MONDAY NO HARVEY AT MUI, and I didn’t know how to get in touch with him. If I called his home and he wasn’t there, I might worry his parents. Tuesday no Harvey. Wednesday no Harvey. The art director hadn’t heard from him, picture proofs were piling up on his desk. Wednesday afternoon Fox called me to his office and said he was surprised I was still working for him and not writing for television. I don’t think I’d be any good at that, sir, I said. You don’t think you’d be any good at it? No, sir. You mean you think you’d be too good, don’t you? I didn’t answer him, I was wondering what I had done to call this forth. May I speak to you frankly, he said. Sure. If you were a Jewish boy—you’re not a Jewish boy, are you—if you were a Jewish boy we’d say you had a goyische kopf, do you know what that means? Yes, I said. I don’t mean the words, I mean the idea, do you know what the idea means? Yes. Well, and he sighed, if you know what the idea means, you don’t have one. That doesn’t necessarily follow, I said. Believe me, it follows, will you believe me if I say it follows, if I say it follows will you believe me? OK, if you say so, I said. You see, if you had a goyische kopf, you’d argue with me, wouldn’t you? Whatever you say, I said. OK, now the caption writer is not coming back. How come? He’s an unstable boy, if you want the job it’s yours. Thank you. Wait, before you accept I’d like to ask you a question, may I ask you a question? Sure. Why are you here? Here, I asked. Here at MUI, because if you’re here to make money the only thing you’ll make is a mistake. I asked him why that was so. If you wrote me fifty articles a day, a hundred captions, collected a thousand pictures, if you did any one of those jobs outside—and he waved his hand in deprecation of his staff—like a genius, you wouldn’t make money. I asked him again why this was so. Because I wouldn’t pay you money. If you were a genius, a genius, I’d only pay you two, three hundred a week. Isn’t that a lot of money, I asked. If you’re a genius, it’s a lot of money. I’m not a genius, I said. You’re lucky, can I tell you something? Sure. To make money, there’s one thing you have to do, do you know what that is? Marry it, I said. You’re a deep boy. So there are two ways, what’s the other way? Steal it. I’m a busy man, I’m taking time to tell you something, do you want to learn or joke? Learn, I said. All right, you sell, and he paused for my reaction. My father was a salesman, I said. He made money? Yes. Of course, he said. Do all salesmen make money, I said. Some salesmen don’t sell, my friend. Your father was a selling salesman, so he made money. I can look at you and know your father made money, do you know how I know? How? Because you’re a nicely brought-up boy. Your father made money and sent you to a nice school, didn’t he? Pretty nice, I said. But he didn’t want you to be a salesman like him. I don’t know about that, I said, when he retired he asked me if I wanted his job, because if I did he said he’d hold out until I was finished school and he could turn over his territory to me. And you said what? I said I wanted to be a writer. And he said what when you said you wanted to be a writer. He said I’d have to pick something I could make a living at. And you said? I said I’d be a teacher. But you didn’t want to be a teacher. No. You wanted to be a writer. Yes. And what do you want now? To be a writer. So what are you doing in the art department? Making a living. A good living? It’s OK. But you’d rather be a writer. Yes. Do you want to write captions? Sure. Your heart’s desire is to write captions. It’s not my heart’s desire particularly. You’re too good to write captions. I didn’t say that. But you thought it. Does anybody want to write captions, Mr. Fox? No, so why not admit it? All right, I don’t want to write captions. You just turned down a good job, he said. Mr. Fox, you’ve been frank with me, may I be frank with you? His eyes narrowed, he thought I was going to insult him, but Go ahead, he said. I heard you address the staff when I worked here the first time, and you said that books were the hardest commodity in the world to sell. So? So if that’s true, couldn’t you make more money selling stocks or groceries or something else besides books? Did I say I was interested in making money, he said. No. So what’s your point? I guess I don’t have any point, but may I say something else, Mr. Fox? Go. Well, I think you have a goyische kopf, which made him laugh, and after that I kind of liked the guy. Anyway, it turned out that he didn’t want me to write captions. He had been testing me. Actually he wanted me to work with him and another guy developing a sales program for MUI. Also, he told me that he was selling another item besides books, an item in which there was no profit at all, only satisfaction. It’s the most valuable item in the world, see if you can guess what it is, he said. God, love, sex, I didn’t know. I’m selling, he said, capitalism to Communists! His idea was to attack communism in the same way Communists were attacking capitalism, through salesmanship. Train agents in the dialectics of free enterprise and sneak them behind the Iron Curtain. Have them work their way into the state-owned factories, the collective farms, into the schools and newspapers, even into the government itself, just as Communists infiltrate into our institutions. (Shades of Austin.) Communists are the greatest salesmen the world has ever seen, he said, and we haven’t learned from them. Well, the guy has two staff members on the scheme full time, working out the bugs, as he put it. And when the presentation is done he intends to send it to the President. If the President doesn’t act on it, he’ll send it to Congress. And if they do nothing, he’ll take it directly to the people. He would prefer the secrecy of an Executive crash program but, whichever way, he feels it’s bound to work. While I was in his office his former brother-in-law called, Fox’s voice rose to a wheedling whine, the poor slob, and I gathered from the conversation that as publisher of MUI he felt he was not adequately endowed with university degrees. He had learned that a certain institution in Maryland would issue him an honorary Litt.D. in exchange for a donation of five thousand dollars’ worth of books to their library, but he needed the brother-in-law’s OK to charge it off to MUI. He didn’t do much of a selling job that I could see, because after he hung up he said How will it look, that three people on my staff have Ph.D.’s when I only have a B.S.? Since I already told him that he had a goyische kopf I decided not to push my luck, and suggested that he pay for the books himself if he couldn’t charge them to the company. He said he might have to, and added that at trade discount they’d only come to three thousand bucks. Well, he offered me this other job, and I accepted, which entitles me to a title, Assistant Director of Sales Research for the Revised Modern Universal International Encyclopedia, at $145 a week. Someone’s at the door. It’s Jose. More later, man. He just left, after telling me the secret of his life. He’s in love with a nun who teaches in the grammar school across the street. In fact, that’s why he’s living here, to be close to her. Wait a minute, I want to go to the window and find out the name, also get a beer. I can’t see the name, but it’s something like School of the Sacred Heart or the Bloody Liver. I could see, however, carved over the two entrances, the word BOYS and the word GIRLS. Like great toilets. Did you know that the Catholic grammar schools separate the sexes after the fifth grade, shake the kiddies down into convex and concave, short-haired and long-haired, flat-assed and round-assed. Otherwise some devil-ensnared eleven-year-old Catholic male might just slip his foot, hand, pookie into a Catholic female’s coozie. Let’s consider the facts, man. There is no God. Or if there is one it’s unlikely He resembles the God put forth by the Christian churches. I mean, because human beings have been projecting images of God like crazy for thousands of years the chances that this is the right one are not overwhelming. So what is a young girl doing when she becomes a nun, when she takes the vows of poverty, obedience and chastity? Most people are poor anyhow, and also obedient—to bosses, spouses, mores. But the chastity, ah, where else but in a religious community is celibacy institutionalized. Consider, this young girl is now provided with a complete change of rules. Where before she was at the doubtful mercy of those billions of penetrating males who roam the earth, offering her violence and violation, now they accept that she is off limits. And as a teacher she inculcates her former fears for herself into the children, she keeps the girls from the boys and the boys from themselves. Well, given this one condition, we find Jose in love with one. It makes me wonder. Seems the nun in question is his cousin. When he came to America five years ago he went to live with his father’s brother’s family. They had one child, Rita, eighteen, two years older than Jose. Now she is Sister Barbara, Jose says with disgust, they have taken the blood even from her name. The instant I saw her, he said, I fell in love. Limbs like burnished wood (we went to the beach often), a voice like the viola d’amore (she hummed as she washed the dishes after supper), exactly semispheric breasts (I surprised her in the bath on two occasions). Did she know you loved her, I asked. Of course she knew, when I looked at her she could feel me between her thighs. Does she know you’re living across the street from her? Of course, every night I enter her cell and lie with her, every night she experiences my presence, and every morning she is on fire for the reality. I mean, does she consciously know you’re here? I speak to her every day, every morning when she gathers the dirty-faced children on the sidewalk in double file I am there. In person? Of course, in person. Don’t the other nuns get suspicious? They are suspicious of everyone, Jose said, malevolent penguins, suspicious and jealous. She tells them, however, that I am the father of one of her students. You don’t look old enough, I said. That is why I have grown this mustache, but what does it matter, what can they do? One morning she will tear off the black cerements and come back with me to my room. What do you say when you talk to her? I tell about the night before, how firm and deep I was, how responsive and satisfying she was. Occasionally when I have had a woman in my room she will have sensed it and say nothing to me. Doesn’t anyone overhear you? We speak Spanish, although there is one Puerto Rican boy, I will see him on the street alone one day and frighten him. What does she say to you? She pleads with me to leave her in peace, but this is the traditional reply of the woman, is it not? Always they say no, while pressing their flesh on your flesh. No, no, and then O, O. She is waiting for me now, I must go to my room. Good luck, I said. I do not need luck, he said, I need endurance. I think he needs both.