5:45 to Suburbia (16 page)
Authors: Vin Packer
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
C
HARLIE
G
IBSON
woke after an hour. It was still dark out, and the lights blazed in the room around him. Beside the leg of the couch, the half-empty glass of bourbon rested, and the letter from Janie had fallen from his pocket onto the floor.
He looked at his watch and saw that it was fifteen minutes past four. He still felt a little foggy, high. Getting up, Charlie went to the front door through the hallway, opened it and breathed in the cold March air. He looked across the street at the Marksons’, wondering why he felt some preposterous satisfaction in the knowledge that all seemed serene there. And then, he glanced next door at the Lederers’. He remembered a couple of months back when Ashley Lederer lost his job; just got dumped — wham-o, like that! — out of a $30,000 a year P.R. job. He remembered how Mil, Ashley’s wife, tried to cover for him, saying Ash had always wanted to free-lance and Ash himself coming right out with it one night at the club — sober, too; saying, “I was fired. And I’m plenty worried about getting something else. Man my age, for the love of Pete!” Charlie remembered that Bruce interviewed Ashley almost the next day, after Markson got him an interview at a colleague’s firm; and Charlie remembered when Ashley finally got placed — for more than he’d been making in P.R. Well, Charlie felt great, he remembered. God damn it, when Ash got that break Charlie felt great. And the only time he’d probably ever see Ash before spring, when they’d wave casually from their lawns, would be if Ash wanted to borrow a snow shovel, or if Charlie’d forgotten his chains and wanted a push.
It was funny all right, Charlie thought. God damn it, it was nice. He decided he was either drunk or a candidate for the laughing academy to be standing on his front porch at four in the morning waxing sentimental over a bastard like Ashley Lederer who couldn’t even keep his hedges clipped. Or Mel Markson, a lousy cheapskate who still drove a ‘41 Buick. Likes their lines, the ‘41’s, he claims, goddam rubbish, Charlie thought; cheapskate. Charlie grinned. Yep, he was off his rocker, all right, standing out at the crack of dawn choking up over his neighbors.
He took a deep breath, one last one, went in and shut the door behind him. Again he tripped on the edge of the coat rack. Some day he’d kill himself that way.
Charlie walked into the living room and reached down to take the letter from Janie from the rug. He decided to answer it before he went to bed. He decided he could do that much anyway. With it, Charlie went to his den, around the corner from the kitchen near the rear staircase, and sitting down at his desk there, shooting a clean piece of paper into the roller, Charlie began to type.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
D
EAR
J
ANIE
(Jaynie)
Your father is a little high; he thinks, with good reason.
In this world of comfortable shoes, Dr. Spock and Scrabble after dinner, he finds himself in the awkward position of being locked out of the bedroom by your mother. And yesterday he was fifty years old. He received your letter about Dudley Davis, and he suddenly realized he had no answer for you, only some stray and sundry thoughts to pass along to you.
This then, in the form of an answer.
You’re right to say I never failed you — along material lines. I wanted you to have everything, and I think I provided you with everything you wanted — in the way of schools, clothes, allowance and so forth. You were more or less handed these things on a silver platter.
But honey, I think I failed you by never telling you that the platter wasn’t just pulled out of the butler’s pantry, but that it was worked for.
When you were born — and what a squalling brat you were — and what a terror that first year — your mother and I sat up nights thinking of ways to slash the budget to afford you, and through the years we planned and saved so that you could enjoy the things we’ve given you and hope to give you in the future.
I don’t tell you this to say, “See what we’ve done for you, see how we’ve sacrificed,” but to explain to you that you are the end product of the two machineries which, in your letter, you most abhorred, the business world and marriage. And the struggle within both for success.
You’re right in believing the business world is not all lollipops and luncheon dates, but neither is it all “step-on-the-toes-and-go-for-the-buck.” Like any other world, what it is depends on what you are. Like any other world, it has its stereotypes and clichés, its ruts and necessities, and its challenges, casualties, triumphs and tragedies.
Your young man wants to be a writer, a serious writer, and that’s a fine ambition. But in the writers’ world too there are the ruthless and the kind, the monotonous and the vital. No one world holds a monopoly on either good or bad, more “meaningful” or more “meaningless.”
As a lad, I believed I’d be a poet or a novelist, a renowned one. I imagined I’d have several alluring and fawning mistresses, and maybe a wife, and at the chance of shocking
you,
I never, not even when your mother told me you were on the way, wanted children to have any part in my life.
Now at 50 I find myself an editor in a chain magazine house, who rarely even gets the opportunity to read poems or novels; on the verge, after this letter is written, of trying to persuade the woman I have been married to for 22 years to unlock the door of the guest bedroom and come on into ours (because your father never rests comfortably unless he sees the curler-pinned head on the pillow of the bed opposite him) and attempting in a clumsily affectionate way to tell the other woman he loves — you — how many good things he wants for her, not material things, but cliché things he never thought he’d endorse as a boy. Marriage, and a family, and some certain place in the community of people.
This isn’t quite the world I imagined and dreamed of in my younger days, but it’s very nice all the same —
and
that’s the
way in
this life. One’s prayers
and
wishes are usually granted, but often the fullfillment is quite different — and much better — than the wish.
I can’t advise you, sweetheart, but I can hope for you, that somehow this feeling you have which is “more than love” will bring what love brings — the immense complexity involved in being not different from everyone else, and not exactly like everyone else, but more or less the way people are in all worlds: unwilling, protesting, happy, sort of soaring along without knowing it.
This, in place of an answer.
Love,
DAD
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I
T WAS
six forty-five in the morning when Charlie finished what he had begun after he had written Janie.
Carefully, he began to reread the memo he had worked over:
RE: THE VILE DUMMY
One of the principle reasons this book is a mistake is that it will alienate a major advertising account — the sponsors of Avery’s shows, who take full-page advertsements in seven of our books, including the weekly,
Topic.
They have built the name Avery, and vice versa, and to attack him is to attack them, so closely associated are they in the mind of the consumer. In addition, it is obvious that —
Suddenly, Charlie put the pencil down and let the memo fall to the desk. He began to wonder just what in hell he was doing writing a memo to Bruce. Why didn’t he just
tell
Bruce? Why hadn’t he told him before this? … He was immensely ashamed to believe that Wally Keene could have even in any small way been the reason, so ashamed that he guffawed aloud. My God, Charlie, whata you know about that.
Impulsively he wadded up the memo. He would remember it, all right! And before he got up to Bruce’s office, he’d get the sales figures on the last issue of the Dorset book which ran the banner on the cover with the Hemingway piece.
That was what Cadence needed more than they needed a new book; they needed to do something about the old ones. They needed banners and big-name writers, and they needed to promote hell out of them — billboards, radio spots across the board canned for national consumption. They needed to spark up what they had. What the hell made Bruce sell Cadence down the river for a book on queers and creeps and crackpots? Charlie was going to ask him just what the hell Bruce was thinking of. Never mind if it’s in dummy. Never mind if it’s in mock-up. Shove it! Can it!
The hell with a memo!
Charlie leaned back in his desk chair and laughed.
Then, stretching, he pulled himself to his feet. He felt good, better than he’d felt in a long time. He wanted to go up and pound on Joan’s door and tell her how he felt, and as he stood there staring out at the beginning blue of early morning, he began to resent her locking him out without even waiting to hear his side. And as suddenly as he had felt the resentment, he felt a certain resignation, and a flash of uncanny loneliness.
He thought of how really alone people could be — not for long, not most people, but for those suspended moments of utter isolation. And he thought of Marge waking up in a bed in the hospital, and he stood staring at the day with an empty feeling, wishing Joan would appear miraculously, like the wife in some slick story, with a pot of hot coffee on a tray, and a smile and a kiss.
But God, he was too tired now. He decided to go up to bed and sleep the few hours left before it would be time once more to catch the New York bound.
After he put out the light, Charlie went up the stairs, past “Janie & Mamma, Glen Falls, 1936 — ?icnic” and “Papa’s new car & Janie, 1946” and on down the hall toward the bedroom.
In her bed across from him, Joan was asleep.
Quietly Charlie slipped out of his clothes and under the covers in his own bed.
At some point in the night, she had come back to their room. She had met him halfway. The rest was up to him when they woke up, and Charlie grinned as he shut his eyes.
That’s right, he thought, it never works out quite the way you dreamed it would in this life. But somehow it does work out.
It isn’t total one-hundred percent-Ivory-Soap perfect. Nothing is.
But it’s okay.
Charlie Gibson was just dropping off to sleep then, when the telephone began its persistent ringing.
THE END
of a Gold Medal Original
V
IN
P
ACKER
If you liked 5:45 to Suburbia check out:
Something in the Shadows
Upstairs in his study, Joseph Meaker heard Maggie’s voice drown out the others. Weekends, Maggie held court in the living room, over coffee and brandy, after a late dinner. Her audience was always a captive one, since the guests were there for the weekend. Last night had been a two-thirty night, and this one? Joseph Meaker glanced at his watch. Ten-after-one. He was reminded of an old Frost poem which ended: “And miles to go before I sleep.” Hours to go — Saturday night Maggie was always in top form.
They had reached an agreement about weekends after the last fight, four or five days ago. Joseph could simply sleep in his study on weekends. Maggie would close the door separating the upstairs from the downstairs. By the time everyone was ready to turn in, Joseph would be asleep, and Maggie would sleep in their bedroom so as not to disturb him. After all, wasn’t that the
fair
way, Maggie asked? It was certainly no fault of hers that Joseph did not drink and did not enjoy sitting up and talking. “Chewing the fat,” as she put it. Besides, Maggie always added, the move to Pennsylvania had completely inconvenienced her, and all it had done where he was concerned was to make life easier. It was Maggie who had to get up at six every weekday morning, in order to be at her office in New York by ten. It was Maggie who had to watch the weather reports and the road reports and the Trenton train schedules; Maggie, who had to rearrange her entire life so they could rent this farm.
And
— the knife’s final thrust — if Maggie did not have friends out for weekends, what the hell kind of a weekend would it be for her? A quiet one, maybe? Joseph Meaker thought of that answer, but said nothing. It would only start her off again on her favourite subject: how
he
lived in a dream world. So they had reached an agreement about weekends, and here it was in effect.
Maggie’s shrill laughter startled the cat on Joseph’s lap. A Siamese cat named Ishmael, after a favourite opening line of Joseph’s. One of his pastimes was recollecting famous opening and closing lines of novels, plays and poems; and his cat’s name came from
Moby Dick.
“Call me Ishmael” — and then followed the narrator’s description of the “damp, drizzly November in my soul.” Often Joseph took down his copy of the novel and read and reread the whole opening paragraph. It was always November in Joseph Meaker’s soul, and no way to wander and escape it as Herman Melville’s hero had. The cat, then, could do it for him, Ishmael — wanderer. Joseph put his hand out and calmed the creature. Everyone downstairs was laughing now, and Joseph wondered if Ishmael felt more than a disturbance at the noise. Ishmael often slept contentedly through the noise of Joseph’s typewriter, the noise of the radio — even the noise of Joseph’s and Maggie’s arguments; but now the cat’s ears twitched nervously, and he switched his position on Joseph’s lap, and flagged his tail. Oh, there was more to it than the noise, wasn’t there? Something else, even more annoying than noise: a door closed to you. Not just the door separating the downstairs from the upstairs, but the door separating Maggie’s kind from Joseph’s. The Maggies of the world outnumbered the Josephs, and even if that was not a fact, who would know? If there were a million or more Josephs alone in the night, who would count them? Would one of the Maggies leave the bright room, put down her drink, excuse herself from her friends and go off to make the report on Josephs? No, unlikely. A Joseph doing it was even more unlikely. He would never find his way around the Real World.
“Listen! Hush, I’ll read it!” Tom Spencer’s voice from downstairs now.
“Yes, read it, Tom!” — Maggie’s — “Joseph had them printed in Doylestown.”
Joseph Meaker did not have to listen too carefully to know what they were talking about. Maggie always got out one of the signs on weekends, to show guests. Joseph had designed them and had them made up as supplements to the standard NO GUNNING signs required by law to keep hunters off your property. Joseph’s signs were just as large as the official ones, and he had gone about his land tacking one over the other, on every tree in sight. It was a sort of postscript to the cold legal wording of the official one, and Joseph was aware that his sign was shamelessly sentimental, but he had always liked the poem; “corn” never really bothered Joseph Meaker if it made the point well.
He heard Tom Spencer reading the de la Mare poem now, imagined Maggie sitting back cupping the brandy snifter with that certain smug smile tipping her lips. Joseph’s eccentricities pleased Maggie more often than not; Joseph was her conversation piece.
HI!
HI! HANDSOME HUNTING MAN,
FIRE YOUR LITTLE GUN.
BANG! NOW THE ANIMAL
IS DEAD AND DUMB AND DONE,
NEVERMORE TO PEEP AGAIN,
CREEP AGAIN, LEAP AGAIN,
EAT OR DRINK OR SLEEP AGAIN —
OH, WHAT FUN!
Laughter and squeals and Maggie’s voice again above it all, “Isn’t it per-fect? Per-fect!”
“Per-fect!” Tom Spencer’s.
“Per-fect!” Miriam Spencer’s.
Joseph Meaker reached on the table beside him for the package of Flents. From it he took one of the pink wax plugs and popped it into his right ear, then another for the left. The noise became a humming, a buzzing; and he went back to what he was doing: reading over the letters, the poems, the notes — all that was in his Varda file.
“… and my dear, I love your soul — profound, sad, wise and exalted, like a symphony….”
2
“Don’t be silly! He has his Flents in his ears,” Maggie Meaker said. “Joseph shuts the world out with wax balls! Ah, but he’s sweet! God, but he’s sweet!” She was sitting crosslegged on the couch, wearing the new red gondolier’s pants from Bonwit’s, cradling her brandy in her palm, smoking the new brand of cigarette Albion & Frazier was launching. The confirmation that A. & F. had won the account had come through yesterday; Picks were unfiltered, regular-size cigarettes, and A. & F. was supposed to dream up a campaign which would emphasize the pleasures of the past, the old way of doing things. Tom Spencer and Maggie were to work on it together; Maggie, in charge, of course, because of seniority and experience.
“He really is sweet,” Miriam Spencer agreed.
“He must hate advertising people!” said Tom.
“I’m advertising people,” Maggie laughed. “No, Joseph’s just different. A loner, you know? Dreamer. He’d do the same if I had the Queen of England out for a weekend. That’s just Joseph.”
Maggie reached across for the bottle of Remy Martin and refilled everyone’s glass. Her own was full. She was two or three ahead. At A. & F. when men went to lunch with Maggie, they often did not appear in the office again until next day, Maggie always came back, no worse for three or four martinis and a brandy or two after the meal, but Maggie’s lunch dates (the men, not the women who never tried keeping up with her) faded off to steam rooms, early trains, or some movie to sleep through. Maggie held her liquor as well as she carried her age. At thirty-eight she had a full figure, not a thin girlish one by any means, but certainly not one that inspired her to read the Metrecal ads all the way to the end either. She was a 36-C with no sag, and a perfect size 14. Her skin was clear and softer than many women’s, and her features were good, strongly feminine, in the wide-mouthed, big-eyed, long-legged way, with large hands and feet, as some very beautiful women have, and coal black hair she wore in a semi-short, windblown fashion. If she was not exactly as beautiful as some of the classic examples of women with big feet, she was a very good-looking woman. She had style and confidence, and she was New York to her teeth.
And Joseph? Her opposite. If Joseph was anything to his teeth, he was Joseph. He was not handsome, and if someone who knew him well (whoever that would be) were asked if he were good-looking, that someone (Maggie) would most likely pause a moment and then answer, “Well, yes,
I’d
say he was.” There was room for doubt, in other words. He was extremely skinny and long-nosed, with sand-coloured hair that always seemed matted to his head, since he wore a cap most of the time, and he was nearsighted, though he seldom wore his glasses. The result was that Joseph squinted. One of the things about Joseph, one in a thousand, that Maggie never figured out, was the fact that vanity kept him from wearing his glasses. He would just as soon take Maggie out to dinner in a fine restaurant tieless, with egg on his shirt, but he would not appear in public wearing glasses. If he could help it, Joseph would not appear in public, period.
A lot of it Maggie crossed off as the predictable eccentricity of the scholar. A lot of it, as she always framed it in her thoughts, griped her soul! Before she had married Joseph three years ago, she had thought it would be fascinating to be a folklorist’s wife. She had imagined quiet evenings before some fireplace, sitting and listening to Joseph explain folk tales, discuss mores, and describe odd and enchanting peoples no one in the world had ever heard of but Joseph. As it turned out, Joseph never discussed his work and he did not enjoy sitting before fireplaces. He spent most of the time up in his study, and before they had moved to Bucks County, when they were still living in New York, he spent his evenings in the local library. Early in their marriage he had made an effort, but it was so obviously an effort — fidgeting at the table after dinner while Maggie had a second cup of coffee, falling asleep in front of guests — that Maggie finally encouraged him to do what he felt like doing, which was spending as much time as possible by himself. Bed was good, bed was very good, but whenever Maggie made a reference to her enjoyment, it seemed to embarrass Joseph. He never liked to talk about it.
• • •
There was a plus side, of course, even omitting bed. Joseph was a real individual, not cut out of anyone else’s pattern, nor chipped off anyone’s block. He was a beautiful artist, whether he simply sketched Maggie while she was cooking dinner or reading, or whether he did a full-scale oil of the house or a view from his study window. Any other man Maggie knew, who had a talent like Joseph’s, would be stacking canvases for a show, or never mind that, off in some garret wearing a beret and waiting for the world to recognize him; but Joseph often painted over his very best work, and never dragged a canvas out for anyone to see. Sometimes when Maggie was cleaning up Joseph’s study, she would come across a poem scribbled on his yellow scratch pad. Once she had asked him if she could make a copy of one and send it to
The Saturday Review.
Joseph’s answer: “What for?”
Then there was the gentleness of Joseph, the nearly self-effacing modesty of her husband. She had never seen him lose his temper, nor make what even came near a harsh statement, and Maggie had often thrown the book at him. In contrast to Maggie’s first husband, who drank himself into Roselawn Cemetery before his thirty-third birthday, Joseph was a
Ladies’ Home Journal
dream partner.
“What is Joseph working on now?” brought Maggie back from her thoughts; Tom Spencer, apple-faced and boyish (“Gotta have a gimmick, Mag, gotta get a gimmick” — rushing around A. & F., pushing his way up the ladder with calculated sincerity, fighting the good fight for that plot of suburbia at the end of the rainbow), “Another book?”
“We don’t know whether it will be a book yet or not,” Maggie said. “The Pennsylvanian Society of Folk Mores has given him a grant to study hexerei.”
“What-er-eye?”
“You know, hex signs on barns and everything. A form of Pennsylvania-Dutch witchcraft.”
Miriam Spencer exclaimed, “I love hex signs on barns!”
The single word “dumb” came to Maggie’s mind, but she smiled sweetly at Tom’s wife, and for some reason, said she loved hex signs on barns too. Tom Spencer said he had always thought they were very interesting, that someone at the agency ought to work them into an ad some time. Well, Maggie thought as she sipped her brandy, you can take the Chinaman out of China, but you can’t take China out of the Chinaman.
“I mean,” said Tom Spencer, “I’ve never seen hex signs in an ad, and I think we could work up something damn good around them.”
“I love them on barns,” Miriam Spencer repeated. She was trying hard not to yawn.
3
Joseph had dozed off. In the dream Varda sat beside him on the steps of Jesse Hall, back at the University of Missouri, blonde hair spilling down her back with the sun on it, warm; she was reading the poem she wrote. “It’s called
Dear,
Joseph” — smiling up at him on the steps of Jesse Hall, in the years back at the University.
Am I dear to you?
I wish I were.
Dear is the held in mind
in warm rooms of thought
Do I live there?
Do I live at the fireplace of your eyes?
Dear you call me
I wish I knew
Dear is the tear, the wind soft-voiced
the peaceful word
Is there peace in you?
Is there
Is there. Is there — is — and the buzzing seemed louder in his ears, slicing into his dream, waking him. He pulled the Flent out of his left ear.
“Is there any reason why you have to sit up with her all night?”
It was Miriam Spencer’s voice outside the door of his study, in the hallway by the bathroom. Joseph Meaker glanced at his watch. Six-past-three now.
Tom Spencer was saying, “Keep your voice down, Miriam!”
“Well, is there any reason why you have to sit up with her all night?”
“We’re having one last nightcap together, Miriam. Just one!”
“Every time I hear your steps come up the stairs I think you’re finally coming to bed, but oh, no, you’re just going to the bathroom, then back down to Maggie for another hour!”
“Go back to sleep, Miriam. I told you what it would be like this weekend. Didn’t I? We’ve got to work out this Picks deal.”
“All night?”
“Yes, all night, if it takes all night, dammit!”
There were angry mumblings then, and the sound of the bathroom door shutting, of feet shuffling down the hall towards the guest room. Joseph removed the other Flent and sat up on the studio couch. Ishmael was curled in a ball at the end of the couch, and scattered on the floor beside the couch were pieces from the Varda file. Joseph picked them up and put them back neatly in the Manila file folder.