Myrnie was not certain, in the case of the vacant building, what she expected the Cardinal to do, exactly. With some idea that he might levitate the building, or dissolve the spell upon it, or simply exercise his metaphysical authority in its direction, she waited for him. The Cardinal arrived, urbane, interested, but not, thank heaven, prying. He settled easily with his bourbon. With her characteristic delicacy and frankness, Myrnie outlined the problem to him. Over his second drink, he had it solved. A syndicate, of doubtful rectitude but of unquestioned financial stability, was run by an inhabitant of the diocese, who, though he had not specifically mentioned any need for an office building, most probably had such a need. One more drink, and the Cardinal departed. One more week, and the building was bought — as a headquarters for enterprises in jukebox rental, private garbage collection, and parking lots.
Lewis was an excellent barber. His customers — Lothar, Jim, Dennis, the Dean, and the Cardinal among them — held him in high regard. There was also an eight-year-old boy whose hair Lewis had been cutting once every three weeks for five years. Last week, Lewis, having completed his haircut, removed the towel from the boy’s shoulders and said, “You know, you’ll have to pay me.”
The boy stood with his hands in his pockets. “I can’t,” he said. “Dad’s meant to pay.”
“Hasn’t paid me in six months,” Lewis said.
“He won’t,” the boy said. “Ever since he moved out, he says it’s Mom’s business.”
“Your ma will have to pay, then,” Lewis said.
“She says, under the settlement, Dad’s got to pay.”
“Please don’t come back, then,” Lewis said, “until somebody pays.”
I was sitting next to the chairman of the committee, our renowned biographer. The dinner was, as it is quite often, at his club. The club is for men who have good manners and a connection of some sort with arts and letters. Twice a year, and throughout the year in selected dining rooms, the club waives its rules and lets escorted ladies in. For two courses, the chairman had pointed out to me paintings and other objects associated with high moments in the club’s long history. By the cheese and salad, we had hit a lull. Mr. Hardemeyer, on my right, was muttering about “the wonderful insights of our African friends about nature.” On the chairman’s left, our married nun, member of the City Council, was taking down the phone number of the black psychiatrist on her left. Conversation had lapsed — definitely. The chairman and I inhaled to speak at the same moment. “You were saying?” I said. “No, please,” he said. I asked whether women’s groups had ever protested the exclusion of women from the club. “Ah, no,” he said. “No, no. Our wives and colleagues have their own club, don’t you see.” “Oh,” I said. The subject had been a mistake. There just aren’t so many subjects. “Well, I didn’t mean your wives and colleagues so much…” He looked alarmed, then inspired. He offered to sponsor me for membership in his wives’ and colleagues’ club. This involved a misunderstanding so profound that it reminded me of the time when, to surprise me on a cheerful day, Jim’s brother took me, without warning, to a full performance of Parsifal. Admitting women into his club, the chairman now said, “would be as inappropriate as,” he paused, “as introducing a trumpet into a string quartet.”
The coffee table seemed to be whale vertebrae, laminated, or enclosed in Perspex. All around the wall, there were tusks. A disagreeable cat and an old gray rag were lying on the piano. A bulldog, wrapped in a blanket, wheezed on the sofa, beside the spot where a drink had been spilled. The bachelors and divorced fathers sat, with their drinks and their girls, on the floor. It was late. Now and then, someone would get up to restore circulation. Immediately, the host’s fine, hard-breathing bloodhound would bound into the room. “Down,” Max would say as this creature attempted to wrap himself around the leg of another guest. “Albert,” I said. “Down.” There would be the sound of ice in glasses, canine panting, Max and others saying “Down,” and “Shame,” and “Sit.”
All the men in the room had drinks in both hands. They had tried to extricate themselves from conversations by saying, “I guess I’ll have another drink. May I get one for you?” The trouble with this method is that it takes people right back where they came from; it is impossible to approach with one lady’s gin and tonic another lady who may be drinking Scotch. Escape procedures, however, were in full force. Some people, in a frenzy of antipathy and boredom, were drinking themselves into extreme approximations of longing to be together. Exchanging phone numbers, demanding to have lunch, proposing to share an apartment — the escalations of fellowship had the air of a terminal auction, a fierce adult version of slapjack, a bill-payer loan from a finance company, an attempt to buy with one grand convivial debt, to be paid in future, an exit from each other’s company at that instant.
The inside-dopester, having been, according to the morning paper, wrong again, was ranting slightly. Edith, whose nine-year-old has polish on her nails and a silver electric chair on her charm bracelet, was on the floor in contortions, trying to endear herself to a child. “Warren Burger,” the baby-food tycoon was saying to the assassination theorist. “He’s no friend of the Establishment.” A young professor from Iowa, who was in the city for a lecture series on Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, spoke of his closeness to his own students, with several of whom he had had affairs, although he did not believe, in the academic context, in shacking up. He was preoccupied with his brightest student, a girl, with whom, during office hours, he engaged in — he wished there was an Anglo-Saxon word for it — fellatio. I said I thought it was sort of a metaphor for education, wasn’t it. Then I thought I had gone too far. But no. He said, “Exactly.” We all watched the “Eleventh Hour News,” which went on, of course, at the Twelfth Hour. Jim and I drove out to the country. It was very late. We stopped for coffee at an all-night dairy-and-diner on the way. A man got out of a truck, came in, ordered a milkshake, put his wallet on the counter, and mumbled something. Then he left, looking angry. “He asks me for a package of rubbers,” the man behind the counter said. “I mean, this is a dairy.” When our car broke down near the highway exit to the farm, a boy with a sign reading BOSTON trotted over. He thought we were slowing to give him a lift.
We may win this year. We may lose it all. It is not going as well as we thought. Posterity, anyway, does not know everything. The simplest operations of life — voting in a booth, filling out returns, remembering whether or not one has just taken a pill — are very difficult. Jim leads an exemplary life, and I can’t cook. As is clear from the parking regulations, however, there are situations in which you are not entitled to stop.
ISLANDS
THE DRIVER of the island’s only taxi was a tall, thin man, with almost invisible eyes and a sparse, brown, asymmetrical mustache. He drove his rickety old car in a kind of drunken weave, from one side to the other of the road. Shrill, improbable cries of “Taxi! Taxi! Taxi!” rang out from behind the rocks and hills, and from the sea. It turned out that the man was a ventriloquist. This cry of “Taxi!” was his talent, and his only joke. He required, every few seconds, to be praised for it. “Taxi!” he would scream from a passing motorbike or donkey cart. “Taxi!” from behind a cow. He insisted that his passengers laugh, turn around, look astounded, incredulous. He kept right on. If passengers resumed a conversation of their own, or gave any sign that their attention had lapsed, he would speed his car into a wilder weave, his voice into more and shriller screams. Some thought him a charming eccentric. It had never occurred to me, though, what an oddity, intellectually, ventriloquism on the radio used to be.