I’ve been going up and down the high-rent districts — Wall, Madison, Fifth, ducking in and out of Radio City (the scene of those old guided tours; how far I’ve come). I’ve been in the reception rooms now of many of the country’s most prestigious firms, and though I do not always meet I often get a chance at least to see their top men. (It never fails to strike me that these magnificent lives are built on simple profit and loss.) Brashness does not work here. It’s not like the movies. I must subdue myself in order to subdue others. It’s the high espionage of high finance, the subversion of self. Calmness is what these babies pay for.
However, this campaign isn’t organized yet. I have no really firm goals or procedures. Mostly I walk their neighborhoods like a kind of rube, my eyes on the tops of the buildings. On a hunch I pick one and go inside.
Yesterday I spotted a new one, all aluminum and glass, like some colossal upended tray of ice cubes. The impression was that the books all balanced, that I would even be allowed to examine them if I liked. The lobby was vast, a marbled, climateless hall which gave me the feeling that somewhere nearby a spectacular ice show was in progress, or a revival of Porgy and Bess in French, or one of those concerts for children, judiciously Negroed and Puerto Ricaned and Central Park Wested, narrated by this handsome symphony conductor who explained Wagner as though the Walkyries were a kind of baseball team in the American League. This aura had less to do with the building’s architecture, perhaps, than with its state of mind. I felt that above me, in all the offices, suites, executive dining rooms and marbled toilets bright as ballrooms, were men of our time doing the work of our time. It was as if the American Can Company’s vision of the world had finally won through, and that here, throughout this new, light, sleek-angled temple of new materials-through-chemistry, duty and profit mixed and were, at their highest level, one.
I gave in at once. I usually do, of course, but this time I gave in eagerly, turning over my will to the will of the place, the Anglo-Saxon genie god of Western Man who folded out, like a picture in Life magazine. If I had spoken just then my voice would have been low, reverential, like the voice not of the believer himself but of the visitor in an alien church who cannot keep the exaggerated respect out of his tone.
I examined the directory hastily.
There was a tremendous tier of elevators which looked like a solid wall of chrome, a huge, wide block of the stuff, in which, one day, some artist, some Western Man, would chisel the faces of the New Heroes and make of it a fresh Rushmore. Looking at the imposing set of elevators I had the feeling that somehow I would have to book passage, that there were low seasons and high, family plans and excursion tours, and perhaps, despite my feeling of being in a new and better democracy, different classes.
I went up to one of the starters. “The Complex is on what floor, please?”
He looked at me critically. “Which office?” he asked.
“Which office?” I repeated lamely. I stared gloomily at the emblem on his tunic, a highly edited map of the world with the shapes of all the European and Western Hemisphere countries. “Western Civilization, Inc.,” it read.
“Press, Radio, TV, the Magazine? Which department?”
“Oh,” I said. “Executive. Editorial.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Yes. Yes I do. I have an appointment.”
“With whom?”
“With — with the Chairman.”
“Gordon Rail?” He looked at my clothes doubtfully, the slacks-and-sportshirt and Toby Tylers in which I meet the world. I look not so much like Western as Bleacher Man.
“Look,” I said, “I’m an ex-dope fiend.”
“What?”
“A junkie. You know — pot, snow, horse, shit. They’re doing a story on me, man. How I had the courage to shake the monkey. You know.”
“Oh.”
“Mr. Rail thinks I’ll be an inspiration to all the other dope fiends. He’s doing the interview himself. You know.”
“Oh.”
“I’m getting five thousand bucks,” I said.
“Oh,” the starter said. He took my arm and led me to one of the elevators. “Thirty-eighth floor, Bill,” he said to the operator.
When the doors closed the world was shut out. Unfamiliar music purred. “Pretty,” I said to the operator.
“It’s on tape,” he said. “A special composition. Lasts exactly seventy-two seconds, exactly the time it takes to get up to the thirty-eighth floor. There’s a whole cycle of these compositions. They’re done by a very famous composer. That’s Stokowski conducting.”
“Is that right?” I said. “Pretty.”
“Sure,” he said. “There are two hundred different compositions. It would take hours of riding in the elevator to hear them all.”
“I suppose if one had the time it would be very worthwhile,” I said.
“Every elevator will have its own cycle one day, except for the lower floors maybe. You can see why it would be impractical for the lower floors.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Right now only thirty through sixty are installed with the service.”
“It’s terrific,” I said.
“Mr. Rail himself commissioned it. Oh, it’s very sound psychologically. You take most elevators. You get into the average elevator, you come on it’s the middle of a song and usually you’re out before it’s over. There’s a sense of incompleteness, of frustration. There’s something… you know… missing. It could upset you. You’d want to hear the whole tune; you’d worry about it unconsciously.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“In a creative place like this precious man-minutes could be lost.”
“Yes.”
“Tum-ta-ta-tum. Tum-tum-ta-ta-tum, tum-tum. Here we are. Thirty-eight. Right on time.”
“Remarkable,” I said.
The doors opened and for a moment I thought I had gone blind. After the brightness of the lobby and the elevator I was unprepared for the dimness that greeted me. I seemed to be in a large room of a deep, profound brown, amid deep, profound brown walls and a deep, profound brown ceiling. My feet sank four inches into deep, deep profound brown carpet. There was no furniture in the room, just deep, profound brown space.
The very bowels of Western Man, I thought, astonished.
After a few moments I became aware that I was not in an empty room. At one end of the place, at a distance of perhaps a little less than the length of a bowling alley, there was a deep, profound brown desk, uncluttered except for a single deep, profound brown telephone. Behind it was a girl, her face washed in a nimbus of sourceless light. I went toward her, moving through layers of soft, sourceless music.
When I was closer I saw that the girl was beautiful, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She had a face like Laura on a train that is passing through, and even before she spoke I knew what that voice would sound like. It would be a mature blend of Bronx and London drawing room, intelligent and sexy and comfortable and a little hoarse — the voice of a girl who had quit Vassar or Smith or Radcliffe in her sophomore year, and had slept around and drunk gin neat and toured Europe on a motorcycle and been in air raids and spent evenings of the revolution in sleeping bags on mountaintops with a guerilla leader who had lost an arm. She’d had poems published and once been in love with a bald, fat, sensitive little man who sold insurance door to door in Omaha, Nebraska. She had gone there to have her baby which the beaten-down brain surgeon, later a suicide in Vera Cruz, had given her. She was neurotic and sick and a black-belt judo champion who could play the guitar and the recorder and sing songs in strange, unremembered languages like Babylonian, Urdu, and Red Chinese. She had sat turning tricks in the windows of Amsterdam and been a Gray Lady in a Chicago hospital. She had been stranded during the war once in a low café in Saigon where she sat beneath a chuffing palmetto fan dealing cards to a Japanese general, all the time collecting information which would later be of use to the Allies. A beat Beatrice, she had been the lost love and inspiration of poets and philosophers and kings and to more than a few men of good will who’d had nothing before she met them but their despair. She was four hundred and thirty-seven years old but she looked twenty-six.