Jailbird

20

Sacco and Vanzetti never lost their dignity — never cracked up. Walter F. Starbuck finally did.

I seemed to hold up quite well when I was arrested in the showroom of The American Harp Company. When old Delmar Peale showed the two policemen the circular about the stolen clarinet parts, when he explained what I was to be arrested for, I even smiled. I had the perfect alibi, after all: I had been in prison for the past two years.

When I told them that, though, it did not relax them as much as I had hoped. They decided that I was perhaps more of a desperado than they had at first supposed.

The police station was in an uproar when we arrived. Television crews and newspaper reporters were trying to get at the young men who had rioted in the gardens of the United Nations, who had thrown the finance minister of Sri Lanka into the East River. The Sri Lankan had not been found yet, so it was assumed that the rioters would be charged with murder.

Actually, the Sri Lankan would be rescued by a police launch about two hours later. He would be found clinging to a bell buoy off Governor's Island. The papers the next morning would describe him as "incoherent." I can believe it.

There was no one to question me at once. I was going to have to be locked up for a while. The police station was so busy that there wasn't even an ordinary cell for me. I was given a chair in the corridor outside the cells. It was there that the rioters insulted me from behind bars, imagining that I would enjoy nothing so much as making love to them.

I was eventually taken to a padded cell in the basement. It was designed to hold a maniac until an ambulance could come for her or him. There wasn't a toilet in there, because a maniac might try to bash his or her brains out on a toilet's rim. There was no cot, no chair. I would have to sit or lie on the padded floor. Oddly enough, the only piece of furniture was a large bowling trophy, which somebody had stored in there. I got to know it well.

So there I was back in a quiet basement again.

And, as had happened to me when I was the President's special advisor on youth affairs, I was forgotten again.

I was accidentally left there from noon until eight o'clock that night, without food or water or a toilet or the slightest sound from the outside — on what was to have been my first full day of freedom. Thus began a test of my character that I failed.

I thought about Mary Kathleen and all she had been through. I still did not know that she was Mrs. Jack Graham, but she had told me something else very interesting about herself: After I left Harvard, after I stopped answering her letters or even thinking much about her anymore, she hitchhiked to Kentucky, where Kenneth Whistler was still working as a miner and an organizer. She arrived at sundown at the shack where he was living alone. The place was unlocked, having nothing inside worth stealing. Whistler was still at work. Mary Kathleen had brought food with her. When Whistler came home, there was smoke coming out of his chimney. There was a hot meal waiting for him inside.

That was how she got down into the coalfields. And that was how she happened, when Kenneth Whistler became violent late at night because of alcohol, to run out into the moonlit street of a shanty town and into the arms of a young mining engineer. He was, of course, Jack Graham.

And then I regaled myself with a story by my prison friend Dr. Robert Fender, which he had published under the name of "Kilgore Trout." It was called "Asleep at the Switch." It was about a huge reception center outside the Pearly Gates of heaven — filled with computers and staffed by people who had been certified public accountants or investment counselors or business managers back on Earth.

You could not get into heaven until you had submitted to a full review of how well you had handled the business opportunities God, through His angels, had offered to you on Earth.

All day long and in every cubicle you could hear the experts saying with utmost weariness to people who had missed this opportunity and then that one: "And there you were, asleep at the switch again."

How much time had I spent in solitary by then? I will make a guess: five minutes.

"Asleep at the Switch" was quite a sacrilegious story. The hero was the ghost of Albert Einstein. He himself was so little interested in wealth that he scarcely heard what his auditor had to say to him. It was some sort of balderdash about how he could have become a billionaire, if only he had gotten a second mortgage on his house in Bern, Switzerland, in Nineteen-hundred and Five, and invested the money in known uranium deposits before telling the world that E=Mc2.

"But there you were — asleep at the switch again," said the auditor.

"Yes," said Einstein politely, "it does seem rather typical."

"So you see," said the auditor, "life really was quite fair. You did have a remarkable number of opportunities, whether you took them or not."

"Yes, I see that now," said Einstein.

"Would you mind saying that in so many words?" said the auditor.

"Saying what?" said Einstein.

"That life was fair."

"Life was fair," said Einstein.

"If you don't really mean it," said the auditor, "I have many more examples to show you. For instance, just forgetting atomic energy: If you had simply taken the money you put into a savings bank when you were at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and you had put it, starting in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty, say, into IBM and Polaroid and Xerox — even though you had only five more years to live — " The auditor raised his eyes suggestively, inviting Einstein to show how smart he could be.

"I would have been rich?" said Einstein.

" 'Comfortable,' shall we say?" said the auditor smugly. "But there you were again — " And again his eyebrows went up.

"Asleep at the switch?" asked Einstein hopefully.

The auditor stood and extended his hand, which Einstein accepted unenthusiastically. "So you see, Doctor Einstein," he said, "we can't blame God for everything, now can we?" He handed Einstein his pass through the Pearly Gates. "Good to have you aboard," he said.

So into heaven Einstein went, carrying his beloved fiddle. He thought no more about the audit. He was a veteran of countless border crossings by then. There had always been senseless questions to answer, empty promises to make, meaningless documents to sign.

But once inside heaven Einstein encountered ghost after ghost who was sick about what his or her audit had shown. One husband and wife team, which had committed suicide after losing everything in a chicken farm in New Hampshire, had been told that they had been living the whole time over the largest deposit of nickel in the world.

A fourteen-year-old Harlem child who had been killed in a gang fight was told about a two-carat diamond ring that lay for weeks at the bottom of a catch basin he passed every day. It was flawless and had not been reported as stolen. If he had sold it for only a tenth of its value, four hundred dollars, say, according to his auditor, and speculated in commodities futures, especially in cocoa at that time, he could have moved his mother and sisters and himself into a Park Avenue condominium and sent himself to Andover and then to Harvard after that.

There was Harvard again.

All the auditing stories that Einstein heard were told by Americans. He had chosen to settle in the American part of heaven. Understandably, he had mixed feelings about Europeans, since he was a Jew. But it wasn't only Americans who were being audited. Pakistanis and pygmies from the Philippines and even communists had to go through the very same thing.

It was in character for Einstein to be offended first by the mathematics of the system the auditors wanted everybody to be so grateful for. He calculated that if every person on Earth took full advantage of every opportunity, became a millionaire and then a billionaire and so on, the paper wealth on that one little planet would exceed the worth of all the minerals in the universe in a matter of three months or so. Also: There would be nobody left to do any useful work.

So he sent God a note. It assumed that God had no idea what sorts of rubbish His auditors were talking. It accused the auditors rather than God of cruelly deceiving new arrivals about the opportunities they had had on Earth. He tried to guess the auditors' motives. He wondered if they might not be sadists.

The story ended abruptly. Einstein did not get to see God. But God sent out an archangel who was boiling mad. He told Einstein that if he continued to destroy ghosts' respect for the audits, he was going to take Einstein's fiddle away from him for all eternity. So Einstein never discussed the audits with anybody ever again. His fiddle meant more to him than anything.

The story was certainly a slam at God, suggesting that He was capable of using a cheap subterfuge like the audits to get out of being blamed for how hard economic life was down here.

I made my mind a blank.

But then it started singing about Sally in the garden again.

Mary Kathleen O'Looney, exercising her cosmic powers as Mrs. Jack Graham, had meanwhile telephoned Arpad Leen, the top man at RAMJAC. She ordered him to find out what the police had done with me, and to send the toughest lawyer in New York City to rescue me, no matter what the cost.

He was to make me a RAMJAC vice-president after that. While she was at it, she said, she had a list of other good people who were to be rounded up and also made vice-presidents. These were the people I had told her about, of course — the strangers who had been so nice to me.

She also ordered him to tell Doris Kramm, the old secretary at The American Harp Company, that she didn't have to retire, no matter how old she was.

Yes, and there in my padded cell I told myself a joke I had read in The Harvard Lampoon when a freshman. It had amazed me back then because it seemed so dirty. When I became the President's special advisor on youth affairs, and had to read college humor again, I discovered that the joke was still being published many times a year — unchanged. This was it:

SHE: How dare you kiss me like that?

HE: I was just trying to find out who ate all the macaroons.

So I had a good laugh about that there in solitary. But then I began to crack. I could not stop saying to myself, "Macaroons, macaroons, macaroons . . . "

Things got much worse after that. I sobbed. I bounced myself off the walls. I took a crap in a corner. I dropped the bowling trophy on top of the crap.

I screamed a poem I had learned in grammar school:

Don't care if I do die,

Do die, do die!

Like to make the juice fly,

Juice fly, juice fly!

I may even have masturbated. Why not? We old folks have much richer sex lives than most young people imagine.

I eventually collapsed.

At seven o'clock that night the toughest attorney in New York entered the police station upstairs. He had traced me that far. He was a famous man, known to be extremely ferocious and humorless in prosecuting or defending almost anyone. The police were thunderstruck when such a dreaded celebrity appeared. He demanded to know what had become of me.

Nobody knew. There was no record anywhere of my having been released or transferred elsewhere. My lawyer knew I hadn't gone home, because he had already asked after me there. Mary Kathleen had told Arpad Leen and Leen had told the lawyer that I lived at the Arapahoe.

They could not even find out what I had been arrested for.

So all the cells were checked. I wasn't in any of them, of course. The people who had brought me in and the man who had locked me up had all gone off-duty. None of them could be reached at home.

But then the detective who was trying to placate my lawyer remembered the cell downstairs and decided to have a look inside it, just in case.

When the key turned in the lock, I was lying on my stomach like a dog in a kennel, facing the door. My stocking feet extended in the direction of the bowling trophy and the crap. I had removed my shoes for some reason.

When the detective opened the door, he was appalled to see me, realizing how long I must have been in there. The City of New York had accidentally committed a very serious crime against me.

"Mr. Starbuck — ?" he asked anxiously.

I said nothing. I did sit up. I no longer cared where I was or what might happen next. I was like a hooked fish that had done all the fighting it could. Whatever was on the other end of the line was welcome to reel me in.

When the detective said, "Your lawyer is here," I did not protest even inwardly that nobody knew I was in jail, that I had no lawyer, no friends, no anything. So be it: My lawyer was there.

Now the lawyer showed himself. It would not have surprised me if he had been a unicorn. He was, in fact, almost that fantastic — a man who, when only twenty-six years old, had been chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Investigating Committee, whose chairman was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the most spectacular hunter of disloyal Americans since World War Two.

He was in his late forties now — but still unsmiling and nervously shrewd. During the McCarthy Era, which came after Leland Clewes and I had made such fools of ourselves, I had hated and feared this man. He was on my side now.

"Mr. Starbuck," he said, "I am here to represent you, if you want me to. I have been retained on your behalf by The RAMJAC Corporation. Roy M. Cohn is my name."

What a miracle-worker he was!

I was out of the police station and into a waiting limousine before you could say, "Habeas corpus!"

Cohn, having delivered me to the limousine, did not himself get in. He wished me well without shaking my hand, and was gone. He never touched me, never gave any indication that he knew that I, too, had played a very public part in American history in olden times.

So there I was in a limousine again. Why not? Anything was possible in a dream. Hadn't Roy M. Cohn just gotten me out of jail, and hadn't I left my shoes behind? So why shouldn't the dream go on — and have Leland Clewes and Israel Edel, the night clerk at the Arapahoe, already sitting in the back of the limousine, with a space between them for me? This it did.

They nodded to me uneasily. They, too, felt that life wasn't making good sense just now.

What was going on, of course, was that the limousine was cruising around Manhattan like a schoolbus, picking up people Mary Kathleen O'Looney had told Arpad Leen to hire as RAMJAC vice-presidents. This was Leen's personal limousine. It was what I have since learned is called a "stretch" limousine. The American Harp Company could have used the backseat for a showroom.

Clewes and Edel and the next person we were going to pick up had all been telephoned personally by Leen — after some of his assistants had found out more about who they were and where they were. Leland Clewes had been found in the phone-book. Edel had been found behind the desk at the Arapahoe. One of the assistants had gone to the Coffee Shop of the Royalton to ask for the name of a person who worked there and had a French-fried hand.

Other calls had gone to Georgia — one to the RAMJAC regional office, asking if they had a chauffeur named Cleveland Lawes working for them, and another one to the Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility at Finletter Air Force Base, asking if they had a guard named Clyde Carter and a prisoner named Dr. Robert Fender there.

Clewes asked me if I understood what was going on.

"No," I said. "This is just the dream of a jailbird. It's not supposed to make sense."

Clewes asked me what had happened to my shoes.

"I left them in the padded cell," I said.

"You were in a padded cell?" he said.

"It's very nice," I said. "You can't possibly hurt yourself."

A man in the front seat next to the chauffeur now turned his face to us. I knew him, too, He had been one of the lawyers who had escorted Virgil Greathouse into prison on the morning before. He was Arpad Leen's lawyer, too. He was worried about my having lost my shoes. He said we would go back to the police station and get them.

"Not on your life!" I said. "They've found out by now that I threw the bowling trophy down in the shit, and they'll just arrest me again."

Edel and Clewes now drew away from me some.

"This has to be a dream," said Clewes.

"Be my guest," I said. "The more the merrier."

"Gentlemen, gentlemen — " said the lawyer genially. "Please, you mustn't worry so. You are about to be offered the opportunity of your lives."

"When the hell did she see me?" said Edel. "What was the wonderful thing she saw me do?"

"We may never know," said the lawyer. "She seldom explains herself, and she's a mistress of disguise. She could be anybody."

"Maybe she was that big black pimp that came in after you last night," Edel said to me. "I was nice to him. He was eight feet tall."

"I missed him," I said.

"You're lucky," said Edel.

"You two know each other?" said Clewes.

"Since childhood!" I said. I was going to blow this dream wide open by absolutely refusing to take it seriously. I was damn well going to get back to my bed at the Arapahoe or my cot in prison. I didn't care which.

Maybe I could even wake up in the bedroom of my little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and my wife would still be alive.

"I can promise you she wasn't the tall pimp," said the lawyer. "That much we can be sure of: Whatever she looks like, she is not tall."

"Who isn't tall?" I said.

"Mrs. Jack Graham," said the lawyer.

"Sorry I asked," I said.

"You must have done her some sort of favor, too," the lawyer said to me, "or done something she saw and admired."

"It's my Boy Scout training," I said.

So we came to a stop in front of a rundown apartment building on the Upper West Side. Out came Frank Ubriaco, the owner of the Coffee Shop. He was dressed for the dream in a pale-blue velvet suit and green-and-white cowboy boots with high, high heels. His French-fried hand was elegantly sheathed in a white kid glove. Clewes pulled down a jumpseat for him.

I said hello to him.

"Who are you?" he said.

"You served me breakfast this morning," I said.

"I served everybody breakfast this morning," he said.

"You know him, too?" said Clewes.

"This is my town," I said. I addressed the lawyer, more convinced than ever that this was a dream, and I told him, "All right — let's pick up my mother next."

He echoed me uncertainly. "Your mother?"

"Sure. Why not? Everybody else is here," I said.

He wanted to be cooperative. "Mr. Leen didn't say anything specific about your not bringing anybody else along. You'd like to bring your mother?"

"Very much," I said.

"Where is she?" he said.

"In a cemetery in Cleveland," I said, "but that shouldn't slow you down."

He thereafter avoided direct conversations with me.

When we got underway again, Ubriaco asked those of us in the backseat who we were.

Clewes and Edel introduced themselves. I declined to do so.

"They're all people who caught the eye of Mrs. Graham, just as you did," said the lawyer.

"You guys know her?" Ubriaco asked Clewes and Edel and me.

We all shrugged.

"Jesus Christ," said Ubriaco. "This better be a pretty good job you got to offer. I like what I do."

"You'll see," said the lawyer.

"I broke a date for you monkeys," said Ubriaco.

"Yes — and Mr. Leen broke a date for you," said the lawyer. "His daughter is having her debut at the Waldorf tonight, and he won't be there. He'll be talking to you gentlemen instead."

"Fucking crazy," said Ubriaco. Nobody else had anything to say. As we crossed Central Park to the East Side, Ubriaco spoke again. "Fucking debut," he said.

Clewes said to me, "You're the only one who knows everybody else here. You're in the middle of this thing somehow."

"Why wouldn't I be?" I said. "It's my dream."

And we were delivered without further conversation to the penthouse dwelling of Arpad Leen. We were told by the lawyer to leave our shoes in the foyer. It was the custom of the house. I, of course, was already in my stocking feet.

Ubriaco asked if Leen was a Japanese, since the Japanese commonly took off their shoes indoors.

The lawyer assured him that Leen was a Caucasian, but that he had grown up in Fiji, where his parents ran a general store. As I would find out later, Leen's father was a Hungarian Jew, and his mother was a Greek Cypriot. His parents met when they were working on a Swedish cruise ship in the late twenties. They jumped ship in Fiji, and started the store.

Leen himself looked like an idealized Plains Indian to me. He could have been a movie star. And he came out into the foyer in a striped silk dressing gown and black socks and garters. He still hoped to make it to his daughter's debut.

Before he introduced himself to us, he had to tell the lawyer an incredible piece of news. "You know what the son of a bitch is in prison for?" he said. "Treason! And we're supposed to get him out and give him a job. Treason! How do you get somebody out of jail who's committed treason? How do we give him even a lousy job without every patriot in the country raising hell?"

The lawyer didn't know.

"Well," said Leen, "what the hell. Get me Roy Cohn again. I wish I were back in Nashville."

This last remark alluded to Leen's having been the leading publisher of country music in Nashville, Tennessee, before his little empire was swallowed up by RAMJAC. His old company, in fact, was the nucleus of the Down Home Records Division of RAMJAC.

Now he looked us over and he shook his head in wonderment. We were a freakish crew. "Gentlemen," he said, "you have all been noticed by Mrs. Jack Graham. She didn't tell me where or when. She said you were honest and kind."

"Not me," said Ubriaco.

"You're free to question her judgment, if you want," said Leen. "I'm not. I have to offer you good jobs. I don't mind doing that, though, and I'll tell you why: She never told me to do anything that didn't turn out to be in the best interests of the company. I used to say that I never wanted to work for anybody, but working for Mrs. Jack Graham has been the greatest privilege of my life," He meant it.

He did not mind making us all vice-presidents. The company had seven hundred vice-presidents of this and that on the top level, the corporate level, alone. When you got out into the subsidiaries, of course, the whole business of presidents and vice-presidents started all over again.

"You know what she looks like?" Ubriaco wanted to know.

"I haven't seen her recently," said Leen. This was an urbane lie. He had never seen her, which was a matter of public record. He would confess to me later that he did not even know how he had come to Mrs. Graham's attention. He thought she might have seen an article on him in the Diners Club magazine, which had featured him in their "Man on the Move" department. |

In any event, he was abjectly loyal to her. He loved and feared his idea of Mrs. Graham the way Emil Larkin loved and feared his idea of Jesus Christ. He was luckier than Larkin in his worship, of course, since the invisible superior being over him called him up and wrote him letters and told him what to do.

He actually said one time, "Working for Mrs. Graham has been a religious experience for me. I was adrift, no matter how much money I was making. My life had no purpose until I became president of RAMJAC and placed myself at her beck and call."

All happiness is religious, I have to think sometimes.

Leen said he would talk to us one by one in his library. "Mrs. Graham didn't tell me about your backgrounds, what your special interests might be — so you're just going to have to tell me about yourselves." He said for Ubriaco to come into the library first, and asked the rest of us to wait in the living room. "Is there anything my butler can bring you to drink?" he said.

Clewes didn't want anything. Edel asked for a beer. I, still hoping to blow the dream wide open, ordered a pousse-caf?, a rainbow-colored drink that I had never seen, but which I had studied while earning my Doctor of Mixology degree. A heavy liqueur was put into the bottom of a glass, then a lighter one of a different color was carefully spooned in on top of that, and then a lighter one still on top of that, and on and on, with each bright layer undisturbed by the one above or below.

Leen was impressed with my order. He repeated it, to make sure he had heard it right.

"If it's not too much trouble," I said. It was no more trouble, surely, than building a full-rigged ship model in a bottle, say.

"No problem!" said Leen. This, I would learn, was a favorite expression of his. He told the butler to give me a pousse- caf? without further ado.

He and Ubriaco went into the library, and the rest of us entered the living room, which had a swimming pool. I had never seen a living room with a swimming pool before. I had heard of such a thing, of course, but hearing of and actually seeing that much water in a living room are two very different things.

I knelt by the pool and swirled my hand in the water, curious about the temperature, which was soupy. When I withdrew my hand and considered its wetness, I had to admit to myself that the wet was undreamlike. My hand was really wet and would remain so for some time, unless I did something about it.

All this was really going on. As I stood, the butler arrived with my pousse- caf?.

Outrageous behavior was not the answer. I was going to have to start paying attention again. "Thank you," I said to the butler.

"You're welcome, sir," he replied. Clewes and Edel were seated at one end of a couch about half a block long. I joined them, wanting their appreciation for how sedate I had become.

They were continuing to speculate as to when Mrs. Graham might have caught them behaving so virtuously.

Clewes mourned that he had not had many opportunities to be virtuous, selling advertising matchbooks and calendars from door to door. "About the best I can do is let a building custodian tell me his war stories," he said. He remembered a custodian in the Flatiron Building who claimed to have been the first American to cross the bridge over the Rhine at Remagan, Germany, during World War Two. The capture of this bridge had been an immense event, allowing the Allied Armies to pour at high speed right into the heart of Germany. Clewes doubted that the custodian could have been Mrs. Jack Graham, though.

Israel Edel supposed that Mrs. Graham could be disguised as a man, though. "I sometimes think that about half our customers at the Arapahoe are transvestites," he said.

The possibility of Mrs. Graham's being a transvestite would be brought up again soon, and most startlingly, by Arpad Leen.

Meanwhile, though, Clewes got back on the subject of World War Two. He got personal about it. He said that he and I, when we were wartime bureaucrats, had only imagined that we had something to do with defeats and victories. "The war was won by fighters, Walter. All the rest was dreams."

It was his opinion that all the memoirs written about that war by civilians were swindles, pretenses that the war had been won by talkers and writers and socialites, when it could only have been won by fighters.

A telephone rang in the foyer. The butler came in to say that the call was for Clewes, who could take it on the telephone on the coffee table in front of us. The telephone was black-and-white plastic and shaped like "Snoopy," the famous dog in the comic strip called "Peanuts." Peanuts was owned by what was about to become my division of RAMJAC. To converse on that telephone, as I would soon discover, you had to put your mouth over the dog's stomach and stick his nose in your ear. Why not?

It was Clewes's wife Sarah, my old girlfriend, calling from their apartment. She had just come home from a private nursing case, had found his note, which said where he was and what he was doing there and how he could be reached by telephone.

He told her that I was there, too, and she could not believe it. She asked to talk to me. So Clewes handed me the plastic dog.

"Hi," I said.

"This is crazy," she said. "What are you doing there?"

"Drinking a pousse- caf? by the swimming pool," I said.

"I can't imagine you drinking a pousse- caf?," she said.

"Well, I am," I said.

She asked how Clewes and I had met. I told her. "Such a small world, Walter," she said, and so on. She asked me if Clewes had told me that I had done them a big favor when I testified against him.

"I would have to say that that opinion is moot," I told her.

"Is what?" she said.

"Moot," I said. It was a word she had somehow never heard before. I explained it to her.

"I'm so dumb," she said. "There's so much I don't know, Walter." She sounded just like the same old Sarah on the telephone. It could have been Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five again, which made what she said next especially poignant: "Oh, my God, Walter! We're both over sixty years old! How is that possible?"

"You'd be surprised, Sarah," I said.

She asked me to come home with Clewes for supper, and I said I would if I could, that I didn't know what was going to happen next. I asked her where she lived.

It turned out that she and Clewes lived in the basement of the same building where her grandmother used to live — in Tudor City. She asked me if I remembered her grandmother's, apartment, all the old servants and furniture jammed into only four rooms.

I said I did, and we laughed.

I did not tell her that my son also lived somewhere in Tudor City. I would find out later that there was nothing vague about his proximity to her, with his musical wife and his adopted children. Stankiewicz of The New York Times was in the same building, and notoriously so, because of the wildness of the children — and only three floors above Leland and Sarah Clewes.

She said that it was good that we could still laugh, despite all we had been through. "At least we still have our sense of humor," she said. That was something Julie Nixon had said about her father after he got bounced out of the White House: "He still has his sense of humor."

"Yes — at least that," I agreed.

"Waiter," she said, "what's this fly doing in my soup?"

"What?" I said.

"What's this fly doing in my soup?" she persisted.

And then it came back to me: This was the opening line in a daisy-chain of jokes we used to tell each other on the telephone. I closed my eyes. I gave the answering line, and the telephone became a time machine for me. It allowed me to escape from Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-seven and into the fourth dimension.

"I believe that's the backstroke, madam," I said.

"Waiter," she said, "there's also a needle in my soup."

"I'm sorry, madam," I said, "that's a typographical error. That should have been a noodle."

"Why do you charge so much for cream?" she said.

"It's because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles," I said.

"I keep thinking it's Tuesday," she said.

"It is Tuesday," I said.

"That's what I keep thinking," she said. "Tell me, do you serve flannelcakes?"

"Not on the menu today," I said.

"Last night I dreamed I was eating flannelcakes," she said.

"That must have been very nice," I said.

"It was terrible," she said. "When I woke up, the blanket was gone."

She, too, had reason to escape into the fourth dimension. As I would find out later, her patient had died that night. Sarah had liked her a lot. The patient was only thirty-six, but she had a congenitally defective heart — huge and fatty and weak.

And imagine, if you will, the effect this conversation was having on Leland Clewes, who was sitting right next to me. My eyes were closed, as I say, and I was in such an ecstasy of timelessness and placelessness that I might as well have been having sexual intercourse with his wife before his eyes. He forgave me, of course. He forgives everybody for everything. But he still had to be impressed by how lazily in love Sarah and I could still be on the telephone.

What is more protean than adultery? Nothing in this world.

"I am thinking of going on a diet," said Sarah.

"I know how you can lose twenty pounds of ugly fat right away," I said.

"How?" she said.

"Have your head cut off," I said.

Clewes could hear only my half of the conversation, of course, so he could only hear the premise or the snapper of a joke, but never both. Some of the lines were highly suggestive.

I asked Sarah, I remember, if she smoked after intercourse.

Clewes never heard her reply, which was this: "I don't know. I never looked." And then she went on: "What did you do before you were a waiter?"

"I used to clean birdshit out of cuckoo clocks," I said.

"I have often wondered what the white stuff in birdshit was," she said.

"That's birdshit, too," I told her. "What kind of work do you do?"

"I work in the bloomer factory," she said.

"Is it a good job in the bloomer factory?" I inquired archly.