Bertie got back into the bed. “Ah,” he said, “the sanctum sanctorum.” He rolled over and over from one side of the bed to the other. He tucked his knees into his chest and went under the covers. “It makes you feel kind of small and insignificant,” he said.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Graham Macnamee speaking to you from the Cave of the Winds. I have made my way into the heart of this darkness to find my friend, Poor Bertie, who, as you know, entered the bed eight weeks ago. Bertie is with me now, and while there isn’t enough light for me to be able to see his condition, his voice may tell us something about his physical state. Bertie, just what is the official record?”
“Well, Graham, some couples have been known to stick it out for seventy-five years. Of course, your average is much less than that, but still—”
“Seventy-five years.”
“Seventy-five, yes sir. It’s amazing, isn’t it, Graham, when you come to think? All that time in one bed.”
“It certainly is,” Graham Macnamee said. “Do you think you’ll be able to go the distance, Bert?”
“Who, me? No, no. A lot of folks have misunderstood my purpose in coming here. I’m rather glad you’ve given me the opportunity to clear that up. Actually my work here is scientific. This isn’t a stunt or anything like that. I’m here to learn.”
“Can you tell us about it, Bert?”
“Graham, it’s been a fascinating experience, if you know what I mean, but frankly there are many things we still don’t understand. I don’t know why they do it. All that licit love, that regularity. Take the case of Richard and Norma, for example — and incidentally, you don’t want to overlook the significance of that name ‘Norma.’ Norma/Normal, you see?”
“Say, I never thought of that.”
“Well, I’m trained to think like that, Graham. In my work you have to.”
“Say,” Graham Macnamee said.
“Sure. Well, the thing is this, buddy, when I first came into this bed I felt the aura, know what I mean, the power. I think it’s built into the mattress or something.”
“Say.”
“Shut your face, Graham, and let me speak, will you please? Well, anyway, you feel surrounded. Respectable. Love is made here, of course, but it’s not love as we know it. There are things that must remain mysteries until we have more facts. I mean, Graham, checks could be cashed in this bed, for Christ’s sake, credit cards honored. It’s ideal for family reunions, high teas. Graham, it’s the kind of place you wouldn’t be ashamed to take your mother.”
“Go to sleep, Bert,” Graham Macnamee said.
“Say,” Bertie said.
Between the third and fourth day of his stay in the Premingers’ apartment Bertie became restless. He had not been outside the house since the Sunday he arrived, even to bring in the papers Preminger had told him about. (Indeed, it was by counting the papers that he knew how long he had been there, though he couldn’t be sure, since he didn’t know whether the Premingers had taken the Sunday paper along with them.) He could see them on the back porch through the window of Norma’s sun parlor. With the bottles of milk they made a strange little pile. After all, he was not a caretaker; he was a guest. Preminger could bring in his own papers, drink his own damn milk. For the same reasons he had determined not even to answer the phone when it rang.
One evening he tried to call Klaff at the Los Angeles County Jail, but the desk sergeant wouldn’t get him. He wouldn’t even take a message.
Although he had not been outside since Sunday, Bertie had only a vague desire to leave the apartment. He weighed this against his real need to rest and his genuine pleasure in being alone in so big a place. Like the man in the joke who does not leave his Miami hotel room because it is costing him thirty-five dollars a day, Bertie decided he had better remain inside.
With no money left he was reduced to eating the dry, cold remainder of the pizza, dividing it mathematically into a week’s provisions, like someone on a raft. (He actually fancied himself, not on a raft perhaps, but set alone and drifting on, say, the Queen Mary.) To supplement the pizza he opened some cans of soup he found in the pantry and drank the contents straight, without heating it or even adding water. Steadily he drank away at the Premingers’ modest stock of liquor. The twelve cans of beer had been devoured by the second morning, of course.
After the second full day in the apartment his voices began to desert him. It was only with difficulty that he could manage his imitations, and only for short lengths of time. The glorious discussions that had gone on long into the night were now out of the question. He found he could not do Gimpel’s voice any more, and even Klaff’s was increasingly difficult and largely confined to his low, caressing obscenities. Mostly he talked with himself, although it was a real strain to keep up his end of the conversation, and it always made him cry when he said how pathetic he was and asked himself where do you go from here. Oh, to be like Bird, he thought. Not to have to be a bum. To ask, as it were, no quarter.
At various times during the day he would call out “Bird lives” in seeming stunning triumph. But he didn’t believe it.
He watched a lot of television. “I’m getting ammunition,” he said. “It’s scientific.”
Twice a day he masturbated in the Premingers’ bed.
He settled gradually, then, into restlessness. He knew, of course, that he had it always in his power to bring himself back up to the heights he had known in those wonderful first two days. He was satisfied, however, not to use this power, and thought of himself as a kind of soldier, alone in a foxhole, in enemy territory, at night, at a bad time in the war, with one bullet in his pistol. Oddly, he derived more pride — and comfort, and a queer security — from this single bullet than others might have from whole cases of ammunition. It was his strategic bullet, the one he would use to get the big one, turn the tide, make the difference. The Premingers would be away two weeks. He would not waste his ammunition. Just as he divided the stale pizza, cherishing each piece as much for the satisfaction he took from possessing it during a time of emergency as for any sustenance it offered, so he enjoyed his knowledge that at any time he could recoup his vanishing spirits. He shared with the squares (“Use their own weapons to beat them, Bertie”) a special pride in adversity, in having to do without, in having to expose whatever was left of his character to the narrower straits. It was strange, he thought seriously, it was the paradox of the world and an institutional insight that might have come right out of the mouth of that slut in Dallas, but the most peculiar aspect of the squares wasn’t their lack of imagination or their bland bad taste, but their ability, like the wildest fanatics, like the furthest out of the furthest out, to cling to the illogical, finally untenable notion that they must have and have in order to live, at the same time that they realized that it was better not to have. What seemed so grand to Bertie, who admired all impossible positions, was that they believed both things with equal intensity, never suspecting for a moment any inconsistency. And here was Bertie, Bertie thought, here was Bertie inside their capitol, on the slopes of their mountains, on their smooth shores, who believed neither of these propositions, who believed in not having and in not suffering too, who yet realized the very same pleasure that they would in having and not using. It was the strangest thing that would ever happen to him, he thought.