IT WAS ONE O’CLOCK and the waiters were wishing the two young men would go home when Mead came in and sat down. “Hello, Sheridan. Hello, Peters,” he said, and paused for their invitation to join them.
Sheridan and Peters exchanged a look that said they were ready to leave, but would have to linger. After all, who were they, young writers who had written a mediocre Broadway success in collaboration, to walk out on the author of The Days Beyond? That play had been required reading in Baker’s course when they were at Yale ten years ago.
Mead saw the look in their eyes, for he was a student of looks and eyes, but he didn’t care. It was late and he was lonely. Bending his tall, unathletic body to the table, he slid into the booth. His dark, heavy-lidded eyes twitched behind their thick lenses as he observed his youthful, not yet twitching companions. His long, nervous fingers reached out for things with which to occupy themselves, arranging the water glass, a fork and several matches into various designs.
“Have a drink, Mead?” Sheridan said, trying to keep the scholastic awe out of his voice.
“Thanks,” said Mead. “Maybe one. A nightcap.”
Sheridan beckoned the waiter and caught Peters’ eye again. To such a man we owe a debt, he signaled. Even two drinks and twenty minutes’ conversation is not too much.
“Can you imagine?” said Mead. “They don’t even know who Firdausi is. Can you imagine living in a town fifteen years where they never even heard of Firdausi?”
“You mean Joe Firdausi, the agent?” Peters said. They were writing a farce comedy at the moment and keyed for wit.
“An agent they would have known,” Mead said. “Up at Vonn’s party, I’m talking about, playing Who Am I? So I take Firdausi, you know, the Persian epic poet, and everybody screams it shouldn’t count because he’s too obscure.”
Mead drank the straight Scotch the waiter brought him without asking, and it was only when he tried to raise the glass to his lips that Sheridan and Peters saw how drunk he was.
“‘Obscure!,’ I told them,” Mead continued, “‘So obscure the encyclopedia gives him a full page, that’s how obscure!’ So then Birdie Slocum, that noted historical scholar, says, ‘I never heard of such a man.’ So I told Birdie, ‘That’s because his name has never been in the Hollywood Reporter.’”
“Did you really tell her that?” Sheridan asked.
Birdie Slocum was the wife of Mead’s producer. Mead twirled the empty whiskey glass idly. The young men looked at each other guiltily. They knew his reputation for post-facto courage.
“I don’t know how to play that game in this town,” Mead said. “If you pick Churchill or Eisenhower they get sore because they think you’re insulting their intelligence. And if you pick anything tougher than that, they think you’re trying to show off.”
Peters and Sheridan said nothing. They were afraid Mead was going to ask them if they knew who Firdausi was. “Have another?” Sheridan urged.
“Well, all right,” said Mead. “But this is the nightcap. Firdausi. The greatest poet in the history of Persia. The author of The Book of Kings. Even the savage tribesmen in the hills recite Firdausi.”
The waiter brought Mead his drink and he raised it in toast. “To Firdausi,” he said, “whom Birdie Slocum will never know.”
“And last week it was Tilly,” Mead was saying into his empty glass. “And Vonn wouldn’t count him either. Can you beat that, a German and he never heard of Tilly? Tilly, the Catholic general. The Thirty Years’ War. It’s like an American not knowing Washington.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his red eyes irritably. “And the week before that, Vico, the Italian philosopher. And before that, Timothy Dwight.”
Mead studied the two young men with pensive amusement. His face looked as if it had been drawn on an egg, the narrowing side down, the forehead broad and bulbous.
“Fifteen years in a town that never heard of Firdausi or Tilly or Vico or Dwight,” said Mead.
“Have another one,” Sheridan said.
“But this really has to be the nightcap,” Mead said. “I’ve got a conference with Slocum at ten.”
After the third nightcap, Mead said, “When I was your age, at least I used to stand for something. I was a Socialist. I voted for Debs. Now I haven’t got enough freedom of speech to talk back to Birdie Slocum.”
The young men were ready to call it a night, but neither would make a move. After all it wasn’t every day in the week that they could sit down with Elliot Mead, former historical scholar, now thirty-five hundred a week.
The waiter yawned and turned off as many lights as he could with ostentatious discretion. The old writer and the two young ones sat there in the empty bar.
“Don’t make so much noise turning off those lights,” Mead reprimanded. “Remember, there are people here trying to sleep.”
The waiter laughed joylessly and Sheridan and Peters looked at each other in mutual acknowledgment of Mead’s reputation for repeatable quips.
Mead smiled with them. He was not going to keep that ten o’clock date in the morning. He was going to sit up with these boys, impress them with his wit and knowledge, get good and drunk, and have his secretary call the studio to say he was sick.
“I know what let’s do,” Mead suggested. “Let’s play one quick game. I am somebody whose name begins with C. Now, who am I?”
“Are you a brilliant French economist of the mercantile period?” Sheridan began, reaching back into freshman history.
“No,” Mead said, smiling, warming to the game, “I am not Jean Baptiste Colbert. …”