rotation meant increased production, improved morale, and decreased complaints, mistakes, monotony, fatigue, and absenteeism. Kidd was convinced that the whole thing was only a sly management scheme to downgrade higher-paying jobs.
It ended, as usual, with both men pounding on the table and throwing their arguments at each other’s heads like clubs. Afterward Josh was exhausted, and the taste of old emotion was sour in his mouth.
He sneezed. His head was stuffed with hot cotton. There was no mistaking the symptoms: he was getting a head cold.
The rest of the endless day was still ahead of him.
He felt like putting his head down on his desk and sobbing. He didn’t, of course. Men don’t do that.
Somehow he struggled through the day. Somehow he resisted the impulse to spring madly at the throats of the five people who greeted him with “Joy!” and the six who asked “Are you happy?”
“Marie,” he mumbled, “I won’t be in tomorrow.”
As he dragged himself through the front door of his French colonial home, Ethel greeted him with offensive gaiety. “Joy, Josh,” she sang. “Are you happy?”
“I feel lousy,” he shouted.
“Oh, dear,” she said sympathetically. “What’s the matter?”
“Everything,” Josh moaned. “I’m coming down with a cold, my ulcer is acting up, and—”
“You know what you should do?” Ethel said earnestly. “You should call Hedonics, Inc.”
Josh staggered back making a strangled, animal sound in his throat. He caught himself, stumbled into the study, and locked the door. Shakily he poured himself a drink, tossed it down, and poured another.
Sometime during the long, blurred evening, the situation became crystalline-clear. What was wrong with him was Hedonics, Inc. It was the breeding pit of all his irritations. If it were gone, he could be happy again.
The only way to get rid of it was to do the job himself.
He had been wrong about leaving it to the police. It was his business; fraud was everyone’s business. And the police wouldn’t act until after the masses had been mulcted. Mulcted. He liked that word. He said it over to himself several times.
He picked up the telephone. Five minutes later he put it down, frowning awesomely. Millville had a thoroughly unsatisfactory police department.
Yes, Mr. Hunt. No, Mr. Hunt. But we can’t do that, Mr. Hunt.
Complaint, indeed! Proof, indeed!
He’d give them a complaint. He’d give them proof. This time he dialed P-L-E-A-S-U-R.
The voice that answered was delightfully feminine. “Joy,” it said. “This is Hedonics, Inc. How can we make you happy?”
“This,” Josh said cautiously, “is Joshua P. Hunt.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Hunt,” the girl said. “We’ve been expecting to hear from you.”
The implications of that remark didn’t register on Josh until long afterward. “This service you offer,” he said tentatively, “I’d like to learn more about it.”
“Yes, sir,” the girl said. “A salesman will call on you tomorrow morning. Ten? At your home?”
When Josh lowered the handset into the cradle, his mouth was twisted up thoughtfully and a tiny muscle was jerking in his left eyelid.