The Song of the Four-Colored Sell

The Tiger of Third–Class Mail at Work?

No.

The Come–On Letter, How It Grew?

No.

I Was a Teenage Circulation Hotshot? The Song of the Four – Colored Sell Which Looks Like It, Was Typed? The Duplicated Personal Signature? The Junk Mail King? I Threw Up into My Typewriter and Found Child Support?

Maybe I don't need a title for this part of my confessions. I just did this job. Come Goneril, come nightlong fret with some lady, I nevertheless came tramping through the office at 54th and Madison first thing in the morning, dazed and creative, saluting the aluminum stripping (the building had been modernized) and the automatic elevators (the human factor sometimes got drunk) and humming right back at the air conditioning as it hummed at me. The office was already filled with human factors. On an average Monday morning, hung over by Goneril, say, but still shaven, shriven, shorn and Ivy, I smilingly still could not stand the sight of my secretary. Her name was Rita Rooney. Her breath smelled of raisin-and-nut bread from the Chock Full o' Nuts (with cream cheese) for the first two hours after lunch. When I dictated to her, it always seemed as if she were dictating the menu, chopped nuts, homogenized Kool Aid, three cigarettes and a Dexedrine Spansule (for luck and weight control) right back at me. I'm doing the talking; why is she breathing so much, with eyes dreamily crossed? Well, I preferred to compose directly onto the typewriter anyway. But even over the intercom, when she announced that Mr. Anthony desired to see me, I conjured up a vision of Rita's waxed paper with a few crumbs of raisin-nuts sprinkled carelessly over it as she dreamed away the few hours of lunch in a vision of slimness. If fantasy slenderized, we'd be a nation of poets.

"Hiya," I said, striding in. That already is a great accomplishment. You try striding in those pipestem pants; you try saying Hiya first thing in the morning to Rita Rooney. This lady, my secretary, whom I shared with Tom Davenport from the Advertising department (I was in Promotion), gave me a brilliant smile out of a mouth painted like a perfect satiny ribbon, the lips wriggling along each other. "'Sa beautiful day, isn't it?" I asked Miss Rooney. "Going to be hot as hell."

"Fabb," she wriggled and wriggled, "simply fabb." I decided that I preferred the Village beatniks at Jim Atkins' on Sheridan Square or the Israeli-style Zioniks in the coffeehouses of the upper West Side, with their white or non-lipsticked mouths. Rita did that to me. She was taking noonsies with Tom Davenport. He couldn't afford a hotel room, paid a Karen Horney analyst for his wife, was too shy to borrow an apartment, sweated out renting a hotel room anyway. This meant that she gave me an extra "b" for crispness on the word "fab," since she was not sure of my intentions about her. She was nervous about this weight problem (the Dex) and guessed that maybe I didn't even lust after her. Cool I remained, and imagined a future of Fabb ... fabbb ... fabbbb, Mr. Shaper. It used to be that this accent and speech mannerism indicated leisure and certain girls' schools, but now, given time to read the society pages, Rita could pick up the latest word in the early afternoon edition over her lunch, a mere 12 hours after Cholly Knickerbocker had got it straight. "He's clyde," she once confided to me, lips writhing with disdain, "you know, square. I prefer Leonard Lyons 'cause he has substance, not just gossip, don't you?"

"Fabbola," I said.

She glanced at me with one wild crossed eye as if she feared catching me in the act of one-upping her. She didn't mind sexual perversions (experimentation, she would call it – it's thinking makes it dirty), but one-upping is fattening to a girl; it makes unsightly bulges; it also gave her the anxiety which the idea of three-in-one sex would give my mother in Cleveland. From too much reading in the social service area of the New York Post which surrounds Leonard Lyons, Rita had obscurely decided that liberal and experimental sex somehow helped to stop reaction here and abroad; she had not decided exactly, she just lived liberally and sincerely, planning to go to bed with a Negro someday. This year the three-in-one tablet, next year the Negro. But the Puerto Ricans would have to wait for another Great Stride Forward. You can't hurry human nature. Tom Davenport had morosely reported, with no visible joy on his henpecked countenance, that he had been the inner layer in a three-in-one tablet composed of Rita and Frederika, the German receptionist. He got sore when I referred to him as Spansule for the next week or so. Frederika was dumb and pretty, the ideal receptionist, though at 35 beginning to lose her first enthusiasm for the job; Rita took lousy shorthand, breathing too much, but typed carefully and had a cunning little crossed eye. Since I like to compose my own copy directly, saying "Bllach" to the typewriter when it turns my stomach, her shortage of shorthand was no pain to me. She copied neatly, on the electric typewriter, changing colors when I so indicated. "Make the Your neighbors will turn green in green, Miss Rooney. Well-read about the reds in red, please."

"Fabb," she said. "Capitalized like that? Italicized? How about paragraphing? Every sentence? Special words? What happened to your lip? Please caw me Rita, Mr. Shaper. Dan."

"It's all indicated in the margin." As she well knew. But she needed to rub my nose in her efficiency. Bllach, I thought into my cream-colored office Olivetti, filling the pit which hid the keys with my last night's supper. Caw me Dan. Bawh. Davenport had been looking liverish lately, too. Maybe new trouble with his wife. Or maybe the three-in-one pill was ceasing to take effect. What next? What next? No wonder he took offense at the Spansule notion. I meant someday to tell him that Rita's metabolism was all g-shmasht by the Dexedrine she took for weight control. Those stimulants seem to constrict the blood vesicles in the brain and other organs of pleasure, giving all sorts of fantastic ideas but making it difficult to live up to them. No blood, no joy. But lots of weight control and squeezed ideas. Bllach. Laughing is the quickest way I know to dry off the disgust behind my ears, to shake me into good or bad behavior, to jiggle me up and out of troubles. Of course, it doesn't help the Africans or the Asians or the Europeans much – if they know how to laugh, they just laugh – but it isn't aimed at solving their problems. And maybe not Goneril's either. Or Castro's. Or Rita's. Or Peter's. Question: Or mine? It usually settles my stomach, anyway. The way camphor helps a cut lip.

An office boy strolled past with the Napoleon-in-Egypt look that goes with this absolutely arrogant profession, provided the boy is white, Anglo-Saxon and Protstant; he flung a black folder on my desk. String-tied, Top Secret. It contained the latest report on advertising and circulation gains and losses for our chief competitors, The New Yorker, The Reporter, Harper's, The Atlantic and some lesser outlets and intakes of dollars. Oh-oh. Our rate of gain was still the steepest in town, but it was slowing down in proportion to the others, and according to a memo from our consultant statistician, using the present evidence, he projected a topping out in 17 to 20 months. "When you top out, you cop out," Tom Davenport had once announced to me at coffee-wagon time, and Rita had sighed adoringly – wisdom from the mouth of a grownup. I stared at the graph. There was a crawly jagged line up to a December future, then squash – we ceased to be the phenomenon of the publishing business. Naturally, there would be changes projected at that point, or sooner, if they took the statistician seriously. They might. He was paid like a downtown lawyer. I moped at my desk. I wished once more for a desk in a cubicle, a big old wooden desk in a nice friendly claustrophobic little closet, instead of this aluminum kidney on legs, without drawers, in a work area, surrounded by office boy, stenographers, secretary, mailers, machinery for producing agoraphobia. It's easy to grumble in an area, but hard to mope. At the grade in the organization where losses could easily be blamed on me, I was like a Greek messenger – off with my job security! Put your head in the Outgoing basket, please. Last item in the folder was a note from my pal Bobb Anthony, the boss: "Lunch today? Talk this over." Bobb sat at his control point in a private office like a humane, sluggish general, sucking gumdrops, with nothing to do but occasionally to destroy entire civilizations. At a nod he might order the deluge of junk mail to be (continued on page 138) Four – Colored Sell (continued from page 64) brought down upon an unsuspecting civilian population. He might order me out in the field to sell subscriptions door to door. What was on his mind, that fine executive instrument that knew little, saw nothing, but controlled all? Soon I would know. Soon I would have to face the pitiless scrutiny of manifest capitalism. Well, that's our way of life – Gen. Bobb Anthony at the chartreuse push button.

My mouth was dry. Fear for my future. Also Goneril was a dehydrating factor in the economy of my saliva balance. By mistake I had licked my lip and opened the cut.

I carried the black folder with me to the water cooler and stood sipping from a triangular folded cup. A trickle ran out of the isosceles. Goddamn statistics, graphs, graph paper and leaky cups. When you're ahead, you're not ahead; and when you're behind, you're collecting unemployment. What would I do for the child support? Well, I'd find another job.

Rita approached too closely, raisins and nuts, as I stood sipping cool water and said, "Mr. Anthony called. Right now. If you're not too busy." I was still at the gurgle-bottle of spring water. There were droplets on my tie. I had not worn old school today. Knit, the raveled tie of care which had flapped in Goneril's face as I lugged her home. Last night had left me slightly verbose, weak in the head and needing the moral support of the classics. "He'd like you to step in to see him," Rita said. I wondered if Tom D. got those if-you're-not-too-busies from her satiny lips. Please hurry up if you're not too busy, Frederika's waiting. Poor tuckered-out Davenport.

I blew at the tip of her nose and she winced. "Thunkyo," I said crisply, Englishing it up a bit. She knew this wasn't love and her mouth wriggled accordingly.

On my way to the boss I stopped to chat with Tom Davenport in his corner of the work area. A few symbolic words to establish my goal for the day: Absence of Panic. Davenport was my colleague in Advertising, slightly my senior in rank and seriousness; Promotion is a more airy occupation. It's the difference between a staff captain and a captain of infantry. He had a morning headache, he reported. Like a lady, he had morning headaches, not hangovers; cramps, not gastritis; his regular physician was a gynecologist, I do believe. "Oh I tell you," he said. That year he was also saying, "Let's face it" and "The thing is, I got this headache." Davenport was loyal to everything. He was a dog and loyal. He was loyal to everything but his own desires. These he constantly betrayed. What he really wanted, let's face it, was to be conjugal, uxorious, with a wife he bedded once a week except during the rutting season, then once extra on the weekend, all honor to trees budding in Scarsdale. Instead he felt it his duty as a modern man, loyal as a dog to the concept of Modern Man, to chase secretaries, receptionists, and others whom his low energy put in easy reach. Because he didn't really want them, he desired only his wife, he had to invent newer and newer stunts, like the three-in-one pill. (Actually, it seems more likely that Rita and Frederika had invented it.) Poor loyal fellow used to take the train out to Scarsdale, totally pooped, but feeling awfully loyal as he napped, swaying with the train motion. He felt himself in the big league for sex. He was a loyal little leaguer, anyway, lugging his bat home to momma. Mrs. Davenport (Peg) was a thin and pretty girl who made hungry love to him occasionally. She looked like the assistant buyer at a notions counter. She took his exhaustion for work exhaustion, a devotion to her which kept him driving, driving, driving at his job. Which in a way it was. I imagine him in bed explaining affectionately to Peg, "Let's face it. The thing is, I'm tired." The thing sure was. Together, like the Chinese Communists and Rita Rooney, they had taken the Great Leap Forward into a dazed effort and fatigue. Seeking an identity as Davenport the Stud, he became meeker and meeker, week after week.

"It's not nice to go about seducing all these nervous girls," I once told him as we stood in the men's room, "some of them with this weight problem they have to take Dexedrine for."

He grinned nervously at the compliment. He zipped up, tucking himself ostentatiously out of the way. "How's the boy?" he said. I had made his day. On the other hand, he also had his doubts.

Later he came up to my desk and wanted to talk to me seriously about things. He thought I shouldn't try kidding the folks too much in my letters. The thing is, that was just his opinion. I should just lie straight and friendly on the page and tell the American people we were giving them something the other magazines wished they could give, but they just didn't have the know-how. Well, not say it, imply it. But not kid about vital issues and personalities. "You know?" he asked. "Think it up in your own words, Dan. Let's face it, you're the sharp one with words."

"But you with the ––" And I made an Italian gesture.

"Aw," he said, "I got troubles, you know?" That was just his opinion, too.

"You make out swell, gee," I said, "considering you got all those troubles."

"How often you see your kids?" he asked me. A little dig. "It cost you a lot, I know, but is it worth it?" Another little dig. Still, he really was wondering if he should maybe marry Rita and Frederika. Well, that triangle stands up as well as many of the parallelograms I know. Also he was giving me the needle. "You're a kidder," he said, "but I have to tell somebody. Only I'd consider that thing, you know, about the P.O.V. Emphasize how we protect American values, the home and country bit, plus the long view, that's the ticket. Consider it, anyway. We're going ahead on the woman package again this spring – special issue on problems, featuring the liberal view on divorce. We're going to say sometimes it's justified. Twenty-three percent Catholics in our latest figures! Wow!" He moved his head from left to right and then back straight on its socket again. "Risky."

"Bobb wants to see me."

"Risky," he repeated, glad to be part of a team that wasn't afraid to take chances on minority groups. We had faith in the open-mindedness of Americans. "Hey, that's a funny lip you got there!" he called as his parting shot.

On my way to see the boss I wondered why that statistic about our Catholic readership stuck in my mind. Had there been a significant 23 percent of something in Kinsey, too? Well, despite Pythagoras and Davenport, there is no magic in unalloyed numbers. A secondary quality – no essence.

The boss, big-hearted Bobb Anthony, sat at an antique desk which Caroline, his wife, had personally installed in his office (no work area for him). The desk uncooled the color scheme; it didn't go with the space dividers; it stayed. Oh you interior decorator, but I love my wife. On this stretch of wormy French wood with green hoofs instead of legs, Bobb placed his executive elbows, he placed the saucer of gumdrops out of reach, he placed his head in his cupped hands, he placed all his attention on me and said dolefully, "Dan, you got like a talent for sweet copy, smartness. But productwise we got to figure out how to use it bestest. Not just adequate, but authentic. I want you to be fulfilled, too."

Translation: If my letters didn't pull trade, I should look for other work. And smartness – that's not a nice word.

Line of Meaning: Keep an eye on the circulation charts. And don't say Lung Guyland about Southhampton, even wisecrackwise.

"How's the family?" he asked. "I suppose you miss them" (sigh) "it's tough."

Translation: Three years ago the company's Operations Research analyst finished his presentation of findings on the pilot project – statistics, market study, analysis of typing pools, depth questionnaire on editorial matter, the works – with a comment to Bobb over lunch: "Oh yes. Take an interest in the help. The team. Infects them with Oedipal identification – all siblings together. Break down the barriers. Implement the work concept. The image is – you're the daddy, Bobb."

Line of Meaning: Got to limit time off for trips to Cleveland. The children of divorced employees don't sell magazines.

I told big-hearted Bobb, big-hearted, spongy-jowled, snack-loving Bobb, about how my children in Cleveland had wanted to see what I did when I went to work. One day my stepwife, then still my antiwife, brought them to the office where I then wrote training manuals. It happened that it was somebody's birthday and we were eating cake and drinking coffee and there were funny paper hats on heads and crumbs in the typewriters. "Oh," said the boys, "work is where Daddy goes to eat cake and coffee. And ice cream."

Big-hearted Bobb was frowning, thinking, Shouldn't get crumbs in the rollers, jam 'em up. But then he came awake: "Cute!" he said. "I bet they're cute kids! I love kids like that!" The troubled, humanoid frown faded back on. He took off on Monday, Wednesday and Friday to see his analyst – a three-credit course. "Kids, they're great, the greatest in the cathexis department," he said, "mine like that, too – Caroline wants to have you out to the place real soon. You must miss a real home with kids."

Should I thank him?

"The stable family structure," he remarked, "is one of our foundations in life as in the magazine business." He was making an effort. I wanted to return him to his effortless self. A little bit of that higher-priced spread would bring the boss back to normal – not that normal was a happy state for him. On the contrary. But normal at least.

I knitted my brows. "This job is a step forward for me," I said to Bobb. "You know, New York is a bigger town than Cleveland."

"I know," he said resonantly.

Inspired by comprehension, real intercommunicating between me and Bobb, I pursued my discovery to its outer reaches. "New York is more demanding than Cleveland. Intense. It's like the business center of America. Skyscrapers. Why, we work in one ourselves! Commercial and trade."

"More theater, too," he murmured delicately. "The arts. Their galleries. The United Nations."

He was drumming with three fingers. There was a sound like hoofbeats at Caroline Anthony's antique desk. I was carried away. "And those double-decker buses on Fifth Avenue."

Silence. Communion. A breach in the wall of responsibility, salary and stock options which lay between us.

"I suppose you're kidding again," he said at last, with a sigh, "since those double-decker buses went out after the war."

"Yeah. They sold 'em to Mexico. I was kidding, Bobb."

"I miss 'em, too. I used to ride 'em with a girl all the way up to the Cloisters, you know, Rockefeller's house? Blonde hair. Small firm breasts. That's what makes you the right guy for your job ––"

"What?" I said.

"Your ability kiddingwise. On the T. A. test you scored exceptionally high in Creative Kidding." He thrummed lightly with three fingers on the antique desk. Heavy drumming would have wiped it out – vibration, splinters. So he thrummed, but I took in the signal.

"Bye, Bobb."

He reached for a gumdrop from the ceramic saucer his daughter had made in Creative Crafts at nursery school. You could always see when a paper had been given Mr. Anthony's personal attention by the creative sticky fingerprints. Surreptitiously he put the gumdrop in the wastebasket and went looking for a cherry one. They were his favorite, but he often got grape instead.

On the way out I thrummed with three fingers on my forehead, practicing, and Bobb's secretary thought, Always thinking. Or so I think she thought. But my antique green brain hardly quivered; in its shrunken autumnal state, it lay curled and waiting, suffering from its desires. Cunning. Patience. Self-knowledge and knowledge. The problem, Bobb and everyone seemed to say, is Communication. But oh no it wasn't. We communicated too goddamn much already. It's what we communicated that bothered me. The President and Khrushchev understood each other all right – they spoke clearly enough – it's what they say and do that may wipe us out.

I felt that Bobb and I communicated just fine – communicated incomprehension, confusion, suspicion, doubt and friendly personal regards. Like Goneril, he meant well. I was being warned as only a gentle bureaucracy knows how to warn that the guillotine is being returned from its vacation in the attic.

"Hey!" Bobb came lumbering after me, ignoring the buttons on his intercom. "How's about lunch later? I can clear my calendar." He seemed to have forgotten that he had already asked me to lunch with him. Or maybe this was a subtle way of being nice after the business about the graph and my children – letting the whole office know that he appreciated me, ran after me, even fed me. There was a caesura in the din of typewriters as he trampled into the work area, peeling dried sugar from his fingertips. "And we can check the zoo!" he said.

After his own feeding on martinis and chops, Bobb liked to stroll into Central Park and make sure the animals had dined adequately. And that they were still there. I also liked to check the park, though I was more interested in the people on benches. The losers sit in Central Park of a nice Indian summer day, confronting nature with silent reproach; some have animals, some don't; some nurse incurable diseases, such as postnasal drip and Weltschmerz, watching like parents over their hygienic fetishes.

For lunch we ate martinis, lamb chops with paper booties, and fruit salad. Bobb had like this weight problem. Sure, his gumdrops might contain calories, he argued, but they kill the appetite. If overweight didn't exist, America would have invented it. Midtown Manhattan sometimes seems to use work as a rest between Metrecal binges. Slimming is serious; a job is only a job, but clothes are not made for fat boys and girls.

"Well, it's not so bad as all that," Bobb told me. Weight? No, the circulation projection. "First place, not your fault. Second place, every book has its period of consolidation. This is consolidationsville for us. Ne worry pas." He got that from Caroline, I was sure. "Third place – hell, you want to spend a weekend with us on the Island? How are things in Ole Cleveland? You know, I met a girl, Barbara Jones, your buddy Pete Hattan been seeing. You'd like her. My wife knows her from – Caroline knew Pete from ..." He was puzzled about how Caroline knew Barbara Jones and Peter. "Small-worldsville," he said anyway. And he topped his hand briefly, nonpederastically, over mine in order to indicate brotherly feeling, friendship, trust, confidence, and that at his stage in analysis he could hold hands with a man in a restaurant without feeling queer; I squeezed back; he squeezed; we squeezed in unison; the final squeeze clinched it that I probably wouldn't be fired, maybe just not promoted, in case my campaigns failed, and that at the very least I would someday have a weekend in Southampton to remember him by. Pensively we untangled our hands from what might have been.

"It's through Peter Hattan I think Caroline knows her," he concluded. With the hand that had gripped mine he restlessly took up a load of peanuts from the bowl left, by error, on our table. "Ask him to turn you on."

"Well, I suppose I'll meet her someday."

"S.W., huh?"

Small World. Before the boss married this wife and found himself in the magazine business and on a diet, he had been a Jehovah's Witness briefly, then gave up doing the Lord's work to do the 14th Air Force's work (bomber pilot, sitting up there in the sky over Germany, eating Oh Henrys), and now he was back to doing the Lord's work on one of His chosen magazines. Providing the graph didn't ground him. Bobb would never be fired; he had the business equivalent of Calvinist grace – stock representation, a directorship – but he didn't want to feel squirmy, anyway. He wanted to build something more than his buttocks. As a youth he had rebelled against his family by finding a seriously out religion; also he had made friends with Sonny Tufts. Sometimes he grew nostalgic, overeating at lunch, overtaken by thirst, getting thrown for a weekend nag by his wife, for the days when he did the Lord's work in more direct ways. The three fingers of his right hand were continually busy, brushing peanuts, picking gum-drops, tapping his forehead. His wife Caroline was so elegant that she left out both the consonants and the vowels when she talked, trailing only a neurotic sexy breeze in the air behind her; she had her charities (Russian relief) and her men (Anon.), and she lay around a lot on committees. The Russians she wanted to relieve were not Red Russians. They were foxy-faced children of heroes of the Denikin horse cavalries which fought to keep Formosa free in 1917–1919, all over Europe and Siberia. They scraped their ancestral saddle sores raw again in time for the Easter ball. "Hiya, Serge." "Hiya, Prince, howsa boy?" They were caterers or majordomos and a few worked for the CIA, advising on choice of hors d'oeuvres or Latin countries to be subverted, as the case might be. Their stubborn cousins still needed subsidies from the boss' wife's efforts. They alone upheld the banner of the screaming eagle of the Czar. What if the rightful government of La Sainte Russie were not reinstated in time to save the Czar's loyal children from infection by godless Western European ways? What if the Bolsheviki actually succeeded in making collective farmers out of the happy wood-gathering peasants? It was one of Caroline's causes.

Bobb finished the nuts in the bowl. "Let's," he said. He presented his Diners' card. He wrote in the tip, making that odd stifled satisfied grunt which men make when writing in a generous expense-account tip. We threaded our way through the little tables designed for drinking, not eating, on which we had eaten. We would now check the zoo. Bobb walked over to Fifth Avenue and uptown with great purpose. He knew where he was going. His wife liked lions, he liked seals. First, for me, we went through the monkey house. "Blah, smells," he said.

"It's the kids and their peanuts," I said.

"It's the monkey turd," he said. He was right. The red-and-blue–tailed primates crouched, capered, loped, moped in their cages and work area.

"Aw. Aw," I heard myself saying.

"Goshalmighty, Dan, you got a strong maternal instinct," Bobb commented.

Outside – "Blah!" cried Bobb to underline his point – we paused near the hippopotamus in its deep mud. A child in bloomers, a boy-child with a momma who liked bloomers, a kid whose mother had the notion that bloomers are Edwardian, like Tiffany glass, this desperate child was teasing the hippo; the hippo lay stoned in mud, unresponsive, autistic, catatonic, asleep with its warts and subsidiary worms and weevils; the child climbed onto the fence and fell into the slurpy, turdy, fertile ditch. He was hauled up by his shrieking, bloomer-loving mother. "Aiee!" She screamed like the victim of a Japanese art film. The child wore a subtle smile beneath its pout. It might lose the war, but it would win campaigns. Its momma, Lady Macbeth, was in a momentary breakdown, plucking madly as she howled. The hippo blinked and heaved itself delicately over. Opening its mouth – those shapeless drapes of tumbling pink membrane – the hippo let go with a volcanic convex yawn. Momma screamed at this further insult, and the child, dripping hippo reject as it dangled from its mother's hands, gave the animal a grateful wink. The child had paid a small price, merde on the face, for a great reversal of fortunes. Its mother broke her heel stamping. "Hire that man!" I said to Bobb. "Enterprising."

"Do you believe in permissive children?" he asked. "I haven't made up our mind yet."

The seals were Bobb's goal, but he had been courteous with my digressions. Now his stride quickened. There were marvelous waxy yellow leaves strewn on the path along with the Good Humor wrappings and peanut bags. It was like Indian summer in Cleveland – banks of leaves and an acrid burning in the air. High clouds. A brilliant sun. Now here we were at last. The seals poked up onto rocks, aw, and pointed their snouts heavenward, gee. Bobb gazed at me with silent reproach. Sometimes he wished he didn't have to be my father figure. Because of my dawdling over the monkeys, hippo and people, we had missed the exhibition of catching lunchtime fish in the air. A seal staggered on its flippers and made a wet awking noise. Moved, Bobb responded. "Kitchykoo!" he shouted. "Kitchy, kitchy, kitchy, koo!" They slickly digested their meals in the cool gray sun and failed to answer his entreaties. Maybe, like me, they did not know what he really wanted of them. Any more than did the losers on their benches, playing possum. The boy at the hippo moat knew, though. Or knew enough, since his own purposes were clear to him. He wanted to embarrass his mother by getting hippopotamus turd on his face and bloomers. We can use more men like that in this country.

Bobb licked his lips, hungry for seal meat. Admiration made him hungry. Both eating and dieting made him hungry. The thought of his wife made him hungry. He had pangs when he thought of the world's troubles. Doing the Lord's work, he had been slim; as a fighter pilot, lean; now – fighting the belt. Calves heavy in his narrow pants. The pants hiked up on him. There were broad horizontal wrinkles in the lap when he sat down. His garters itched. He wanted to fly again; like the seal, he had evolved too far and his flippers were overspecialized. He was clumsy. Regretfully he said goodbye to the seals for another day. No tears. He would be back.

Excitement had loosened his tongue. He began to tell me his innermost secrets. I didn't want to hear. He would regret it later. Men have been fired from better jobs than mine for less cause than that.

"Bobb, listen," I was saying. He had been telling me about his body. "There's a health food for every lack ––" Vitality, energy or will, take your pick.

"Your friend Peter's a health bug," he said thoughtfully. "He's in good shape. Course, he's not married."

"Some of those foods taste good," I said.

"Umm, I like carrot sticks, with a little salt, you know? For a snack? Instead of crackers?"

We strolled out of the park toward the office. We hit the crowd on Fifth Avenue, going every which way. Bobb stood confused, his head higher than most, looking for his bearings. I could see him selling The Watchtower and predicting the end of the world soonest. He looked hungry for a meaning in life. He looked hungry in general. Then abruptly he was reminded of the basic point. He stood amid the crowd and called down to me: "Now hear this. With your help, boy, we're going to climb into the steeratosphere, stee-rat-rat-ratosphere. We'll not only sell more paid-up subscriptions, no giveaway gimmicks, I mean gimmicks, than any other class magazine, but also than any other quality rag. Now hear that."

I was at his side throughout this outburst. The seals were over. The hippo-boy was over. I tended to consider the speech a little sanity-inducing joke on his part, but he repeated it on an average of twice a week, usually on Monday at the morning meeting and on Thursday at random. There at the southeast corner of Central Park where the Plaza Hotel gracefully looms, I decided that it must be a complicated put-down, but of whom? Of me and my job? Of himself? Of his wife for marrying him? Of things in general? Later in the day I came around to the simple solution: He meant it. He was like Goneril. He was sincere, and that was the gimmick. "You're right, Bobb," I replied, "and I'll do the best I can." He might have looked foolish to me, smelling his salty, spitty fingertips near the fountain of the Plaza, but he knew how to substitute other pleasures for his slim bygone waistline.

The lights were against us, so I took the time to admire the Plaza, the fountains, the hacks and their horses. It may have been all a plot – the clop of horses' hoofs, the high hats on the hackies, the water leaping in the Plaza fountains – but it succeeded in generating a nostalgic yearning for grace.

"This is a beautiful corner," I said, "beloved by writers since the Twenties."

"Hell," he said, "I'm going on 45 and I still love it."

Want to bet he was closer to 50?

After lunch I wrote my child support check for the month. Sigh. A moment of gloom. I took the pictures out of my wallet and set them up on the desk in front of me. Must get new ones; children grow. Then rubbed my hands together. I went back to work on a special letter for the subscribers of The Realist, a funny little hip magazine whose subscription list we had bought from a part-time secretary who had managed to steal it out of the shoe box in which the editor kept it. Just how, I don't know. This is business, not crime. We paid her 25 cents per name, and with the proceeds she took a weekend in Fire Island. Ate steamed clams for the first time – then the crook went back to Hunter College, with a major in Lit. I read (researched up) some back issues of the magazine, which was slanted toward the secular branch of the Lenny Bruce cult. Prophet, not Saint, thank God. Steeping myself into the slant, a toe at a time, I tapped out some sick humor, ritually said "Bllach" into the typewriter, and let's go. "Hiya, Dads. Sick we're not, but disgusted we sometimes are ––" No. "Hey buddy. Look, you're probably not a magazine subscriber. Take a walk in the evening, pick up on the headlines, browse in an open-late bookstore –– "Bllach. No and double-no. That blasted secretary, that smalltime goon, what trouble she made for me. How could I both conform to company policy and pick up the trail after this narrow band of nonconformists? I mean, if you have to sell an ingroup on being an outgroup, you might as well teach Lit at Hunter College.

I was thinking again. Across the work area Rita frowned with her company-spy, three-in-one eyes. I was staring at the freckles. A blouse covered them, but she knew I knew from Tom Davenport. She sat at a metal desk with pipestem legs and her skirt hiked up as she typed. Thigh, thigh, then metathigh – why? The Napoleonic office boy ambled past with a fresh cargo of gumdrops for Mr. Anthony. An afternoon yawn hit me and I remembered Goneril. I concentrated. Focus – it is important in selling.

Delicacy is also essential, but my task was not easy. These small-small promotions were sometimes worse than the big ones. Even if it came to the subscribers to some California literary quarterly with 126 paid-up admissions, we would bend all our (my) effort to drag in a few of them with a special letter. Frederika and Rita whispered together in the girls' room, but I slaved away over my cream-colored Olivetti. It isn't that 126 subscriptions made any real difference. But we thought of them as peer-group leaders, we thought like that, and they firmed up the advertising base ... That was it! Try that old story again! I rolled in another sheet. It made a zipping sound. Bllach. I sometimes wrote the self-critical words onto the top of the sheet; my fabb secretary knew enough not to type it into the final copy. "As a peer-group leader – jargon is shorthand, pals – you are especially valuable to a magazine like ours. We admit that we attempt to influence the decision-making mass of Americans; a magazine like ours cannot be edited from Big Sur; but still there is an advantage for you too in keeping touch ..." I considered this a mildly novel way to sell the product. I tried to imply: Look, buddies, we're giving you something to sneer at in case you're tired of Time-Life. Be advanced. Be far out. (I scribbled in the margin: hp, swng, meaning: Don't forget to use the words hip and swinging someplace in the copy.) Sneer at us, I was begging them, at a bargain introductory rate to peer-group leaders, stamped envelope enclosed.

In months and years to come I might have to deal with the subscription lists of the National Review (right), the National Guardian (left), a journal of members of the union of AFL-CIO business agents, a Jewish anti-Zionist newsletter (we are Americans of the Mosaic persuasion, we have swell table manners dating back to before the Civil War, in which we fought bravely and impartially on both sides), not to speak of such major sources of names as The New Yorker and the Chevy Chase telephone directory.

The buzzer sounded. Rita said, "Mister Hattan on the telephone." I could see her satiny lips wriggling across my work area.

"Put him on, please. Hello, pal. Yeah. Sticky and hot inside – the air is coolified. Sure, you say so, I'd like to meet her. No. No. I'd like to meet the lady. Trust in the Lord."

He called me the Mahalia Jackson of the magazine promotion trade and signed off. All I meant was that I trusted him to fill my evenings with pleasure and occupation, amen. Back to The Realist.

At 3:30 I looked up to notice that the coffee wagon had passed me by. I would do without. It tasted like boiled back issues, anyway. The wastebasket was half full of wadded-up paper. But there were three sheets in a new manila folder.

At five o'clock I skipped the usual drinks, as usual, but shaved myself with an old Sunbeam Shavemaster I kept in the closet in the men's room, in a gnurry tangle of extension cords wrapped around a drugstore minor. It was the razor my father gave me when I got out of the Army – single-headed, slow, grinding away like the mills of God against my beard. It still worked. The plan for its obsolescence had not been perfected. And it relaxed me to rub the machine against my jaw and think of my father in Cleveland, moral, sleepy, still alert to my failings. The grumpy motor massaged my brain. I also brushed my teeth.

At six I would meet Peter at his place and life would begin anew in the gray-yellow dusk of Manhattan. I would tell Peter about Goneril and he would cluck and grin and then he would lead me back into the maze. The girls of Riverside Drive, Village chicks, those lovely East Side ladies, so patient in their eagerness ... But before this, I met the boss one more time that day. He barged in on me just as I was tucking the Shavemaster back in the closet. He said: "You working kind of late?"

And you piddling in the help's John? I wanted to ask. Lonely, Boss? But I didn't. While he stood aspraddle and sighing, I apologized. He shivered, took a deep breath, zipped, buttoned. For this relief, much thanks. Also it took him away from fingering his candies. I apologized for working so late. I'd rather he didn't know about the shaving, but I also didn't want him to think me panicky because of our lunch and that graph. I winked. "Busy," I said.

Winks he understood. He winked back. Christ, if he wanted to hold my hand again ––! But he only said: "Fabb." Making out with the secretaries in the office was OK, while shaving somehow lay in some murky area which lacked definition and clear precedent. Maybe this was because it implied that the beard was growing out of the head on company time. I imagine, given a razor account at an advertising agency, protocol might be reversed; the daily growth of hair could be considered field research, and shaving it a case of market analysis. But we sold deodorized and homogenized sex – sophisticated sex, with deep analysis – along with our politics. If I could talk once on the phone with one of the President's speech writers, also in advt. & promot., as I in fact once did, I could cop a feel behind the files.

Bobb Anthony had a vestigial twitch in his eye. It dated back to the Twenties. Winking is out; we wink in words nowadays; but the boss was nonverbal despite his garrulity. Like the seal, he stretched, preened and fished in the air. He trapped an innuendo in the stee-ratosphere.

Bobb winked.

About that conversation with Washington: We had been negotiating with the President for a little text piece on fallout. His man said he was waiting for the right crisis to wake up America. The Chief was biding his time. You can lead a man to the shelter, but you can't make him dig. In the end we decided that major policy decisions should be left to the Luce magazines and Congress; we wanted to preserve our independent critical posture, like The Reporter. Only sharper and more homespun. We didn't think it in keeping with our image to add the President to our stable of writers. We preferred sharp-eyed pros. They required less rewriting and were unlikely to cause war with a careless word. In case of war, we would probably enjoy major (circulation increases, due to national anxiety, but this advantage would be more than offset by likely hydrogen damage to our plant. The President's man said it was OK by him. No sense in precipitating a moral crisis in the cement industry before we were ready. He said his feelings weren't hurt, but the plug he gave us for the fall circulation drive had a pretty general ring to it.

From the woman's angle, we had thought the President's wife might give us some tips on how to decorate your home away from home, underground, making use of antique fold-away furniture to lick one of the major problems in styling, limited space. We thought of running it with a red and blue color layout – a novel wake-up device to beat certain gloomy implications. Who wants to be cooped up with the family that way, even in a flawlessly decorated living area? Well, we ran it up the flagpole – as Bobb said – but it didn't flutter. I had to throw away a whole promotion series geared to the progressive slant on "Wake Up, America!" Bobb liked the way I had stolen this theme from under the noses of the Radical Right, and yet preserved our magazine's traditional liberal posture (or image).

We stood at the elevator together. Bobb stared at my lip with a worried frown (Boss takes interest in health of Team). "I got a little Chap Stick, you want to try it?" he said. "Last time they ran their ad, they sent me a hundred." He took his head on a slow shake. "Now what am I gonna do with a hundred Chap Sticks? Eat 'em?"

"No," I hastily urged him, thinking, They're probably slimming, though.

"Well, you take care." He put his head next to mine and his eyes widened delightedly. "Say! Hey! Wow! That's a bite, boy!"

I hung my face in pride. "Aw," I said. It wasn't. It was a blow from Goneril's neck. The camphor had irritated it.

"Boy! And I was worrying about you, too! Man! Come on, Dan, please – aw, come on – please – have a Chap Stick, will you?"

Others came up, saw us in close discussion, pressed the button for themselves. Bobb made a small conspiratorial gesture of one finger to mouth. He considered himself sworn to secrecy. I could trust him with my secrets (Boss like a father to Team). Implicitly. Grave silence. We entered the elevator. As I said, Bobb winked. At least a half-dozen people felt caught and blushed. What dreams on their work-ended minds? Guilty, guilty. We shot down 18 floors to our nighttime, part-time careers in what seemed like real life. Rita Rooney and Tom Davenport, trapped in the elevator together, did not even glance at each other. Workaday love was over; conjugal duty and dating now began. The troops marched through the lobby, good soldiers all. We were released from the command of ravenous, organizational Bobb Anthony. The building dribbled us forth into the newsreel evening. Farewell till tomorrow, dear colleagues. Bye-bye.

We broke step and took a breath, and then went forward on our separated campaigns.

Subway. Down again, across, and up the West Side. The subway was filled with brutal exhaustion on the muzzles of travelers, brutal hilarity in the form of elbows and feet. We rocketed through the earth, holding our breath. I wanted to do something personal. It had been a long day. Personal! I felt denuded. My right shoulder ached. It had been to the wheel. Each day was like flipping a little. Each evening I sought to do something which would make me human in this inhuman city. The elbows in my ribs in the subway – like the bloomered boy at the hippo pit – made me flush with gratitude. Fight back, fellas! Return junk mail to sender! Loaf, laze and wallow! Enjoy a surliness break! Goof off! Love. Coffee breaks are not enough. Drink and eat! Kick and yell! My lips were chapped and dry from the smiles I had licked away. Ah food, strong bread with sweet butter, that would be an introduction to personal life again.

On the way to meet Peter, I stopped to buy a loaf of pumpernickel in one of those supermarkets on Broadway which they install in converted movie theaters. On the marquee they advertise lard, you know? Or a special on Mazola? Some of them are being transferred back now to noncholesterol-producing art movies. Well, anyway, in the supermarket there was this girl, this woman – full in style, no hysteria on the face, a beauty in a plaid skirt and white blouse, strong legs, high breasts, a long straight nose, just a touch of dampness at the blouse and hairline; she was wheeling a cart and rested on the steering bar a hand without a wedding ring. That proved thatshe was meant for me. For ever after, a woman, a woman! Irish maybe. With a touch of Slav. Of Indian. Of English aloofness. Yet earthy. Perfect, her for me and me for her. Our team! Goodbye, Goneril, you had your chance. You muffed it. Not this darling, my true love. She said nothing to me, but she rode that grocery cart with the grace of an angel. For my benefit. She stood on one toe to lift off a bag of flour. For me. Not a large bag. Medium. She lived alone. But she liked to cook. English muffins. Apple pies. Oatmeal cookies. Mm, fresh cookies. How to speak with her? If I came up behind her and said all at once, "I love you," wouldn't she maybe think me a masher, even crude? Possible. So I followed her. Grilled bacon. Bacon and tomato sandwiches for two. On a little marble table. Fireplace. The glow on her face. If only she knew how discreetly I followed her, with consideration for her delicate feelings, instead of just boorishly falling to my knees in front of her cart, she would learn to appreciate me. But she did not notice. Brillo. Ivory Snow. I trailed her in a transport. I wheeled my cart, containing nothing but a long loaf of bread, behind her cart, containing a mounting pile of staples. Jell-o yes. Jell-o no. She replaced the Jell-o on the shelf. She put it back in the right spot. She would not lose my place when I wanted her to read something in a book I admired. She would read the paragraph and hand it back. She would comment briefly. Later we would discuss it in detail. She was considerate of Jell-o. She would be considerate of me. With a delicate pressure on the bar and wheels of her cart she braked it in order to read the backs of boxes. She was literate. She was an intelligent consumer. She compared quantities of riboflavin in breakfast cereals before making her choice. She made distinctions. She was intelligent. She went to the library near Amsterdam Avenue to read Consumer's Report. But she was not a slave to advice. Imagining the crisp pop of Kellogg's Special "K" against the soft thrill of Wheaties, her tongue between her teeth, the tradition of the New against a fine old flake. I wanted to bite that tongue. Not now, Jater. I wanted to squeeze it gently. Later. Not now. But I wanted to, badly. At some future date. When I knew her better. When it was appropriate. When it flowed naturally from long acquaintance. When she knew I cared about her, the real her, not merely some ideal of Ideal Woman, not merely some psychosensual target. She was not just a pickup. She was Venus and Aphrodite, she was a careful shopper. She put both boxes down and decided on Kretchmer's Wheat Germ in the jar. It goes wonderfully with bananas and nuts. In the fruit and nut department. I didn't blame her at all. I was with her there. I was on her side all the way. I was behind her.

She wheeled her cart and I wheeled mine. She had her hair pinned up and the nape of her neck was lovely, unhysteric, calm, womanly, loving. She forgave me my sins. She knew I was a sinner, but knew also that the worst of all sins is not to recognize one's own flaws. I saw error and sin! within! And yet she knew that I did not wallow in self-pity. Yes, I dipped in a toe now and then, but I had so much to give her. Kretchmer's Wheat Germ is toasted, did she know that? Toasting probably changes some of the original vitamins. That's all right. "Alteration will thy pleasure be." We took our joys carelessly. Untoasted wheat germ is for cattle. We sliced bananas, raisins, and sprinkled nuts on our morning cereal. We took coffee in mugs we bought at the outdoor fair on Waverly Place. We went shopping together because that was how we had met, she and I.

But how to speak those first words to her? So far we were merely grocery carts that passed in the Manhattan night. Quality there. Frozen meat. Liver. Ground chuck. She wasn't poor, she didn't buy hamburger; she wasn't extravagant, she didn't buy steak; she bought ground chuck. She bought liver. She wasn't phony, she didn't buy tripe or brains. God she was perfect. No animals. I bet she had no cats. I felt it in my bones – no cats. She liked human beings better than cats. But how to stop her? How? I mooned along, pushing rubber wheels. I had inadvertently picked a cart for myself with a little elevated wire throne for a baby. She could be mother on vacations to my two. She would like them. They would like her. She took an old envelope out of her purse and checked off her list. She had every item and more. Me. She also had me. I was on her list if she only knew. She did not know. She would leave soon. She felt fulfilled. I felt unfulfilled. How to fulfill us both? I could strike up a conversation about Pechter's Russian Pumpernickel. That's what I wheeled in my cart. I could tell her all my jokes about it, my bad puns. How it supports life, it's true, it's beautiful. "Beyond the Pechter Principle" – Freud. "Pechter's in Our Time" – Neville Chamberlain. But she was too young for appeasement. But what if she didn't like Pechter's Russian Pumpernickel? What if she ate Pepperidge Farm bread? Wouldn't she think me odd? Eccentric? Pushy? "Beyond the Pepperidge Principle." No, it didn't have that swing. The rhythm was off. She might call for the manager. The police. Have me thrown out. For protection against her goons I seized a box of frozen strawberries and threw them next to the bread in my empty cart. Unmelted, they make a brutal weapon. And maybe they would give me an idea. We need ideas more than weapons. They gave me no idea, they did not even thaw.

The master maneuverers say that the important thing in politics is to be on the scene, present, there. Wildly I skated up behind her. If I knew her name, I could be more fully present. In England they know each other. Here we have to be empirical. Love is a kind of politics. But what did I know about her? She was standing at a bin that displayed rubber gloves to protect a lady's hands from detergent itch. This week only, if you bought a pair of rubber gloves, you got an extra glove free, due to this special offer. She took the package. I knew nothing at all about her but what I sensed in my heart. Maybe she had a third hand. I never said a word to her. I listened to her with the third ear, but I never had the chance to say I loved her, third hand and all. I never saw her again. She never had the chance to make me the happiest man in the world. I was disappointed, wouldn't you be?

I carried my bread and strawberries down Broadway in a paper bag.

Even Goneril cared more than she did.

Frederika and Rita Rooney cared more about Tom Davenport than she did about me.

Caroline Anthony cared more about Bobb.

"Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care," Shakespeare said, thinking of love; but every way you look at it, love no longer works like that. Now youth is full of care – struggle for an ideal beauty, struggle to fit romance to marriage, the bitter decision-making of divorce – and only in age do most of us learn to take pleasure easily. Age begins to know how, pleasure sinks into the bones at last; but in age a man should settle to his ambitions and get to work and be full of satisfactions. Still, there are nasty men of all ages, groping in the streets; young-men in the basements, old men dancing at Roseland. Youth and age both are full of care. Even Rita Rooney, letting her eyes cross all the way, is fabulously sincere. Bobb, Tom and the man who wheeled the coifee cart worked at it all night, worked by day; Goneril lived in care as she made her films in magnificent pornoscope; Peter and I discussed; there was very much alike in all our lives.

Could private detectives find me the girl in the supermarket? Track her down? Learn her habits and teach me to infiltrate her days somehow?

Reasoning and fantasy. Bllach.

A group of Puerto Rican kids at a pizza stand were laughing at me. I had taken a greedy bite of the heel of the bread and was chewing with my jaw making clicking noises. One of them tossed me a crust of pizza. He judged me.harshly. I too. I sometimes think we all now reason too much about things, Why? and why? and why?, eating ourselves up with insights, I insight you and you insight me and we each insight the other; we brood brood brood; but then I look at the way I live at work, what I do with my brains all day, and goddamnit, maybe I ought to think more. Is writing come-on letters what for we rose out of the slime with the help of the opposable thumb and the Olivetti? Is this why I battered my way out of my mother's cervix, with my head all bloodied and her filling the delivery room at St. Luke's Hospital with screams? To write let's-do letters? To smell Rita Rooney's breath and see the bottle of Dexedrine in the wastebasket? To hear Tom Davenport's troubles and bluff with Bobb Anthony? Finally getting down to labor at: "In the coming weeks our line-up includes such vital reports on war and peace, Broadway and Hollywood, as ..."

Isn't there something more?

Now the strawberries began to melt and there was a soggy stain on my grocery sack. I held the strawberries between two fingers. I drop-kicked them into the street. Applause. More Puerto Rican kids. I had strawberry mush on my right toe. But the strawberries had only started to melt. I limped.

I wanted something more! The days were growing short. It was getting dark. Indian summer over soon. Daylight saving time over soon. I wanted more time, more days, more light and air. I wanted to like what I did. I wanted to love whom I bedded. I had plans for the universe. I wanted it to stick around lor a while.

Could I rescue foundered love, foundered marriage and family, by finding Miss Right? (Ten million frayed boys were looking for that same girl, strong, laughing, pensive, multilayered, strolling the supermarket without a past.) I would take her for a weekend with Bobb and Caroline Anthony at their place in Southampton. Gradually she would see me for what I am. Then I would launch myself bravely into business, founding a magazine called Thank You, The Quarterly of Gracious Receiving.

What else is there to do?

We're not at the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, running switchboards. We're running typewriters, wheeling grocery carts.

So how else to spend all the power we nonetheless gloriously still possess? Not like the trained seal bobbing out of the salt in the zoo, flapping winglessly under the sun.

Up the stairs two steps at a time. In a hurry.

I presented the bread like a carbine at Peter's door. Black bread with a harsh grain in the stock. Good bread, but unkind thoughts about myself. I knocked with it. The door came open. Green eyes and a smile of welcome. A crisp fresh beige shirt and a black knit tie, just being tied.

"Hi, Pete. What's doing tonight?"

"Games, boyo, games. There are these two good sports I thought you ought to meet. One, she has nice eyes. The other – she's highly skilled."

"Skill," I said. "Hm. I think I'd rather see nice eyes. There's more than enough technique already in this world."

He wagged his head disapprovingly. "You're not being a very good student. Old Uncle Pete is trying to tell you something. After dinner we'll ––"

I gave him the bread to show I meant him no disrespect. "After dinner," I said, "I want to take Nice Eyes away alone someplace. It would be kind of nice to talk to someone with nice eyes."

He bugged out his green gaze at me. Well, it was time for me to be a little hard on reality. Maybe Miss Nice Eyes and Dreamy Dan could find our way to what skills we needed all by ourselves on that workaday and fantastic floating island.