Ideal (4 page)

Mick Watts had platinum blond hair, the face of a thug, and the blue eyes of a baby. He sat in his office, his head buried in his arms on the desk. He raised his head when Morrison Pickens entered, and his blue eyes were crystal clear—but Pickens knew that they saw nothing, for two empty bottles lay conspicuously under his chair.

“Nice weather we're having, Mick,” said Morrison Pickens.

Mick Watts nodded and said nothing.

“Nice, but hot,” said Morrison Pickens. “Awful hot. Supposing you and me slip down to the commissary for something cool and liquid?”

“I don't know a thing,” said Mick Watts. “Save your cash. Get out.”

“What are you talking about, Mick?”

“I'm not talking about nothing—and that goes for everything.”

In the typewriter on the desk, Morrison Pickens saw the sheet of a press release which Mick Watts had been composing. He read, incredulously:

“Kay Gonda does not cook her own meals or knit her own underwear. She does not play golf, adopt babies, or endow hospitals for homeless horses. She is not kind to her dear old mother—she
has
no dear old mother. She is not just like you and me. She never was like you and me. She's like nothing you rotters ever dreamt of.”

Morrison Pickens shook his head reproachfully. Mick Watts did not seem to mind his reading it. Mick Watts sat there, looking at the wall, as if he had forgotten Pickens' existence.

“You could stand a drink, once in a while, couldn't you, Mick?” said Morrison Pickens. “You look thirsty to me.”

“I don't know a thing about Kay Gonda,” said Mick Watts. “Never heard of her. . . . Kay Gonda. It's a funny name, isn't it? What is it? I went to confession once, long ago—very long ago—and they talked about the redemption of all sins. It's a funny thing to yell ‘Kay Gonda' and to think that all your sins are washed away. Just pay two bits in the balcony—and come out pure as snow.”

“On second thought, Mick,” said Morrison Pickens, “I won't offer you another drink. You'd better have something to eat.”

“I'm not hungry. I stopped being hungry many years ago. But she is.”

“Who?” asked Morrison Pickens.

“Kay Gonda,” said Mick Watts.

“Any idea where she's having her next meal?”

“In heaven,” said Mick Watts. “In a blue heaven with white lilies. Very white lilies. Only she'll never find it.”

“I don't quite follow you, Mick. What was that again?”

“You don't understand? She doesn't, either. Only it's no use. It's no use trying to unravel, because if you try, you end up with nothing but more dirt on your hands than you care to wipe off. There are not enough towels in the world to wipe it off. Not enough towels. That's the trouble.”

“I'll drop in some other time,” said Morrison Pickens.

Mick Watts rose, and staggered, and picked up a bottle from under his chair, and took a long drink, and, straightening himself to his full height, raising the bottle, swaying, said solemnly:

“A great quest. The quest of the hopeless. Why are the hopeless ones always those to hope? Why do we want to see it, when we're luckier if we don't even suspect that it could ever be seen? Why does she? Why does she have to be hurt?”

“Good day,” said Morrison Pickens.

 • • • 

The last place Morrison Pickens visited on the lot was the dressing room bungalow of Kay Gonda. Miss Terrence, her secretary, sat in the reception room as usual. Miss Terrence had not heard from Kay Gonda for two days, but she appeared at the bungalow promptly on the dot of nine and sat at her spotless glass desk till six. Miss Terrence wore a black dress with a blinding white collar. She wore square, rimless glasses and her nails were shell-pink.

Miss Terrence knew nothing about Miss Gonda's disappearance. She had not seen Miss Gonda since her trip to Santa Barbara, two days ago. She supposed, however, that Miss Gonda had been back at the studio, after that dinner, sometime during the night. For when she, Miss Terrence, had entered the bungalow on the following morning she had found that from among Miss Gonda's fan mail, six letters were
missing.

“Dear Miss Gonda,

I am not a regular movie fan, but I've never missed a picture of yours. And I can't even say that I like your pictures. For instance, I enjoy the Willie Wookey comedies much more. Only there's something about you which I have to see. Sometimes I think that the day I stop wanting to see it, that day I'll know I'm not alive anymore. It's something I can't give a name to, something I had, but lost, but you're keeping it for me, for all of us. I had it long ago, when I was very young. You know how it is: when you're very young there's something ahead of you so big you're afraid of it, but you wait for it and you're so happy waiting. Then the years pass and it never comes. And then you find one day that you're not waiting anymore. It makes you sad,
and that's silly, because you didn't even know what it was you were waiting for. I look at myself and I don't know. But when I look at you—I do.

And sometimes I think that if ever, by some miracle, anything like you came into my life, I'd drop it all and follow you, and gladly lay down my life for you, because, you see, I'm still a human being.

Very truly yours,

George S. Perkins

S. Hoover Street

Los Angeles, California”

O
n the afternoon of May 5th, George S. Perkins received a promotion. He was made Assistant Manager of the Daffodil Canning Company. The boss called him into his office to congratulate him. The boss said:

“If ever a man deserved a raise, you're it, G.S.”

George S. Perkins straightened his knitted tie of green and blue stripes, blinked, cleared his throat and answered:

“I feel greatly honored and I shall do my best.”

The boss said:

“Of course you will, old boy. Now, what about a little cough medicine for the occasion?”

George S. Perkins said:

“I don't mind if I do.”

The boss filled two glasses that had red rims and funny black figures of drunks leaning against lampposts. George S. Perkins got up to take his glass, and the boss got up, and they clinked glasses across the desk.

“Here's looking at you,” said the boss.

“Mud in your eye,” said George S. Perkins.

They emptied the glasses and the boss said:

“Bet you're just itching to get home and tell the news to the little woman.”

“Mrs. Perkins will be most grateful, same as myself,” said George S. Perkins.

Outside the boss' office, the advertising manager—who was a wit—twisted the sparse blond hair into a curlicue in the middle of George S. Perkins' scalp, saying, “Always knew you had the stuff, old boy, old boy, old boy.”

George S. Perkins sat down at his desk to finish the day's work. He had sat at the desk every working day of the last twenty years. He knew every grain in its old wood and the charred spot of a cigarette burn someone had left there carelessly a long time ago. He had not noticed how and when the bright broad varnish had disappeared and how the long, grayish bands had come to cross its wide expanse. He had not noticed how the little wrinkles had come in the skin between his fingers; but his hands were still the same, white and soft, with fingers too short for his body, and when he closed them into helpless little fists, soft creases, like bracelets, still crossed his wrists, like the wrists of a baby.

His face had not changed, and his office had not changed, everything in it familiar, inescapable, like the lines of his face. The legs of the filing cabinet had worn deep cuts in the carpet, and the sun had burnt the carpet to a soft gray, leaving a darker brown patch under the filing cabinet. He had sat there while somewhere at home a wedding had been waiting for him, while in a used car lot a dealer had been waiting with his first automobile, while in a hospital his wife had been awaiting a new life to enter their lives. He had stared hopefully, miserably, happily, wearily at the same spot on the wall by the watercolor, a gray spot that looked like a rabbit with a round snoot and one long ear.

On a shelf by the window stood tiers of bright cans with green and red and pink labels fading softly into one shade of dusty yellow: peaches and apple butter and mincemeat and salmon. They stood erect, immovable like stout bars. Sometimes he thought foolishly that the bars were rising across the windowpane. But he liked the can of salmon, because he had suggested to the artist the green tangle of parsley on the white plates by the juicy pink slice, and the artist had said, “Great idea, Mr. Perkins. Just the right touch. The appeal to elegance.”

Beyond the window, a tangle of roofs and chimneys stretched to the far horizon. The sky was turning a muddy brown beyond the roofs, with a faint reddish hue, like dishwater after a dinner when beets had been served. But there were a few spots of pink scattered over the brown, a pink soft as petals of apple blossom in the spring. Many years ago, at that hour, George S. Perkins remembered watching the pink beyond the cornice of a tall old house and thinking dimly of what lay there, beyond the house, and farther, beyond the pink, in some strange countries where the sun was just rising, and of what could happen to him there, very far away, what would happen—someday. But he had not thought of that for many years, and a big black skyscraper had risen to hide the old house, and on the roof of the skyscraper there was an electric sign for Tornado Motor Oil, a tangled web of metal against the sunset.

George S. Perkins took two letters from his recent mail, one from a famous golf club with a return envelope enclosed for his initiation fee, the other from an expensive tailor. He made a ring with a red pencil around the tailor's address. He must also look up a good gym, he thought, would have to do something about that stomach of his; a bulge would spoil the classiest suit, not a big bulge, but still a bulge.

The light went on in the Tornado Motor Oil sign beyond the window, huge letters going on and off, thick drops outlined in yellow
neon tubes, falling, in jerking spasms, from a long nozzle into a bucket. George S. Perkins got up and locked his desk, whistling a tune from a musical comedy he had seen in New York while on his honeymoon. The advertising manager said: “Well, well!”

George S. Perkins drove home, whistling “Over There.” The evening was turning chilly, and a fire burnt on the imitation logs in the fireplace of his living room. The living room smelt of lavender and deep-fat frying. A lamp was lit on the mantelpiece; it had a standard of two huge dice cubes and a shade covered with old whiskey labels.

“You're late,” said Mrs. Perkins.

Mrs. Perkins wore a dress of brown crepe de chine with a large rhinestone clip in front that always snapped open, showing a slip that had been pink. She wore dark gray, service-weight stockings and brown comfort shoes. Her face looked like a bird's, a bird that had wizened slowly, drying out in the sun, and her nails were clipped very short.

“Well, dovey,” said George S. Perkins gaily, “I have a good excuse for being late.”

“I have no doubt about that,” said Mrs. Perkins, “but listen to me, George Perkins, you'll have to do something about Junior. That boy of yours got a D again in arithmetic. As I've always said, if a father don't take the proper interest in his children, what can you expect from a boy who—”

“Aw, honeybunch, we'll excuse the kid for once—just to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“How would you like to be Mrs. Assistant Manager of the Daffodil Canning Company?”

“I would like it very much,” said Mrs. Perkins. “Not that I have any hope of ever being.”

“Well, dovey, you are. As of today.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Perkins. “Mama! Come here!”

Mrs. Shly, Mr. Perkins' mother-in-law, wore an ample dress of printed silk with blue daisies and hummingbirds on a white background, a string of imitation seed pearls, and a net over her heavy, graying blond hair.

“Mama,” said Mrs. Perkins, “Georgie's got a promotion.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Shly, “we've waited for it long enough.”

“But you don't understand,” said George S. Perkins, blinking helplessly, “I've been made Assistant Manager—” He looked for a response in their faces, found none, added lamely, “—of the Daffodil Canning Company.”

“Well?” asked Mrs. Shly.

“Rosie,” he said softly, looking at his wife, “it's twenty years that I've worked for it.”

“That, my boy,” said Mrs. Shly, “is nothing to brag about.”

“Well, but I've made it. . . . It's a long time, twenty years. You get sort of tired. But now . . . Rosie, now we can take it easy . . . easy . . . light. . . .” His voice sounded eager and young for a moment. “You know,
light . . .
” and died again, and added apologetically, “Easy, I mean.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Mrs. Perkins.

“Dovey, I've been sort of . . . planning . . . thinking on the way home. . . . I've been thinking of it for a long time, nights, you know . . . making plans. . . .”

“Indeed? But your wife's not let in on any of it?”

“Oh, I . . . It was just sort of like dreaming . . . and you might've thought I was . . . unhappy, and it isn't that at all, only you know how it is: you work and work all day, and everything goes nicely, and suddenly you feel like you can't stand another minute of it, for no reason at all. But then it passes. It always passes.”

“I declare,” said Mrs. Perkins, “I never heard the like of it.”

“Well, I was just thinking . . .”

“You'll stop thinking this minute,” said Mrs. Shly, “or the roast'll be all ruined.”

At the dinner table, when the maid had served roasted leg of lamb with mint sauce, George S. Perkins said:

“Now, what I was thinking about, dovey . . .”

“First of all,” said Mrs. Perkins, “we've got to have a new Frigidaire. The old one's a sight. No one uses iceboxes anymore. Now, Mrs. Tucker . . . Cora Mae, you don't butter a whole slice at once. Can't you eat like a lady? Now, Mrs. Tucker has a new one and it's a honey. Electric light inside and everything.”

“Ours is only about two years old,” said George S. Perkins. “It looks pretty good to me.”

“That,” said Mrs. Shly, “is because you're a very economical man, but the only thing you save on is your home and family.”

“I was thinking,” said George S. Perkins, “you know, honey, if we're very careful, we could take a vacation maybe—in a year or two—and go maybe to Europe, you know, Switzerland or Italy. It's where they have mountains, you know.”

“Well?”

“Well, and lakes. And snow high up there. And sunsets.”

“And what would we do?”

“Oh . . . well . . . just rest, I guess. And look around, sort of. You know, at the swans and the sailboats. Just the two of us.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mrs. Shly, “just the
two
of you.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Perkins, “you were always a great one at making up ways of wasting good money, George Perkins. And my slaving and skimping and saving every little penny. Swans, indeed. Well, before you go thinking of any swans, you'd better get me a new Frigidaire, that's all I've got to say.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Shly, “and we sure need a mayonnaise mixer. And a 'lectric serving machine. And it's about time to be thinking of a new car, too.”

“Look,” said George S. Perkins, “you don't understand. I don't want anything that we need.”

“What's that?” asked Mrs. Perkins, and her mouth remained hanging open.

“Please, Rosie. Listen. You
must
understand . . . I want something I don't need at all.”

“George Perkins! Have you been drinking?”

“Rosie, if we start that all over again—buying things—paying for things—the car and the house and the dentist's bills—more of it—all over again—and nothing else—never—and we pass up our last chance—”

“What's the matter with you? What's come over you all of a sudden?”

“Rosie, it isn't that I've been unhappy. And it isn't that I don't like what I got out of life. I like it fine. Only . . . well, it's like that old bathrobe of mine, Rosie. I'm glad I have it, it's pretty and warm and comfortable, and I like it, just the same as I like the rest of it. Just like that. And no more. There should be more.”

“Well, I like that! The swell bathrobe I picked for your birthday. That's the thanks I get! Well, if you didn't like it, why didn't you exchange it?”

“Oh, Rosie, it isn't that! It's a swell bathrobe. Only, you know, a man can't live his whole life for a bathrobe. Or for things that man feels the same way about. Nice things, Rosie, only there should be more.”

“What?”

“I don't know. That's just it. A man should know.”

“He's touched in the head,” said Mrs. Shly.

“Rosie, a man can't live just for things that do nothing to him—inside, I mean. There should be something that he's afraid of—afraid
and happy. Like going to church—only not in a church. Something he can look up to. Something—high, Rosie . . . That's it,
high
.”

“Well, if it's culture you want, didn't I subscribe to the Book-of-the-Month Club? Didn't I?”

“Oh, I know I can't explain it. There's just one thing I'm asking, Rosie, just one: let's take that vacation. Let's try. Maybe things would happen to us . . . strange things . . . the kind you dream about. I'll be an old man, if I give that up. I don't want to be old. Not yet, Rosie. Oh, Lord, not yet! Just leave me a few years, Rosie.”

“Oh, I don't mind about your vacation. You can have your vacation—if we can afford it, after the important things are taken care of. You got to think of the important things first. Like a new Frigidaire, for instance. That old box of ours is a mess, all right. It never keeps anything fresh. Now, I had some apple butter and . . .”