was bare of furniture except for an ironing board with an iron on it, a chess set with a few scattered pieces in a corner of the room, a typewriter sitting on the floor, a cardboard carton which seemed to have dirty laundry in it and which he kicked into the closet as I came in, and a narrow bed. He pulled a grey army blanket over the tangle of sheets on the bed and crawled onto it, where he settled himself cross-legged, backed into the corner formed by the two walls. He switched on the reading lamp over the bed, took a cigarette from a pack which he replaced in his back pocket, lit it, and sat holding the cigarette before him, his hands cupped, like a starved buddha burning incense to itself.
“All right,” he said.
I sat down on the edge of the bed – there were no chairs – and began to go through the questionnaire with him. After I had asked each question he would lean his head back against the wall, close his eyes, and give the answer; then he would open his eyes again and watch me with barely perceptible signs of concentration while I asked the next.
When we got to the telephone commercial he went to the phone in the kitchen to dial the number. He stayed out there for what seemed to me a long time. I went to check, and found him listening with the receiver pressed to his ear and his mouth twisted in something that was almost a smile.
“You’re only supposed to listen once,” I said reproachfully.
He put down the receiver with reluctance. “Can I phone it after you go and listen some more?” he asked in the diffident but wheedling voice of a small child begging an extra cookie.
“Yes,” I said, “but not next week, okay?” I didn’t want him blocking the line for the interviewers.
We went back to the bedroom and resumed our respective postures. “Now I’m going to repeat some of the phrases from the commercial to you, and for each one I would like you to tell me what it makes you think of,” I said. This was the free-association part of the questionnaire, meant to test immediate responses to certain key phrases. “First, what about ‘Deep-down manly flavour’?”
He threw his head back and closed his eyes. “Sweat,” he said, considering. “Canvas gym shoes. Underground locker rooms and jockstraps.”
An interviewer is always supposed to write down the exact words of the answer, so I did. I thought about slipping this interview into the stack of real ones, to vary the monotony for one of the women with the crayons – Mrs. Weemers, perhaps, or Mrs. Gundridge. She’d read it out loud to the others, and they would remark that it took all kinds; the topic would be good for at least three coffee breaks.
“Now what about ‘Long cool swallow’?”
“Not much. Oh, wait a moment. It’s a bird, white, falling from a great height. Shot through the heart, in winter; the feathers coming off, drifting down… This is just like those word-game tests the shrink gives you,” he said with his eyes open. “I always liked doing them. They’re better than the ones with pictures.”
I said, “I expect they use the same principle. What about ‘Healthy hearty taste’?”
He meditated for several minutes. “It’s heartburn,” he said. “Or no, that can’t be right.” His forehead wrinkled. “Now I see. It’s one of those cannibal stories.” For the first time he seemed upset. “I know the pattern, there’s one of them in
“Thank you.” I wrote busily. By this time I was convinced that he was a compulsive neurotic of some sort and that I’d better remain calm and not display any fear. I wasn’t frightened exactly – he didn’t look like the violent type – but these questions definitely made him tense. He might be tottering on an emotional brink, one of the phrases might be enough to push him over. Those people are like that I thought, remembering certain case histories Ainsley had told me; little things like words can really bother them.
“Now, ‘Tingly, heady, rough-and-ready’?”
He contemplated that one at length. “Doesn’t do a thing for me,” he said, “it doesn’t fit together. The first bit gives me an image of someone with a head made out of glass being hit with a stick: like musical glasses. But rough-and-ready doesn’t do anything. I suppose,” he said sadly, “that one’s not much use to you.”
“You’re doing fine,” I said, thinking of what would happen to the I.B.M. machine if they ever tried to run this thing through it. “Now the last one: ‘Tang of the wilderness.’ ”
“Oh,” he said, his voice approaching enthusiasm, “that one’s easy; it struck me at once when I heard it. It’s one of those technicolour movies about dogs or horses. ‘Tang of the Wilderness’ is obviously a dog, part wolf, part husky, who saves his master three times, once from fire, once from flood and once from wicked humans, more likely to be white hunters than Indians these days, and finally gets blasted by a cruel trapper with a.22 and wept over. Buried, probably in the snow. Panoramic shot of trees and lake. Sunset. Fade-out.”
“Fine,” I said, scribbling madly to get it all down. There was silence while we both listened to the scratching of my pencil. “Now, I hate to ask you, but you’re supposed to say how well you think each of those five phrases applies to a beer – Very Well, Medium Well, or Not Very Well At All?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said, losing interest completely. “I never drink the stuff. Only scotch. None of them are any good for scotch.”
“But,” I protested, astonished, “you picked Number Six on the card. The one that said seven to ten bottles per week.”
“You wanted me to pick a number,” he said with patience, “and six is my lucky number. I even got them to change the numbers on the apartments; this is really Number One, you know. Besides, I was bored; I felt like talking to someone.”
“That means I won’t be able to count your interview,” I said severely. I had forgotten for the moment that it wasn’t real.
“Oh, you enjoyed it,” he said, smiling his half-smile again. “You know all the other answers you’ve been getting are totally dull. You have to admit I’ve livened up your day considerably.”
I had a twinge of irritation. I had been feeling compassion for him as a sufferer on the verge of mental collapse, and now he had revealed the whole thing as a self-conscious performance. I could either get up and leave at once, showing my displeasure, or admit that he was right. I frowned at him, trying to decide what to do; but just then I heard the front door opening and the sound of voices.
He jerked forward and listened tensely, then leaned back against the wall. “It’s only Fish and Trevor. They’re my roommates,” he said, “the other two bores. Trevor’s the mother bore: he’s going to be shocked when finds me with my shirt off and a capital-G girl in the room.”
There was a brown-paper crunkle of grocery bags being set down in the kitchen, and a deep voice said, “Christ, it’s hot out there!”
“I think I’d better go now,” I said. If the others were at all like this one I didn’t think I would be able to cope. I gathered my questionnaires together and stood up, at the same time as the voice said “Hey Duncan, want a beer?” and a furry bearded head appeared in the doorway.
I gasped. “So you do drink beer after all!”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. Sorry. I didn’t want to finish, that’s all. The rest of it sounded like a drag, and I’d said all I wanted to say about it anyway. Fish,” he said to the beard, “this is Goldilocks.” I smiled rigidly. I am not a blonde.
Another head now appeared above the first: a white-skinned face with receding lightish hair, sky-blue eyes, and an admirably chiselled nose. His jaw dropped when he saw me.
It was time to leave. “Thank you,” I said coolly but graciously to the one on the bed. “You’ve been most helpful.”
He actually grinned as I marched to the doorway and as the heads retreated in alarm to let me pass he called, “Hey, why do you have a crummy job like this? I thought only fat sloppy housewives did that sort of thing.”
“Oh,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster, and not intending to justify myself by explaining the high – well, higher – status of my real job, “we all have to eat. Besides, what else can you do with a B.A. these days?”
When I was outside I looked at the questionnaire. The notes I had made of his answers were almost indecipherable in the glare of the sunlight; all I could see on the page was a blur of grey scribbling.
