laughed.
"Oh, you're a gem, you are," she said. "What do you do?"
"I'm a detached professor of literature at Princeton."
"But how can you live here and work there?"
He shrugged. "I don't work there. I said detached. When the new television
teaching came in, my PQ was too low. I'm not a screen personality." "So few of us are," she said sagely, nodding and smiling. "Oh, how I long for the
good old days. When ugly men like David Brinkley could deliver the news."
"You remember Brinkley?"
"Actually, no," she said, laughing. "I just remember my mother talking about him." Hiram looked at her appreciatively. Nose not very straight, of course-- but that seemed to be the only thing keeping her off TV. Nice voice. Nice nice face. Body.
She put her hand on his thigh.
"What are you doing tonight?" she asked.
"Watching television," he grimaced.
"Really? What do you have?"
"Sarah Wynn."
She squealed in delight. "Oh, how wonderful! We must be kindred spirits then! I have Sarah Wynn, too!"
Hiram tried to smile.
"Can I come up to your apartment?"
Danger signal. Hand moving up thigh. Invitation to apartment. Sex.
"No."
"Why not?"
And Hiram remembered that the only way he could ever get rid of the television was to prove that he wasn't solitary. And fixing up his sex life-- i.e., having one-- would go a long way toward changing their damn profiles. "Come, on," he said, and they left the Friends of the Family without further ado.
Inside the apartment she immediately took off her shoes and blouse and sat down on the old-fashioned sofa in front of the TV. "Oh," she said, "so many books. You really are a profes6or, aren't you?"
"Yeah," he said, vaguely sensing that the next move was up to him, and not having the faintest idea of what the next move was. He thought back to is only fumbling attempt at sex when he was (what?) thirteen? (no) fourteen and the girl was fifteen and was doing it on a lark. She had walked with him up the creekbed (back when there were creeks and open country) and suddenly she had stopped and unzipped his pants (back when there were zippers) but he was finished before she had hardly started and gave upinm disgust and took his pants and ran away. Her name was Diana. He went home without his pants and had no rational explanation and his mother had treated him with loathing and brought it up again and again for years afterward, how a man is a man no matter how you treat him and he'll still get it when he can, who cares about the poor girl. But Hiram was used to that kind of talk. It rolled off him. What haunted him was the uncontrolled shivering of his body, the ecstacy of it, and then the look of disgust on the girl's face. He had thought it was because-- well, never mind. Never mind, he thought. I don't think of this anymore.
"Come on," said the woman. "What's your name?" Hiram asked.
She looked at the ceiling. "Agnes, for heaven's sake, come on."
He decided that taking off his shirt might be a good idea. She watched, then
decided to help.
"No," he said.
"What?"
"Don't touch me."
"Oh for pete's sake. What's wrong? Impotent?"
Not at all. Not at all. Just uninterested. Is that all right?
"Look, I don't want to play around with a psycho case, all right? I've got better
things to do. I make a hundred a whack, that's what I charge, that's standard, right?"
Standard what? Hiram nodded because he didn't dare ask what she was talking about.
"But you obviously, heaven knows how, buddy, you sure as hell obviously don't know what's going on in the world. Twenty bucks. Enough for the ten minutes you've screwed up for me. Right?"
"I don't have twenty," Hiram said.
Her eyes got tight. "A fairy and a deadbeat. What a pick. Look, buddy, next time
you try a pickup, figure out what you want to do with her first, right?"
She picked up her shoes and blouse and left. Hiram stood there.
"Teddy, no," said Sarah Wynn.
"But I need you. I need you so desperately," said Teddy on the screen.
"It's only been a few days. How can I sleep with another man only a few days
after George was killed? Only four days ago we-- oh, no, Teddy. Please."
"Then when? How soon? I love you so much."
Drivel, George thought in his analytical mind. But nevertheless obviously based
on the Penelope story. No doubt her George, her Odysseus, would return, miraculously alive, ready to sweep her back into wedded bliss. But in the meantime, the suitors: enough suitors to sell fifteen thousand cars and a hundred thousand boxes of Tampax and four hundred thousand packages of Cap'n Crunch.
The nonanalytical part of his mind, however, was not the least bit concerned with Penelope. For some reason he was clasping and unclasping his hands in front of him. For some reason he was shaking. For some reason he fell to his knees at the couch, his hands clasping and unclasping around Crime and Punishment, as his eyes strained to cry but could not.
Sarah Wynn wept.
But she can cry easily, Hiram thought. It's not fair, that she should cry so easily. Spin flax, Penelope.
The alarm went off, but Hiram was already awake. In front of him the television was singing about Dove with lanolin. The products haven't changed, Hiram. thought. Never change. They were advertising Dove with lanolin in the little market carts around the base of the cross while Jesus bled to death, no doubt. For softer skin.
He got up, got dressed, tried to read, couldn't, tried to remember what had happened last night to leave him so upset and nervous, but couldn't, and at last he decided to go back to the Aryan at the Bell Television offices.
"Mr. Cloward," said the Aryan.
"You're a psychiatrist, aren't you?" Hiram asked.
"Why, Mr. Cloward, I'm an A-6 complaint representative from Bell Television. What can I do for you?
"I can't stand Sarah Wynn anymore," Hiram said.
"That's a shame. Things are finally going to work out for her starting in about two weeks."
And in spite of himself, Hiram wanted to ask what was going to happen. It isn't fair for this nordic uberman to know what sweet little Sarah is going to be doing weeks before I do. But he fought down the feeling, ashamed that he was getting caught up in the damn soap.
"Help me," Hiram said.
"How can I help you?"
"You can change my life. You can get the television out of my apartment."
"Why, Mr. Cloward?" the Aryan asked. "It's the one thing in life that's absolutely free. Except that you get to watch commercials. And you know as well as I do that the commercials are downright entertaining. Why, there are people who actually choose to have double the commercials in their personal progranuning. We get a thousand requests a day for the latest McDonald's ad. You have no idea."
"I have a very good idea. I want to read. I want to be alone."
"On the contrary, Mr. Cloward, you long not to be alone. You desperately need a friend."
Anger. "And what makes you so damn sure of that?"
"Because, Mr. Cloward, your response is completely typical of your group. It's a group we're very concerned about. We don't have a budget to program for you-- there are only about two thousand of you in the country-- but a budget wouldn't do us much good because we really don't know what kind of programming you want."
"I am not part of any group."
"Oh, you're so much a part of it that you could be called typical. Dominant mother, absent and/or hostile father, no long-term relationships with anybody. No sex life."
"I have a sex life."