3
 

What the Wilders called “the country” was a clapboard bungalow on half an acre of ground, fifty miles up the west bank of the Hudson. It would have been exposed to a great many other bungalows except for the dense shrubbery and trees shielding it on three sides and a high rustic fence along the fourth—that gave it the seclusion they prized, and there was a small lake for swimming close by.

But the best and most bracing part of the country was getting there: the trip across the George Washington Bridge and the long pastoral ride up the divided highway. As with certain other family pleasures, expectation topped fulfillment.

“… I think this is my favorite time of year,” Janice was saying, “when it’s just beginning to get fresh and cool again. Oh, I suppose it’ll be even nicer in a few more weeks when the leaves really turn—all those lovely yellows and oranges and reds and browns—but even so, this is marvelous.”

“Mm,” he said. She had done a great deal of talking since he came home from Bellevue yesterday—most of it serving no purpose except to fill silence—and he knew that was because he’d said so little himself: he had mostly drunk bourbon and looked out of windows, or sat blinking in bewilderment along the shelves upon shelves of tightly packed books. “Well,” he said now, doing his best, “it’ll sure feel great just to lie on a blanket in the grass.”

Tommy, in the back seat, had been silent since leaving home. He was methodically pounding an unused regulation baseball into the oiled pocket of his fielder’s glove, and he wore a New York Yankees cap. The Yankees were far ahead in the American League pennant race, and Tommy liked winners.

“How do you want to work it, Champ?” Wilder asked him. “Take a swim first and then play catch, or play catch and then go swimming?” And he instantly regretted calling him “Champ.” He used that nickname, or “Buster,” or “Slugger,” only in times of family tension when it seemed urgent to be hearty (on mornings, for example, when he knew the boy had lain awake and heard his parents fight the night before), and he knew that Tommy knew it too.

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “I don’t care.” And the flawless surface of the road sped along under their tires.

The way they worked it was to play catch first, while Janice, wearing a big floppy hat, knelt and squatted in the sun to weed her vegetable garden.

It wasn’t a good game of catch—no warm, sweat-raising pull and release of muscles with each exchange, no clean flight of the ball to a satisfying pock in the glove, no easy laughter and congratulations (“Hey!…”; “Nice!…”). Well over half of Tommy’s throws were wild and sent his father racing breathlessly over the grass or down on all fours under the bushes, where twigs whipped his face and mud soaked the knees of his clean chino pants. Once a pine needle stabbed him in the eye.

Then his own throws began to go wrong, making Tommy do the running, and if nothing else, that gave him a chance to get his wind back. “Let’s try—let’s try a couple of grounders,” he called, hoping to make it easier on them both, but there was nothing easy about grounders on this lumpy ground: the ball jumped and flew in crazy directions; they ran and went sprawling and Tommy’s Yankee cap fell off.

“Haven’t you two had enough?” Janice inquired, smiling up from the garden. “Don’t you want to go for a swim?”

“How—how about it, Tom? Feel like calling it—calling it quits?”

“I don’t know; I don’t care.”

Things didn’t go well at the lake either, but that was to be expected. Janice was an excellent swimmer and Tommy was good too, for his age, but Wilder had been afraid of water—and afraid to admit it—all his life. Through boyhood and youth he had done his best to avoid swimming; when it was inevitable, he’d endured it as a kind of aquatic clown, thrashing and dog-paddling, helplessly gulping and inhaling water, scared of putting his head under but taking hilariously graceless flops from springboards to win laughs he never heard as he struggled blind and terrified back to the air. This was one of the first things Janice had learned about him, before they were married, and had caused one of their first quarrels (“But that’s silly, John; anybody can learn to swim.” “Okay, okay; I’m silly, then. Let’s shut up about it”). When Tommy was a baby and even until he was five or six, it hadn’t mattered much: he could wade in deep with the boy wriggling and squealing on his shoulders, and he’d greatly enjoyed the trusting grip of small thighs around his neck and fingers in his hair—it had been especially good in heavy ocean surf where nobody really swam anyway and the whole point was to jump and shout in the breakers—but over the past few years, here at the lake, Janice had taught Tommy to swim. She had done it tactfully: if he’d ever asked why Daddy didn’t teach him, she’d probably said that Daddy was too busy or too tired, or that Daddy didn’t really enjoy swimming as much as other things, like—well, like playing catch.

The lake was crowded today—people from neighboring bungalows out for a last chance at summer—and that made him less conspicuous as he hung back to fuss over the careful arrangement of blanket and towels and shoes and wristwatches while his wife and son struck out for the white raft that always seemed an impossible distance away. Nobody in a crowd this thick was likely to notice that he waded up to his nostrils before starting to tread water and only then began the desperate flailing and kicking, with tightly held breath, that enabled him at last to reach out and grasp one of the wet chains securing the raft to the steel drums beneath it. Once he had that chain he was all right; he could rest, maneuver for purchase and heave himself up, shedding water and whipping back his hair with a gasp of relief that might have been a victorious athlete’s sigh.

“Hi,” Janice said as she and Tommy made room for him. There was no way of telling whether they’d watched his journey out here.

“It’s a little chilly, don’t you think?” she said. “Look, I’m all goose pimples.” He looked, and she was. She lowered her voice. “And it’s so crowded. I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite so many people here before, have you?”

No; he hadn’t.

Nor had he ever seen anything quite so lovely as the slim young girl who walked alone among the huddled bodies on the raft at that moment, murmuring “Excuse me” as they moved aside for her. She wore her bikini with a sweet combination of shyness and pride, and when she stood erect at the base of the diving board she seemed unaware of anyone watching. She took three gracefully measured steps, then both arms and one splendid thigh rose up, the thigh came down, the board shuddered under her powerful spring and she was airborne, parting the water with almost no splash at all.

He expected a pair of heavily muscled arms to reach out and help her back to the raft, but none did: she was alone. She climbed back herself and sat shaking out her long black hair, talking to nobody. Except for a young couple absorbed in each other, the raft was filled either with children or with adults of middle- and post-middle age: bald heads and sagging flesh and varicose veins.

“Let’s go back in,” Janice said. “I want to put on some clothes and get warm, don’t you?”

“Okay. You two go on ahead. I’ll be along in a minute.”

He watched their precise four-beat crawl to the shore, watched them gather up their things and disappear into the bushes; then he gave his whole attention to the girl, who had stood up in readiness for another dive. When she came back from this one he would speak to her. He wouldn’t try to help her onto the raft—that might spoil everything—but it would certainly be easy to sit beside her as she dried off (if they were sitting, she wouldn’t see how short he was; then later when they stood up it might turn out that she wasn’t really very tall), and now as she gravely advanced to the board he allowed his mind to fill with a happy rehearsal of their talk.

“You know, you’re really very good at that.”

“Oh?” (Shaking her hair, not quite meeting his eyes.) “Well; thank you.”

“Live around here?”

“No; I’m visiting my parents. They have a little …”

“You in school?”

“No; I graduated from Holyoke last June; now I work for an ad agency in the city.”

“Which one? Thing is, you see, I’m in the same business.”

“Really? Well, it’s …”

She had executed her three dancer’s steps now, performed her wonderful thigh-flexing and her leap, and his secret dialogue raced ahead.

“… Maybe we could meet for lunch sometime.”

“Well, actually, I—yes, that might be nice.”

And later: “Oh, this has been such fun, John; I mean I’d heard of expense-account lunches, but I’ve never really …”

And later still, after their first brandy-flavored kiss in the taxicab downtown: “What street? Varick Street? Is that where you live?”

“Well, not exactly; just a little place I think you might like …”

The bubbles had long vanished from her splash, and he waited for the water to break again with her surfacing, but it didn’t. He stood up (Who cared how short he was?) and watched for her on all sides of the raft like an alert, conscientious lifeguard. Only after what seemed a full minute did he see her moving far away, her slender arms stroking as smoothly as Janice’s as she made for the shoreline and the trees, going home. And then, sitting hunched until his heart had slowed down and the ache of disappointment in his clenched jaws relaxed, there was nothing to do but slide into the cold water and fight his way home himself.

One good thing: there was plenty of bourbon on the kitchen shelf. As soon as he was dressed he got out the ice and made himself a double that was more like a triple.

“Feel like a drink?” he asked Janice.

“No thanks.” She was sitting on a tall kitchen stool in her slacks with a colander in her lap, snapping string beans for dinner, and didn’t look up. “It’s a little early, isn’t it?”

“Seems late enough to me.”

And not until he’d gone outdoors for the first few greedy swallows did he figure out why he was so angry. It wasn’t because of the girl on the raft (the hell with the girl on the raft), or because Janice had asked if it wasn’t a little early, or because her crisp little snap-snap of string beans had always been an irritating sound; it was because the stool she sat on, with her tennis shoes hooked over its middle rung, was exactly like the cop’s stool at the door in Bellevue.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered aloud, and his free hand made a trembling fist in his pocket as he walked around the yard. “Son of a bitch.” Because this was the funny part, the neurotic part, the crazy part: he was still furious. Wasn’t it supposed to be true that if you could isolate the cause of an irrational anger it would go away? Didn’t everybody know that? Then why wasn’t it working? All he wanted now was to go back into the kitchen and say “Janice, get off that stool.”

“What, dear?”

“You heard me. Get your ass off that fucking stool.”

She’d look as astonished as if she’d been slapped; the colander might fall from her lap and if it didn’t he’d grab it up and send it clattering against the wall, spraying string beans.

“I swear to Christ if you don’t get off I’ll knock you off! Is that clear?”

“John,” she’d say, standing up and backing away in fright, “John, what’s the—John, are you—?”

He’d get the stool then, swing it high and bring it down in so mighty a crash that its splintered legs and rungs would skate across the floor, and as she cowered against the wall the very sight of her would enrich his voice with a thunderous rage: “Whaddya think you are, some cop? Some cop in a madhouse? Huh? You think you’re some broad-assed, bull-dyke cop keeping the lunatics in line? Huh? Huh?”

By this time Tommy would be crying in the kitchen doorway, helplessly clutching the fly of his pants (as the ancient man had clutched his shrunken genitals in Bellevue and caused Spivack to say “Hey there, sexpot”), and in the momentum of his fury he would turn on Tommy too. “Yeah, yeah, yeah; you better take a good look, kid, and don’t forget it. Wise up. I’m your father. This is your mother. I’m a certified lunatic and she’s a cop, do you understand that? A cop! A cop!”

None of that happened, but only because he stood whispering it all to himself, breathing hard, with one arm tight around the trunk of a tall rustling tree in the silence of the yard.

The next morning was bright but too cool for the lake, so he did what he’d said on the highway would sure feel great: he lay on a blanket in the grass.

Well before noon he was getting up to stretch every twenty minutes or so, aiming a congenial smile at Janice in case she happened to look up from the garden, and going inside to pour a quick, deep shot of whiskey which he downed like medicine at the kitchen sink. Several times, when the drone of Tommy’s transistor radio in another room seemed to guarantee that he wouldn’t be seen, he had two or three.

After lunch he took a nap; when he awoke very late in the afternoon he struggled heavily up to sit on the edge of the bed and called Janice, and she came to sit beside him.

“Look,” he said. “I know you were planning to spend a few more days up here, but I want to go home tomorrow. The thing is I’ve got to get back to the office.”

“Well, it’s hardly a question of ‘got to,’ dear,” she said. “George Taylor can wait.”

“Of course he can wait. It’s not him, it’s me. I just think the sooner I get back into a normal working routine the better I’ll be, that’s all.”

He knew he couldn’t expect her to say “You know best,” or anything like that, but at least she didn’t argue. She studied the leaf-mottled rectangles of sunset on the floorboards for a while; then she patted his knee and said “All right.”

He was in the kitchen, fixing the first of what he vowed would be his only two drinks before dinner, when he heard her announcing the change of plans to Tommy. “Dear, Daddy and I’ve decided to go home tomorrow. You won’t mind that very much, will you?”

And Tommy said he didn’t know; he didn’t care.

“Well, hey, stranger,” George Taylor said, lumbering around his big desk with his hand held out. “Janice said you might be laid up another week.”

“Yeah, well, you know how the flu is; sometimes it hangs on, sometimes not.” And Wilder allowed his knuckles to be crushed in welcome back to work.

“You did a great job in Chicago; got some good reports on that.”

“Well, that’s—fine.” But it was strange, too: he could remember almost nothing of Chicago.

“Like to go over some of that stuff with you today; then there’s a couple new things coming up. You free for lunch?” He was back behind the desk now, punching one of the many buttons on his complicated telephone. “Honey,” he said, “Mr. Wilder ’n’ I’ll be wanting a table for two at Rattazzi’s, twelve thirty. Right.”

And so at twelve thirty they presented themselves to the headwaiter in the upstairs room, who called them “Gentlemen” like Charlie in Bellevue. The martinis here came in stemmed glasses, but the stems were only an inch high and the glasses as deep as tumblers. Well before George Taylor had finished his first it was clear that he’d grown bored with going over the Chicago stuff and the new things coming up: as his voice trailed away in incomplete sentences and his eyes wistfully roved the crowded tables he seemed bored with the very idea of The American Scientist, with advertising, with business and with money itself—and who could blame him for that?

He was fifty-six and burly, with a healthy crop of red hair just beginning to turn grey. As vice-president in charge of advertising sales he had risen as high as he ever would in the corporate structure. His excellent salary and stockholder’s dividends accounted for less than half his income; the rest came from shrewd investments. He lived in an exclusive Rockland County village; all his children were grown and he was a grandfather of three. Another man might have turned obsessively to golf or sailing or collecting antique shotguns, but George Taylor’s avocation was young girls. More than a few of his lunches with Wilder in the past had featured stories of girls who found it impossible to leave him alone, who hounded him and begged for him and fought for his favors, of how at least one had wept in his arms all night after her formal engagement to some recent graduate of Harvard Law.

“Hell, I’m about ready for another one, aren’t you, John?” he said now, raising his empty glass.

“Yeah; I’m ready.”

And the second round launched him into a confessional monologue. “… Jesus, if you only knew what’s been going on with Sandy. I mean talk about a sweet little package of trouble; talk about a sweet little nest of rattlesnakes.” Sandy was a laughing, full-breasted girl who’d been his secretary for six months. “Bad enough when she worked for me, but it’s been even worse since I got her outa there. Told you I got her a job up at Drake and Cornfield, didn’t I? This new agency up on Fifty-ninth? You know, one of these swinging little shops where everybody says ‘creative’ all the time; they’ve got girls running around the office barefoot; got a lotta bright young studs on the make; I figured she’d fit in there. But son of a bitch, John, she can’t quit. Worst part of it is I can’t quit. Three, four evenings a week, half my vacation—Jesus. Crazy child. Twenty-two years old and all sex. All sex. Says she can’t stand boys her own age. Says I fulfill her. Last week my wife said ‘Pajamas? What’re you wearing pajamas for?’ And you know why I was wearing pajamas? Because my back was all raw welts from where Sandy’d clawed me. Crazy, crazy child. Couldn’t stand her apartment. Had this apartment with another girl, didn’t like it because she didn’t have enough privacy with me, so I got her a new one by herself—oh, she pays the rent and everything—she’s very strict about that—but now if I don’t show up there damn near every afternoon she’s calling me on the phone. Then about a month ago she said ‘Drive me to Philadelphia.’ I said ‘Why should I drive you to Philadelphia?’ She said ‘Because I want to blow you while you’re doing eighty miles an hour on the Jersey Turnpike.’ ”

“And did she?”

“Damn right she did, buddy. Eighty miles an hour. Jesus.”

There was a third round of drinks and finally some food, which grew cold before they began to pick at it; then there were gulps of coffee and the promise of a long and dismal afternoon. Taylor grumbled about having to arrange the God damn December Issue Sales Conference; Wilder’s desk held an indecipherable batch of expense-account vouchers from Chicago that would somehow have to be put in order, and after that he’d be on the phone trying to set up a week’s worth of calls.

The office was better than Bellevue. Its walls were white and its lights indirect; it contained women as well as men; everybody wore clothes and nobody pleaded to be saved or screamed or masturbated or kicked at windows—even so, there were signs of mounting desperation in every face as the day wore on, and the arrival of five o’clock was like the cop’s signal to unlock the big front door.

“Hi,” he said, unlocking the door of his own home, released not only from the office but from the clangorous imprisonment of the subway.

“Hi, there,” Janice said, and Tommy looked up from the television to acknowledge him with a mouthful of apple.

When he’d taken off his coat and tie he went to the place where the bourbon and the ice were kept, with Janice following him closely. “Make you a drink?” he asked her.

“Just a very small one. About a third of what you’re having.”

The phone rang in the middle of dinner, and when Janice came back from it she said Paul wanted to drop over for a drink later on. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Course not.” And he guessed he didn’t; but if it hadn’t been for Tommy, solemnly slicing a pork chop across the table, he might have said he did. He knew what Borg would want tonight: he’d want to recommend a reputable psychiatrist, and Janice would sit nodding in wise approval, maybe even holding her husband’s hand.

How had Borg known they were back from the country? But that was a stupid, easily answered question: Janice had called him today with news that John had acted “funny” all weekend and spent most of it in a drunken stupor. The two of them had been in cahoots on this thing from the start, after all. (It hadn’t taken him long, walking the corridor at Bellevue, to figure out that there’d been nothing accidental about Borg’s showing up in the Commodore bar that night.)

He didn’t arrive until well after Tommy’s bedtime; then he came in wearing an open shirt and a baggy sweater as if to prove there was no serious business at hand. All he wanted was a little Scotch, thanks—very light.

And the first part of their talk, as it had been for a year or more, was of politics. Hell, God knew anybody’d be better than Nixon, Wilder said, but even so he didn’t quite trust Kennedy. A rich boy, a glamour boy, a senator who’d never once spoken out against McCarthy even after it was safe for anyone to do so, a candidate who’d bought the primaries and rigged the convention—and he wound up that discourse by proclaiming, as he’d often done before, that he himself was an unregenerate Stevenson man.

“Well, but John,” Paul Borg said, “I think we have to agree that Stevenson was a Greek. Kennedy’s a Roman. We need Romans in this country now.” That was something Borg had said before too, and it was so neatly phrased that Wilder suspected he had read it somewhere.

On any other evening Janice would have said “Oh, exactly,” as if the line were brand-new to her, and gone on to explain that she’d always sensed something a little soft and indecisive about Stevenson; but she kept her mouth shut and vanished into the kitchen to make coffee. There were more important things on which to agree with Paul Borg tonight.

Even after she was gone it took him quite a while to come out with the opening salvo. “John,” he began, tamping his pipe with a careful forefinger (ordinarily he smoked cigarettes, but he reserved a pipe for moments like this; he probably used it with difficult clients, too). “John, have you given any thought to psychotherapy?” And the very word was enough to bring Janice softly back into the room, averting her face as she set a tray of trembling cups and saucers on the coffee table.

The question hung in the air and he made them wait for his answer, determined to keep his voice down. Tommy’s bedroom was far away down a hall between two closed doors, but even so there must be no chance of his hearing this.

Given any thought to it? Yes, he had. Exactly once, on the last day in Bellevue when that greasy little clerk had made him say he would, as a condition of his release in Borg’s custody. “So if you’re speaking as my custodian, or whatever they call it, don’t come to me. Go to him. Take Janice along too. I’m sure the three of you can work something out, even if you have to lock me up again first.”

Janice was almost visibly fighting an urge to say “John, that’s not fair”; instead she sipped coffee to show that this, at any cost, would be a civilized discussion.

And Borg frowned through the billows of common sense that rose from his clenched pipe. They would get nowhere, he said, by harping on Bellevue. Neither he nor Janice had ever wanted him “locked up,” as they’d both made clear time and again. For John to attack them now as some sort of conspirators was simply—

“ ‘Hostile,’ right? ‘Paranoid’?”

“Those are your words, not mine. Look: suppose we consider the events leading up to Bellevue. You had a nervous breakdown in Chicago; when you got back you were wholly irrational. And frankly—” he lowered his eyes “—well, this may be hindsight, but frankly I’d noticed a good many signs that something of the kind was building up over the past few months.”

“Signs, huh? What signs?”

“Excessive drinking, for one; compulsive drinking. Irritability: you’d blow up over the slightest—over nothing. And moodiness; sulkiness. Sometimes Natalie and I’d be over here, or you’d be at our place, and you wouldn’t say a word all evening.”

Wilder almost said Maybe I was bored; instead he got a fresh drink and sat silent while Borg explained how much good a good psychiatrist might do for him. Oh, not one of the old-school, doctrinaire Freudians—and certainly not one of these new, underqualified “hip” people, either—but a sound, reputable therapist who’d see him twice a week and “work” with him.

A crisp little notebook was drawn from Borg’s hip pocket, a page torn out and laid on the coffee table: Dr. Jules Blomberg, with offices in the East Sixties. This man had helped a client of Borg’s to recover from an almost suicidal depression; he had helped an obese friend of that same client to lose a hundred pounds. And he was highly respected in the field: his papers were published in the best psychiatric journals; he’d lectured at many universities …

“And of course you’ve told him all about me, right? And set up an appointment?”

“I’ve told him a little about you, yes. The appointment is entirely your business.”

Entirely his business. For some time there was no sound but the clicking of ice in his glass while he thought it over. What the hell. It might help; it might “work”; and if it didn’t he could always quit.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll see the guy.” And he put both shoes on the coffee table to dramatize his capitulation.

But Janice was still tense, and Paul Borg made great flames as he tried to light his pipe for the third or fourth time. He didn’t really know how to smoke the thing; maybe soon he’d stop trying. “There’s just one hitch, John,” he said at last. “Dr. Blomberg made it clear to me that he won’t work with you unless you stop drinking.”

“Well,” he said, getting up. “There goes the ballgame. Dr. Blomberg is out of business. Dr. Blomberg is shit outa luck. So are you, buddy—” he pointed at Borg and then at his wife—“and so are you. I may be mentally ill and I may need ‘help,’ but I am not, never have been and never will be a drunk.” And to prove it he made straight for the bourbon bottle and poured himself a big one. This was the closest he’d come to losing his temper all evening, but he didn’t, cautioned not only by fear of waking Tommy but by a quick secret vision of Charlie bearing down on him in the corridor with his needle aloft (“All right, Mr. Wilder; I’ve warned you …”).

“… We’ve been friends for years, John,” Borg was saying, “and it’s often struck me that you have a low tolerance for alcohol. We’ve drunk together many times, matching each other drink for drink, and when I’d be just beginning to feel high you’d be—well, drunk.”

“Matter of opinion. Prejudiced opinion. You do drink every day, right? Just like me?”

“Every day, yes. I don’t drink at lunch but I always have a few after work; usually a few after dinner.”

“Which means,” Wilder said, “which means that along about three thirty or four you start craving it. You crave it so bad you can taste it, right?”

“No; it’s not that way at all. I’m always tired at that time of day; sometimes by five o’clock I’m very nervous as well as tired. Then I have a few drinks and I’m not tired or nervous any more. Simple as that. Of course I need alcohol, John. The difference is, my system can handle it. I imagine it’s purely a matter of body chemistry.”

“How nice for you,” Wilder said. “Isn’t that swell.”

Then they heard a high, shy call from Tommy’s room. Janice hurried to him, while Wilder finished his drink in a gulp, and when she came back she said “He wants to see you, John.”

“My God. He can’t have heard anything. I haven’t raised my voice once during this whole God-awful—”

“No, it’s not that. He just woke up, and he says he wants to see you.”

Going down the hall he found he wasn’t steady on his feet: he swayed and lurched against a wall with one shoulder.

Tommy was sitting up in bed with the light on, surrounded by Yankee pennants and Kennedy posters. His pajamas were rumpled, his straight hair stuck out in all directions and he looked younger than ten. He looked about six or seven.

“Well, hi,” Wilder said, sitting on the bed. He sat close enough so they could hug, if that was what Tommy wanted to do, and it was. The warm feel of him and the sour, little-boy smell of him were almost enough to make him weep. “What’s the matter, Tom? You just want a hug, or do you want to talk about something?”

For some seconds it seemed that he’d just wanted the hug; then he said “Daddy?”

“Yeah?”

“You went to Chicago for a week, right?”

“Right.”

“And then your business kept you there for another week.”

“Right.”

“Well then, how come your suitcase’s been in Mom’s closet ever since a week ago last Saturday?”

“And what did you tell him?” Dr. Jules Blomberg inquired a few days later.

“What could I tell him?”

“Mm.” Dr. Blomberg was his own age or younger, chubby and nearly bald; he wore pink-tinted glasses that magnified his eyes, and his office was very well appointed: rich-looking paintings, rich-looking abstract sculpture on low pedestals around the carpet. There was a psychiatric couch on which Wilder had refused to lie, and there were two deep leather armchairs in which they now sat facing each other, man to man. That was all he had learned so far about Dr. Blomberg except that he didn’t take notes and had a habit of saying “Mm.”

“Oh, looking back now I guess I might’ve found a way to tell him, but at the time it seemed impossible. For one thing I’d had a good deal to drink and my head was—I don’t know. Anyway I just held onto him and said—I said it was a tough question but I promised him I’d answer it soon, and I guess I went into some spiel about how I never broke promises. I knew I had to get out of there fast before I started bawling all over him, so I tucked him in and turned out his light and I think he went to sleep. But the point is, doctor, that’s when I decided to come to you.”

“Mm. And to stop drinking.”

“Right. That too.”

And Dr. Blomberg spent the next twenty-five minutes, earning twenty-five dollars, on that. First he offered his professional endorsement of Alcoholics Anonymous as the most reliable, most enlightened and best means of dealing with the problem; then he dialed an avocado-colored telephone and asked for Mr. Costello.

“… Fine, thanks, and you, sir? Good. Mr. Costello, I have a new patient here who wants to join the Program, and I wondered if you’d care to be his sponsor.… Well, I don’t want to inconvenience you, but I’d say the sooner the better. Tomorrow; possibly this evening, if you’re free.… No, actually, I think it might be preferable not to visit his home—there’s a young child involved—I thought perhaps you might meet him alone for a cup of coffee.…”

A mercilessly bright coffee shop lay around the corner from this office (next door to a dark bar where Wilder had downed two quick ones to brace himself for confronting Blomberg and where he’d planned to repair for a few more as soon as Blomberg set him free); it was arranged that Mr. Costello would be there at the end of this session; then Blomberg earned a few more dollars in apologies and thanks: “… I hate to bring you out on such short notice, sir; I certainly appreciate it …” and in a silence allowing Mr. Costello to insist it was no trouble; he was happy to oblige.

With the phone in its cradle at last and Blomberg still glowing from the pleasantries, he checked his watch, found there wasn’t time to open a new line of questioning and went back to a point he’d missed earlier in the interview about the nature of Wilder’s job with The American Scientist: what exactly had Wilder meant by the term “classification specialist”?

“Oh. Well, see, most space salesmen go out after any kind of advertising they can find. I was hired away from another magazine because I brought in two new product lines the Scientist had never approached before—foreign cars and high-quality liquor. Both very lucrative.”

“Mm. So you’re the ‘specialist’ in those two ‘classifications,’ I see. And I imagine the liquor end of it must involve a good deal of drinking as part of your—work.”

“No, it’s not that simple, doctor. The liquor industry’s very solemn about ‘moderation.’ I mean, that week in Chicago was a distillers’ convention and of course there were parties, but that wasn’t the trouble: I did all the heavy drinking on my own.”

“Yes. Well, I’m afraid our time is up, Mr. Wilder.”

The coffee shop was nearly empty, as if everyone on the block preferred the bar for which he still yearned, and he didn’t have to wait long before his sponsor strode in with a briefcase.

“John Wilder? Bill Costello.” He was ruddy and dapper, with sparse white hair as neat as Harry Truman’s and a big smile of very clean false teeth, and his handshake seemed determined to prove what laying off the booze could do for a man’s grip. “I want to congratulate you,” he said when he was settled across from Wilder with both pin-striped elbows on the plastic table. “Not only on your decision for AA but for putting yourself in Dr. Blomberg’s care. This town’s loaded with psychiatrists and I know I don’t have to tell you most of ’em are quacks. They’ll treat people like you and me for years, ignoring our problem, letting us drink ourselves into the madhouse or the grave. Black, please,” he said to the waitress. “Dr. Blomberg’s one of your rare, very rare exceptions. I think the world of that young man.”

“You a former patient of his?”

“Me? Oh, no; I’m afraid I’m too old to’ve had that privilege. I imagine Jules Blomberg was still a student when I—when I first joined the Program. Well. Down to business. When did you have your last drink, John?”

“About an hour ago, waiting to see the doctor.”

“One for the road, huh?” And Bill Costello began heaping more sugar into his coffee than Wilder had ever seen anyone do. “ ‘One for the road.’ Ah, God, how often we say that, people like us. Then next day we open up the paper: TOT SLAIN BY DRUNK DRIVER, and we think, hell, nothing like that could ever happen to me. Right?”

“How long’ve you been—I mean when did you have your last drink?”

“Nine years ago next month. October sixteenth, Nineteen Fifty-one. Oh, don’t get me wrong, John, I’m not boasting. I’m deeply grateful for my sobriety, but it’s nothing to boast about. People offer me a drink at parties and I ask for a Coke or some damn thing. If they press me I say I don’t drink, and if they press me harder I say I’m an alcoholic. Not an ‘ex-alcoholic’ or a ‘reformed alcoholic,’ because you see there’s no such thing. In AA we never promise anything, to ourselves or each other, except that we’ll stay sober for one more day. Twenty-four hours. That’s why it’s so important to attend a meeting every night if you can, when you’re starting out. But hell, John, I can’t explain the Program all at once; you’ll discover it yourself. Let me just leave a few things with you.” And out of the briefcase came a handful of bright brochures (one entitled “Who, me?”) to be spread on the table. “These are just to put in your pocket. This is more important: this is your directory of meetings all over the city. Dates, times and addresses. You’ll find four or five to choose from every night—high-school gyms, church basements, loft buildings—all kinds of places.” Then his false teeth flashed in a grin of invitation and challenge. “Feel like hitting one tonight? With me?”

And Wilder stuttered through an apologetic lie about having guests for dinner.

“Tomorrow night then? Or no, wait; damn. I’m tied up tomorrow night.”

“That’s okay. I’ll go to one alone.”

“Good. That’s a good sign in itself. Many beginners are shy about walking into that first meeting alone. Well, we’ll hit a few together later on. And here,” he said, probing in the briefcase again. “This isn’t a gift, John, only a loan. I don’t care how long you keep it but I want it back; it’s a dearly prized possession. Once you get into it you’ll see why, and you’ll want to buy a copy of your own. This is what we call the Big Book—our definitive text.” It was as black as a Bible, and heavier. “Don’t try to read it all at once; take it a chapter at a time. Let it soak in. One more thing. You’ll see I’ve written my home and office numbers on the back of your directory. Now in theory, your sponsor’s always available on the phone for times when you feel you’re slipping, got to have a drink, can’t control yourself; he’s the guy who comes over or meets you somewhere and talks with you. Trouble is in my case I’m out of town a lot, so let’s leave it this way: whenever I leave town I’ll notify Dr. Blomberg and give him another number you can use, another sponsor, and of course I’ll inform that man too. Fair enough? Well. It’s been a pleasure.” He spilled an overly generous amount of change on the table and led the way out to the street. “You headed downtown? I’ll walk you over to Lex. What line of work you in, John?”

“I sell advertising. What do you do?”

“Oh, I guess you’d say I’m in show business. Television.”

“You an actor?”

“No, the writing end. Did Hollywood screenplays for a good many years; before that I did radio. Now I sort of divide my time between here and the Coast. I’m one of the three story editors on ‘Let’s Ask Daddy.’ ”

“Well, I’ve certainly heard of that show, but I’m afraid I’ve never—”

“You’re very fortunate.” There was another vigorous handshake and another gleam of dentures under the streetlights. “I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to watch the son of a bitch. Good luck, John!” And Bill Costello hurried away.

Wilder chose his first meeting because it wasn’t far from home and didn’t start until well after Tommy was asleep. But it was held in a church basement—he had uneasy memories of churches—and at first he didn’t know how to be less conspicuous: hanging around the sidewalk as the other members arrived, or going inside to study the two rumbling coffee urns and the two homemade cakes (chocolate and coconut) along the rear wall.

“Most of you know me,” said a man at the rostrum at last, while Wilder squirmed in the back row of folding chairs, “but I see some new faces tonight so I’ll go through the old routine. My name’s Herb and I’m an alcoholic.”

And there was an almost thunderous response of “Hi, Herb!”

“I think we’ll have a fine meeting tonight—two very fine speakers—but first I’d like to call on Warren here to read the Seven Principles.”

“My name’s Warren and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Warren!”

The Seven Principles seemed to go on forever as the air grew dense with cigarette smoke and loud with coughing, and then a homely girl with a barely audible voice (“Hi, Mary!”) was called upon to read the Twelve Steps.

“Our first speaker is no stranger here,” Herb said, “but he’s so modest a man that I’m sure he won’t introduce himself properly. Bob’s a highly successful management consultant—so successful in fact that I just heard today, and I didn’t hear it from him, that he’s been elected president of the Management Consultants’ Association of New York. He always gives a stimulating, provocative talk, and—well, I’ll leave the rest of it up to him.”

Bob sprang for the rostrum like a man who runs a mile before breakfast every day, adjusted the perfect tailoring on his meaty torso, proclaimed himself an alcoholic and could scarcely wait for the cries of “Hi, Bob!” to dwindle before he launched his attack.

“I know ‘management consultant’ may sound nice and solid,” he said, “but there was a time not too long ago when I couldn’t manage myself—couldn’t even consult myself without a triple Scotch in my hand, and we all know what those kind of consultations amount to. Oh, I guess I had it pretty bad in the war, picked up a few scratches—Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima—but hell, that’s no excuse: millions of guys had it bad in the war. Anyway when I got out of the Marines I made a poor adjustment to civilian life—and I don’t have to tell you good people what I mean by that. Went to business school and flunked right out because of my drinking; got a couple of jobs and lost ’em because of my drinking. Then I lost—lost my wife because of my drinking. Wonderful woman; stuck it out as long as she could for the sake of our little girl; finally just couldn’t—couldn’t stick it out any longer.” And after that, he said with an appropriate tremor in his voice, he had touched bottom.

But the rest of Bob’s story was all uphill: he had joined the Program with the help of a wonderful sponsor; soon he was back in school and doing well, holding down a job on the side to help support his child; after graduation a number of lucky breaks had helped him toward his present career. His former wife had married a fine man—a very lucky man—his daughter had made a wonderful adjustment and become a lovely teen-ager with whom he had a wonderful relationship; he himself had married again to—well, to the most wonderful girl in the world.

“Oh, I can count my blessings, sure,” he concluded. “I count ’em all the time; but deep down I know there’s only been one truly wonderful thing in my life, and that’s my association with wonderful people like you—this wonderful organization of AA, this wonderful, wonderful fellowship. Thank you.”

And he got a wonderful round of applause.

Their final speaker, Herb said, was a very gracious lady, a busy housewife and mother with many social and charitable obligations who nonetheless found time to drive all the way in from Westport several nights a week for AA; her presence was always a pleasure and he was sure they’d enjoy her remarks.

She was in her middle forties and pretty in a square-jawed way, very trim and fashionable in her full, sweeping clothes. “I’m Eleanor,” she said, “and I’m a very, very grateful alcoholic.”

She told of how in the worst of her drinking years she’d had to fix not one but three martinis for herself at five o’clock each day: one in the kitchen to help her through the preparation of dinner, one beside the hall telephone in case it rang—“I was terrified, simply terrified of talking on the phone without a drink”—and one near the children’s bathroom in readiness for her supervision of their baths. Then of course there had always been wine with dinner and brandy afterwards, until she’d come to realize she was a slave to alcohol. And in the happy, post-Program part of her recital she made frequent use of the phrase “my sobriety.”

“Eight’ll getcha five that broad’s never been drunk in her life,” said the man beside Wilder, nudging his ribs and breathing whiskey fumes in his face. “Fucking society broad; matron of honor. Drives in from Westport in her Lincoln fucking Continental. Gets her kicks this way. Wait’ll you see her serve that fucking cake.”

But Wilder didn’t wait for that. There was a passing around of baskets to collect dollar bills, an announcement listing members in various hospitals who would certainly appreciate cards and flowers; then everyone rose for an intonation of the Lord’s Prayer and he was free.

He found the darkest bar in the neighborhood and drank until he was certain Janice would be long asleep—certain too, as he sank into a taxicab, that if the morning’s paper read TOT SLAIN BY DRUNK DRIVER it wouldn’t be his fault.

“Before we begin,” Dr. Blomberg said at their next session, “I talked with Mr. Costello today. He’s been called out to Los Angeles, doesn’t know how long he’ll be gone, but he asked me to give you this name and number in case you—”

“Yeah, yeah, okay; thanks.”

“Have you been attending the meetings?”

“Two. The first was lousy—” he tried at some length and with no apparent success to explain that—“but the second was better, up in the West Seventies. They had it in an abandoned movie theatre; I sort of liked that. Had an ex-cop who’d been fired off the force for drinking, said he was a security guard in a bank now but knew he’d lose that too if he went back on the bottle; then there was a girl who’d been a prostitute until her sponsor helped her find work as a hairdresser.…”

“And you haven’t been drinking?”

“No.” That was a lie—even after the second, better meeting he had sneaked three warm bourbons in the kitchen before going to bed—but it seemed a lie worth telling, at prices like this. “And I’d really rather talk about other things, doctor. I mean I always thought you were supposed to tell a psychiatrist whatever was on your mind. For instance, coming over here from work today I was thinking about the books we have at home. There must be four, five thousand books—I’m not exaggerating—and maybe twenty of them are mine. All the rest are my wife’s. Thing is, you see, I don’t read. I’m a very, very slow reader. Guess that’s the main reason I’ve spent most of my life watching movies. I must’ve seen damn near every movie ever made since back around Nineteen Thirty-six—but don’t let me get started on the movies; I’ll get back to the movies soon enough, okay? Anyway, a few years ago my wife got me into one of these commercial speed-reading courses and I was hopeless. I mean the other people were poor readers too but they didn’t seem ashamed of it the way I was. They all made progress; I didn’t. Dropped out of the course halfway through, lost about five hundred bucks. I guess it’s what you people call a block.”

“Mm. And I imagine that must have made difficulties for you in school.”

School. The word made him squirm in his chair and clutch his forehead before he remembered Spivack’s caution against such gestures, but what the hell: he was paying this man. “School,” he said. “You really want to dig into that whole can of worms? My half-assed childhood? My crazy parents and all that?”

“Your crazy parents?”

“Well, not crazy in your sense—nobody ever had to lock them up or anything—but they were crazy as hell. Called themselves ‘business people’ all through the Depression, which meant my father was employed as an accountant in one office building and my mother did secretarial work in another. As long as I can remember they’d be lecturing me about ‘Management’ and ‘Free Enterprise’ and ‘Venture Capital.’ And this was their dream: my mother had this set of secret recipes for some kind of candy—she’d gotten ’em from her own family, back in Nebraska—and they were convinced all they’d need was a little luck and a little Venture Capital to establish their own business. Marjorie Wilder’s Chocolates. Very classy, very expensive; chocolates with snob appeal. And do you see where I was supposed to fit in? The only child? The son and heir? I’d learn the business from the ground up; they’d groom me to take over; I’d be the damn prince. By the time they retired we’d all be millionaires, and when they died they’d have a living memorial: Marjorie Wilder’s Chocolates, Inc.; John C. Wilder, President. Do you see what I mean by crazy?”

“Not exactly.”

“Had a feeling you wouldn’t. Never mind. School. I started out in the city school system, which damn near humiliated my parents to death. They couldn’t afford a private school, but they found something even better. You know Grace Church? Episcopal church down on East Eleventh? Well, it’s fairly well-known—used to be anyway—and one of the big things about it was the boys’ choir. The church ran its own little school for boys: if you could sing you not only got free schooling, you got paid. Every kid in the choir got five bucks a week, the soloists got ten, and pretty soon I was the soprano soloist. Of course I never did well at schoolwork, but in that school it didn’t matter: they let me get by because I was such a hotshot in church. Not just every week, but in the big Christmas and Easter services when people came from all over to hear the Magnificat, or the Messiah. I’d stand there in the middle of the front row, about a head shorter than anybody else, and take off on these long, intricate solo parts, and God damn it I could feel all the women out there going apeshit over me. Do you get the picture? Little Mickey Rooney with the voice of an angel? Jesus Christ.”

“I’m afraid our time is up, Mr. Wilder.”

Their time was up time and again, twice a week, leaving him to stumble for Lexington Avenue with a headful of things he wished he’d said, whispering to himself all the way home on the subway; and Blomberg’s first question at the next session was always the same: Had he been keeping up with his meetings?

“… Yeah, yeah. Went to a new one last night, down in the Village. There was a young girl, started drinking at Sarah Lawrence; had an affair with one of her teachers and when he dropped her she tried to kill herself, wound up in Bellevue. Funny: after all these meetings she’s the only other ex-Bellevue patient I’ve met—or heard, rather.” He didn’t tell of how he’d tried to pick the girl up after the meeting, with Varick Street in mind (she’d been a slender, bedraggled girl with big suffering eyes), or of how she’d almost physically recoiled from his suggestion that they might “get a cup of coffee somewhere” and hurried away down the sidewalk alone.

“But look, doctor; let’s get back to where we were, okay?”

School consumed another therapeutic hour, with digressions back and forth in time: “… Ah, I was always kind of a dud in that school, soloist or not. One thing, I was a pious little bastard. It wasn’t only the singing I loved; I loved the whole damned formal-religion scene—the rituals, the vestments, the prayers, the stained-glass windows—and I think I must’ve been just about the only kid in school who did. There was a lot of blowing farts in the choir loft, whispering dirty jokes and passing around dirty pictures, sometimes passing around half-pints of whiskey, daring you to take a nip. What I’m getting at, those other kids were on to everything: they had the kind of healthy skepticism it took me years to learn. Old Wanamaker’s Department Store used to hire us every afternoon during Christmas season, to sing carols, and of course nobody complained because it meant a few more bucks for each of us, but can you imagine how much real money must’ve changed hands between the God damned store and the God damned church? What kind of horseshit is that?

“… A lot of the kids were out of luck when their voices changed—some kids’ voices didn’t change ‘right’ for choral work, and even if they did, there was only a small section for tenors and baritones; they couldn’t keep everybody. My voice changed right—not solo quality, but good enough—so they made a tenor out of me and let me stay through the twelfth grade; then I went into the army. Have we got any time left?”

“A few minutes.”

“Because if I get going on the army it’ll take forever, and it’s not that important anyway—not nearly as important as what came afterwards. Let me just tell you one thing. At the induction center they gave us all an IQ test. Didn’t call it that, called it the Army General Classification Test, but everybody knew what the deal was. You had to score a hundred and ten to qualify for officers’ training—or any other halfway decent job, for that matter—and my score was a hundred points. So I asked if I could take it again, and some clerk said I could apply for it at my ‘next post,’ which turned out to be a basic training camp in North Carolina. And I did. There were only half a dozen of us taking it that time, and there was kind of a nice, easygoing lieutenant in charge: he let us watch while he corrected the papers, and when he came to mine he said I’d scored a hundred and nine. Then he said, ‘Curious thing; you didn’t get a single question wrong, but you only did about half of them.’ I said something like ’Well, but, sir, if I got them all right, doesn’t that indicate—” And he said, ‘It indicates a hundred and nine. You must be a very slow reader, that’s all.’ ”

And it was a week or two later that he had a fight with Janice—or a quarrel that came closer to a fight than anything since long before Bellevue.

It didn’t happen until after dinner, after the dishes were washed and Tommy sent to bed. He was sitting on the sofa looking over the acres of books and wondering how anyone, with any kind of IQ, could possibly read so much, when she came and sat beside him.

“John, do you know something? I’ve been very proud of you these past—however long it’s been.” And she nestled closer to him on the cushions. “Enormously proud.”

“Yeah, well, let’s hold off on the enormous pride for a while. It hasn’t been all that long.”

“But if you could only see the changes in you. You look so much better; you seem to have so much more self-confidence, so much more spirit. You’re a different person.”

“Then why do you figure Tommy still acts funny around me? I don’t think he’s looked me straight in the eye since—you know, our little bedside chat about the suitcase.”

“Oh, John, are you still brooding about that? That’s ancient history. I talked it over with him weeks ago.”

“You what? God damn it, Janice, I promised him I’d tell him, and I told you that. You had no God damn business—” He was on his feet in a spasm of anger, and she raced to close the hall door in the old ritual of precaution against Tommy’s hearing them at their worst. “—No God damn business violating that promise.”

“You’ve got to keep your voice down,” she said, and he did, first clamping his jaws and breathing hard through his nose—the Bellevue method of self-control—but he liked the ring of his last line so much that he said it again, very low: “You had no business violating that promise.”

“I didn’t see it as a ‘violation.’ I thought you’d be relieved.”

“You thought I’d be relieved.” He tried to make that sound contemptible and emphasized it by pacing the floor with shoulders hunched and fists tight in his pockets; even so, he had to admit she had a point. He was relieved, but he was damned if he’d let her know it.

She was back on the sofa now, not curled up but sitting straight, in her civilized-discussion posture.

“… I asked him if he knew what a nervous breakdown was and he said he guessed so, but I could tell he didn’t. So I said sometimes people worked so hard and got so tired that their nerves couldn’t take the strain and they had to go to a hospital and rest. And he did seem to understand. You mustn’t forget he’s nearly eleven, John. And I said—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah—oh, Jesus, I can picture it. You said ‘Isn’t it wonderful how Daddy doesn’t get fall-down drunk any more?’ ”

“John, I never even mentioned your—”

“Well, thanks,” he said. “Thanks for nothing.” He grabbed his coat and raincoat and headed for the door, where he stood dramatically with one hand on the knob. “I’m going out. Maybe to a meeting, maybe to get smashed. If I’m not back by morning you’d better call the cops—or call Paul Borg; same thing. In the meantime you can take your Enormous Pride and shove it up your—shove it up your—”

He let the door click shut behind him before finishing that sentence; then he was out on the street and walking fast, downtown, with no idea of where he was going. Somewhere around Twenty-third he stopped for a drink—just one—and studied Bill Costello’s directory for a meeting that might still be open. There was one on West Houston Street.

It took place in a fourth-floor loft, and its leader was quick to explain what made it different from most other meetings. “We don’t schedule any formal speakers here,” he said. “We’re impromptu. We call on anybody in the room for a few minutes’ talk; if they don’t feel like talking we respect their privacy. I see a young fella over here on my left been with us a few times before, looks like he might like to say a few words; trouble is he looks all out of breath. How about it, Carl?”

A compact, tight-faced boy who couldn’t have been more than twenty went forward, said his name was Carl and that he was an alcoholic.

“Hi, Carl!”

“And you’re right, Tony, I am out of breath. Got on the wrong train in Brooklyn; had to get off down at Broadway and Delancey Street and I—I ran all the way.”

“Whyn’t you take it easy a second, Carl?” Tony said. “Get your wind back.”

“Okay.” Then he said “Guess the reason I keep getting lost in the subways is I’m not a native New Yorker. I’m from Kansas. Led a very sheltered childhood out there; what I mean is, I spent most of it in state correctional institutions. Wasn’t bad; I always had three meals a day, always had clean clothes and a clean place to sleep and plenty of smokes, and I learned my trade. I’m a barber. Then I got out, and that’s when I started drinking. Oh, if it was just me it wouldn’t matter; I make good money; I’m a good barber even when I’m half crocked; but it’s not just me. Past year or so, eleven months, I’ve been living with this girl in Brooklyn. And the thing is—the thing is, it’s not working out. I’m not—She’s not—It’s not working out at all.” He was silent for a few seconds. “Hell, I know I can’t bullshit you people. I won’t claim I’ve quit drinking because it’s not true.” And here his voice could scarcely be heard. “I’m scared, you see. I’m scared she’ll leave me. That’s why I come to these meetings. That’s why, when I take the wrong train like tonight, why I figure it’s worth running all the way—worth it because if nothing else, if nothing else, I can be with people like you for an hour—just an hour—and be sober. Thank you.”

There was plenty of applause but Carl didn’t acknowledge it; he went quickly back to his chair and used it in a way he’d probably learned in the correctional institutions: sit stiff, keep both hands on your knees, look straight ahead and never smile, especially after any chance that you’ve said something dumb, or smart, unless you want somebody to think you’re some kind of a fruit.

“I’d like to address my remarks to Carl,” said the next speaker, a wobbling old man with few teeth. “I want to say ‘Carl, I don’t care how many wrong trains you take. I don’t care how much running you have to do. Just keep coming, boy; keep coming. You’re on the right road.’ ”

There were four or five other speakers, and then Tony took over. “We’ve got something special to conclude our meeting tonight,” he said. “We’ve got a birthday. Now, personally, I’ve always thought most AA birthdays are kind of silly: you see them give some guy a cake with six, eight, twelve candles to prove how many years he’s been dry, they tell his last name in honor of the occasion and he makes his little speech, and you sit there thinking What does this guy need AA for? He just tryna show off, or what? But a first birthday, that’s different. That’s something else. That’s an achievement. I mean those first twelve months—well, hell, you know what I mean.” He nodded toward a curtained-off portion of the loft and out came a pink man, all smiles, bearing a pink cake with a single candle whose wavering flame he shielded with his hand. Then Tony said “Will Mr. Sylvester Cummings please come forward?”

A gaunt middle-aged Negro got up and went to the rostrum, wearing a cheap blue suit and trailed by cheers and whistles. He shook hands with Tony and thanked the man who gave him the cake platter, but when some of the audience broke into a ragged chorus of “Hap-py birth-day to—” he held up one hand and said “No, no, please; never mind the birthday song. I mean I appreciate it, but that’s a song for children. I’m forty-seven years old. Even my own children aren’t children any more; they’re grown and gone.” He stood looking down at his cake for some time. “It doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “A whole year. Only thing I know for certain, I never would’ve made it without your help—without Tony here and all you other people. I think back to the way I was—way I was for more years than I want to think about—and sometimes all I can remember is how I’d wake up every morning on my knees with my arms wrapped around that old toilet bowl, puking my guts out, and I’d say to myself ‘Sylvester, you are praying. You are worshiping at the only altar in which you have ever truly believed.’ ”

That won him a laugh, but he didn’t smile. “I’ve never been a very religious man, you see. Even here at these meetings, when it’s time for the Lord’s Prayer, I just kind of move my mouth a little and hope nobody’s noticing. Matter of fact I don’t enjoy cake very much either—maybe some of you people can help me out on this one.” He looked down at it again in a long, meditative pause. “But I have come to believe something, this past year. I’ve come to believe that I would rather—I would rather light one candle than curse the darkness.” Then he blew the candle out, and there was a standing ovation.

It was enough to send Wilder home without stopping for even so much as a beer, enough to make him wake his wife and tell her he was sorry.

“Oh, I know, dear,” she said. “I know …”

He had insisted he wouldn’t spend much time on the army with Dr. Blomberg, and he didn’t. The army had convinced him he wasn’t very smart and jolted all the religion out of him; he’d seen action only at the end of the war in Europe and spent his whole final year in the mildewed “Tent Cities” of France, where there’d been nothing to do, between painfully infrequent three-day passes, but go to the movies every night. “I told you we’d get back to the movies.”

“Mm.”

“Funny thing: in civilian movie-houses people’d sit still for any kind of trash—you’d never hear anybody laugh out loud in a love scene or anything like that—but in the army there was nothing magic about the big silver screen any more, and we all got to be very vocal, brutal movie critics. We could spot a fake plot or a fake ‘message’ a mile away; we’d stomp and laugh and yell obscenities at anything cheap or trite or hoked-up or sentimental, and I remember thinking Jesus, these guys are like me: we’ve all been raised on movies, and we’re just now beginning to figure out what frauds most of them are. And here’s what I’m getting at, doctor: that’s when I decided I wanted to make movies. Good movies. Oh, I knew I couldn’t be a director—that’d take more talent than anybody with an IQ of a hundred and nine could claim—but a producer: the man who gets the idea, raises the money, hires the talent, puts the whole thing together. That’s what I wanted.

“Course, I couldn’t tell my parents, or thought I couldn’t. They were still in the old apartment when I got home, working at their old jobs, and they both looked old as hell—they must’ve been in their middle fifties—but the damned chocolate business was bigger than ever in their heads. My father spent all his free time hustling up Venture Capital, and the funny part is he did well. Everybody was talking about a postwar boom: just the right time for a good, well-marketed luxury product to catch on. He took me along with him to meet some banker. ‘This is my son John. Twenty years old; infantry veteran just back from Europe; went through the Bulge and all that. Going to Yale next month; he’ll be in on the business from the start.’

“When we got out of there I said ‘Dad, could you please lay off the Bulge? You know I didn’t go through the Bulge.’

“He said ‘They gave you the star for it, didn’t they?’

“And the point is, Doctor, I’d told him time and again, time and again they gave the damn star to everybody within a hundred miles of the Bulge. So I said ‘Look: it may not matter to you but it matters to me. Can’t you see that?’

“And the little bastard just walked along—he was little, even smaller than me, with a face like a walnut and this old-timey, pearl-grey hat pulled down hard over his eyes—just walked along and said I had a lot to learn about the business world. Jesus.

“But I did go to Yale; that was the college they’d picked for me, and they’d been careful to send me the application forms the minute the war was over so I’d beat the big rush of GI Bill students. I still don’t understand how I got in and I was scared shitless of flunking out. The reading assignments almost killed me—I’d be up reading all night while everybody else was out drinking and screwing around—but I made it through freshman year, and by then my parents were in business. They had a little factory up in Stamford with about six employees; they’d paid some designer a lot of money for the most elegant-looking package you ever saw; they were turning out honest-to-God chocolates every day and they had my own summer’s work cut out for me: I was the assistant to an older guy who took ‘the line’ around to wholesalers all over New York.

“ ‘Taste one—just taste one,’ the older guy’d say. ‘Be our guest.’ And I’d sit there smiling like a clown in my J. Press suit, wondering what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life.

“Well, it didn’t last long; my sophomore year was a disaster. Barely made it through the first semester, and along about April I sort of gave up. Went to the movies all the time, quit studying, quit trying, and I flunked out that June.

“And my God, talk about family tragedies! They seemed to think I’d done it on purpose, just to thwart them. Started bringing home armloads of other college catalogues, and I’d throw ’em away. Oh, I’ve always regretted that—there must’ve been plenty of colleges with remedial reading programs—but the thought of any college made me sick; besides, I knew they only wanted me to graduate for the sake of Marjorie Wilder’s fucking Chocolates. Quarrels, recriminations, fights, tears—Finally I said ‘I don’t owe you people anything,’ and I took off.

“Got a room in the city and answered a help-wanted ad for an outfit called Films for Industry: ‘Learn the ropes of motion-picture production.’ Paid me thirty-five a week to carry lights and drag cables around the floor and get sandwiches for the actors and the camera crew, and I mean that might’ve been okay if they’d been making halfway decent movies, even industrial movies, but they weren’t. I remember one they made for Meade Record-keeping Systems; the title was It Must Be Somewhere—twenty minutes of unfunny slapstick about what happens in the office when an important paper gets lost. Bosses blowing their tops, secretaries crying, file cabinets dumped out on the floor; then the man from Meade comes in and saves the day. Finds the paper, says ‘Record-keeping is my business’ and goes into his sales pitch. The End.

“And the worst part, all those Films for Industry people were happy as clams—none of them ever thought of getting into real movies, even the girls. I took one girl out to lunch, tried to get her talking about movies and she looked at me like I was some dopey little kid: ‘You mean consumer films? Feature films?’ Didn’t consider herself an actress at all; couldn’t have cared less. Then it turned out she was shacked up with one of the Films for Industry executives; soon as his divorce came through she’d quit working and they’d settle down in Forest Hills.

“… Oh, if I’d had any guts I’d have hitchhiked out to Hollywood and hung around the studios until somebody hired me as a grip or even a mail clerk—if I’d done that I might even have become a producer by now—but I didn’t. Maybe I wasn’t ready to make that big a break with my parents; I don’t know. Anyway I didn’t.

“Then somebody told me the Herald Tribune was taking on space salesmen, paying good money, not too fussy about college degrees. So I said I’d had three years at Yale instead of two, and that’s how I got started in this racket. That’s how I met Janice too—she worked there. We got married within a year and then we had our boy. By that time I was working for a trade journal, Chain Store Age; then I moved over to a magazine called Vanguard and then to The American Scientist, and somewhere along the line the whole movie-producer idea evaporated. Oh, don’t worry, doctor, I’m not saying marriage tied me down; you won’t catch me blaming my wife for everything I can’t blame on my parents or any neurotic horseshit like that. The ambition just went away, that’s all. It’s come back now and then over the years—usually when I’ve been drinking, I guess—but it’s gone. Nobody’s fault but mine. You want to hear what happened to my parents?”

“Mm.” And the doctor inspected his watch.

“Well, we had a halfhearted reconciliation after the baby was born, but in the meantime they’d found what I suppose you guys would call a surrogate son: another Ivy League type, only this one had his diploma, and he really did take over the business and build it up, just the way they’d always thought I would. They were rich as hell by the time they retired. My father died four years ago and my mother’s in a nursing home now—she had a brain hemorrhage and she’s pretty much a vegetable—but son of a bitch, you can’t walk into any supermarket in America today without bumping into this big-assed revolving rack: Marjorie Wilder’s Chocolates. Six bucks a box. How about that?”

“Mm. Yes. Well, I’m afraid our time is—”

“Not so fast, Doctor.”

“Mm?” Blomberg blinked up through his pink-tinted glasses.

“You know something? You’re the only dead-silent bullshit artist I’ve ever met. I tell you the whole God damned story of my life; you sit there saying absolutely nothing and hauling in a hundred a week of my money, and you know what that’s called? That’s larceny.”

They were both on their feet. “I have another patient waiting, Mr. Wilder.”

“Let ’im wait. You’ve kept me waiting often enough. I’ve got one question: When the hell are you gonna start talking? When’s all this famous ‘work’ and ‘help’ and ‘therapy’ supposed to begin? Huh?”

“Mr. Wilder, I don’t know what’s brought on this hostility, but perhaps it’s something we can discuss Thursday.”

Then a line of Spivack’s in Bellevue seemed appropriate: “Yeah, well, don’t hold your breath.”

“Do you plan to cancel your Thursday appointment?”

“It might just be,” Wilder said, trembling at the door, “that ‘our time is up’ in more fucking ways than one.”

“Do you want to terminate your association with me?”

“Suppose we let you sweat that one out. I’d like to picture you all alone here twice a week, watching all my money float away. So long, pink-eyes.”

And jolting home on the subway he kept thinking of embellishments he might have put on that final speech: he might have said “… all alone here twice a week with your finger in your mouth, or up your ass—depending, of course, on whether you’re an oral- or an anal-fixation type …” But then he began to wonder if Blomberg might pick up that avocado-green, snot-green phone and call Paul Borg with the news of his outburst. Well, hell. What if he did?

“Dear?” Janice said when they were alone that night, and at first he thought it might be about Blomberg and Borg, but it wasn’t. “I’ve been looking through some of the AA leaflets—That doesn’t upset you, does it?”

“Course not.”

“The thing is, they say it’s often helpful for a member’s wife or husband to go along to the meetings, and I was wondering if—I mean I’d really like to. Especially the one you told me about, where the man said he’d rather light one candle than curse the darkness.”

“Well, I don’t know, I—okay. Sure.”

They were climbing the stairs to the loft before it struck him that he might well be called on to speak tonight; and toward the end of the meeting Tony’s index finger swung straight at his face.

“I see a man back there’s been with us a few times lately; want to say a few words, sir?”

Blood beat in his ears all the way to the rostrum, and the voice that addressed the group through hanging veils of smoke didn’t sound like his own at all. “My name’s John and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, John!”

“I haven’t been in the Program very long, but I’ve gone to meetings all over town and this one’s the best I’ve found. Trouble is, it’s the first time I’ve been asked to talk and that’s a little embarrassing because my wife’s here with me as a guest tonight—but what the hell, she’s seen me make a fool of myself plenty of times before.”

There was some laughter—not much—and he wondered if it might be bad manners in this group even to hint at being securely married, or to bring any kind of “guest.”

“I’m a salesman, and I guess I always thought heavy drinking was part of a salesman’s life. Well, that idea went down the drain a while back when I was locked up for a week in Bellevue …” He didn’t know how to finish: he heard himself saying “still scared” and “grateful” and “with your help” until he found his way through a clumsy final sentence that allowed him to say “Thank you.” He couldn’t tell if the clapping was tepid or hearty or even if it lasted until he was back in his chair, where Janice made a display of squeezing his hand.

“You were wonderful,” she said when they were out on the street again.

“The hell I was. All that self-pitying shit about Bellevue; all that false humility. I felt like an idiot.”

“I thought you did very well. Besides, what does it matter? This isn’t show business, after all.”

He almost stopped on the sidewalk to turn her around and shout that it was show business—the whole God damn “Program” was show business, from Bill Costello to Sylvester Cummings; that psychotherapy was show business too, with an inattentive, pink-eyed audience of one—but this was no night for another quarrel.

“Oh, let’s just walk a while,” she was saying. “I love this old part of town; I don’t think I’ve been down here for years and years. Remember all the walks we used to take around here before we were married?”

“Yup.”

“Houston and Canal and Delancey, and we’d go to the Fulton Fish Market early in the morning, and we’d walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Mm.”

“That’s odd,” she said at an intersection. “This ought to be Seventh Avenue, but the sign says something else; I can’t quite make it out.”

“I think it’s Varick Street. Turns into Seventh Avenue a few blocks uptown.”

“You really are remarkable, John,” and she clung to his arm in an affectionate, almost flirtatious way as they turned the corner. “You know all the streets.”

Well, no; not all; but he did happen to know a few. And well within a block of the secret cellar he saw lamplight flooding up from its clean, closed Venetian blind. Whatever Paul Borg was doing down there tonight, with whatever girl, he sure as hell wasn’t cursing the darkness.

“Seen the Times yet?” George Taylor inquired, easing one haunch onto Wilder’s desk. “Bad news.”

Like everything else concerning work these days it took a little while to sink in. He heard Taylor say “McCabe’s lost the Northeast account” and watched his mouth labor through many other words of supporting information. He said “Damn” because it seemed appropriate, but then he had to hang his head, pretending to think it over while he tried to puzzle out what Taylor had told him. His brains seemed filled with sand.

Northeast Distillers was a giant of the liquor industry; through the giant advertising agency of McCabe-Derrickson they had bought the full-color back cover of The American Scientist every month for years, providing one of the mainstays of Wilder’s income, so it was indeed bad news. “And what’s the new agency again? Hartwell and who?”

“ ‘Hartwell and Partners.’ I never heard of ’em. Prob’ly about six months old, one of these damn little ‘creative’ shops. Anyway you better get on the horn, try to set up a presentation.” And Taylor slid heavily off the desk with the look of a bewildered old man. “I just don’t get it—a staid, conservative outfit like Northeast pulling a switch like this. Whole thing’s crazy,” he said as he turned away. “Seems like now Kennedy’s in, everybody wants to be some kind of a swinger.”

There was some confusion at the Hartwell and Partners switchboard when he asked for the Northeast account executive; he talked with several impatient voices before he found the man, whose name was Frank Lacy and who sounded less than thirty years old.

“A ‘presentation’?” Frank Lacy said as if the very word had gone out of style—and maybe it had. “Well, I don’t see why not, Mr. Wilder. Things are fairly hectic around here now, but I think we can fit you in. Hold on a sec. How about Wednesday at ten?”

And so he found his way to the thirty-ninth floor of a steel-and-glass tower, lugging the briefcase that contained his presentation in a sweaty hand.

WE HATE TO PRY

That was the heading of the big cardboard flip chart he propped on the central table of the meeting room, after making his own nervous opening remarks, and beneath it ran the words:

That’s why The American Scientist never asks its readers what they drink, how much they drink or when they drink it. It’s all right to ask whether they hunt, fish, play tennis or golf, but a man’s communion with his favorite tipple is a private matter.…

His audience consisted of five or six young men and three or four girls, all semi-collapsed in deep sofas and chairs; they didn’t look bored but they were hardly spellbound, and that prompted him to risk a little extemporaneous talk. “I’m supposed to read this thing aloud to you,” he said, “and I think I’m even supposed to underscore each line with my finger, but I’ll spare you that. I mean the Scientist is a great magazine but I’ve never figured out where they hire the people who write this flip-chart stuff; at least I don’t think I could get my mouth around ‘a man’s communion with his favorite tipple.’ ”

It wasn’t a big laugh, and like Sylvester Cummings he didn’t spoil it by smiling, but it was good-natured enough to make him feel at ease, even a little jaunty, as he paged through the rest of the chart.

Still, it seemed only reasonable that the 600,000 American Scientist readers would be as excellent a market for alcoholic beverages as they are for expensive cars, cameras, stereo components and European travel.

To find out, we performed a simple exercise in logic. First, a profile was developed of the alcoholic-beverage industry’s prime consumer. The American Scientist reader was then compared to him. Here, feature by feature, are the results of that comparison:

And on the final page, in twin columns, the prime consumer and the magazine’s reader turned out to be identical in every way. That page took longer to read than the others, which gave him time to glance over the pictures on the walls—much like Dr. Blomberg’s pictures except that one seemed to be a framed comic strip—and at the people, especially the girls. One wore her tan hair like Jackie Kennedy’s and had a face that made his heart turn over, but his several seconds of lust dissolved when he saw her long, slender legs: she’d be too damned tall.

“Well, so much for the flip chart,” he said. “I have a few other things here to leave with you. This heavy one—” he felt like Bill Costello handing over the Big Book—“is a very thorough demographic survey called The Subscriber Self-Portrait; I hope you’ll have time to look it over. And I’d like to sum up with a few points about our average reader. He’s forty years old. He earns more than twenty thousand a year, and his work is so highly technical that you and I could never understand it. But he doesn’t read the magazine at work; he reads it at home, and he spends four hours over each issue. I don’t know what you people do when you’re spending four hours at home with a magazine, but I—well, hell, I guess I commune with my favorite tipple.”

It was time to get offstage. “As you know, Northeast Distillers already has six of our back covers. The other six are still available, and I think you’d be making a good decision, as soon as possible, to pick them up. Thanks very much.” He shook hands with Frank Lacy and several others; then he got out fast and made for the reception room.

“That was nice,” said a girl walking beside him. It was the girl with the face and the long legs, and the top of her head came only to his ear.

“Well,” he said, “thanks. I always dread these damn things.”

“That’s what made it nice. I mean I could tell you hated it, but you did it well anyway. I think everyone was impressed.” They were out in the reception room now, alone except for the receptionist who sat cuddled over her phone and murmuring seductively in what couldn’t have been a business call. “Have you seen our terrace?” the girl said. “It’s really the only nice thing about this place.”

One panel of a glass wall slid open and she led him out onto a wide, windswept prairie of white pebbles. There were a few wrought-iron tables and chairs and a few stone benches among potted shrubs, but she took him straight to the low balustrade for a naked view of the city. To look out was spectacular; to look down was almost enough to scare the life out of him.

“We spent most of our time out here all summer,” she was saying, “but I like it even better now.” She didn’t even seem to mind that the cold wind was spoiling her Jackie Kennedy hair, and he was already half in love with the proud, slim way she paced the pebbles—she moved like a student of modern dance—and with her big brown eyes and vivid mouth.

“Been working here long?”

“Just since I got out of school last June. I thought it might be fun because you get to do a little of everything, but it’s—I don’t know. You know.” And she wrinkled her nose in disdain. “It’s still advertising.”

He asked her name—Pamela Hendricks—and when he’d tucked the whipping necktie back into his coat and tried to smooth his own flying hair he asked her out to lunch, which seemed to take her wholly by surprise.

“Well, no, actually, I’m afraid I’m—” And the brightness vanished so quickly from her eyes that he didn’t dare say How about tomorrow? She was probably Frank Lacy’s mistress anyway (Frank Lacy was a hulking, rock-jawed, big-shouldered son of a bitch, and he remembered now that they’d sat thigh to thigh during the presentation); she might well have brought him out here on the terrace only in some girlish attempt to make Frank Lacy jealous.

“Well. Maybe I could call you some other time.”

“All right.”

Then they were back in the reception room shaking hands, and he dropped thirty-nine floors in the elevator with a sense of falling back to reality.

Less than a week later he walked into his office to answer a ringing phone and heard, “John Wilder? Frank Lacy, Hartwell and Partners. Look: are those six back covers still available?”

“They sure are.”

“Good. We want to pick them up; I’m sending over a contract this afternoon.”

“Well, that’s—that’s fine.”

“Great!” George Taylor said. “By Jesus, John, I knew you’d pull it off, if anybody could. Damn, I’d treat you to lunch if I wasn’t tied up.”

And the word “lunch” rode happily back with him to his own desk, where he called Hartwell and Partners and asked for Pamela Hendricks.

“Oh,” she said. “Hi, there. Congratulations.”

“How’d you hear about that?”

“Oh, well; word gets around.” Which probably meant Frank Lacy had mentioned it as she lay stroking his massive chest in bed.

“I was just wondering if you’d have lunch with me today.”

“Well that’s very nice, but actually I’m afraid I’m—”

And this time he cut her off in mid-sentence with all the authority of a man who has nothing to lose: “Okay. How about meeting me after work, then. For a drink.”

There was a slight pause. “All right. I’d love to.”

But two other calls had to be made.

“… Janice, there’s this guy on the Jaguar account flying in from London this afternoon; George wants me to take him out to dinner. No big deal; I’ll probably be done with him by ten, then I’ll hit one of the meetings … Okay … See you in the morning.”

The second call wasn’t quite so easy. “Mr. Paul Borg, please … Paul? John. Listen: I just want to know if you’re going down to Varick Street tonight.… Okay, good. Is it clean? Sheets clean? Towels clean?… What do you mean, how’m I doing? I’m doing fine. How’re you doing?…”

He took her to the Plaza in the hope of impressing her, but she’d evidently been there many times before.

The first drink tasted so good that he let her do most of the talking while he savored it, sitting beside her and watching her profile. The tip of her small nose bobbed very slightly up and down at each syllable beginning with p, b or m, and that seemed a lovely thing for a girl’s nose to do.

She talked about her school, a small experimental college in Vermont called Marlowe, of which he’d never heard—“I mean it’s sort of like Bennington only more so; and coeducational”—and about her father in Boston and her older brother who was an “absolute genius” at the piano, and he began to realize she was a rich girl; maybe even a very rich girl.

“What does your father do?”

“Oh, he’s a banker. An investment banker. Anyway …”

And over the second or third drink she explained why she was never free for lunch: “I was—well, ‘seeing’ Frank all summer—Frank Lacy—until his marriage counsellor advised him to break it off, and he did. But we still have lunch together every day to sort of prove we’re friends. I know that sounds silly.”

“And you’re still crazy about him.”

She shook her head and pressed her lips tight. “No. Not really; not at all any more. I mean it seems to me that a man who lets a marriage counsellor make his decisions for him isn’t—well, isn’t much of a man. You’re married, aren’t you?”

“Yeah; yeah, I sure am.”

“Well, would you let some marriage counsellor talk you into—Oh, never mind. It’s too complicated.”

During the prime-rib dinner, with wine, she complained that most of the other people at Marlowe had been “so terrifically creative—oh, I don’t mean ‘creative’ in the twerpy advertising sense; don’t get me wrong—” and she aimed her knife straight at his throat to make sure he didn’t. She meant poetry and painting and sculpture and music and dance; she meant theatre—“Everything from Sophocles to what’s-his-name, you know, Beckett—all that stuff. I was always the world’s dopiest, no-talent square. Still am, in fact.”

By the time the coffee and brandy arrived her talk had subsided and she’d begun to look at him as if through a mist of romance; then at last he had his arm close around her in a taxicab.

“What street?” she said. “Where’s that?”

“Just a little place I think you might like.”

“You’re sweet, John.” And she offered up her mouth for the ritual first kiss, allowing his hand to cradle one breast as they began the long ride down Seventh Avenue.

She was great. At least that was the word that kept spilling from his mouth as they clung and rolled and locked and thrusted in the bed beneath the sidewalk, with the Seventh Avenue subway rumbling under the floor: “Oh, you’re great … oh, baby, you’re … oh, Jesus God, you’re great … You’re great …” She said nothing, but her gasps and moans and her long high cry at the end were enough to suggest that he’d been—well, not too bad himself.

They lay silent for a long time afterwards while he pondered the remarkable truth that he was thirty-six years old and had never known this much pleasure with a woman before. He almost said it: You know something? I’m thirty-six years old and that’s absolutely the best I’ve ever—but he checked himself. She might laugh at such a confession, or pity him, after all her damned “creative” boys at Marlowe and a whole summer of romping with Frank Lacy. Instead he said “Pamela? How old are you?”

“I’ll be twenty-one in February.”

She disentangled herself, got up and walked naked across the linoleum, reminding him of the girl on the raft that weekend after Bellevue. How could any girl his size have legs like that?

“That first door’s just the toilet,” he called after her. “The sink’s in the kitchen.”

“Oh,” she called back, “I see. Like a French apartment.”

So she’d been to France too—probably all over Europe, on long vacations since childhood—and as he padded to the liquor cabinet he allowed his head to fill with maddening images: Pamela shyly opening those legs for some oily nobleman at a champagne breakfast in the Bois de Bologne; Pamela delirious and clawing the back of some grunting Spanish peasant in dirty straw; Pamela sprawled and breathing “Te amo” to some Italian racing driver on an Adriatic beach …

But soon she was back with him. He had made a couple of drinks and pulled on his pants; she was wearing an old raincoat of Paul Borg’s that she’d found in the closet, and they sat close together on the edge of the bed. “This is a cozy little place,” she said. “I hardly noticed it when we came in because I was so—you know, horny—” And it was all he could do to keep from saying Horny? Honest to God? For me? “—but it’s really sort of nice.”

“Well, it’s not much of an apartment, but it serves its—I mean, I like it too.” He touched the rim of his tinkling glass to hers. “So. I guess this is what might be called a man’s communion with his favorite tipple.”

“Mm,” she said like Dr. Blomberg, and so he learned that weak jokes didn’t go over very big with Pamela Hendricks. Twenty years old or not, she required something funny to make her laugh. Another thing: never once that night did she say “What’s your wife like?” or ask if he had children, or make sly inquiries about how many girls he’d brought down here, and that alone set her apart from the others.

After a while she began pensively stalking the floor in Borg’s raincoat and went back to her old and apparently favorite topic: the dilemma of being the world’s dopiest, no-talent square.

“… One funny thing, though,” she said while he fixed himself a new drink, “I know I can’t act and I don’t photograph well, and I certainly can’t write and wouldn’t know what to do if somebody handed me a camera, but I’ve always had this feeling I’d be good at making movies. Good movies.”

His drink was made, but he let an extra shot of whiskey slide in over the ice cubes before he looked up into her wide, dead-serious eyes.

“Me too,” he said.