What Is All This? (22 page)

“What'd he mean with that last remark?” Jennie said.

“I don't know; too highbrow for me. Maybe that my stunt backfired.”

“Did they can you?”

The manager said he'd speak to upper management about it. Meanwhile, because they're short of help in the produce section, I should stay on. But there are always other jobs.”

“We got bills, you know, a baby coming on, and chicken costs money, especially if you don't get it at twenty-percent off.” She went to the kitchen, yelled out “You're a fool and a showoff, Kevin Wimer,” and, a little later, that dinner would be ready in five minutes.

Blackspot called. “You weren't at first forceful enough with those three kids, but thanks, anyway. Nobody won or lost, but it at least drew some much-needed nonviolent attention to the movement. I was wondering if you'd join our picket line tomorrow against a pro-grower Food-O-Rama on a Hundred and Sixty-eighth. We need marchers badly.”

“I'm still working,” I said. “But because of my general all-around foul-up today and sympathy for the movement, I'd like to give a few dollars to the pickers. Where do I send it to?”

“We're having a full-page ad in all the city's newspapers on Sunday. It'll mention just that matter and also the address of national headquarters where the donations should go.”

The phone rang a minute later. “Let it ring,” Jennie said. “Even pull out the jack, since there'll be no end to those calls,” but I left the table and answered it. It was Nelson's wife, Rita. She said she hadn't seen the story on television herself, but a couple of her friends called to tell her that one of Nelson's coworkers had come on television to say that not only did Nelson deserve to get burned but the whole city should be torched if the mayor and city council and all the supermarkets and their customers don't support the berry boycott. I told her that wasn't true about one of Nelson's coworkers and wondered what news program her friends could have been watching. “It certainly wasn't the one my wife and I saw, and the other station covering it filmed the same scene.” Then I asked how Nelson was and she said “Oh, fine, absolutely fine. How else would he be with half his body charred to shreds and all the pain that goes with it, which no amount of drugs seems to help.”

“But is he improving any? I mean, Nelson and I were friends at work, so I'm interested. Everybody at the market's concerned, customers too.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “a lot you all care.”

“We do, a lot, me, especially. That television report your friends gave was totally false.”

“Well, the doctors say he'll live, thank God, though with so much of his body burned, they say he'll have to get skin grafts on the parts burned most,” and it occurred to me that she if anybody would know the answer as to which of the two degrees was worse. I first said “Listen, and I swear to this, I'd be glad to give some of my skin to Nelson, if the doctors think the color is right and all, as I've big thighs and an even bigger behind and I know that's where they take the donor's skin from.” Then I told her about the question that had been bothering me for two days now and which was worse, if she didn't mind my asking, second-or third-degree burns?

“Well, the main difference, Nelson's main doctor told me—” but then she broke down. I felt very bad for her and said “Now, come on, don't cry, Rita. It'll be all right; everything'll work out okay,” but she said “I can't talk anymore; I've been like this since the firebombing. Oh, what's wrong with this world, anyway?” and hung up.

I stood there a few seconds with that sobbing plea of hers still in my head, then went to the dictionary in the living room while Jennie was calling me back to the table in the kitchen, but all it had in it were the words “second” and “third” and “first” and “burn” and “-s” for the plural, but no word “degree” after them, neither with hyphens, separated nor anything. I decided I'd never get to know the answer to this question. That none of my friends knew and nobody at work knew and that maybe the only person who could tell me would be one of those great skin-doctor specialists like the one working on Nelson, who wouldn't give me the time of day on the phone if I called him, he'd be so busy. Then I remembered my promise to Rita and I said out loud “Good God, what the hell you get yourself into this time?” and I all of a sudden felt stomach-sick and woozy, because just the thought of being operated on for skin for Nelson's grafting scared me to no end now. I hoped Rita would forget my suggestion, or maybe in her condition she hadn't even heard me make it, but I had promised her and I knew I'd have to go along with it if I was asked.

At the state unemployment office this morning, David met a woman in line who told him, after giving him the once-over and then deploring the long wait and interminable California rain, that she had five beautiful daughters at home from whom he could just about take his pick if he liked. “You seem that good-natured and sensitive to me,” she said, “and just look at the way you read those brilliant books. And then, strange as this sounds, sonny,” and she looked around the room suspiciously and then stretched on her toes to speak into his ear, “I think it's high time they began seeing men who aren't always so stupid and wild.”

David thought the woman was a little eccentric, so he politely told her he wasn't interested. “What I'm saying is that, enticing as your offer sounds, I'm really much too busy with my studies to go out with some women I don't even know.”

“
Girls
,” she said, “not women. Young gorgeous, unattached girls, the homeliest of which looks like nothing short of a glamorous movie starlet. And who said anything about going out with all five of them?
One
, just one, we're not perverts, you know. And my daughters are smart and obedient enough to realize that what I say is usually the right thing for them, so you can be sure you'll have your choice, like I say.”

Thanks again,” he said, as he was trying to finish the last few pages of the paperback he was reading and then get to the one sticking out of his jacket pocket, “but I'm afraid I'll still have to say no.”

“Why no? Listen some more before you shut me off. One's even a blonde, though with fantastic dark black eyes. You ever go out with a blonde with fantastic dark black eyes? Ever even seen one, no less? Take it from me, they're the most magnificent female creatures on God's earth, bar none. Writers write endless sonnets about them, swoon at their feet. One handsome young biochemist actually wanted to commit suicide over my Sylvia, but I told him he was crazy and he'd be better off discovering new cures for cancer, instead. And listen: Each of them has a beautiful body. You interested, perhaps, in beautiful bodies?”

“Of course I am,” and he closed the book on his finger. “I mean”—he tried to harden his face from showing his sudden interest—“well, every man is.”

“Like Venus and Aphrodite they have beautiful bodies,” she said dreamily. “And cook? Everything I know in the kitchen and my
cordon bleu
mother before me knew, I've taught to my daughters. Now, what do you say?”

She was next in line now and the clerk behind the window asked her to step forward. “Listen to that jerk,” she whispered to David. “Someone like that I wouldn't let one foot into my house. Wouldn't even let him say hello on the phone to my daughters, even if he was pulling in five hundred a week from his job. But
you
?”

“Madam,” the clerk said irritably, “if you don't mind?”

“
You
,” she continued with her back to the clerk, “sandals, long hair, mustache, face blemishes and all, I'd make an elaborate dinner for and introduce to my girls one by one. Then I'd give you a real Cuban cigar and Napoleon brandy and show you into our library till you made up your mind as to which of my beauties you want to take for a drive. And you want to know why? I like brains.”

“It's nice of you to say that,” David said. “Because nowadays—”

“Brains have always been taught to me by my father as the most important and cherishable part a man can bring to a woman. Clerks like that dullard don't have brains, just fat behinds with sores on them through their whole lives. But you I can tell. Not only because of your intelligent frown and casual way you speak but also how you concentrate on your brilliant English novel here,” and she slapped the book he held. “So, come on, sonny, because what do you really have to lose?”

“Okay,” he said, smiling for the first time since he met her, “you broke my arm. But just for dinner, if that's all right. And only to meet your lovely family and have a good home-cooked meal for a change, with some stimulating conversation.”

“Now you're being smart.” She wrote her name and address on the inside cover of his book, told him to be at her home around six and went up to the clerk's window to sign the form for her unemployment check.

“You act like you don't even need the money,” the clerk said, shoving the form in front of her.

This paltry sum?” she said for everybody to hear. “
Peanuts
. But I and my employer put good money into your insurance plan, so why shouldn't I make a claim for it if I'm looking for work?”

“Next,” he said over her shoulder, and David walked up, said good morning extra courteously, as he didn't want to give this man even the slightest excuse for becoming unfriendly and ultimately overinquisitive about him, and answered the same two questions he'd been asked since he started getting the checks.

“Did you work any days last week or receive a salary or payment of any kind for any type of labor?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you make an effort the last week to look for work in your field?”

“Yes, sir.”

“See you tonight, then,” the woman said from the side, twiddling her fingers goodbye as David signed the form. “And don't worry about any fancy dressing for our cozy dinner. We're informal people—very informal, though we're not exactly beggars, by any means.”

That evening, David shaved himself twice with his electric razor, as the rotary blades were in serious need of a sharpening, and trimmed his full mustache so that none of the hairs hung over the upper lip. Then he dressed in his only suit and tie, brushed down his curly hair with hair oil till his skull was flat and shiny, and patted after-shave lotion on his face and neck and then at the underarms of his jacket, which needed a dry-cleaning. But then, he thought, it wasn't every day of the week a lonely, sort of homely-looking guy like himself was invited to sit down at an elegant table with five beautiful young sisters.

The house he drove up to turned out to be in the seediest part of town. It was small and boxlike, sticking out of a garden of tall weeds like an ancient, run-down mausoleum. He rang the bell, much less hopeful of any grand time tonight, but, surprisingly, the girl who opened the door was as beautiful as her mother had said. She was about twenty, black-eyed and as well built as the famous Venus statue in Paris, whom she also resembled above the neck a great deal, he now noticed, except for the long blonde hair. “Come right in,” she said in a sweet voice, and David, feeling his neck knot up with excitement, managed to squeak out that he was the man his mother had met this morning and invited to dinner.

“You're Sylvia,” he said. “I'd know you anywhere by your mother's glowing description.” He stuck out his hand, but instead of having his fingers squeezed seductively as he had imagined, he was jerked past the door and thrown halfway across the room. When he got up a few seconds later, a bit dizzy and his pants ripped at the knee and all set to ask what kind of silly practical joke she was playing on him, he saw her locking the front door with a key, which she promptly dropped down her bra.

“Now, how's that for a quick-change routine?” Sylvia said with a voice much tougher and throatier now, though that smile of unwavering sweetness remained. “Years back, I was in show business, so I know what's what with costumes and makeup and things.”

David tried to stay composed by examining the rip in his pants. “It's a damn good thing this is my oldest suit,” he said, and looked up to see what reaction his remark had made and saw her peeling off her face skin from the forehead down and then her gorgeous blonde hair.

“A voluptuous goddess of love I can only pretend to be for minutes,” the woman he'd met at the unemployment office said, “but a svelte water nymph I could play for you for hours. Not much padding then to bother my tush and ribs and hamper my walk, you know what I mean?” She placed the wig and Venus mask in a hatbox—neatly, as if she were preserving them to wear again—and unzipped her dress, removed the socks from her bra and bandages wrapped around her buttocks and, from her waist, a tight black-satin cummerbund. When she finished rezippering and hitching, and patting her gray hair back into place, she said “Well, now, Davy boy, what do you say we get down to business.”

“Why you big fraud,” he said. “I mean…why you big incredible fraud.”

“Sure, I'm a fraud. What then? You saying you would've come all the way out here just to see an old bag like me? But look who's talking about frauds. We're on to you, you know, the way you take unemployment-insurance money from our Government under somebody else's name and Social Security number—a good pal of yours in Paris who you send a hundred bucks to every other week. We checked, so don't think you've been invited here just for your good looks, you weasel. At least I worked for my unemployment money—twenty miserable weeks I worked, which isn't one day over the minimum and which I don't ever expect to do again. But sit down.” She motioned him to a chair. “A sense of decency I at least still got for your likes. You want a drink? Some good gin? Oh, stop shaking your head like a clod. You're not getting out of here till we've had our say, so you might as well sit back comfortably with a drink.”

“About that unemployment insurance,” David said uneasily. “Well, that's my business—my worry. And if you've brought me here to extort hush money out of me, forget it. I'm broke, flat,
rien—comprenez-vous français
? So I'll be leaving,” and he stood up and confidently stuck out his hand for the key. She laughed and slapped at his fingers and yelled in the direction of the stairs “Georgie? Little Davy's here and he's getting impatient. You want to come down?”

From upstairs, a man answered in a soft, lilting voice: “I'll be down in a sec, sweet.”

“You'll be down in a sec, nothing. Get your skinny ass here this instant.”

A thin, sickly-looking man in his fifties came hurrying downstairs. He was panting, still full of sleep, a few days past his last shave and scratching his undershirt nervously when he gave David a limp, wet hand to shake.

“Pleased to meet you, son. Sylvia's told me some very encouraging things about you. Very.”

“You see,” Sylvia said, edging David back into a couch beside Georgie, “my husband and I have decided you're just the man we need for our work.”

That's right,” Georgie said. “We need a smart boy with brains.”

“What Mr. Peartree means is that simply the idea of you carrying through your plans to finagle the Government is a good sign to us. Besides which, of course, we can always use it against you if you don't go along with what we ask.”

“Sylvia told me all about it,” Georgie said. “Amazing. Just terrific. No, really, pal, because not many guys can get away with conning the Federal Government anymore.”

David said “Not that I'm committing myself to anything, but I still don't know what you have in mind or even what the wages are for your mysterious work.”

“Twenty dollars a day,” she said, as if it were two hundred, “and judging from what we have on you, consider it philanthropy.”

“You're getting a bargain,” Georgie said. “Take it quick before she lowers the offer.”

“Offer for what, goddamnit?” David said, and Sylvia, telling him to control himself for a minute, went into a long detailed account of what they had in mind. She and Georgie were basically uneducated people, she said, and as he could see by just looking around their home, these weren't the best of times for them, either. So what they needed now was an educated person to write bright convincing letters to all sorts of big American companies, complaining about the products some woman they'd made up had bought and how much trouble and even serious harm these defective goods had caused this woman and her family.

“We give you the names of the products,” she went on, “and what you do, and which we know you're capable of because of your strong English-literature background, is think up something wrong with these goods, type up a nice neat letter telling about it and then sign our Mrs. O'Connell's name and our address. From these letters we expect all kinds of small and semi-large cash settlements, and if not that, then tremendous supplies of these same products Mrs. O'Connell's complaining about, which should keep us in most of our home goodies for a solid year.”

“A friend of mine,” Georgie said, “once wrote a letter to a cigarette company, telling the truth about how the cig paper had pinholes in it, which made the things unsmokable. In a week he got back a hand-signed letter from the sales manager himself, saying how sorry they were and he should know how untypical his experience was and for his trouble they were sending along two cartons of the same brand he made a stink about. Two cartons—can you imagine? Just think if he was a brainy guy like yourself and wrote an intelligent letter telling how he found some chemically tested rat hairs in his smokes.”

“Letters like that,” Sylvia said, “which shouldn't take you more than two days. Then you get your forty dollars and our sincerest promises that we won't leak a word to the Government about your little insurance embezzlement. Is it a deal?”

David had nineteen more weeks to go on his friend's unemployment insurance, which came to—after he'd subtracted the biweekly hundred dollars he sent to Paris—around two thousand dollars, tax free and clear. He really had no choice but to go along with them, so he said he agreed, though reluctantly, he wanted them to understand, and promised he'd be at their house for work bright and early the next day.

“Listen,” Sylvia said sharply as she unlocked the door, “bright and early it better be. Or around nine a.m. tomorrow, the U.S. Government gets an anonymous tip concerning one David O. Knopps, you know what I mean?”