Juice (3 page)

When Raymond died in 1940 Joseph Harrison was not yet twenty-eight. He was twenty pounds heavier, had forty-two hundred dollars in the bank, smoked an occasional cigar, and was promoted to program director, midnight to 8:00
A.M.,
at a salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. It was pointed out by a pickerel-eyed executive named Swenson that he was not yet twenty-eight.

When Joseph Harrison came back from the war, with two silver bars, three battle stars, and hepatitis, he was not yet thirty-three. He was five pounds lighter and had eleven thousand dollars in the bank. He was made over-all program director at a salary of two hundred and seventy-five dollars a week. It was pointed out that he was not yet thirty-three.

When Arthur Rhein called on a warm May afternoon in 1957, Joseph Harrison was not yet forty-five. He weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. What he had in the bank was nobody's business but his own. He was married and had two children. He was managing director of P.A.N. at a salary of over fifty thousand a year.

It had just been pointed out to him by Arthur Rhein (wealthy, civic-minded Arthur Rhein; visionary, hollow-eyed Arthur Rhein) that he was not yet fifty.

Joseph Harrison was finally ahead of the game, by five years.

His secretary buzzed. He was to call Osterman, Hendricks, Schmidt.

“Get me Schmidt first,” he said. Waiting, he contemplated the city through his broad fourteenth-story windows. He had an unobstructed view of roughly half the city—a million people. Unobstructed was perhaps too strong a word; most days at least half the million were hidden from him by smog. “This city,” his wife had said, “is the exhaust pipe of the Western world, to bowdlerize a much more accurate metaphor.” He did not like the city, and lived in one of the valleys, thirty-five miles off; but he was made restless and tolerant by a feeling that cities were where things happened.

Schmidt was unruffled. He reported that the drivers wanted more money. So did the loaders. No question of more take from the retailers, unless they jacked the price of the paper.

“We may have to do that anyway,” Harrison said. “Five months since the last newsprint hike, and we're due for another. Who do we negotiate with down there? Jacobs?”

“Jacobs.”

“So. All right. Do something for me. Figures. Work it out with the same rise in newsprint as last time and the maximum union demand. Then work it out with a likely union compromise. Project the circulation to September first, probably up about fifteen thousand. Check it all with Weinstein and get it up to me as soon as you can. When would they go out?”

“September. The contract comes up. Part of this is routine, you know. Contract expires, everybody threatens.”

“Yes. And paranoia fells the board of directors, but we always work it out.”

“We do,” Schmidt said. “The biannual madness. I'll get you the figures.”

“Thanks. And calm down.”

Schmidt laughed. “See you.”

“Thanks again.”

He buzzed. “Osterman now.”

Osterman wanted to know about Flavia Montrose. Schedules were in the works. The usual gaps. The time was sold, all right, but they had to help fill it. Pan-American Can would be very grateful for Montrose.

Harrison told him a call was in; he would talk to him again tomorrow.

Pan-American Can, Harrison thought as he hung up. Flavia Montrose, the Pan-American Can, interprets Richard Brinsley Sheridan to the great unseen audience. So? It was still Sheridan. And who else could do it? Marie Dressier? Rhein's idea: Keaton to mime great scenes from
Hamlet.

“Hendricks,” he said to his secretary.

Hendricks had good news: two more cities approved.

“Radio was easier,” Harrison said.

“Radio?” Hendricks hawed. “You serious?”

“All right,” Harrison said. “I still listen to it. Get the papers ready for the board. No more FCC problem?”

“Nope. We're not a monopoly yet.”

“Don't tell Rhein,” Harrison said. “You'll break his heart.”

There remained the in-basket. Joe Harrison worked fast. The final August schedules. The contracts from Santiago and Morris. A complaint about dead air from the sponsors of a daytime serial. The letter from Sigerson: a good stiff price for thirty B pictures, none less than fifteen years old. The names hurt him: Olympe Bradna, Jack LaRue, Conrad Veidt, Stroheim. He smiled. How superior to be forty-five, to have more than one world running along the memory circuits.
La belle époque.
You should have been here before the war. When Louis kayoed Braddock who had beaten Baer who had destroyed Carnera, Floyd Patterson was two years old. Floyd Patterson had never done business with Samuel Insull. A chicken in every pot; college kids today knew it was from Henri IV, but Harrison's generation had assumed it was Hoover's. And Dave and Sally had barely heard of Hoover. Dave had thought he was President shortly after the Civil War and had lived to a ripe old age. Sally was eleven and did not care about Hoover. Eleven. There it was: the answer. Sally Harrison, born 1947. David Harrison, born 1949. Possessed potentially of all human vices and virtues. They could go either way, couldn't they? We could all go either way. Miniver Cheevy or Sam Houston. Billy the Kid or Andy Jackson. Dillinger or Pershing; Huey Long or George Norris. Samuel Insull or Bill Haywood.

The hell with it, he thought. Diamond Jim Brady or Joe Harrison. May I remind you that you are not yet fifty.

Flavia Montrose called back at 5:42; Joe Harrison noted the historic moment. He would have to inform the elevator man, who was a Montrose devotee.

“Of course I'll do it, darling. But only for you.”

“My Melpomene,” Harrison said. “My Thalia. Marvelous. Can't wait to see you again. Shall I have Eddie get to work on the papers?”

“Of course. And remember the reruns, darling. I wouldn't care about them if I weren't sure they'll have to bring it back. Probably every year.”

“I won't forget.”

“Any time between the twenty-fourth and September fifteenth. I don't care when. I'd like a good night, of course. Sunday. And I
must
have Sylvan Johnson to direct. You can get him, of course?”

“I hope so. It'll cost. This may run to big, big money before we're through.”

“As it should,” she said sweetly. “After all …”

Harrison laughed.

“And, darling,” she said, “not too many parties, please? I'll be a wreck by then. Inside, of course. Broadway is absolutely grueling. I cry after each performance.”

Harrison reassured her through a slight taste of bile.

“And how is your lovely wife?” Flavia asked. “And those darling children? Really she should have gone into something, films, the stage. She's
too
beautiful—just my age, and looks five years younger. I hate her for it, you know.” Harrison closed his eyes. “But I suppose she prefers home and family.”

“I suppose she does,” Harrison said.

“A compliment to you, dear boy. And so
rare
on the West Coast, don't you think? Old-fashioned. Really, Joe, you're almost
quaint,
you two.”

“You should see us in wooden shoes,” he said.

Flavia laughed; it was the jingle of costume jewelry. “You
are
a love,” she said. “Meet my plane?”

“I'll cut my way through a forest of Speed Graphics.”

“The valiant Sir Joseph,” she said. “You know, you
are
like something out of Walter Scott.”

“I feel like something out of Walter Scott. A haggis.”

She laughed again. “You're terrible. There's no one like you in New York, you know.”

“Then hurry west,” he said.

“I'm on my way,” she said. “In three months.
A bientôt.”

“See you then. Good luck.”

“Goodbye, my dear.”

Joe Harrison wiped his brow. It was 5:51. His day was over. It had ended, he decided, ingloriously. He required strong drink. He required Mrs. Harrison. He required music from another century. He required a month on Java Head. But primarily strong drink.

He kicked his briefcase into a corner, took a forty-five-dollar Panama hat from its hook, set it on the back of his head, opened the door, and walked out with both hands in his pockets. In the reception room he stopped, tall and tan and rumpled, to stare broodingly at Marie Dumont, who was so thunderstruck that she neglected to arch her back, adjust her coiffure, or even breathe deeply.

“Miss Dumont,” he said, “you are a flower, blushing unseen, wasting your sweetness on the desert air.”

Miss Dumont was terrified.

Joe Harrison walked out.

At Tony's—time, the elements, and faulty tubing had reduced it to
Ant n o's
—he looked Harold squarely in the eye and said, “A Martini. At once. Then work on another.”

Harold grinned at him.

The light was of course dim. There was neither Muzak nor juke. Television had been banished to the Men's Grille. Some very beautiful women came to Tony's. None was there now. This once, Harrison was relieved, almost jubilant. Harrison was an admirer of beautiful women. He had been castigated for it by a wearying succession of voluble amateur analysts, among them a number of beautiful women. He had tried reason, been refuted, tried instinct, been refuted, and finally taken the offensive. “You can learn charm at Miss Finch's,” he said. “You can learn talent at Berlitz or the Actors Studio. What I like, you got to be born with.”

His case was discussed; rumor traveled fast; there were still a few who believed that Joe Harrison had hidden depths of depravity. Likely he did: the thought did not alarm him.

Tonight, however, he preferred solitude. He preferred the loyal and fraternal companionship of an accomplished bartender. He preferred the heavy draperies, the dying light of a dead afternoon, the sad glint of neglected bottles, the dirty glow of a cigarette shrinking to its doom.

Sparks of the day pricked him and died. Arthur Rhein, the pearl of great price. Weinstein-Einstein
à bas
Euclid. The drivers. Strike. Picket lines. Difficulties. All right: life was full of difficulties. Joe Harrison managed many difficulties because he was pleased to be Joe Harrison—which he admitted to himself without embarrassment. He had seen something of the world—his world, at any rate; something of its inhabitants. He could not honestly say that people were admirable. He knew few admirable people. Helen was one. Weinstein was one. Periodically an acquaintance was admirable for thirty seconds or so, but for no longer. The laws of probability being immutable (or at least, he smiled to himself, incomprehensible), the odds were that if he ceased to be Harrison, if he changed, altered, let the basic man become other than he had been for thirty years, it would be for the worse. Vanity, he chid himself; but there was no heart in the rebuke: he deplored mores that forbade a man to think well of himself. They had played the parlor game, long ago, at a regrettable gathering of
lumpen
-intellectuals: who would you be if you could not be yourself? And he had answered, “Marco Polo,” with no inkling beforehand that the name was on his tongue. He tried to explain—it was a cultured group, and everything had to be explained—but failed; he knew only that it had something to do with the early start, the full life, the time in jail (“Polo's, of course,” he had added, noticing confusion in his audience), the independence and the stubbornness and ultimately the talent, the competence for life, for survival, for learning, for letters; and the instinctive awareness (Polo's and his) that the true track was always unmarked, that it had to be found and followed obstinately, through the desert or through the gestalt; Polo had done it, his way, and Joe Harrison would have to do it too, his way. That was all, and it was not much to go on. His host said it was an obvious manifestation of repressed homosexuality.

Harold set before him the second Martini. Harrison glanced, startled, at his empty glass.

Helen, he thought. Why waste time here? Not a woman, really, but his own idealization of a woman. Fair enough. It hardly mattered unless the illusion dissolved. Perhaps it was not illusion: perhaps it was Helen. Or an ideal plus a reality; the thousand thousand brute intimacies unbearable except within the illusion. The smells of a house; the slurping and licking and belching and chewing at table; the repellent sight of a man in socks, garters, and shorts, or of a woman in stockings and a strapped, hook-and-eyed, vulgarly ruffled garter belt, with a seam running crooked along her thigh; grunts in the morning, coughs at night, the shaming ugliness of tears; wet diapers—who could love a wet diaper? Who could love the early man, lying in his own slime, potbellied and cross-eyed and bowlegged, a cycle of ingestion and expulsion, incapable of choice or action, incapable of good or evil, barely capable of senseless motion? But you did. This was the mystery. You loved all of that, and you never knew whether the blaze of early love made them bearable or the combustibles of life together kept the blaze going. What matter? Possibly love, unlike other inexplicables, should never be questioned. Possibly in the end it was not the money or the learning or the real estate or the number of heirs or the lives saved or the paintings painted or the books written, but how much love you had given before you were stopped.

Well, well, well, Harrison thought. My! “What's in this?” he asked Harold.

Harold looked properly blank. “Gin, vermouth, dash of bitters.”

“Bitters,” Harrison said reproachfully.

“Well, you know,” Harold said. “They make it a little different every year.”

It's the bitters, Harrison decided. Bitters are a stimulant, and probably an intoxicant. Must lay off bitters for a while. What are bitters? Who are they? That all our swains command it?

He searched his pockets and found a crumpled ball of paper. He smoothed it on the bar.