The spectacular happened upon me — or beneath me, to be more nearly precise. And bombs went off, and choirs sang, and whistles tooted, and Grant took Richmond, and Socrates took poison. I had Jodi’s breast for a cushion and Jodi’s hips for a safety belt and Jodi’s body for a fine and private place. She squirmed and tossed, the ultimate synthesis of genuine passion and the technical virtuosity only a professional can display. She moved and I moved, and she moved and I moved, and she moved, and I moved, and she moved and everything moved—
Slowly the world came back into its own. Slowly the clouds drifted away, the fog lifted, and reality returned. I was lying on my back and Jodi’s face hovered above, inches from my own. Her mouth opened.
“There,” she whispered. “You won’t forget this time, will you?”
I did not have to answer. She turned away from me, her face nestled against her pillow. She fell asleep at once, the healthy sleep of the healthy animal. I lay on my back, my eyes tightly shut, but I did not sleep. I thought instead of Jodi, and I thought of just how far I had come, how I lived now with a streamlined iceberg and peddled monotonous meals and stale cigarettes to Mr. & Mrs. Middle Majority.
It seemed to be my day for reminiscence. There had been Jodi, in the beginning, shortly after God created the heavens and the earth. Then there had been the shoeless time in the bar, and the Harv, we shouldn’t interlude with Laura Gray. Even then I had been a human being, living a human life. But somewhere, in the course of it all, things changed...
As it turned out, it took even longer to get out of the mailroom than it had taken to get into Laura Gray. One year longer, more or less. For the first two months of that year I lived at Laura’s humble flat. I dragged my suitcase from the Y and moved in with little ceremony, and Laura and I set sail upon the placid sea of domesticity.
Every morning we awoke together to the farm news, furnished by a nasal-voiced announcer who held sway on her clock-radio. Every morning we turned off the farm news and played hayloft for a spell, after which we showered and brushed out teeth. Then I would shave while she applied make-up, and then she cooked either bacon and eggs or ham and eggs, each an equally valid rebellion against her ancestry. And then off to work went we, she to the secretarial pool and I to the mailroom. Then home came we, sweat-stained and weary, grabbing dinner at a luncheonette around the corner from our 69th Street home, and killing time one way or another until it was a respectable hour for mattress machinations.
A scant two months, and then our mad and passionate affair withered and turned to dust. There were a great many reasons. On the purely physical side, I think another month of Laura would have killed me. She liked to bite, and to scratch, and to dig with her claws and to hit — in fact, I finally took to calling her Justine. This was before Lawrence Durrell, I was thinking of De Sade. The scratches and bites didn’t embarrass me too much — I probably wore them with an air of callow triumph — but the pain, in time, grew unbearable.
Then there was our different position in the lists of commerce. She was a secretary while I was a mail clerk, and this fact remained no matter who was on top during the night. Account executives made passes at her, and copywriters made passes at her, and once in a while a partner of the firm cast a sidelong look at her. And here she was, shacking up with a clod from the mailroom, for the love of God.
Besides, domesticity paled. I was too young for it. The delight of having a sure conquest at home failed eventually to compensate for the moral obligation to refrain from making a fresh conquest. Our affair ran its course and died and despite mutual tears at parting, I am sure we were both equally delighted to be on the loose again.
This time the Y didn’t snare me. It was autumn. I went downtown and shared a one-room apartment with four hundred and thirty-seven cockroaches, a fourth-floor walk up on Barrow Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. It should have been romantic — I was young enough to appreciate that sort of thing. Somehow, it was only verminous.
And so I toiled, and toiled. The months went by and the seasons changed, and I remained in the mailroom, carting correspondence from desk to free-form desk and waiting patiently for a promotion. There were five of us in the mailroom, all hungry to break into the ad game, and all of us united by one other common bond.
We were never promoted.
No one, it seemed, was promoted. Periodically one of us was fired, and periodically one of us quit, and the agency quickly replaced the departed one with still another young hopeful. I decided that Tom Stanton, S-sub-two, was the most hilarious practical joker since Guy Fawkes. I was doomed to a lifetime in the mailroom, a lifetime of $40-a-week minus deductions.
Then came August. And somewhere, I suppose, someone died, because a man named John Fehringer came up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and said See you a min, keed.
I translated this mentally — I had learned, in my year with MGSR&S branch of the post office, how to translate Newspeak into English automatically. I went off with Fehringer, and he gave me a filtered cigarette and a filtered smile, in that order. I accepted both.
“I hear good things about you,” he said. “The word from up high has it that you should be given room to grow. Like to try a stint of copywriting, Harv Boy?”
“Well,” I said, “sure.”
He took me to another huge room, into which I had occasionally delivered pieces of copy and mysterious manila envelopes. He showed me a desk and told me that it was going to be my desk. It was old and wobbly, the kind they sell for ten dollars, but, by God, it was all mine. There were drawers in it, and I could fill those drawers with my things. There was a top on that desk, and when no one was looking I could put my feet on it. It was my desk, my first desk, and I shelved it in my mind next to my first love affair.
Fehringer brought me some artwork for a magazine ad, with the key copy penciled in and with catchwords scrawled on a batch of file cards. “This is the ad,” he said. “Like?”
The artwork showed a half-naked girl drawing the string on a sixty-pound bow. It was an advertisement for Bull’s-Eye Spaghetti.
“Like,” I said.
“In here,” he said, pointing at the white space at the bottom of the layout, “is where we tell them that if they buy this cruddy spaghetti they can grow boobs like the broad in the picture. Or whatever we’re telling ’em this week. It’s all on the file cards. You turn it into English and put it in there.”
“I see,” I said.
“It’s a pipe,” he told me. “Easy-do does it, Harv Boy. If it sails smoothly you can keep this desk.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then you’re fired,” he said sweetly. “Have fun, keed. Just take your time and hurry. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.”
He left. I sat in my desk for a minute, getting the feel of it, and then I started to turn Bull’s-Eye Spaghetti into English. It was a pipe, and easy-do did it. I got a head-swelling collection of compliments from the goof I turned the gunk over to, and I celebrated that night by picking up a Bohemian girl in Greenwich Village.
Her name was Saundra. She had long black hair and purple eye shadow, and she was not quite as bad as she sounds. Or maybe she was. She seemed all right at the time. I found her over a cup of cappuccino in something called Le Cul de Sac, where she was telling a group of bearded young men just how horrible Madison Avenue was. It was amusing, because I was certain she got nosebleeds every time she went north of Fourteenth Street. But I kept a straight face.