A Fan's Notes (19 page)

Bunny Sue was the consummation of many long months of incredible, nearly unspeakable apprehension—months in

which I had, like the mad Kinbote, lived my life in exile, waiting to sail back and recover my lost kingdom of Zembla. That kingdom was always a
“
dim iridescence
”
—a place above and beyond the next precipice; but I always knew that at any moment, the very next no doubt, the world
’
s colors would fall into place and define themselves. They merely assumed their focus in the taffy, benumbing presence of Bunny Sue. And though I had always expected them to do so, I was, I expect, left quite as speechless by the girl as if I had never anticipated her.

A few days after my journey to the Polo Grounds, I got a job. I would like to believe that my cheering for Owen had rendered my countenance more amenable to prospective employers, but this was not the case. Exhausted by the long months of my defeat, I combed my hair, had my suit cleaned, walked into the personnel department of the New York Central Railroad, and told the man I would take anything he had to offer. He took me at my word—giving me anything: a job as clerk-trainee in the passenger department at a pittance. But my luck was beginning to change, and in a few weeks I had an impossibly splendid job in that company
’
s public relations department. Robert R. Young, the powder-haired, tassel-toed, dapper little financier out of Texas, had just won control of the company in that now-famous proxy war and was, as his first order of business,
“
clearing the deadwood
”
(twenty thou sand employees) from the Central
’
s payroll. In all the time I was with the railroad, this onslaught on the
“
featherbedders
”
seemed to be his only policy. He was more than anything, I think, a phrasemaker—
”
A hog can cross country without changing trains, but you can
’
t
”
—and because he seemed to have no clear-cut policy, we gentlemen in public relations, as near as I could determine, were expected to do little more than sit in our cubicles, pick our noses, clean our fingernails, watch Young brush away the scarabs, and wait for reporters to telephone with questions we wouldn
’
t, even if we knew the answers, be permitted to answer. Which is as good a definition of public relations as any.

Working under such conditions, I needed no time at all to decide that one ought to exercise such duties in style. I bought a couple tweed suits, a few delicately patterned bow ties, and a pair of sincere black Oxfords. Putting a lot of impressive-looking and forged documents into my in-box, I closed the door to my glass cage, and for the next few months read cover to cover every issue of Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Harper
’
s, the Atlantic, and The New Yorker, which still left time for Saul Bellow
’
s The Adventures of Augie March, a volume I read till it came unbound and the pages started dropping out and cluttering up the in-box. In public relations there were only three of us who had been retained from the pre-Young days. On Young
’
s enthronement most of the men, including the boss, had been shown the door for having worked too stridently to prevent Young
’
s coronation— for doing their jobs, in other words; and shortly thereafter some of his own people began to seep into the vacated cubicles.

Into the one next to mine moved a raven-haired Radcliffe girl with a superb behind, a pair of legs that must have held their own on the hockey fields of Cambridge, and an authoritative though pleasing voice. It was her job to answer Young
’
s lunatic mail. These letters were from people who believed, quite properly, that eight million dollars was much too much for any one man, and who, as a result, had come up with some rather novel and touching ways of rectifying the situation. Perhaps dear, drunken, and beloved old Uncle Casper was expiring from a minuscule tumor of the brain, and all they wanted was two thousand dollars
’
“
surtchon
’
s dues.
”
Others wanted a million or so for a Great Dane hospital, a home for retired pederasts, or backing for an
“
all-day musical,
”
featuring a thousand sequined chorus girls and songs by an unacclaimed lyricist named August Sugarword (the very same whose soon-to-be-immortalized signature could be seen bringing up the bottom of the letter). The girl was good; she knew her business. For two days I picked my nose and listened to her dictate before introducing myself, and by then I had a case on her.

Dear Mrs. Curpartial:

Thank you for your letter of October 20 requesting a million dollars to help construct your planned sanatorium for Great Danes.

Let me say at the outset that, though I am unable to give to you
the funds for this good cause, there is no one, I think, who is more
fond of canines than I, and especially of your particular choice, the
noble-hearted Dane.

Without going too deeply into the reasons for my refusal, I hope you can appreciate that I am each year literally inundated with financial requests for one good cause and another. For that reason I have long made it my practice to give to the more general charities, Community Chest, etc., in the hope that what I am able to give will find a more equitable distribution among the needy.

In conclusion, and if it doesn
’
t seem too presumptuous, I might offer a word of advice. Don
’
t you think you might have better luck by enlarging your plans to envision a sanatorium whose doors would be open to other breeds, the Chow, the Boxer, the Chihuahua, the Red-Bone Hound—perhaps even a mongrel or two? I wonder, really, if there will be enough Great Danes for the ample and lavish space you so obviously have in mind.

Yours sincerely,

Sybil Radcliffe

For Robert R. Young

That letter won me over; and Miss Radcliffe and I had a shy, kissless, and quite unsettling romance for a few weeks subsequent to my introducing myself. We sat in cozy Italian restaurants for three-hour lunches, nibbling delicately on breadsticks and smiling demurely at each other. I talked about Hemingway, she about Young, and that, in a nutshell, was the terrible division of our outlooks. She believed Young to be

a Great Man caught up in matters out of the reach of other mortals, where, if I believed him to be anything (and scarcely looked on him as human), it was as a pipsqueak parvenu out of the Super State gone quite power-loony. Oh, she knew Hemingway—better than I did; but his world was as unreal to her as Young
’
s was palpable. Her alarming backside and luxurious thighs were always virginally enwrapped in black wool and gray tweed, and that was the way she wanted it. I always envisioned that grand thing sheathed in the Tyrolese corduroy of mountain hikers; and I had this vision of following it, so sheathed, up that pale precipice to the iridescent land where, once attained and in a tremble of exhaustion and anticipation, I would decorduroy, depant, and deflower her among the flora, the world
’
s colors coming into focus in the soft raven down of her thingamajig. I wanted to risk great happiness, but I never got the chance. Our
“
romance
”
ended one bleak night in Louis
’
Tavern in the Village. I had taken her there to show her my
“
dream-tavern,
”
the place to which I fled every night to dream my dreams of fame. She said that she liked neither it nor the people there; I became upset, gave her money for a cab, and watched her walk away from me, wondering if I shouldn
’
t run after her. But I never did. I was hurt and furious that she hadn
’
t taken to Louis
’
. At that time Louis
’
was one of the places that made my existence bearable.

In the evening Louis
’
was always the penultimate stop. There was Louis
’
, then there was bed, though there were always a number of stops before these. Immediately after work I always fled, jogging a little perspiration-inducing trot, to the midtown Young Men
’
s Christian Association I called home. The idea was to get to the communal showers before the fags did. For a time they hadn
’
t bothered me; I had read in a Paul Bowles story about a group of rather playful Arab Moslems who, after strenuously using a young Westerner, had relieved him of his penis, had sewed it into his mouth or belly or someplace (the story was an immense bore), and had left his naked and disfigured body to the African sun: there was some comfort in the knowledge that my sodomites were merely playful Christians. I thought the best way to act in the showers was quite manly, and for a few weeks I had stood among those steam-glistening, wispy young men vigorously lathering my genitalia and buttocks, and yodeling (I am a good yodeler) in a studiously indifferent way. I won
’
t say that I didn
’
t understand I might be making myself as attractive to them as a mustachioed and beribboned Scots Guard, that I was teasing, but I do know that it caught up with me, degenerating into a scene of ludicrously comical possibilities, with a frail, befreckled, and redheaded Christian youth, his man hood all afluster, madly pursuing my scarcely rinsed and virginal body down the long, bleak hall to my room where I just managed to get the chain latched in time. On my way out of the building that night I stopped by at the desk intent on registering a complaint. There I was met by a cross-eyed, sticklike ephe
b
e who, bringing himself gingerly up to the counter in anticipation of my query, smiled demurely at me and said,
“
Yeth?
”
I laughed like a goddam madman.
“
Forgeth abouth it,
”
I said. After that day I started jogging
“
home
”
to get to those showers first.

After showering I lay naked atop my iron cot for a couple hours, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, sometimes staring at the weird patterns made by the peeling lemon walls.

Below me in the street, it was the rush hour, and the cabs seemed furious, screeching agonized brakes at each other
’
s behinds, and bellowing violently at each other with their horns. Doors opened and closed in the halls. Giggling, flighty voices drifted by my door. Occasionally I fell asleep to lovers
’
quarrels that had erupted into clawing, head-banging, tear-laden affairs. On awaking, it would be dusk. The street noises below me now seemed far off—as remote as if they came from some distant city. The silence of evening was encroaching. Rising from the cot, I would dress, take the elevator to the lobby, walk through the door into the autumn night, and go in search of the future.

My search followed a rigid pattern, beginning at P. J. Clarke
’
s saloon at the corner of Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street. This bistro was said to have been employed by Billy Wilder in his filming of The Lost Weekend, being that saloon where Ray Milland in his splendid evocation of Don Burn-ham, the
un
writing writer, had drunk his drinks and dreamed his dreams. Because of the notoriety brought on by the film, the place had, for the rich and the near-rich, for the gifted and the near-gifted, taken on a slightly sinister and degenerate aura, a place where these good souls might go and imagine themselves hard by squalor. It was ironical. In the end they only rubbed shoulders with each other. Time after time I stood, as Milland had done in the movie, slightly aglow with drink and tried to imagine myself as Michelangelo sculpting the chin of Moses, or, looking out at the El (which still stood in those days) and seeing not Third Avenue but the Nile.

But I had no luck. The atmosphere was without that bleakness conducive to dreams. The pink-cheeked, tweedy men, the downy-armed, thrilling girls, the antiquated mahogany bar, the murky yellow mirrors, the saw-dusted and white-tiled floors, all conspired to remind me of a genteel English pub. It might, one thought, have been sent over by some eccentric English man to keep the British Delegation to the UN from becoming homesick; and one could even imagine how, if that august body suddenly dissolved itself, workmen would arrive one day, carefully disassemble the place, pack it, smoky mirrors and all, into vast wooden crates, and send it back across the sea to London where it would be lovingly reassembled on a cobbled lane off Fleet Street. P. J. Clarke
’
s was not the sort of place to imagine oneself mingling with the profligate elements of the earth.