The Antelope Cage

They weren't still married. They weren't officially separated. They weren't much of anything. The way it worked was that each Sunday, Harry Towns's son would be shipped into the city with a package of bills and Towns would take care of them; he saw it not so much in terms of paying them as in terms of whittling down the stacks as they arrived. At the time he had broken up with his wife, he had owned a massive wardrobe, mostly because he rarely threw away clothing and still had sweat shirts that dated 20 years back, ones he had bought at college. He had left most of his clothing behind, although, admittedly, he had taken along his key outfits, four leather sports jackets and four pairs of his top slacks, in combinations that he could keep switching around so that he came across as being well dressed. A dapper newscaster who had never been seen twice in the same outfit stopped Harry Towns on several occasions and said, "Jesus, where do you get your stuff?"--a tribute to Towns's nimble footwork as a switcher of outfits. He had left behind his tax records, his Army uniform and a ton of his books, although in this last category, he had skimmed off the cream, 50 winners--books like Henry Esmond and Middlemarch, ones he had read but wanted to take a second and more mature shot at. He had left several suitcases with his wife, taking with him one that was expensive but professionally battered; it was that way when he bought it and might have belonged to an Italian film director, one whose career had been uneven.

He had left with what he saw as a lean and mean assortment of items and, as far as he knew, his wife had not thrown out the rest of his possessions. Now they met for dinner once in a while, and if she had unloaded his old sweat shirts, he felt he would have sensed it--although he never asked her. He had gone to see a divorce lawyer once and they wound up talking about Ethel Merman. And he had received a vague, exploratory call from a lawyer of hers. It stayed vague and finally petered out. None of this added up to much of an arrangement, except that built into it--and the reason they probably kept it going that way--was the unspoken notion that at one point or another they would give it another try. It was a possibility that kept floating around on the edge of his life.

Towns liked to think it was the morning he woke up and heard about the Tom Eagleton Vice-Presidential nomination that he had decided to make his move. To spell it out accurately, he did not wake up. It was ten in the morning and he hadn't been asleep. He heard about Eagleton at a time when he was not only wide but outrageously awake, staring at the ceiling and flailing out for sleep as though it were a fish he had a chance of holding if he could just grab it. Inside his chest, an involuntary muscle snapped away like a tiny whip. This took place a little too far over to the left to be a heart attack, so he decided for the moment to sweep that possibility under the rug, although there was no way to rule it out entirely. It might have been fascinating to lie there and watch this snapping phenomenon take place in his own body, except that, at the moment, Harry Towns was in no mood to be fascinated. He had gotten himself into this by-now-familiar condition by violating a basic cocaine rule, which is that if you have any thought of falling asleep at night or accomplishing something when the sun comes up, you don't get under way by inhaling great vacuuming blasts of the drug at four in the morning. Which is what he had done. And in the past several months, he had piled up a dangerous number of violations. What happened is that for each transgression, in addition to the snapping, you lost an entire day. At minimum. This was fine if you were a failed romantic poet and were supposed to touch bottom a few times, knock off a couple of sonnets and check out at the age of 33. But Harry Towns was a screenwriter in his 40s, and each of those lost snapper days made it that much tougher to whittle down the pile of bills his son carried in on the train each Sunday. He knew that if he got up on one elbow, he could see a mound of them piled high on an end table. So he stayed as flat as he could.

The only reason he switched on the news was so that he could tell himself he hadn't wasted the whole day. It was a little like nourishment. He would take some news into his system. This would enrich him and make him a slightly better person.

The actual sound of the news was not very soothing to him. Music would have been better, even experimental rock sounds. Best of all would have been a tomblike silence. Instead, he had the crackle of the news and the traffic outside; even though he was 33 stories up, each car seemed to be headed into his mouth. It wasn't that difficult to see why Towns made the connection between himself and Eagleton. He and the Senator were the same age. And Eagleton came from a state in the Midwest right next to the one in which he had gone to college. Eagleton was a family man, just like Towns, except that Eagleton had kept his family together, while Towns had let his own fall to pieces. He had that great name: Eagleton. It sounded just like the country. If America hadn't been named America, it could have been called Eagleton and no one would have known the difference. Russia would never fool around with Eagleton, the number-one power. If you don't like Eagleton, leave it!

So Harry Towns identified with this terrific new fellow who turned up out of nowhere and was going to get a try at the Vice-Presidency. Towns loved people who came out of nowhere. In the one speech he had ever made, he told a group of high school students that America was good because it kept coming up with people like that. The country had an endless supply. They came galloping out of nowhere just when you needed them. This was probably true about Finland, too, but Harry Towns didn't say that in his speech. Usually, you found out these "new" people had spent years building up a foundation. A bit later, when Harry Towns got a look at the New York Times background profile, he found out that Eagleton was no exception.

He slipped out of the lobby of his apartment building to get the newspaper, looking around to make sure that a normal and pretty-looking girl who lived up the street in a brownstone wasn't out walking her dog. They had flirted around a bit and, in a display of the new female consciousness elevation, she had reached out and pinched his ass in broad daylight. A very pretty girl had done that to him. He did not see himself as having set the world on fire, but wouldn't it be something if it turned out that he had gotten as far as he had because he had a cute ass? And only now were women allowed to let him know about it? That would be some shocker. Harry Towns felt strongly that the fallout from the move that women had made was terrific. For everybody. Or at least it was going to be. A statement he liked to throw out was: "I'm just sitting on the side lines, waiting for the dust to settle." In actuality, he wasn't sitting on the side lines. For example, he could now say to a woman, "Listen, I'm not an easy lay." The remark tended to back most of them off a bit, but some wound up enjoying it. This particular girl let him neck with her as long as they did it in the lobby of his building and she got to keep one hand on the mailbox and an eye on the street. As far as getting her up to his apartment, it was no dice. There was something charming about this arrangement, and Harry Towns meant to get around to her one day. This would be at some future point, after he had closed down his involvement with hookers and cocktail waitresses, freeing himself for everyday girls.

Meanwhile, he didn't want to blow it by letting her see him after a cocaine night, his eyes filmed over and tufts of what was left of his hair shooting out in different directions.

He slipped across the street and bought a quart of Light n' Lively milk and the Times, both of which he took back to what he still referred to, only sardonically now, as his tower of steel and glass, high above Manhattan. One plus item in the cocaine column--in fact, the only one he could think of at the moment--was that it deadened your appetite and kept you on the skinny side. That made it the world's most expensive diet. He could get the Light n' Lively milk down, but it would be midnight before he felt the first stirrings of appetite. He would probably want a couple of egg rolls then. Meanwhile, he took sips of the milk and read the Times, gliding right by the latest developments in SALT and zeroing in on the Eagleton background coverage. He just wasn't up to SALT breakthroughs at the moment. If he had been in love with Eagleton before, he was head over heels after he took a look at the fellow's picture. He looked exactly like his name. Towns loved his profile and he loved his hairline. He had every one of his hairs and each one was in place. Towns felt that Eagleton deserved that hairline, too, after the way he had worked his way up, doing various jobs in the country, any one they threw at him, always performing selflessly and not getting caught in municipal-bond scandals. Just as Towns suspected, he hadn't really come out of nowhere. They had a picture of his family in there, the one he had made sure to hold together, and they looked terrific, too. Towns had a famous racketeer friend who looked him in the eye one night and said he never trusted a man unless the fellow had "a tight family." He had his head blown off in a Queens restaurant, but Towns always remembered the remark and felt (continued on page 170) The Antelope Cage (continued from page 132) guilty about not having that kind of family himself.

The reason Harry Towns was so involved with the Vice-Presidential candidate was that, even though they were the same age, Eagleton's life, a slow, upward climb, was just coming into blossom, whereas Harry Towns saw himself as being on a downhill slide. Forget about his seeing himself on one. He really was on one. He could not even pass himself off as a fellow who had peaked. If he had, he wished someone had tapped him on the shoulder when he was way up on that peak, so he could have taken out a little time to enjoy it. Tom Eagleton wasn't into coke. He sure as hell wasn't shelling out $300 a week for a quarter of an ounce and slowly easing his way into the half-an-ounce league--with money that should have been used to whittle down the huge stack of bills on the end table, money he could have turned over to his wife so she could buy a couch and some ottomans and have a complete living room like other people.

Was Eagleton seeing his kid once a week, taking him to a monster movie, a Mexican restaurant and then back to the train? Not on your life. Let's say that perfect family portrait in the Times was a little exaggerated for political purposes and that if you peeled off a layer or two, there were a couple of serious problems in the Eagleton family, the kind everybody had. A heart murmur, something like that. At least Eagleton had hung in there and stuck around, so that no matter how bad he felt, his children could see him before they went to bed at night. He wasn't stretched out in any king-sized bed watching a chest muscle snap. And finding traces of the hooker he had had up there with him the night before. (Harry Towns had been lucky with this particular hooker. She was a fresh young one, new on the street, and she didn't have a price list. She didn't say, "Turn over? Are you kidding? That's an extra ten." And when he unpeeled her, he had gotten a delightful surprise--long pretty legs, a perfect ass and the name Tony tattooed above one nipple. She apologized for the Tony inscription, saying, "It took six bikers to hold me down and do it." That's all Towns had to hear. He tore into her and the tattoo, and unless she was the world's greatest actress, he got to her. There was a line around the block of ones he hadn't gotten to, so he felt qualified to know when he had struck pay dirt.)

None of which altered the fact that Eagleton wasn't spending his time with tattooed hookers. He wasn't losing entire days sipping Light n' Lively milk, feeling shaky and looking up ahead to the high point of his day, a lonely midnight egg roll. You didn't make that firm, steady climb to the nation's second biggest job with that type of behavior.

So then the shock-treatment story broke and under other circumstances, Harry Towns might have permitted himself an ironic chuckle. Except that he was in no condition to do any ironic chuckling. Besides, Towns looked at it this way: Even while Eagleton was soaking up shock treatments, the man wasn't busy busting up any families. He probably had a lot of life insurance and wasn't forking over any $300 a week to coke dealers. He did his work, electrodes or no electrodes. A few blasts and right back to the desk. With no time for tattooed hookers. Unless that were the next big story on the horizon. Even if it were, it had nothing to do with Harry Towns.

He had been carrying around that notion of another try long before he had heard of Tom Eagleton. Towns didn't like the quality of his life, and he saw his wife and his old family as a means of protecting him from it.

During this time, he occasionally went out with a woman who boasted some distinguished credentials. She was a lady poet who had once bummed around with Ernest Hemingway. Towns felt that this lady was his link to the literary greats of yesteryear. He gave himself high marks for taking her to Chinese restaurants, despite her advanced age. It was a sign of his maturity that he allowed himself to be seen around with a woman who was not exactly a cupcake. But she was hard on him and made him feel that his behavior was not first-rate and true like that of the literary greats of yesteryear she had once bummed around with. For example, when she ordered fried carp with noodles, her voice was firm, her gaze at the waiter steady, and there was a sense of her having come up with a dish that was first-rate and full of integrity. Whereas, if Harry Towns went for the sea bass with black-bean-and-garlic sauce, she gave him a look of cold steel that said he had done something second-rate and not really true. As he spoke to the waiter, she would crane her neck around as if searching the restaurant for some small trace of the honesty and lack of pretense she had experienced in Paris during the Twenties. Hemingway or Faulkner would have picked Towns as a phony the second he placed such an order, he knew, and she was more or less acting on their behalf. So he didn't see her too often. If he was a little short in the integrity department, he didn't want it rubbed in. Still, he sensed that his notion of moving away from waitresses and hookers in the direction of mature women was a sound one, even though he hadn't had much luck as yet.

He sometimes thought of his wife--if he went back to her--as someone who could help him keep the cocaine out of his nose. She could block off the hookers and the other bad characters who had come into his life. And, while she was holding them off, he could get back to being a serious man.

This included getting involved in television, which he kept describing as a medium ready to "step on the gas." He had once said this to the lady poet who used to bum around with Hemingway and she'd taken it as a confirmation of what she had always felt about him, that despite his lip service to Camus and Dr. Johnson, he was really second-rate. Ninth-rate, if you wanted to press her on it. Imagine Hem taking the tube seriously.

His wife had always said that when and if she ever wanted him back, she would tell him, straight out. So there was a certain amount of risk involved in letting her know he was ready to make the move. She could slap him right down. They had an arrangement in which they still went to a few family functions together, her family's and what was left of his. In particular, they went to one wedding. It brought out a certain amount of bitterness in her. During the ceremony, she said, "Big deal. In a couple of years, they'll be fucking other people." Towns couldn't get over the look on her face when she came out with that one. On the other hand, when they danced, after the ceremony, she held him in such a way that he could feel a little thrill to her flesh. He had never felt that when they were together. He took that tremulous little shiver to be her way of saying she wanted him back.

So, on this occasion, having tested the water, so to speak, he plunged in and said, "Listen...."

And she said, "I know ... and I want you to."

In what one of his friends had described as "a lightning move with her bishop," she had sold their old house in the country and taken what he saw as a kind of sliced-off apartment in an economical and thickly ethnic quarter of the city. It was a slice of an apartment to him in the sense that half of it was outdoors and terraced and the other half was indoors, long and skinny. He imagined himself having to stand sideways all the time to fit into it. But he had visited it, and it had terrific cooking smells in it and a sense of order. Heavy nourishing stews were always bubbling away on the stove; and there were bulletin-board markings, telling when floor shellackers were due. He looked forward to getting involved in those stews. And it would be nice to have some of those bulletin-board notations relate to him. Maybe he could even ink in a few himself. That would mean farewell to coke and egg rolls, except maybe once in a while on the latter.

He sublet his own apartment and made the decision to store his steel-and-leather furniture rather than sell it. It may have been that he was hedging his bets a little on that one. On the other hand, he loved his furniture and wondered if you were allowed to visit it in storage. He imagined a warehouse fellow taking him in to see it and leaving him alone with it for a while, then coming back to say, "Your time's up, sir." Moving some of it to the sliced-off apartment was out of the question. It would be like bringing a few hookers into his wife's apartment, and he didn't want to do that to her.

• • •

The first major event that happened once he had moved in was that his son swiped a giant pencil sharpener from one of the ethnic stores and got traced back to the apartment by a team of detectives. Harry Towns had been out buying some cigars. When he walked in, he saw his teenage son sitting on a kitchen stepladder in handcuffs. Actually, all he saw were the handcuffs. He didn't wait for the story from his wife or the detectives. All he knew was that the handcuffs had to come off. That was worth his life, then and there. Without raising his voice, he communicated this fact to the detectives. There was a good detective and a bad detective, and the good one unlocked them. The bad one, a dead ringer for a French mime, was breathing heavily from the exertion of getting the cuffs on. Harry Towns had not done any sober reasoning. He could not get his eyes off the handcuffs and he could not think past them. They had nothing to do with him or anyone that came from him. They were for other people. His family, his son, his father, his uncles were not handcuff people. So how could his son be? Once the handcuffs were off, Harry Towns calmed down a little.

His son didn't say a word but simply looked at the detectives with what appeared to be gratitude for confirming feelings he always had about police. Later, Harry Towns would say something to the effect that they were doing their job, but the boy would not forgive them for putting cuffs on him over a sharpener, one he had taken because he had three years of bum knees and occasionally did things that were a little out of sync. And he had no dad around to keep an eye on him. He would not forgive them, but he also loved them for letting him hate them.

Meanwhile, Harry Towns swung into action. This took the form of getting a distinguished attorney with frail kidneys down to the apartment in 45 minutes. On a weekend. There was talk about booking Towns's son, but there was also a quiet hint from the attorney that there had been an illegal entry; it got settled by everyone's agreeing to sit by silently while the bad detective delivered an uninterrupted lecture to the boy about how he shouldn't grab sharpeners that weren't his, since it led to major crimes. It was difficult for Towns to sit by during the lecture, but he held himself in check. After the talk, the two detectives shook hands all around and went home. The attorney stayed for a brandy, Harry Towns wondering all the while if his kidneys hadn't been further imperiled by the excitement. How could they not have been? He came to the conclusion that this attorney should restrict himself to a calmer form of law.

Harry Towns thought it was certainly lucky he was around for this episode. Otherwise, the boy would have had to remain in the cuffs for a long time. Maybe overnight. He had moved back to his family in the nick of time.

At the wedding, Towns's wife had said it would be terrific for them to get back into one bed again. He was not licking his lips over the prospect, but he was more than willing to go with it. The first time he walked into the bedroom, he saw that she had bought two identically sized beds and thrown a quilt over them to make them look like one. So, technically speaking, it wasn't one bed. And it was more than technical. It meant that someone had to go over to someone else's side. And there was a crevice in the middle. Sometimes he thought of it as a deep one that you could go plunging into, like a skier missing a jump. Latter, they would find you at the bottom, crumpled up.

She made love to him in a dutiful way, which he supposed was an advance over their old days together, when, for the most part, it was no dice. In a court of law, he would have to say she made herself "available" to him. She was "responsible" in bed, he had to give her that. Just as she was responsible in making neat floor-shellacker notations on the kitchen bulletin board. But he couldn't stir up the shiver and thrill he had felt in her flesh during the wedding dances before they got back together. There were a thousand early reasons for this--and sometimes they talked about them until they were blue in the face--but he had his own theory, and it was one he found difficult to discuss. It had to do with the instant they had met.

Long ago, when he had seen her for the first time, he hadn't been able to speak. She was so beautiful then that nothing in his mouth had worked. On the other hand, when she had gotten a load of him, her smile, which struck him as being on the perfect side, had dropped a little to the right, although she'd tried bravely to keep it even. The girlfriend who had fixed them up had led her to believe that he had another kind of face. Once again, bravely, she'd tried to go with what she saw as his "truck-driver" features, but she had clearly been hoping for someone finer looking. Like the cabaret piano player who had been her previous lover. Or would have been, if girls had had lovers in those days. That's where it began, he believed, and that's where it would end. Exhibit A: Her face stopped his heart. Exhibit B: He didn't look like a cabaret piano player. He didn't care if a massive land army of psychoanalytical giants converged on him with evidence to the contrary, he was sticking to that. It was ironic, too. She was in her 40s now, with a new set to her jaw, and if there was anything that stopped his heart, it was her courage in turning herself inside out. Coming out from behind layers of make-up and forgetting about her ankles, which she had always felt were too wide.

He did a Cosmopolitan magazine thing one night, staying out late with her and checking into a hotel with no luggage. He fed her cocaine (his idea, not Cosmopolitan's) and predictably, asking no questions, she lunged out for it and swore she was reborn. She tore at him, her body pleading, but she could go only so far with it and, at one point, she drew back, holding his cock, as though in mortgage, and asked him to say he would never use it on anyone else. As her part of the bargain, she would take care of it. He asked her if she would please give his cock back, because he didn't feel like making that kind of promise to anyone. He didn't see any need to. It was all very desperate. He wanted to be with someone he didn't have to make that kind of promise to. If and when he found that kind of person, there wouldn't be any need for promises. And it followed that he wouldn't go passing it around, either. And what if he did once in a while? How would it affect Western civilization?

From then on, he stayed on his side of the twin beds that were disguised to look like a double and never again risked breaking his bones by leaping over the crevice. What he did was switch over to running for a while. There was a track nearby, and after a few months of getting nowhere, being a tired fellow with frail arches, he got good at it. She eagerly pitched in and helped him along. A new bulletin-board notation said: "Wash Harry's sweat suit." She would do anything for him. The only thing she couldn't do was make believe he had the delicate features of a cabaret piano player.

He would waltz out of the sliced-off apartment in his sweat suit, wearing three heavy rings on his fingers that might just as well have been brass knuckles. This was in case anyone in the highly ethnic neighborhood fucked around with him. The biggest challenge was in letting young Catholic high school runners breeze past him while he kept his pace. There was another type of fellow, who would high-kick by in a snotty way, but he knew this style of runner would drop out, just as soon as he was around a bend where Towns wasn't able to see him. You couldn't run for miles with those high kicks, and distance was what Harry Towns was after. You had to keep your feet low to the ground, almost shuffling. Once, in the early evening, when it was cool, he broke five miles and for a minute or two, he felt he could run forever. His chest didn't hurt anymore. Watching him from the terrace of the sliced-off apartment, his son said he seemed to be crawling. "I'm shooting for distance," said Harry Towns, "and I'll bet you there isn't one guy in fifty my age can go that far." His son agreed with him on that one, but you could tell he wished his dad would pick up the pace a bit. It was probably embarrassing to have a father crawling around the track with young Catholic guys zipping past him. Still, Harry Towns loved the running and burst out of the building each day as if he were gasping for oxygen. That was his life: running and stews. Maybe if he kept running, he could bounce right along to the end of the line. Running; hot stews; bulletin-board notations; some writing for television, a medium that was ready to step on the gas; and out. What was so bad about that? What was bad was that he saw his life as having a giant lie buried in the middle of it, one that had to be plucked out.

One of the developments that had got him back to his family was the loss of his mother and father, back to back, his father in particular. When something like that happened, weren't you supposed to hold on to whatever you had--your son, your wife, stews? He had done that, but now another impulse took hold of him--to stop the shit. To pare himself all the way down to something clean. To get rid of everything and find out once and for all if there was anything clean to get down to. That meant saying goodbye to the doctor he wasn't comfortable with, and the insurance man he had inherited from his folks, and the ancient dentist who pinched his gums. And not writing for television, which, let's face it, was not ready to step on the gas. Most of all, it meant setting himself, almost like an Olympic athlete, a fellow from East Germany, so that he got all of his strength concentrated in his legs and his arms and could haul out the lie.

So he stopped running and told his wife to hold off on the stew one night because he wanted to talk to her in a restaurant, even though it was in the middle of the week. They picked a restaurant that he didn't consider very romantic, though she did. It went exactly the way it had at the wedding. He said, "Listen ..." and she covered his folded hands, kissed him, getting back that fragile gently tissued give to her flesh, and said, "I know." This was some girl. And boy, did he love her now. She had tiny experiential lines around her eyes; she no longer had a summer fragrance to her, and the face that had stopped his heart, but she stopped it another way. He generally switched off when someone said that mature women were like vintage wine, but he had to confess that the comparison applied here. Maybe that's why so many people used it. A favorite kind of film of theirs was one in which the perfect lovers would part at the end, sadly, but with no question that it had to be that way. One of them, usually the girl, would ask forlornly, "Why, Bill?" to which Bill would say, "Because we have to, darling." Then Bill would ship out on a freighter, leaving her standing on a dock in Hong Kong. But actually, nobody knew why. It was assumed that everyone knew, but nobody did, and that included the trio of screenwriters who had thrown together the script. Maybe the studio heads knew and were keeping it to themselves. From time to time, Harry Towns and his wife would laugh about that kind of picture, and now they were following the same story line. He couldn't put his finger precisely on the reason he was leaving, either. He was unhappy and that was enough for him.

This time, when he packed, he took all his slacks. He went through his bureaus and took along every trace of himself. For all her new perfection, she stood by and watched him pack, saying, more than once, "Are you sure you've got everything?"

Harry Towns was so anxious to get the slacks and old bandannas out of there, he almost forgot he had nowhere to take them. He quickly rented the first place an agent showed him, making sure only that it was a giant departure from the coldness and impersonality of his former steel-and-leather apartment, 33 floors above the city. He took one giant room, a kind of studio in a brownstone. It wasn't exactly a bare room, since it had two long smoked-glass mirrors to cover the charm department. It also had a loft that you climbed up to for sleeping. He was worried about crashing through to the sink below, but the landlord assured him it was built by a Greek, who guaranteed that a dozen people could do tempestuous, high-kicking dances up there and it would hold them.

Harry Towns didn't pay enough attention to the neighborhood he was in, and it turned out that there was no neighborhood. The apartment was ringed by elegant hotels with carpets out front. (continued on page 178) The Antelope Cage (continued from page 174) Government officials in the Commerce Department stayed in these hotels, and also representatives of Southwest utility companies. If there was a place where you could get a grilled-cheese sandwich, Harry Towns couldn't find it. There were a lot of models out with their dogs, and an Italian hair-styling place that featured extreme and up-to-the-minute cuts, just in from Rome. He couldn't imagine establishing a meaningful relationship with a person who had one of those cuts. From Harry Towns's new window, he could see an art gallery and the embassy of a Persian Gulf country. The landlord said the street looked just like Paris, and he had a point there. The smoked-glass mirrors and the art gallery across the street added up to a certain degree of charm. Harry Towns had to admit that. Except that there was no place to get a B.L.T. down. Or a strainer. He got his cold leather-and-steel furniture out of storage and it just fit in with the smoked-glass mirrors by an eyelash. It looked a little as if he knew what he was doing.

The first morning in the new place, he got up early and did a little heartsick running in a park next to the hotels and wound up in a zoo. It occurred to him that he could have breakfast there, except that the cafeteria wasn't open yet. So he stood opposite the antelope cage while he waited for the breakfast place to start serving. In all his years of knocking around, he had never before taken a good hard look at an antelope, and now he did. What in the hell kind of animal was that? What did they need them for? And, on top of that, he started to feel a little like one. He and the antelopes were both waiting around, kind of directionless, their futures uncertain. He might as well have gotten right in the cage and stood around with them. He had a zoo breakfast, featuring zoo Rice Krispies, zoo milk and zoo orange juice.

The next day, he still felt so barred in, so antelopelike and functionless that he decided to do something fast. Trips always helped, and so he did some quick packing and headed west, to somewhere deep inside the country where he'd never been before.

He took a plane to St. Louis, rented a car there and headed for the unfamiliar Southwest, a place that seemed to have a lot of those adventure-filled names. He drove through Tucson and Yuma and El Centro, trying to soak up the local color. Finally, he came to rest--for a couple of hours, anyway--at a natural preserve called the Salton Sea, 30 miles long, very natural and empty. It didn't smell great, but he lay down on a large flat rock and tried to fill himself with a sense of vastness. It didn't work. After a few minutes, it stopped seeming very vast at all.

Then the idea came to him that he might look up a Border Patrolman named Harmon who lived in a remote little town called Brawley. He'd known Harmon elsewhere a few years before, when he was doing some research on the Border Patrol for a script, and it occurred to him that he might say that he was down here doing some further work of the same kind.

Some years back, Harmon had made a name for himself as a famous highway patrolman. In pursuit of two young tire thieves, he'd gone sweeping off a bridge and had broken most of his bones. So they had shifted him over to the Border Patrol, where he was now famous for spotting Mexican illegals who had crossed the border and had made it as far north as Brawley. He was eagle-eyed at this, even though he was a little sleepy, and his bones were on the soft side. He could pick off Mexicans even when they wore sets of diversionary cow hooves, sold to them on he Mexican side. In two hours of bouncing around the outskirts of Brawley, with Harmon at the wheel of a jeep. Towns got to know all he wanted to about Border Patrol work. He liked the sniperscopes that had been developed in Vietnam and could pick off Mexicans in the dark, but that's all he liked about the work. Harmon tried to get him interested in the grid lines of defense the Border Patrol had set up to ensnarl the errant Mexicans, but it wasn't for Towns. When his new friend told him the patrol occasionally took in old guys, Towns let it go by. Harmon had a dutiful Mexican wife and Towns couldn't help wondering if, one moonlit night, he hadn't picked her off on a grid line wearing cow hooves and kept her for himself.

The Mexican wife served them dinner, and when she had dutifully gone off to grind something, Harmon took a few sleepy puffs on his pipe and told Towns about a girl he liked who was living in Brawley and wasn't like the other Brawley people. By the time he finished telling Towns about her, Towns knew that Harmon was in love with this girl but felt that because he was sleepy all the time and his bones were lopsided, there was no way for him to have a shot at her. He worshiped her from a distance and slipped her regular chunks of his Border Patrol salary, easily finessing these sums past his wife, thanks to the language barrier. "She doesn't have a wicked bone in her body," said Harmon, who, come to think of it, related an awful lot of his ill inking to bones. There was an exchange of glances between the two men that said Towns was allowed to meet her and, if it went that way, to fuck her, but he wasn't to hurt her in any way. If he did, Harmon would come after him, in his sleepy, soft-boned style.

The girl came over to meet Towns in his Brawley hotel and he immediately went into a nonstop recitation about the back-to-back loss of his folks, and how he had broken up his family and wasn't sure which way he was heading. He hadn't expected to tell her all that, but he got it in with one burst before she said a word. She wasn't so much listening as waiting for him to stop and, when he did, she went for him as though he were a lobster dinner and she hadn't eaten in a week. She seemed to have been waiting for someone to come into Brawley and say he had lost his folks, busted up his family and was rudderless. This was a fine stroke of luck for Harry Towns, but it was also puzzling, because, appearance-wise, she was the kind of girl he generally wrote off, right at the top, as being for other people. He tended to think that this kind of girl was out of his league. He kept saying he would get around to girls like this at some later point. After he had won some kind of outstanding-citizen's award.

She was blonde and had a slender, long-legged, playful kind of New England body. He had seen this kind of girl with other men, fellows with massive rolling banks of attractively disordered hair and Juan-les-Pins suntans. He generally spotted them leaving restaurants. Sometimes he got a defective version of this type of girl, one who was old or had a speech impediment; but until he got to Brawley, he had never had the real McCoy. That was supposed to be coming up later, except that later seemed to be now. Right there in Brawley. What did she see in him? That Harmon must have given him some introduction. She couldn't have been more than 24; and she didn't have a limp or a skin condition that was immediately discernible to the eye. She was it, a flirtatious, prime, Government-inspected, New England-finishing-school, horse-jumping, delicious-smelling, blue-eyed, absolutely A-number-one specimen of blondeness who, to cap it all off, delivered the goods. Ten minutes after they met, she was sucking him off, using inventive little finishing-school tricks, as if she were terrified of missing the mark and being dismissed with a bored wave of Harry Towns's hand. Maybe Brawley had something to do with it. All they had there were Harmon and fellows who worked for feed companies. Not too many screenwriters passed through Brawley, even depressed rudderless ones.

He tried his best to settle in and enjoy her, but the missing pieces kept nagging him. He had told her straight out the way he was, not feeding her pâté, caviar, cold white wine and shoving cocaine in her nose, his usual style. Instead, he came right out and gave her rudderless. Maybe that's what it was. Maybe if he did that more often, he could be one of the fellows seen leaving restaurants with this type of girl. Her lovemaking had a stop-and-start style to it. Each time they finished one section, she would sit up with her back arched, put her fingers to her lips as if she were a secretary who had forgotten an important memo, then shrug it off and return for the next section. He liked those pert secretarial pauses, particularly after he mastered the rhythm of them. He could not imagine ever getting tired of them.

That first night, he walked her back from the hotel to her small ranch house, which was hair-raisingly neat, and found another missing piece, except that it was a terrific one. She had a little girl who was a direct replica of herself, with a soft and Continental overlay that gave the New England style some seasoning. "She's awful," said her mother, as she hopped right up on Harry Towns's lap. "She goes around all day with no pants." As if Harry Towns had to be told that. He knew that the second she hopped up there, even though he wasn't used to little girls. He did freight-train imitations and coin tricks, quickly exhausting his repertoire, but she stayed on his there for a few weeks if her mother hadn't pried her off. The Continental leavening came from her father, a product of Rio nobility, who had sworn he was coming to get her, using bribes and guns, if necessary. For about a week, Harry Towns forgot all about his past and his roots and got right into the middle of this situation, seeing himself as a fellow whose obligation it was to stand between the two females and the south-of-the-border nobleman who had beaten them both up, causing them to flee Rio and hide in Brawley. That father was banned from the States for poor moral character; but if he ever bribed his way ashore and made his way inland, tracking his old family down, Harry Towns felt confident he would know how to deal with him. In the event that he brought along Rio guns, there was always Harmon to help out. He sympathized with the Latin for wanting to have his daughter back, but there was no excuse for his slamming the two of them around. Harry Towns gave his new friend $700 as a step toward putting some legal distance between herself and the Rio man. She protested an awful lot about accepting the money, but he got her to take it anyway. He was never in any doubt that she would. And it was money he needed.

The yellow-haired New England girl was a bit like a high-keyed filly; each night he stroked her and made love to her, often just to calm her down. They made love on a rug in front of a fireplace, even though it was much too hot for that in Brawley. It was because she was romantically inclined that she felt she had to bring the fireplace into play. After one of her secretarial pauses, instead of plunging on to the next lovemaking sequence, she jumped up and decided they all ought to sweep off to Bali. Only she wasn't kidding. Before the Rio nobleman had developed a poor moral character and started smacking her in the head, they used to do things like that--sweep off to Bali or Villefranche. The whole fun of it was to do it on impulse. Harry Towns was charmed by her jumping up and down naked, saying, "Let's do it, let's do it," but he wasn't one of those people. He was more deliberate.

She made the suggestion that they both refer to his cock as Pepe, and that's another move he didn't much care for. "It's just part of my body," he said. "There's no need to give it a name." He really disappointed her on that one; she made many efforts to get the name to stick, which he fended off. Greeting him at the door, she would ask, "How's Pepe today?" To which he would say, "Look, I'm willing to go with you on a lot of things, but I'm just not buying Pepe." He would have bet anything that the Rio man went in for that. That's probably where the idea originated. The Rio man probably wouldn't dream of going around the corner unless he had at least three names festooned on his dick.

After a few weeks in Brawley, he started to get a little lonely, even though he wasn't sure what he was lonely for. He missed his son, but he knew the boy was all right, so he didn't miss him that much. Did he miss his new apartment, the one that was in the middle of regally carpeted hotels? How could he miss his mother and father back East, when they were underground? Did he miss his father's pocket watch and the picture of both his folks? Maybe it was Brawley that was getting to him, a place that was built for driving through but definitely not for staying in.

Each little wave of loneliness got the girl more keyed up; she had terrifically keen antennae for loneliness. Whenever a wave of it broke against Harry Towns, she popped her fragrant little daughter onto his lap and the child clung to Harry Towns's neck. One night, when he was lying in the blonde girl's bed, she slipped her sleeping little daughter under the covers with him and said she was going out to get some fried chicken breasts. They were a favorite of his and they weren't bad in Brawley. While she was gone, Harry Towns hugged the little girl, who was sucking her thumb, and gave her quite a few licks between her legs. It was only later that he considered the possible consequences, that instantly upon hitting her teens, she would take on the entire male and female population of St.-Tropez, including dogs and pet ocelots, in pursuit of those mysterious comatose primal licks. Still, at the moment, it would have taken a squadron of highly motivated commandos to hold him back. She pressed herself toward him and seemed to keep on sleeping. After he had done this, he knew he would have no need ever to do it again. He wasn't going to be one of those fellows who get rounded up every time there is a local sex crime. The experience just wasn't apocalyptic. But he had to work it in once and get it out of the way.

When her mother came back with the fried chicken breasts, Harry Towns said, "All I did was hug her." The mother's smile had a mischievous wrinkle to it as she scooped up the little girl and slipped her back into her own bed.

"I'll just bet," she said. At the moment, he felt the Rio nobleman ought to be greeted at the docks with a brass band and Harry Towns shipped out of the country. But he also saw that he had been set up. It would have been different if he had tiptoed over to the girl's cot in the dead of night and leaned in for some furtive licks. But her own mother had slipped her in there with him. She could only have been giving Harry Towns a sneak preview of what it could be like if he stayed with the two of them. As the mother declined, which had to be quite a way off, her daughter would be ripening in the sun, blonde, fragrant, Continentally seasoned, ready to go on stage in her mother's place.

One night, a wave of sadness, bigger and more serious than the ones before, washed over Harry Towns. He tried to tell the woman about it, but all she could say was "Yes, you're depressed." Insightful therapy wasn't her long suit. So, to emphasize that things weren't proceeding very well, Towns suddenly drove his fist through the mantelpiece. It was made of thin plywood and the only damage was skinned knuckles, but the violence of the gesture itself brought on a genuine rage in him--a rage that didn't subside until his plane touched down at La Guardia.

• • •

In the following weeks, for lack of any better plan, he reverted to his old style, getting involved with a black, thickly gummed, new form of cocaine and a nest of girls who went in and out of drug rehabilitation centers. Each one was in her early 20s, going on 45, but temporarily pretty. He had to wait for them to sign out on passes in order to get at them. At least they weren't Pepe girls. He developed a small lesion on his penis, which he let slide; shortly thereafter, two of the girls phoned in and reported raging brush-fire infections in their bodily orifices. A friend of his, who ran into one, said, "What did you do to Holly? She looks as if she spent two years in the Mekong Delta." They had a chuckle about this, although when Harry Towns walked off, he thought to himself that he must be some son of a bitch for doing that to Holly.

Going back into cocaine, especially black-gummed coke, after a long time away, was like diving into a pool without checking the water level. Harry Towns cracked his head on the bottom. One night, in his loft with a freshly healed rehabillitation girl, he went into a deep coma, which was oddly pleasant until he realized he was not going to have and easy time climbing out of it. The drug-center girl brought him a great soup bowl of coffee, which helped Harry Towns get to his feet and over to the new doctor he has switched to. This man took care of people in the communications field and had once, reportedly, smacked a Secretary of State and gotten away with it. Towns liked knowing that about him. The new man said Towns had an illness of the blood that would keep him exhausted for months.

Once again, illness had come to his rescue. It always pinned him by the shoulders and forced him to give himself a once-over. The doctor told Harry Towns that this was the kind of illness it was best to ignore. Just hang in there, don't do anything preposterous and eventually it would peter out. It was a little hard to ignore. Following those instructions would be like living in a tiny apartment with an Irish wolfhound and pretending it wasn't there. But Harry Towns set out to ignore his illness as aggressively as possible.

At the same time, the illness was a wonderful protection against his old style and he worked it for it was worth. The cocaine, for instance, fell into some sort of perspective for him. Though he wouldn't sign an affidavit on the point--the coke was a terribly alluring force still--he felt that he'd put the habit behind him. No doctor had so much as hinted at this, but somehow he connected it with his illness. If someone were to drop by with a fistful. Harry would be hard-pressed not to take a little taste. He had to admit that. But he would not be hunting it down any longer.

He fixed up his apartment. He did not stock it with priceless art treasures of the world, but he made sure that everything he picked out was something he liked. If he saw that a napkin holder was not going to give him any pleasure, he kept hunting for one that would. He threw out his smoked-glass mirrors. In some wild and circuitous turn of logic that had once made sense to him, he had felt they would be an aid in getting stewardeases to whip off their clothes. A friend had once described his old apartment as looking like an airport lounge, Maybe that was the connection. He bought some plants and took terrific care of them, pleased when they didn't die right off and loving it each time a new little shoot appeared. Once in a while, he would stand back and take a look at his apartment and wonder if it threw of the impression that an interesting fellow lived in it. He thought it probably did, but he couldn't tell for sure. He bought things like Swiss cheese and noodle soup and Crisco, and even weighed in one day with a head of lettuce. Each and every item was nonseductive. And all this made him feel less rudderless.

Before he got too ambitious, he had to get his health back. He was not about to recommend it to friends, but he had come up with a remarkable illness and had to admire its ingenious turns. Between spells of weakness, he would suddenly be filled with great foaming cascades of energy, during which times he would construct myths, fables, encyclopedic films and novels--what seemed at the time to be ground-breaking theories of time and existence. He took a few notes and some held up. He took a glance at them when he got weak again. During the wild periods, it would frustrate him that there weren't typewriters that could keep pace with his output, that a hundred people weren't at his disposal to dispatch his work to the outside world, that he didn't have 20 lives in which to get all of it done. He was no judge, of course, but he didn't feel deranged. He just had all this energy and his mind kept swirling. These bursts took a physical turn, too. One day he snapped a handgrip together 175 times, besting his old record of 90. Once he ran seven non-stop miles, the full circumference of the nearby park.

And then he would get weak again, Propping himself up on a pillowed couch, his arms hanging limp, fingers touching the carpeting. Normally, Harry Towns ignored his internal machinery and simply pushed on. Now he wondered for the frist time in his life about the source of his strength, such as it was. Doctors had recently been quoted in the Times in a table that allotted points to a person for each of life's personal disasters. Loss of a spouse was worth 100, a physical illness 53, a job gone up in smoke 47. And so on. Adding up his own setbacks over the past year, Harry Towns--with dead folks, bones gone soft, a shattered family and massive financial. setbacks--almost broke the bank at 299. According to the table, it was a safe prediction that he would currently, be found strait-jacketed at Matteawan, staring blankly at the walls. Yet here he was, at one moment foaming with energy, at another surprised and a little impatient at being slightly depressed and a bit scattered. One night, a producer, renowned for forcing a long list of filmworkers into nervous and said he would see to it that he never worked again. Gripping a restaurant table with one hand and feeling the heat of his own eyes as they burned into the other man's, he said, "Don't threaten me." To Towns's surprise, the producer, toupee slipping over one ear, said, "All right, but when I say this next thing, please don't yell at me." Where did Harry Towns come up with this strength? Short years back, in the only job he had ever held, he had gone into paroxysms of fear whenever the boss's secretary phoned and said, "Mr. Baldwin wants to see you."

How come he had suddenly come up with all this meat on his bones? Had he borrowed some of it from his dead parents' flesh? That was certainly an unattractive way to put it. But wasn't it possible he had now taken into himself some of his mother's brashness and ferocity, his father's ability in turmoil, to bend, like Japanese trees, and not crack in half? Until the hurricane died down. Some of Harry Towns's own material had been sprinkled in and, who knows--if each man was more than the product of what filtered through him in a lifetime, then perhaps ancient legend, myth and wisdom ran through his genes, too. If this were true, didn't his composition make Harry Towns a paste-up man, ready to fall a party if someone struck exactly the right chord, tapped him along one of his seams? He preferred to think of himself as some kind of strong, functioning mutation of a man. Could you get along if you were one of those? Have a few laughs? His guess was that you could.

The girl in Brawley had given him an animalskin bracelet and made him swear he would never take it off. He'd worn it dutifully after that and, in time, he'd forgotten it was there. Then one day, many months later, she suddenly telephoned to say that she was passing through town and to ask if she could drop by. Towns said. yes, of course, and hung up.

Just at that moment, the leather parted and the bracelet fell from his wrist. The odds against it must have been about a billion to one--was it a sign? In days past, Harry Towns had always walked away from anybody who talked about signs or omens. Now he left the apartment and was careful to stay away for a full hour, until he could be sure that the girl had come, found no answer to her ring and departed.

For all his new fragments of insight, he still flailed around and sought ways in which he could be hurt. They were fewer than ever before and most of them were old and covered with scar tissue. There was his son, of course, and the second he thought of the boy, he knew they had him. One day, during one of the weak times, he suddenly started to cry about losing his boy. When Harry Towns was young, he remembered crying a lot, being ashamed of it and wondering if he were ever going to get past bursting into tears at the drop of a hat. He was positive the was on older crier than any boy on the East Coast. He remembered stopping just before he left for college--as he saw it, just in the nick of time. Now he was back at it again. In his 40s. Was he going to keep crying all the way through? Until they carted him off? It was a possibility.

At the moment, the tears related exclusively to his boy. If he could just see to it that nothing happened to him. On his own behalf, there wasn't much he could do about holding off major convulsions such as blindness and impotence. And of course, if he came up with cancer, his goose was cooked. But he made a promise to himself to work on a fall-back position, even if he wound up with one of those.

Both his mother and his father had died with enormous grace and lack of selfishness--never mind raging against the night--and don't think that didn't give Harry Towns an advantage. He would take that against any inheritance you could dream up. Which is not to say he had it made. That the world was going to be his oyster.

One night he bought a supermarket ready-roasted chicken and, in the course of eating it, plucked out the wishbone. It was the first time he had ever found himself holding both ends. This gave him a heady, uncertain feeling, but there was some pleasure to it and only the tiniest wisp of loneliness. It would be fun having someone on the other end--who could argue forcefully against that?--but there were pluses in having both ends for himself. All bracelet coincidences to the contrary. Harry Towns remained a man who wouldn't touch a symbol with a ten-foot pole. But how was he going to let this one go by?

He had no idea how he was going to fare, although he was first on line in the curiosity department when it came to finding out. He sensed he ought to do the following things: go to Sofia, or places like it (with modest expectations); keep an eye out for a sweet and easygoing girl (what did he have to lose?); try like hell not to get hit with a brick. Treat each human being he came across with generosity--until such time as he found reason not to. That last one was vital to Harry Towns. And it didn't mean falling all over people, either.

He felt that if he made a strong effort to do each of these things, he had a chance of coming out all right. In Vegas terms, he was even tempted to give himself a slight edge.