“That’s what I’m driving at. You’re with colleagues. Isn’t it natural for people who know each other this way to talk about the oddball things that have happened to them?”
“Sure, but why lunch? We see each other socially at other times and it isn’t like that. I see Schmidt. Schmidt’s probably my best friend. But when we go to parties or out to dinner, Schmidt’s a totally different person. We talk about issues, or the news, or maybe our kids. There isn’t all that laughing.”
“I don’t understand. Does it bother you to hear a humorous story?”
“I didn’t say it bothered me. I never said it bothered me. But don’t you see? Everything is funny; it’s always funny. Everybody in my department is an adjustor, but often we eat with underwriters or salesmen or computer personnel or even with the company physicians. We’re a big company, one whole floor is a clinic where people come to be examined for their policies. But it doesn’t make any difference if a man is a doctor or a salesman or an adjustor like myself. Whenever he speaks up at lunch it’s to tell a funny story or make some wisecrack. That’s the way it was with the last company I worked for, and the firm I was with before that when I was in another business. It’s universal.”
“Well, if you enjoy these stories—”
“Certainly I enjoy them. I laugh as hard as the next guy, but what is it? We’re adjustors. We see awful stuff. I mean, our nose is in it every day of the week. Probably the only time you ever saw an adjustor was when some guy sideswiped your car while it was parked outside your house. He looked at it and told you to go ahead and get it fixed. But that isn’t the half of it — it isn’t a tenth of it. Every day I see someone with his neck creamed or his leg torn off at the pocket, or his house up in flames and his kid third-degreed in her bedroom. You see pictures of accidents in the papers, but you don’t see these. They don’t show you the totals.
“And the underwriters know what’s going on too. They know everything there is to know about casualty and percentages, and the docs the same. Either you’re realistic in the insurance business or you go under. Do you know that 39 percent of the people who apply for life insurance are uninsurable unless they pay some fantastic premium, and 7 percent are uninsurable no matter what the premium is? There isn’t a premium large enough they could pay to insure themselves. And they’d pay it too.”
“Well, there’s your answer, then. You people see so much horror that you’ve got to have some sort of safety valve or you couldn’t take it. That’s why you tell each other funny stories.”
“No! It’s the same in any business. It’s the same in your business. Don’t the announcers all kid around when you go to lunch?”
“Yes, but—”
“Certainly. In every business. I used to be in the toy business before I went into insurance. It was the same there.”
“Well, then, the pressures,” Dick Gibson said, genuinely interested now in the problem. “Or perhaps it’s the fact that it’s mid-day. The temperature is highest then. You’ve moved your bowels, you’re not tired out yet, you’ve got all your energy. You’ve—”
“No. What is that? The temperature, your bowels? What is that, astrology? No. Why humor? I’m talking about good will — people wrestling to pick up checks or at least to leave the tip and the sky’s the limit, the world’s their oyster and good mood on them like the birthmark. No. No,” the caller said excitedly. “And all the fear that engines us gone, the personality seamless as brushstrokes on a painted wall. And to get as good as you give — the ears open and the heart as well. Lunch’s good democracy. The menu a ballot, you’re voting your appetite.”
“Certainly,” Dick Gibson said, “that would put you in a good mood.”
“What? Yes … But maybe a joke is a shyness, an anecdote no assertion and good will a finesse. I think maybe it’s strategy, a camouflage, some Asian nuance of delay. Sure. To miss profundity is to lose face.”
“I’m glad I could help you.”
“Well, you have. I think I’ll be able to sleep.”
“I’m sorry to lose a listener.”
“What? Oh. Yes. Ha ha. Why lunch? Why gags, humor, good will? Why can’t it always be lunchtime?”
The voice cracked, trailed off, and the connection was broken. Dick took three more calls and signed off for the night.
He left the studio and walked to the Fontainebleau where he garaged his car. Mopiani, one of the Negro night men, complimented him. “That was a good program, Dick. I listened on a ’68 Cadillac. Used both speakers. Drained the battery.”
He got into his car and started up Collins Boulevard to the Deauville. He loved Miami Beach, as he admired and loved all excess. He was at home in inflation, and saw the bizarre luxury hotels along the strip as a unique and lovely manifestation. Air conditioning and paper bathing suits, celebrities, amphibious automobiles, the open bus-trains that pulled tourists up and down the shopping mall on Lincoln Road, marinas, eleven different varieties of bagel, the infinite quinellas of pancake combination in the delicatessens (“Woolfie’s” and “Google’s” were his home cooking), glass-bottom boats, weather, Italian knit, sun-tan lotions and the parking problem. (Mopiani was only one of several personal attendants; indeed, he had never owned a car in his life and had purchased this one merely to have it parked.) He was visible in Miami Beach, a celebrity; he’d never been one before, not in this way. He was an intimate of bartenders, cigarette girls and wandering girl photographers (they still had them here; for all its modern patina, one of the Beach’s excesses was the past: thus, the entertainers were often older stars, the Tony Martins and Jimmy Durantes and Joe E. Lewises who were famous from a vintage of fame he had known as a boy). He enjoyed the vaguely North African sense of the place, its spanking whitewash and tiny Oriental-like shops. Though the vegetation was at first unreal to him — as though it too, like the bagel styles and lush, semi-kosher mood of the hotel kitchens, might have been imported — he had come to look upon palm trees as the very essence of tree, and to dismiss the familiar oaks and elms and maples of his past as spurious and faintly contrived. He knew beach boys, towel boys, the captains of fishing boats and their one-man crews, girl lifeguards, maître d’s, chambermaids, Cuban bookies, cops. And they knew him. To be a celebrity, he decided, was to be part of an intricately hierarchical staff, to know semi-secret passageways, backstairs, greenrooms, to have an inexhaustible supply of first names and exist placidly at last with one’s world, to belong to it as to a country club.
He lived in the Deauville Hotel facing the Atlantic in a small celebrity suite which he got at a discount, and his pockets were always filled with Deauville matchbooks — changed regularly as the sheets each morning — a Vandyked cavalier, the hotel’s symbol, on the front cover. Though he was trying to give up smoking, for some reason he could not give up the matches, and when he offered a light it was always with a strange flourish that he tossed the matchbook on the table. There were Deauville matchbooks on top of the dash of his car, in his jackets, in his rooms, in the studio, everywhere, his small, semi-official litter. Similarly, he stuffed his pockets with the tiny, wrapped hotel soaps, using them as sachets, so that he always smelled faintly of Dial and Deauville. There were other things, cavalier-topped swizzle sticks— though he was not much of a drinker — and Deauville stationery on which he jotted down memos to himself and which he actually preferred for his business correspondence to the official WMIA letterhead. For some reason these souvenirs had become important to him; he did not know why.