Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (23 page)

When McIntyre turned back from the window to blink in the yellow light, leaving a shriveling ghost of his breath on the glass, it was with an oddly shy look of rejuvenation and relief. He walked to his bed, stacked the pages of his manuscript neatly, tore them in halves and in quarters and dropped them into the waste bag. Then he got his pack of cigarettes and went over to stand beside Vernon Sloan, who was blinking through his reading glasses at
The Saturday Evening Post
.

“Smoke, Vernon?” he said.

“No thanks, Mac. I smoke more’n one or two a day, it only makes me cough.”

“Okay,” McIntyre said, lighting one for himself. “Care to play a little checkers?”

“No thanks, Mac, not right now. I’m a little tired—think I’ll just read awhile.”

“Any good articles in there this week, Vernon?”

“Oh, pretty good,” he said. “Couple pretty good ones.” Then his mouth worked into a grin that slowly disclosed nearly all of his very clean teeth. “Say, what’s the matter with you, man? You feelin’ good or somethin’?”

“Oh, not too bad, Vernon,” he said, stretching his skinny arms and his spine. “Not too bad.”

“You finish all your writin’ finally? Is that it?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “My trouble is, I can’t think of anything to write about.”

Looking across the aisle to where Tiny Kovacs’s wide back sat slumped in the purple amplitude of the new robe, he walked over and laid a hand on one of the enormous satin shoulders. “So?” he said.

Tiny’s head swung around to glare at him, immediately hostile. “So what?”

“So where’s that beard?”

Tiny wrenched open his locker, grabbed out the beard and thrust it roughly into McIntyre’s hands. “Here,” he said. “You want it? Take it.”

McIntyre held it up to his ears and slipped the string over his head. “String oughta be a little tighter,” he said. “There, how’s that? Prob’ly look better when I get my teeth out.”

But Tiny wasn’t listening. He was burrowing in his locker for the strips of bandage. “Here,” he said. “Take this stuff too. I don’t want no part of it. You wanna do it, you get somebody else.”

At that moment Jones came padding over, all smiles. “Hey, you gonna do it, Mac? You change your mind?”

“Jones, talk to this big son of a bitch,” McIntyre said through the wagging beard. “He don’t wanna cooperate.”

“Aw,
jeez
, Tiny,” Jones implored. “The whole
thing
depends on you. The whole
thing
was your idea.”

“I already told ya,” Tiny said. “I don’t want no part of it. You wanna do it, you find some other sucker.”

After the lights went out at ten nobody bothered much about hiding their whiskey. Men who had been taking furtive nips in the latrines all evening now drank in quietly jovial groups around the wards, with the unofficial once-a-year blessing of the charge nurse. Nobody took particular notice when, a little before midnight, three men from C Ward slipped out to the linen closet to get a sheet and a towel, then to the kitchen to get a mop handle, and then walked the length of the building and disappeared into the A Ward latrine.

There was a last-minute flurry over the beard: it hid so much of McIntyre’s face that the effect of his missing teeth was spoiled. Jones solved the problem by cutting away all of it but the chin whiskers, which he fastened in place with bits of adhesive tape. “There,” he said, “that does it. That’s perfect. Now roll up your pajama pants, Mac, so just your bare legs’ll show under the sheet? Get it? Now where’s your mop handle?”

“Jones, it don’t
work!
” Tiny called tragically. He was standing naked except for a pair of white woolen socks, trying to pin the folded towel around his loins. “The son of a bitch won’t stay
up!
”

Jones hurried over to fix it, and finally everything was ready. Nervously, they killed the last of Jones’s rye and dropped the empty bottle into a laundry hamper; then they slipped outside and huddled in the darkness at the head of A Ward.

“Ready?” Jones whispered. “Okay. … Now.” He flicked on the overhead lights, and thirty startled faces blinked in the glare.

First came 1950, a wasted figure crouched on a trembling staff, lame and palsied with age; behind him, grinning and flexing his
muscles, danced the enormous diapered baby of the New Year. For a second or two there was silence except for the unsteady tapping of the old man’s staff, and then the laughter and the cheers began.

“
Out wivvie old!
” the baby bellowed over the noise, and he made an elaborate burlesque of hauling off and kicking the old man in the seat of the pants, which caused the old man to stagger weakly and rub one buttock as they moved up the aisle. “
Out wivvie old! In wivva new!
”

Jones ran on ahead to turn on the lights of B Ward, where the ovation was even louder. Nurses clustered helplessly in the doorway to watch, frowning or giggling behind their sterile masks as the show made its way through cheers and catcalls.

“
Out wivvie old! In wivva new!
”

In one of the private rooms a dying man blinked up through the window of his oxygen tent as his door was flung open and his light turned on. He stared bewildered at the frantic toothless clowns who capered at the foot of his bed; finally he understood and gave them a yellow smile, and they moved on to the next private room and the next, arriving at last in C Ward, where their friends stood massed and laughing in the aisle.

There was barely time for the pouring of fresh drinks before all the radios blared up at once and Guy Lombardo’s band broke into “Auld Lang Syne”; then all the shouts dissolved into a great off-key chorus in which Tiny’s voice could be heard over all the others:

“
Should old acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
…”

Even Vernon Sloan was singing, propped up in bed and holding a watery highball, which he slowly waved in time to the music. They were all singing.

“
For o-o-old lang syne, my boys
,
For o-o-old lang syne
…”

And when the song was over the handshaking began.

“Good luck t’ya, boy.”

“Same to you, boy—hope you make it this year.”

All over Building Seven men wandered in search of hands to shake; under the noise of shouts and radios the words were repeated again and again: “Good luck t’ya. …” “Hope you make it this year, boy. …” And standing still and tired by Tiny Kovacs’s bed, where the purple robe lay thrown in careless wads and wrinkles, McIntyre raised his glass and his bare-gummed smile to the crowd, with Tiny’s laughter roaring in his ear and Tiny’s heavy arm around his neck.

W
RITERS WHO WRITE
about writers can easily bring on the worst kind of literary miscarriage; everybody knows that. Start a story off with “Craig crushed out his cigarette and lunged for the typewriter,” and there isn’t an editor in the United States who’ll feel like reading your next sentence.

So don’t worry: this is going to be a straight, no-nonsense piece of fiction about a cabdriver, a movie star, and an eminent child psychologist, and that’s a promise. But you’ll have to be patient for a minute, because there’s going to be a writer in it too. I won’t call him “Craig,” and I can guarantee that he won’t get away with being the only Sensitive Person among the characters, but we’re going to be stuck with him right along and you’d better count on his being as awkward and obtrusive as writers nearly always are, in fiction or in life.

Thirteen years ago, in 1948, I was twenty-two and employed as a rewrite man on the financial news desk of the United Press. The salary was fifty-four dollars a week and it wasn’t much of a job, but it did give me two good things. One was that whenever anybody asked me what I did I could say, “Work for the UP,” which had a jaunty sound; the other was that every morning I could turn up at the
Daily News
building wearing a jaded look, a cheap trench coat that had shrunk a size too small for me, and
a much-handled brown fedora (“Battered” is the way I would have described it then, and I’m grateful that I know a little more now about honesty in the use of words. It was a handled hat, handled by endless nervous pinchings and shapings and reshapings; it wasn’t battered at all). What I’m getting at is that just for those few minutes each day, walking up the slight hill of the last hundred yards between the subway exit and the
News
building, I was Ernest Hemingway reporting for work at the
Kansas City Star
.

Had Hemingway been to the war and back before his twentieth birthday? Well, so had I; and all right, maybe there were no wounds or medals for valor in my case, but the basic fact of the matter was there. Had Hemingway bothered about anything as time-wasting and career-delaying as going to college? Hell, no; and me neither. Could Hemingway ever really have cared very much about the newspaper business? Of course not; so there was only a marginal difference, you see, between his lucky break at the
Star
and my own dismal stint on the financial desk. The important thing, as I knew Hemingway would be the first to agree, was that a writer had to begin somewhere.

“Domestic corporate bonds moved irregularly higher in the moderately active trading today. …” That was the kind of prose I wrote all day long for the UP wire, and “Rising oil shares paced a lively curb market,” and “Directors of Timken Roller Bearing today declared”—hundreds on hundreds of words that I never really understood (What in the name of God are puts and calls, and what is a sinking fund debenture? I’m still damned if I know), while the teletypes chugged and rang and the Wall Street tickers ticked and everybody around me argued baseball, until it was mercifully time to go home.

It always pleased me to reflect that Hemingway had married
young; I could go right along with him there. My wife, Joan, and I lived as far west as you can get on West Twelfth Street, in a big three-window room on the third floor, and if it wasn’t the Left Bank it certainly wasn’t our fault. Every evening after dinner, while Joan washed the dishes, there would be a respectful, almost reverent hush in the room, and this was the time for me to retire behind a three-fold screen in the corner where a table, a student lamp and a portable typewriter were set up. But it was here, of course, under the white stare of that lamp, that the tenuous parallel between Hemingway and me endured its heaviest strain. Because it wasn’t any “Up in Michigan” that came out of my machine; it wasn’t any “Three Day Blow” or “The Killers”; very often, in fact, it wasn’t really anything at all, and even when it was something Joan called “marvelous,” I knew deep down that it was always, always something bad.

There were evenings too when all I did behind the screen was goof off—read every word of the printing on the inside of a matchbook, say, or all the ads in the back of the
Saturday Review of Literature
—and it was during one of those times, in the fall of the year, that I came across these lines:

Unusual free-lance opportunity for talented writer. Must have imagination. Bernard Silver.

—and then a phone number with what looked like a Bronx exchange.

I won’t bother giving you the dry, witty, Hemingway dialogue that took place when I came out from behind the screen that night and Joan turned around from the sink, with her hands dripping soapsuds on the open magazine, and we can also skip my cordial, unenlightening chat with Bernard Silver on the phone. I’ll just move on ahead to a couple of nights later, when
I rode the subway for an hour and found my way at last to his apartment.

“Mr. Prentice?” he inquired. “What’s your first name again? Bob? Good, Bob, I’m Bernie. Come on in, make yourself comfortable.”

And I think both Bernie and his home deserve a little description here. He was in his middle or late forties, a good deal shorter than me and much stockier, wearing an expensive-looking pale blue sport shirt with the tails out. His head must have been half again the size of mine, with thinning black hair washed straight back, as if he’d stood face-up in the shower; and his face was one of the most guileless and self-confident faces I’ve ever seen.

The apartment was very clean, spacious and cream-colored, full of carpeting and archways. In the narrow alcove near the coat closet (“Take your coat and hat; good. Let’s put this on a hanger here and we’ll be all set; good”), I saw a cluster of framed photographs showing World War I soldiers in various groupings, but on the walls of the living room there were no pictures of any kind, only a few wrought-iron lamp brackets and a couple of mirrors. Once inside the room you weren’t apt to notice the lack of pictures, though, because all your attention was drawn to a single, amazing piece of furniture. I don’t know what you’d call it—a credenza?—but whatever it was it seemed to go on forever, chest-high in some places and waist-high in others, made of at least three different shades of polished brown veneer. Part of it was a television set, part of it was a radio-phonograph; part of it thinned out into shelves that held potted plants and little figurines; part of it, full of chromium knobs and tricky sliding panels, was a bar.

“Ginger ale?” he asked. “My wife and I don’t drink, but I can offer you a glass of ginger ale.”

I think Bernie’s wife must always have gone out to the movies on nights when he interviewed his writing applicants; I did meet her later, though, and we’ll come to that. Anyway, there were just the two of us that first evening, settling down in slippery leatherette chairs with our ginger ale, and it was strictly business.