Ice-Cream Headache (26 page)

“Well, for Christ’s sake,” Eddie Maynar said disgruntledly and with chagrin. At least you could have called me. Can’t you get a doctor or something?” He had at himself down, still in his topcoat, in the single armchair across from the day ouch where Sidney lay gasping for breath, her nose and eyes streaming.

“Well, I can’t just go out and leave her here alone like this!” Cott said heatedly. Do you think I’m some land of insensitive animal?” And Cott, the beautiful Cott, lad swept across the room indignantly to sit down by Sidney and feel her forehead for temperature. There wasn’t any, but at midnight, long after Eddie Maynar had given up in disgust and disgruntledly gone off alone dateless, Sidney had reached such a state that she was actually turning slowly blue, slowly strangling before Cott’s very eyes. And in the end there was no choice, even as late as the hour was, but to ring up their doctor and have him come over.

Big, shambling, perpetually rumpled looking, and elderly, a professional and cute psychologist as well as an expert diagnostician, a sort of combination spiritual father and nurse to both girls as well as their doctor, he came ambling disgustedly over carting his black satchel. He had been at a theatrical party given by another of his actress patients and had had to leave it. And after giving Sidney a shot of adrenalin that quieted her down and relaxed her enough so she could start breathing again, Doc Bernstein and Cott talked about it.

“But has she ever had anything like this before?” he wanted to know.

“I told you, no!” Cott said. “In school she used to get asthma around examination time. But never anything as bad as this! I’m sure it’s all in her mind and he’s making it up.”

“Sure,” Doc Bernstein said disgustedly. “Sure, it’s all in her head and she’s making it up. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t kill her just as easy as if it was real. And I told her that. I told her if she doesn’t stop playing these silly damned games with herself she’s going to wake up someday and find it’s for real and find herself dead. I’ve about run out of patience with her, Cott.”

“Well, she just isn’t happy,” Cott said, and told him all about Manny’s defection.

“Christ, can’t you find her a husband around somewhere?” Doc Bernstein said disgustedly.

“Find
her
one! I can’t even find myself one.”

“There must be somebody around somewhere that the two of you could get married to.”

“There is. Gobs of them. But what good is that? We’ve both of us turned down more chances to get married than you ever did when you were single, I’ll bet. Would you have us just marry any damned body?”

“Well, it might be better than slowly choking to death,” Doc Bernstein said hourly. “I get awful tired of hysterical women in my business. How far’s a doctor supposed to go? Does he have to find husbands for his patients, too?”

“We’re neither one of us getting any younger, Doc,” Cott grinned at him. “I’m nearly twenty-nine, and Sidney’s almost thirty.” She paused. “They’re either a slobs or else they’re already married,” she said thoughtfully. “And wanton lovers.”

“There’re only about ten thousand girls like you two in this town,” Doc Bern stein said. “And I guess every damned one of them is my patient. Why the he don’t you all go back to the Middle-west where you came from?”

“What? and marry one of the stupid middle-class slobs we all came to the city to get away from marrying?” Cott said. “Anyway, what would all the married men in New York do for lovers if we all went home? The business of the whole city would disintegrate. And with it, the nation.”

“I guess you’re right at that,” Doc Bernstein said sourly. “Well, you better find her some kind of a man. Married or unmarried. I speak as your lay psychiatrist.”

“Well, I’ll try,” Cott said.

And she did try. Sidney tried too, herself. And in the end it was Sidney herself who succeeded. Two months after the conversation with Doc Bernstein (which she recounted to Sidney who took violent exception to it) Cott got herself a job in a West Point movie, a bit part as the Cadet-elected Sweetheart of Flirtation Walk. She was gone six weeks to the Coast, and it was when she came back that L. Carter Wright, book reviewer and interviewer of female movie stars, had entered the scene. Sidney had found him herself, through having lunch with him in order to get an interview for one of her clients at Celebrities, Incorporated, Advertising Agency (on 49th just off Madison). But before that had happened, and during those two months, Sidney had had two more attacks bad enough that Doc Bernstein had to be called. Both of them hit her on occasions when Cott had heavy dates.

One, the first, (or second, rather, if Eddie Maynar was counted as the first) was when Hank Jeffer, novelist and script writer, flew in drunk from the Coast after a fight with his wife and put himself up for four days at their apartment, as he always did on such occasions. It was he who had first got Sidney her job with Celebrities, Incorporated (on 49th just off Madison), one of whose clients he was; and it was he who later got Cott the bit part in the West Point movie, which he had written. Hank had taken Cott out twice to El Morroco, but the third time was too much for Sidney and she came down with an attack which was even worse than the one Eddie Maynar had caused.

The third attack had occurred six week later when Cott was preparing to go off for a week to Connecticut to the ancestral home of a young CBS account executive, the latest in her series of prospective husbands. Cott had gone ahead and gone, anyway. But she might as well not have. It was a week which turned to be one grand fiasco of misunderstandings, petty arguments, recriminations, and unhappiness; although the young man’s family was nice. It succeeded only in her being forced to mark off as a total loss one more prospect.

But it was after Cott had come back from her six weeks on the Coast, to discover the advent of L. Carter Wright upon the scene, that Sidney’s allergy appeared to have taken on its present form.

Larry Wright was, Cott thought, although Sidney violently disagreed, almost ludicrously typical of the available New York male. Tall, slender, sensitive-faced, impeccably dressed, married with three kids. Larry was miserably unhappy in both his marriage and his job because he had wanted to be a novelist, and he loved nothing better than coming over to the apartment late in the evening after getting done work and relieving himself of all of his troubles to Sidney (Cott of course always went out), before he made love to her and then drove out home to the country and his wife. Everything said, he was a nice, caught-in-a-trap, unhappy guy—who, nevertheless, did nothing about getting out of it; nothing that is, except talk to Sidney about it, and tell her he wanted to.

And sitting in the apartment any Saturday, just like the one today, Cott was convinced she could plot almost like on a graph—whether Sidney herself believed it or not, which Sidney didn’t—the exact pattern of rise and fall that Sidney’s allergy would take. And during the four months Sidney had been going with Larry Wright, that graph would not have varied a quarter of an inch.

Sunday was always the worst day. Friday night Larry Wright would be over at the apartment late after he got off work, as he was at least four nights every week, and Cott would get out and let them have the apartment. Luckily, she was still going with her CBS executive, (as Doc Bernstein advised: for God’s sake at least keep a stud around), and she could go over to his place or else take in a late movie. Then around three Larry would leave for his home in the country. And then, late Saturday morning or at noon, the sneezing would start. It would get progressively worse until six o’clock, at which time it would abate and they would have a couple of drinks and eat and go out to a movie. But on Sunday Sidney would wake up sneezing, and it would stay that way all day—and generally half the night, until she could get herself to sleep. And the pattern never varied.

Sitting across from each other in the little living room, the beds in the tiny bedroom still unmade (the sight of which made for depression), and staring at each other while both their lives revolved slowly around simultaneously in each’s head, it was all just suddenly too much. The remark, fatuous and untrue, as both knew, that Sidney had just made about how Cott could not be expected to know what she felt was still hanging over them in the air, and Cott suddenly, impulsively got up and went over to the day couch and put her arms around her friend.

“What are we going to do?” Sidney said brokenly, and sneezed. “What are we ever going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

Sidney sneezed again and leaned her head against her roommate’s shoulder “Who the hell wants to be a damned account executive in an advertising agency?”

“Who the hell wants to be a goddamned actress?” Cott said.

“Men!” Sidney said, and sneezed. “Why is it only married men that ever seem to like me?”

“Because the bastards know they haven’t got anything to lose, that’s why!”

“I’m going to have to break it off with Larry,” Sidney said.

“Yes,” Cott said. “I think you should. There’ll never be anything permanent in it for you. We both know that. But remember what Doc Bernstein said: Always keep at least one man around. Don’t break it off with Larry until you’ve found yourself another.”

“No,” Sidney said stubbornly, and sneezed again. “I’ve never been like that. I’m not going to start now. I’ll tell Larry tomorrow.”

“You have to be tougher,” Cott said gently.

“Tougher!” Sidney cried, and sneezed. “Tougher! In two months I’ll be thirty. Do you realize that? Thirty years old?

“I swear it to you,” she said. “I swear it to you on my thirtieth birthday I’m going to put my head in the oven and just turn on the gas. I mean it. I swear it.”

Her arms around her, Cott rocked her slowly back and forth. “You just have to believe,” she said. “You have to believe there’s a man somewhere. With your name on him. You have to believe it. I have to believe it.”

“I believe it,” Sidney said. “I believe.” She straightened herself and sat back up and wiped her streaming eyes and nose. “And I’m going to tell Larry tomorrow.” She sneezed again, rendingly, brokenly.

“We just have to get rid of Frederick the Cat, Cott,” she said decisively. “We just simply have to, that’s all.”

Esquire
published this in January 1958. It refers directly back to the mention of the tennis game in “A Bottle of Cream,” and in fact grows directly out of it. Certain phrases, such as those mentioning the boy’s “peepee”, his “pubis bone”, the sentence “He wanted to play with himself.”, which I had to agree to cut to have the story published in a magazine, have all been put back. I think it’s an interesting study of male masochism of which there appears to be a great deal in my generation, brought on of course by mothers like the mother in the story.

L
YING IRRITABLY AND SWEATING
between the rows of radishes in the hot humid air under the beating sun, he peered through the screen of tall grass and weeds that formed the boundary of the garden, at the man moving slowly under the shade trees beyond. A slow, warm, secretive pleasure crept over him replacing the irritation as he carefully got the man in his sights. He would never know what hit him. Slowly he cocked the hammer of his pistol and then squeezed the trigger, and the hammer fell upon the little red paper cap igniting it with a low splatting sound.

The man, who was colored and whose name was George and whom the boy’s uncle had only recently brought up north from Florida to work for him, was too far away even to hear the sound and went on slowly pushing his lawn mower across the grass under the shade trees and the boy, whose name was John Slade and who was eleven years old, watched him secretively and with that wholly contained private pleasure that nobody else in the whole world knew about from between the rows of radishes in the garden he was supposed to be weeding for his mother. No, sir, he would never have known what hit him.

“Johnnn-y-y-y!” his mother’s voice came from behind him, shrill, penetrating, nasal, demanding, insistent, rising in the air and going outward in all directions from the back porch of his house as if it were some kind of audible radio wave and himself the sole receiving set.

“I am!” he cried furiously. He holstered the gun, not really holstered, he didn’t have a holster for this one, but jammed between his belly and the belt of his overall pants that he always had to wear when he worked in the garden to keep his better clothes clean. He hated them. And he hated her. And that shrill ear-shivering, penetrating, insistent voice of hers. In his mind’s eye he could see her standing there in the shade on the back porch looking out at him through the screen and drying and drying her hands over and over on a dish towel from the kitchen. Without even bothering to look around he began pulling out weeds again from between the dirty damn radishes, the gun barrel he could feel pressed against his belly just above his peepee, his only hope, his only friend. Like Daniel Boone in the forest.

He had tried making a game of it, playing he was the army and the weeds the enemy and watching his hands which were his troops capturing more and more and more clean ground from them and killing them by the hundreds, infiltrating around the heavier pockets of resistance until they had them completely surrounded by clean captured ground and then uprooting the whole big bunch that died to the last man. But there was too much garden and too many too-big weeds, and in the hot humid summer air under the suffocating sun the game had just run down of itself. He had been at it over an hour, John had, if you counted too all the little bits of time he managed to sneak away from pulling.

Across the back-yard fence and screen of cover the colored man George under the shade trees had stopped pushing his mower when he heard John’s mother’s voice and looked up and grinned, his teeth flashing white in his dark face even at that distance. Now he called sympathetically, “Hot work, ain’t it Mister Johnny, on a day like this.”

John preferred not to answer and, pretending he had not heard, ignored him and went on pulling weeds lethargically. He would never tell him how he had got him dead to rights so he never knew what hit him. He would never tell it to anybody. Nobody in the world. And it would be one more thing he would have that his mother wouldn’t know about, or his father, or any of the other grownups in the world. Or kids either, for that matter. The very thought of it, of having that to add to all the others, the secret, made the pit of his stomach whirl round and round inside him with excitement and he stopped pulling and lay down full length between the rows on the captured clean dirt and wallowed himself on it, all that dirty dirt, rubbing his hands in it above his head and grinding the gun barrel in his pants hurtfully, against his pubis bone, filled with a consuming luxurious hatred for himself, and for her, and for the colored man George, and for his father, and everybody else in the whole world. He’d show them. Let them all see him, wallowing here in the dirt. And just wait till she saw how dirty he got, too, boy, would she be mad, he thought with pleasure. Weeding her old damned vegetable garden.