Someone touched my elbow and I looked down into a round unwrinkled face under a woolen hat.
"Hobart Cawdrey," the face said.
From the first glance it was clear that Mr. Cawdrey was a man of his profession. It wasn't merely that he wore a woolen hat and a trench coat, but that he failed to wear an expression. His eyes lacked many of the qualities that one normally associates with eyes. Though he was looking right at me, I could not tell that he regarded me with the slightest interest or curiosity.
"We better get in line," he said. "This place is going to fill up soon."
Without further ado we joined the nearest food line. At close range the people in line looked even more depressed than they had from a distance. Mr. Cawdrey did not seem to feel the need to say anything. His round face and blank eyes did not change expression, though since they had not really attained an expression they couldn't very well have changed it.
"How’s the food?" I asked, to be conversational.
This simple question startled Mr. Cawdrey. He looked around at me with something like a look of puzzlement— then he glanced at the food counter as if he were being forced to take cognizance of it for the first time.
"Why the food's right there," he said. "You'll see for yourself. We're a new department, you know. I understand they have more things over at State. I ate at the Treasury once and they had quite a few things, too. But we seem to have all the normal things. I usually eat a hamburger."
With that he picked up a Styrofoam plate and ordered a hamburger and French fries. I did the same. When I asked if I could have everything on my hamburger the woman who was doling out burgers looked at me so truculently that I didn't repeat my request. As a result I got two buns, a patty of meat, and one leaf of lettuce. Mr. Cawdrey got a Pepsi, I got iced tea, and then we stood in line for about ten minutes at the cash registers.
Mr. Cawdrey had been right. People were pouring into the cafeteria like beetles, armored with carapaces of total indifference. The streams of beetle-people were beginning to back up into the stairwells.
I was beginning to get depressed, partly because I hate Styrofoam. To me, Styrofoam plates aren't even objects— they belong in a revolting subclass of some kind, well beneath the level of an honest paper plate. The one I was holding seemed to have pores. Also, it was taking an awful long time to get to the cash registers, though I was the only one who seemed to mind. Everyone else seemed to think it perfectly natural that the food they were buying would be cold long before they could even pay for it, much less eat it.
Finally we got past the cash registers and took our food into another vast room, this one filled with tiny tables. The tables and chairs were of some sort of plastic that was itself not far removed from Styrofoam.
The ice had long since melted in my tea, which was watery, and when I took a bite of my hamburger it was as if I had taken a bite of my plate: It tasted like Styrofoam. When I picked up a French fry it folded limply down my finger, like a dead worm. I couldn't bring myself to eat it so I eased it off my finger, back into the pile, and contented myself with a little sip of watery tea. I felt dismal. No wonder the people in the food line didn't look anticipatory. They knew perfectly well the food they were waiting for would consist of impotent French fries and hamburgers that tasted much like a Styrofoam plate.
Mr. Cawdrey was clearly not bothered by these dismal reflections. He munched his way right through a tasteless hamburger, eating every crumb.
"It's a pity you weren't a little quicker," he said. "If I were a buyer I would have wanted the baskets, because they're so easy to move. Baskets are light. We have many other things, but they aren't very light."
"What sorts of things?" I asked.
"Well, the weapons, for example," he said. "You could buy the weapons, but they aren't light, you know. We have two thousand cannons, and they have to go with the weapons."
"How much are the weapons?" I asked.
"Six point two million," Mr. Cawdrey said. "But you have to take the cannons."
"What else do you have that's light?" I asked.
"Well, the pottery," he said. "Much of it is light, but unfortunately the sarcophagi go with the pottery and sarcophagi aren't light."
Then he noticed that I hadn't eaten my food.
"My goodness," he said. "You didn't eat."
"It got cold while we were standing in line," I said. "I don't like cold hamburgers."
"I guess mine got cold, too," he said, as if trying to remember the hamburger he was even then digesting.
Then he fell silent. I fell silent, too. I was getting very depressed. All at once I couldn't think of any reason to go on doing what I was doing, if what I was doing could bring me to such a place. The mere sight of the round blank face of Hobart Cawdrey was discouraging. For a moment I saw my life in its most ridiculous light: Here I was, in a city I had only come to on a whim, talking to a man who wanted to sell 2,000 cannons, among other things. For the course of perhaps twenty seconds I felt I must be virtually insane, not to have found a more sensible occupation in my thirty-three years.
Mr. Cawdrey was looking at my hat. A faint flicker of expression crossed his face.
"I was sent to a dude ranch once," he said, as if surprised at having been invaded by a memory. "I was fourteen. It was in Wyoming. I had never been in Wyoming before."
He paused. "Come to think of it, I've never been since."
"Did you enjoy yourself?" I asked.
"No," he said, a little sadly. "The cowboys laughed at me because I wore pajamas. Then they stole my pajamas. They also put a skunk in my bed. It didn't stink, but it was a skunk."
Then he stopped talking as abruptly as he had begun. The memory of his embarrassments at the dude ranch apparently faded somewhat. Then he looked at his watch and it faded completely.
"My goodness," he said. "I've dawdled. Are you quite sure you don't want the weapons?"
"I'm quite sure," I said, feeling slightly nauseous, either from my one bite of Styrofoam hamburger or from the thought of 2,000 cannons.
"It's odd that you came," Mr. Cawdrey said. "Though of course you did have an appointment."
A second later he was gone.
Chapter IX
Escaping from the Department of Transportation cafeteria into the bright fall sunshine was such a relief that it made me feel dizzy. It was a joy to discover that the world was still there. I felt a tremendous urge to be with people who were as different as possible from the thousands of numbed souls still waiting in line in the depths of that vast building.
Accordingly, I headed straight for the Little Bomber's Lounge, where I was immediately rewarded by the sight of Lolly and Janie Lee, sitting in their favorite booth giggling like mad. This time they were drinking pina coladas. Their girlish laughter seemed to be something of an irritant to a couple of sullen-looking customers who probably just wanted to sit in a bar and nurse a beer and be quietly depressed.
They waved me over the minute they saw me.
"I knew he'd come back," Lolly said, when I squeezed in beside them.
"Yeah, he can't resist us," Janie Lee said.
"Well, so what, I can't resist them yellah boots," Lolly said. "Have a pina colada. We're celebrating."
"Don't tell me you finished secretarial school already," I said.
"Naw, we quit," Janie Lee said. "I couldn't stand that shorthand."
"I bet Boog's disappointed. He had high hopes for you girls."
"Yeah, he was," Lolly said. She was wearing a red peekaboo blouse over a pink peekaboo bra.
"We made it up to him, though," Janie Lee said. "We kept him in the Jacuzzi all afternoon and didn't charge him a dime."
"He was all wrinkledy when he got out," Lolly remembered.
"Am I too late for the Double Bubble Brunch?" I asked.
"Aw yeah, you missed it," Lolly said. "That's okay, though. We can just give you the Soap Opera special. It ain't supposed to start till one, but Penny ain't here today."
"
Who's Penny?"
"The manager. Shoot, she don't care. We got some special going 'bout every hour of the day."
"We even got a Midnight Special," Janie Lee said. " 'vailable till 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights."
Ten minutes later i was in a large, warm whirlpool bath drinking pink California champagne with two fat naked girls. A big color TV sat across the room, providing the soap opera part of the Soap Opera special. As the World Turns was on, Janie Lee's favorite soap, as it happened. She watched it intently, her elbows on the side of the big tub and her pinkish body floating more or less on the surface. From time to time she set her plastic champagne glass on her stomach.
Lolly evinced little interest in As the World Turns. Beside the deep whirlpool was a heap of green snorkeling gear.
"What's the snorkeling stuff for?" I asked. Lolly was trying to get some water out of her ear.
"Aw, that's for Congressmen," she said. "Representatives mostly. Sometimes two or three of them get in here and want to watch what's going on from under water."
"Shoot, that ain't the worse of it," Janie Lee said, looking our way, during a commercial break.
"What's the worse of it?"
"When they put that stuff on an' expect us to suck 'em off while they're sitting on the bottom," she said. "I never did like to swim underwater."
"First time I tried it I swallert so much water I like to drowned," Lolly said. "I don't know who thought up this snorkeling business, anyway. It don't mix with fucking very good."
A minute later she got out of the tub and pattered wetly over to the icebox where they kept the champagne.
"Oh Janie Lee, you drunk all the pink," she said.
Janie Lee didn't hear her. The soap had started again and whatever was happening struck her as deeply wrong-headed.
"Now that ain't gonna work," she said. "That's just gonna make trouble all around."
Lolly came back with some white champagne and hopped back in the bath.
"Janie Lee, you don't never help if there's a soap opera on," she said, a little testily. "I end up doin' just about every bit of the work."
With that she began to blow in my ear. Janie Lee looked briefly guilty and worked her way around the pool to us, with the result that I was soon floating between two sizable girls both of whom were slick as seals. The scene was too companionable, if not ridiculous, to provoke anything resembling passion, and anyway Janie Lee couldn't really get her mind off the soap opera.
"You wanta get on the floatie?" Lolly asked.
The floatie was a huge rubber air mattress. It lay over by the snorkeling gear.
Without waiting for an answer Lolly drug the big mattress into the pool.
"You won't hold us both up?" Janie Lee said.
"Janie Lee, you don't never wanta try nothing," Lolly said. With the floatie in the pool there was not much room for the three of us. It covered at least three quarters of the surface of the tub.
"Now I can't see," Janie Lee complained. "This is the Soap Opera special. What's so special about it if we can't even see the soap opera?"
Lolly ignored this complaint. She managed to get on the air mattress by the simple expedient of straddling it and then flopping backwards.
"Come on up here, Janie Lee," she said. "It'll hold us up."
Though not as enthusiastic as Lolly, Janie Lee finally complied. With my help she managed to get on the floatie, too. The two of them lay there looking as innocent as babes but a lot larger, while As the World Turns, unnoticed now, filled the big color screen, occasionally sending an orange or green shadow over their bodies.
Both girls had fat thighs with dimples in them, smallish breasts, and fat white shoulders. Somehow as they lay there with their legs squeezed together and their wet blond hair stuck to their necks they reminded me of Beverly and Belinda Arber. They had the aspect of two slightly mischievous little girls.
"You could pour some champagne on us, I guess," Janie Lee said. "That's real popular, seems like."
"I don't think so," I said. "I'd rather drink the champagne."
"See, he's normal, like us," Lolly said.
"You girls are too friendly," I said, apropos of my own lack of raging passion.
"Yeah, we are," Lolly agreed. "It's our only trouble. My husband's always tellin' me that."
"Your husband?"
"Yeah, Bobby," she said. "He's best friends with Janie Lee's husband."
"I wisht you hadn't reminded me," Janie Lee said. "We don't never get to see them. They stay on the road a lot."
"What do they do on the road?"
"We wisht we knew," Lolly said. "I guess they mostly chase girls, unless they're smuggling dope. They stay in
Florida just about all the time. Shoot, me and Janie Lee's got to have a life, too. That why we work at the Double Bubble, rd rather suck off Congressmen than sit around the house."
"What do your husbands think about all this?" I asked.
Both girls looked solemn for a moment—neither of their faces were meant for solemnity and it had the effect of making them look younger than they were.
"I don't know," Lolly admitted. "We ain't asked them."
"Shoot, why ask them?" Janie Lee said. "They don't ask us if they can go to Florida. They just get in the car and take off."
"Yeah, and they don't call, neither, unless the car breaks down and they need money."
"We don't never know when to expect them," Lolly added somewhat forlornly.
"Do you reckon they've got mistresses?" she asked. "A lot of men around here have mistresses."
"Yeah, I wish I could be one," Janie Lee said. "I'm getting tired of staying in a tub half the time. I get water up my nose nearly every day."
"We had a double wedding," Lolly said, somewhat more cheerfully. "But no double honeymoon. Shoot, that wouldn't have worked. Me and Bobby went to Ocean City and Eddie and Janie Lee went to Norfolk."
"Reason it wouldn't have worked is because they're always trying to get us to swap," Janie Lee said. "Or worst than that. Four in a bed is what they really want. Pretty soon they'd get us so mixed up we couldn't remember who we was married to. It'd be just like a soap opera."
"If they've got mistresses I bet they do it four in a bed," Lolly reflected.
"Shoot, I'm not going through that," Janie Lee said. "I'd rather not do it at all."
This was going too far for Lolly, who looked at her friend with a shocked expression. The notion of celibacy was clearly one she had never entertained.
"Not do it at all?" she said. "With your own husband? You better be glad Eddie didn't hear you say that. Shoot, Bobby would run me over with a car if I was to tell him I didn't plan to do it at all."
Janie Lee looked unrepentant. "We could still dance," she said. "That's about all me an' Eddie like to do together, anyway, and we can't even do that if he stays in Florida all the time. Me an' you paid our own way into the disco every night last week."
"Yeah," Lolly said, as if a sad truth had just been revealed to her.
"I don't like to think about it," Lolly added. "I'd rather do almost anything than think."
My heart went out to her. In general, it was a heart that went out at odd moments. It had gone out to Coffee while she was trying to stuff the hippo chair into her blue Chevelle. It went out to Cindy because she liked to sleep holding hands, and now it was going out to two fat wet girls on a rubber mattress in a fairly low-grade pussy parlor.
"Aw," I said. "Then don't think."
"Can't help it," Lolly said, with a little gulp. "Janie Lee got me started and when I get started I can't stop."
She was silent for a moment. Janie Lee was silent too, evidently chastened by having caused her friend to think.
They floated quietly for a while. True to her own prophecy, Lolly had not been able to stop thinking. While Lolly thought, Janie Lee paddled in the water with one foot. I realized she was trying to turn the floatie so she could watch her soap. I helped her turn it. When I did Lolly nudged me intimately w
ith one of her plump little feet.
"Lookit," she said. "You ain't even got a hard-on. You shouldn't never have got us talking."
"We don't usually talk," Janie Lee said.
"We knew you'd come back," Lolly said. "I even had dibs."
"Dibs on what?"
Lolly looked surprised. "On fuckin', what else?" she said. "Janie Lee don't care 'cause she don't like it as much as I do, anyway."
"I do sometimes," Janie Lee said, defensively. "But sometimes I don't."
"Anyway, I had dibs," Lolly said.
"Sometimes I don't care if I never do it again," Janie Lee said, reflecting on her periods of sexual disinclination.
"Then why'd you wanta quit secretarial school I'd like to know?" Lolly asked. "If you don't wanta fuck a lot you oughta get another job."
Janie Lee was silent. Lolly's logic was more or less irrefutable.
"I do sometimes." she said, a little plaintively.
Lolly sighed. "We ain't usually gloomy," she said.
“I don't know why he'd believe that," Janie Lee said. "All we've done is lay on the floatie and talk depressing."
"Well, it's his fault, too," Lolly said. "He coulda done something."
Four eyes, all blue, looked at me with faint reproach. I had stood by and let a whole Soap Opera special fizzle away into sobering thoughts.
"Well, it's too late now," Lolly said. "Penny's coming with a whole station wagon full of Representatives. That Penny knows a bunch of people."
"Okay, but she is twenty-six," Janie Lee said. "If this keeps up you an' me will know about half the world by the time we're twenty-six."
Then their spirits bobbed up, as buoyant as the mattress.
"Least I didn't get water up my nose," Janie Lee said.
When I left, the two of them were giggling again and slipping into billowy blue negligees, in anticipation of the station wagon full of Representatives.