Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (45 page)

This is a
terrible
party. All the men have bunched up. We stand in a circle, glowering at one another. I can think of nothing to say. I feel oddly hemmed in, like a man who is about to be stoned to death.

“Am I late?” asks the actress Uta Hagen gaily as she comes tripping into the room.

“No, no!” I say, gallantly taking her arm and steering her at once toward the punch bowl and away from the others.

“Please have the common decency to introduce your guests to one another,” says Miss Sumac, in a cold monotone. “And in the proper manner.”

In the dream, Yma Sumac seems to have some kind of hold over me, and I must do as she wishes. “O.K., O.K.,” I snap crossly. “Uta, Yma; Uta, Ava; Uta, Oona; Uta, Ona; Uta, Ida; Uta, Ugo; Uta, Abba; Uta, Ilya; Uta, Ira; Uta, Aga; Uta, Eva.” I turn to see if this has placated Miss Sumac, but she coldly ignores me. I have begun to hate her. Then I discover that the
glügg
has run out, and I am forced to offer my guests rye-and-7-Up. In the hope that no further company will arrive, I silently close the door. The bell rings instantly, however, and I feel a chill run down my spine. I pretend not to hear it.

“Answer the door,” Miss Sumac says peremptorily. My circle of guests moves menacingly toward me. With a plummeting heart, I open the door. Standing before me, in immaculate evening dress, is a sturdy, distinguished-looking man. He is the Polish concert pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski.

“Come in, Mieczyslaw!” I cry, with tears in my eyes. “I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life!”

And here always, my dream ends.

1962

ROGER ANGELL

AINMOSNI

I
NSOMNIA
is my baby. We have been going steady for a good twenty years now, and there is no hint that the dull baggage is ready to break off the affair. Three or four times a week, somewhere between three and six in the morning, this faulty thermostat inside my head clicks to “On,” raising my eyelids with an almost audible clang and releasing a fetid blast of night thoughts. Sighing, I resume my long study of the bedroom ceiling and the uninteresting shape (a penguin? an overshoe?) that the street light, slanting through the window, casts on the closet door, while I review various tedious stratagems for recapturing sleep. If I am resolute, I will arise and robe myself, stumble out of the bedroom (my wife sleeps like a Series E government bond), turn on the living-room lights, and take down a volume from my little shelf of classical pharmacopocia. George Eliot, James, and Montaigne are Nembutals, slow-acting but surefire. Thoreau, a dangerous Seconal-Demerol bomb, is reserved for emergencies; thirty minutes in the Walden beanfield sends me back to bed at a half run, fighting unconsciousness all the way down the hall. Too often, however, I stay in bed, under the delusion that sleep is only a minute or two away. This used to be the time for Night Games, which once worked for me. I would invent a No-Star baseball game, painstakingly selecting two nines made up of the least exciting ballplayers I could remember (mostly benchwarmers with the old Phillies and Senators) and playing them against each other in the deserted stadium of my mind. Three or four innings of walks, popups, foul balls, and messed-up double plays, with long pauses for rhubarbs and the introduction of relief pitchers, would bring on catalepsy. Other nights, I would begin a solo round of golf (I am a terrible golfer) on some recalled course. After a couple of pars and a brilliantly holed birdie putt, honesty required me to begin playing my real game, and a long search for my last golf ball, horribly hooked into the cattails to the left of the sixth green, would uncover, instead, a lovely Spalding Drowz-Rite. In time, however, some perverse sporting instinct began to infect me, and my Night Games became hopelessly interesting. As dawn brightened the bedroom, a pinch-hitter would bash a line drive that hit the pitcher’s rubber and rebounded crazily into a pail of water in the enemy dugout, scoring three runs and retying the game, 17–17, in the twenty-first inning; my drive off the fourteenth tee, slicing toward a patch of tamaracks, would be seized in midair by an osprey and miraculously dropped on the green, where I would begin lining up my putt just as the alarm went off. I had to close up the ballpark and throw away my clubs; I was bushed.

It was an English friend of mine, a pink-cheeked poet clearly accustomed to knocking off ten hours’ sleep every night, who got me into real small-hours trouble. He observed me yawning over a lunchtime Martini one day and drew forth an account of my ridiculous affliction. “I can help you, old boy,” he announced. “Try palindromes.”

“Palindromes?” I repeated.

“You know—backward-forward writing,” he went on. “Reads the same both ways. You remember the famous ones: ‘Madam, I’m Adam.’ ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba.’ ‘A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.’ The Elba one is supposed to be about Napoleon. Here—I’ll write it for you. You see, ‘Able’ backward is ‘Elba,’ and—”

“I know, I know,” I snapped. “But what’s that got to do with not sleeping? Am I supposed to repeat them over and over, or what?”

“No, that’s no good. You must make up your own. Nothing to it. Begin with two-way words, and soon you’ll be up to sentences. I do it whenever I can’t sleep—‘sleep’ is ‘peels,’ of course—and in ten minutes I pop right off again. Never fails. Just now, I’m working on a lovely one about Eliot, the poet. ‘T. Eliot, top bard . . .’ it begins, and it ends, ‘drab pot toilet.’ Needs a bit of work in the middle, but I’ll get it one of these nights.”

I was dubious, but that night, shortly after four, I began with the words. In a few minutes, I found “gulp plug” (something to do with bass fishing) and “live evil,” and sailed off into the best sleep I had enjoyed in several weeks. The next night brought “straw warts” and “repaid diaper,” and, in time, a long if faintly troubled snooze (“ezoons”). I was delighted. My palindromic skills improved rapidly, and soon I was no longer content with mere words. I failed to notice at first that, like all sedatives, this one had begun to weaken with protracted use; I was doubling and tripling the dose, and my intervals given over to two-way cogitation were stretching to an hour or more. One morning, after a mere twenty minutes of second shut-eye, I met my wife at the breakfast table and announced, “ ‘Editor rubs ward, draws burro tide.’ ”

“Terrific,” she said unenthusiastically. “I don’t get it. I mean, what does it
mean?
”

“Well, you see,” I began, “there’s this editor in Mexico who goes camping with his niece, and—”

“Listen,” she said, “I think you should take a phenobarb tonight. You look terrible.”

It was about six weeks later when, at five-fifteen one morning, I discovered the Japanese hiding in my pajamas. “Am a Jap,” he said, bowing politely, and then added in a whisper, “Pajama.” I slept no more. Two nights later, at precisely four-eleven, when “Repins pajama” suddenly yielded “Am a Jap sniper,” I sprang out of bed, brewed myself a pot of strong coffee, and set to work with pencil and paper on what had begun to look like a war novel. A month later, trembling, hollow-eyed, and badly strung out on coffee and Dexamyl, I finished the epic. It turned out that the thing wasn’t about a Japanese at all; it was a long telegram composed by a schizophrenic war veteran who had been wounded at Iwo Jima and was now incarcerated in some mental hospital. (This kind of surprise keeps happening when you are writing palindromes, a literary form in which the story line is controlled by the words rather than the author.) Experts have since told me that my barely intelligible pushmi-pullyu may be the longest palindrome in the English language:

MARGE, LET DAM DOGS IN. AM ON SATIRE: VOW I AM CAIN. AM ON SPOT. AM A JAP SNIPER. RED, RAW MURDER ON G.I.! IGNORE DRUM. (WARDER REPINS PAJAMA TOPS.) NO MANIAC, MA! IWO VERITAS: NO MAN IS GOD.

M
AD
T
ELEGRAM

MY recovery was a protracted one, requiring a lengthy vacation at the seashore, daily exercise, warm milk on retiring, and eventually a visit to the family psychiatrist. The head-candler listened to my story (“Rot-cod . . .” I began), then wrote out a prescription for a mild sedative (I murmured, “slip pils”) and swore me to total palindromic abstinence. He told me to avoid Tums, Serutan, and men named Otto. “Only right thinking can save you,” he said severely. “Or rather,
left-to-right
thinking.”

I tried, I really tried. For more than a year, I followed the doctor’s plan faithfully, instantly dropping my gaze whenever I began to see “
POTS
” and “
KLAW
” on traffic signs facing me across the street, and plugging away at my sleepy-time books when I was reafflicted with the Big Eye. I had begun to think that mine might be a total cure when, just two weeks ago, nodding over “Walden” again, I came upon this sentence: “We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled. . . .”

“Ah-ha!” I muttered, struck by the remarkable pertinence of this thought to my own nocturnal condition. Thoreau himself had said it; I could never quite escape. To prove the point, I repeated my exclamation, saying it backward this time.

I did not entirely give way to my reptile. Remembering my near-fatal bout with the telegram, I vowed to limit myself entirely to revising and amplifying existing palindromes—those famous chestnuts recited to me by my English friend. The very next night, during a 4
A.M.
rainstorm, I put my mind to “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.” Replacing de Lesseps with a female M.I.T. graduate, I achieved “A
woman,
a plan, a canal: Panamowa,” which was clearly inadequate; she sounded more like a ballerina. Within a few minutes, however, a dog trotted out of the underbrush of my mind—it was a Pekinese—and suddenly redesigned the entire isthmus project: “A dog, a plan, a canal: pagoda.” I went to sleep.

Napoleon led me into deeper waters. Bedwise by night light, I envisioned him as a fellow-sufferer, a veteran palindromist who must have been transfixed with joy to find the island of his first exile so brilliantly responsive to his little perversion. But what if the allies had marooned him on a
different
island in 1814? Various possibilities suggested themselves: “A dum reb was I ere I saw Bermuda.” . . . “No lava was I ere I saw Avalon.” . . . “Lana C. LaDaug was I ere I saw Guadalcanal.” None would do; the Emperor’s aides, overhearing him, would conclude that the old boy had fallen victim to aphasia. A night or two later, I replaced Boney on Elba and retinued him with a useful and highly diversified staff of officers and loyal friends—a Rumanian, a female camp follower, a Levantine, and a German. These accompanied the Emperor by turns during his habitual evening walks along the cliffs, each feigning awe and delight as the impromptu musing of the day fell from his lips. “Uncomfortable was I ere I saw Elba, Trofmocnu,” he confessed to the first. To the female, smiling roguishly and chucking her under the chin, he murmured, “Amiable was I ere I saw Elba, Ima.” The next evening, made gloomy by the rabbinical sidekick, he changed to “Vegetable was I ere I saw Elba, Tegev.” He cheered up with the burly Prussian, declaiming, “Remarkable was I ere I saw Elba, Kramer!,” but, finding the same man on duty the following night (the list had run out, and new duty rosters were up), he reversed himself, whining, “
Un
remarkable was I ere I saw Elba, Kramer,
nu?
”

That seemed to exhaust Elba (and me), and during the wee hours of last week I moved along inevitably to “Madam, I’m Adam.” For some reason, this jingle began to infuriate me. (My new night journeys had made me irritable and suspicious; my wife seemed to be looking at me with the same anxious expression she had worn when I was fighting the Jap sniper, and one day I caught her trying to sneak a telephone call to the psychiatrist.) Adam’s salutation struck me as being both rude and uninformative. At first, I attempted to make the speaker more civilized, but he resisted me: “Good day, Madam, I’m Adam Yaddoog.” . . . “Howdy, Madam, I’m Adam Y. Dwoh.” . . . “
Bonjour,
Madam, I’m Adam Roujnoh.” No dice. Who
was
this surly fellow? I determined to ferret out his last name, but the first famous Adam I thought of could only speak after clearing his throat (“
Htuis,
Madam, I’m Adam Smith”), and the second had to introduce himself just after falling down a flight of stairs (
“Y ksnilomray!
. . . Madam, I’m Adam Yarmolinsky”). Then, at exactly six-seventeen yesterday morning, I cracked the case. I was so excited that I woke up my wife. She stared at me, blurry and incredulous, as I stalked about the bedroom describing the recent visit of a well-known congressman to Wales. He had gone there, I explained, on a fact-finding trip to study mining conditions in the ancient Welsh collieries, perhaps as necessary background to the mine-safety bills now pending in Washington. Being a highly professional politician, he boned up on the local language during the transatlantic plane trip. The next morning, briefcase and homburg in hand, he tapped on the door of a miner’s cottage in Ebbw Vale, and when it was opened by a lady looking very much like Sara Allgood in “How Green Was My Valley,” he smiled charmingly, bowed, and said, “
Llewopnotyalc,
Madam, I’m Adam Clayton Powell.”

When I got home last night, I found a note from my wife saying that she had gone to stay with her mother for a while. Aware at last of my nearness to the brink, I called the psychiatrist, but his answering service told me that he was away on a month’s vacation. I dined forlornly on hot milk and Librium and was asleep before ten . . . and awake before three. Alone in bed, trembling lightly, I restudied the penguin (or overshoe) on the wall, while my mind, still unleashed, sniffed over the old ashpiles of canals, islands, and Adams. Nothing there. Nothing, that is, until seven-twelve this morning, when the beast unearthed, just under the Panama Canal, the small but glittering prize, “Suez . . . Zeus!” I sat bolt upright, clapping my brow, and uttered a great roar of delight and despair. Here, I could see, was a beginning even more promising than the Jap sniper. Released simultaneously into the boiling politics of the Middle East and the endless affairs of Olympus, I stood, perhaps, at the doorway of the greatest palindromic adventure of all time—one that I almost surely would not survive. “No!” I whimpered, burying my throbbing head beneath the pillows. “No, no!” Half smothered in linen and sleeplessness, I heard my sirens reply. “On!” they called. “On, on!”