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  “You’d better stop acting so crazy, Jimmie,” said Roberta. “You know how you’ll get.”

  “No, you’re not Jack London,” said Mom, fumbling faster with the safety pin. “Jack London didn’t give up just because he didn’t have everything right like he wanted it. He wrote on fishing boats and in lumber camps and—”

  “Yes, and I wrote in caddie houses and hotel locker rooms and out on the pipeline; I wrote between orders of scrambled eggs and hot beef sandwiches; I wrote in the checkroom of a dance hall; I wrote in my car while I was chasing down deadbeats and skips; I wrote while I was chopping dough in a bakery. I held five different jobs at one time and I went to school, and I wrote. I wrote a story a day every day for thirty days. I wrote—”

  “I think we’d all better go to bed,” said Roberta. “Come on, hon—”

  “I will not go to bed!”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” said Mom. “I was just saying—”

  “You didn’t read your Jack London far enough. He began slipping off the deep end when he was thirty. Well I’m thirty-five. Thirty-five, can you understand that? And I’ve written three times as much as London wrote. I—”

  “Let’s skip it,” said Frankie.

  “You skip it! Skip through fifteen million words for the Writers’ Project. Skip through half a million for the foundation. Skip through the back numbers of five strings of magazines. Skip through forty, fifty, yes, seventy-five thousand words a week, week after week, for the trade journals. Skip through thirty-six hours of radio continuity. Do you know what that means—thirty-six hours? Did you ever sit down and write thirty-six hours of conversation? Conversation that had to sparkle; had to make people laugh or cry; had to keep them from tuning to another station. Did you? Did you?”

  “Please, Jimmie…”

  “Of course you didn’t. Why should you? What would it get you? What did it get me? Shall I tell you? You’re damned right I shall. It got me a ragged ass and beans three times a week. It got me haircuts in barber colleges. It got me piles that you could stack washers on. It got me a lung that isn’t even bad enough to kill me. It got me in a dump with six strangers. It got me in jail for forty-eight hours a week and a lunatic asylum on Sunday. It got me whisky, yes, and cigarettes, yes, and a woman to sleep with, yes. It got me twenty-five thousand reminders ten million times a day that nothing I’d done meant anything. It got me this, this extraordinarily valuable, this priceless piece of information that I’m not…”

  I opened my eyes and said, “Jack London.”

  I was sitting on the divan. Roberta had her arm around me. Frankie was holding out a drink.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I slopped over.”

  “I didn’t mean you hadn’t worked hard,” said Mom. “I know how hard you’ve worked.”

  “You’d better go to bed, Mom,” said Frankie. “I’m going to turn in as soon as—”

  “No, I’m all right,” I said. “Now that we’ve buried the dead, let’s take up the living. What do you think we’d better do, Frankie?”

  “Well—what do you think about Moon?”

  “I don’t know. He spends a lot. He might not have it.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “You could borrow the money if you had to? A hundred bucks is a pretty stiff loan for a shark.”

  “I know that, too. I could get part of it, though. Maybe I could get part of it one place and part another.”

  “You’re not going to, though,” said Mom. “And that’s final.”

  I couldn’t see, at the time, why Mom was so dead set against it. Frankie’s got money from sharks before. And this was certainly an emergency.

  “Why not, Mom?”

  “Because there’s other—because that Moon can just be made to come across.”

  “What if he won’t?”

  “Well, he’ll have to.”

  “Oh, for—well, we don’t have to decide anything tonight,” I said. “We don’t even know of a doctor yet, anyway.”

  20

  We all went to bed, and Jo kept getting up to go to the toilet. And Roberta lay taut and silent. Hurt, now that the excitement was over. After a while:

  “Jimmie.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you asleep yet?”

  I wanted to say yes, yes, I’m asleep, but I knew I hadn’t better. “No, honey,” I said. “I’m still awake.”

  “Well—Jimmie—”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you mean all those things you—”

  “No, honey. I was just raving. You know how I get.”

  “You said some pretty mean things, Jimmie.”

  I patted her on the bottom. Her nightdress was up, and it was bare. She turned, facing me.

  “You really didn’t mean them?”

  “No.”

  “And you really do love me?”

  “That’s one thing you can count on. No matter what I say or do or where I am, I’ll always love you.”

  And it was and it is true.

  I had my mind on that—the abstract—and I didn’t notice when she wiggled closer.

  “You don’t act like you love me.”

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “You—you never kiss me or pet me any more.”

  “I’m sorry, dear.”

  “Well, you don’t, Jimmie.”

  “Sorry.”

  She leaned over me and pressed her lips against mine in a long kiss, and her shoulder straps were down and one of her breasts slid under my armpit.

  “Good night, Jimmie.”

  “Good night, honey.”

  Thinking. And worn out. And I had no more emotion to spend.

  I was thinking of why I couldn’t talk to Frankie; of how she had got to be like this.

  A little girl who was big for her age, a little girl with yellow hair who was thirteen in years and eighteen in size; whose eyes were as innocent and blue as a ten-year-old’s. Walking down Commerce Street, the little girl and I…

  “Who was that woman that spoke to you, Jimmie?”

  “No one.”

  “You know lots of women, don’t you, Jimmie? Every time we go down the street—”

  “Forget it.”

  “One of the girls in the coffee shop wants to come out to our place and live. I told her she couldn’t sleep with you because Pop—”

  “Don’t talk to those tramps.”

  “A man gave me a whole dollar last night, and he’s going to give me another one tonight. Can I put one of them in my bank?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And he said if I’d meet him after work, he’d give me five dollars. He said—”

  “You point the son-of-a-bitch out to me! I’ll have him rode.”

  “But he’s a nice man, Jimmie! He said he knew you and it would be all—”

  “Just point him out.”

  And a big girl, living with relatives, taking magazine subscriptions from door to door, selling Christmas cards, going to school more and more infrequently. A big girl who could walk into a garage or a barber shop or a warehouse and hand back as good as she was given. A girl who studied Harper’s and who read the New Yorker, who memorized good English and wisecracks because they were valuable to have.

  And a woman. An overweight overdressed woman with blondined hair and too much lipstick who sat behind the cash register in coffee shops and barbershops and cigar stores:

  “Hi-ya, Jack. What you got up your pantsleg besides your sock?”

  “Say, Frankie, you got to hear this one. This one’ll slay you.”

  “Just a minute.…How do you do, Mr. Pendergast. Was everything satisfactory?”

  “Very. Something for you.”

  “Thank you, so much.…Now what were you saying, Jack?”

  A woman who knew there was something wrong and wanted to get out of it. A woman who would marry the first man who came along to get out of it. A woman who could never feel anything very deeply, regard anything very highly.

>   I sat up.

  Roberta raised her head.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just to the bathroom.”

  “Oh. When are you coming back?”

  “Do you have to go?”

  “No. I just wondered.”

  I got my cigarettes out of my pants and went into the bathroom. I stood in front of the mirror and blew smoke out at myself and looked sinister, and heroic, and solemn. No reason. I just did it. I sat down on the stool and started thinking, and somehow a crazy story I’d read came into my mind. Crazy isn’t the right word. It was by a writer named Robert Henlein, and it was one of the finest pieces technically I’ve ever read. Here’s the gist of it:

  An inmate in a private nut-house is talking to a psychiatrist. The latter is drawing him out, trying to get at the basis of the persecution complex from which the inmate is obviously suffering. The lunatic is firmly convinced that the whole world is in a conspiracy to make him do things he doesn’t want to do. Everyone is plotting against him, and they always have. When he was a little boy (he relates), the other children dropped their games when he came around, and stood off by themselves, whispering and looking at him. When he entered a room where adults were talking, they stopped until he had left—

  The psychiatrist laughs: Well, there’s nothing very unusual about that.

  Oh, but that isn’t all, says the nut. When I entered college they wouldn’t let me study the things I wanted to. They made me study the things that—

  But you had to be equipped for a job, says the psychiatrist. Their judgment of what you needed to fit into life was probably better than yours.

  No, it wasn’t, insists the lunatic. When I got out, I got a job, and it didn’t make sense, and they made me stay there against my will.

  They? Who are they, anyhow?

  Well, my wife and my employer and all the Others. Maybe you were in on it, too.

  I see, says the psychiatrist. But how do you mean—the job didn’t make sense?

  Why it just didn’t. I slept all night so that I could be rested enough to go to work in the morning, and I got up and ate breakfast so that I’d have strength enough to get through until noon, and at noon I ate so that I’d have strength enough to get through the afternoon, and I went home at night and ate and slept again so that I could go to work the next morning, and the money I made was just enough to keep me strong and rested so that I could work so that I’d be strong and rested so that—

  The psychiatrist throws up his hands: But those things are true of any job.

  No, no, says the patient. No, they’re not. There is work that does make sense. I know there is, if I could just find it. They are keeping me from it. They keep putting things in my path. Making me see things that aren’t real. Trying to make me do something I don’t want to do.

  The psychiatrist shakes his head sadly and gets up and walks out.

  Then comes the final scene:

  The man’s wife, his employer, his college teachers, and a host of other demons—yes, demons—are in conclave. There is a plot.

  He’s getting on to us, says the wife. I think he’s going to run away again. What’ll we do this time?

  Let him go, says the psychiatrist. We’ll get him back. We always get ’em back.

  I guess I don’t tell the thing very well. But if you read it, it’ll stick in your mind for days. You get to wondering—

  “Jimmie.”

  I jumped.

  Roberta was in the doorway. Her breasts were completely bared, and her gown was hiked up. But I was thinking, and she often sleeps that way, with the thing just tied around her middle, when the weather is warm. Her breasts are so full that the gown bothers her, it seems, and she likes to spread her legs wider than it will allow, so she sleeps that way. I’ve asked her why she doesn’t do without a gown, because there’s not much left to expose. But she says she gets cold there, and maybe she does. My unspoken theory is that she simply knows the value of understatement.

  “Aren’t you ever coming to bed?”

  “Oh sure. Right away.”

  “Well come on, then.”

  She went back into the bedroom, and I sat there a moment longer, thinking about that crazy story that wasn’t crazy. And then she hollered again and I went in to her, but I was still sort of dreaming.

  I lay down and—

  And there was a Fury upon me; sobbing, mad with impatience, shivering with heat: an angel-Fury with cream-yellow thighs who had made herself over, and who would never be able to unmake herself. A Frankenstein monster with silky lashes and a white smile, with breasts that turned outward with their fullness.

  “You better! You always better! You hear me? You better! What would I do if…Not—now.…Don’t…answer…now…”

  I don’t think I had realized until then how impossibly hopeless it all was.

  21

  I have been riding with Gross. I couldn’t very well get out of it. He knew that I didn’t have a ride, and he offered to haul me back and forth for nothing (I wouldn’t let him do that, of course). And I needed a ride. I couldn’t have made it walking much longer. I take a quart vacuum bottle of coffee to work instead of a pint, and, what with the knowledge that everyone there would like nothing better than to catch me asleep, I have kept from dozing off. But I couldn’t walk any longer.

  I’m sure, of course, that Gross isn’t putting himself out any merely to favour me. I’m just about to get my new system set up, although I’ve not solved that one problem I spoke about, and he knows that Baldwin is pleased with it. And, in me, I think, he sees someone on whose coattails he can ride.

  But clubbing up with Gross hasn’t helped me any with Moon, personally, that is. I think he is doing all he can about Frankie. He wasn’t at all bad when I first spoke to him about it.

  He stood rapping my desk with a ruler, looking off absent-mindedly toward the final-assembly line. At last he said,

  “You’re sure it was my fault, Dilly?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. And nothing more. When you’ve lived like we have, when you put yourself on a spot of this sort, you’ve got to take that kind of question.

  “I guess it was, all right,” he said. “How much do you think it’ll take?”

  “A hundred dollars, anyhow.”

  He nodded. “You think you can get it done for that? When my wife was—”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I just supposed we could.”

  “Well, I think I can get a hundred.”

  “You ought to be able to,” I said, taking courage.

  He nodded again. “It looks that way, don’t it, Dilly? I’m running better than seventy-five dollars a week. But I’m paying for that car, and we bought us a houseful of furniture here a while back, and I’ve been sending money to my brother’s folks. It looks that way, but when you try to lay your hands on even a hundred dollars—all in one chunk—it’s not easy.”

  “We’ll have to have it, Moon.”

  “I said I’d try to get it. I’m pretty sure I can.”

  Well, it was a couple days later that I started riding with Gross, and as soon as Moon learned of it he got me off in a corner.

  “Did you tell Gross about this?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Why the hell should I, Moon?”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, and when he did, he didn’t answer my question.

  “Are you after my job, Dillon?”

  “After your—!” I burst out laughing.

  “Are you or not?”

  He was serious. I couldn’t believe it, but he was.

  “No, Moon,” I said. “I positively am not. Why—what in the name of God would I want with your job?”

  “You’re drawing seventy-five cents an hour. I’m getting twice that much.”

  “But I don’t like this work, Moon.”

  “You’d like a dollar and a half an hour wouldn’t you?”

  “Not if I had to stay here to get it. I’m a writer—at least I used to be
. If I took your job, it’d mean I couldn’t ever get away. I wouldn’t have the excuse that I could make more writing. It would be the end of my writing.”

  “How much were you making before you came here—on this fellowship you told me about?”

  “Twenty-one hundred a year.”

  “Well, but my job pays almost twice that much.”

  “I know, Moon,” I said. “But—”

  “But what?” he said, staring at me somberly.

  “Why, goddammit, didn’t I just tell you—”

  “Keep your voice down. Are you trying to tell everybody in here about it?”

  “I’m through talking,” I said. “Think what you want to.”

  A few days later he came around again.

  “If you don’t want my job, what are you working so hard for? Why’d you want to learn blueprints and set up this new system and—”

  “Would you rather I hadn’t?” I said. “Would you rather I just sat here and let things go to hell like they were going? If you would, just say so. I’m getting pretty goddamned tired of working my head off for a bunch of numbskulls who don’t appreciate it and won’t lift a finger to help me.”

  “I just asked, Dilly.”

  “And I told you. Think what you want to, do what you want to.”

  I am pretty confident of one thing: He doesn’t dare fire me. He might make things so uncomfortable for me that I couldn’t stay, but—I don’t think he would even do that. We’ve been inquiring around, you see, and 250 dollars seems to be about the minimum for the job we need doing. And Moon is undoubtedly figuring on my paying a good share of it. If I lost my job…

  I have already seen one man “crowded down the line”—a new man in our department. It was a vicious and fascinating piece of business.

  He was an honor-graduate from high school. Perhaps that was the trouble. Perhaps he was a little too eager to show his knowledge of things in general, for that is one way of getting your ears knocked down very quickly in here. Knowledge is taken for granted here. You don’t flaunt it. You use it. He hadn’t been here three days before I was aware that everyone had it in for him. And that he wasn’t going to last.