Six

Tattersall was about two months into his new career when, through the half-open door of his cubicle at Wurlitzer and Wise, he caught a glimpse of a long-legged girl who looked familiar. He saw her from the back just as she turned a corner of the corridor and disappeared in the direction of the wing in which the agency brass were quartered. She slipped along with a rapid gliding walk, as though about to break into a trot toward or away from something. She carried a leather shoulder bag, and her head was tilted to one side in a manner that rang a bell, even though the black hair remembered as hanging straight down was now done up in a large biscuit.

Tattersall rolled aside the typewriter stand behind which he had been working and shot on tiptoe down the hallway to the corner where she had turned, and peered around it just in time to see her vanish again, this time into the complex of executive lairs which included Wurlitzer’s own. It was Mayo Stiles all right. Another leap brought him to a water cooler where, standing with his back to the closed double door, he could listen to what went on behind it with a paper cup in his hand. He heard the receptionist’s typewriter stop, and then Mayo’s voice asking to be announced to Wurlitzer. “He’s expecting me,” she said.

Tattersall remained at the otherwise deserted water cooler a few minutes, reviewing the general situation and trying to sort out the possibilities inherent in it. The one that made most sense was that Mayo was seeing her uncle about a job herself. She had graduated and now wanted to write, with the problem of a livelihood classically embedded in that wish. The Satyr Press could not have advanced her much. He knocked back several paper cupfuls of water during this train of thought and bleated “Maaw,” a few times, although, truth to tell, he was as much excited as nonplussed by the speculation. A buzzer sounded behind him, and the receptionist told Mayo to go in. The typewriter there resumed its tattoo, and Tattersall returned to his, assuming the dramatic crouch he had come to develop here, like that of a hard-pressed jockey pressing on, in turn, his mount.

Working with the door partway open enabled him both to see into the hall and be seen by anyone approaching down it, banging away at his copy or glaring at what he had written with that grim and bitter self-evaluation that went with creative standards. Orders were to regard Tattersall as offbeat, special, to give him his head and let him incubate his own ideas in his own good time. The previous resident sport, Gascoyne, with whom Wurlitzer had once mentioned his possibly collaborating, was no longer with the firm; regrettably, accordingly to Wurlitzer, who considered him “a real pro” despite his Off-Broadway copy. He was now working for another agency.

Wurlitzer wanted a minimum of twenty “are you sick of’s” before he would even think of showing the series to the one client for whose blood Tattersall might not be too rich. He was too rich for the average sponsor’s blood, that they all knew. This one was a manufacturer of a line of soft drinks still lacking a “cola,” and who was about to launch one, to be called Kickola.

“Are you sick of batteries that go dead when you need your car most?” he had been writing when he had glimpsed Mayo in the passage. This wouldn’t work, since failures of ignition were likely to be at their most vexing to commuters who had just inadequately breakfasted and must be off for their train, or in the dead of winter when the thing to hit the spot is a cup of hot coffee or cocoa, not a cold bottle of Kickola, even supposing one were available. Tattersall twisted the sheet of paper out of the roller, but instead of discarding it cross-filed it under headings such as Coffee, Cocoa, Gums, Mints and Antacid Lozenges, as well as other products conceivable as ameliorants in the crisis postulated. The complex variety of factors that had to be taken into account in this venture had by now been borne in on Tattersall. He had so far submitted a hundred and eleven “are you sick of’s” to the front office, where superiors of an almost Kafkaesque anonymity and elusiveness had accepted ten and rejected the other hundred and one. Moreover, they refused for obscure bureaucratic reasons to return the rejections. They considered them killed, unaware of the swelling limbo in which Tattersall was cross-filing carbons. If whatever plugs finally made the grade here met the same rate of extermination at the hands of sponsors to whom they were in turn submitted by the agency, Tattersall estimated, he would be several hundred years old before the show got on the road. Here they wanted the “are you” vignettes to be both dramatic and commonplace—something listeners could identify with. Thus one could not be fed up with oil furnaces exploding, since such things did not recur with a sufficient frequency in everyday life, nor with fabrics to which lint easily adhered, since such experiences lay at the other extremes, below the threshold of exasperation. Neither, in any case, called for a Kickola. But Tattersall knew one thing. Neither the strains of composition nor the obstacles flung up by the front office against the end product would make him ever compromise the original integrity of his conception. These plugs were going to express a dignified resignation to life.

He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his hands folded under his chin, scrutinizing what was in his typewriter, when he became aware of two people coming down the corridor. Without raising his eyes he knew them to be Wurlitzer and Mayo. He was hammering away again when they stopped in his doorway.

“Hank?”

It was not till he paused once more in his fusillade that he looked up, with a start of interrupted concentration.

“Oh, hello, Harry, I’m sorry I—Mayo! What a pleasant surprise. What brings you here?” He wheeled the typewriter aside again and scrambled around it to greet her. “You’re looking fine.”

It fell out that she was going to get married. Her young man was a medical student whose remaining few years of study and internship necessitated her working for a while to help make both ends meet. Her novel would be published some time next year, but would not be expected to bring in any money to speak of. She was taking a job here at Double W, as the agency was called, in the copy department. So they would be seeing a lot of one another again.

“I was surprised to hear you quit teaching,” Mayo whispered. “Whatever made you do that?”

“Oh, I wanted a change. The real world, you know. I found myself beginning to think about tenure, that old placenta.” Shifting his weight to another foot, he adjusted this esoteric metaphor downward to Wurlitzer’s level. “That old cocoon. And that’s a danger signal. When things get too safe and snug, flee for your life.”

“I think Hank felt the academic world was too secloistered for a man of his restless nature.” Had Wurlitzer really said that? Secloistered. Tattersall hoped he had heard right. A glance at Mayo revealed nothing to indicate that she had caught any such malapropism.

“You can say that again,” Tattersall said.

“He’s turning out to be a real pro, anyway,” Wurlitzer said. Tattersall would have found the testimonial more bracing had he not heard it in frequent requiems for the departed Gascoyne. Still, it was a term of praise Wurlitzer used for everybody. He would have called a prostitute a real pro.

“Care to join us for lunch?” Wurlitzer said.

Tattersall had more sense than to accept such an invitation. He declined it by pleading something in the pressure cooker, glancing at the typewriter as he responded with this bit of agency slang.

He told Sherry the day’s news when he got home, not neglecting the malapropism his ear had chosen to pick up whether it had been uttered or not. He was determined that Wurlitzer had said it. “A regular Joyce. Secloistered. A great composite word for secluded, cloistered and sequestered,” he said as he shook up the cocktail with which to unwind. He admired the cotton print in which she sat, neat and fresh, waiting for her drink. “You might go all the way and make it seclustered. To mean all those clammy little cliques you get into on campus, you know, and that you’re damn well out of!” He was not sure he should have left.

It was an odd aspect of academic life for a loner like Hank Tattersall to express no regrets about, Sherry thought, humid fraternization being among the tendencies to which he was least prone. She wished again that he erred in the direction about which other wives could by contrast complain; that he bowled, golfed, played poker or even drank with cronies. She thought about that again after dinner as, drawing on her gloves, she prepared to go out for an evening of committee work for some charitable organization. He was playing the piano, with the same rapt expression he wore sitting at the mangle. His fingers picked out a popular song, into the words of which he then flung himself. He had a really good amateur tenor, with a certain rough sweetness to it. If he would only join a singing group somewhere. She could see him in a glee club, standing tall and straight in a grove of shirtfronts, singing Brown October Ale and Shipmates o’ Mine and Where My Caravan Has Rested. But he couldn’t see himself that way. He had joined in the singing around the fountain where he had found Harry Wurlitzer the night he hit him for the job, but only for diplomatic reasons, and it had gone against his grain. He preferred belting a song out on his own. She could hear him as she entered the elevator (they had moved into a city apartment of course) and knew that was how he would spend the evening. When he had the house to himself he would let go for hours at a time, either accompanying himself at the piano or singing along with phonograph records. In that case he would harmonize with other soloists, or with quartets or other vocal groups of some distinction, without having to go out through the wet and the drear to attend rehearsals.

When she got back about a quarter to eleven, he was sitting in his armchair smoking a cigar, surrounded by sheet music and unreplaced record albums. She brewed them some tea, and as they sipped it he talked again about Mayo, wondering what her young man was like, and how soon they were going to get married. Sherry went to bed, but after a sleepless hour came in again to find him still sitting where she’d left him, staring into space and wreathed in the smoke of still another cigar.

“Would you like to get married again?” she said.

“Well, we are two different people. This is a new life. Up to now I’ve been a teacher, you a faculty wife. Now I’m an organization man and you’re a company wife. We might make a better go of such a marriage.”

“I’m not going to make a big production of it. Another license and all that red tape.”

“Don’t you think it’s worth it?”

“Yes, but we’ve got a file of marriage licenses by this time—all probably illegal. And bothering ministers and getting justices of the peace out of bed and all. I just feel guilty. Why can’t we just slip into an empty chapel somewhere and exchange the vows by ourselves. Pretend there’s someone officiating. It comes to the same thing. God, I know the ceremony by heart by this time.”

“How would you like to elope this time?” he asked, half turning his head with an engaging grin.

“But nobody’s objecting to the match! Except me, a little.”

“We’ve never done that before. That’s why—you might like running away.”

“From whom? You have no parents, and I’ve got one arthritic mother.”

“She objected to me when she first met me.”

“She’s gotten over it by now.”

“I doubt it. Deep down, I sense a persisting grain of hostility. She disapproves of the match and so we have to run away and get married. We’ve never given it that feel yet. It might be just the thing we need. That final dash of reckless romance, of first fine careless rapture the unions have hitherto lacked. I knew there was something missing in all the other marriages. That’s it.”

Sherry came farther into the room and sat down in a chair facing his.

“Look. You can’t elope any more. You’re living in the past. You’re dreaming. Almost every state around here has got a waiting period after you get the license—just to prevent this impulsive kind of thing—and even where they haven’t you’ve got to wait for your blood test. In other words, couples don’t go popping off to Maryland anymore, or wherever it was they eloped to, after having a few.”

“You’ve solved that with your suggestion about slipping into a chapel and exchanging our ‘I do’s’ without benefit of clergy. Then it doesn’t make any difference where we go.”

“So if you accept that it’s just the feel of the thing, we don’t even have to do that. If it’s the feel of a honeymoon we want, of being newlyweds and having people think so, all we have to do is register at a hotel and say we are. Pick up the phone and ask for some bridal suite.”

He did not reply to the point directly, but sat dreaming again. At last he said:

“The super’s got a ladder which I’m sure he’ll let me use. I’ll prop it under your window, and hold it while you precariously descend in a new blue suit, an orchid in the lapel, clutching a valise. As I help you down the last rung, my hand will inadvertently slip up your leg and along your bare flank, for this is our wedding night. The raptures of the nuptial couch await us!”

“Or a hospital room, unless I can get safely off the garage roof you’d have to prop the ladder under. I’d rather descend five floors in an elevator, thank you. Just ring twice for a signal and I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

They had scarcely returned from their honeymoon when there was a telephone call from Lucy, asking them to a small dinner party for Mayo and her fiancé—quite uncannily bearing out Tattersall’s statement that Sherry had entered upon a new existence as a corporation wife. So closely was protocol followed that, when Tattersall answered the phone, Lucy asked to speak to Sherry, in order that the social invitation might be extended to her. Tattersall’s part in the mosaic was given a much more dramatic definition a few days later.

The very afternoon of the party, Wurlitzer trotted excitedly into. Tattersall’s office with some news he knew would interest him. Tony Lumpkin, president of the company they had in mind for Tattersall’s idea, was in town from Chicago, and they were inviting him to dinner at the last minute, so that they might all meet.

“We’ll get him good and sozzled up, and then hit him with it,” Wurlitzer said. “I’ve found that’s much the best way with Tony. He tends to freeze and stiffen up at formal presentations of ideas, but around the old piano—”

“Piano?”

“Yes. Haven’t I told you about Tony? He likes to sing. Nothing fancy. Just barbershop stuff. I heard you around the fountain, and you’re not such a slouch in that department yourself. So while the ladies are powdering their noses maybe we can get in a little caterwauling. And when the moment seems right, wham.”

“You mean I’ll have to sing?”

“For your supper, why not?” Wurlitzer said with a jolly laugh. “We all have to do it. Way of the world.”

“I thought you wanted more specimens.”

“For a formal presentation, yes. But over the old brandy bottle, which is where a lot of business is transacted after all, it’s a different matter. Just try it on him for size the way you did with me. And Hank?”

“Yes.”

“Good luck. You know I want you to make good here.”