“He made fun of us. He’s the star and we’re the stooges.”
“Mark, so what? Would you rather be on top, with the power, or on the bottom making fun?”
“He’s on top,” Mark insisted. “He has the power.”
“Then go downstairs and kick him a few times,” Peter said, obviously annoyed and bored. “Show him who’s in charge.”
Joyce was grateful when Larry chimed in then, awkwardly but earnestly changing the conversation, saying, “Um, Peter, what about the deadline business? What that FBI man said, that they can’t get an answer out of Washington in twenty-four hours. Do you think that’s true?”
Mark said, “They have to be pushed.”
Peter smiled easily at Larry. “We’ll send them another tape tomorrow night,” he said. “And this time we’ll let Mark direct the performance.”
Larry looked disapproving, but didn’t react directly. Instead, he said, “How much time will we give them, really?”
“We don’t know, really. The minimum time possible.”
“I wonder...” Larry said, musing, then said, “Peter? Do you think he’s trainable?”
Peter seemed amused. “Koo Davis? You want to orientate Koo Davis in dialectical materialism?”
“An intelligent brain is capable of seeing truth,” Larry said.
“Then give it a try,” Peter suggested. Joyce saw that he was mocking Larry, and that Larry knew but didn’t care. “Spend time with him tomorrow,” Peter said, “discuss the theory of labor. How much is a man worth who tells jokes for a living?”
“All men are worth the same,” Larry said.
Peter gave him a sly look. “More and more, Larry, your politics sound like religion.”
Mark said, “I’ll go look at Davis, check him one last time tonight.”
He means to do something cruel, Joyce thought, looking at Mark’s face, grim and angry behind the heavy beard. She was glad when Larry said, “I’ll go with you.”
Mark gave him a venomous look. “You can go instead of me,” he said, and walked away, toward his bedroom.
“Leave Davis alone for tonight,” Peter said. “He’s all right down there.”
“I didn’t want Mark to see him alone.”
“I know, Larry.”
Liz abruptly got to her feet, saying, “Mark’s right, we should push them, get this over with. Phone that number they gave, put Davis on, let Mark twist his arm. When they hear Davis holler, they’ll start to move.”
Peter shook his head, like a patient tutor with a backward pupil. “In the first place, they’d trace the call. In the second place, if we start with high pressure, where do we go from there? We begin calm, and we crank it up a bit at a time. If they stall we can still go way up. We can let Mark slice off his ears, for instance.” Peter chuckled, a low comfortable sound. “Can you imagine that round neat head without ears?”
Joyce, who preferred to be silent, was driven to speech now, saying in a pained voice, “You aren’t serious, Peter.”
“Of course not,” Peter told her, speaking easily, but Joyce watched his face and eyes, and she thought he might very well be serious, if the circumstances were right.
Liz said, “Peter. Do you want to fuck?”
He seemed to consider the question, without much enthusiasm. “Possibly.”
“All right, then. Goodnight,” Liz said, and walked from the room. Smiling slightly, Peter followed her.
Leaving Larry and Joyce. Open sexuality had been a postulate in the Movement in the early days, sexual relationships as a statement of political belief, so these five people had long ago completed the round of all the possible heterosexual couplings. But sex had long since faded as a primary factor with any of them; these days, only Liz would raise the subject in public, and particularly in that aggressive way.
The introduction of sex in that manner and these circumstances left Joyce embarrassed and uneasy. She didn’t want Larry to feel obligated to make the same offer to her; she had no illusion that he might actually want to have sex with her. Casting about for a new topic, glancing over at the TV screen, she said, “Larry?”
“Yes?”
“Did that look like me?”
“Not a bit,” Larry said. He sounded surprised at the question. “To tell the truth, I thought they did those things better.”
“It must have looked something like me.”
“I’ll tell you want it looked like,” Larry said, coming over and sitting at the other end of the sofa. “It looked like a category of person which includes you, but it didn’t look like you. It looked like someone who might be you for two seconds from a block away, but then you’d say, ‘Oh, no, that doesn’t look like Joyce at all.’ ”
“It’s not that I’m being vain.” Joyce was always afraid people would think her too feminine. “It was just that she looked—dead.”
“It wasn’t accurate,” Larry told her. “I promise.”
She offered him a quick grateful smile. “Thank you.” Then, looking at his earnest face, all the doubts she tried to keep buried came rushing into her mind, and she cried, “Larry, is it really going to work? Will it all come out somewhere?”
“Of course.” He was surprised, and it showed. “We’ve had victories,” he said. “We’ll have more.”
“Yes,” she said, concealing her doubts.
But he leaned closer, saying, “Do you mean you fight without believing in the inevitability of success? Don’t you know, historically, we must win?”
“Yes, of course. It just seems so long sometimes.” Then she smiled at him, knowing he needed the reassurance more than she did. “And I seem so short. Goodnight, Larry.” She patted his knee, and got to her feet.
“Good night, Joyce.”
“Don’t bother about Davis tonight,” she told him.
“No, that was just to protect him from Mark. He’s all right down there, he’ll keep until morning.”
7
“My brain is happy to be here,” Koo Davis says, “but my feet wanna be in Tennessee.” That’s a line from Saturday Evening Ghost, one of a series of comic spook movies Koo made in the early forties. Portraits with moving eyes, chairs whose arms suddenly reach up and grab at the person seated there, wall panels that open so a black-gloved hand can emerge clutching a knife; and Koo Davis moving brash and unknowing through it all. It was a genre then, everybody did the same gags: the candle that slid along a tabletop, the stuffed gorilla on wheels whose finger was caught (unknown to him) in the back of the hero’s belt so he’d be tiptoeing through the spooky house with this gorilla rolling along behind him, the hero pretending to be one of the figures in a wax museum. The audiences didn’t seem to care how often they saw those gags, and a recurring bit in Koo’s movies was the point where he would suddenly notice all those weird things around him, and become terrified. Koo’s bit of going from oblivious self-assurance to gibbering terror was one of his most famous routines, so much so that Bosley Crowther wrote in a review, “No one can make panic as hilarious as Koo Davis.”
I’m scared, Koo thinks, but he doesn’t say it aloud; it ain’t that hilarious. Remembering how often he simulated fear in all those movies, and later on television, he’s surprised at how different the real thing is. Of course, like everyone else he’s known brief moments of fear in his life—mostly on those USO tours—but what he’s feeling now is steady, growing, ongoing. He’s afraid of these people, he’s afraid of what will happen, he’s afraid of his own helplessness, and he’s afraid of his fear.