If I met the great now, it would have to be in the way others met them, at a humiliating second-hand, conducted into their presence by ushers with flashlights to watch their images on screens, or hear them in concert halls, or applaud them at rallies while arc lamps played across the sky, or read about them in books or hear their voices on the radio. The life I had chosen for myself—or had had thrust upon me by reasons of temperament—was over now. It had been a grand idea, a great idea, a noble idea for a life—I still insisted on that. But, like many before me. I didn’t have the price.
I could still see Lome talking to the official, arguing special privilege, blandishing, terrorizing in his great salesman’s way. They will have to let him go, I thought. I could imagine his arguments, compelling, urgent, single- minded, and I pitied the official who did not know what I knew: that his single-mindedness, his force, his logic, were shammed, his motives all ulterior. I thought of his pitch to the crowd. He knew. He knew. He had the intimations, the hints. The ungodly voices whispered in his ear too. “Save yourself.” Lome knew about death. They would not leave the nickel in his pants either. He knew that, yet he persisted. Perhaps that was it; perhaps that’s what lay at the core of all greatness—a willingness not to abide by logic, to shrug it off in the soul’s own optimism. He was an inspiring sight. If only I knew how to respond, if only I could learn the lesson of the clay and other pigeons that the sight of Lome, grounded in Dallas halfway to Cleveland and death, stirred in me. He sold the clay and had accepted mere money, defying the very arguments he invented, the very truths he alone understood.
All genuinely great men were martyrs whose characters and purposes were like those double ramps in architecture which wound and climbed and never touched in a concrete illusion of strand. The rest of us climbed those ramps in the delusion that the fellow we saw across the gaping space moved on the same path. It was the barber-pole condition of life, and we assumed in good faith some ultimate matrix common to all. But
isolate, isolate
—that was the real lesson. Hecuba was nothing to any of us.
Then I saw Lome’s briefcase, the one I had carried to his room. He had put it down on a counter when he was talking to the official and when they went off together—to look, I suppose, at the radar screens—he had forgotten it.
I did not hesitate. Isolate, isolate. I moved up to the counter and slid the case inside my raincoat. Inside would be the tips, the speculations, the deals, the weird money lore, the master plan. Inside would be the inside information.
With my prize I went into the man’s toilet. I pushed a dime into the slot, locked myself in a private booth, sat down on the toilet seat and opened the case, feeling as I did a thrill of greed. I was like some pirate before a treasure chest.
The lists and charts which tumbled out of the briefcase were like some paper abstraction of golden bracelets and jeweled crowns and ruby-mouthed statues. There were lists of holdings in foreign counties, discussions of economic prospects for various markets. These I ignored. There were plans for taking over firms, suggestions for mergers, passbooks from five dozen banks. There were lists of stocks which Lome owned, and signed proxies, and a handful of prospectuses for firms which Lome was evidently interested in. But I could make nothing out of them. Perhaps an expert, someone familiar with the language of money, might have been able to take Lome’s hints, but I couldn’t. Before the network of statistics and the strange bookkeeper’s vocabulary I was helpless. I began to fear that I had acted in haste, and as I continued to go through the briefcase I felt increasingly frustrated. In despair I began to stuff the papers back into the briefcase and was about to zip it shut when I saw something I had overlooked before. It was written in pen on a piece of lined, yellow, legal-size paper. The fact that it was on legal paper somehow gave it, even before I read it, the integrity of an official document. I felt a peculiar anticipatory excitement, and as I read over the paper it mounted steadily. Lome had written in his own hand:
The following firms will issue stock on the New York Exchange within
the
next six months.
There followed a list of four companies I had never heard of. The note had been dated the previous week. Lome went on:
My own plan is to purchase substantial blocks of the first two stocks and to hold them in perpetuity.
“My plan too,” I said hoarsely.
Suddenly, inside the pay toilet, there came the sound of an enormous peal of thunder, growling, sustained, hoarse. For a moment the lights dimmed. The electric circuits hummed and sang and then restored themselves.
An act of God, I thought, feeling suddenly warm, befriended, destiny’s child, son of Herlitz, son of fate, son of luck and chance and circumstance.
October 22, 1953. Philadelphia.
My invitation to the Irving Gibbenjoys’ came today. I glanced at the envelope and called the caterer immediately for the guest list. My contact, Davis, was out, so I left word for him to call me at the hotel. Everyone has a weakness, Davis a particularly filthy one, but he can be put off easily enough. I let him watch me in my shower. It’s a torment for him, more pain than pleasure. He sits on the closed toilet lid and talks shyly. He pretends, I think, that we’re somewhere else, in a drawing room or a restaurant. When I turn toward him to dry myself, more often than not he looks away. Davis does not have the strength to go with his weakness. No man without character can support a vice.
Once I’m established I won’t have to rely as heavily on Davis or on my other contacts. Lord, when will it happen? Of course, they’re not all Davises. Beverly Brain in Chicago wants to marry me. Beverly is nice, of course, but she’s insignificant. It’s amazing how many of my contacts fall in love with me—Sheila Mobley in Boston, Anor Lyon in San Francisco, Jeanette Bouchard in Washington. The trick is to make yourself completely dependent on them. That’s why traveling salesmen often have such good relationships with their customers. Ah, but it takes a toll. I can relax only with Nate Lace in New York. Nate is the only one of my contacts who’s in on the joke of my life. I swear I wish the others were, but if I were to say to Anor, “Anor, honey, it’s just supply and demand with me,” she’d never do me another favor. Occupational hazard—like cave-ins for a miner. It’s always what something else does to us. The fault, dear Brutus, lies in our stars that we are underlings.
Still, one has to get along with people. Live and let live. Be let to live and live. If they were all like Nate, though…Anyone who says I don’t work hard is crazy. Look at Philadelphia, for God’s sake. I was stymied in Philadelphia for years. The Main Line was busy! I saw the columnists, the society bandleaders, the golf pros. Who didn’t I see! Nothing. Then I had this idea about the invitations. Idea? It was an inspiration, actually. Suddenly I remembered the prom bids from high school. They were gorgeous, I remembered: cellophane and satin, brocade and cardboard, with long silken tassels that were attached to the pegboards of the parented. The silly, romantic apotheosis of the Occasion. Each printed cardboard page vaguely visible through a covering of waxy, spidery paper, shimmering history books in raised type; the date, the name of the hotel, the band, the charity, the sponsor, the committee; a closing poem, even a page for remarks (“Willy said he loved me and squeezed me up there” ). Then I thought, Where do they get that stuff? A service, of course,
a service,
and I remembered something I had once seen on a tray in a hall.
I called the Philadelphia Board of Education. “Do you give prizes for calligraphy?”
“What’s that?”
“Do you give prizes for calligraphy? Handwriting.”
“Just a minute, please. I’ll check.”
I got the names of all the prize winners from 1925 through 1951. But when I looked in the phone book I could find only a handful of names. Turnover. I called those that were listed.
“Excuse me, madam, does Gerald Vidilowski live there, please? I understand Mr. Vidilowski holds The Brotherly Love Award for Penmanship. I can use a man like that in my work.”
“Mr. Vidilowski wrote a beautiful hand, but he’s dead,” the woman sobbed.
I called the residence of Miriam Spidota. “Excuse me, ma’am, are you the Miriam Spidota who won the 1946 Brotherly Love Award for Penmanship?”
“Yes, that’s right,” the woman said brightly.
“Do you still wield the pen, ma’am?”
“How do you mean, ‘wield the pen’?”
“I’ll be direct, Miss Spidota. Are you now employed in addressing envelopes?”
“Is this Harry? Harry, is this a rib? Harry?”
“Please, Miss Spidota. I’m very serious.”
“Gee,” she said. “I thought you were that pimp, Harry. You a salesman? One of the boys give you my number?”
The third on the list was Davis. He told me nervously that he worked for Affairs, Inc. I arranged to meet him, and that was that. Keys to the City.
Davis called back at six. The Gibbenjoy affair sounds disappointing. Ray Pilchard will be there, of the Pilchard Hotel chain. Leroy Buff-Miner of the pharmaceutical house. Gabrielle Gal—I’ve heard some of her phony recordings of Greek songs. Still, she’s very popular in café society. Dr. Morton Perlmutter, an archeologist. A Mr. and Mrs. Nelton Fayespringer of Pittsburgh. She’s one of the Carnegies, Davis says, and he’s one of the few Pennsylvania industrialists without his own town named after him. All in all, there were about three dozen names, some of which I didn’t recognize at all. I’ll go, of course, because it’s the opening of the season, but it looks pretty grim.
October 24, 1953. New York City.
Nate’s call yesterday morning caught me just as I was going out for breakfast. He couldn’t talk over the phone, he said—God, how it annoys me when people call to tell you they can’t talk over the phone—but something big was coming up in New York and I had better get into town immediately. I’ve noticed that I’m an extremely impatient person—invariably, for example, I flush the toilet before I have finished urinating—and during the hour and a half train ride from Philly to NY I could do nothing but wonder what Nate could have meant. Probably it was nothing but another party. Nate gives parties violently, and sometimes I have met middlingly important people at them. I say important rather than great because I have noticed that the great don’t often go to parties— unless, of course, they are the guests of honor. At any rate, I’ve become disenchanted with parties (two years ago I could never have imagined myself saying this), though I never refuse an invitation. It always seems to me that the next one might change my life.
Nate wasn’t in his place when I went up there, but it was already four o’clock when the train got to Penn Station and the traffic was so heavy that the bus didn’t get up to Forty-seventh Street until almost five. I asked Perry whether Nate would be coming back.
“That is to speculate,” Perry said coldly. Perry is one of my enemies. He doesn’t approve of Nate’s careless attachments to outsiders. He calls them “befriendships.”
Perry is a very popular mâitre d’ in New York, though I have never understood the reason. His dignity and aloofness seem spurious to me. I feel that they’re simply tools of the trade with him, ones he uses a little squeamishly, as a professional locksmith might use dynamite. I like to picture him at home in front of the TV with his shoes off and a beer from Nate’s kitchen in his hand. There are softer, sloppier Perrys inside him, I know. Even at that, talking to Perry, I always get the peculiarly grateful, slightly vicious feeling of “There but for you go I.”
“I’ll get him at the apartment. Thanks, Perry.”
“Messieur
Nate will have guests,” Perry warned.
I looked at this mâitre d’hôtel, at this head waiter who got his name in the columns and was the constant
bête noir
of a government tax man who worried about his tips.
“Perry,” I said affably, “you may lead them to the tables, but I, I sit down with them.”
“May I show
Messieur
to a table?” Perry said viciously, knowing that without Nate there to tear up my check I could not afford even the cheapest item on Nate’s menu.
“I dined on the train, Perry,” I said easily. Much as I loathe myself for it, Perry is always able to force me into transparently absurd positions. As a professional mâitre d’, Perry despises moochers. He once told me that I ate above my station. It is outrageous to Perry that I should even be allowed inside Nate’s. It is, he thinks, like a panhandler coming to the front door of Buckingham Palace. I can see his point, of course, but that sort of demeaning introspection leads nowhere. As well for me to feel guilt because I cannot pay my checks as for a cripple to feel it because he cannot run races. We have our handicaps, the cripple and I, and a gentleman does not look too closely into them. If Perry objects that I do not meet my obligations, I can counter that there are certain obligations which I must simply be allowed to write off in order to get on with my life.
“If I should happen to miss Mr. Lace,” I told Perry, “please tell him that I’m in town and that I’ll get in touch with him later.”
I had a hot dog and an orange drink at a Nedick’s on Sixth Avenue, and walked with my valise over to a special entrance I know at the Radio City Garage which all the advertising executives and TV and radio and publishing people use when they go down to get their cars. I was a little late, but I did see Henry Luce drive off to Connecticut, and just when I was ready to leave I happened to spot Doris Day about to get into a cab. She had some packages, and I rushed up to the side of the taxi and opened the door for her.
“Good day, Miss Day,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Thank
you,
Miss Day,” I said. “Your voice is a gift from God. Cherish it always.”
“Thank you,” she said, a little nervously.
I was waiting for the traffic to break. As I say, I am an impatient man. I cannot stand to sit stalled in a bus when I have somewhere to go—or even when I don’t have somewhere to go. Frequently I will get out and walk, though I know I lose time this way. This habit is one of my small fictions for preserving the illusion that I am in complete control of my life. I could have gone down to Nate’s on the subway, of course, but I will not travel underground. Finally at about six-fifteen I walked over and caught a Fifth Avenue bus going downtown.