Not right away, of course. He started at forty bucks and I told him it was a stinking machine. He came down to thirty-five and I stuck a piece of paper in it, typed something, and spat disgustedly on the floor. He said thirty and I started for the door.
I gave him twenty-five and carried off the typewriter.
It’s all part of the ritual. He wouldn’t have had any respect for me if I gave him the forty, and I wouldn’t have had any for him if he started at twenty-five, which was all the machine was worth.
Of course it’s ridiculous. Most things are.
The typewriter was heavy — the only value in portables is that they are portable. I hauled it into a candy store, past a row of incipient juvenile delinquents drinking egg creams, and into a phone booth. I dropped a dime into the slot and listened to the dial tone for fifteen long seconds while Lou Harris’s number came back to me.
Then I dialed it.
The girl who answered the phone had an appropriately brittle voice. Every girl Lou ever had — and he ran through help like I ran through cases of rye — sounded brittle. I think he must have hired them over the phone. Some were ugly and some weren’t but they all sounded alike. It was uncanny.
I gave her my name and she repeated it solemnly and told me to hold the line. A minute later Lou answered.
“Danny?” he half-shouted. “Is it really you?”
My mother was the only other person to get away with calling me Danny. Girls tried it on occasion but I broke them of the habit quickly enough. You didn’t break Lou Harris of habits.
“It’s me,” I said.
“I thought you were dead.”
I grinned involuntarily. “Not yet, Lou.”
“Are you drunk?”
The grin lingered. “Not any more.”
He took a short, quick breath. He breathed as if it cost him money; for that matter, he did most things as if it cost him money. “Going to start typing again?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So why are you calling me?”
“I want you to handle my stuff.”
“Yeah? Why?”
I grinned again. “Because you’re the best agent in the world.”
“Yeah.” I could picture him nodding rapidly at the phone. “Yeah, I guess I am. Get the hell down here, will you?”
“Why?”
“I can’t talk business over the phone.”
I laughed out loud. “Like hell you can’t. You wouldn’t go to the John if there weren’t a phone in it.”
“Get the hell down here,” he said again. “I want to see your ugly face, you son of a bitch.”
The phone clicked in my ear.
I got the hell down there. His office was on Madison between 45th and 46th, so I took the Lexington train and left the typewriter in a locker. It was getting heavy.
He really did have a phone in the john, believe it or not. He had a phone in even room of his house in Westchester and a phone in his car. I think he made love over the phone, but you can’t be sure of it. If anybody could do it, he could.
I rode to his office in an elevator with about three dozen perfumed secretaries and got off, mildly dizzy, at the sixteenth floor. I pushed open the door of his outer office, walking past the autographed pics of important clients and leaning on the buzzer. Brittle-voice opened the window and asked me who I was. She wasn’t bad. She was wearing one of those suits that pretend the girl wearing it is a guy but she was twisting the poor thing all out of shape.
“Mr. Larkin,” she repeated after me. “Lou’s on the phone right now but I’ll tell him you’re here.”
I nodded. Behind her there were five or six guys in shirtsleeves pounding hell out of typewriters and smoking cigarettes with a vengeance and dark-green metal filing cabinets lined the light-green walls.
I returned my attention to brittle-voice who had been studying me all the while. Her hair was brown and it looked soft — softer than her voice, anyway. She had a suntan — the nice, even tan you get from a sunlamp. I found myself wondering whether she was just as nice and brown under the suit.
“You’re Dan Larkin,” she said.
I nodded.
“I know your books,” she said. “I read most of them.”
“You did?”
This time it was her turn to nod. She did, and her breasts bobbed pleasantly with the motion.
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“They’re junk,” I told her. They are.
“They’re good junk,” she said. “I used to want to write a while back.”
“Ever try?”
She nodded. “Pulp. Nothing sold and I gave it up. There are easier ways to make a living.”
“Like answering the phone?”
It didn’t even get a smile out of her. “I figured the job would be glamorous,” she said. “That’s what the son of a bitch at the employment agency said. Low salary, but the glamour of working around writers and agents and publishers.”
I sort of looked at her.
“I like glamour,” she said. She looked right at me and said, “I get a real kick out of some things. Like exciting things.”
I thought about carting her off to a bedroom somewhere and gave up the idea. The body was worth it, but what was inside the body didn’t figure to be worth it at all. She was the type you meet all over the place — the type who sleeps with you because you’re a writer or because you’re an actor or whatever. They’re all over, all over New York and all over Hollywood and all over everyplace I’ve ever been in my life. You don’t have to beat them off with a club but you don’t have to bait your hook too carefully either.
Sometimes they were fun. But after last night I wasn’t having any.
The buzzer rang mercifully while she was still gazing at me with that soulful look in her eyes. She shrugged, picked up the phone and looked up at me.
“You’re in luck,” she said. “The great man will see you now.”
I walked to the door while she pressed another magical buzzer and the door opened before me. I knew the route — the office was the same as the day I last saw it, even if Lou was a few fortunes richer. I walked through the door with his name on it in gold letters and sat down in the leather chair next to his desk.
He was sitting in the other leather chair, the one behind his desk. The desk was massive, and any man as small as Lou would look ridiculous behind a desk like that. Any man but Lou.
Lou looked a little older and smaller than last time I saw him, but otherwise he hadn’t changed a bit. He had all his hair and it crowded over his ears and piled up on top of his head in a sprawling mass. His eyes were small blue dots that looked right through a person. His forearms were heavy and muscular — he had played handball when he was younger and the muscles didn’t go away.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “So you want to be a writer again.”
I nodded. We didn’t shake hands; it wasn’t necessary.
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“You son of a bitch,” he said again. “Dan, you’re not the rat race type. That’s why you cracked up before. All along you were a guy looking for a place to crack up and you found it out on the coast.”
“What do you mean?”
He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a wooden match. “There’s two kinds of writers,” he said. “One kind has a wife and kids and lives in a small town and saves a little money every year and writes regularly and lives without pressure. The other kind lives in New York or Chicago or Hollywood and writes like a machine and makes lots of money and spends all of it.”
“So? I’m in the second class.”
“Yeah.” He flicked ashes in the brass ashtray and stuck the cigarette back in his mouth. “You’re in class two, Dan. But you’ve spent all your life trying to get into class one. You’re a guy who wants a home and kids and who can’t stop running.”