“No.”
“I’m a salesman. Dover Insurance. Like the White Cliffs of, ya know. I’ve studied the problems involved in smoking. Can’t quit, though. When I do, the nerves shrivel up, stomach goes sour. I worry a lot – but we all worry, don’t we? I mean, my mother used to worry about the earth slowing down. She read somewhere that between 1680 and 1690 the earth lost twenty-seven hundredths of a second. She said that meant something.”
Ashland sighed inwardly. What is it about cocktail parties that causes people you’ve never met to unleash their troubles?
“You meet a lotta fruitcakes in my dodge,” said the pained-looking insurance salesman. “I sold a policy once to a guy who lived in the woodwork. Had a ratty little walk-up in the Bronx with a foldaway bed. Kind you push into the wall. He’d stay there – I mean, inside the wall – most of the time. His roommate would invite some friends in and if they made too much noise the guy inside the wall would pop out with his Thompson. BAM! The bed would come down and there he was with a Thompson submachine gun aimed at everybody. Real fruitcake.”
“I knew a fellow who was twice that crazy.”
Ashland looked up into a long, cadaverous face. The nose had been broken and improperly reset; it canted noticeably to the left. He folded his long, sharp-boned frame onto the couch next to Ashland. “This fellow believed in falling grandmothers,” he declared. “Lived in upper Michigan. ‘Watch out for falling grandmothers,’ he used to warn me. ‘They come down pretty heavy in this area. Most of ’em carry umbrellas and big packages and they come flapping down out of the sky by the thousands!’ This Michigan fellow swore he saw one hit a postman. ‘An awful thing to watch,’ he told me. ‘Knocked the poor soul flat. Crushed his skull like an egg.’ I recall he shuddered just telling me about it.”
“Fruitcake,” said the salesman. “Like the guy I once knew who wrote on all his walls and ceilings. A creative writer, he called himself. Said he couldn’t write on paper, had to use a wall. Paper was too flimsy for him. He’d scrawl these long novels of his, a chapter in every room, with a big black crayon. Words all over the place. He’d fill up the house, then rent another one for his next book. I never read any of his houses, so I don’t know if he was any good.”
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said Ashland. “I need a fresh drink.”
He hurriedly mixed another Scotch at the bar. Around him, the party rolled on inexorably, without any visible core. What time was it, anyway? His watch had stopped.
“Do you happen to know what time it is?” he asked a long-haired Oriental girl who was standing near the bar.
“I’ve no idea,” she said. “None at all.” The girl fixed him with her eyes. “I’ve been watching you, and you seem horribly alone. Aren’t you?”
“Aren’t I what?”
“Horribly alone?”
“I’m not with anyone, if that’s what you mean.”
The girl withdrew a jeweled holder from her bag and fitted a cigarette in place. Ashland lit it for her.
“I haven’t been really alone since I was in Milwaukee,” she told him. “I was about – God! – fifteen or something, and this creep wanted me to move in with him. My parents were both dead by then, so I was all alone.”
“What did you do?”
“Moved in with the creep. What else? I couldn’t make the being-alone scene. Later on, I killed him.”
“You what?”
“Cut his throat.” She smiled delicately. “In self-defense, of course. He got mean on the bottle one Friday night and tried to knife me. I had witnesses.”
Ashland took a long draw on his Scotch. A scowling fellow in shirt-sleeves grabbed the girl’s elbow and steered her roughly away.
“I used to know a girl who looked like that,” said a voice to Ashland’s right. The speaker was curly-haired, clean-featured, in his late thirties. “Greek belly dancer with a Jersey accent. Dark, like her, and kind of mysterious. She used to quote that line of Hemingway’s to Scott Fitzgerald – you know the one.”
“Afraid not.”
“One that goes, ‘We’re all bitched from the start.’ Bitter. A bitter line.”
He put out his hand. Ashland shook it.
“I’m Travers. I used to save America’s ass every week on CBS.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Terry Travers. The old Triple Trouble for Terry series on channel nine. Back in the late fifties. Had to step on a lotta toes to get that series.”
“I think I recall the show. It was—”
“Dung. That’s what it was. Cow dung. Horse dung. The worst. Terry Travers is not my real name, natch. Real one’s Abe Hockstatter. Can you imagine a guy named Abe Hockstatter saving America’s ass every week on CBS?”
“You’ve got me there.”
Hockstatter pulled a brown wallet from his coat, flipped it open. “There I am with one of my other rugs on,” he said, jabbing at a photo. “Been stone bald since high school. Baldies don’t make it in showbiz, so I have my rugs. Go ahead, tug at me.”
Ashland blinked. The man inclined his head. “Pull at it. Go on – as a favor to me!”
Ashland tugged at the fringe of Abe Hockstatter’s curly hairpiece.
“Tight, eh? Really snug. Stays on the old dome.”
“Indeed it does.”
“They cost a fortune. I’ve got a wind-blown one for outdoor scenes. A stiff wind’ll lift a cheap one right off your scalp. Then I got a crew cut and a Western job with long sideburns. All kinds. Ten, twelve . . . all first-class.”
“I’m certain I’ve seen you,” said Ashland. “I just don’t—”
“ ’S’awright. Believe me. Lotta people don’t know me since I quit the Terry thing. I booze like crazy now. You an’ me, we’re among the nation’s six million alcoholics.”
Ashland glared at the actor. “Where do you get off linking me with—”
“Cool it, cool it. So I spoke a little out of turn. Don’t be so touchy, chum.”
“To hell with you!” snapped Ashland.
The bald man with curly hair shrugged and drifted into the crowd.
Ashland took another long pull at his Scotch. All these neurotic conversations. . . He felt exhausted, wrung dry, and the Scotch was lousy. No kick to it. The skin along the back of his neck felt tight, hot. A headache was coming on; he could always tell.
A slim-figured, frosted blonde in black sequins sidled up to him. She exuded an aura of matrimonial wars fought and lost. Her orange lipstick was smeared, her cheeks alcohol-flushed behind flaking pancake make-up. “I have a theory about sleep,” she said. “Would you like to hear it?”
Ashland did not reply.
“My theory is that the world goes insane every night. When we sleep, our subconscious takes charge and we become victims to whatever it conjures up. Our conscious mind is totally blanked out. We lie there, helpless, while our subconscious flings us about. We fall off high buildings, or have to fight a giant ape, or we get buried in quicksand . . . We have absolutely no control. The mind whirls madly in the skull. Isn’t that an unsettling thing to consider?”
“Listen,” said Ashland. “Where’s the host?”
“He’ll get here.”
Ashland put down his glass and turned away from her. A mounting wave of depression swept him toward the door. The room seemed to be solid with bodies, all talking, drinking, gesturing in the milk-thick smoke haze.
“Potatoes have eyes,” said a voice to his left. “I really believe that.” The remark was punctuated by an ugly, frog-croaking laugh.
“Today is tomorrow’s yesterday,” someone else said.