The tic, which came in Mr. Pivner's lower lip just left of center when he was tired, came now, and waked him to a look of indecisive emotion. It would not stop, but pulled his lip down in quick throbs, as though he had abruptly been asked a question whose answer he knew, and feared to give. He looked suddenly at his watch. He raised it, and held it to his ear. He stood up (still holding the book, open) picked up the telephone, and dialed O, — I'd just like to know what time it is, he said. (—Do you want the time bureau?) — No, I just wanted to know if you had the time, please. (—I'm sorry, we're not permitted to give out that information. .) He hung up, and looked at the radio, waiting. The Reformation Symphony made him nervous, as all such music (called "classical") did, as the word Harvard did; but sometimes he was struck with a bar of "classical" music, a series of chords such as these which poured forth now, a sense of loneliness and confirmation together, a sense of something lost, and a sense of recognition which he did not understand. It must be time to take his medicine, before he left to go downtown. The symphony continued as he left it, and went into the bathroom. He preferred that music to which he did not have to listen. It was only the human voice on the radio that stopped him, that raised his head in expectation, as though it were about to impart something of great personal significance, to him. Indeed, that was always the tone in the voice, disembodied; and still listening, expectant, he would sit back, and wait. He had been laughed at, by someone who said, — But you don't listen to that stuff? Why do you let it bother you? and of advertising in print, — But you don't read that stuff, do you? What do you let it bother you for? What was this anomaly in him, that still told him that the human voice is to be listened to? the printed word to be read? What was this expectant look, if it was not hope? this attentive weariness, if it was not faith? this bewildered failure to damn, if it was not charity?
The room was filled with the strident ring of a telephone bell. It shivered the metal sails on the man o' war, brought forth an undisciplined tinkle of broken glass, and a frantic shade of movement concerted in seizure: breathing the hoarse aspirate initial of greeting, waiting, listening, everything stopped:
— Hello! This is Meribeth Watzon, speaking for the New York
Telephone Company. . the radio confided without changing the expression of its features, grill and knobs and a lighted smile; and what shadows moved in the room were slow about retiring, those that remained borne still on the walls including the black shape of the cradled telephone where he had dropped it dead, for almost a minute.
Mr. Pivner stood quivering. He'd just broken his last container of insulin. It was too late to go out and return.
— Friends, don't take my word for it. You owe it to yourself to get the details of our free offer. And listen, friends, the next time you. .
True, the janitor in Mr. Pivner's office building did not yet call him by his first name. True, the divorce rate had almost doubled since the publication of the book before him. True, he read in headlines of men in the governments he helped to elect, men who might not know their work, but they certainly knew how to deal with people, men who strode forth from the front page in expensive clothes, smiling, the hand raised in bonhomie, on their way to appear before investigating committees interested in their remarkable incomes, withering the smiles which had brought a good price in the market place.
". . dashed off in a moment of sincere feeling. ." As he put the green scarf around his neck, his lower lip pulled, and he tried to hold it tight — Friends, you owe it to your own health, and your family's. .
And King David, what did he say in his chamber over the gate, after Joab had dispatched his son still hung in the branches of the terebinth tree?
Mr. Pivner pulled on his overcoat, and put the needle and syringe into a pocket. He turned off the radio, courteously, waiting until the voice had finished a sentence. He left the book of selective quotations out on the table, next the photograph album. True, one must select; impossible to quote all that Shakespeare ever wrote, to prove a point he never embraced; impossible to print the words of Rosalind, when she said, "But these are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love."
Mr. Pivner stood in the doorway for a moment, looking back into the small apartment before entering the world of loss which came when he turned off the light. He remembered years back, when he had bought that book; and in the doorway, still lighted, a fragment of gold arrested him, gold now like the double eagle of the nineteenth century, bored as those words had pierced him, with the sound of the counterfeiter's drill, hollowing out the coin, and filling it with lead, and sealing it so, a very difficult counterfeit to detect. He had bought that book hoping to win friends. He wondered if other people had bought it for the same reason.
The button at his hand clicked, the place disappeared in darkness, as the days of faith were gone, all gone into the dark, gone to earth under Fort Knox, and in the cemetery at Hatton Gap, Arkansas, where, a bare half-century before, Moses had polled six votes in the presidential election, and John the Baptist, three.
And the Buddha?
And the Gainas?
And the morning? and the evening? Morning, evening, noontime, night: what was the shape of Mr. Pivner's soul? round, or oblong? And its atoms, worth as much as iodine atoms? worth five cents? Or were they of a different kind: round, smooth, and especially mobile?
And a good price in the market place, say. . thirty pieces of silver?
— Whhhhassafuksamatter? This delicate question went unanswered, for the man who asked it was alone on the street corner. He waved his rolled-up newspaper at no one, and then stood smiling. — So. You wonanswer? Ascared? he challenged. The light above his head changed, on one side, from red to green, on the other from green to red. A bus approached. It stopped, and so he got on it. He put his fare in the box, and stopped halfway down the aisle, — MERRY CHRISTMAS!
No one answered. — Sgoddam too bad, he said. — I got on a funeral hearse. Snobody's funeral, snobody to bury. Merry Christmas in a cemetery. He sat down, and opened his newspaper. After a few minutes of patiently staring at the words there, he asked the man across from him, — Wherzis bus go?
— I don't know, said the other.
— Fine thing, you don't know. I congradulate you. You're the first man I've met in New York'll admit he don't know something. Con-gradulations. He extended a hand which swung emptily in the air between them. The bus stopped, and as his neighbor got off he called, — Look out, don't break your leg or we'll have to shoot you. .
He sat back and stared at the newspaper. Across the top of it were printed chapters from Genesis, which was being serialized for the holiday season, as a public service. — I'll be damned, it's the Bible, he said loudly. — You get the Bible in the newspaper, he said, addressing the man who had sat down across from him, next to a lady with a baby in arms. — Whdyou think of that. You know why that is? He looked up and down the bus. — Sbecause any of these fine people would feel like a jerk reading the Bible in public, they'd be ashamed to. But if they're oney reading the newspaper, that's all right. Merry Christmas! You don't have to go to college four years to know that. Am I right? Am I right? he demanded of this man across from him.