Good neighbor sam, p.10
Good Neighbor Sam, page 10
As Benjamin Franklin probably said, you can't do two things at once, especially one of them, and when we drew apart we both knew there wasn't much point in a second round. Janet mixed us a couple of drinks in the kitchen, but we didn't sit down in the living room with them. She stayed out there, opening the oven and poking into it with a fork, looking abstracted, her drink in hand; I suppose she was feeling guilty toward friend Min. I wandered out to the patio, drink and cigarette in hand, looked over at my place, and was glad to see Howie out on my patio looking over here.
It was Act Two of a summer-theater production of Private Lives; a positive flurry of urbane saluting with drinks, tapping of cigarettes, and wry, sophisticated little smiles. Howie had a slight edge in urbanity because he had a champagne glass, but I thought I tapped my cigarette a little more debonairly. We strolled about, gazing around, sipping our drinks, flicking cigarette ashes; in another moment I'd have begun thinking in French. But then a rhumba began on the hi-fi in my living room. Howie gave me the urbane salute, shrugged Gallicly, and stepped inside, and if I'd had eleven million dollars I'd have just given it to Janet and gone home. And on the other hand, wild horses couldn't have dragged me.
I turned and walked back into the house, the full plan in my mind from a to f; in the kitchen I'd just turn off the oven, take Janet by the wrist, and either lead or drag her to the nearest cushioned horizontal surface. But in the living room I stopped with one foot in the air; I knew it was the voice of Superstition, but it spoke loud and clear, and I had to listen. It said that if I made a pass at Janet, Howie would make one at Min, and my foot still in the air, I turned and set it down in the direction of the davenport. There, with a cigarette in one hand, I took another from the box on the coffee table, lit it with the table lighter, and sat smoking them alternately till Janet called in that supper was ready.
We ate in the kitchen, and for a time it was a subdued, even somber affair. But it brightened up when we began ripping Howie apart. I certainly didn't want to knock him, I said, and maybe I was wrong, but in my experience you couldn't trust a man who was too good-looking; they're unreliable, too self-centered. Right! said Janet. Talk about vain, why, she used to have to fight him to get to the mirror! She went on about that, and I sat like a kid, listening, nodding, occasionally asking her to go back and repeat a good part. Obviously he was greedy, she went on, and I listened some more. He was boorish, and she gave me examples. He was argumentative, and I nodded happily, stirring my coffee, eating a cooky. What's more, she said, and I nodded eagerly, he was oversexed, and I said excuse me, and got up and walked out to the phone in the hall.
"Min?" I said, when she answered "Are you all right?"
"Of course I'm all right. What do you mean?"
"Well, nothing, actually. It's just that you looked a little pale this morning."
"You weren't here this morning."
Lovingly, longingly, I said, "Look, baby, I miss you. What are you doing?"
"Howie and I are playing cards. He's really a lot of fun, Sam."
"What kind of cards?"
"Honeymoon bridge."
"Oh, yeah," I said, chuckling; it occurred to me that I was doing a lot of chuckling lately for no very good reason. "Great game, but it can't compare with four-handed bridge, of course. How about a game? The four of us? It's perfectly okay for neighbors to visit and play a little bridge!"
"Well, I don't know," Min said. "I'll have to see how Howie feels; he had a pretty rough day at the office. Wait a sec." She was gone from the phone, then she came back. "It's okay," she said. "It's all right with Howie. He says come on over."
"Well, gee whiz," I said, "you sure it's all right with Howie? We wouldn't want to tire him."
"No, come on over. For a while."
So we did. Janet had to fix her face and change her dress, and she said I ought to wear a tie and suit coat. I argued a little. I said it was only next door and that we knew them well enough so that I could go in shirt sleeves and no tie. But Janet said I ought to look nice, so I put them on.
Howie met us at my door in shirt sleeves and welcomed us. While he and I shook hands heartily, the two women half kissed and half nuzzled each other's cheeks in the traditional mixture of simulated ardor and genuine concern for the make-up. Howie invited us to sit down — the bridge table was set up in the living room — then went out to the kitchen to fix drinks. This was all necessary for the benefit of the investigator, if he were anywhere he could possibly see us; this was all standard procedure in Treasure Island where drapes are never drawn when you entertain. I glanced interestedly around the room and said to Min, "Nice place you have here." She was dressed up in a pale-blue dress and looked great.
She said, "Yes, it must seem very different since you last saw it," and we all laughed a little louder than we meant to. Howie brought in the drinks, and we cut for partners, standing around the table, and as my hand touched the cards I had the momentary feeling that he and I were actually cutting to see who'd take both women.
I played a lousy game, especially with Min, though she didn't complain. Just before the last hand Howie, who'd been dummy the previous hand, was out in the kitchen, fixing a final nightcap for us all. Janet was shuffling, and I got up and walked out to the kitchen.
He looked up watchfully when I came in; he knew this wasn't just a social call. I said, "Look, old boy, eleven million bucks or eleven billion, you aren't staying here tonight. I am."
He nodded and gestured with his chin toward the house next door. "Exactly the message I've been waiting to give you about Janet's. Now how should we work it? There's a pretty good moon tonight."
"I know," I said. I had it all figured out; if my bridge had been bad, it was because my planning wasn't. Assuming we were still being watched, I said, I'd leave with Janet. I'd go right out to the back patio then, with a lighted cigarette; he'd do the same at my place, and we'd each know where the other was. We'd allow ten minutes for the lights to be out in both houses. Then the guy on the hill, I figured, would leave for the night, too, but we'd give him still another ten minutes to get packed up and be gone. What if he didn't leave? That was a chance we'd just have to take, that's all. But in order to cut even that to a minimum, Howie and I would run across the open space between the houses simultaneously, on signal from me. This would reduce the time when he could possibly see one of us to only a few seconds. While we were at it, we worked out a plan for the morning, too.
Explaining this to the girls, I watched their faces closely. I wanted Min to be glad and Janet to be sorry. But it was hard to tell what they thought; they just nodded and shrugged and then — absolutely inexplicably — looked at each other and laughed. Howie and Min standing in the lighted doorway, Janet and I left in a welter of glad cries, and we crossed the lawns to her place.
There was a moment when Janet locked her front door, the bolt chunking solidly into its slot for the night, when I wondered if there weren't some way to prop a lighted cigarette out on the patio, maybe wedged into the cast-iron legs of one of the chairs out there so that it faced — the Germans have an interesting legend about what they call Doppelgangers; literally, doublegoers. Under certain circumstances, that is, a precise physical duplicate of a man is evoked, each one capable of being busy in separate places so that … There was a cigarette over on my patio, all right, and after watching it closely I saw it move, and I sat down in a sling chair and looked up at the sky.
There was a high three-quarter moon which gave some light, though not a lot. It was hard to say whether a man across the street on the hillside could see any movement here or not. I didn't think it mattered; if it was photographs he wanted, he could hardly take them now, and I was sure he was gone long since. I could see my watch, and when twenty minutes had passed, the lights in both houses out long ago, I stood up and quietly crushed out my second cigarette. The one across the way disappeared, too, and I gave the tiny little one-note whistle Howie and I had agreed on as our get-ready signal. It meant we were each to stand, still out of sight of the hillside, ready to run on the next signal. We'd considered the possibility of actually bumping into each other, so as agreed, I stood crouched almost directly beside the house, ready to run along the inner edges of the two patios. Howie would take the outer edges, well clear of me. I gave the double-note signal and began sprinting hard toward my house and heard a fearful crash-bam-bang, so incredibly loud the hair on my neck stood up even though I'd instantly recognized exactly what it was; Howie had run straight into the goddamned mobile.
11
In the center of miles of suburban nighttime stillness my patio was now a clattering, clanking oasis of hideous sound, the mustached photo jouncing, the tennis racket flapping, hub caps whirling in the moonlight, and Howie lay tangled like a trapped fly down in the center of the whole insane web. All my life I'd had the idea, like everyone else, that I could think fast in an emergency. Now I proved that, while it was true, I didn't think very well. Nothing occurred to me except to get him out of there, and I grabbed Howie's ankles, began yanking, and — idiotically in a whisper, as though otherwise he could be heard across the street above the wild racket here — Howie said, "Cut it out, you idiot. My head's stuck!" And before I could let go he yanked his feet away from me so hard that I was pulled in after him.
At first I thought I had somehow shut the thing off by falling into it, then I heard a mouselike squeak and looked toward the house. In the open patio doors Min stood in her nightgown, holding the end of the extension cord which she'd yanked loose and laughing so helplessly she couldn't get enough breath to make much sound. It was a silent paroxysm — she staggered — the only sound being rapid little whooping-cough-like gasps, and she raised an arm to full length, pointed to us, then collapsed, sprawling into a chair.
It seems to me that Howie and I behaved with a good deal of dignity, considering that we had one hell of a time getting out of the mobile — our clothes kept snagging on things — and that Janet was out on her patio in about the same state as Min. Women, I've noticed, have primitive senses of humor.
When I finally crawled out of the mobile, backward, I just walked on into the house; what anyone over on the hill, or anywhere else, had heard, seen, or thought, I didn't care. And I didn't care what happened to Howie. I learned later that he'd sat out on our patio for an hour, then sneaked on over to Janet's. When Min walked into the bedroom she was still giggling and I felt a little put out, but when I turned to say something and looked at her, I had to laugh, too, and it was a good thing. Whatever restraint had come up between us disappeared as we laughed, and we went to bed friends, and I was glad to be home.
At five twenty-five in the morning, during the last minutes of full darkness, I was back out on the patio, fully dressed, revived and refreshed by over five long hours of sleep, and ready to sprint. I gave a soft, nearly inaudible whistle; Howie replied from Janet's patio, and the moon gone now, we crouched in the pre dawn darkness like World War I infantrymen on opposite sides — I was the American, he was the German — ready to go over the top. I waited till a star shell died out over the trenches, whistled twice as I beckoned to my men, and Howie and I darted across no-man's land, this time without banging into anything.
We sat out on the patios then, each of us occasionally and considerately scuffing a shoe to let the other know he was still here. At five forty-five, the sky lightening, the daily New Year's Eve of Birdland began, and I sat coating over with dew, one and a half degrees warmer than a corpse, only the thought of Howie's equal suffering keeping me alive. At six-ten the sun showed, and at six-fifteen we each tiptoed through the other's silent house and came out the front door.
I got out the Thunderbird and off we drove, two neighbors, each with some reason, apparently, for going to his office early today. We were cold, hungry, exhausted, but our wives were inviolate and we even managed to smile when I stopped in front of the big Foster's cafeteria on Van Ness. At breakfast Howie told me — I don't think he'd meant to, but he did — that when he finally got to Janet's last night her bedroom door was locked, there was a blanket on the davenport but no pillow, and he'd had to sleep in the same prenatal two-cushion style that I had at Janet's. I was so glad that not only Min but Janet, too, had been kept safe from this sex fiend that I walked into Burke & Hare with the young-executive spring in my step.
There I had a blow; a new BELS radio commercial was to be recorded tonight. Every BELS commercial had to have bells of some sort in it. This was our own idea; it's how we took the account away from another agency, and now we were stuck with it. We'd already used hand bells ("Hear ye, hear ye! BELS banish belly blues!"), doorbells ("Yes, who's there? BELS for indigestion, ma'am!"), fire bells with the crackle of flames ("Quick! Put out acid burn with BELS!"), a troupe of Swiss bell ringers with a yodeler ("BELS-eeeeyelleeyohoo!"), and last Christmas we'd used sleigh bells in the background as a choir sang, to "Jingle Bells" ("Acid burn, acid burn, can spoil your holiday! So get yourself a roll of BELS, and burp those pains away!"). For this newest commercial I'd finally thought of using cathedral bells. We'd persuaded the client it would give the product a certain dignity it may have been lacking, and I'd worked out a new jingle to the tune of "Ave Maria." We'd arranged to record it in the belfry of a local cathedral, but now, sitting at my desk after I'd hung up my hat and phoned Comet for coffee, I read a note from Mr. Burke's secretary, Rose-Marie. The man who played the carillon was a cable-car gripman and couldn't be there in the daytime. We'd have to record this evening; could I be present, please? No answer was expected to this. I had never once performed any useful function at any recording session, but the writer was expected to attend, and I phoned Min to tell her I'd be working this evening.
There is no overtime paid in an advertising agency. It is tacitly understood that none of us works at B&H merely for money; we are there because we are dedicated to the holy cause of increasing the sales of things like BELS and would no more think of asking to be paid for overtime work than a member of the Crusades. So to partially make up for the no-pay evening ahead, I got out my important-papers file an hour or so after lunch and went to visit the art department, which is usually good for a pleasant half hour.
The big room was so quiet, everyone hunched so intently over his drawing board, that I knew it couldn't be agency work. During lunch hour someone had bought a package of toy balloons of assorted sizes, colors, and shapes, and now each man was painting a balloon with whatever suggested itself to his creative artistry: a comic face, a dirty word, an obscene suggestion, a clever enhancement of an original resemblance to some object found in nature. Bert Bishop was painting the tips of a pair of pinkish balloons a rosy red. As a balloon was finished, it was inflated from a tank of compressed air used in airbrush work and thrown out the window to the surprise, pleasure, or occasional annoyance, presently, of pedestrians whom we watched chasing after and picking them up.
After a while I left this pleasant Santa's Workshop atmosphere, and by visiting several other oases, and going out to the cafeteria for afternoon coffee with Rose-Marie, I managed to while away the afternoon. Back at my desk a little after five, I found a phone-call memo from the switchboard; Min had called, and I phoned her back, but the line was busy and I decided to try again later. I was tired of the office, and with a two-hour recording session to face tonight, I wanted to leave now, walk up to Enrico's and have a drink or two, then go get a decent dinner somewhere to brace myself for the evening.
In the lobby I walked out of the elevator, and a man leaning against the wall pushed himself off it and walked toward me. "Hi, there," he said pleasantly, holding his hand out, and we shook hands. "You don't know me, but I sure know you. I'm Rein-hold Shiffner, private investigator, and I've been watching you off and on since last Sunday night."
I couldn't believe it. Without ever having consciously thought of it before, I now discovered that my mental image of a detective was a man with a walrus mustache and a derby hat. But this was a clean-cut, narrow-brimmed young executive in a clean-cut young-executive suit and a smile that made you want to adopt him. He could have got a job as an account executive at Burke & Hare on sight; he was Tab Hopper, Rock Rubble, and Rip Snort all in one. "Like to talk to you," he was saying now, steering me toward the lobby doors by an elbow. "And it might be a good idea if we got your car." We were out on the sidewalk now, and he flashed his smile. "A car's the best place to talk; hard to bug, and while it's moving you can't focus the electronic stuff on it." All I did was nod; I didn't know what to say, because it had just occurred to me: who did he think I was, Sam Bissell or Howie Ebbett? My first thought had been: he knows who I really am because he knew where my office was. But on second thought, he might have followed me to this building any day this week, thinking I was Janet's husband. Cleverly I decided to wait and see.
