The Broken Bubble Page 4

  “Sure,” he said, “why not?”

  He went to his car, started it up, and in it followed Pat’s cream-and-blue Dodge up Geary Street, past Van Ness, and then up the hill on the far side.

  Ahead of him the taillights of the Dodge blinked red, massive coils like the turrets in a pinball machine. He could not see her; he followed the taillights of her car. Here and there, he thought. Wherever she went. Uphill and down. Like a child’s fantasy of faith. And so, he thought, they lived happily ever after, the two of them in their cottage on the side of the hill, the two of them in their candy-bar home where nobody could find them. The Dodge stopped—its brake lights blazed warningly—and he wondered where he was; he had lost track of the streets. The Dodge’s turn signal blinked, and the car turned left. He followed.

  The Dodge was at the curb, and he almost went on past; he heard the sound of her horn at the instant he realized she had stopped. How few times, he thought, he had been here to this apartment. The location, the address were shut out of his mind, as if the place did not exist. Twisting his neck, he began to back the car against traffic. The Dodge was directly beside his car, and now he was pulling behind it, parking parallel to it. The red taillights dazzled him. A variety of lights, turn lights, brake lights, white backup lights; they made his head hurt. The gaudy bedroom-and-chrome cars, he thought. Carpets and record players. He shut off his headlights, rolled up his windows, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  Pat stood shivering, her arms folded, as he locked his doors.

  “It’s the fog,” she said, as they walked up the broad concrete steps of the apartment building. The door was bronze and glass, locked. They had to wait while she found her key. The hall inside was soundless. On each side of them the doors were shut. Everyone here, he thought, believed in the good solid things of life. To bed at eleven, up at six.

  Trustingly, he went along after her, icing her find the right door. She seemed to know; her long dark hair bounced at the collar of her coat as she trotted over the carpet. Her heels made no sound. Like a long vault, he thought, a passage into the side of the mountain.

  The door was open, and she was inside the apartment, switching on lights. As she reached to pull down the window shades, he said, “These big apartment houses—they’re clammy.”

  “Oh no,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “It would bother me, each person retiring to his sealed chamber.”

  Still in her coat, she bent to light the heater. “You’re just full of morbid images.” Going to the closet, she took off her coat and hung it on a hanger. “You know, in some ways you’re rational and in other ways you’re erratic and nobody can tell what you’re going to do; you just stand there with a blank look, and nobody can reach you or get across to you, and then finally, when we’ve all exhausted ourselves talking and waving our hands in front of your face—” She closed the door to the hall; the door banged. “Then you suddenly come to life and start charging everything in sight.”

  He went into the tiny clean-sparkling kitchen to see about drinks. In the refrigerator was a bowl of potato salad. When Pat came in, she found him eating the potato salad from the bowl with a soup-spoon he had pulled out of the sink.

  “Oh god,” she said. Lines formed about her eyes and spread like minute cracks to her lips and chin. “You make me feel like crying.”

  “Old times?” he said.

  “No. I don’t know.” She blew her nose. “I hope for your sake you can survive this. I’ll do what I can to smooth it over, at the station. I think I can talk to Haynes better than you or Bob Posin.”

  “You’re a great one to smooth,” he said.

  She said, “All right, and you might consider this: you talk about going to another station. Do you think you’ll get away from Looney Luke? That stuff is on all the independents and on the network AM stations and on TV; I heard it the other night late, on TV, after the movie. So what good will it do? Are you going to quit when they give you Looney Luke commercials? And are you going to confine it to Looney Luke? Why just Looney Luke? What about the bread commercials and the beer commercials? Why be arbitrary? Don’t read any of them. Isn’t that so? Aren’t you being arbitrary? And you pretend I wanted you to do something like this, I’m somehow responsible.” She was yelling at him in a little high-pitched shrill whistle of a voice, her old domestic-argument voice. “Isn’t that right? Aren’t you trying to pretend it’s my fault? I put you up to this or something—God knows what. You know this wasn’t what I meant. I wanted you to do something rational, show Haynes it wouldn’t go on the dinner music program. You say you started to read it, and then you just gave up. Why did you give up? Why did you have toy that over the air? Why couldn’t you just—not have started it? You can’t say things like that over the air; you can’t say you won’t read it, you’re tired of reading it.”

  “Take it easy,” he said.

  “This finishes you,” she said. “God, I had such high hopes for you—and you’re winding up nowhere, nowhere at all. Just because you couldn’t go out and meet this rationally, and go to Haynes and discuss it before you went on the air; no, you had to wait until you had the script in your hands and you were alone in the station, and maybe then you felt safe, you could get away with it, and then you opened your mouth and fucked up the script so that god knows what sort of grief we’re in for, maybe a lawsuit, maybe a fine by the FCC. And what about your music? What about the five years you worked fixing it up with them so you could play classical music, whatever you liked; they even let you pick it out and call it your show, like ‘Club 17.’ Are you just going to junk that? Isn’t that what this is all about? Weren’t you trying to protect that in the first place? Isn’t that why you didn’t want to read the commercial? You didn’t want to offend the old ladies, and now you just throw away the whole program, much more than reading it would have. I don’t understand you. I can’t make any sense out of it.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Five years,” she said. “Wasted. Thrown away.”

  As he figured it, he had put at least ten years into the hopper getting this far. First there were the four years at Cal, getting his BA in the music department under Elkus, the counterpoint and composing. Then the two postgraduate years, doing a little conducting, singing (a so-so baritone) in their own group, the Marin Choral Singers, writing a moribund cantata dealing with peace among nations and the like. Then his fine job at the NBC music library: the Big Move to San Francisco, away from the university. Eleven years, he decided. Lord, it was almost twelve. He had first gone on the air as a private record collector—a discophile, as the term had it—and his easy delivery, his lack of snobbishness and pedagoguery, had put his program over long after the notion of inviting collectors had withered. He had a natural radio personality; he talked spontaneously, directly, without the customary rhetoric of the classical music fancier. And most important of all, he liked all kinds of music—classical and pop and moldly-fig jazz and progressive Los Angeles jump.

  He said, “No, I didn’t do it to get away from Luke.”

  “What then?” she said.

  “To get away from you. Or maybe to get closer to you. Probably both. It’s intolerable as it stands. Seeing you every day at the station. Do you realize, a couple of years ago you and I were married? Remember that?”

  “I remember,” she said. “What a diabolical business.” She said, “Like—who was it?”

  “Somebody. Somebody in a myth. Separated by the winds of Hell.”

  “It’s your own fault.”

  “It is?” he said.

  “It’s this same kind of thing, this purposeless wandering activity.”

  “Plus,” he said, “the slides in Doctor—what was his name, McIntosh?”

  “Yes,” she said, “McIntosh. Plus what you couldn’t see letting happen because it might wound your vanity; it might have made you feel superfluous.”

  “There’s no point in arguing it out now,” he said.

  “No,” she
agreed.

  He said, “The only thing I don’t understand is the picture I get, probably inaccurate. But I see you sitting around the place that Saturday afternoon by yourself, meditating everything over rationally in your mind, and then, click, you had it worked out. As calm and coldblooded as—” He lifted his hands.

  “I thought it over for months,” she said.

  “But you came to your conclusion like an IBM machine.” And then, he thought, after that there was no talking to her. No arguing, no discussing. Not after her mind was made up. Their marriage had been a mistake, and the next question had to do with how to divide up the joint possessions and how to get the thing through court as cheaply and simply as possible.

  The hiring of mutual friends, he thought; that was the really evil part. Sending them down-picking them up in the car and driving them down—to the courthouse, to testify to the travesty he and she had invented. What a pitiless time that had been.

  Across from him, Pat said, “The phone’s ringing.”

  “What?” he said. It was, but he had not even heard it. Still ringing, even here, at her apartment. “So it is,” he said, glancing around.

  “I’ll get it.” She disappeared into the living room. “Hello?” he heard her say.

  He opened the refrigerator and examined the unopened fifth of Gilby’s gin, excellent stuff, and a cheap vermouth, and a pint of vodka, and wine of every description. The Gothic script on the label of a MM Wein bottle attracted him, and he began to translate the German.

  Pat appeared in the kitchen doorway. “It’s Ted Haynes.”

  He went stiff-legged into the living room. “Does he want me?”

  “He wants to know if you’re here.” She had her hand over the receiver, but he had never believed in that; he knew that the other person could still hear. They got the sound through the Bakelite, as the deaf person got sound through the bones of his skull.

  “Sure I’m here,” he said.

  Pat said, “He’s so mad he can hardly talk.”

  “Well,” he said, still holding the bottle of German wine, “I guess Posin must have called him.”

  “Don’t blame Bob,” she said. The phone dipped, and he took it from her. “Don’t blame him or me.” When he took the phone, Haynes’s voice said hoarsely in his ear, “Jim, a man named Sharpstein called me just now here at my home and said they’re canceling, and if they ever see our sales representative near their lots they’ll call the police and have him thrown into the street.”

  “Sharpstein,” he said. “He must represent them or something. What’s his first name? Luke?”

  “I’d like to see you in the next half hour, preferably at the station, or if you feel you can’t make it down there again on your own time I’ll meet you where you are now. You’re at Pat’s apartment; that’s not very far from where I am. If you’re going to be there for a while, I’ll drop over and we can settle this on the spot.”

  His brain was too fuzzy; he could not follow what Haynes was saying. “If you want,” he said.

  “I want you to call Bob Posin and ask him to come over so he can be present. It isn’t essential, but he’s more familiar with the union rulings than I am; I have no time to memorize that sort of business. I have too many other important things on my mind to waste my time with that. All right then, I’ll see you where you are now in about fifteen minutes.”

  “Goodbye,” Jim said.

  The phone clicked first, before he was able to get the receiver down. He felt childishly defeated. “Did they hear?” Pat said. “Did the Luke people hear?” He said, “I have to call Bob Posin.”

  As he reached to take up the telephone book, Pat said, “It’s on the cover. By the corner.”

  “Oh?” he said, with rage. “You keep it handy?”

  “Yes, I keep it handy.”

  “What’s this?” he demanded.

  “What do you mean, what’s this? Oh my god.” She walked out of the living room: a door slammed, probably the bathroom door. He stood a moment, and then he dialed Bob Posin’s number. There was only the one brief buzz and then Posin’s voice saying, “Hello?”

  “This is Jim Briskin,” he said. “Oh, did Haynes get hold of you?”

  “He wanted to get hold of you.” Posin’s voice had a muted quality, as if his own rancor had been punctured; as if, Jim thought, now that Haynes had come onto the scene Bob Posin was bowing out. “Say,” Posin said, “that was quite a stunt you pulled tonight.”

  “Tell me,” Jim said, “how did the Luke people get into it? Were they listening?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact they were. Just a minute.” A long minute and then Posin was back. “I had a cigarette going. Say, well, apparently they were gathered around the radio. Can’t hear enough of their own bilge, I suppose. Something on that order. He must really have hit the roof. I got this all secondhand, of course. He—Luke Sharpstein, I mean—called Haynes, and Haynes got hold of me; he was looking for you. By that time you had left the station.”

  Jim said, “I’m over at Pat’s.”

  “I see,” Posin said. “Well, how about that.”

  “Haynes told me to call you,” Jim said. “You’re supposed to be here. He’s coming over in fifteen minutes or so.”

  “What’s he want me around for? To hold the bowl, I guess. You know, the bowl under the neck, after they make the cut.”

  “I’ll see you, then,” Jim said and hung up. This time he was the first to get the phone onto the hook.

  Pat had come back out of the bathroom. She was in the process of fixing her hair, putting it up for the night. “Did you tell him to come here?” She seemed to have settled down a trifle; her voice was less uneven. “It’s almost one o’clock.”

  “Not my idea,” he said. “Haynes is coming too. Both of them.”

  “Now I’ll tell you exactly what to say,” she said. “I was working it out while you were talking.”

  “More smoothing,” he said. “You tell them, yes, of course, you stopped in the middle of the ‘commercial’ you admit they heard you— But here’s why you did it; you decided a lot of entertainers like Arthur Godfrey and Steve Allen and all those have been more successful with an—”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell Sharpstein and Haynes and Posin that. I’ll tell them I wanted to be another Henry Morgan. Remember him?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It’s hard to,” he said. “It really takes you back.”

  She said, “Henry Morgan is on television; he’s on the ‘Garry Moore Show.’ Every week.”

  Shrugging, Jim said, “It doesn’t matter. I have nothing to tell them. Let’s just get it over. I’m sorry it has to be here in your apartment. That wasn’t my idea.”

  She stood considering, meditating. Then she returned to the bathroom and resumed what she was doing to her hair. He remembered the nightly setting. The metal clips, the cloth, the smell of shampoo and wave lotion, the bottles and cotton pads. Her back to him, she said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Her hands worked methodically at the base of her skull, lifting her hair, sorting, massaging, putting the hair in place. “Do you want me to quit my job? Would you feel easier if I left the station?”

  “Too late for that now.”

  “I could.” She turned toward him. “I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to that. I might anyhow, no matter how this turns out.”

  He had no answer for that. Sitting down on the couch, he waited for Bob Posin and Haynes. “Do you understand what I’m talking about?” she said.

  “Sure I understand; you want to get married. Don’t they all want to get married? But this time make sure. Get him up to Doctor McIntosh and get the slides going.” It was the meanest thing he could think of, the bitterest remark.

  Pat said, “I’m fairly sure.”

  4

  Haynes entered the apartment several minutes ahead of Bob Posin. He was a small, rather delicately built gentleman, in his sixtie
s, with luminous white hair and a thin, celluloid-like nose, a nose without bone. The veins on the backs of his hands stood out, blue and distended. His skin was mottled by liver spots, and his walk was the half-shuffle of the elderly professional man.

  “Good evening,” he said to Patricia. His voice was shaded with elegance. Jim thought of a conductor on a Southern railroad, a rigid old conductor with pocket watch and shiny, black, narrow-pointed shoes.

  “Where’s Bob?” Pat asked. A heavy damp towel was wrapped around her head, elongating her skull, obscuring her hair; she supported the towel with one hand.

  “Parking his car,” Haynes said. To Jim he said, “The first thing to get settled is, do you want to continue working for KOIF? Or was this a method of telling us that you intend to leave?”

  The question bowled him over. “It sounds as if it’s up to me,” he said.

  “Do you want to leave the station?”

  He said, “No.”

  “What is it then? The summer? Thinking about fishing in the mountains?”

  At the door Bob Posin knocked, pushed the door open to look in. “Hard to park,” he said, entering. He had on a yellow Aloha sports shirt, hanging out at his waist, and dacron slacks. His hair was uncombed, and he looked seedy and harried.

  “Then that’s settled,” Haynes continued. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re a fair enough announcer. We’ve never had any complaints about you up to now.”

  “I’ll resign,” Jim said, “if you want.”

  “No, we don’t want you to resign,” Haynes said. His hands behind his back, he went over to the corner of the room and looked at something hanging from the ceiling. “What’s this?” He touched it circumspectly. “Is this what they call a mobile? The first one I ever saw made out of—what is this? Eggshells?”

  “You want the truth?” Pat said.

  “I’ll be darned,” Haynes said, scrutinizing the mobile. “You made this yourself? Very clever.”