"All right. Can I talk now?"
"Yes. You do understand, though, don't you? And could I have a little more of the brandy? Just a splash—that's fine. Thanks." When she'd sipped at it she threw back her hair, allowing the blanket to slide from her shoulders, and drew a little away from him in order to sit back against the wall, tucking her legs up beneath her. She looked wholly relaxed and confident, ready to listen, happy in the knowledge that she'd stated her case. The blue-white luminescence of her body was a powerful force; he knew he wouldn't be able to think straight if he looked at her, so he willed himself to look at the moonlit floor between his feet, and he took longer than necessary over the lighting of a cigarette, stalling for time. He would have to get his bearings. When she came home to the Paris apartment her spike-heeled pumps would click decisively on the tile floor and her hair would be pulled back into a neat bun; her face would be drawn with fatigue so that the little vertical line between her eyes would show, even when she smiled. On the other hand . . .
"In the first place," be said at last, "I think you're being much too hard on yourself. Nothing's ever that black and white. You didn't force me to take the job at Knox. Besides, look at it this way. You say you've always known you weren't really an actress, and therefore it's not too legitimate for you to go around feeling cheated. Well, let's face it: isn't it just possible the same thing applies to me? I mean who ever said I was supposed to be a big deal?"
"I don't know what you mean," she said calmly. "I think it might be rather tiresome if you
were
a big deal. But if you mean who ever said you were exceptional, if you mean who ever said you had a first-rate, original mind—well my God, Frank, the answer is everybody. When I first met you, you were—"
"Oh, hell, I was a little wise guy with a big mouth. I was showing off a lot of erudition I didn't have. I was—"
"You were not! How can you talk that way? Frank, has it gotten so bad that you've lost all your belief in yourself?"
Well, no; he had to admit it hadn't gotten quite that bad. Besides, he was afraid he could detect a note of honest doubt in her voice—a faint suggestion that it might be possible to persuade her he
had
been a little wise guy, after all— and this was distressing.
"Okay," he conceded. "Okay, let's say I was a promising kid. The point is there were plenty of promising kids at Columbia; that doesn't necessarily mean—"
"There weren't plenty like you," she said, sounding reassured. "I'll never forget what's-his-name, you know? The one you always admired so much? The one who'd been the fighter pilot and had all the girls? Bill Croft. I'll never forget the way he used to talk about you. He said to me once: 'If I had half that guy's brains I'd quit worrying.' And he meant it! Everybody knew there was nothing in the world you couldn't do or be if you only had a chance to find yourself. Anway, all that's beside the point. You wouldn't have to be the least bit exceptional, and this would still be a thing that has to be done. Don't you see that?"
"Will you let me finish? In the first place . . ." But instead of allowing his voice to run on he felt a need to be quiet for a minute. He took a deep drink of brandy, letting it burn the roof of his mouth and send out waves of warmth across his shoulders and down his spine as he solemnly stared at the floor.
Had Bill Croft really said that?
"Everything you say might make a certain amount of sense," he began again, and one of the ways he could tell he was losing the argument was that his voice had taken on a resonance that made it every bit as theatrical as hers. It was the voice of a hero, a voice befitting the kind of person Bill Croft could admire. "Might make a certain amount of sense if I had some definite, measurable talent. If I were an artist, say, or a writer, or a—"
"Oh, Frank. Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own? Listen: I don't care if it takes you five years of doing nothing at all; I don't care if you decide after five years that what you really want is to be a bricklayer or a mechanic or a merchant seaman. Don't you see what I'm saying? It's got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents—it's your very
essence
that's being stifled here. It's what you
are
that's being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life."
"And what's that?" For the first time he allowed himself to look at her—not only to look but to put down his glass and take hold of her leg, and she covered and pressed his hand with both of her own.
"Oh, don't you know?" She brought his hand gently up her hip and around to the flat of her abdomen, where she pressed it close again. "Don't you know? You're the most valuable and wonderful thing in the world. You're a man."
And of all the capitulations in his life, this was the one that seemed most like a victory. Never before had elation welled more powerfully inside him; never had beauty grown more purely out of truth; never in taking his wife had he triumphed more completely over time and space. The past could dissolve at his will and so could the future; so could the walls of this house and the whole imprisoning wasteland beyond it, towns and trees. He had taken command of the universe because he was a man, and because the marvelous creature who opened and moved for him, tender and strong, was a woman.
At the first bright, hesitant calls of awakening birds, when the massed trees were turning from gray to olive green in a rising mist, she gently touched his lips with her fingertips.
"Darling? We really are going to do it, aren't we? I mean it hasn't just been a lot of talk or anything, has it?"
He was on his back, taking pleasure in the slow rise and fall of his own chest, which felt broad and deep and muscled enough to fill the modeling of a medieval breastplate. Was there anything he couldn't do? Was there any voyage he couldn't undertake and any prize in life he couldn't promise her?
"No," he said.
"Because I mean I'd like to get started on it right away. Tomorrow. Writing letters and whatnot, and seeing about the passports. And I think we ought to tell Niffer and Mike about it right away too, don't you? They'll need a little time to get used to it, and besides, I want them to know before anybody else. Don't you?"
"Yes."
"But I mean I don't want to tell them unless you're absolutely sure."
"I'm absolutely sure."
"That's wonderful. Oh darling, look at the time. And it's practically light outside. You'll be dead tired."
"No I won't. I can sleep on the train. I can sleep at the office. It's all right."
"All right. I love you."
And they fell asleep like children.
THERE NOW BEGAN A TIME
of such joyous derangement, of such exultant carelessness, that Frank Wheeler could never afterwards remember how long it lasted. It could have been a week or two weeks or more before his life began to come back into focus, with its customary concern for the passage of time and its anxious need to measure and apportion it; and by then, looking back, he was unable to tell how long it had been otherwise. The only day that would always stand clear and sharp in his memory was the first one, the day after his birthday.
He did sleep on the train, riding with his head fallen back on the dusty plush and his T
imes
sliding from his lap; and he stood for a long time over scalding cups of coffee in the echoing tan vault of Grand Central, allowing himself to be late for work. How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their gray-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting midtown office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.
In the meantime, Frank Wheeler's coffee was delicious, his paper napkin was excellently white and dry, and the grandmotherly woman who served him was so courteous and so clearly pleased with the rhythm of her own efficiency ("Yes, sir, thank
you
sir; will that be all, sir?") that he wanted to lean over and press a kiss into her wrinkled cheek. By the time he reached the office he had passed into that euphoria of half-refreshed exhaustion in which all sounds are muffled, all sights are blurred and every task is easy.
First things first: and the first thing he had to do, when the elevator door slid open at the Fifteenth Floor, was to walk up and deal like a man with Maureen Grube. She was alone at her reception desk, in a dark suit that she'd probably worn because it was the most severe, least provocative thing in her wardrobe, and when she saw him coming she looked badly flustered. But his smile was so expert—not the least bit furtive or the least bit vain, a perfectly open, friendly smile—that he could see the assurance come back into her face before he got to the desk. Had she been afraid he would think her a tramp? That he'd spend the day whispering and chuckling about her with the other men? If so, the smile told her she could relax. Had she been afraid, on th other hand, that he would try to make a big romantic thing out of it? That he'd embarrass the life out of her with messy little importunings in corners ("I've got to see you . . .")? The smile told her she could stop worrying about that, too; and these two possibilities, for the moment, were the only ones that seemed likely enough to bother with.
"Hi," he said kindly. "You have any trouble about yesterday? With Mrs. Jorgensen, I mean?"
"No. She didn't say anything." She seemed to be having some difficulty in meeting his eyes; she was looking mostly at the knot of his tie. Standing there and smiling down at her, with the constant hum and bustle of people milling just out of earshot in the dry lake beyond them, he could easily have been stopping to pass the time of day or to ask her about a typing job; there was nothing in his face or his stance to arouse the curiosity of onlookers. Yet at close range, from where she sat, he knew there could be no doubt of his intimate sincerity.
"Look, Maureen," he began. "If I thought there was anything to be gained by it, for either of us, I'd say let's go somewhere this afternoon and have a talk. And if you want to, if there's anything at all you want to tell me or ask me, that's what we'll do. Is there?"
"No. Except that I—well, no. There isn't really. You're right."
"It isn't a question of being 'right.' I don't want you to think I'm—well, never mind. But listen: the important thing in a thing like this is not to have any regrets. I don't; I hope you don't, and if you do I hope you'll tell me."
"No," she said. "I don't."
"I'm glad. And listen: You're swell, Maureen. If there's ever anything I can—you know, do for you or anything, I hope you'll let me know. I guess that sounds sort of crummy. All I mean is that I'd like us to be friends."
"All right," she said. "So would I."
And he walked away up the aisle of cubicles, moving slowly and confidently in a new, more mature version of the old "terrifically sexy walk" of Bethune Street. As simple as that! If he'd spent days planning and rehearsing it, filling page after page of scratch paper with revised and crossedout sentences, he could never have come up with a more dignified, more satisfactory speech. And all on the spur of the moment! Was there anything in the world he couldn't do?
"Morning, Dad," he said to Jack Ordway.
"Franklin, my son. How good to see your shining morning face."
But first things first; and the next thing now was his in basket. No; it was the batch of papers he'd dropped on the middle of his desk yesterday, the things Maureen had pulled from the central file, which brought up the whole disorderly problem of the branch manager in Toledo and the production control brochure. Was he going to let a thing like that harass him? Certainly not.
"Intra-company letter to Toledo," he said into the mouthpiece of his Dictaphone, leaning back in his swivel chair and working his foot into its wooden saddle on the drawer edge. "Attention B. F. Chalmers, branch manager. Subject: NAPE conference. Paragraph. With regard to recent and previous correspondence, this is to advise that the matter has been very satisfactorily taken in hand, period, paragraph."
He went that far without any idea of how the matter was going to be taken in hand, if at all; but as he sat fingering the mouthpiece he began to get ideas, and soon he was intoning one smooth sentence after another, pausing only to smile in satisfaction. The branch manager in Toledo was turning out to be as easy to handle as Maureen Grube.
F. H. Wheeler, or "we," wholly agreed that the existing brochure was unsuitable. Fortunately, the problem had now been solved in a way which "we" were confident would meet with the branch manager's approval. As the branch manager doubtless knew, the NAPE delegates would be given dozens of competitive promotion brochures, most of which were certain to end up in the wastebaskets of the convention floor. The problem, then, was to develop something different for Knox—something that would catch the delegate's eye, that he would want to put in his pocket and take back to his hotel room. Just such a piece was now in production, designed specifically for the NAPE conference: a brief, straightforward sales message entitled "Speaking of Production Control." As the branch manager would see, this document relied on no slick format, no fancy artwork or advertising jargon to tell its story. Crisply printed in large, easy-to-read type, in black and white, it had all the immediacy of plain talk. It would "give the NAPE delegate nothing more or less than what he wants, colon: the facts."
After putting a new belt in the Dictaphone machine, he leaned back again and said, "Copy for Veritype. Heading: Speaking of Production Control, dot, dot, dot. Paragraph. Production control is, comma, after all, comma, nothing more or less than the job of putting the right materials in the right place at the right time, comma, according to a varying schedule. Period, paragraph. This is simple arithmetic, period. Given all the variables, comma, a man can do it with a pencil and paper, period. But the Knox '500' Electronic Computer can do it—dash—literally—dash— thousands of times faster, period. That's why . . ."
"Coming down for coffee, Franklin?"
"I guess not, Jack. I better finish this thing."
And he did finish it, though it took him all morning. Fingering through the papers from the central file with his free hand, lifting a sentence here and a paragraph there, he continued to recite into the Dictaphone until he'd explained all the advantages of using a computer to coordinate the details of factory production. It sounded very authoritative when he played it back ("Once the bill of materials has been exploded," he heard his own voice saying, "the computer's next step is to scan the updated parts inventory"). No one could have told that he didn't quite know what he was talking about. When the typescript came back he would polish it up—maybe he'd have it checked over by one of the technical men, just to be safe—and then he'd have it Verityped and sent to Toledo in the required number of copies. For self-protection he would send one copy to Bandy, with a note saying "Hope this is okay—Toledo wanted something short & sweet for the NAPE thing," and with luck he'd be off the hook. In the meantime he could safely remove all the troublesome Toledo correspondence from the stack of things he couldn't bring himself to face just now, and put it in his out basket marked "File," along with all the brochure material.
This made such a surprising reduction in the clutter of his desk that he was encouraged, after lunch, to tackle two or three other matters in the stack of things he couldn't face. One of them involved a ticklish letter explaining why "we" had allowed an obsolete model of adding machine demonstrator to be shipped to the Chicago Business Fair, and he made it an airtight masterpiece of evasion; another, a thick sheaf of letters that he'd been avoiding for weeks, turned out to be much simpler than he'd thought in that it all boiled down to a decision left squarely up to him. Should solid-gold tie clasps ($14.49) or solid-gold lapel buttons ($8.98) be offered as the prizes in a quota-breaking contest among the tabulating-equipment salesmen of MinneapolisSt. Paul? Tie clasps! And into the out basket it went.
He was a demon of energy; and it wasn't until four o'clock, walking blearily to the water cooler ("Watch the big bubble come up—Blurp!—Isn't that funny?") that he realized why. It was because April had left a small pocket of guilt in his mind last night by saying that he'd "worked like a dog year after year." He had meant to point out that whatever it was he'd been doing here year after year, it could hardly be called working like a dog—but she hadn't given him a chance. And now, by trying to clear all the papers off his desk in one day, he guessed he was trying to make up for having misled her. But what kind of nonsense was that? How could it possibly matter what he'd been doing here year after year, or what she thought he'd been doing, or what he thought she thought he'd been doing? None of it mattered any more; couldn't he get that through his head? And as he stumbled back from the water cooler, wiping his cold mouth with a warm hand, he began to understand for the first time that in another few months he would leave this place forever. All of it—lights, glass partitions, chattering typewriters—the whole slow, dry agony of this place would be cut away from his life like a tumor from his brain; and good riddance.
His final act of that day in the office involved no work at all and very little energy, though it did take a certain amount of courage. He opened the big bottom drawer of his desk, carefully lifted out the whole stack of Real Goodies—it weighed as much as a couple of telephone books—and tipped it into the wastebasket.
For an indeterminate number of days after that, the office all but vanished from his consciousness. He went through the motions, shuffling his papers, having conferences with Bandy, having lunch with Ordway and the others, smiling with dignity whenever he passed Maureen Grube in the corridors and even stopping to chat with her now and then, to show that they were friends—but the fact was that the daytime had ceased to have any meaning except as a period of rest and preparation for the evening.
He never seemed to come fully awake until the moment he swung down from the train at sunset and climbed into his station car. Then came the stimulation of drinks with April, while the children lay silenced by television, and then the pleasure of dinner, which in conversational intensity was very like the dinners they'd had before they were married. But the day didn't really begin until later still, when the children were in bed with their door firmly shut for the night. Then they would take their places in the living room—April curled attractively on the sofa, usually, and Frank standing with his back to the bookcase, each with a cup of black Italian coffee and a cigarette—and give way to their love affair.
He would begin to pace slowly around and around the room as he talked, and she would follow him with her eyes, often with the tilt of her whole head and shoulders. From time to time when he felt he'd made a trenchant point he would wheel and stare at her in triumph; then it would be her turn to talk, while he walked and nodded, and when her turn was over their looks would meet exultantly again. Sometimes there was a glint of humor in these embraces of the eye: I know I'm showing off, they seemed to say, but so are you, and I love you.
And what did it matter? The very substance of their talk, after all, the message and the rhyme of it, whatever else they might be saying, was that they were going to be new and better people from now on. April, tucked up on the sofa with her skirt arranged in a graceful whirl from waist to ankle, her tall neck very white in the soft light and her face held in perfect composure, bore hardly any resemblance to the stiff, humiliated actress who had stood in the curtain call—and still less to the angrily sweating wife who had hauled the lawnmower, or to the jaded matron who had endured the evening of false friendship with the Campbells, or to the embarrassed, embarrassingly ardent woman who had welcomed him to his birthday party. Her voice was subtle and low, as low as in the first act of
The Petrified Forest,
and when she tipped back her head to laugh or leaned forward to reach out and tap the ash from her cigarette, she made it a maneuver of classic beauty. Anyone could picture her conquering Europe.
And Frank was modestly aware that something of the same kind of change was taking place in himself. He knew fo did his head duck and weave in the familiar nervous effort to make himself clear. Catching sight of his walking reflection in the black picture window, he had to admit that his appearance was not yet as accomplished as hers—his face was too plump and his mouth too bland, his pants too well pressed and his shirt too fussily Madison Avenue—but sometimes late at night when his throat had gone sore and his eyes hot from talking, when he hunched his shoulders and set his jaw and pulled his necktie loose and let it hang like a rope, he could glare at the window and see the brave beginnings of a personage.