The Magic Christian (8 page)

The open-mouthed astonishment of waiters, diners and others who were witness to these scenes was hardly lessened by the bits of bland dialogue they might overhear between the ma?tre d’, who was also in on the gag, and the valet.

“Chef’s
Bèarnaise
pleased him,” the maître d’ would remark soberly to the valet, “I could tell.”

The valet would agree with a judicious nod, as he watched Grand storming through the restaurant. “He’s awful keen tonight.”

“In the
Bèarnaise,”
the maître d’ would suddenly confide in an excited whisper, “the peppercorns were
bruised
merely by dropping them!” And the two men would exchange dark knowing glances at this revelation.

By the last course Grand would be utterly exhausted, and the exquisite dessert would invariably prove too much for his overtaxed senses. At the first taste of it, he would go into a final tantrum and then simply black out. He always had to be carried from the restaurant on a stretcher, leaving waiters and diners staring agape, while the maître d’ stood respectfully by the door with several of his staff.

“Boy, was that guy ever
nuts!
Huh?” a wide-eyed young waiter would exclaim as he stood with the maître d’, gazing after the departing figures. But the latter would appear not to have heard.

“The last of the
grand gourmets,”
he would sigh, and there was always a trace of wistful nostalgia in his face when he turned back from the door. “No, sir, they don’t make taste buds like
that
any more.”

Connivance with the maître d’s of these top restaurants was an expensive affair, and there was a shake-up in more than one veteran staff due to it. Those who lost their jobs though were usually in a position to open fairly smart restaurants of their own—assuming, of course, they didn’t care to buy the one from which they were fired.

“I
N LITERATURE, OF
course,” Ginger Horton was saying, “the
best
writing comes out of the
heart,
and
not
the
head!”

“
I’ll
buy that!” agreed Guy Grand, coming forward on his big chair in ready interest, his voice going a bit taut with feeling as he continued:

“For
my
money the best . . . the
very best
darn writing is done right out of the old guts, by God!” And he gave his budding paunch a short slap to strengthen his meaning.

“Good Heavens,” said Esther crouching forward into a sea of giggles.

“And
no rewrite!”
said Guy strongly, “. . . right out of the old guts onto the goddamn paper!”

“Guy!” exclaimed Agnes, “really!” It was well known that Ginger Horton
did
write—wrote unceasingly—relentless torrents of a deeply introspective prose.

“Sorry,” muttered Grand, sitting back again, “get a bit carried away sometimes, I expect.”

“Feeling and passion!”
agreed Ginger Horton in a shriek. “Of course most of the nasty little people around don’t feel a
thing! Not a single thing!”

“Interesting you should bring that up,” said Guy, reaching in his coat pocket and withdrawing a small memo-book, which he thumbed through as he continued:

“Fellow I met on the train—I won’t mention his name if you don’t mind, because the thing is still pretty much on the drawing board, so to speak . . . but I can tell you
this:
he’s one of the top-brass along ‘Publishers’ Row’—well, we got to talking, one thing and another, and he offered to let me in on a new scheme of his. How sound it is I
don’t
know, but he’s willing to let me in on the ground floor—at
second-story prices,
of course—” added Guy with a good-natured chuckle. “And
there’s
your old six-and-seven again, but, still and all, that’s to be expected in the investment game. Well, his scheme—and I’d like to put out a feeler on it—is to issue a series of Do-It-Yourself Portables . . . the
Do-It-Yourself Shakespeare,
the
D.H. Do-It-Yourself Lawrence,
and so on.”

“What on earth—” Ginger began crossly.

“His
idea,” said Guy, “—and I don’t pretend to know how sound it is—is to issue the regular texts of well-known works, with certain words, images, bits of dialogue, and what have you, left
blank
. . . just spaces there, you see . . . which
the reader fills in.”

“Well, I never—” said Ginger irately.

“Oh yes, here we are,” said Grand, evidently finding the place he was looking for in the memo-book, “Yes, now here’s some of his promotional copy . . . rough draft, mind you . . . let’s see, yes, this is for Kafka’s
Do-It-Yourself Trial.
Goes like this:

‘Now you too can experience that same marvelous torment of ambiguity and haunting glimpse of eternal beauty which tore this strange artist’s soul apart and stalked him to his very grave! Complete with optional imagery selector, master word table and
writer’s-special
ball-point pen, thirty-five cents.’”

Ginger Horton made a gurgling sound of anger preparatory to speaking, but Guy was quick to press on:

“And here we are for the
Look Homeward (Yourself) Angel:

‘Hey there, reader-writer—how would you like to spew your entrails right out onto a priceless Sarouk carpet?!? Huh? Right in the middle of somebody’s living room with everyone watching? Huh? Well, by golly, you
can,
etcetera, etcetera.’

“As I say, it’s rough-draft copy, of course—needs tightening up, brightening up—but what’s your feeling on it, Ginger? Think it might spell ‘blast-off’ in the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch?”

“What? Well I wouldn’t put a . . . a
single cent
into it!” said Ginger with considerable emphasis.

“Oh it’s just too dreadful, Guy,” exclaimed Agnes. “You mustn’t.”

“Hmm. I suppose you’re right,” said Guy, “. . . hard to say really.
Might
catch on—might not . . . just wanted to put out a feeler or two on it. Always best to keep an open mind in the investment game.”

Grand had a bit of fun when he engaged a man to smash crackers with a sledge-hammer in Times Square.

The stout fellow arrived with his gear—a box of saltine crackers and a sixty-pound sledge—at precisely 9
A.M
. and “set up shop,” as Guy expressed it, just outside the subway entrance on Forty-Second Street, the busiest thoroughfare in the world at this particular hour.

Dressed in khaki and wearing a tin hat, the curious man forged his way through the deluge of people pouring out of the subway, and then in the very midst of the surging throng, opened the brass-studded pouch attached to his belt, extracted a single saltine cracker, and stooped over to place it carefully on the sidewalk.

“Watch yourself!” he shouted as he stood up, gesturing impatiently. “Keep clear! Mind your step!” And then, raising the hammer to shoulder height, he brought it down in one horrendous blow on the cracker—not only smashing it to dust, but also producing several rather large cracks in the sidewalk.

Within a few minutes the area was swollen with onlookers—all but the nearest of whom had to crane their heads wildly or leap up and down to get a glimpse of the man in the tin hat now as he squatted to examine the almost invisible dust of the cracker. “Sure mashed it, didn’t it?” he muttered, as to himself, in a professional manner.

“What’d he say?” demanded several people urgently of those near the operation.

“Said it ‘sure
mashed
it,’” someone explained.

“
‘Mashed
it’?” snorted another. “Boy, you can say
that
again!”

Guy Grand was on the scene as well, observing the diverse comments and sometimes joining in.

“Hey, how come you doin’ that?” he asked directly of the man in the tin hat.

The man laid out another cracker, placing it with great care.

“This?” he said, standing and raising the big sledge. “Oh, this is all technical.”

“What’s he say?”

“Says it’s technical.”

“What?”

“Technical.”

“Yeah, well, what’s that he’s hitting with the hammer? What is that? It looks like a
cracker.”

“Naw, what’d he hit a
cracker
for—you kiddin’?”

“Boy, look how that sledge busts up the sidewalk! Man, that’s some
sledge
he’s got there!”

Within a very short time indeed, the gathering had spilled over into the street, interfering with the traffic there and causing the tough Forty-Second Street cop to wade growling into the heart of the crowd. “Okay, break it up!” he kept saying. “Shove off!” And when he reached the center where the operation was being carried out, he stood for a long while with his cap pushed back on his head, hands on hips, and a nasty frown on his face, as he watched the man in the tin hat smash a few more crackers with the giant sledge.

“Are you workin’ for the
city,
bud?” he finally asked in an irate voice.

“That’s right,” said the tin-hat man without looking up. “City planning. This is technical.”

“Yeah,” said the cop, “well, you sure picked a hell of a place to do it, that’s all I got to say.” Then, adjusting his cap, he started pushing at the crowd.

“Okay, let’s keep movin’!” he shouted. “Break it up here! Get on to work! This is technical—
shove off!”

Diversion is at a premium at this hour however, and the crowd was not to be dispersed so easily. After a while the hoses had to be brought. When the ruse was discovered, Grand had a spot of bother clearing it.

“P
ERHAPS
G
INGER COULD
slip into one of your things,” suggested Guy.

Esther childlishly covered her mouth to hide a laugh, and darted glances of mischief and glee at the others, while Agnes drew in her breath before speaking:

“I’m afraid we do
not
take the same size, Guy!”

Agnes, thin as a whip, was perhaps a size nine; Ginger’s great size must have been well into the sixties.

Ginger, too, shook her head emphatically.

“Charles would simply die if I wore a frock he hadn’t done!” she said.

“Has Charles done any chemises for you?” Guy inquired.

“I
wanted
Charles to do some little Roman chemises for me, Guy,” Ginger confided. “I think I have the fullness for them—well, it would have meant giving up all my little feminine frills and laces, of course, and Charles simply would not hear of it! He said it would be a perfect
crime
—and he does so love to work with his laces, Guy, I simply didn’t have the heart! But then what’s your feeling on it, Guy?” she asked finally, giving a Carmenesque toss of her head.

“Charles
could
be right, of course,” said Guy, after allowing it a moment’s thought.

Grand gave a bit of a shock to the British white-hunters along the Congo (as well as to a couple of venerable old American writers who were there on safari at the time) when he turned up in a major hunting expedition with a 75-millimeter howitzer.

“She throws a muzzle-velocity of twelve thousand f.p.s.,” Grand liked to quip. “She’ll stop anything on this continent.”

Ordinarily used by the French Army as an artillery fieldpiece, the big gun, stripped of all but its barrel, chamber, and firing mechanism, still weighed well over a hundred and fifty pounds.

“She’ll stop anything that moves,” Guy would say,
“
—including a surfaced
whale.”

Grand had three natives carry the giant gun, while he, wearing a huge cushion-device around his stomach and a pith helmet so enormous that half his face was concealed beneath it, sauntered jauntily alongside, speaking knowledgeably to other members of the party about every aspect of firearms and big-game hunting.

“A spot of bother in Kenya bush the other day,” he would say,” the big cat took two of our best boys.” Then he would give his monstrous weapon an affectionate pat and add knowingly, “—the cat changed her tune when she’d had a taste of the old seventy-five! Yessir, this baby carries a real
wallop,
you can bet your life on that!”

About once an hour, Grand would stop and dramatically raise his hand, bringing the entire safari to a halt, while he and one of his trusty natives (heretofore known as the “best guide in Central Africa”) would sniff the air, nostrils flared and quivering, eyes a bit wild.

“There’s cat in the bush,”
Guy would say tersely, and while the rest of the party looked on in pure amazement, Grand, big helmet completely obscuring his sight, would take up the huge gun and, staggering under its weight, brace it against the great cushion at his stomach, and blindly fire one of the mammoth shells into the bush, blasting a wide swath through the tall grass and felling trees as though they were stalks of corn. The recoil of the weapon would fling Grand about forty feet backwards through the air where he would land in a heap, apparently unconscious.

“The baby packs a man-sized recoil,” Guy would say later. “The Mannlicher, of course, is nothing more than a
toy.”

Due to the extreme noise produced by the discharge of the 75, any actual game in the area was several miles away by the time the reverberations were stilled—so that these safaris would often go from start to finish without ever firing a shot, other than the occasional big boom from Grand’s 75.

African hunting expeditions are serious and expensive affairs, and this kind of tomfoolery cost Grand a pretty penny. It did provide another amusing page for his memory book though—and the old native guides seemed to enjoy it as well.

“H
OLD ON, HERE’S
a bit of news,” said Guy then, suddenly brightening in his big chair and smartly slapping the newspaper spread across his lap. The banner read:

PRESIDENT ASKS NATION FOR FAITH