“I love you,” she said.
“I love you,” he said, and kissed her again. They went, holding hands, into the living room.
“You’re early,” she said. “You usually stop off for a quick one with the boys.”
“To hell with the boys. You know where we’re going Saturday, darling? Instead of my sleeping in the backyard on the lounge, we’re going to that fashion show you wanted me to go see.”
“I thought you hated—”
“Anything you want, peaches,” he said. “I told the boys I won’t make it Sunday for the fishing trip. They thought I was crazy. What’s for supper?”
He stalked smiling to the kitchen, where he appreciatively ladled and spooned and stirred things, smelling, gasping, tasting everything. “Shepherd’s pie!” he cried, opening the oven and peering in, gloriously. “My God! My favorite dish. It’s been since last June we had that!”
“I thought you’d like it!”
He ate with relish, he told jokes, they ate by candlelight, the pink carnations filled the immediate vicinity with a cinnamon scent, the food was splendid, and, topping it off, there was black-bottom pie fresh from the refrigerator.
“Black-bottom pie! It takes hours and genius to make a really good black-bottom pie.”
“I’m glad you like it, dear.”
After dinner he helped her with the dishes. Then they sat on the living-room floor and played a number of favorite symphonies together, they even waltzed a bit to the Rosenkavalier pieces. He kissed her at the end of the dance and whispered in her ear, patting her behind, “Tonight, so help me God, cricket or no cricket.”
The music started over. They swayed together.
“Have you found it yet?” he whispered.
“I think so. It’s near the fireplace and the window.”
They walked over to the fireplace. The music was very loud as he bent and shifted a drape, and there it was, a beady black little eye, not much bigger than a thumbnail. They both stared at it and backed away. He went and opened a bottle of champagne and they had a nice drink.
The music was loud in their heads, in their bones, in the walls of the house. He danced with his mouth up close to her ear.
“What did you find out?” she asked.
“The studio said to sit tight. Those damn fools are after everyone. They’ll be tapping the zoo telephone next.”
“Everything’s all right?”
“Just sit tight, the studio said. Don’t break any equipment, they said. You can be sued for breaking government property.”
They went to bed early, smiling at each other.
On Wednesday night he brought roses and kissed her a full minute at the front door. They called up some brilliant and witty friends and had them over for an evening’s discussion, having decided, in going over their phone list, that these two friends would stun the cricket with their repertoire and make the very air shimmer with their brilliance.
On Thursday afternoon he called her from the studio for the first time in months, and on Thursday night he brought her an orchid, some more roses, a scarf he had seen in a shop window at lunchtime, and two tickets for a fine play.
She in turn had baked him a chocolate cake from his mother’s recipe, on Wednesday, and on Thursday had made Toll House cookies and lemon chiffon pie, as well as darning his socks and pressing his pants and sending everything to the cleaners that had been neglected previous times.
They rambled about the town Thursday night after the play, came home late, read Euripides to one another out loud, went to bed late, smiling again, and got up late, having to call the studio and claim sickness until noon, when the husband, tiredly, on the way out of the house, thought to himself, This can’t go on. He turned and came back in. He walked over to the cricket near the fireplace and bent down to it and said:
“Testing, one, two, three. Testing. Can you hear me? Testing.”
“What’re you doing?” cried his wife in the doorway.
“Calling all cars, calling all cars,” said the husband, lines under his eyes, face pale. “This is me speaking. We know you’re there, friends. Go away. Go away. Take your microphone and get out. You won’t hear anything from us. That is all. That is all. Give my regards to J. Edgar. Signing off.”
His wife was standing with a white and aghast look in the door as he marched by her, nodding, and thumped out the door.
She phoned him at three o’clock.
“Darling,” she said, “it’s gone!”
“The cricket?”
“Yes, they came and took it away. A man rapped very politely at the door and I let him in and in a minute he had unscrewed the cricket and taken it with him. He just walked off and didn’t say boo.”
“Thank God,” said the husband. “Oh, thank God.”
“He tipped his hat at me and said thanks.”
“Awfully decent of him. See you later,” said the husband.
This was Friday. He came home that night about six-thirty, having stopped off to have a quick one with the boys. He came in the front door reading his newspaper, passed his wife, taking off his coat and automatically putting it in the closet, went on past the kitchen without twitching his nose, sat in the living room and read the sports page until supper, when she served him plain roast beef and string beans, with apple juice to start and sliced oranges for dessert.
On his way home he had turned in the theater tickets for tonight and tomorrow, he informed her; she could go with the girls to the fashion show, he intended to bake in the backyard.
“Well,” he said, about ten o’clock. “The old house seems different tonight, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Good to have the cricket gone. Really had us going there.”
“Yes,” she said.
They sat awhile. “You know,” she said later, “I sort of miss it, though, I really sort of miss it. I think I’ll do something subversive so they’ll put it back.”
“I beg your pardon?” he said, twisting a piece of twine around a fly he was preparing from his fishing box.
“Never mind,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”
She went on ahead. Ten minutes later, yawning, he followed after her, putting out the lights. Her eyes were closed as he undressed in the semi-moonlit darkness. She’s already asleep, he thought.
Afterword
Metaphors, the Breakfast of Champions
Every year in Paris, coming from the airport I have my driver pause at the Trocadero, a vast esplanade that overlooks the entire city with a splendid view of the Eiffel Tower.
I run out on this plaza, spread my arms, and cry, silently, “Paris, I’m home!”
When I leave, weeks later, I return to the plaza and, somewhat tearfully, say, “Paris, goodbye.”
A few years ago when I crossed that twilight esplanade, it was raining.
My driver ran, shielding me with his umbrella. I fended him off with: “You don’t understand, I want to get wet!”
So it is with these stories. Late in life I find I have been running a gauntlet downpour of metaphors. People try to shield me from this surprising storm, but my cry continues: “Don’t! I want to drown!”
So, I’ve never worked a single hour in my life. For years metaphors bombarded me, but I never knew what they were, never having learned the word.
The recognition of metaphors came late when I found that ninety-nine percent of my stories were pure image, impacted by movies, the Sunday funnies, poetry, essays, and the detonations of Oz, Tarzan, Jules Verne, Pharaoh Tutankhamen, and their attendant illustrations.
In scanning this book I again realize how fortunate I was to live catching metaphors on the run.
The old question is repeated: Where do you get your ideas? Or rather, How do ideas run you down?
Many years ago I was successful in starting a film society for screenwriters. One of the first films we screened was the avant-garde Last Year at Marienbad, a somewhat bewildering production.
During the viewing of the film the projectionist somehow reversed the reels and ran reel number ten after reel number five. No one noticed. Some in the audience even claimed that the picture was better than when first seen two weeks before! Need I say that I ran to my typewriter within hours to write the splendid film mix-up of “The Dragon Danced at Midnight?”
“Quid Pro Quo” is an almost true story. Forty years after my first encounter with a handsome young writer of immense talent, he shambled into my life, a derelict madman, empty of talent, lost to his promise and dreams. I was so brutalized by his self-destruction that “Quid Pro Quo” poured from my fingertips within hours.
A while back, I wrote a poem titled “I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives,” touching on the fact that all of their past boyfriends, lovers, and fiancés stayed in touch with me long after being abandoned. I wrote “Leftovers” to fit the poem.
“The Nineteenth” is one more love offering to my father, who retired to play golf five days a week. One twilight I encountered him by the side of a golf-course path with a bucket, retrieving lost golf balls. The scene haunted me for years. My dad’s fine ghost returned last year and I had to put him to rest.
In 1946 I often rode the Venice trolley Saturday midnights when the celebrants from Myron’s Ballroom climbed on the streetcar to ride toward the sea. They were old white-haired men and women in tuxes and evening gowns. Some stepped off the trolley alone. Some strolled off into the dark in couples. Fifty-five years later, grown somewhat old and white myself, I had to step off the trolley to discover the rest of one couple’s night journey
