Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (40 page)

Yours truly,
S. J. P
ERELMAN

New York City,

July 27

D
EAR
M
R.
P
ERLEMAN:

If all you can do with yourself in a summer place is hang indoors and write me love letters about Rose Finkel, I must say I have pity on you. Rose Finkel, Rose Finkel—why don’t you marry this woman that you are so crazy about her. Then she could clean your suits at home and stick them in the icebox—after she cleans that, too. What do you want from me? Sometimes I think I am walking around in a dream.

Look, I will do anything you say. Should I parcel-post the suit to you so you can examine it under a microscope for holes? Should I board up my store, give the help a week free vacation in the mountains, and bring it to you personally in my Cadillac? I tell you once, twice, a million times—it went to cold storage. I didn’t send it myself; I gave orders to my assistant, which she has been in my employ eleven years. From her I have no secrets, and you neither. She told me about some of the mail she found in your pants.

It is quite warm here today, but we are keeping busy and don’t notice. My tailor collapsed last night with heat prostration, so I am handling alterations, pressing, ticketing, and hiding customers’ property in the back of the store. Also looking up psychiatrists in the Yellow Pages.

Yours truly,
S. M
ERLIN

Gay Head, Mass.,

July 29

D
EAR
M
R.
M
ERLIN:

My gravest doubts are at last confirmed: You are unable to say unequivocally, without tergiversating, that you
saw
my suit put into cold storage. Knowing full well that the apparel was irreplaceable, now that the British Raj has been supplanted—knowing that it was the keystone of my entire wardrobe, the
sine qua non
of sartorial taste—you deliberately entrusted it to your creature, a cat’s-paw who you admit rifles my pockets as a matter of routine. Your airy disavowal of your responsibility, therefore, leaves me with but one alternative. By this same post, I am delegating a close friend of mine, Irving Wiesel, to visit your place of business and ferret out the truth. You can lay your cards on the table with Wiesel or not, as you see fit. When he finishes with you, you will have neither cards nor table.

It would be plainly superfluous, at this crucial stage in our association, to hark back to such petty and characteristic vandalism as your penchant for jabbing pins into my rainwear, pressing buttons halfway through lapels, and the like. If I pass over these details now, however, do not yield to exultation. I shall expatiate at length in the proper surroundings; viz., in court. Wishing you every success in your next vocation,

Yours truly,
S. J. P
ERELMAN

New York City,

August 5

D
EAR
M
R.
P
ERLMAN:

I hope you received by now from my radiologist the two X-rays; he printed your name with white ink on the ulcer so you should be satisfied that you, and you alone, murdered me. I wanted him to print also “Here lies an honest man that he slaved for years like a dog, schlepped through rain and snow to put bread in his children’s mouths, and see what gratitude a customer gave him,” but he said there wasn’t room. Are you satisfied now, you Cossack you? Even my
radiologist
is on your side.

You didn’t need to tell me in advance that Wiesel was a friend of yours; it was stamped all over him the minute he walked in the store. Walked? He was staggering from the highballs you and your bohemian cronies bathe in. No how-do-you-do, explanations, nothing. Ran like a hooligan to the back and turned the whole stock upside down, pulled everything off the racks. I wouldn’t mind he wrecked a filing system it cost me hundreds of dollars to install. Before I could grab the man, he makes a beeline for the dressing room. So put yourself for a second in someone else’s shoes. A young, refined matron from Boston, first time in the Village, is waiting for her dress to be spot-cleaned, quietly loafing through
Harper’s Bazaar.
Suddenly a roughneck, for all she knows a plainclothesman, a junkie, tears aside the curtain. Your delegate Wiesel.

I am not going to soil myself by calling you names, you are a sick man and besides on vacation, so will make you a proposition. You owe me for cleaning the suit, the destruction you caused in my racks, medical advice, and general aggravation. I owe you for the suit, which you might as well know is kaput. The cold-storage people called me this morning. It seems like all the brownish rings in the material fell out and they will not assume responsibility for a sieve. This evens up everything between us, and I trust that on your return I will have the privilege of serving you and family as in years past. All work guaranteed, invisible weaving our specialty. Please remember me to your lovely wife.

Sincerely yours,
S
TANLEY
M
ERLIN

1960

S. J. PERELMAN

MONOMANIA, YOU AND ME IS QUITS

M
Y
immediate reaction when a head studded with aluminum rheostats confronted me over the garden gate last Tuesday morning was one of perplexity. That it belonged to a courier from outer space was, I felt, improbable, for nobody of such transcendent importance would have chosen a weedy Pennsylvania freehold to land on. Its features, moreover, were much too traditional for an interplanetary nuncio; instead of the elephant ears and needle-sharp proboscis that science fiction had prepared me for, the apparition exhibited a freckled Slavic nose and wattles ripened by frequent irrigations of malt. In the same instant, as I straightened up, giddy with the effort of extricating a mullein from the cucumbers, I realized that the spiny coiffure was in actuality a home permanent and the bulging expanse of gingham below it the rest of Mrs. Kozlich, our current cleaning woman.

“I hope I didn’t scare you,” she said tremulously, “but I thought I better drive over and speak to you personally. Something funny happened while you and the missus were away last weekend.” She cast a quick, nervous glance about the surrounding eighty-three acres and lowered her voice. “A man burned a chair on your place Friday night.”

“Yes, I know,” I replied. “I meant to call you so you wouldn’t be alar—”

“I was so frightened I almost fainted,” she pursued, unheeding. “My niece Kafka and I were washing your upstairs windows around five o’clock when this station wagon came up the lane. I figured it was yours—”

“It was mine, Mrs. Kozlich,” I gentled her. “Listen to me, will you? I made a special trip back from the city—on purpose—to
burn
that chair. Do you understand?”

It was obvious she didn’t, or, even if she did, was determined not to be denied the opportunity of a dramatic recital. The car, she went on breathlessly, had traversed a long field adjacent to the barn, parking by the gulch where I file old paint cans, leaky gutters, and window screens for future reference. The driver (who bore a striking resemblance to me, the ladies decided from their distant vantage point) had then unloaded a large black easy chair, systematically disembowelled its upholstery, and, while they watched spellbound, set fire to it. “Go back there and look, if you don’t believe me,” she challenged. “The springs are laying all over the ground where he kicked them. After he drove out, I sent Kafka up and she found a couple of scraps like horsehide or something. It must have been a leather chair.”

It was indeed, but what Mrs. Kozlich had witnessed, and what I prudently decided not to spell out for her, was the end of a dream—a romantic quest that began some twenty-two years ago. Just when or how my yearning for a tufted black leather armchair originated I cannot remember. Perhaps some elderly member of the Rhode Island medical profession, which I supported singlehanded as a boy, had one in his consulting room, or I may have seen the prototype, spavined with use, in the professorial chambers at Brown. At any rate, among the fantasies I nurtured into manhood—a princely income and a sleek, piratical schooner for cruising the Great Barrier Reef, to mention only two—was a clear-cut image of my ideal study. Its appointments varied from time to time; on occasion the walls were book-lined, or hung with rare trophies like Mrs. Gray’s lechwe or a sitatunga, or again bare except for a few gems of Impressionist painting. The focus, the keystone of the décor, nonetheless, never varied—a capacious, swollen club chair, well polished, into whose depths one sank and somniferously browsed through the latest English review. There might be a revolving mahogany bookcase alongside, but I wasn’t sure. I was afraid it might detract from the rich, baroque impact of the chair.

By the time I had acquired my own inglenook in the mid-thirties, though, and started prowling the auction rooms for my fictive
fauteuil,
I discovered it was a chimera. Curiosities of that sort, dealers pityingly confided, had vanished with the buffalo lap robe and congress gaiters. They offered me substitutes that awoke my outrage—knobby monstrosities of red plastic that tilted at the touch of a spring, slippery leatherette abstractions that pitchforked one into prenatal discomfort inches off the floor. The more I insisted, the more derisive they became. “Look, Grover Cleveland,” one of them finally snapped at me after my third approach. “Harmoniums and water wings, diavolos and pungs we got, but Victorian easy chairs
—nyet.
And now, excuse me, will you? I have another nudnick here wants a round table like King Arthur’s.”

The first intimation that my will-o’-the-wisp, however unattainable, did in fact still exist came in 1938. Yawning through a Tim McCoy Western at a rural cinema in our township, I was suddenly electrified by the furnishings of the sheriff’s office. Beside the period roll-top desk stood a voluptuously padded armchair, not only covered in black leather but (tears rose to my eyes) its outlines accented by brass nailheads. I whipped to my feet. “That’s it! That’s it!” I fluted, my voice gone contralto with agitation. “That’s my chair!” I was so overwhelmed, to be candid, that it required the intervention of the manager to persuade me to resume my seat, and subsequent accounts, gleaned by my wife from local tradespeople, hinted I had succumbed to a Holy Roller seizure. Undaunted, I took care to note the production details of the film against some future visit to Hollywood, and chancing to be there shortly, at once proceeded to track down the chair. It was relatively simple. In a matter of minutes, Columbia’s art department disclosed the name of the warehouse that supplied such props, and, cramming my pockets with enough rhino to vanquish any obstacle, I pelted over. The manager of the enterprise, a foxy-nose with a serried gray marcel that mounted like a linotype keyboard, was the soul of courtesy.

“Of course I remember the piece,” he acknowledged silkily. “This way, please.” The freight elevator discharged us in a shadowy loft on the sixth floor, where furniture of every conceivable epoch lay stored. He dove into the maze and yanked aside a dust cover. “There,” he said. “Is this the one you mean?”

An inexpressible radiance suffused me. The chair was so much more beautiful than my cinematic memory that speech was inadequate. It was a haven, a refuge; I saw myself lolling in it, churchwarden poised, evolving new cosmogonies, quoting abstruse references to Occam’s razor and Paley’s watch. “Oh, God,” I choked, extracting a fistful of bills. “I— You’ve made me so happy! How much?”

“How much what?” he asked woodenly.

I explained that I was prepared to buy it, to buy the whole warehouse if necessary. He uttered a sharp, sardonic hoot and bade me wipe my chin. “Not for sale, Buster,” he said, replacing its shroud. “You know what this thing brings in every year in rentals? Why, last month alone it worked in ‘Addled Saddles,’ ‘Drums Along the Yazoo’—”

Short of manacling myself to the chair, I used every inducement I could marshal to obtain it, including bribery, pleas of medical need, and threats of legal duress, but the man was intractable. I retired so crushed in spirit that I inclined to be somewhat paranoid about the subject over the ensuing decade. The world supply of tufted black leather, I frequently told my friends, was being manipulated by a small ring of interior decorators, men who would stick at nothing to bilk me. I was telling it to one of them, an advertising nabob and self-admitted expert in arranging the impossible, at a Turkish bath, when he brought me up short.

“Wait a minute,” said Broomhead imperiously. “Outside of Hollywood or the Reform Club, are any of these chairs still extant?”

“Yes, in Washington,” I said. “They’ve some honeys in the Senate corridors—the real McCoy, so to speak—but nobody could ever wangle—”

He produced a solid-gold pencil the diameter of a needle from his towel and scrawled a note on a masseur. “Relax,” he commanded. “Your worries are over. I happen to know a politico or two down there who’d go pretty . . . far . . . out of his way to accommodate Curt Broomhead.”

I automatically dismissed the assertion as bluster, until his secretary phoned me a month later. A certain Mr. X, whom it was inadvisable to identify, in an equally mysterious government bureau, was laid up with croup. On his recovery, he would promptly expedite the item requested by Mr. Tuftola, which, she whispered, was the pseudonym her boss had adopted for the transaction. While elated at the news, I experienced a vague malaise. It bothered me that some fine old lawgiver, a chivalrous Southerner out of George Cable, with a white imperial and arthritis, might be unceremoniously deposed from his chair because of my whim. I was also positive that I had heard a muffled click during our phone conversation, as though the line were bugged. Before I could cry peccavi and tout Broomhead off, however, the affair took on juggernaut momentum. Telegrams and messages proliferated, warning me that Mr. X’s favor was in transit, and I received unmistakable assurance from a Chinese fortune cookie that destiny was arranging a surprise. A fortnight thence, two orangutans in expressmen’s aprons dumped a formidable crate on the sidewalk outside our New York brownstone. After an ugly jurisdictional squabble, they departed, leaving the handyman and me to wrestle the shipment up three flights; after an uglier one, we did so, and he departed, leaving me to open it. I was ablaze with fever and salivating freely as I hacked through the excelsior wrappings, but I cooled off fast enough. Inside was a stiff and dismal board-room chair, welted with tacks, that belonged in a third-rate loan shark’s office. The sticker on the reverse, however, implied otherwise. It read, “Property of U.S. State Dept.”