The Celebrity (2 page)

Nevertheless, Gregory Johns was at peace with himself, if not with the world of atom bombs, loyalty oaths, the Berlin Airlift, and the climbing temperature of the cold war. What combination of glandular balance, metabolism, pulse rate, blood pressure, and philosophy accounted for his state of well-being is perhaps impossible to determine, but the fact remains that he was singularly free from those modern ailments we call neuroses, aggressions, compulsions, insecurities—except one—and self-destructive impulses. He loved his wife Abby (for Abigail) and his daughter Hat (for Harriet). They loved him. They also approved of him though Hat, at seventeen, sorrowed often over the clothes she wanted and could not have, and Abby longed for a larger icebox and a four-room apartment instead of a three. Abby not only loved and approved of him but helped him in his research, typed his manuscripts, listened to his plots, and augmented his income by writing brief reviews of children’s books and detective stories. Since children’s books and detective stories were written and published endlessly, she often added as much as twelve dollars to the weekly Johns income.

Apart from these major blessings he had many minor ones. He was not susceptible to the common cold, he had only four fillings in his thirty-two teeth, his hair remained thick and one shave a day sufficient. He was six-one in height and had put on enough weight so that people called him lanky instead of skinny as they had when he was a boy. He no longer fumed and fretted that his one brother and four sisters, as well as their parents, had 20-20 vision while he, through some sportive quirk of genes, had always needed to wear glasses. He knew he was fairly good-looking and that Abby persisted in thinking him handsome.

In short the dissatisfactions and griefs and indignations that visited the mind and heart of Gregory Johns were only those vast ones which must come to all thoughtful and humane men. He did not turn them out like undesirable tenants to be dispossessed. Rather he harbored them closely so that he could study them, ponder their complexities, discover and use the energies generated by them. Sometimes he failed; at other times he succeeded.
The Good World
had taken its first nebulous form in his mind nearly two years ago, when he and Abby and their neighbors, the Zatkes, had been discussing mankind’s inability—or was it reluctance?—to outlaw war and the relentless rhythmic recurrence of war. That very night he had begun to sketch out the book, and the next morning to write it. It had gone, for him, rather quickly, though not easily; nothing ever went easily from his soft black pencils to the pad on which he set down his first drafts. And because he instinctively avoided the hot painful language of outrage, he had turned to fantasy, even to optimism, in telling a story half a century in the future.

Except for Ed Barnard, his editor, nobody at Digby and Brown had been too happy with the manuscript, but this was not unusual enough to startle him. A few critics seemed to take his work seriously and perhaps that fact deterred his publishers from any drastic decisions about dropping him from what they always called “our list.” In any case, happy or no, they had never yet rejected any book he had ever submitted.

They’ll be even less happy, Gregory Johns thought now, with this new one I’m starting, but I can’t help that. He put his hand on the few sheets before him, his long fingers protectively spread over as large a surface as they could span. In the bedroom Abby said, “There!” and recognizable sounds of finality came to him: a page ripped out of the typewriter, something else rolled in, three brief spurts of rapid typing and again the energetic ripping out. She had addressed the envelope. Her batch of reviews was done.

She appeared at the door and eyed the yellow pages. “Is it going now, Gregory?”

“I think yes,” he said and nodded slowly two or three times. He gathered the sheets, held them loosely in both hands, and slapped their bottom edges briskly on the desk. Then he turned them sideways and repeated the operation. He liked the crisp tap-tap they made. “Tomorrow, of course, I may think no.”

“Naturally.”

He glanced at the top right-hand corner of the last sheet and looked up at her. “Page seven—quite a lot of progress from a month ago when I was at page thirty-three.” He smiled and asked, “Is Hat meeting us there or here?”

“There. Do I look all right?”

“Yes,” he said. She does, he thought, she always does. He liked her slight figure and blond hair. He admired the faint lines around her mouth for not being lines of disapproval and discontent, as they so often were in wifely faces at thirty-eight. He stood up, stretching, and added, “You look fine. You’re all ready to go, aren’t you?” His back ached a little; he had been at the desk for eight hours, except for luncheon. It was a familiar ache, almost pleasant, since it meant he had been working well enough to need no pacing up and down. “Did we get them a present?”

“The preoccupied mind,” she answered.

“Oh, Lord, the sherry,” he said mildly. They had decided on sherry a week ago and gone out together to buy it.

“Come on, wash up and get a tie on. We’re due there at six-thirty and I promised Cindy we’d be prompt.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “We ought to take it off their hands next year—there’ll be eighteen of us tonight.”

“Thornton likes it,” he said lazily. “It makes him feel expansive.”

“But Cindy doesn’t. It’s a lot of work and it costs a lot.”

“Just the same.”

“I suppose they both like being
able
to do it. But next year—” Dubiously she measured the small room with her eyes. “We’d have to have some sort of outdoor picnic.”

“In midwinter?”

“We could pretend your father and mother were married in June, 1905, instead of January, 1905.”

He counted fingers.

“That would have made Thorn a five-month premie—he wouldn’t like that.”

She said, “No, he wouldn’t,” and went back to the bedroom ahead of him. He washed, chose one of his three ties, and strolled over to the windows. They were in the rear of the house and he looked out at the backs of the other four-story apartment houses, identical with each other and his own, that ranged chunkily around the interior “garden.” The afternoon light was fading from winter-dry grass and red brick walls, outlines were softening, sounds muting. He liked this time of day.

Martin Heights was one of the pioneer “Garden Developments” on Long Island, reasonably priced to begin with and then low-priced during the black depth of the depression when he and Abby had moved into their $42.00-a-month living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath. In fifteen years, the initial strictness about community rules had waned and then died. Baby carriages were now permitted anywhere within the enclosure instead of only on the crosswalks, and children’s bicycles and scooters and toys leaned against every available yard of brick wall. But the redness of the brick had dimmed, the shrubs had grown; only about one in three of the young maples planted at rigid intervals twenty years before had taken firm root and flourished, and now the casual spacing of the stripped trees let one forget that a purposeful landscape architect had originally put them there.

Not bad, Gregory thought. You’re supposed to chafe against anything so suburban, but I rather like it. Here and there a single window, or a string of windows, was already lighted and this pleased him also. During daylight, the unblinking panes, in their undeviating horizontals crossed by verticals, gave the square a hard precision, but at twilight, the softening began, and he was always responsive to it.

He looked forward to the family evening ahead. It would be uneventful but free of strain; he would not have to devote most of his energy to combating an inner frozen shakiness, as he would at any other large social gathering. He never thought of himself as antisocial, but he shrank from meeting new people and always had; a pitiless knot of shyness began to tie up inside him at the very idea of walking into a room where he would find strangers. He never knew what to say; exploratory chatter was notably not one of his gifts.

He assumed that this must stem from something buried deep in his earliest childhood but he did not often struggle to unearth it. Children developed one way or another; his sisters and Thorn were quite the opposite, but as far back as he could remember himself at all, he was painfully uneasy with new people. By the time he was seven or eight, he had heard himself called “a timid little thing” many times, and when he was twelve—

Once again he was at Thorn’s sixteenth birthday party, the bespectacled kid brother in knee pants ignored by the crowd of guests who were all as old as Thorn. He was desperately anxious to join in, to seem as carefree as they, when suddenly, prompted by he knew not what, he addressed himself to Thorn’s special girl. In his piping voice, he loudly announced, “Next week I’m going to have a puppy,” and Janie Hyatt said, “You don’t
look
pregnant,” and the whole room rocked with laughter.

He was again running out of the door, away from that laughing, away from the eyes, away from the strange faces—

Gregory Johns came back to the present. Being happy with Abby had helped him conquer most of his shyness; he rather thought he could have outgrown it completely, had it not suited him to remain its victim. Once, years ago, he had offered this hypothesis to Abby; she had looked at him with wise and merry eyes, and said, “Nobody ever wrote a chapter at a big party.”

One of the many sound good things about Abby was that she had accepted him as he was and never sought to change him. She seemed no more gregarious than he, though he was sure that if she had married a man who liked to go out a great deal, and to entertain often at home, like Thornton, her adaptability would have made her like it too. As it was, she seemed content with his family and the Barnards and a few neighbors in the same street—the Smiths, the Feins, and especially the Zatkes, whose apartment was just the other side of their living-room wall, and whom Abby had come to regard as another kind of family.

She had no family of her own now, except for distant cousins. She had grown up in a small town on the Cape; her father had been a lawyer who doubled as summer renting agent for Wellfleet and Truro, and her mother, also an Abigail and always called by all three syllables of it, had been as Puritan and reserved as if she had come down intact from her eighteenth-century ancestors. Abby had gone to Pembroke College in Providence, expecting to be a teacher or librarian, but after two years, she had left and gone to New York. She had enrolled in a short story course at Columbia, and there they had met when she spoke to him after one of his stories had been read and discussed in class. “It’s awfully good,” she had said; “it could be the first chapter of a novel.” “I’m writing a novel,” he had answered and they had stayed in the hall outside the classroom, talking for a long time. He was never, even then, ill at ease when he spoke of writing.

Gregory turned away from the window. He could hear Abby tugging and pulling at the warped door of the cabinet in the kitchen and he went in quickly.

“I keep forgetting to plane that thing down,” he said.“Here, let me.” He pulled at it with short jerks; it flew open and banged at his shoulder. Abby lifted out a long white box prettily tied with loops of red and silver ribbon, and he remembered teasing her on Christmas mornings, for straightening out and rolling up discarded bows and bindings.

“I’ll remind you about planing it tomorrow,” she said. “And don’t forget your letter.”

“What letter?” Immediately he thought, My world government piece, and felt sheepish. To have risen early, while the family was asleep, with the idea for the short editorial strong in his mind, to have sat freezing on a kitchen stool while he wrote it, to have liked it better than anything he had ever sent in to the committee—and then to have been on the point of leaving it behind on his desk!

Pre-school mind, he amended ruefully, and fetched the letter. He followed Abby through the door and thrust it at her. She was talking to Mary Zatke in the small square hallway that served their adjoining apartments, and took it absently, but he knew she would see that it was mailed. He remembered Barnard’s postcard and gave that to Abby also.

“—at your mother-in-law’s?” Mary Zatke was asking.

“No, at my brother-in-law’s.”

“Well, tell me all about it tomorrow.”

“There won’t be much to tell,” said Gregory.

I
F THOSE FIVE O’CLOCK CHIMES
could have drifted all the way down Fifth Avenue to the noble arch at Washington Square and then on for another few miles southward, they might have brought a moment of cheer to a tall fair-haired man in an office at the lower tip of Manhattan.

As it was, the only sound that came to him was the restless drumming of his own fingertips on the desk blotter before him. It was a muted tattoo in an odd rhythm, made by running the tips of four fingers rapidly over the blotter and then striking his ring finger twice against it before beginning the little arpeggio all over again with his pinky. He had repeated this accented pattern dozens of times and did not know he was doing it. All he knew was that he wished to hell the evening ahead were over. It would be so dull. So absolutely goddam dull.

As his fingers flew, his eyes remained fixed on the top page of a memo pad at one side of the blotter. Nothing was written there, but in neat printing across the top ran the legend,

“From the office of G. Thornton Johns.” Below that, in two banks of smaller capitals appeared

The stacked words caught his attention and his flying fingers came to rest. He picked up a pencil and began to draw a descending line connecting the top corners of the final letters in the first bank, and then the top corners of the initial letters in the second bank. He could not get a true V and wished, for the hundredth time, that “burglary” had two more characters in it, to maintain the symmetry of the arrangement from the four-letter word at the top to the twelve-letter word at the bottom. Four, six, eight, eight, twelve was no good, he thought, and began to count the letters on the right bank; the right bank was even worse. Four, six, seven, nine, ten—he shoved the pad away disconsolately.