Assunta began to cry, and stamped down the stairs. From the window, I saw her crossing the courtyard. When the priest began to administer the last rites, I went out.
I kept a sort of vigil in the cafe. The church bells tolled at three, and a little later news came down from the villa that the signorina was dead. No one in the cafe seemed to suspect that they were anything but an eccentric old spinster and a cranky servant. At four o’clock the band concert opened up with “Tiger Rag.” I moved that night from the villa to the Hotel National, and left Montraldo in the morning. THE OCEAN
I am keeping this journal because I believe myself to be in some danger and because I have no other way of recording my fears. I cannot report them to the police, as you will see, and I cannot confide in my friends. The losses I have recently suffered in self-esteem, reasonableness, and charity are conspicuous, but there is always some painful ambiguity about who is to blame. I might be to blame myself. Let me give you an example. Last night I sat down to dinner with Cora, my wife, at half past six. Our only daughter has left home, and we eat, these days, in the kitchen, off a table ornamented with a goldfish bowl. The meal was cold ham, salad, and potatoes. When I took a mouthful of salad I had to spit it out. “Ah, yes,” my wife said. “I was afraid that would happen. You left your lighter fluid in the pantry, and I mistook it for vinegar.”
As I say, who was to blame? I have always been careful about putting things in their places, and had she meant to poison me she wouldn’t have done anything so clumsy as to put lighter fluid in the salad dressing. If I had not left the fluid in the pantry, the incident wouldn’t have taken place. But let me go on?for a minute. During dinner a thunderstorm came up. The sky got black. Suddenly there was a soaking rain. As soon as dinner was over, Cora dressed herself in a raincoat and a green shower cap and went out to water the lawn. I watched her from the window. She seemed oblivious of the ragged walls of rain in which she stood, and she watered the lawn carefully, lingering over the burnt spots. I was afraid that she would compromise herself in the eyes of our neighbors. The woman in the house next door would telephone the woman on the corner to say that Cora Fry was watering her lawn in a downpour. My wish that she not be ridiculed by gossip took me to her side, although as I approached her, under my umbrella, I realized that I lacked the tact to get through this gracefully. What should I say? Should I say that a friend was on the telephone? She has no friends. Come in, dear,” I said. “You might get struck.”
“Oh, I doubt that very much,” she said in her most musical voice. She speaks these days in the octave above middle C.
“Won’t you wait until the rain is over?” I asked.
“It won’t last long,” she said sweetly. “Thunderstorms never do.”
Under my umbrella, I returned to the house and poured myself a drink. She was right. A minute later the storm blew off, and she went on watering the grass. She had some rightness on her side in both of these incidents, but this does not change my feeling that I am in some danger.
Oh, world, world, world, wondrous and bewildering, when did my troubles begin? This is being written in my house in Bullet Park. The time is 10 A. M. The day is Tuesday. You might well ask what I am doing in Bullet Park on a weekday morning. The only other men around are three clergymen, two invalids, and an old codger on Turner Street who has lost his marbles. The neighborhood has the serenity, the stillness of a terrain where all sexual tensions have been suspended?excluding mine, of course, and those of the three clergymen. What is my business? What do I do? Why didn’t I catch the train? I am forty-six years old, hale, well-dressed, and have a more thorough knowledge of the manufacture and merchandising of Dynaflex than any other man in the entire field. One of my difficulties is my youthful looks. I have a thirty-inch waistline and jet-black hair, and when I tell people that I used to be vice-president in charge of merchandising and executive assistant to the president of Dynaflex?when I tell this to strangers in bars and on trains?they never believe me, because I look so young.
Mr. Estabrook, the president of Dynaflex and in some ways my protector, was an enthusiastic gardener. While admiring his flowers one afternoon, he was stung by a bumblebee, and he died before they could get him to the hospital. I could have had the presidency, but I wanted to stay in merchandising and manufacture. Then the directors?including myself, of course?voted a merger with Milltonium Ltd., putting Eric Penumbra, Milltonium’s chief, at the helm. I voted for the merger with some misgivings, but I concealed these and did the most important part of the groundwork for this change. It was my job to bring in the approval of conservative and reluctant stockholders, and one by one I brought them around. The fact that I had worked for Dynaflex since I had left college, that I had never worked for anyone else, inspired their trust. A few days after the merger was a fact, Penumbra called me into his office. “Well,” he said, “you’ve had it.”
“Yes, I have,” I said. I thought he was complimenting me on having brought in the approvals. I had traveled all over the United States and made two trips to Europe. No one else could have done it.
“You’ve had it,” Penumbra said harshly. “How long will it take you to get out of here?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“How the hell long will it take you to get out of here!” he shouted. “You’re obsolete. We can’t afford people like you in the shop. I’m asking how long it will take you to get out of here.”
“It will take about an hour,” I said.
“Well, I’ll give you to the end of the week,” he said. “If you want to send your secretary up, I’ll fire her. You’re really lucky. With your pension, severance pay, and the stock you own, you’ll have damned near as much money as I take home, without having to lift a finger.” Then he left his desk and came to where I stood. He put an arm around my shoulders. He gave me a hug. “Don’t worry,” Penumbra said. “Obsolescence is something we all have to face. I hope I’ll be as calm about it as you when my time comes.”
“I certainly hope you will,” I said, and I left the office.
