'I promise,' she said.
I went around toward Weede Denney's office. On the way I saw Dickie Slater, the sixty-five-year-old mailboy, standing behind Jody Moore's desk rubbing his groin. When he saw me he grinned, man to man, and kept rubbing. Jody was on the phone, speaking Portuguese for some reason. I turned a corner and saw James T. Rice running down a hallway at top speed. I had no idea what I wanted to say to Weede. I was upset about the series being dropped and I felt venomous. In similar situations I usually reacted as a child might react after he has been disappointed or rebuked, with a child's petty genius for reprisal. I told bizarre and pointless lies. I broke my typewriter. I stole things from the office. I wrote snake-hissing memos to my subordinates. Once, after an idea of mine had been criticized by a senior vice-president named Livingston, I went back to my office, blew my nose several times, and that night sneaked up to Livingston's office and put the soiled handkerchief in the top drawer of his desk.
Weede was standing in the middle of his office, deep in thought, one hand absently grooming his bald head. He looked at me carefully.
'Can't talk to you now, Dave; wires are burning up; see you first thing in the morning.'
On the way back to my office I stopped at Binky's desk to talk some more but she looked busy. I went inside and dialed Sullivan's number again. She was there.
'Utah,' I said.
'Hello, David.'
'Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona.'
'I didn't see you leave last night. You abandoned me to all those keening necrophiles.'
'Steamboat Springs, the Sawtooth Mountains, Big Timber, Aztec, Durango, Spanish Fork, Monument Valley.'
'I hear America singing,' she said, but not as if she meant it.
'I know a guy with a camp trailer. He's living in Maine somewhere. We can pick him up and then all head west in the camper.
'All I need is an hour's notice.'
'Blasting through New Mexico in the velvet dawn.'
'I'm late for an appointment,' Sullivan said.
I tried to get some work done. It was dark now and I went to the window. Looking south, from as high as we were, I could see the stacked lights extending almost the entire length of Manhattan, and that delicate gridiron tracery in the streets. I opened the window slightly. The whole city was roaring. In winter, when the darkness always comes before you expect it and all those lights begin to pinch through the stale mist, New York becomes a gigantic wedding cake. You board the singing elevator and drop an eighth of a mile in ten seconds flat. Your ears hum as you are decompressed. It is an almost frighteningly impersonal process and yet something of this kind seems necessary to translate you from the image to what is actually impaled on that dainty fork.
I strolled around to Carter Hemmings' office. He was at his desk, smelling the nicotine on his fingers. When he saw me he tried to neutralize the flow of panic by standing up, absurdly, and spreading his arms wide, an Argentinian beef baron welcoming a generalissimo to his villa.
'Hey Dave,' he said. 'What's happening, buddy?'
'I understand Mars Tyler got the sack,' I said.
'No kidding. No kidding. Jesus.'
'There's a big purge on. The tumbrels are clattering through the streets.'
'Sit down,' he said. 'I'll get Penny to order some coffee.'
'Can't spare the time, Carter. All the circuits are overloaded. How's that laser beam project shaping up? They're starting to put pressure.'
'I'm trying to hammer it into workable form, Dave.'
'Have a good time with B.G. last night?'
'I didn't know you knew her, Dave.'
'Slightly,' I said.
'Beautiful girl. But we didn't really hit it off. Dinner. Then I took her home.'
'Weede was talking about you during lunch today. He's a curious man, Weede. Sometimes given to rash judgments. Better get cracking on that laser beam thing. I'll be in early tomorrow to take a look at it. Weede'll be in early tomorrow too. We're all coming in very early tomorrow. Have a nice evening, Carter. Say hello to your wife for me.'
'Dave, I'm not married.'
I went back to my office. Binky was in there trying to straighten out my files. It was almost time to leave. I fixed my tie and buttoned my shirtcuffs. In the corridor all the phones were ringing. I wondered who Trotsky was.
3
People leaned into the traffic, scouting for cabs. Thousands of men hurried toward Grand Central, moving in broken strides, dodging, marching down deep corridors, emptying into chambers, the warm trains waiting, long darkness, newsprint on every finger, the fight against sleep. I liked to walk home from the office because it made me feel virtuous.
The crowds didn't begin to thin out until I got south of Forty-second Street, and traffic was bad all the way. Below Forty-second, people were able to choose their own pace and yet here the faces seemed gray and stricken, the bodies surreptitious in the scrawls of their coats, and it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. It was just a passing thought. I got home, turned on the TV, undressed, and got in the shower.
I was living then in an apartment overlooking Gramercy Park. My ex-wife lived in the same building. The arrangement wasn't as strange as it may sound-it wasn't even an arrangement. While married we had lived in a larger apartment on the other side of the park. From a friend I learned of the vacancy across the way and it seemed sensible to move in since my wife had just left me and there was no need for such a large place and no point in paying the higher rent. She lived in the Village for a while, taking ballet lessons, courses at the New School, instructions in macrobiotic nutrition; she also joined a film society and began going to an analyst. She invited me down to dinner one evening and said finally, over coffee, that her new life wasn't working out too well. The activities were not very involving and her gentlemen friends seemed able to discuss nothing more important than their season tickets to hockey games, football games and the Philharmonic. She missed Gramercy Park, she said; it was one of the last civilized spots in an ever-darkening city. Some time later an apartment became available in my building. I told her about it and she took it sight unseen.
She was a pretty girl, blond, with small breasts and a cheerleader's bounce. Meredith Walker was her name. We had met at a country club dance in Old Holly, the Westchester town where I was raised. I was nineteen then, home from college for summer vacation. Merry had been living in the town for only a few months. Her father was an Air Force major who had been assigned to head an ROTC detachment at a small college nearby. She said the family had been moving from place to place all her life. She was eighteen and didn't know what it was to have a home. I can remember that night well, a perfect August night with a warm wind raking the tops of the big oaks, with lawn sprinklers hissing and the silver couples standing near the trees, the men in white dinner jackets and their girls in chiffon and silk, each couple sculpted in the dim light, almost motionless, and the distances between them absolutely right so that the whole scene obeyed an abstract calculus of perspective and tone, as if arranged for the whim of a camera. A girl walked across the grass, then quickly whirled, shrieking, as the spray from a lawn sprinkler touched her arm. The laughter of her friends on the warm night was like a knife-chime on delicate glass and it seemed to take a long time to reach us. Merry and I were standing on the veranda. There were fireflies and music, a lazy samba, a foxtrot. Merry looked beautiful. We talked quietly and held hands. Once again, as on so many occasions in my life, I was stirred by the power of the image.
We went to my car and drove to the amusement park at Rye. There, in tuxedo and evening dress, we rode the
