The Children of Hamelin (31 page)

“Not so bad, is it?” I said.

She smiled shyly at me. “No.... I’m all confused... But... you really don’t...?”

I fished in my pocket and brought out my key. I dangled it in front of her face.

“You don’t really expect me to accept that now,” she said. It was just short of being a question.

“No. But I want you to know it’s still there for the taking, dig?”

She smiled a real wide smile, and her eyes seemed to soften.

“You’re really a good person,” she said. “You know, I just might be falling in love with you.” And she kissed me again, harder this time, with a flick of her tongue and the homey taste of coffee.

Eyes to eyes, smile to open smile, she said: “I woke up thinking last night had killed everything between us. Now I think... things may just be starting—”

Once more she kissed me, a kiss that was hot and languid, and her tongue started to move in my mouth like something we had no time to finish was starting.

I pulled away with a little laugh. “Better cool it,” I said, “or you’ll never get to class and I’ll never get to work.”

She laughed back. I felt five years younger, felt I could contemplate the word “love” without snickering.

“I’m a little scared,” she said. “It feels so different... Let’s take our time... yes?”

I felt that uncertain hollow tingling too. “Slow and easy,” I said. “We’ve got all the time in the world....”

“...comes as close to being the big breakthrough for you, Mr. Feinblatt, as anything of yours I’ve ever seen. In fact,
Silent Cat
is the kind of novel that gives a conscientious agent fits...”

Gah! Fits is right! What kind of jerk would spend two years on and off writing a novelization of the life of Calvin Coolidge? A 100,000 word eight-pointer yet! Which was its only saving grace—here it was Thursday afternoon and here I was with only 32 points and a Foundation meeting tonight so I couldn’t catch up at home. So an eight-pointer that would bring me even should’ve been a godsend.

Only how the fuck was I going to write six pages on this thing? It was the ultimate horror—a good novelization of the life of Calvin Coolidge; every one of those hundred thousand words well-chosen, well-typed, well-punctuated and stupefyingly dull. Paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, this Feinblatt freak could really write. Only trouble was he had made one small mistake at the outset—he had chosen a subject for his masterpiece that was
dull dull dull.
I mean
—Calvin Coolidge?

Moaning softly, I returned to the salt mines:

“...Structurally, the novel is flawless. The prose is clean, well-chosen, and carries what action there is smoothly along in a most professional manner...”

Well, it was that kind of week. After Monday night, I had pissed Tuesday away on a lousy seven points worth of one pointers, unable to get my mind off Arlene. Wednesday, I made like a Stahkanovite and tore off twelve points, but after dinner with Arlene and a quick one that wasn’t a thing like Monday and soothing her for about three hours afterward because it wasn’t and having to convince her it didn’t matter, I had started today in a nice rotten mood and goofed the morning away on one short and reading this mess and now I had damn well better rip off six pages before five somehow, or Friday would be a nightmare...

“...however, to paraphrase something Herman Melville once said about the impossibility of writing a great work about a flea...”

“Come take a piss with me, Tom, old man.”

Dickie Lee had appeared before me like the Cheshire Cat, replete with shit-eating grin.

“What?”

“I am inviting you to the executive’s pissoir,” Dickie said grandly. Bruce and Berkowitz barely looked up; too busy typing away to even bother making the required cracks about faggotry. That kind of week for them too, I guess.

“There
is
no executive’s john, Dickie,” I pointed out.

“I,” huffed Dickie regally, “am an executive. Therefore, wherever I piss is the executive’s john.”

“Your logic is irrefutable, Dickie. Besides, anything to get away from Calvin Coolidge.”

“Who?”

“The latest candidate for fame and fortune,” I said, thumping the giant manuscript of
Silent Cal.
“A novelization of the life of Calvin Coolidge. Nice piece of work. I’m thinking of—”

Dickie winced. “If you pass that thing on to me even in jest,” he said, “you will become the executive’s pissoir because this executive will piss all over you.”

As we stood side by side at the reeking urinals, Dickie letting loose a healthy piss and me faking it, Dickie glanced around the large, dirty-tiled men’s room that served our whole floor of the building, saw that we were alone except for a pair of feet peeking out from the bottom of one of the crapper stalls, said: “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you here tonight?”

“A company that goes to the head together makes bread together?” I suggested.

“I am trying to be serious.”

“I guess you just haven’t had too much practice, Dickie.”

“Look, Tom old man,” Dickie said, now
really
serious, “I’m trying to do you a favor. I’m gonna reveal a deep, dark secret. Dirk offered you the
Slick
slush-pile job, right?”

“Dirk
did
seem to be hinting at something.”

“Ah!” said Dickie. He flashed me a conspiratorial smile. “Well...
Slick
is a small operation itself. Mort Clarke is the editor and Harold Berg is the assistant editor and there’s the usual fag photography editor and that’s it.”

“So?”

Dickie beamed at me. “However, me lad,” he said,
“Slick
is owned by a big West Coat stiffener outfit that publishes about a dozen of the things.”

“Come on Dickie, what are you getting at?”

“I am trying to show some class, but I see that a peasant such as yourself understands nought but crudity. Harold Berg is approximately three hundred years old and far too senile to take over the editor’s job. And good old Mort is starting to fuck up.”

“So?”

Dickie frowned, shook his head at my denseness.
“So,”
he said, “Mort has blown several similar jobs in the Big Town, which, in fact, is why he fled to L.A. Old Mort is—shall we say?—a lush. Dirk knows him well and such is Our Leader’s wisdom that by the length of time Mort is taking to read stories from the pros and the growing incoherence of his correspondence, Dirk has concluded that Mort will drink himself out of the
Slick
editorial seat and under the proverbial table ere the year is out. And if not, New Year’s Eve is certain to finish the job. So... since Harold is ready for St. Petersburg, whoever gets the slush-pile job will probably be editor of
Slick
before February.
Comprende?”

“Comprendo,”
I said as we walked toward the door. In fact, I
comprehended
a bit more than Dickie thought I did, namely that Dirk had put him up to this.
“If
I wanted to be editor of
Slick,
that would be very interesting. However—”

“Fame and fortune await in the Golden West, me boy!” Dickie chided. “Don’t be an ingrate, old man.”

“I won’t be an ingrate, Dickie,” I said. “You told me your big secret and now I’ll let you in on an even more important piece of information.”

“Oh? And what might that be, old man?”

“Your fly is open,” I said.

“What’s this meeting supposed to be about, baby?” I asked Arlene as Harvey threaded his way through the crowd on the floor to his folding chair on the dais. We were sitting on folding chairs too—in the row of chairs at the back of the room. After getting my suit good and mungy from the floor last time, I had made it my business to get there early enough to cop a chair and save one for Arlene too.

“I don’t know,” Arlene said. “You know that meetings aren’t usually called for any fixed purpose.”

“Uh-huh. But I also know that this one is on Thursday and the last one was on Wednesday, so there’s no fixed schedule for the things, right?”

“So?”

“So old Harv calls ‘em when he wants to call ‘em.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Arlene said. “I suppose Harvey just calls a meeting when he senses something in the air.”

“Uh-huh. And five’ll get you ten I know what’s in the air tonight: San Francisco.”

Arlene frowned. “I hope you’re wrong,” she said.

“Why’s it got you so uptight?”

“Everything that matters to me is in New York. Everyone I know... you... my family... college.... I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’d be lost in California.”

I remembered what Dickie had told me this afternoon. Dickie was not one to give away Dirk’s secrets unless under orders to make like a security leak. Therefore, Dirk was really offering me the editorship of
Slick
by next year. It made a lot more sense from Dirk’s viewpoint that way: with me as full editor of
Slick,
he would have a permanent friendly outlet for the agency’s stiffener crud. It had been eating on me all evening: why couldn’t I get interested in a real editor’s job, even if it was a sleazy mag like
Slick?
Sure beat fee-reading. But now Arlene had laid it out for me: I was a New Yorker clean through, everyone and everything I knew—and her too—was here and there was nothing for me in LA but the gaping unknown and a job. I felt much saner knowing that Arlene felt the same way about leaving New York. Cowardice loves company...?

“So what’s the problem?” I said.

“The problem is I’d be lost without the Foundation too,” she said.

“God, I don’t know what I’d do.”

Way across the carpet of people in front of us, Harvey had seated himself on the dais. He lit a cigarette, took a drag, exhaled and said: “I understand Ted would like to open this meeting. Ted...?”

I gave Arlene an I-told-you-so look as Ted stood up at the foot of the dais, put one foot up on it, and turned to face the membership, his blue eyes gleaming, his big body hunched forward almost like a quarterback behind his center.

“Last meeting we kicked around the idea of what it would be like to have the Foundation in San Francisco,” Ted said. “Since then, everyone seems to be talking about it, but we really haven’t discussed it seriously yet. So I think it’s time we did. So to start it off, I’m making a formal motion that the Foundation move itself to San Francisco as soon as possible.”

Arlene clutched at my hand. I shrugged at her. I had seen this coming a mile away. And I could even see Harvey’s next move....

“Let me get this straight, Ted,” Harvey said. “You want to put this to a vote of the membership?”

“That’s right.”

“But don’t you think it’s a little unrealistic, even unfair, to expect people to make such a monumental decision on such short notice?”

“No, no, no!” Ted said, shaking his head violently. “I’m not really saying we should decide right now. All I’m saying is that we should
really
start thinking seriously about moving the Foundation to San Francisco. And I just think the way to do that is to have a formal motion before the membership, dig? Sure we’d be crazy to vote one way or the other right now, but if we’ve got a motion, it gives all the bullshit we’ve been throwing around lately some reality.”

“Well that seems to be a reasonable way of going about it,” Harvey conceded. “In order to make it a formal motion, though, I think we should have some seconds...?”

A sprinkling of hands went up: Doris (quickly, but without much obvious enthusiasm), Linda Kahn (surprise!), Charley Dees, Bill Nelson, Tod-and-Judy, Chester White, George Blum, and a few others. And a few mutters: “Second the motion.”

“Well,” Harvey, carefully not gloating, “it looks like a formal motion to move the Foundation to San Francisco is now before the membership. So let’s chew it over. Since it was your idea, Ted, suppose you tell us why you’re in favor of the move—”

Ted flashed a big grin out over the room, rose to the balls of his feet, and man, did I recognize that look on his face: Ted the True Believer, fried to the eyeballs on adrenalin, panting to convert the whole world to his latest Big Answer. Old Harv sure knew who to maneuver into playing his mouthpiece—when Ted got wound up like this he could just about sell a lifetime subscription to
Pravda
to J. Edgar Hoover.

“Look at us!” Ted nearly shouted. “Maybe forty people who’ve come to the Foundation because we’re not satisfied with our lives and we want to change them by changing ourselves, right? Okay, so we come into this loft, and while we’re here, we
do
change our consciousness. But then we drag our sorry asses out into the same shitty environment we’ve known all our lives and do the same fuck-up things we’ve always done.
So where’s the change?
Trouble is, we’re all committed to a whole shitload of useless garbage besides the Foundation: jobs, school, people, ways of fucked-up living. When we should be totally committed to just one thing
—Total Consciousness.
Deep down we all know that, or we wouldn’t be here. We need to move the Foundation to San Francisco to get rid of all that external crap and make the Foundation the center, the
only
center, of our lives!”

Arlene was suddenly on her feet shouting: “This is crazy! Do you realize what you’re asking? We’ve all got lives of our own here, jobs, school, family, friends! Why the hell should we cut ourselves off from everything we care about to drag ourselves across the continent to some city most of us have never seen? It’s crazy!”

“Ah shit—” Ted began.

But Harvey cut him off. “That’s a very good point. I don’t think you’ve really thought this through, Ted. You and Doris have no strong ties here, and you can work and paint anywhere. But many of the members have careers, families, are going to college—have deep ties to New York. You don’t seem to understand what moving to San Francisco would mean to them—they’d have to totally uproot their lives. And those that chose to stay behind would lose even more—the chance to develop their consciousness. You don’t seem to realize what this would mean to the Foundation members as individuals.”