Anna had said that, and, though his healthier side told him she intended nothing malicious (if Anna was not a friend, then who was?), he’d despised her for it, had gone around telling everybody how much he despised Anna, what a bitch she was. That woman! he said, don’t trust that Anna. This plainspoken act of hers—nothing but a cover-up for all her repressed hostility; terrible liar, too, can’t believe a word she says: dangerous, my God! And naturally all he said went back to Anna, so that when he called about a play-opening they’d planned attending together, she told him: “Sorry, Walter, I can’t afford you any longer. I understand you very well, and I have a certain amount of sympathy. It’s very compulsive, your malice, and you aren’t too much to blame, but I don’t want ever to see you again because I’m not so well myself that I can afford it.” But why? And what had he done? Well, sure, he’d gossiped about her, but it wasn’t as though he’d meant it, and after all, as he said to Jimmy Bergman (now there was a two-face if ever there was one), what was the use of having friends if you couldn’t discuss them objectively?
He said you said they said we said round and round. Round and round, like the paddle-bladed ceiling fan wheeling above; turning and turning, stirring stale air ineffectively, it made a watch-tick sound, counted seconds in the silence. Walter inched to a cooler part of the bed and closed his eyes against the dark little room. At seven that evening he’d arrived in New Orleans, at seven-thirty he’d registered in this hotel, an anonymous, side-street place. It was August, and it was as though bonfires burned in the red night sky, and the unnatural Southern landscape, observed so assiduously from the train, and which, trying to sublimate all else, he retraced in memory, intensified a feeling of having traveled to the end, the falling off.
But why he was here in this stifling hotel in this faraway town he could not say. There was a window in the room, but he could not seem to get it open, and he was afraid to call the bellboy (what queer eyes that kid had!), and he was afraid to leave the hotel, for what if he got lost? and if he got lost, even a little, then he would be lost altogether. He was hungry; he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he found some peanut-butter crackers left over from a package he’d bought in Saratoga, and washed them down with a finger of Four Roses, the last. It made him sick. He vomited in the wastebasket, collapsed back on the bed, and cried until the pillow was wet. After a while he just lay there in the hot room, shivering, just lay there and watched the slow-turning fan; there was no beginning to its action, and no end; it was a circle.
An eye, the earth, the rings of a tree, everything is a circle, and all circles, Walter said, have a center. It was crazy for Anna to say what had happened was his own doing. If there was anything wrong with him really, then it had been made so by circumstances beyond his control, by, say, his churchly mother, or his father, an insurance official in Hartford, or his older sister, Cecile, who’d married a man forty years her senior. “I just wanted to get out of the house.” That was her excuse, and, to tell the truth, Walter had thought it reasonable enough.
But he did not know where to begin thinking about himself, did not know where to find the center. The first telephone call? No, that had been only three days ago and, properly speaking, was the end, not the beginning. Well, he could start with Irving, for Irving was the first person he’d known in New York.
Now Irving was a sweet little Jewish boy with a remarkable talent for chess and not much else: he had silky hair, and pink baby cheeks, and looked about sixteen. Actually he was twenty-three, Walter’s age, and they’d met at a bar in the Village. Walter was alone and very lonesome in New York, and so when this sweet little Irving was friendly he decided maybe it would be a good idea to be friendly, too—because you never can tell. Irving knew a great many people, and everyone was very fond of him, and he introduced Walter to all his friends.
And there was Margaret. Margaret was more or less Irving’s girl friend. She was only so-so-looking (her eyes bulged, there was always a little lipstick on her teeth, she dressed like a child of ten), but she had a hectic brightness which Walter found attractive. He could not understand why she bothered with Irving at all. “Why do you?” he said, on one of the long walks they’d begun taking together in Central Park.
“Irving is sweet,” she said, “and he loves me very purely, and who knows: I might just as well marry him.”
“A damn-fool thing to do,” he said. “Irving could never be your husband because he’s really your little brother. Irving is everyone’s little brother.”
Margaret was too bright not to see the truth in this. So one day when Walter asked if he might not make love to her she said, all right, she didn’t mind if he did. They made love often after that.
Eventually, Irving heard about it, and one Monday there was a nasty scene in, curiously enough, the same bar where they’d met. There had been that evening a party in honor of Kurt Kuhnhardt (Kuhnhardt Advertising), Margaret’s boss, and she and Walter had gone together, afterward stopping by this bar for a nightcap. Except for Irving and a couple of girls in slacks the place was empty. Irving was sitting at the bar, his cheeks quite pink, his eyes rather glazed. He looked like a little boy playing grown-up, for his legs were too short to reach the stool’s footrest; they dangled doll-like. The instant Margaret recognized him she tried to turn around and walk out, but Walter wouldn’t let her. And anyway, Irving had seen them: never taking his eyes from them, he put down his whiskey, slowly climbed off the stool, and, with a kind of sad, ersatz toughness, strutted forward.
“Irving, dear,” said Margaret, and stopped, for he’d given her a terrible look.
His chin was trembling. “You go away,” he said, and it was as though he were denouncing some childhood tormentor, “I hate you.” Then, almost in slow motion, he swung out and, as if he clutched a knife, struck Walter’s chest. It was not much of a blow, and when Walter did nothing but smile, Irving slumped against a jukebox, screaming: “Fight me, you damned coward; come on, and I’ll kill you, I swear before God I will.” So that was how they left him.
Walking home, Margaret began to cry in a soft tired way. “He’ll never be sweet again,” she said.
And Walter said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, yes, you do,” she told him, her voice a whisper. “Yes, you do; the two of us, we’ve taught him how to hate. Somehow I don’t think he ever knew before.”
Walter had been in New York now four months. His original capital of five hundred dollars had fallen to fifteen, and Margaret lent him money to pay his January rent at the Brevoort. Why, she wanted to know, didn’t he move someplace cheaper? Well, he told her, it was better to have a good address. And what about a job? When was he going to start working? Or was he? Sure, he said, sure, as a matter of fact he thought about it a good deal. But he didn’t intend fooling around with just any little jerkwater thing that came along. He wanted something good, something with a future, something in, say, advertising. All right, said Margaret, maybe she could help him; at any rate, she’d speak with her boss, Mr. Kuhnhardt.
2
The K.K.A., so-called, was a middle-sized agency, but, as such things go, very good, the best. Kurt Kuhnhardt, who’d founded it in 1925, was a curious man with a curious reputation: a lean, fastidious German, a bachelor, he lived in an elegant black house on Sutton Place, a house interestingly furnished with, among other things, three Picassos, a superb music box, South Sea Island masks and a burly Danish youngster, the houseboy. He invited occasionally some one of his staff in to dinner, whoever was favorite at the moment, for he was continually selecting protégés. It was a dangerous position, these alliances being, as they were, whimsical and uncertain: the protégé found himself checking the want ads when, just the evening previous, he’d dined most enjoyably with his benefactor. During his second week at the K.K.A., Walter, who had been hired as Margaret’s assistant, received a memorandum from Mr. Kuhnhardt asking him to lunch, and this, of course, excited him unspeakably.
“Kill-joy?” said Margar
et, straightening his tie, plucking lint off a lapel. “Nothing of the sort. It’s just that—well, Kuhnhardt’s wonderful to work for so long as you don’t get too involved—or you’re likely not to be working—period.”
Walter knew what she was up to; she didn’t fool him a minute; he felt like telling her so, too, but restrained himself; it wasn’t time yet. One of these days, though, he was going to have to get rid of her, and soon. It was degrading, his working for Margaret. And besides, the tendency from now on would be to keep him down. But nobody could do that, he thought, looking into Mr. Kuhnhardt’s sea-blue eyes, nobody could keep Walter down.
“You’re an idiot,” Margaret told him. “My God, I’ve seen these little friendships of K.K.’s a dozen times, and they don’t mean a damn. He used to palsy-walsy around with the switchboard operator. All K.K. wants is someone to play the fool. Take my word, Walter, there aren’t any shortcuts: what matters is how you do your job.”
He said: “And have you complaints on that score? I’m doing as well as could be expected.”
“It depends on what you mean by expected,” she said.
One Saturday not long afterward he made a date to meet her in Grand Central. They were going up to Hartford to spend the afternoon with his family, and for this she’d bought a new dress, new hat and shoes. But he did not show up. Instead, he drove out on Long Island with Mr. Kuhnhardt, and was the most awed of three hundred guests at Rosa Cooper’s debut ball. Rosa Cooper (née Kuppermann) was heiress to the Cooper Dairy Products: a dark, plump, pleasant child with an unnatural British accent, the result of four years at Miss Jewett’s. She wrote a letter to a friend named Anna Stimson, who subsequently showed it to Walter: “Met the divinest man. Danced with him six times, a divine dancer. He is an Advertising Executive, and is terribly divinely good-looking. We have a date—dinner and the theater!”
Margaret did not mention the episode, nor did Walter. It was as though nothing had happened, except that now, unless there was office business to discuss, they never spoke, never saw each other. One afternoon, knowing she would not be at home, he went to her apartment and used a passkey given him long ago; there were things he’d left here, clothes, some books, his pipe; rummaging around collecting all this, he discovered a photograph of himself scrawled red with lipstick: it gave him for an instant the sensation of falling in a dream. He also came across the only gift he’d ever given her, a bottle of L’Heure Bleue, still unopened. He sat down on the bed, and, smoking a cigarette, stroked his hand over the cool pillow, remembering the way her head had lain there, remembering, too, how they used to lie here Sunday mornings reading the funnies aloud, Barney Google and Dick Tracy and Joe Palooka.
He looked at the radio, a little green box; they’d always made love to music, any kind, jazz, symphonies, choir programs: it had been their signal, for whenever she’d wanted him, she’d said, “Shall we listen to the radio, darling?” Anyway, it was finished, and he hated her, and that was what he needed to remember. He found the bottle of perfume again, and put it in his pocket: Rosa might like a surprise.
In the office the next day he stopped by the water cooler and Margaret was standing there. She smiled at him fixedly, and said: “Well, I didn’t know you were a thief.” It was the first overt disclosure of the hostility between them. And suddenly it occurred to Walter he hadn’t in all the office a single ally. Kuhnhardt? He could never count on him. And everyone else was an enemy: Jackson, Einstein, Fischer, Porter, Capehart, Ritter, Villa, Byrd. Oh, sure, they were all smart enough not to tell him point-blank, not so long as K.K.’s enthusiasm continued.
Well, dislike was at least positive, and the one thing he could not tolerate was vague relations, possibly because his own feelings were so indecisive, ambiguous. He was never certain whether he liked X or not. He needed X’s love, but was incapable of loving. He could never be sincere with X, never tell him more than fifty percent of the truth. On the other hand, it was impossible for him to permit X these same imperfections: somewhere along the line Walter was sure he’d be betrayed. He was afraid of X, terrified. Once in high school he’d plagiarized a poem, and printed it in the school magazine; he could not forget its final line, All our acts are acts of fear. And when his teacher caught him out, had anything ever seemed to him more unjust?
3
He spent most of the early summer weekends at Rosa Cooper’s Long Island place. The house was, as a rule, well staffed with hearty Yale and Princeton undergraduates, which was irritating, for they were the sort of boys who, around Hartford, made green birds fly in his stomach, and seldom allowed him to meet them on their own ground. As for Rosa herself, she was a darling; everyone said so, even Walter.
But darlings are rarely serious, and Rosa was not serious about Walter. He didn’t mind too much. He was able on these weekends to make a good many contacts: Taylor Ovington, Joyce Randolph (the starlet), E. L. McEvoy, a dozen or so people whose names cast considerable glare in his address book. One evening he went with Anna Stimson to see a film featuring the Randolph girl, and before they were scarcely seated everyone for aisles around knew she was a Friend of his, knew she drank too much, was immoral, and not nearly so pretty as Hollywood made her out to be. Anna told him he was an adolescent female. “You’re a man in only one respect, sweetie,” she said.
It was through Rosa that he’d met Anna Stimson. An editor on a fashion magazine, she was almost six feet tall, wore black suits, affected a monocle, a walking cane and pounds of jingling Mexican silver. She’d been married twice, once to Buck Strong, the horse-opera idol, and she had a child, a fourteen-year-old son who’d had to be put away in what she called a “corrective academy.”
“He was a nasty child,” she said. “He liked to take potshots out the window with a .22, and throw things, and steal from Woolworth’s: awful brat, just like you.”
Anna was good to him, though, and in her less depressed, less malevolent moments listened kindly while he groaned out his problems, while he explained why he was the way he was. All his life some cheat had been dealing him the wrong cards. Attributing to Anna every vice but stupidity, he liked to use her as a kind of confessor: there was nothing he could tell her of which she might legitimately disapprove. He would say: “I’ve told Kuhnhardt a lot of lies about Margaret; I suppose that’s pretty rotten, but she would do the same for me; and anyway, my idea is not for him to fire her, but maybe transfer her to the Chicago office.”
Or, “I was in a bookshop, and a man was standing there and we began talking: a middle-aged man, rather nice, very intelligent. When I went outside he followed, a little ways behind: I crossed the street, he crossed the street, I walked fast, he walked fast. This kept up six or seven blocks, and when I finally figured out what was going on I felt tickled, I felt like kidding him on. So I stopped at the corner and hailed a cab; then I turned around and gave this guy a long, long look, and he came rushing up, all smiles. And I jumped in the cab, and slammed the door and leaned out the window and laughed out loud: the look on his face, it was awful, it was like Christ. I can’t forget it. And tell me, Anna, why did I do this crazy thing? It was like paying back all the people who’ve ever hurt me, but it was something else, too.” He would tell Anna these stories, go home and go to sleep. His dreams were clear blue.
Now the problem of love concerned him, mainly because he did not consider it a problem. Nevertheless, he was conscious of being unloved. This knowledge was like an extra heart beating inside him. But there was no one. Anna, perhaps. Did Anna love him? “Oh,” said Anna, “when was anything ever what it seemed to be? Now it’s a tadpole, now it’s a frog. It looks like gold but you put it on your finger and it leaves a green ring. Take my second husband: he looked like a nice guy, and turned out to be just another heel. Look around this very room: why, you couldn’t burn incense in that fireplace, and those mirrors, they give space, they tell a lie. Nothing, Walter, is ever what it seems to be. Christmas trees are cellophane, and snow is only soap chips. Flying around inside us is so
mething called the Soul, and when you die you’re never dead; yes, and when we’re alive we’re never alive. And so you want to know if I love you? Don’t be dumb, Walter, we’re not even friends.…”
4
Listen, the fan: turning wheels of whisper: he said you said they said we said round and round fast and slow while time recalled itself in endless chatter. Old broken fan breaking silence: August the third the third the third!
August the third, a Friday, and it was there, right in Winchell’s column, his own name: “Big shot Ad exec Walter Ranney and dairy heiress Rosa Cooper are telling intimates to start buying rice.” Walter himself had given the item to a friend of a friend of Winchell’s. He showed it to the counter boy at the Whelan’s where he ate breakfast. “That’s me,” he said, “I’m the guy,” and the look on the boy’s face was good for his digestion.
It was late when he reached the office that morning, and as he walked down the aisle of desks a small gratifying flurry among the typists preceded him. No one said anything, however. Around eleven, after a pleasant hour of doing nothing but feel exhilarated, he went to the drugstore downstairs for a cup of coffee. Three men from the office, Jackson, Ritter and Byrd, were there, and when Walter came in, Jackson poked Byrd, and Byrd poked Ritter, and all of them turned around. “Whatcha say, big shot?” said Jackson, a pink man prematurely bald, and the other two laughed. Acting as if he hadn’t heard, Walter stepped quickly into a phone booth. “Bastards,” he said, pretending to dial a number. And finally, after waiting a long while for them to leave, he made a real call. “Rosa, hello, did I wake you up?”
“No.”
“Say, did you see Winchell?”
“Yes.”
Walter laughed. “Where do you suppose he gets that stuff?”