INSPIRED, IF THAT’S not too strong a word, by his public conversation with himself, Saul returned the next day for an encore. Being a creature of habit, he made a habit out of it, and in the days to come he became an out-and-out public phone freak junkie.
A street person of sorts.
He used his apartment as a place where he could take showers and have his nightly insomnia, but other than that his life was lived in public.
Just as in the old days he used to get up in the morning, take a shower, and go to his office on West Fifty-seventh Street, he now got up, took a shower, and left his apartment at about the same time, to walk the streets of Manhattan and make imaginary calls from public phones.
Except that he now no longer paid or dialed. He just picked up the receiver and started talking.
He wandered down Broadway, down Eighth Avenue past Forty-second Street, all the way down to Penn Station, using pay phones along the way.
Sometimes he took cabs to La Guardia or the JFK airport and spent part of his day at various clusters of pay phones at these places, talking on the telephone, surrounded by travelers who were likewise engaged.
His conversations, if they can be called that, ranged far and wide. Some were local. Some long-distance. Some were with the living and some were with the dead. He still called himself from time to time, and then, as himself, he called others.
He always made sure, however, that there was somebody nearby who could not help overhearing what he was saying.
He called his dead father and tried to convince him that he had tried to love him while he was alive.
He called his mother in Chicago and apologized profusely for not having called her before.
“I’ve been going through hell, Mom, I really have. Have you heard? Do you know what happened? Billy died. My Billy is dead, Mom. I’m nobody’s father anymore and never will be again. I hurt, Mom. I hurt. I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. No, no, don’t worry. I’ll be fine. How are you? …”
He called Billy and Leila at least once a day, sometimes two or three times a day.
“Billy, It’s Dad. I was just wondering how you’re doing, son. No, nothing wrong, I was just calling to see …”
“Leila, it’s Saul. When are you coming back? I miss you. I miss you so much I can hardly …”
Sometimes he wept. Sometimes he told jokes. Sometimes he pleaded with both Leila and Billy to forgive him.
“Please, I beg you …”
“Nymph,” he cried out once in his call to Leila, “in your orisons be all my sins remembered.”
Over and over again, he insisted in his calls to both that he had loved them with all his heart.
And although he broke down and wept on the phone, making a spectacle of himself, something in his sentimental declarations of love failed to satisfy, so that he had to call again.
“I do, I do love you, I really do, why don’t you believe me?” he insisted, as if one of them or both of them were casting doubts on his assertions at the other end.
Whether he called Laurie Dohrn to seek her forgiveness or whether he called Arthur Houseman to seek his for ruining his film (“I loved your film. I adored it. It was a masterpiece”), almost all his public phone calls were designed to induce pain in him.
He welcomed guilt and pain and embraced them with open arms.
But it was only guilt and public pain that he embraced and the public remorse that went with them.
His public torment was pleasant in comparison to the torment that awaited him in the privacy of his apartment at night.