Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (2 page)

 
          
 
This was no accident. The bartender had done
it on purpose. Preston looked at the vile, sniggering couple huddled in a
miasma of toxic fumes over a pile of mutilated fruit, and he knew that they
were waiting to see him abase himself, hoping he would lean forward and bury
his muzzle in the glass like a dog in his water dish or—better still—that he
would attempt to hoist the glass and would spill it and, in desperation, would
lick the liquid from puddles on the bar.

 
          
 
As ghastly as this day had been, as compelling
as his need now was, he resolved that he would not be the butt of their cruel
game. He felt like a captive member of the Maquis, determined not only to
endure Gestapo torture and deny his interrogators the nuggets of intelligence
they sought, but also to outwit them at their own game and escape to sunlit
uplands, singing 'He jour de gloire est arrive. ..."

 
          
 
He took his handkerchief from his pocket and
unfolded it. Holding it beneath the level of the bar, he twirled it into a
length of linen rope. His left fist gripped one end of the rope. The middle
fingers of his right hand pressed the other end to his palm, leaving his right
thumb and forefinger free.

 
          
 
Then he sat and waited, watching the vicious
duo watching him, pleased that he knew what they were doing but that they did
not know he knew, anticipating the triumph of proving to them that he was not
one of the helpless rummies they were accustomed to tormenting.

 
          
 
Outside, in the concourse, commuters hurried
by, unaware of the heroic test of wills being fought here in the dim cocoon.
The stationmaster announced the arrival of a train from
Boston
.

 
          
 
Preston
could hear his heart beating, could taste a dusty gum like plaster on his
teeth. Come on, damn you! Get bored. Slice a lemon!

 
          
 
A homeless man reeled into the bar, dragging a
fur coat on the floor behind him.

 
          
 
"Hey, man . . . gizabeah. ..."

 
          
 
"Beat it, Jasper."

 
          
 
"Igotafuckinbread . . . gizabeah.
..."

 
          
 
"I said beat it!" The bartender
pointed at the door.

 
          
 
The waitress reached for a cigarette.

 
          
 
Now!

 
          
 
Fast as a cat, Preston looped the handkerchief
around his neck. He dipped his right shoulder far enough for his right thumb
and forefinger to lift the glass. Then he pulled with his left hand, and the
glass rose—smoothly, without a quiver, without spilling so much as an atom— to
his lips.

 
          
 
He drained it in a single swallow.

 
          
 
He closed his eyes and held the glass aloft as
the precious lubricant coursed through his pipes and pooled warmly in his
stomach. A delicious shudder traveled across his shoulders and lifted the hair
on the back of his neck. He balled the handkerchief and stuffed it in his
jacket pocket.

 
          
 
The warmth rippled outward, sending messages
of peace to the sentinels at the farthest reaches of his body.

 
          
 
He opened his eyes and set the glass down on
the lacquered bar. At the sound the bartender wheeled. His face betrayed
nothing, but Preston knew he was dumbfounded.

 
          
 
Preston said pleasantly, "The other half,
if you please."

 
          
 
One more, two at the most, would keep the
peace till lunchtime.

 
          
 
As
Preston
awaited the refill, a vague spectre of disappointment fluttered by. He had
promised himself that today would be the day. He had finished the last of the
scotch last night before supper and, to banish temptation, had drunk at
midnight the final four fingers of Stolichnaya from the bottle in the freezer.
All that remained in the house now was cooking sherry, and he'd have to have a
real problem before he'd drink that sewage.

 
          
 
Today was the first of the month, and he had
found that it was good to quit on such signal days. It gave him landmarks to
measure his progress against.

 
          
 
But how could he have known what today would
be like? First Margaret forgot to wake him. Then the coffee machine went berserk
and produced nothing but black sludge. Then the car was so low on gas that he
had to fill it on the way to the station, which meant that he had to sprint for
the train, ending up sweating like a longshoreman and having to stand all the
way to
Newark
. Then the goddam train broke down somewhere
in the tundra, which gave him a bad anxiety flash, and finally Dave Diamond had
to sit next to him and babble like a fishwife all the way to Penn Station,
which capped the morning with shit.

 
          
 
Perhaps there were Pollyannas who could deal
with a day like this without a little help from their friends. Not Preston. He
was a human being, not one of your high-performance robots. What was it Doctor
Johnson said? “Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without
gilding." Amen.

 
          
 
The bartender put the refill before Preston
and cut six more dollars from the twenty. There was no sneer on his face now,
no holier-than-thou attitude. Preston decided that he wasn't such a bad guy.

 
          
 
Preston didn't gulp this one. He didn't have
to. He sipped it, savoring the feeling of the icy silk as it coated his tongue
and flushed all the gloom away. There was hope for today after all.

 
          
 
And tomorrow? Would tomorrow be the day? No.
Forget it. Don't even think about quitting on a weekend. People who try to quit
on weekends are kidding themselves. It can't be done. The pressures are too
great: lunches, dinners, cocktail parties. What happens is, you promise
yourself that you're going to quit on the weekend, and when you don't, you go
into a funk of self-loathing for breaking your promise, and the only way out of
the funk is . . . well, it's obvious.

 
          
 
Mondays were the best days. Clean slate. No
social commitments. Early supper, a little television, read a book, go to bed.
Once you have a whole day under your belt, the next day’s easier and the next
even easier, and so on. You can build momentum if you stop on a Monday.

            
Monday,
Preston
vowed. I'll quit Monday.

 
          
 
As THE ELEVATOR Opened onto the reception area
of Mason & Storrow,
Preston
mashed the last of a Lifesaver between his molars and swallowed the crumbs. He
exhaled into his palm: pure mint.

 
          
 
This reception area was famous in publishing.
It had been featured in Architectural Digest and had been used as a set in half
a dozen movies and television shows. It was decorated like the library of an
Edwardian men's club, furnished with leather couches and armchairs, standing
brass ashtrays and floor-to-ceiling bookcases packed with every book published
by M&S in 103 years in the business, including (most prominently displayed)
those by the winners of two Nobel Prizes, sixteen Pulitzers, a gaggle of
National Book Awards, Newberys and Caldecotts too numerous to count and
assorted Edgars and science-fiction citations.

 
          
 
To established authors, the reception area of
Mason & Storrow was warm and welcoming, an affirmation of their
accomplishment. To ambitious unpublished authors, it was inspiring but
frightening, seeming to cry out to them, “Abandon hope, all hacks who enter here,
for this is a class house.”

 
          
 
To
Preston
, it
was home. More than his house in Hopewell, more than his cottage in Maine, more
than the house in which he had grown up in New Canaan, this imposing but cozy
room represented support and security, long-term care for himself, his career,
his retirement, his family. Even his teeth.

 
          
 
It was also home, from nine to five, to the
finest-looking receptionist in all of publishing, one Sharon Prinze. Preston
was fond of telling a story (apocryphal, perhaps; embroidered, certainly) about
Styron and Mailer stopping by one day to see Warren Storrow and becoming so
smitten by Sharon Prinze that they absconded with her to Elaine's and
imprisoned her there until she consented to spend the rest of her natural life
shuttling between Provincetown and Martha's Vineyard to serve each, in turn, as
muse and boon companion.

 
          
 
What was particularly tantalizing about Sharon
Prinze was that her formidable battlements had so far proven to be unscalable
by anyone at M&S. She was congenial, efficient, respectful, breathtakingly
beautiful and utterly unattainable.

 
          
 
This morning, Preston thought, she looked
especially heartstopping, and it occurred to him that she might be susceptible
to a subtle overture—say, a luncheon invitation tendered under the guise of
seeking help with a difficult manuscript that dealt with the aspirations of
single young women struggling against the anomie of the Big Apple.

 
          
 
But one of
Preston
’s spiritual lifeguards had escaped drowning
in the sea of four double vodkas, and now it called out to him from a remote
beach in the back of his brain, “Don’t be an imbecile!"

 
          
 
So he restricted himself to a cordial
“Morning, Miss Prinze,” and turned to the corridor that led to his office.

 
          
 
He collided with Dave Diamond, who was coming
to retrieve a delivery from Miss Prinze.

 
          
 
“Hey, buddy,” said Diamond. "How you
feeling? You look better.”

 
          
 
“Great!"
Preston
replied truthfully. “Just what I
needed." He marched off to his office without stopping to decipher
Diamond's look of vague distaste—as if he had swallowed a tainted clam.

 
          
 
Preston's office looked down on Park Avenue.
The door was always left open so that his secretary (she preferred “editorial
assistant”), Debbie Browning, whose workstation was a closet in a fetid
corridor, could reassure herself that there existed a world without ducts. Now,
for some reason, the door was closed.

 
          
 
Debbie looked like a young Margaret Thatcher,
and indeed around M&S she was known as the Iron Maiden. She intended to be
an editor—no, she intended to be the editor—and her work was her life. Preston
assumed that she slept on the crosstown bus, because in addition to her
forty-hour week for him, she worked on nights and weekends as a free-lance copy
editor, read every esoteric quarterly in the land and clipped promising poems
and stories, with which she besieged him each morning, and not only read every
manuscript he edited but offered gratuitous detailed critiques of the writing,
the editing and the typesetting.

 
          
 
She was a royal pain in the ass.

 
          
 
“Hi, Deb,"
Preston
said. “Anything cooking?"

 
          
 
He expected to be handed a stack of phone
messages and slapped with a sly rebuke about lax work habits.

 
          
 
Instead, this woman who believed that direct
eye contact was a key to success, this paragon who could stare down a cobra,
refused to look at him and said only, “Mr. Preston, I'm truly sorry."

 
          
 
"What?"

 
          
 
“I wish you the best of luck." She sniffled
and sprang to her feet. “I mean that sincerely."

 
          
 
“That's very nice of you, but—"

 
          
 
She scuttled off toward the ladies' room, making
a sound—whuck whuck whuck--like a. dog with a bone in its craw.

 
          
 
Metabolic, Preston concluded. It must be a
metabolic thing, like his sweating. She should consider taking Tryptophane. These
mood swings weren't healthy.

 
          
 
He opened the door to his office.

 
          
 
Weeks later, from a prospect of some serenity,
Preston would recall with amazement the speed with which his mind had received,
dissected, interpreted and reacted to the sudden flood of unexpected
information that greeted him when he opened the door. The concept of a
nanosecond had always struck him as being as boggling as the concept of
infinity—something that Man is not really meant to grasp, that doesn't exist
except as an excuse for the endowment of highly paid chairs at Ivy League
universities—and yet it seemed that in less than a nanosecond he was able to
determine that: his parents had died, Margaret's parents had died, Kimberly had
been expelled from Princeton Day School, Margaret was divorcing him to marry
Warren Storrow, Kimberly had been arrested for selling cocaine. Mason &
Storrow was going out of business, and he was being replaced as executive vice
president and senior editor by Chris Evert.

 
          
 
Four people were in his office: Margaret,
Kimberly, Warren and a woman who, on second glance, was older and flintier than
Chris Evert. They sat in straight-backed chairs arrayed in a semicircle with
their backs to his desk. A fifth chair had been placed at the focus of the
semicircle.

 
          
 
They did not look happy. Margaret, in fact,
appeared to be possessed by a fulminating, barely controlled fury Preston had
seen but a few times before in his seventeen years of marriage, most recently
late in the evening of her parents' thirty-fifth-wedding-anniversary
celebration when her father had launched into one of his litanies of kike jokes
and Gullah stories and Preston had called him a troglodyte asshole.

 
          
 
Kimberly looked nauseated. Warren looked
gorgeous, as always, with his Tiffany collar pin perfectly straight and his
helmet of Leslie Nielsen hair perfectly sculpted, but Preston could tell he was
uncomfortable by the way his thumbs were exploring his cuticles. Chris Evert
looked as impassive as Torquemada at an auto-da-fe.

 
          
 
''Come in, Scott," Warren said. ''Shut
the door." He pointed to the empty chair.

 
          
 
"What have we here?"
Preston
said because he felt he had to say something.
“This Is Your Life?" No one smiled. "What's going on? Somebody
hurt?"

 
          
 
Chris Evert said, “A lot of people, Scott."

 
          
 
“Who’re you?''

 
          
 
“Her name is Dolores Stark, Scott," said
Warren
. “We asked her here to help you ... to help
us."

 
          
 
“Help us what?" Preston tossed his
briefcase onto his desk and went to one of the windows overlooking Park Avenue.
It was hot in here. He was starting to sweat again. He opened the window a few
inches and turned around and leaned on the sill. He was damned if he would sit
in that chair and be a bull's-eye. As long as he was standing, he retained a
measure of control.

 
          
 
Dolores Stark said, “Sit down, Scott,"
and she pointed at the chair.

 
          
 
“I’m fine here. No problem. Now tell me—"

 
          
 
“Scott!" Warren barked.
Preston
had never before heard
Warren
bark, had thought him to be—like many
WASPs, like himself—incapable of raising his voice, lacking the barking
chromosome. “Sit down!"

 
          
 
Stunned, Preston walked meekly to the chair
and sat. He could think of no jocular crack. Besides, Warren's Doberman tones
had told him two important things: This little get-together was about him, and
it was serious. What have I done? He revved his mental motor and tried to
anticipate their complaints. I am an extremely careful person—thoughtful, even.
I do not insult strangers, I do not belittle waiters, I do not browbeat
subordinates. On those rare occasions when I take afternoon naps in the office
after wooing bibulous authors at lunch, I cover my tracks like an Apache. I do
my work conscientiously and well. Authors ask for me to be assigned to them.

 
          
 
Dolores Stark said, “How many drinks did you
have on the way in this morning?"

 
          
 
Preston froze. His heart may have stopped, and
surely his breath did. A bizarre recollection commandeered his mind. A year
ago, one of his younger authors, a gifted storyteller but afflicted with a
chronic compulsion to articulate the abysses of human experience that even Saul
Bellow hadn't plumbed, had written a sentence that Preston excised as
pretentious bushwa: “I felt as if he had punched me in the soul."

 
          
 
Preston owed the lad an apology. Dolores Stark
had just punched him in the soul.

 
          
 
All he said was "I ovevslept.”

 
          
 
Margaret exploded. “Like hell! You were passed
out in the living room. I left you lying there."

 
          
 
“I was not passed out. I was asleep because
..." Think! Think! “. . because when I went to bed you were snoring so
badly that—"

            
"Bullshit!" Margaret
never said words like ''bullshit." Ever. "On the floor? With all your
clothes on?"

 
          
 
Preston expected Margaret to come out of her
seat like a pilot ejecting from a burning plane, until Dolores Stark leaned
over and touched Margaret's knee and turned to Preston and said, in a voice as
calm as a windless sea, "How many, Scott? How many drinks this
morning?"

 
          
 
She thinks she's got me. But I will become a
handful of eels. Maybe the building will catch fire. Maybe an earthquake will
strike.