Dreams (4 page)

We were sitting there in the Esquire having brandy and cheesecake. Okay, it isn't the most usual combination but what the hell, after dinner at the slightly ersatz kraut joint that's the most exotic eatery that Asbury sports, even with all the ritzy Valerian College girls, we wanted to stop off
somewhere
for a little after dinner drink before we went home for a real nightcap with Frances and Jack.

So brandy, and Pamela ordered a piece of the Esquire's real cheesecake (imported from Brooklyn, no less) and we asked for extra forks and all four of us picked at the cheesecake when it came. So.

The Esquire is a pretty nice gin mill if that's what you go for. Solid brick walls—it's in an old building, not just pre-prefab but pre-union, when they could lay on a work gang and really
build
—and a nice choice of décor . . . old ads and news pages and magazine covers so you have to tell for yourself (by the light of Tiffany-shaded lamps) whether the intention is antique or camp.

It's crowded, of course, and smoky, of course, and the jukebox is set too loud and it's all bass, but
all
. You throw a dime for
Creeque Alley
and all you get is Denny and John. You know, don't make too much of it, nobody's saying that Wally Wishart—he runs the Esquire—tuned out Michelle and Cass as a kind of sexual protest because he hates making a living off a bunch of horsey Valerian girls. Probably, he just has the bass turned way the hell up to give his place a Big Beat sound. That's the big thing now.

First it was jazz, then it was folk, now it's rock. If you don't stay with it the girls will take their bucks back to Pizza City or worse. Still, it's a little disconcerting to play
I'm In Love With A Big Blue Frog
and get only Peter and Paul plus deep down fiddle thumps.

Jack Gordon, by the ways is, yes,
the
Jack Gordon. Former ad agency art director who went straight and is now just about the top freelance illustrator around. Chances are you know his name; if you don't you've surely seen his work. What brought him to the top, I think, isn't technical skill. He's competent and more, absolutely, but what really makes him so good is a real eye, a talent for showing more than physical appearances in his pictures.

I remember the first time I talked to him about his work. I hardly knew the guy and I figured I'd make an ingratiating first impression by saying something nice about his work. So I picked a then-recent paperback cover painting he'd done and said I liked it. "What really got to me," I told him, "was the oddly flat planes of the faces. Really striking, and it really
says
something."

"Gee, Dave," he said, "I didn't
mean
to make the faces flat, I guess I just didn't paint them very well."

That's Jack. It was a helluva putdown, you can't deny that, but he put himself down in the same breath. How can you complain? But he is a fantastically penetrating observer. And a good storyteller, too. If he'd ever tried to write instead of drawing and painting he would have been just as successful at that too. The writers were lucky.

Let me give you an example. Jack used to tell stories about his ad agency days whenever he was trying to illustrate a point in conversation. He had this idea, for instance, about people and the nature of reality. It had bad effects of course, but it was a terrific insight. "Some people," Jack used to say, "aren't real. They're caricatures!"

You could tell from the way that he said it that an agency days story was in the works. Jack's wife, Frances, and Pamela and I just leaned back and listened. And, with full reliability, "When I was with Folwell, Taylor & Bangs, we used to have these staff meetings. All the Mad Ave types would sit around the polished table wearing the latest identical clothes. I think that season it was four button dark suits and mini-plaid button down Oxford cloth shirts and foulard four-in-hands. And they would stand up in their identical four dollar haircuts and take off their forty buck tortoise shell glasses that they all had to have whether they needed them for their eyes or not, and they'd start mouthing these Mad Ave clichés. You know, the ones that everybody kids about all the time."

Jack stopped talking and picked up his brandy glass and took a big sip. Behind us the juke box was louder than ever, or at least it seemed to be, and all in the lowest registers.

I said to Jack's wife, "That's a good record, Fran, a good lyric."

She said, "All I can hear is boom boom."

"It's a song about this little old man who alternately gets run over by a train and stampeded by elephants at half hour intervals."

"Oh, come on!" she said, so rather than try and convince her I let it drop, and her husband started telling his story again.

"Well, this account exec proudly outlined an idea he had," Jack said, and "a vice president said; and I swear it, 'Let's run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.'" Jack brought his palms down on the table with a half smack, half-thump that as much as said, "believe it or don't."

I mumbled, "Life imitates art."

He said, "That wasn't all. Once they were started, the next line was 'Let's put it on the train and see if it gets off at Westport."

Cosby had given way to a Brubeck side, audio potsherd in the fast deepening sands of popular taste, but nobody else at the table seemed to notice. Pamela and Fran looked at Jack, waiting for more.

So did I, hoping that it wouldn't come. See, I really
liked
Jack, in fact: I kind of liked the whole screwy setup we had, sad and irrational as it was in so many ways. And in my role of husband-and-friend I really loved Pamela and even had a sort of low-keyed lech on for Frances that I never did anything worthwhile about except when I was too drunk to do much worthwhile about it.

"And then this senior-senior type—you could tell him by the carefully cultivated graying temples and the boyish suntan—says, so help me God, he actually says," Jack rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands and giggles soundlessly the way he does when he's too amused to speak, "he says, 'Let's lay it on the floor and walk around it a few times.'"

"That was the beginning of the end for me," Jack says, tears of repressed laughter squeezing past closed eyelids and falling on the laminated artificial wood table top.

More than you, Jack, I thought sadly.

Pamela wanted me to throw some coins in the juke box and play some good sides so I stood up and left her with Jack studying the fauna indigenous to a gin mill that's right across the street from a posh institution for the daughters of the moneyed classes. That was one of the things that made Jack a top illustrator. Unfortunately, it had other results.

I grabbed Frances by the hand and led her over to the juke box, a distance of fully a yard, and we started shooting coins and punching buttons. I'll say this for Wishart: he kept his jukebox up to date. Some gin mills, they think "Blue Suede Shoes" is the latest protest song. But Wishart kept up with the new stuff. Donovan and the Byrds and the Stones and Cream and the
good
Beatle sides, the ones that they won't let on AM at all.

Frances and I slotted a Kennedy half and got seven sides for it and by the time we got back to the table I was really worried about Jack and the whole thing. I tried to swing the conversation around to anything but Jack's too penetrating observations. Even tried talking shop about MPT Computers Inc., the place where I worked in my cover, and how I couldn't tolerate the stories you're always reading about intelligent computers having nervous breakdowns when confronted with logical paradoxes.

Computers just don't
work
that way, I used to tell everybody I could get to listen. They don't and they never will. It just isn't a valid projection, a real personality just isn't in the nature of a computer, it would take a qualitatively different thing that would simply not be a computer any more. I used to spiel on. So.

It didn't do any good.

Jack waved a little fuzzily at the waiter for another round of drinks. Was it the third? Fourth? Plus a couple with dinner, earlier, in the kraut joint. But booze didn't dim his insight. Or his eyesight.

He looked around the Esquire, obviously focusing with difficulty, but also with a new look in his eyes that made me feel very, very sad. And yet, in a way, kind of proud that Jack was my friend. I could see that he understood the whole thing. He was the first person who ever did fully, in this world or any like it.

Oh, others had guessed before, and some had even guessed right. Some nut cults had even been founded on the idea, but they were either wild guesses or lies that happened to be true, if you can grasp that.

But Jack really knew. He really
understood
. It was a shame.

He made a circular motion with a pointing finger, vaguely including everybody in the room, the Valerian girls and their various tweedy-looking Ivy League dates and the phonies and would-be pick-ups who always hang around a place like the Esquire, and he said, "This place isn't real either."

Uh-oh, I thought. I knew it was coming then. I hoped he'd take a big swig and pass out or that a waiter would drop something on his head or anything to distract him, but nothing happened. Hell, I should have made a crude pass at the guy's wife even, that would have distracted him and maybe saved the whole thing, but when he was talking I just froze. Damn it!

Then the fit hit the shan as they say, and it was too late to save anything.

Pamela asked him what he meant.

Jack made his all around gesture again. He said, "I mean mostly—just look at the girls in this place. Look at the perfect hairdos, and the fresh-from-the-beauty-parlor complexions with just the right amount of just the right makeup. And the clothes, they're all too right, nobody's underdressed or overdressed and you can tell that they're all expensive and all new.

"They can't be real. They're straight out of Mary McCarthy or someplace."

It was the
or someplace
that got me. That was Jack. He had those Valerian girls pegged to the last decimal place but he wouldn't admit it, he had to put on that
or someplace
. It was like Einstein saying that E equals MC squared, "I guess." Modest Jack.

We finished our drinks and settled the tab and went and got in the car, our car not theirs, and I drove down College Avenue to Randolph and turned on Randolph headed toward where Jack and Fran had left their station wagon. I turned on the radio loud still hoping to keep Jack from dropping the other shoe, even though I really knew it was too late. It was. He said:

"Wait a minute. If all those Mad Ave types aren't real, and the Valerian girls aren't real . . . I guess maybe we aren't either. In our own way. In fact I don't think that anybody is." Pause. You could almost hear the heavy thinking. "Or anything!"

I told the truth then.

Frances and Pamela took it better than I thought they would. Like real troupers.

But Jack was best of all. That man never wanted to stop learning, understanding new things all the time. I used a simile to MPT computers and studying mathematical models, and of course his agency background prepared him for understanding things like market research and test studies.

He understood it, and he didn't flinch a bit. I thought he was entitled to something for that, I don't care what the rules say about no exceptions.

So I cut over control and took the car up high, and looking out the windshield it seemed even to me that we were suspended there, completely surrounded by bright points of light, the stars above us and the lights of the Valerian campus and the town of Asbury below. I let him watch the first few lights wink out before he did.