Americana

for a minute.'

'No.'

'You're the only friend I have in this place.'

'I told Jody what happened. She thinks you're cracking up.'

'My coat and yours, Binky. Hanging together behind the door. Thunderin' jasus, a grand feeling it is to know our respective bearskins are huddling back there in the darkness. Darlin', will you be coming in now for just a pop of the cork? I've been reading the Irish playwrights. C'mon, Bink.'

'No.'

'Bejasus, Binky. Your truly winning calf. That tiny secret grotto behind your knee.'

'Drop dead, David.'

I wanted to go home and sleep but it was too dangerous to leave this early. Although Weede had gone, Mrs. Kling had not, and it was her practice to make spot checks whenever he was out of the office. I closed the door. I got out the bottle of Cutty Sark I kept hidden in the cabinet, poured out half a glass and drank it neat in four swallows. Then I crumpled a piece of paper into a tight little ball and tossed it toward the wastebasket. Two points. I retrieved the ball and started practicing my hook shot. I moved slowly over the rug in a minstrel shuffle and as my right hand made dribbling motions I expelled air from my nose, synchronizing breath with dribble; and then, my back to the basket, I lifted the right leg, raised the left arm slightly for balance, and swung the right arm over my head and let loose a fifteen-footer.

'Swish,' I said.

I changed to foul shots for a while, then to left-hand hooks and finally to the breathtakingly intricate pattern of my double headfake turn-around jump shot. In that cloistered office I played my silent game. I experienced no sense of boyish self-amusement. No, I played quite seriously, my tie bellying out at each jump shot, sweat blossoming under my arms. No one, not even Binky, knew about these basketball games. I had been my team's leading scorer in prep school; first in scoring, last in assists. Since then the game had followed me, the high amber shine of the gymnasium floor, the squeak of rubber sneakers, the crowd, the crowd, and at parties years later I would turn a cocktail peanut between my fingers and gaze at a distant fishbowl. Basketball has always seemed to me the most American of sports, a smalltown thing, two kids in a driveway and a daddy-built backboard. And now I jumped, released and missed. I picked up the paper ball, stepped back ten feet for an easy one-hander, and missed again. Six times I missed from that distance. The phone rang and I shot again and missed again. I knew I wouldn't answer the phone until I had made that simple shot. I was perspiring heavily as I fired twice more and missed both times. Cursing, I picked up the ball again. The ringing stopped and I figured that Binky had answered on her phone. I went back to precisely the same spot. This time I hit. I stood there for a moment, trembling, then went to the sofa and dropped. The door opened and Binky came in.

'That was Warren Beasley again,' she said. 'Why didn't you answer your phone? You look rotten.'

'Smell my breath.'

'It stinks.'

'I knew it,' I said. 'That bastard Quincy.'

'Mr. Beasley said to tell you he didn't call.'

'What do you mean?'

'That was his message. He didn't call. But he'll call back.'

'I think I'll have another drink,' I said. 'Join me?'

'What do you have?'

'Scotch.'

'On top of bloody marys?' she said.

'Don't be fastidious. These are urgent pleasure-grabbing times, or don't you know there's a war on.'

I got another glass from the cabinet and blew out the dust, a shoulder-bolstered Sterling Hayden holed up in a rooming house. I poured the two drinks.

'I don't think I could take it straight, David.'

'I think there's some froggy water left in that carafe.'

'I'd better close the door,' she said.

We drank in silence. It was very warm in the office and sleet struck the window at intervals. I expected Mrs. Kling to walk in at any minute. I imagined her sitting now in Weede's office, watching television, a cigarette planted in the center of her mouth, knees angled out, hands coupled on abdomen. During an office party several years before I had gone into Walter Faye's office, pursuing a rumor of striptease and frolic, and there had stood Mrs. Kling, alone and unaware of me, standing rigid, shoeless and blouseless, brassiered like a bank vault almost neck to navel, her left foot forward, two clenched fists raised before her, left guarding the face, right lower, the classic Queensberry stance of the pier brawlers. It had been one of those moments for which an explanation evades the mind forever, an underwater moment tilted and warped by a rapture of the deep. Much later, shod and bloused again, she returned to the party. And then, as if to demonstrate the excellent craftsmanship of her digestive tract, its grinding and juicing abilities, she heaved all over a cluttered desk, thus creating, simultaneously, both a legend and a monument to that legend, the Thelma Kling Memorial Desk.

Binky curled up on the sofa and went to sleep, a rippling child-snore rolling off her lips. I finished my drink and saw that the bottle was empty. For a second, seriously, I thought of taking off my clothes and then undressing her as well. Instead I lifted her coat from its hanger and covered her with it, aware that the room was well heated but feeling an overwhelming need to display some tenderness, if only in this trite way. The phone rang.

'Hello, Tab. I was in Hollywood recently. I drove my car into a palm tree and twelve guys fell out. They all looked exactly like you. Norman Rockwell soda jerks.'

'Hello, Warren.'

'When I called before, your secretary said you were in the office committing suicide. I called back hoping I'd be the last person to speak to you alive. Warren Beasley, the controversial radio personality, was probably the last person to talk to the popular young television executive. Mr. Beasley said that Bell, twenty-eight, had been despondent over the loss of his old fielder's glove. The deceased bore a strong facial resemblance to a number of Hollywood stars known for their interchangeability. His body will be sent airmail express to the West Coast for possible casting in a new movie Spectacular based on the siege of Leningrad.'

'You sound as morbidly chipper as ever,' I said.

'I'm calling to invite you to my wedding. If all precedents hold, the honeymoon promises to be a veritable jubilee of ejaculatio praecox.'

Warren Beasley had his own radio program on a local station. It was called 'Death Is Just Around the Corner,' and it was broadcast from two to five in the morning. I had listened to the program, or at least parts of it, close to a hundred times, and not once on all those occasions had I heard Warren repeat himself to any extensive degree. He invited no guests, played no records and gave no news bulletins, except of his own making. The show had ten or twelve steady sponsors and many irregulars-hair restorers, makers of artificial limbs, ear-piercing shops, a metaphysician in Long Island City, an illuminator of manuscripts and scrolls, several dog kennels. Most of the sponsors wrote their own commercials and they were usually read by Warren in what can only be called a mounting orgasmic frenzy. Warren also delivered commercials for nonexistent products. He talked for three solid hours every morning but Monday, sometimes with style, humor and intelligence, sometimes with scatological glee, sometimes in the bitter self-pitying tone of a genuinely desperate man. Warren had a brilliant mind, I thought, but he was completely irresponsible and it wasn't easy to characterize his audience. 'Death' had more than its share of freak- appeal and it probably attracted most of the area's neo-Nazis, transsexuals, interplanetary travelers, coprophiles, whip and chain collectors, astral seers, blood-drinkers and morgue attendants-all the caffeine dregs of a century of national insomnia. His frequent use of obscenity, both primitive and surreal, had drawn no comment from the FCC, either because they were not listening or because the time had finally come for the electrical transmission of wordsex into America's silent bedrooms. Naturally Warren was considered a prophet by some, a menace by others. He encouraged neither view; nor did he encourage that sentiment of unity and common purpose, that sense of underground comradeship, which his listeners undoubtedly shared. Too much like the Masons, he said. Warren had started in broadcasting many years before as a weatherman on a Los Angeles TV station. He had managed to acquire a kinescope of what turned out to be his last program and he showed it to me one evening in a screening room at the network. What I recall most vividly are his eyes, relentlessly drilling, trying to pierce the prohibitive limbo so familiar to those who have stood before a camera in a small studio. He was able to speak for almost a full