of, Smoky?” his mistress asked. “What in the world are you thinking of? What’s become of my little doggy? This can’t be my little Smoky. This must be another doggy…” The dog went on barking at Larry.
“Dogs don’t like you?” the bartender asked.
“I breed dogs,” Larry said. “I get along very well with dogs.”
“It’s a funny thing,” the bartender said, “but I never heard that dog bark before. She’s in here every afternoon, seven days a week, and that dog’s always with her, but this is the first time there’s ever been a peep out of him. Maybe if you took your drink into the dining room.”
“You mean I’m disturbing Smoky?”
“Well, she’s a regular customer. I never saw you before.”
“All right,” Larry said, putting as much feeling as he could into his consent. He carried his drink through a doorway into the empty dining room and sat at a table. The dog stopped barking as soon as he was gone. He finished his drink and looked around for another way to leave the place, but there was none. Smoky sprang at him again when he went out through the bar, and everyone was glad to see such a troublemaker go.
The apartment house where he was expected was one he had been in many times, but he had forgotten the address. He had counted on recognizing the doorway and the lobby, but when he stepped into the lobby he was faced with the sameness of those places. There was a black-and-white floor, a false fireplace, two English chairs, and a framed landscape. It was all familiar, but he realized that it could have been one of a dozen lobbies, and he asked the elevator man if this was the Fullmers’ house. The man said yes, and Larry stepped into the car. Then, instead of ascending to the tenth floor where the Fullmers lived, the car went down. The first idea that crossed Larry’s mind was that the Fullmers might be having their vestibule painted and that, for this or for some other inconvenience or change, he would be expected to use the back elevator. The man slid the door open onto a kind of infernal region, crowded with heaped ash cans, broken perambulators, and steam-pipes covered with ruptured asbestos sleeving. “Go through the door there and get the other elevator,” the man said.
“But why do I have to take the back elevator?” Larry asked.
“It’s a rule,” the man said.
“I don’t understand,” Larry said.
“Listen,” the man said. “Don’t argue with me. Just take the back elevator. All you deliverymen always want to go in the front door like you owned the place. Well, this is one building where you can’t. The management says all deliveries at the back door, and the management is boss.”
“I’m not a deliveryman,” Larry said. “I’m a guest.”
“What’s the box?”
“The box,” Larry said, “contains my evening clothes. Now take me up to the tenth floor where the Fuilmers live.”
“I’m sorry, mister, but you look like a deliveryman.”
“I am an investment banker,” Larry said, “and I am on my way to a directors’ meeting, where we are going to discuss the underwriting of a forty-four-million-dollar bond issue. I am worth nine hundred thousand dollars. I have a twenty-two-room house in Bullet Park, a kennel of dogs, two riding horses, three children in college, a twenty-two-foot sailboat, and five automobiles.”
“Jesus,” the man said.
After Larry had bathed, he looked at himself in the mirror to see if he could detect any change in his appearance, but the face in the glass was too familiar; he had shaved and washed it too many times for it to reveal any secrets. He got through dinner and the meeting, and afterward had a whiskey with the other directors. He was still, in a way that he could not have defined, troubled at having been mistaken for a deliveryman, and hoping to shift his unease a little he said to the man beside him, “You know, when I was coming up in the elevator tonight I was mistaken for a deliveryman.” His confidant either didn’t hear, didn’t comprehend, or didn’t care. He laughed loudly at something that was being said across the room, and Larry, who was used to commanding attention, felt that he had suffered another loss.
He took a taxi to Grand Central and went home on one of those locals that seem like a roundup of the spiritually wayward, the drunken, and the lost. The conductor was a corpulent man with a pink face and a fresh rose in his buttonhole. He had a few words to say to most of the travelers.
“You working the same place?” he asked Larry.
“Yes.”
“You rush beer up in Yorktown, isn’t that it?”
