The Not Nice Guy

He found that it was no longer necessary to be a nice guy.

He had always been sweet, a soft speaker, a considerer of the feelings of others. He discovered the value of mild brutality quite by accident after a strong session with Saralee Sanders, a garment-center model with exceptionally primitive tastes -- Dylan Thomas, Chanel No. 5, early Sibelius and revivals of King Kong. Besides these curious addictions, Saralee was rich in flesh, as most models are not; her after-dinner vitamin pill went down without making a visible traveling lump in her gullet; but of course she modeled for out-of-town blouse buyers, not photographers. She had the sort of pert and uplifted face (soap and water, very little make-up), neat and unstrapped body (healthy muscles, no foam rubber), that could sadden a man when it did nothing but discuss the early poetry of the late Dylan Thomas. Bud Streeter was well saddened. He found the strength in his sadness for a final effort.

"Yes, yes, that would be lovely," she said to the invitation for a drink in his newly air-conditioned apartment.

"You would?"

"I'd love it," she cried. "To see what kind of prints you have on your wall. Your record collection. Your clothes hanging in the closet. These things are so expressive of personality, don't you think? To really know a man. To understand."

It was so easy that he breathed like a heavily dehibernating springtime bear in the taxicab.

"I want to try one of your vitamin pills," she added. "You have such nice pink cheeks all at once. How come? I enjoy keeping my health, too -- it's a girl's fortune -- that and her mind. But I mean intelligence is so much in demand these days. You know this modern world of today, don't you? What was it T. S. Eliot said in that off-Broadway flop? I prefer vitamin combinations with minerals and trace elements added, don't you?"

He didn't even have to persuade her. Gaily she took his hand as they rode up the elevator. She was as excited as if they were going to a double feature at the Museum of Modern Art, a Lon Chaney and a Bela Lugosi. Her damp little mouth came open with delight at the apartment, so artistic and tasteful -- just what a girl respects deep down inside, especially if she's a girl with education and ideals before she started modeling for those terrible lewd cigar-smoking men down in the garment district.

"You poor sweet child," Bud said with all the sympathy of his welling heart. "Scotch or bourbon?"

"Scotch, no mix," she replied. "Of course, I do dearly love the smell of cigar smoke. It's so male. What I mean,masculine."

Nice Bud Streeter went to the liquor cabinet with that strange male sense of inner peace built on wobbly inner turmoil: Will I? Won't I? I will! I will! He promised himself Saralee Sanders, the piece that passeth understanding, as Dylan Thomas might well have put it. He filled the glasses above the ice. He put on enough 19th Century romantic music to ruin four average girls, and Saralee did not seem to be average. She seemed well above the average in all the delightful ways. Her sweater and her conversation, both highly active, seemed to be saying, I like things, I do! Yes, for real.

"No, no, but I mean no," she said on his couch to what followed.

Mussed and disconcerted, he gently tried again. He was still, after all, a nice guy who would never frighten a girl.

"No!" she said.

"No what?" he asked, as if he were really curious. Men say all sorts of stupid things. More than an hour had passed. Harold was still in Italy (that's a tone poem), Bud was flushed and hoping, Saralee was firm and ready-to-run, perched with strongly arched back on the edge of the couch. You know how little things will bother a chap at a time like that? Well, Bud didn't really like Berlioz, only it is said to be the sort of music that makes a girl want to let a man run barefoot over her; but if he was not going to remove his shoes and drop his socks, he would rather have played Bach.

"Just stop it now! You're too nice to do that, Bud Streeter!" she cried.

"Just try, you'll like it, too," he said mildly.

"Maybe I would," said Saralee, "but if you don't stop I'll give you a kick where you wouldn't like to receive it."

Bud fell into a pensive mood. He straightened his shirt and tightened his tie. "You're right, I wouldn't like to be kicked there. We men are a little sensitive."

And so he put another stack of records on the hi-fi and some fresh ice in their glasses and sat beside her on the couch -- beside this highbosomed, highgazing, highwilled, highteasing young lady -- and they talked about poetry and politics. Poor Bud! He played, Bach. He diluted their drinks with soda, why not? And all they did about the Republican Party and Dylan Thomas was hold hands. That isn't very much for Lincoln, Hoover and A Child's Christmas in Wales.

It often turned out that sad and conversational way for Bud Streeter. People found him exceptionally likable, very nice, even girls among these people. They enjoyed his company. Pretty girls, clever girls, stacked girls. Some of them fell mildly in love with him and one had almost married him once. He was so sweet. He had money, talents, charm, a friendly mug. He was such a nice guy. Instead, the girl had found herself a flight instructor who did not drink or smoke but liked to stay quietly at home in his slippers, making anonymous telephone calls to women whose babies and been kidnapped. Not really very nice at all, and he also had varicose veins, but then that girl was really more peculiar than most.

For Bud, on the other hand, whose circulatory system was excellent, who didn't squeeze cats until their eyes popped out, who never even once shot B.B. pellets through old ladies' windows just for laughs, who was ever kind, considerate and giving to the Community Chest, girls' chests did not heave nor their eyes pop out nor their hearts beat, beat, beat, with the throbbing rhythm of Chloe. He usually went home humming some mournful tune, Liebesträume, the Valse Triste, or Open Up the Doghouse Mama a Cat Is Coming In. Something always turned wrong. Poor nice Bud got thrown for a loss, financial, biological and psychological, just like with Saralee at the beginning of that evening.

She looked at him with her huge brilliant eyes gleaming. "You're so intelligent," she said. "You know so much about everything. Do tell me. Oh life is full of mysteries, books I never read. So tell me, Bud."

For some men this might have seemed a promising beginning, but Bud suspected his fate. She felt like talking, she wanted to talk, she hoped to hear Bud's opinion about things -- not just a hullabaloo of sighs, groans and repetitious kissings by a likable fellow. Why not improve a girl's education instead? After all, the animal in a girl -- well, who knows if it really exists?

There was the whole sad problem. That was the black doubt in his soul. Voilà the sneaky hotfoot which life had put in his shoe. Nice Bud Streeter could not convince a girl that there really is an animal in her, too -- a purring, coiling, arching, shivering, grateful beast. He was so sweet. At most, he was merely a nice man to contemplate being in love with, and that is never enough.

It was this lack in Bud that enabled women to take him over so easily. He needed a dash of caddishness, a soupçon of bestiality, a pinch and squiggle of common ordinary indecency. Naturally, being a healthy, high-spirited lad, he had tried, but girls sensed the dishonesty in his efforts to be a bounder, and all he usually got was slapped for his trouble. It isn't easy. You can't fake a thing like that: it's character, deep down character, that old genuine meanness that a fellow has to have. Bud understood it himself, and as he talked with Saralee he somberly judged his fate. "Tragical Dylan Thomas, he shouldn't have drunk those last 2000 straight shots," he was saying, but he was thinking: Dizzy. That's it, dizzy. She likes me, but I don't make her dizzy. Even poor fat Dylan, nothing but a poet, and a poet with dandruff, and a dead poet besides -- he makes her dizzy.

And man, Bud was discouraged.

"What's the matter, Buddy-boy?" Saralee tenderly inquired.

"Nothing, nothing," he said. "I'm a little tired, I guess. Bushed. I better take you home."

"But it's so early!" she protested. "I do so much enjoy talking with you."

With an unusual exasperation and weariness, Bud insisted, "I'm tired, I'm going to take you home. I'll call you again."

Saralee's eyes widened in blue amaze. There were acres of suspicious summer sky color in her lovely blue eyes, surrounded by yards of jealous white and fluttering fringes of wondering lashes. "But it's so early. But it's so early, it's not even a little bit late. But do you have ...?"

Another girl to see tonight? she was thinking. She did not dare say the thought aloud.

"But, but, but," said Bud. "But please forgive me, Saralee, I have an important client coming in tomorrow. He (continued on page 70) Not Nice Guy (continued from page 48) wants me to do a plan for remodeling a coach house."

For the first time, she sat back on the couch. She curled up with her shoes off, her marvelous slim legs tucked beneath her, her mouth slightly parted, and she breathed huskily, "Oh Please tell me all about it, Bud. I just love old coach houses."

"Great. Swell. Another time." Barely knowing what he was doing, without a backward glance at the creature on the couch, he went for her coat.

And then down they went for the taxi, the girl clack-clacking on her heels to keep up with the frowning, abstracted male. At the door to the cab, the first genuine inspiration of his life illuminated Bud Streeter with a flash like a cat caught in the wiring. He short-circuited his way to genius. Sure, in his work-as an architect he sometimes had sharp and original ideas, but this was a stroke of divine power. Like most inspirations, it struck without his thinking very much about it. It came all at once, like Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It was the abrupt crystallization of one of those moments that give a man a sense of power -- like the first time he blows a bubble with doublebubble gum. He paled under the impact, but Saralee saw nothing. He bore it with a hero's calm.

The formula for Bud Streeter's Natural Field Theory for Playing the Field was expressed by his next casual remark to Saralee: "Say, Saralee honey, do you mind if I just put you in the cab and don't take you home? I really have an awfully busy day tomorrow."

The sky falling in! The earth opening! Ed Sullivan changing expression! Such things had never happened before, and Saralee's mouth came forward in a plump, rich and very sad pout. She gazed at him bravely through the cab window and asked in a rather high-pitched voice, "Will you call me sometime when you're not too busy? Will you really, Bud? Promise?"

Weary and bored with love -- that was the key. That's the kind of not-niceness he could manage, because he was almost sincere about it. Plus busy with other things, a man of deep lonely male preoccupations. Work! Important Matters! Not nice at all! Heavily he peered at his watch.

"Promise?" Saralee demanded.

He shrugged negligently. "Sure, sure thing," he murmured, and began walking before the taxi started up. He felt Saralee watching through the rear window. She probably couldn't see the hairs pricking up on the back of his neck. The back of his neck, although no one on the street noticed, belonged to a conquering jungle beast.

And that was how it happened. It may seem like a little thing, but the first oil well was unimportant, too, just a lot of filthy grease that dirtied the nice pure water until they found a use for the stuff. Someday it would give gas stations something to sell and make Texas a cultural center. Being an intelligent, thoughtful person, Bud Streeter now made use of the uses of not-niceness. He had been raised to think that there is justice in the world, and that if you want someone to be nice to. you, you have to be nice to the someone, especially if it's a her-someone. This niceness had become a habit, though generally unrewarded, like cuticle biting. Despite all his past, he had been a virgin to one profound emotional experience -- he had evere before said to a girl, "Here, you go home alone in a cab." He had been wounded in action, he was a Phi Beta Kappa, he had survived a romance with a lady dentist, he was making enough money at 30 to drink himself silly on good liquor and travel himself air-sick on first-class flights -- but he was still that special kind of virgin and unspoiled.

Now he started spoiling himself.

He waited a few days and then called Saralee again.

He was his usual sensitive, considerate self over the telephone. Her relief was as palpable as nudity in his hands, and it gave forth the same tremulous quiver. "Oh I'd love to see you," she said. "Dinner at Paul Winter's? Oh that's really wonderful." Not-niceness can detonate that mysterious pitterpat, pitterpat in a girl's abstract heart. It can pitterpat the abstraction right out, and make it a yearning heart. It is a very important ingredient -- the black oil of not-niceness distills to a fuel that explodes in any number of fiery, pitter-patting ways. "Bud?" she said. "I'm really really glad you called."

She dressed for dinner chez Winter -- long earrings, spectacular silk gown, Italian shoes that were nothing but heel, all the lace et ceteras special and new. She loved fancy dining, fancy dressing, and had steady warm feelings for Bud's return to a comfortable thoughtfulness.

When Bud came for her, however, it turned out that he had changed his mind. There was a homey little pizzeria around the corner -- just a simple neighborhood place with oilcloth on the tables and paper napkins -- but he had a hankering for some spaghetti and a pizza. Nothing special. Greasy silverware. An overloud jukebox and a surly waiter. Just good honest simple fare. Did Saralee mind too much?

Yes, she did, but somehow she could not find the strength to say it. Instead she murmured, "Well, spaghetti is always edible."

"Aren't you a good kid to share my enthusiasm? You're nice," Bud replied, a stealthy saboteur of a smile opening all the doors within him. "Let's walk. Maybe you better change your shoes."

At dinner they talked of many things. Saralee spoke of her brother, a steady high-type fellow whom she really admired, a high school teacher. He would be a principal someday. Bud remarked that he thought her brother a creep.

"Creep? My favorite brother? Morton? Crr-eep?" she demanded.

"Yeah, walks around without using his legs. Can't see six inches in front of his snout. A face like ringworm. Of course, I don't want you to get insulted because I notice as how your brother is strictly from nowhere. You're different. You're from somewhere, Saralee."

"Thanks," she said, "but you don't really understand Morton. He's kind. I don't think you appreciate that, Bud." Picking the anchovies out of her last slice of pizza, she fell into a deep pensiveness which was finally broken by the waiter when he tore her stockings with his broom. He didn't mean it. It was just carelessness.

"Isn't this a wonderful place?" Bud said happily. "So much more genuine. Real life wouldn't happen at Paul Winter's -- they got nothing but good food, soft music, comfort, elegance. Very square."

Saralee was still thinking about her brother while she peeled off her stockings in this genuine, real-life restaurant. "Of course," she admitted, "Morton does proceed rather cautiously down life's thorny path. You're right about that. I never looked at it your way before, but yes, he is a bit of a creep."

"From Creepville," said Bud.

"But I wish two things," Saralee added. "I wish you would restrain your criticisms of my family, who I love. Whom. And I wish you would give up this jive language you've picked up someplace -- probably from that girl you've been going out with." (She gazed shrewdly into his face to see if she had guessed right.)

"Reet," said Bud. "I'll leave your siblings out of it, baby, because I think you're a cool fox. And I won't talk jazz because I really don't did that nothing beat -- except Brubeck, Mingus, Monk, Zoot Sims, the Bird, and Guillaume de Machaut."

"Ghee-yo de who?"

"Machaut. Bill Machaut, Frenchman, pre-Bach. He's really the most, the very end. How about another glass of New York State Chianti?"

"Well, I really don't ----"

"Drink it, anyway," he said briskly, pouring for both of them. "What's the matter, you scared of the trots?"

The new, friendly, convinced, smiling and not-nice Bud Streeter failed even to ask Saralee to come back to his apartment for a nightcap and some music. He didn't seem to care. He wanted his sleep, or was bored, or had other matters on his mind. But this time he took Saralee to her door.

"Uh," she said.

"Uh what? Spit it out, you're chewing on something."

"Bud, please!"

"Please what?"

"Well," she said all in a timid rush, "well, why don't you come upstairs and have a little music and a nightcap? My roommate's out of town. Would you like to dance a little?"

"Probably I'd rather just listen, but OK, why not? I need the exercise."

She put her key in the outside door. "Bud, are you making fun of me?"

"Why should I do that, baby? Nobody here to appreciate the joke if I am. Anyway, I wouldn't do that, because I think ..." He groped for words. "I think ----" He searched for exactly the proper compliment. "I think you're OK. kid. You don't bug me like some broads do."

She smiled with tender gratitude. She studied him as they soared in the self-service elevator. He did not smile, but maybe he twitched a little, she thought. It looked almost like a smile. He must really like her. He was rather rough and crude and inconsiderate, not nice at all the way he had seemed to be, but now there was something basic about him. Basically what? She was not sure. All she knew was that his hand on her arm challenged her, and she was leading him into her apartment with a strange catch in her throat and a hopeful wonderment at what might happen next.

"Oh dear!" she said in a small, very small smothered voice as he took her in his arms. That was what happened next.

"What's the matter?"

"You don't even give me a chance to turn on the lights."

"Is that why you said oh dear?"

She did not reply, but she smiled in the dark. The oh dear which had jumped to her lips was saying something else. It spoke for the fierce perception of desire; and abruptly, with quaking knees and a determined heat, Saralee Sanders had the greatest, most crucial idea of her life. That rough, irrational, moody, untamed man, Bud Streeter -- she would please him absolutely and make him nice. He would be nice again sometime. She could do it to him by a fine and subtle technique which she felt taking possession of her delighted body -- the method of surrender.

And Bud was thinking as they stumbled toward the couch in the dark: Yes, I'll be nice. Why not? Very soon maybe.

Just not yet.

"Promise to call me when you're not too busy?" she pleaded.