The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels Page 6

  As he was chucking paraphernalia back into his attaché case, someone stopped at his desk, and, looking up, he was surprised to see that this time it was Mayo. “Hello, stranger,” he said. He learned the secret that had kept her wrapped in that faraway gaze. The Satyr Press was interested in publishing her novel, and had offered her an advance on the strength of the first chapters, including the one that had excited Tattersall’s powers of pastiche. Maaw! Moreover, what they had seen was a version prior to the revisions on which Tattersall had so strongly insisted. Maaw! Nor did the editor with whom she would henceforth deal agree in the slightest with certain cuts and rearrangements recommended by Tattersall in the interest of unity. He saw that the unity was emotional rather than logical. It was a contemporary work, written in a prevailingly Existentialist climate.

  “Now I think I’ll let you buy me that drink,” she whispered with the gentle smile.

  He had not offered to buy her a drink at all. He had invited her to dinner, then lunch, a progressive scaling down to be completed by the Coke which was all the drink he could buy her on the campus in any case, certainly at this hour of the day.

  To be reduced to a Sad Sack on the one front while fresh from triumphs on another was proof, indeed, of the principle on which he had just been lecturing. That kind of corroboration who needs? Glumly sucking his pop in a booth at the Sugar Jar, he mused on the evening of riot now definitely ahead of him. Oh, indubitably. “Are you fed up with the galling contrariety of existence? Does it seem as though the eternal Footman will never stop holding your coat and snickering? Have a double bourbon on the rocks.” Don’t think he wouldn’t! Dusk came, night fell, and, in a unity emotional rather than logical, he headed across the river after dinner and made for the same bar in which he had taken refuge in another identity not so long ago.

  “I’m standin on de corner mindin my own beeswax,” he told a clutch of good listeners, “when some gazebo wit a clipboard buttonholes me wit some questions fa motivational resoich dey call it. Find out what people like so dey can make de product accordingly? More invasion a privacy you ast me, so I gives dis gink short shrift, bleeme. He’s collectin statistics on some make of car. What do you want above all in an automobile? he inquires of me, and I says a twenty-year-old blonde witout no scruples.”

  They all roared like hell. He continued, a completely realized character.

  “So anyway, I lets him question away, cause I got curiosity a my own I want to satisfy, know what I mean? All de while I got dis gink under observation myself. “Dat suddenly seems more important dan gittin rid a him. One ting led to anodda, and I finely asts him what make a car he’s data-scroungin fa. He told me, and I says your product chews out loud, mister. He says I’m glad to hear you think so, because we pride ourself on caterin to a particular clientele. And I says Ah you stink on ice. Den I walks away. I’m sick a all dis brain pickin. It’s de bane a our society. What do you guys tink?”

  When he got home, Sherry was reading in bed.

  “Out with the boys?” she said.

  “None a ya business,” he said. “I support ya, feed ya, and I treat ya right when I’m home. Where I am when I ain’t is non a ya business. All as I’ll say is, I don’t do no tomcattin. Fa da rest, my life is my own, and ya better git dat troo ya head, macushla.”

  She laughed, a single lazy chuckle that made the book bob on her stomach. She had for so many years made a point of being amused by his kicks—English toff, Russian peasant, now American mug—that response had become second nature to her. They were simply chief among their domestic jokes.

  But this one showed no signs of letting up. It went on. It went on longer than the time he’d been a professor in an Eastern college. He had found a set of false buck teeth in a dime-store display of Hallowe’en costumes, and, wearing these, with an old pepper-and-salt coat, he had shuffled absent-mindedly about mouthing bromides through the awful fixed grin. It had nearly cost him his job, for the President of the school had unexpectedly run into him shuffling through fallen leaves and muttering deprecatory remarks about the curriculum. He had made the mistake of removing his teeth when recognizing the President, thereby unmasking himself. Otherwise he might have gone undetected. He promptly stopped acting like a college teacher. A barren period had followed in which he described himself simply as a tenant-in-residence, then suddenly he was a plantation owner. “Stop picking those banjos and get out there and pick that cotton.” Sherry went along with all of it, believing that a man should be himself.

  But this was different. The persistence of this present mood finally began to cause her a little concern. It was still on him some days later when he answered the phone to hear a voice say: “This is radio station WRTZ, Mr. Tattersall. Your number has been dialed after being selected at random from the book. If you can correctly answer the following question, having to do with American history, you are eligible for our drawing on an all-expense trip to Bermuda. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “What American President is known as the father of his country?”

  “Duh, Abraham Lincoln?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. It’s George Washington. Thanks for being a good sport though and trying, and as a consolation prize we’re sending you absolutely free a carton of Embassy cigarettes.”

  “Dey chew out loud.”

  “They have the new filter almost as long as the tobacco unit itself. No other cigarette can make that statement.”

  “Kin Embassies?”

  “Can Embassies what?”

  “Make statements. Kin dey talk, dese gaspers?”

  “And so thank you, Mr. Tattersall, for being such a good sport, and good afternoon.”

  They went to a cocktail party at which someone who happened to have heard the conversation on her radio was present. She was a tiny, merry woman named Mrs. Wills, who was still in stitches over it. “I nearly called you up myself,” she said, choking back her laughter, “to tell you it was one of the finest things I’ve ever heard.”

  “You meant the call was broadcast?”

  “Oh, don’t object. It was a blow struck.”

  “For what?”

  “Literacy. Intelligence. All the things that matter. Somebody’s got to cut through all this hokum.”

  Cutting through hokum had not occurred to Tattersall as part of his purpose, but the implication that he was doing so seemed to give an added dimension, or resonance, to the sort of thing he was trying to do; almost a kind of crusading element. At any rate, the story, retailed as satire, made Tattersall the center of a small group whom he continued to amuse with his act. The Dean of the school was there, Dr. Shaffer. Nestled well down in his fat pelican chins, he smiled into his punch cup at the carryings on. They were a fast crowd. There was a discussion of prevailing literary trends, to some of the ranker aspects of which the Dean took modest exception. Tattersall asked him whether he would like a karate chop. “Not especially,” the Dean said, looking down his vest with his apologetic smile. The tone grew rowdier and jollier there, and from across the room Sherry, already concerned about the hit Tattersall was making, happened to glance over in time to see him belt the Dean across the puss, that is, pretend to, with the classic double slap—a swipe with the back of the hand and then with the palm coming back.

  “Excuse me,” she said to her group. “I’ve got to rescue Hank.”

  She reached Tattersall’s side in time to see him make a hammerlock of his arms and say to the Dean, “Put your head in there.”

  “I won’t either,” the Dean said, simpering at the carpet.

  “Then don’t talk about realism.”

  The conversation moved along to the topic of integrated housing. It was something for which Tattersall militantly worked on a local civic committee, but of whose appeal to middle-class sanctimony he was so well aware that, when the Dean boasted about the color-blindness of his particular neighborhood, he could not resist the opportunity to cut through a little more hokum. “Yassuh, all you need is sixt
y thousand dollars to buy a house there. So what do it mean dat de section is open to all colors?” he said. “Just dat some dem ladies got deeper tans dan odders.”

  Perhaps he had been working too hard, Sherry thought as they drove home, herself at the wheel. Well, the spring vacation would soon be here, and perhaps they could take a cruise. Or they might get married again.

  They had been married three or four times in their six years together. They had been happy years, as those things went, but much of the happiness depended on the repeated nuptials his spirit required, or which his nervous system craved. It was more than the simple pleasure he took in exchanging vows. A couple of years of living with a housewife, and he felt the urge to make her a bride again. That was the longest interval he could go without feeling the need upon him again. The first time had been some twenty months after their marriage. They had been to a wedding reception for a young cousin of Sherry’s, and, musing in their motel room afterward, he had worn such a wistful expression that Sherry had said, “You wish it was you, don’t you?”

  “Why not? We could elope this time. Where do elopers go? Isn’t it Maryland where you don’t need a license or anything?”

  He called it “renewing the dream.” She had had qualms about its possibly being illegal in some way, but not he. And in any case, such a likelihood could only add an extra dash of flavor to the adventure. Which soon became a regular practice. When daily life had begun again to pall, off they would pop across some state line or other—once to Mexico, when they were vacationing in California—and knock up the first justice of the peace they could find to tie the knot again. When medical tests and licenses were required, they would get them, giving outmoded single identifications. Then off on the honeymoon, a fresh fortnight of champagne and caviar in some bridal suite or other, together with all the other paradisal delights apt to the occasion, including the deference inevitably showered everywhere upon newlyweds. Then home again with the sense of starting a new life, not merely resuming an old one.

  The best account of what happened between now and the following spring is contained in a series of letters Tattersall got from himself in that period. For as the drug addict is unable to kick the monkey, he was unable to kick the Doppelgänger. One of the letters read:

  “Dear Tattersall: First permit me to dispose of a little bit of casuistry, or hairsplitting, with which you have been trying to dispose of me. It might be cast in the form of a syllogism going something like this. I am a mess. But the honesty required for such ruthless self-inventory is almost unheard of. Ergo I am a gem. No. It won’t wash, and I warn you that I will not be the dupe by which you use deflation as a means of blowing up your ego. The very scrounging for pride on that level forfeits the right to it—not to mention that this brand of self-castigation is also an inverted exercise in self-pity. So I’m sorry. What’s always been true is true still: Thou shalt not go hence till thou hast paid the last farthing.

  Now back to the order of business, and down to brass tacks.

  The wish to cut a figure, my dear Tattersall, is certainly not one to which exception can be reasonably taken. Women have other ideals but that is ours—to be thought the cat’s pajamas. Especially by them. The fallacy lies in supposing it to be realizable in all quarters and at all times. Pull down that vanity! Our dignity is not that foolproof, you know, or important. Somebody who has today seen us glitter when we walk will tomorrow catch sight of us chasing our hat down the street, or coming down the Grand Promenade with a loose garter dangling under a trouser cuff. Just as we may see him so running or so promenading. You know that what happened to you could happen to anybody, and that the only intelligent thing to do is forget about it. But no. The memory of such a fall is an acid so exquisitely corroding you that you won’t sleep till you’ve redeemed yourself … somehow, anyhow. You had no serious interest in Lucy at all. You wouldn’t have married her if she were the last woman on earth. Nevertheless what she chucked when she chucked Hank Tattersall she must now be made to see. Up, up, my peacock’s tail! Out of the dust, my feathers! That takes priority over everything else on your agenda. Look to what lengths you go just to contrive opportunities to restore your image. It’s not enough that you get together socially. More “exposure,” as the media people say, is required. So you volunteer for some dreary alumni committee just because she’s on it. Then she quits, leaving you stuck with it. Thus the long, tortuous odyssey of self-justification on which you have apparently embarked in early middle life. It is perhaps fitting, my dear Tattersall, that voyages so motivated are vexed, now by immobilizing calms, now by unexpected storms that take us onto islands more irrelevant than those to which Ulysses was swept on a more legitimate journey. Next week the students may demonstrate against dormitory regulations if the faculty votes against their further liberalization, and you will have to take a stand as a member of the alumni board as well as a teacher. Well, don’t expect any sympathy from me …”

  Tattersall did not read any more just then. It could wait. He had opened the letter as soon as he had fished it out of his pigeonhole in the English Building. Now he thrust it into his pocket along with his other mail and went to his office for some relaxation exercises.

  The decision to have repose is always well advised. Closing his door, he sat slumped in his swivel chair with his arms hanging limp over the sides and his mouth drooping open in an expression of total idiocy. His eyes became hooded, his tongue lolled, as he systematically affected the relaxation of which he was in search. The principle involved is a perfectly valid one psychologically—or, indeed, physiologically. An ostensible state of muscular at-ease, of torpor, communicates to the brain the information that this condition obtains. This in turn prompts the brain to send out instructions to the muscles that all is well, they may relax, and so on, setting up a kind of beneficent circle which at length results in a bona fide version of the composure that had been feigned.

  In contrast to this are the isometric exercises with which those living sedentary lives try to keep their muscles from becoming flabby. Tattersall also faithfully did these. So that he spent much of his day alternately sagging and going rigid, looking now like a collapsed puppet, now like one twitched suddenly erect. He was pushing his desk through the wall when the telephone on it rang.

  “Tattersall? This is Dean Shaffer.”

  “Oh, yes, Dean.”

  “There’s a panty raid going on right this minute in Ida Lowe Hall.”

  “Do they think they’ll find any?”

  “I’m doing a quick run-down on some of the faculty—whoever I can find in. Tell me, do you think we should ignore it?”

  “Don’t even ignore it, as the fellow said.”

  “Right. Now, while I’ve got you, what about this bed stunt they’re going in for. It’s the latest thing. Seeing how many they can get on a bed at once, the way they used to see how many they could get into a telephone booth, remember? Michigan, or one of those midwestern universities anyway, has the record. Sixty-five or something like that. A double bed. Of course the beds break.”

  “Of course,” said Tattersall, who had never heard of this craze, but who did not want to seem not to be keeping abreast of prevailing academic trends. He even had a reefer in his drawer. “If you’re asking my opinion again, I’d say ignore that too, but make them pay for the beds.”

  “Ah. That ought to make them think twice. A good idea. Now I want your thinking on one more thing.” The Dean was breathing heavily, as though he had run up a flight of stairs to answer the phone instead of having done the calling, or perhaps had been himself shinnying up drainpipes in quest of undergarments. “Do you suspect all this is tuning up for something more serious next week if we don’t relax the parietal rules?”

  “I think it may very well be.”

  “Now I’m taking an informal poll on how the faculty is likely to vote on that. Do you mind telling me how you feel?”

  “I think the regulations should be liberalized. Extend the visiting time to e
leven o’clock, with, say, a two A.M. curfew weekends.”

  “Thanks. That’s all I want to know now. Have to ring off. Do you expect you’ll look in on the panty raid?”

  “Oh, I think I’ll just rummage through a few of my wife’s things.”

  “All right.”

  Tattersall felt suddenly distraught, and the urge again seized him to live in another key. It was a mood not assuaged by reading Oosterman’s latest piece of fiction, a complex psychological study of a neurotic business secretary who habitually stole into her boss’s office and filled his fountain pen with vichyssoise. “Excellent,” Tattersall scribbled on it, “and a welcome relief from stories full of all those damned Freudian symbols.” Oosterman would laugh. He was all right.

  As he was jotting the comment, some train of association deposited in Tattersall’s head the suspicion that it was Oosterman who had put the reefer on his desk. That half the class smoked marijuana was plain from their defense of it in a discussion that had developed, in a session about three weeks ago when a story dealing with it came up for general criticism. But Oosterman had been much the most vocal on the subject. He preached that pot was not habit-forming, did not lead to drugs, left you with no hangover, and was patently better for you than tobacco or alcohol. The next day Tattersall had found on his classroom desk an envelope containing a reefer and a note reading, “Try it.” He had pocketed it, put it in his office desk, and forgotten it. Now he took it out again, slipped it into his pocket, and headed for home.