Benchley, Peter - Novel 07

  Rummies

  For Nat and Mdrika

  Contents

  PART ONE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  PART TWO

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  PART THREE

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  All envy would be extinguished if it were universally known that there are none to be envied, and surely none can be much envied who are not pleased with themselves. . . . Such is our desire of abstraction from ourselves, that very few are satisfied with the quantity of stupefaction which the needs of the body force upon the mind. Alexander himself added intemperance to sleep, and solaced with the fumes of wine the sovereignty of the world. And almost every man has some art, by which he steals his thoughts away from his present state.

  —Samuel Johnson Idler 32

  PART ONE

  I

  It must be a metabolic thing, this sweating. Like some people gain weight on a diet of arugula and Yoplait while others gobble nesselrode pie and creme fraiche and look like Twiggy. He wasn't fat, didn't overdose B vitamins. It had to be metabolic. Because on a day like this, here on the yuppie version of the Murmansk Run, nobody else was sweating. The March wind slashed across the Jersey Meadowlands, churning chemical whitecaps on the marsh scum. Smears of acid ice streaked the windows of the New Jersey Transit train car, inside which the air-conditioning blasted away with perverse efficiency. Captains of industry were huddled in their Tripler overcoats, turning the pages of the Times with fleece-swaddled fingers.

  And Scott Preston sat there, in nothing but a lightweight suit, sweating.

  He was having trouble concentrating on the Times. He read one paragraph, and by the time he had started on the second, he had forgotten what the first one said. So he turned to the crossword puzzle: nothing to remember, all there in one glance. But today was a Friday, usually the hardest puzzle of the week, and the first two clues he saw were “Babylonian stringed instrument" and “Hebrew pastry." He dropped the paper under the seat and stared out the window, wiping beads of sweat off his upper lip with the back of his hand.

  The train slowed, stuttered and sighed to a stop. In the middle of nowhere. He didn’t like it when this happened, didn't like being trapped in a steel tube on a frozen desert. He looked to the door at the end of the car, expecting to see the conductor burst through, maybe wearing a gas mask, shouting something like "It's gonna blow!" None of the other passengers even glanced up from their papers. Sheep, all sheep, conditioned to mindless resignation by years of debasing routine.

  Not Preston. He was getting out of here.

  No! Stop it! Nothing 's wrong. Take a deep breath.

  He gripped the back of the seat in front of him. His palms were slimy.

  Count one tiny blessing: No one was sitting next to him. He couldn't stand being crowded, especially by strangers, especially in emergencies like this.

  So of course just then some sonofabitch had to sit down next to him. Preston felt him rather than saw him, for Preston had his face pressed to the window.

  “It's like an oven back there," said the intruder. *'This railroad's got two classes of service: bake and freeze."

  Damn! He recognized the voice. Of all the four billion people on the planet Earth, all the mutes and Lithuanians, bail-jumpers and illegal aliens—people who would not conceive of engaging Preston in idle chatter—the guy who took this last seat in this frigid coffin had to be someone he knew. Not only knew but worked with! Just his luck. He had sensed it since the first blades of light had pierced his eyelids this morning: Today would not be a good day. If his atavistic sensibilities had been more finely tuned, he would have read the omens, chucked his spear into the dirt and turned back into his cave to await more favorable signs.

  He hunched his shoulders and ducked his head, pretending to count dirt balls on the windowsill.

  “Scott! . . . Hey, Scott!"

  With a phony yawn and an elaborate stretch, Preston turned away from the window. “Oh, hi, Dave."

  “I thought you always took the seven-fifty."

  "Overslept."

  “I had root canal. I think my dentist was the guy in Marathon Man.'' Dave Diamond slapped his Times on his lap, folded it open to the advertising section. ''We can split a cab."

  The train jolted, lurched a couple of times and gathered speed. Preston wiped his hands on his trousers, squeezed droplets of sweat out of his eyebrows and forced his mind to focus on devising a plausible reason for not sharing a cab to the office.

  Sharing a cab was a commitment, and he was not ready to make a commitment. Not today. Today was going to be a day to get through, to survive. All bets were off, all promises on hold. It was weird how days like this crept up on him without warning. He had been having more and more of them lately.

  But he could deal with them. The tools were at hand. Or they would be. He smiled as the train plunged into the darkness of the tunnel.

  He felt better already, now that the decision had been made.

  When they reached the top of the stairs in the main concourse of Penn Station, Diamond pointed to the Eighth Avenue exit. Preston shook his head: no.

  “What's the matter?"

  Affecting a stricken look, Preston said, “I have to stop at the John."

  “I’ll wait."

  “No, don't." He clutched his stomach. “Something tells me this'll be a long one. I'll catch you later."

  “No sweat. I wait five minutes, I still save time taking a cab."

  '”No!" Panic. He hadn't thought it through. “I could be an hour. Two hours." Preston reached for his wallet, pressed a few dollar bills into Diamond's hand. “Here. My share." He scurried away before Diamond could think up some other stupid argument. He didn't look back but imagined Diamond standing there, bewildered, as if thinking: This isn't right, this isn't the way things go.

  Screw him. Preston didn't owe him an explanation. Some people think that because they suggest something that on the surface makes sense, like sharing a cab, if you don't go along with it there's got to be something wrong with you and they have a right to know what it is. Well, they don't. Everybody has their own imperatives, and they handle them in their own ways, and

  Preston wasn't about to tell him what was going on beneath his surface. The man wouldn't understand. People always think they'd understand, but they never do. Sometimes they pretend to, but they don't really. Because they can't.

  About fifty yards down the concourse, Preston did turn back, to make sure Diamond wasn't following him. Not that he should be, but it never hurt to be careful. He could see Diamond riding the escalator up to Eighth Avenue.

  The restaurant at the end of the concourse was opening up. A waitress was swabbing tables, the bartender slicing lemon peels into a bowl.

  Preston walked back to the far end of the bar and sat on a stool in the shadows. He sighed. Almost home.

  The bartender did not look up, just kept slicing his lemon. Preston's mouth was dry, his palms sweating again, but he said nothing. Don't be impatient. Be casual.

  The bartender sliced the last scintilla of peel off the lemon and dropped the bald white ball into the steel sink.

  Now he would turn to take Preston's order. Preston forced a smile, started to speak.

  The bartender picked up another lemon and started to flay it.

  Preston's smile froze. Jesus Christ! What does he want? An engraved invitation?


  He cleared his throat.

  The bartender ignored him.

  He said, “Excuse me?"

  “What for?” the bartender said without missing a slice.

  Now Preston knew. The man was a sadist. The cardboard landscape of this man's day was brightened by inflicting pain on strangers. The kind of man whose car sported a bumper sticker reading, “Hire the handicapped. They're fun to watch."

  Preston didn't need this. Not today. He'd take his trade elsewhere. He looked at his watch. Nine forty-five. No time to seek out another oasis.

  He slid off the stool, walked down the bar and stood before the bartender, who, head bent to his sacred lemons, presented to Preston a tonsure in the center of which a scaly substance was thriving. A molting snake.

  "I have just had root-canal work," he said as calmly as he could through a throat whose tendons were as tight as violin strings. “I am in agony. May I please have a double vodka on the rocks?"

  “Twist?"

  “Please." He returned to his stool in the shadows.

  The waitress ambled by and placed an ashtray before him, letting her gaze linger on him for a second. A bony, angular woman whose canine teeth were missing, she looked fifty and was probably thirty.

  Preston touched his cheek and said, 'Talk about pain.''

  “Sure, honey."

  The bartender set the drink before him and took the twenty Preston had tucked under the ashtray. He retreated to his station, where the waitress stood smoking a cigarette. Preston noticed that they were both smiling and stealing glances at him, and for a moment he wondered why.

  Then he reached for his glass.

  The glass was full, brimful, a few molecules from overflowing, the liquid contained only by surface tension. And Preston's hand—as he approached the safe harbor of relief from this most hideous of mornings, as he instinctively tasted the succor waiting in the glass—was palsied. It trembled so much that had his fingers not been padded with flesh, they would have rattled together like castanets. He could not touch the glass without slopping vodka all over the bar, could not lift the nectar to his lips without soaking his shirt.

  This was no accident. The bartender had done it on purpose. Preston looked at the vile, sniggering couple huddled in a miasma of toxic fumes over a pile of mutilated fruit, and he knew that they were waiting to see him abase himself, hoping he would lean forward and bury his muzzle in the glass like a dog in his water dish or—better still—that he would attempt to hoist the glass and would spill it and, in desperation, would lick the liquid from puddles on the bar.

  As ghastly as this day had been, as compelling as his need now was, he resolved that he would not be the butt of their cruel game. He felt like a captive member of the Maquis, determined not only to endure Gestapo torture and deny his interrogators the nuggets of intelligence they sought, but also to outwit them at their own game and escape to sunlit uplands, singing 'He jour de gloire est arrive. ..."

  He took his handkerchief from his pocket and unfolded it. Holding it beneath the level of the bar, he twirled it into a length of linen rope. His left fist gripped one end of the rope. The middle fingers of his right hand pressed the other end to his palm, leaving his right thumb and forefinger free.

  Then he sat and waited, watching the vicious duo watching him, pleased that he knew what they were doing but that they did not know he knew, anticipating the triumph of proving to them that he was not one of the helpless rummies they were accustomed to tormenting.

  Outside, in the concourse, commuters hurried by, unaware of the heroic test of wills being fought here in the dim cocoon. The stationmaster announced the arrival of a train from Boston.

  Preston could hear his heart beating, could taste a dusty gum like plaster on his teeth. Come on, damn you! Get bored. Slice a lemon!

  A homeless man reeled into the bar, dragging a fur coat on the floor behind him.

  "Hey, man . . . gizabeah. ..."

  "Beat it, Jasper."

  "Igotafuckinbread . . . gizabeah. ..."

  "I said beat it!" The bartender pointed at the door.

  The waitress reached for a cigarette.

  Now!

  Fast as a cat, Preston looped the handkerchief around his neck. He dipped his right shoulder far enough for his right thumb and forefinger to lift the glass. Then he pulled with his left hand, and the glass rose—smoothly, without a quiver, without spilling so much as an atom— to his lips.

  He drained it in a single swallow.

  He closed his eyes and held the glass aloft as the precious lubricant coursed through his pipes and pooled warmly in his stomach. A delicious shudder traveled across his shoulders and lifted the hair on the back of his neck. He balled the handkerchief and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

  The warmth rippled outward, sending messages of peace to the sentinels at the farthest reaches of his body.

  He opened his eyes and set the glass down on the lacquered bar. At the sound the bartender wheeled. His face betrayed nothing, but Preston knew he was dumbfounded.

  Preston said pleasantly, "The other half, if you please."

  One more, two at the most, would keep the peace till lunchtime.

  As Preston awaited the refill, a vague spectre of disappointment fluttered by. He had promised himself that today would be the day. He had finished the last of the scotch last night before supper and, to banish temptation, had drunk at midnight the final four fingers of Stolichnaya from the bottle in the freezer. All that remained in the house now was cooking sherry, and he'd have to have a real problem before he'd drink that sewage.

  Today was the first of the month, and he had found that it was good to quit on such signal days. It gave him landmarks to measure his progress against.

  But how could he have known what today would be like? First Margaret forgot to wake him. Then the coffee machine went berserk and produced nothing but black sludge. Then the car was so low on gas that he had to fill it on the way to the station, which meant that he had to sprint for the train, ending up sweating like a longshoreman and having to stand all the way to Newark. Then the goddam train broke down somewhere in the tundra, which gave him a bad anxiety flash, and finally Dave Diamond had to sit next to him and babble like a fishwife all the way to Penn Station, which capped the morning with shit.

  Perhaps there were Pollyannas who could deal with a day like this without a little help from their friends. Not Preston. He was a human being, not one of your high-performance robots. What was it Doctor Johnson said? “Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding." Amen.

  The bartender put the refill before Preston and cut six more dollars from the twenty. There was no sneer on his face now, no holier-than-thou attitude. Preston decided that he wasn't such a bad guy.

  Preston didn't gulp this one. He didn't have to. He sipped it, savoring the feeling of the icy silk as it coated his tongue and flushed all the gloom away. There was hope for today after all.

  And tomorrow? Would tomorrow be the day? No. Forget it. Don't even think about quitting on a weekend. People who try to quit on weekends are kidding themselves. It can't be done. The pressures are too great: lunches, dinners, cocktail parties. What happens is, you promise yourself that you're going to quit on the weekend, and when you don't, you go into a funk of self-loathing for breaking your promise, and the only way out of the funk is . . . well, it's obvious.

  Mondays were the best days. Clean slate. No social commitments. Early supper, a little television, read a book, go to bed. Once you have a whole day under your belt, the next day’s easier and the next even easier, and so on. You can build momentum if you stop on a Monday.

  Monday, Preston vowed. I'll quit Monday.

  II

  As THE ELEVATOR Opened onto the reception area of Mason & Storrow, Preston mashed the last of a Lifesaver between his molars and swallowed the crumbs. He exhaled into his palm: pure mint.

  This reception area was famous in publishing. It had been featured in Architectural
Digest and had been used as a set in half a dozen movies and television shows. It was decorated like the library of an Edwardian men's club, furnished with leather couches and armchairs, standing brass ashtrays and floor-to-ceiling bookcases packed with every book published by M&S in 103 years in the business, including (most prominently displayed) those by the winners of two Nobel Prizes, sixteen Pulitzers, a gaggle of National Book Awards, Newberys and Caldecotts too numerous to count and assorted Edgars and science-fiction citations.

  To established authors, the reception area of Mason & Storrow was warm and welcoming, an affirmation of their accomplishment. To ambitious unpublished authors, it was inspiring but frightening, seeming to cry out to them, “Abandon hope, all hacks who enter here, for this is a class house.”

  To Preston, it was home. More than his house in Hopewell, more than his cottage in Maine, more than the house in which he had grown up in New Canaan, this imposing but cozy room represented support and security, long-term care for himself, his career, his retirement, his family. Even his teeth.

  It was also home, from nine to five, to the finest-looking receptionist in all of publishing, one Sharon Prinze. Preston was fond of telling a story (apocryphal, perhaps; embroidered, certainly) about Styron and Mailer stopping by one day to see Warren Storrow and becoming so smitten by Sharon Prinze that they absconded with her to Elaine's and imprisoned her there until she consented to spend the rest of her natural life shuttling between Provincetown and Martha's Vineyard to serve each, in turn, as muse and boon companion.

  What was particularly tantalizing about Sharon Prinze was that her formidable battlements had so far proven to be unscalable by anyone at M&S. She was congenial, efficient, respectful, breathtakingly beautiful and utterly unattainable.

  This morning, Preston thought, she looked especially heartstopping, and it occurred to him that she might be susceptible to a subtle overture—say, a luncheon invitation tendered under the guise of seeking help with a difficult manuscript that dealt with the aspirations of single young women struggling against the anomie of the Big Apple.