Player Piano (33 page)

W
HEN THE
S
PIRIT OF THE
M
EADOWS
churned up to the dock at the Mainland, the public address system, turned low, was murmuring “Good Night, Sweetheart,” a sweet wraith of music a whisper above the voice in the pines, the lapping of the great blue water, the whir of the eagle wing.

No lights shone from the women’s and children’s lodges. In the Central Administration Building was a single square of light, silhouetting a sleeping clerk.

As Paul made for it, to ask the clerk where he might find Anita, lights flashed in his night-accustomed eyes. When his pupils had adjusted themselves to the glare, he found himself staring at his reflection in a mirror again, under the legend, T
HE
B
EST
W
IFE FOR THE
B
EST
M
AN FOR THE
B
EST
J
OB IN THE
W
ORLD
.

He hurried past the mirror, wondering how many times Anita had contemplated her reflection and the legend here, wondering how she would take the news that her Best Man had become merely a man, with no job at all.

He woke up the clerk, who called the matron in charge of the lodge where Anita slept.

“What’s matter with the party over there?” said the clerk sleepily, waiting for the matron to answer. “You’re about the tenth guy to come over here tonight. Usually they don’t start coming until about the fourth day. Now, what’s the matter with the matron, anyway? The phone’s right by her bunk.” He glanced at the clock. “You know what time it is? You haven’t got time to make a nickel. The last boat back for the island leaves in three minutes.”

“Keep ringing. I’m not going back.”

“If you’re going to spend the night, don’t tell me about it. There’re about twenty-seven rules against it.”

Paul handed him a ten-dollar bill. “Keep ringing.”

“For that, you can be invisible for a week. Whaddya like? Blondes, brunettes, redheads? Aha! She answered. Where the hell you been?” he asked the matron. “You got a Mrs. Paul Proteus there?” He nodded. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. O.K. Leave a note on her bunk, will you.” He turned to Paul. “She’s out, Doctor.”

“Out?”

“Walking in the moonlight, probably. Matron says she’s a great walker.”

If Anita was a great walker, it was news to Paul. He’d seen her drive a car to the house across the street from theirs, and she denied all the tenets of physical culture by remaining young and graceful while eating like a farmhand and conserving her strength like a princess. Bound feet and six-inch fingernails wouldn’t have restricted her activities in the least.

Paul sat down on a wicker chair in the cool blue shadows of the Administration Building’s porch and rested his feet on the peeling bark of the log railing to wait.

Now the lights along the walks blinked on and off, a silent signal, warning that the last boat was about to leave for the island.

There was laughing, and quick crunching in the gravel, and a couple ran from the woods toward the dock. Their insistence on keeping their arms about each other’s waists made their progress as graceless as a sack race. This annoyed Paul as a critic. It was painful to watch a clumsily conducted mating rite, knowing, from long experience with the skilled Anita, how much like a dance it could be when done properly.

There—she was making him slow down now, and their gait through the trees, against the moon, was more orderly.
Paul had been sure that the farewell kiss would be an ungainly business, but, all credit to her, they stopped, and took the time and stances to do it right. Good.

Paul watched them with increasing identification with the man. Paul had always been a petty thief of others’ high moments, and his hunger for this particular sort of moment was acute. With his old life gone, and his new one, whatever it was to be, not yet begun, he was voracious for love—Anita’s love, vividly imagined love, vicarious love—any love, whatever was immediately available.

Now she was coming back, slowly, thoughtfully, content. Wonderful.

The lights on the booby-trap mirror flashed on. The woman smoothed her slacks over her hips and tucked in a wisp of hair. She lingered before her image a long time, turning this way and that, seemingly pleased, as well she might be, by the shape of her breasts ingenuously hidden under tight green cotton, with the word “Captain” undulating uphill, downdale.

“Anita!”

She jumped, and quickly folded her arms across her bosom in a protective gesture. Slowly her arms went to her sides again, and she stood erect, a woman with nothing to hide, least of all Shepherd’s shirt. “Hello, Paul.” She walked over to the porch where he sat, stately, cold, and sat down beside him. “Well?”

When he said nothing, her poise began to fail and she plucked nervously at the bark on the log railing, pulling off little strips and throwing them out into the summer night. “Go ahead,” she said at last.

“Me go ahead?” said Paul.

“Don’t you think an explanation is in order?”

“Decidedly.”

“You
did
get fired, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but not for breaking a Commandment.”

“Is wearing another man’s shirt adultery in your book?” Underneath, she was plainly rattled.

Paul was delighted. He was sure now that he could bluff her into coming away with him. It was inconceivable that she was using the boring, sententious, contentious Shepherd for anything but a hollow threat to him, but this semblance of wrongdoing could now be turned to advantage. “Wouldn’t you say the shirt was symptomatic, coupled with fornication in the underbrush?” he said.

“If you mean do I love him, the answer is yes.”

Paul laughed quietly.

“I’m glad you’re taking it so well,” she said primly. “I guess it proves what I thought all along.”

“Which was—?”

Unexpectedly she burst into tears. “That I wasn’t any damn use to you at all! Finnerty was right,” she sobbed. “All you need is something stainless steel, shaped like a woman, covered with sponge rubber, and heated to body temperature.”

It was Paul’s turn to be startled. “Anita—darling, listen.”

“And you’d lend it to anybody, if you didn’t need it just then.”

“Hell’s bells, I—”

“I’m sick of being treated like a machine! You go around talking about what engineers and managers do to all the other poor, dumb people. Just look what an engineer and manager did to me!”

“For heaven’s sakes, sweetheart, I—”

“You talk about how wrong it is for smart people to lord it over people who aren’t so smart, and then go around our house showing off your great big I.Q. like it was on a sandwich sign. All right, so I’m dumb.”

“No you aren’t, Angel. Listen, I—”

“Saboteur!”

Paul fell back in his seat and shook his head, as though groggily trying to avoid a clubbing. “For the love of God, listen, will you?” he begged.

“Go on.” She was magnificently on top of the situation again.

“Darling, what you say may be true. I don’t know. But please, sweetheart, wife, I need you now like I never needed anybody in all my life.”

“Ten minutes ought to take care of that. At the outside,” she added scornfully.

“For richer, for poorer, in sickness as in health,” said Paul. “Remember that Anita? Do you remember?”

“You’re still rich, and you’re not sick.” She looked at him with passing concern. “You’re not sick, are you?”

“At heart.”

“You’ll get used to it. I did.”

“I’m sorry, Anita—I didn’t know it had been that bad. I see now that it probably was.”

“Next time I’ll marry for love.”

“Shepherd?”

“He needs me, respects me, believes in the things I believe in.”

“I hope you’ll be very happy,” said Paul, standing.

Her lips trembled, and she burst into tears again. “Paul, Paul, Paul.”

“Hmmmm?”

“I like you. Don’t forget that ever.”

“And I like
you
, Anita.”

“Doctor Proteus,” called the clerk through the window.

“Yes?”

“Doctor Kroner called and said you were to be driven over to the railroad station tonight. The jeep’s on the other side of the building, waiting. We’ve got half an hour to make the 12:52.”

“Coming.”

“Kiss me,” said Anita.

It was a stunning kiss, and, in its wake of lackadaisicalness, Paul realized that she had had absolutely nothing to gain by the kiss, that she had done it out of, of all things, the goodness of her heart.

“Come with me, Anita,” he whispered.

“I’m not as dumb as you think.” She pushed him away firmly. “Goodbye.”

D
OCTOR
P
AUL
P
ROTEUS
, an unclassified human being, was put aboard the 12:52, where he shared an ancient coach, half cuspidor, half humidor, with sixty troops on furlough from Camp Drum.

“Great Bend. The stop is Great Bend,”
said a tape recording through a loudspeaker over Paul’s head. The engineer pressed a button in his cab as he pulled into each station, down came the steps, and out came the voice.
“Next station, Carthage. Next station, Carthage. Click.”

“ ’Board!”
bawled another loudspeaker on the outside of the car.

An old man, kissing his wife goodbye on the rotting planks of the Great Bend platform, looked apologetically at the urgent voice, as though to ask the man to wait just a second more for him to say one last word. “
’Board!”
Machinery whirred, and the coach steps arose from the platform, nestled into one another, and disappeared into their niche.

“Coming! Coining!” cried the old man, and jogged unhappily toward the moving train as fast as his brittle legs would carry him. He caught the handrail, swung aboard, and stood panting in the vestibule. He fumbled for his ticket, dropped it into the mechanism on the door. The mechanism considered it, found everything in order, pulled back the door bolt, and let him into the frieze and cast-iron monument to tobacco.

He settled, winded, in the seat next to Paul’s. “Son-of-a-bitch won’t even wait a second for an old man,” he said bitterly.

“It’s a machine,” said Paul. “All automatic.”

“Don’t mean he ain’t a son-of-a-bitch.”

Paul nodded appreciatively.

“Used to be conductor on this line.”

“Oh?” The man had the florid, righteous look of a specialized bore, and Paul wasn’t interested in listening to him.

“Yes, forty-one years,” he said. “For-tee-wunnn years!”

“Huh!”

“For-tee-wunnnn. Two times twenty plus one. And I’d like to see one of them machines deliver a baby.”

“Huh! You delivered a baby, eh?”

“Yep. Little boy. By coincidence I done it in the men’s room.” He chuckled richly. “For-tee-wunnnn years!”

“Huh.”

“And I never seen the machine yet that’d watch out for a little girl three years old all the way from St. Louis to Poughkeepsie.”

“Nope. Guess not,” said Paul. He filed this remark away for his next meeting with Bud Calhoun. He could see the device now—sort of an Iron Maiden, without the spikes, of course, and electronic, of course, that would grasp a little girl firmly at St. Louis, and eject her into the arms of relatives at Poughkeepsie.

“For-tee-wunnnn years! With machines you get
quan
titty, but you don’t get
qual-itty.
Know what I mean?”

“Yup,” said Paul.

“Carthage,”
said the tape recording.
“The stop is Carthage. Next station, Deer River.
”

Paul settled back against the unyielding seat with a sigh of relaxation, and closed his eyes in a pretense of sleep.

“For-tee-wunnnn years! These machines never help an old lady down the steps.”

In time the old conductor ran out of examples of man’s superiority over machines and took to anticipating the tape recording’s station calling, casually, contemptuously, as though any fool could do it. “Deer River. The stop is Deer River. Next station, Castorland.”

“Deer River. The stop is Deer River,”
said the tape recording.
“Next station, Castorland.
”

“Ha! What’d I tell you?”

Paul actually did drop off to sleep fitfully, and at last, at Constableville, he saw his companion slipping his ticket into the door slot and being let off. Paul checked his ticket to make sure it wasn’t bent or torn, that it would unlock the door at Ilium. He’d heard tales of addled old ladies locked aboard cars for days for having misplaced their tickets, or for having missed their stops. Hardly a newspaper was printed that didn’t have a human interest story about car clean-up crews from the Reeks and Wrecks liberating somebody.

The old displaced conductor disappeared into the Constableville night, and Paul wondered at what thorough believers in mechanization most Americans were, even when their lives had been badly damaged by mechanization. The conductor’s plaint, like the lament of so many, wasn’t that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn’t do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do.