The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels Page 9

  “How would you like to elope this time?” he asked, half turning his head with an engaging grin.

  “But nobody’s objecting to the match! Except me, a little.”

  “We’ve never done that before. That’s why—you might like running away.”

  “From whom? You have no parents, and I’ve got one arthritic mother.”

  “She objected to me when she first met me.”

  “She’s gotten over it by now.”

  “I doubt it. Deep down, I sense a persisting grain of hostility. She disapproves of the match and so we have to run away and get married. We’ve never given it that feel yet. It might be just the thing we need. That final dash of reckless romance, of first fine careless rapture the unions have hitherto lacked. I knew there was something missing in all the other marriages. That’s it.”

  Sherry came farther into the room and sat down in a chair facing his.

  “Look. You can’t elope any more. You’re living in the past. You’re dreaming. Almost every state around here has got a waiting period after you get the license—just to prevent this impulsive kind of thing—and even where they haven’t you’ve got to wait for your blood test. In other words, couples don’t go popping off to Maryland anymore, or wherever it was they eloped to, after having a few.”

  “You’ve solved that with your suggestion about slipping into a chapel and exchanging our ‘I do’s’ without benefit of clergy. Then it doesn’t make any difference where we go.”

  “So if you accept that it’s just the feel of the thing, we don’t even have to do that. If it’s the feel of a honeymoon we want, of being newlyweds and having people think so, all we have to do is register at a hotel and say we are. Pick up the phone and ask for some bridal suite.”

  He did not reply to the point directly, but sat dreaming again. At last he said:

  “The super’s got a ladder which I’m sure he’ll let me use. I’ll prop it under your window, and hold it while you precariously descend in a new blue suit, an orchid in the lapel, clutching a valise. As I help you down the last rung, my hand will inadvertently slip up your leg and along your bare flank, for this is our wedding night. The raptures of the nuptial couch await us!”

  “Or a hospital room, unless I can get safely off the garage roof you’d have to prop the ladder under. I’d rather descend five floors in an elevator, thank you. Just ring twice for a signal and I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

  They had scarcely returned from their honeymoon when there was a telephone call from Lucy, asking them to a small dinner party for Mayo and her fiancé—quite uncannily bearing out Tattersall’s statement that Sherry had entered upon a new existence as a corporation wife. So closely was protocol followed that, when Tattersall answered the phone, Lucy asked to speak to Sherry, in order that the social invitation might be extended to her. Tattersall’s part in the mosaic was given a much more dramatic definition a few days later.

  The very afternoon of the party, Wurlitzer trotted excitedly into. Tattersall’s office with some news he knew would interest him. Tony Lumpkin, president of the company they had in mind for Tattersall’s idea, was in town from Chicago, and they were inviting him to dinner at the last minute, so that they might all meet.

  “We’ll get him good and sozzled up, and then hit him with it,” Wurlitzer said. “I’ve found that’s much the best way with Tony. He tends to freeze and stiffen up at formal presentations of ideas, but around the old piano—”

  “Piano?”

  “Yes. Haven’t I told you about Tony? He likes to sing. Nothing fancy. Just barbershop stuff. I heard you around the fountain, and you’re not such a slouch in that department yourself. So while the ladies are powdering their noses maybe we can get in a little caterwauling. And when the moment seems right, wham.”

  “You mean I’ll have to sing?”

  “For your supper, why not?” Wurlitzer said with a jolly laugh. “We all have to do it. Way of the world.”

  “I thought you wanted more specimens.”

  “For a formal presentation, yes. But over the old brandy bottle, which is where a lot of business is transacted after all, it’s a different matter. Just try it on him for size the way you did with me. And Hank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good luck. You know I want you to make good here.”

  Seven

  How Wurlitzer’s prime prospect for an advertising idea as offbeat as the one at stake could also be a barbershop quartet buff was a puzzle on which Tattersall did not dwell beyond the question’s naturally crossing his mind. He spent more time wondering what Mayo’s fiancé was going to be like.

  He turned out to be an earnest young man with a blond mustache and pale blue eyes, named Barry Metcalf. Without looking in the least like Mayo, he resembled her for reasons Tattersall put his finger on almost instantly. He shared her habit of listening with lowered eyes to what you were saying, smiling faintly the while, as though internally weighing fallacies in your statements, or as though there was something about your clothing to which it would have been impolite to call attention. Tattersall experienced a familiar urge to rush off and examine himself in the nearest available mirror—the damned Giocondaphobia again. They were in dinner jackets, and Tattersall sensed that he and Metcalf, at any rate, shared the characteristic of being more at ease in tweed coats, without this recognition of a personal bond between them alleviating his half of the discomfiture. He was glad when, during cocktails, Wurlitzer grasped his arm and hauled him through the crowd of some twenty guests over to meet Lumpkin.

  Here was a different breed of cat. He was a man who struck Tattersall immediately as a recognizable type, the like of which, however, he could not remember having run into before. Perhaps one had been able with intuitive accuracy to imagine the Lumpkins of this world prevailing in segments of it which one had not hitherto trod. Enormous without being exactly fat, he gave the impression of keeping his weight down by the sheer physical exertion involved in laughter. He was always laughing. Wurlitzer had to delay his introduction for several minutes while Lumpkin listened to a funny story someone was telling him. He laughed all through the exposition, not nervously as people will who are afraid of missing the point, but heartily, relishing every moment of it for its own sake and only slightly less than he did the payoff, which he greeted with a final roar of delight. The fact that it was a shaggy dog story fortified Tattersall’s damaged faith in his capacity for special humor. At last Tattersall was presented, and Lumpkin said, “Harry tells me you’re the new ball of fire there,” and laughed like hell again. His tycoon’s genius for “drawing people out” made Tattersall positively shrink inside himself. He classified Lumpkin with those self-made millionaires, midwestern and Texan, who with wealth amassed on commonplace and even embarrassing products proceed to buy up eastern publishing houses, whose heads they then get on the long-distance telephone at hours like eight in the morning though it is only six or seven o’clock in Chicago or Fort Worth, or wherever they are.

  “Harry tells me you sing,” he said.

  “No, no. Only as a ham.”

  “That’s what I mean. We don’t want to get mixed up with stars from the Met,” Lumpkin laughed. “What do you sing?”

  “Songs.”

  “What kind?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I never really gave it any thought. Just anything.” Tattersall tried frantically to think of some titles that might conceivably interest Lumpkin, and finally said, “Santa Lucia, That Old Gang of Mine. Things like that.”

  “No, I mean what part?”

  “Oh, tenor. You could call it that.”

  “First or second?”

  “Second.”

  “Good. Somebody who can carry the melody. I’m bass and Harry’s baritone, as you know. So if we can scare up a first tenor maybe we can line out a few after dinner.”

  Being so committed hardly added to Tattersall’s enjoyment of his food. He found himself seated near both Lumpkin and Mayo. A full half-hour of travel tal
k in which he was lost, never having been abroad, much less to any of the exotic places whose names were being bandied about with the easy profusion of the air age, put him further out of sorts. He found himself growing unhappy, even hostile. What finally got him was the lavish celebration of obscure places and primitive scales of living in which all the globe-trotters engaged, with no apparent realization of the inherent absurdity of their position. At last he cleared his throat angrily, and, having done so, found people turning to him expectantly, as though he had intended to speak, though nothing was farther from his mind. Even Lucy looked over from the end of the table where she reigned, a lull having fallen in the conversation there. It was now quite necessary to say something. What? He had always wanted to tell gadabouts who left you with a mouth full of teeth to shut their tourist traps. He came within an inch of blurting it now, or the demon itching to destroy him did. Instead he managed a more rational response.

  “I mean I can’t quite figure out the way of life we’re developing here,” he said, toying with his dessert fork though they were still eating roast lamb. “Do you really want the donkey carts and mud hovels you can only get to in three hours by jet?”

  Lumpkin threw his head back and roared, leading off a burst of laughter that took Tattersall by surprise. He had been satirizing them. Now their frankly amused reaction made him smile himself, quickly restored his spirits, and encouraged him to develop his point.

  “I mean if we really want to slow down, get back to a really easy pace, why, board a supersonic plane and zzt, be zipped through space at a thousand miles an hour by all means. In a twinkling we’re back to lazy days on rutted back roads, where the tempo of human life has not changed in five thousand years. Soon, they say, fifteen minutes in a rocket will get you all the natives you want in two-wheeled carts, flicking flies from the rumps of water buffaloes.”

  Lumpkin nearly choked. “That’s rich. Of course he’s absolutely—It is a crazy—I mean just flying here from Chi makes me—And then all these other—” He gave off, simply pointing helplessly to Tattersall with tears in his eyes.

  Tattersall became the hit of the table. Even Mayo’s fiancé, he was pleased to see, caught her eye and exchanged smiles of amusement with her. By the time they were through coffee and the ladies had climbed the stairway for half an hour in Lucy’s sitting room, he was even resigned to the harmonizing scheduled to follow.

  Tattersall had no basic objection to men raising their voices in song, provided they did not link arms, or engage in any of the more oppressive forms of camaraderie. He had done that sort of thing once, the time around the fountain, of course, when he had burned his academic bridges behind him. He could stand it once more if he had to in order to make progress on the road taken. One had to play ball, to butter people up in any profession. He preempted the piano as a means of partially detaching himself from the group, which included, besides himself and Wurlitzer and Lumpkin, a man named Matthews who permitted himself to be recruited as a first tenor in default of anything better. He stood behind Tattersall and to the right, Wurlitzer and Lumpkin behind him and to his left, in that order, thus conforming to the traditional positions of the male quartet.

  They sang Danny Boy, The World is Waiting for the Sunrise, You’re the Cream in My Coffee, Rose of the Rio Grande, and other such favorites. After listening dutifully for a bit, the other male guests unobtrusively began a card game, so that the singers were more or less left to themselves. That made them more relaxed, with better and more pleasing results. Lumpkin commented on “that lyric tenor” also tickling the ivories, humorously but with detectable appreciation. He organized an arrangement of My Baby Just Cares for Me more or less around Tattersall. Tattersall took the air while the others wove in a “bum bum ba bum” background, pulling on their noses to obtain a humming effect—an extreme from which Tattersall was at least exempt since his hands were otherwise occupied. “We’ll walk it in, nice and easy, and you sort of walk the piano in under yourself, Hank,” Lumpkin said. They practiced it several times, pausing here and there to polish it up, or over some passage in which Lumpkin spotted a chance for one of those luscious minor chords that are the barbershop quartet’s special joy. Then they ran through it without interruption. They were rewarded with a round of applause for which they were not prepared, for the ladies had returned and were listening.

  “You do have a nice voice,” Lumpkin told Tattersall in his own booming bass, when at last they disbanded and plucked their brandies from the piano.

  “For the bathtub.”

  “That’s just what I’m talking about. Just what’s good about it. Great for this stuff that we’ve been singing, which is at its best when it has an amateur quality about it. And you know what? I think television’s ripe for a program of old-fashioned barbershop harmony. This whole camp fad proves it. It shows a nostalgia for corn that people won’t admit in this sophisticated day and age, so they smuggle it in the side door. I hate that. If you’ve got heart, come out and say so! Don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Tattersall said, backing off an inch as he cast an eye at Wurlitzer.

  “Or maybe something like the Street Singer would go again. Remember him on the radio years ago, Harry?”

  “I certainly do,” Wurlitzer said. “Arthur Tracy. I can hear his theme song now. Martha. How it used to get them. Here.” He laid a palm unequivocally on his midriff.

  “I’d like to hear that right now. Hank, how about it?”

  There was nothing for Tattersall to do but permit himself to be coaxed back to the piano. “Martha, rambling rose of the wildwood …” he sang, throwing his head back and gazing at the far ceiling. A lock of his black hair dangled over his forehead. “Martha, with your fragrance divine …”

  When the applause was finished, it was still Lumpkin who held the stage. The subject was evidently an obsession with him.

  “That’s what I’d like to hear on television,” he said, pointing a fat thumb sideways in the direction of Tattersall, who was attempting another retreat. “Hell, we could even call it the Street Singer again. Or the Hurdy-gurdy Man, or the Peanut Vendor. He pauses every block or so with his pushcart and sings his heart out, gazing up at the windows out of which people are leaning, throwing dimes and quarters into the street. Or coming down to buy his peanuts, or whatever. I’ve even thought of a theme song I’d like. There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding. Do you know that one, Hank?”

  By the time he had obliged with that, Tattersall thought he had earned a hearing for his idea. Without further preliminary he pinned Lumpkin into a corner behind the piano and, finishing off his brandy, said he wished to propose a commercial series. Lumpkin thought he meant a series of programs which would have commercial appeal, and Tattersall had first to straighten that out. When he did, Lumpkin said, “Oh, I see what you mean. OK. Shoot.”

  Tattersall cleared his throat in preparation for the opening sample, and, mimicking an announcer’s voice, said:

  “Are you sick of scouring powders that say they’ll get your oven clean but don’t?”

  “Yeh-heh-heh,” Lumpkin laughed.

  “Wait. That’s not the punchline.” He started over again. “Are you sick of scouring powders that say they’ll get your oven clean but don’t? Or those pots and pans, to say nothing of that grimy, filthy sink? Is your whole kitchen an absolute and utter mess? Have a Kickola.”

  In a pause Lumpkin took to be pregnant, but which Tattersall knew to be barren, Lumpkin waited, his eyes shining expectantly. His eyes seemed to enlarge in anticipations of this sort, his ruddy face to grow redder. His brow glistened as he nodded. It was a good job that his mouth was only moderate size, as it was flung wide in flights of mirth, and even stood open in moments of readiness for them.

  Tattersall sighed, and said, “That’s it. If that’s the way the whole house looks, when it seems as though you’ll never catch up, it’s a losing battle, we recommend that that’s the time to reach for a bottle of good old, ever-reliable Kickola.”

&nb
sp; “But it’s not a kitchen aid. We don’t handle them at all. It’s a soft drink.”

  “I know.”

  “But the two have no connection.”

  “That’s just it. That’s the whole point. It’s the Absurd applied to advertising. The despair thing, you see, man in an irrational universe, deaf to his pleas, indifferent to his needs. Not merely the acceptance, but the very adoption, of absolute and total pointlessness. I think we’re ready for adult plugs.”

  “Me too …” Lumpkin’s gaze began to wander, and his face suddenly went slack, as though, numbed by an evening of fellowship, he could not for the moment be expected to cope with subtleties. Tattersall shot another accusing glance at Wurlitzer, but he was busy talking to some women. Tattersall plowed doggedly ahead, as though he were plodding through a bog in a dream. His legs suddenly felt tired. He sighed again, his hands in his trouser pockets.

  “Have all brands of cigarettes let you down? Doesn’t any you’ve ever tried have that rewarding, satisfying, deep-down flavor you’ve been looking for? Forget it and have a Kickola instead.”

  Lumpkin nodded. “I think I get it now, but—”

  “Are you tired of coffees that don’t really pick you up?” Tattersall’s tone abruptly changed. His voice took on a shrill edge, and he removed at least one hand from his pocket to seize Lumpkin by the lapel when Lumpkin threatened to wander off in the direction his gaze had. “Have you got your belly full of fountain pens that leak,” he continued grimly through his teeth, “not only staining your fingers but causing smudges on your letters, so that you have to write them all over again? Treat yourself to a refreshing Kickola, now in the convenient, no-deposit, throwaway cans with the flip top.”