We finished the meeting in high spirits. Weede suggested we all go to lunch together. Reeves Chubb begged off, saying he had a lot of work to get done, and I knew that sooner or later Weede would make him suffer for that little bit of whitewash. We went to the Gut Bucket, a nouveau speakeasy with spittoons and sawdust where you paid $4.50 for a hamburger. It was full of network people, actors and models. There were hundreds of photographs of George Raft on the wall. We sat at a circular oak table. Nobody said anything for fully three minutes. Then the waiter came and took our orders.
Across the room a very attractive couple sat drinking. Their legs touched beneath the table. I stared at the girl, trying to catch her eye. All I wanted was a brief smile, nothing more. It would have pleased me a great deal. There was an energy in me which demanded release in these small ways. To thieve one smile from that man's afternoon. I hoarded such ego-moments, remembering every one. The nod. The pretty smile. The deep glance over the tip of the cigarette. Anything more would have been too much. I didn't want to cause any pain.
'Good meeting,' Weede said. 'Are we agreed on that?'
The waiter brought the food before we were finished with our second drinks. The place was filled with fantastic women. Weede told us about his camera safari in Kenya. He and his wife, Kitty, had spent a month there in the autumn. He said that we all had to come up to his apartment and look at the slides some time. At the network, people were always making vague invitations. Someone you hadn't seen in months would materialize in your doorway, a seraphic image above your morning coffee. 'Let's have lunch some day,' he'd say, and that would be the end of him. Or one of your superiors, lifting his soapy head from a washroom basin, would squint in your direction and mumble: 'When are you going to come over and have dinner with Ginny [Billie, Ellie, Sandy] and me?' Genuine invitations were usually delivered in secrecy, either in confidential memos or behind closed doors.
Weede excused himself before dessert arrived and he left in an atmosphere of unbending silence. We all knew where he was going-to the Penn-Mar Hotel on Ninth Avenue, where Binky would be waiting for him. They met every Thursday for an hour or so. After he'd gone Isabel decided to order a brandy and we joined her. She was a short mashed woman of forty-five or so. Four months earlier, at a party aboard a tugboat repeatedly circling the Statue of Liberty, she had gone around telling everyone she had dropped one of her pubic hairs into Mastoff Panofsky's scotch and soda. Everybody was afraid of her. There was no logical reason for this; her job, in some obscurely defined way, dealt with fashion coordination, and she was not competitive with anyone in the entire network. Yet we all went to shameful extremes to prove our friendship and loyalty. It may have been that we sensed a dangerous feline perversity. Competitive or not, she seemed to be a woman who might attack at any moment, making no concessions at all to the etiquette of office combat. Now she began to tell us about the graffiti in the ladies' rooms of various restaurants around town. She hit the table after each recitation. The brandies came and we talked about the winter schedule, agreeing it was first-rate. A very tall girl wearing candy-cane trousers walked across the room; her legs seemed joined directly to her shoulders. Then Reeves Chubb came in. He saw us and waved. He dropped into the vacated chair with a burst of relief that seemed worthy of some historic moment, as if he had been gouging through a rain forest for months before finding us, the lost battalion.
'Did I miss Weede?' he said. 'Guess I missed him, damn it. Thought I'd come down for a quickie before tackling that China thing. What's everybody drinking? I just heard Phelps got the ax. He doesn't know about it yet so don't say anything. They'll probably wait until after the first of the year. Paul Joyner thinks he's next. His door has been closed all morning. Hallie said he's been calling everybody he's ever known since high school. But he's been saying he's next for the last eight years. I guess he figures if he says it, it won't happen. Reverse jinx. The last few weeks have been hell on wheels. I've been in the office every weekend this month. If there's no letup soon, my child bride says she's going home to mother. Did you read where MBO is using recons for the depth skeds? I ran into Jones Perkins on my way down. He said Warburton's got some kind of rare fatal blood thing. I'd love to go to Aspen for the holidays but I don't see how I can swing it. My secretary's going though. I don't know how they do it. Hallie's going to Europe again in the spring. Have you heard what Merrill did, that perfect ass? Which reminds me. Blaisdell told me he saw Chandler Bates' wife in San Juan last weekend. Hanging around El Convento with some tacky scuba type. Isabel, those are the most stunning gloves. If I don't take a vacation soon, you're going to walk into my office and see nothing there but a heap of ashes. What's everybody drinking?
We went back to the office. In the early afternoon it was always quiet, the whole place tossing slowly in tropical repose, as if the building itself swung on a miraculous hammock, and then the dimming effects of food and drink would begin to wear off and we would remember why we were there, to buzz and chime, and all would bend to their respective machines. But there was something wonderful about that time, the hour or so before we remembered. It was the time to sit on your sofa instead of behind the desk, and to call your secretary into the office and talk in soft voices about nothing in particular- films, books, water sports, travel, nothing at all. There was a certain kind of love between you then, like the love in a family which has shared so many familiar moments that not to love would be inhuman. And the office itself seemed a special place, even in its pale yellow desperate light, so much the color of old newspapers; there was the belief that you were secure here, in some emotional way, that you lived in known terrain. If you had a soul, and it had the need to be rubbed by roots and seasons, to be comforted by familiar things, then you could not walk among those desks for two thousand mornings, nor hear those volleying typewriters, without coming to believe that this was where you were safe. You knew where the legal department was, and how to get a package through the mailroom without delay, and whom to see about tax deductions, and what to do when your water carafe sprang a leak. You knew all the things you wouldn't have known if you had suddenly been placed in any other office in any other building anywhere in the world; and compared to this, how much did you know, and how safe did you feel, about, for instance, your wife? And it was at that time, before we remembered why we were there, that the office surrendered a sense of belonging, and we sat in the early afternoon, pitching gently, knowing we had just returned to the mother ship.
There was a phone ringing in the corridor. Nobody bothered to pick it up. Then another one began ringing. I walked slowly around my office, stretching as I went. I tried to remember whether Burt or Kirk had ever acted in an office film, one of those dull morality tales about power plays and timid adulteries. I noticed a memo on my desk. I knew immediately, from the brevity of the message, that it was another of the strange memos that had been appearing at irregular intervals for over a year. I picked it up and read it.
To: Tech Unit B
From: St. Augustine
And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless.
Nobody knew who sent these memos. Investigations had been made, people questioned, but nothing came of it. Whoever sent them had to overcome two difficulties. He had to get into the multilith room and run off enough copies for our entire sub-section without being discovered. And he had to distribute the memos, one by one, to every desk and office in the area. The multilith operators had been cleared of any suspicion and so had all the mailboys. No one had ever seen these particular memos delivered; they simply appeared, either in the morning or the early afternoon. This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Levi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office.
I sat at my desk and with a ballpoint pen traced the outline of my left hand on a blank piece of note paper. Then I called Sullivan but she didn't answer the phone. I walked around the office some more and looked out into the corridor. Many of the girls were back at work, unhooding their typewriters and storing squalid Kleenex in the bottom drawers of their desks where it would rest with old love letters, rag dolls, and pornographic books their bosses had given them in the spirit of the new liberalism, and also to see if anything would happen. I closed the door. Then I unzipped my pants and took out my cock. I walked around the office like that for a while. It felt good. I
