Guy raised his glass of beer and moved it from side to side, a gesture meant to indicate comprehension, a concentration of attention, an eagerness to hear the story unfold.
“Now, my powers of persuasion are, OK, they leave a little to be desired under the very best of circumstances, but it is not real difficult to finesse a drunk into ascending to a great height with you. I told him I had a business proposition to discuss. I’m a Western stranger in a seersucker suit and a fedora, a universally familiar type, and it sort of follows that I would have a business proposition to discuss. Now, my great height. For my great height I had picked out an old converted villa with thick walls and a marble staircase and an old-fashioned elevator in a cage that we could ride in the pretty predictable event of drunken fatigue.” He built the place with his hands as he spoke. “Among other things the place housed the Tripoli bureau of the Associated Press, for a steady and inconspicuous influx of pushy Westerners like myself, and an outfit called Mustafa Importing, which supposedly is the firm I’m supposedly doing business through and which I happen to know is closed on that day. Oh, what a shame. They appear to have stepped out. Would you care to come up to the roof with me, have a cigarette? I believe there is an excellent harbor view. Whatever bullshit. The building rises six fucking stories above a street made of opportunely solid cobblestones. It has a parapet about yea high.”
His hand hovered about three feet above the ground. Guy looked down the bar. The bartender was back with the chorus girl, who had been joined at the bar by a man wearing a black leather vest and a sort of sombrero with fringed balls dangling from the brim.
“I am nervous. The guy’s drunk, I don’t think he’s at all leery, but all I can think is: can’t pull this off I’ll have to go back to blunt and edge. Which is fine when you’re first breaking in, but after a while you realize that for all the anatomical knowledge involved there is just not a whole lot of prestige in cracking someone in their temple or severing their spinal cord in the cervical region. People don’t respect it, they don’t see the nuance, they don’t understand how improvisational in nature it can be. Rightly or wrongly, as a specialty it has zero cachet.”
Guy crossed his arms and laid his head on top of them. Soon the bartender was over, rapping sharply on the bar with a shot glass near Guy’s ear.
“No sleeping in here, buddy.”
“He’s all right,” said Ernest. “He’s listening.”
“Listen sitting up.”
Guy raised himself. He felt unusually tired. He wanted to go home and fall asleep on the couch. He felt the beginnings of a hemorrhoid massing sinisterly on his anus, like a rehearsal for cancer. Ernest’s story kept moving forward, but it had grown impossibly ponderous, like a glider made of scrap iron. Ernest had been giving him the foreign intrigue routine for hours. The formal rigor of a haiku—
Soldier in mufti
arrives on a decrepit
(airplane, ferry, bus).
A mission of death,
the locale’s meanest season,
grim job to do well
Soldier: a brother,
a good son, a brave comrade;
kills out of duty.
Blade of bright sunlight,
now red, as a sunset!
night covers all.
— with none of the brevity and lightfootedness, Ernest’s voice steady and unwavering as he unpacked the stories like merchandise from a sample case. Guy found that who he was sitting tiredly next to was a drunken braggart, not the bold raconteur of memory.
“He sits on the parapet, smoking,” Ernest was saying. “My chance is come. I bend down like to tie my shoe. Then I grab his ankles. I lift them up, get them above the level of the parapet, where his whole center of gravity shifts, he’s leaning back, the fear just caught in his throat, terrible, nothing’s coming out, he’s just seized up. I look him in the eye. The souls meet for a sweet adios! Then I give him a shove and he’s gone, goodbye.”
“Wow,” said Guy, without enthusiasm, watching his beer going flat.
“So.” Ernest elevated his chin to stare down at Guy. “How’s the Institute of Soviet Socialist Sports?”
“We’re just fine.”
“You, the Olivetti, and the file cabinet.”
“A Smith-Corona, actually.”
“Very patriotic. I approve.”
“Yeah, well, you can laugh, but personally I think we’re doing some important work. I think we’re ready to start to branch out a little. I think we’ve set forth our ideas pretty clearly and I think they lend themselves to extrapolation so that they can be applied to society as a whole. I think we’ve built a solid foundation to work on—”
“Oh, ho.” Ernest waved out a match, dismissing Guy. “Nobody needs help latching onto these parlor pink ideas of yours, Guy-Guy. Everybody knows these ideas. The whole fucking world has picked up on these ideas; these ideas are what Leonard Bernstein is talking about with Teddy Kennedy over dinner at Kay Graham’s house. These ideas are what Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch are paying to send their kids to Columbia and Ann Arbor to learn. Ideas, he says. You got a little niche, and you’re working it, man. Don’t bullshit me.”
“I’m not,” said Guy. “We see things differently, is all.” Guy felt as if the effort to defend himself, to strain clarity from the murky impressions filling his head, was too much to ask of himself. That plus this same hardy argument had reappeared, ghostlike, so many times, and its materialization here had outpaced any memory of it that might have emerged to warn him.
“Your ideas are all about having more ideas. I mean, what are you actually doing?”
Guy noted: He had only had to say the word ideas exactly once to provoke this sarcastic ricocheting. (So relax, let it go.)
Guy noted: Such a reaction was the one predictable general effect of having had ideas. (So let it go already.)
Guy noted: Whether from the right or the left, the ideas always take it on the chin. (No problem, then, just letting it go.)
Guy noted: This is not the time, the place, or the person for his candor. (Drop it, veer off, let it go!)
What he said was, “You want to know what I’m ‘actually doing,’ secret agent man?” Then he told him, rewinding the tape back to the day in June when he’d first offered his assistance and providing details on the cross-country trips, the Manhattan stay, the Pennsylvania farmhouse not far from where the two of them had grown up.
“Ah,” said Ernest.
“Really,” said Ernest.
“How interesting,” said Ernest.
It was later, as the desert dawn began to light up the living room and Guy huddled under his blankets on the couch, that it came to him: Ernest had copped that whole Tripoli rooftop scene from A Kiss Before Dying. The chutzpah: they’d seen it together at the Ritz, in Scranton, back in 1956. With Robert Wagner, a young Joanne Woodward, and an old Mary Astor. Also Virginia Leith, who later was to achieve a certain renown portraying a chatty severed head in a bathing cap in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. The son of a bitch, Guy thought, that son of a fucking bitch.