The Broken Bubble Read online

  Blood for his veins, he thought, putting her letter where he could refer to it. Something to show the advertisers. On went the struggle…five years of work, keeping up the pretense that this was his interest in life. He was devoting himself to this, to his music and programs. His cause.

  From the doorway, Pat said, “You going to play the Fantastic Symphony tonight?”

  “I thought so.”

  She entered the room and seated herself across from him, in the comfortable armchair. Light flashed, a spark of yellow, as she lit a cigarette with her lighter. A present from him, given three years ago. Her legs rustled as she crossed them, smoothed her skirt. At one time she had been his wife. A few trivialities still connected them; the Berlioz symphony was one. An old favorite, and when he heard it, the whole background swam up: smells, tastes, and the rustle, as now, of her skirt. She liked long heavy colorful skirts and wide belts and the kind of sleeveless blouse that reminded him of the chemises of the girls on the covers of historical novels. Her hair, too, was that flowing uncombed mass, dark, soft, and always amiably in her way. Actually she was not large; she weighed exactly 111 pounds. Her bones were small. Hollow, she had once informed him. Like a flying squirrel’s. There had been a number of such similes tying them together; when he remembered, he was vaguely embarrassed.

  Their tastes did not basically differ, and it was not on that account that the marriage had collapsed. The inside story he kept to himself, hoping that she had done the same; as office gossip it would have yielded indefinite harvest. They had wanted kids, right away and plenty of them, and when no kids appeared they had consulted specialists and discovered—lo!—that he, of the two of them, was sterile. But that had not been as bad as the next part, which involved Pat’s desire to locate what was ingenuously called a donor. The bickering over that had split them up. In all seriousness—but with overtones of self-contempt and rage—he had suggested that she get herself a lover; an affair, with emotional involvement, had seemed more acceptable to him than the science fiction device of artificial insemination. Or, he had suggested, why not simple adoption? But the donor idea intrigued her. His theory—and it had not gone over well with Pat—was that she yearned for parthenogenesis. And so they had gradually lost any real understanding of each other.

  Now, glancing up at her, he saw this attractive woman (she was still not over twenty-seven or twenty-eight) and made out, as easily as ever, the qualities that had excited him in the first place. She had a genuine feminineness about her, not merely a daintiness, or a diminutiveness, or even a gracefulness; those were present, but in addition he recognized in her a basically active spirit.

  Across from him, Pat said in a low voice, “Do you know what this Looney Luke business means? It means the end of our classical music. He’ll want Okie music, steel guitars, Roy Acuff. You’ll be squeezed out. The old ladies won’t listen…the restaurants won’t keep on with us. And you—”

  “I know,” he said.

  “And you’re not going to do anything?”

  “I did what I could,” he said. “I made my gesture.”

  She arose and put out her cigarette. “The phone,” she said.

  In a sweep, a flow of color, she passed him. The brightness of her blouse brushed by. Buttons, too, at the center.

  How odd, he thought. Once, with his love for her, he had been on the proper track, a good husband. Now, if the idea came to him, it was a sin, and the act itself was unthinkable. Time and intimacy, the incongruity of life. He watched her go, feeling lonely, feeling that perhaps he did not have the answers even yet. The principle of expectation…in him yet was this model, this standard of judgment. They had been divorced for two years, and in that time he had not seen anyone who could equal her.

  I hang around her, he thought. I still have to be somewhere nearby.

  Returning to his records and letters, he prepared notes for his dinner music program.

  2

  At five in the afternoon his program of popular music and talk for teenagers ended. Usually he went across the street and ate dinner in a booth in the back of the café, with his script beside him, his notes and ideas for the dinner music program.

  On this July afternoon, as he finished ‘Club 17,’ he noticed before the glass window of the studio a group of teenage kids standing peering at him. Lifting his hand, he made a motion of recognition. The kids had been in before. The boy with glasses, wearing a sweater and brown pants and carrying a binder and school books, was Ferde Heinke, president of a science fiction fan club called The Beings from Earth. Next to him stood Joe Mantila, very dark and squat, like a troll. Joe’s shiny black hair oozed oil down his cheeks and neck, down his bumpy flesh to the cultivated fur of his mustache. Beside Joe was Art Emmanual, wearing a white cotton shirt and jeans; he was a good-looking blond kid, with a sturdy face, blue eyes, and great laborer’s arms. The first two were still in school, at Galileo High, and Art Emmanual, a year older, was out of school and apprenticed—he had told Jim—to a printer, an old man named Mr. Larsen, who had a shop on Eddy Street and who did wedding announcements and business cards and, occasionally, tracts for fundamentalist Negro religious sects. He was a bright, fast-voiced kid who, when excited, talked with a stammer. Jim liked all three of them. Now, as he left the studio and walked toward them, he thought how important this was to him, this contact with the kids.

  “H-h-hey,” Art said, “that was a cool show, you know?”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  The three kids shuffled shyly. “We gotta go,” Joe Mantila said. “We gotta get home.”

  “How about playing not so much of that sentimental big-band stuff?” Ferde said. “More combo, maybe.”

  “You coming?” Joe Mantila said to him. “I’ll drive you.”

  Two of them, Ferde and Joe, went off. Art remained. He seemed unusually keyed-up; he stood first on one foot and then the other. “R-r-remember that time,” he said, “wh-wh-when you let us sit in the control r-r-room when you were doing the show?” His face lit up. “That was cool.”

  Jim said, “I’m going across the street and eat. You want to come along and have a cup of coffee with me?” Sometimes kids trailed along with him, asking him questions about radio and music, this and that. He enjoyed their company at dinner; they kept him from feeling lonely.

  Glancing around, Art said, “My wife’s with me; she wants to meet you. She always listens to your show.”

  “Your what?”

  “My wife,” Art said.

  “I didn’t know you had a wife,” Jim said. It had never occurred to him that this eighteen-year-old boy, just out of high school, earning fifty dollars a month, might be married; he had taken it for granted that Art lived with his family in an upstairs room with model airplanes and school pennants stuck up on the walls. “Sure,” he said, “I’d like to meet her.”

  Art’s wife was in the station’s carpeted lounge.

  “This is my w-w-wife,” Art said, blushing and, with his hand, touching the girl on the shoulder.

  The girl wore a maternity dress. Except at her waist, she was exceptionally thin. Her hair was clipped short, ragged. She wore neither makeup nor stockings. On her feet were flat slippers. She drooped as she waited, and her, face was expressionless. She had a narrow, somewhat small nose. Her eyes were striking. The pupils were quite dark, and she gazed in an absorbed, preoccupied way, seeing off into space. She was a rather undernourished-looking girl, but he could not get over her eyes; they certainly were majestic.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Her name is R-r-rachael,” Art said.

  The girl was still staring down at the floor. On her forehead was a frown. Then she glanced up at him solemnly. She reminded him of Patricia. Both of them were small-boned. Both had an unkempt animal-like toughness. Of course, he realized, this girl was no more than seventeen.

  Art said, “R-r-rachael here listens to your show all the time; she’s home in the afternoon after she works, fixing dinner. She wanted to come up
and meet you.”

  To the girl Jim said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Across the street with me while I eat dinner. It’s on me.”

  After a glance at each other, they followed. Neither of them had much to say; they were docile but withdrawn, as if a part of their minds was uncommitted.

  In the booth, he faced them across his plate of veal chops, his coffee cup, his salad and silverware. Neither Art nor Rachael wanted any thing; they sat close together with their hands out of sight. The café was noisy and active; the counter was jammed with diners, and all the booths were filled.

  “When’s the baby due?” he asked Rachael.

  “In January.”

  “You have room?” he asked. “You’ve got a place for it?”

  “We have this apartment out on Fillmore,” Rachael said. “Down in the basement.”

  “How many bedrooms?”

  “One,” she said. “And a kitchen and living room.”

  “How long have you been married?” he asked her.

  “Since April 14,” Rachael said. “We got married up in Santa Rosa…we sort of ran off. You know? I was still in high school, and they didn’t think we should get marred. We told the license woman we were older. I said I was eighteen, and I wrote a note—I said he’s twenty-one.” She smiled.

  Art said, “She signed the note with my mother’s name.”

  “We used to get out of school that way,” Rachael said. “And then we’d walk around town or just sit in the Park. Golden Gate Park. My handwriting looks good.” She put her hands on the table, and he was conscious of the long, bony, fingers; mature fingers, he thought. Grownup hands.

  “A-a-and,” Art said, “the sheriff, he was the best man.”

  “He even had a gun on,” Rachael said. “I sort of thought maybe he might do something to us. Take us back. Afterward he came over and shook hands with Art.”

  “A-a-and the judge said—”

  “If we didn’t have five dollars to pay him,” Rachael said, “we didn’t have to. But we did. We hitchhiked up. We stayed there that night with a girl I knew, at her house. We told her family we were camping or something. I don’t remember. And then we came back here.”

  “What happened when they caught up with you?”

  “Oh, they threatened us with a lot of different things.”

  “They said they’d put me in j-j-jail,” Art said.

  Rachael said, “I told them I was going to have a baby. I wasn’t then. So they let us alone.” She was pensive a moment, and then she said, “One night we were walking home; we were walking back from a show. And a police car stopped us and made Art stand up against the wall. And they asked us a lot of questions. And they pushed him around.”

  “There’s the curfew,” Art said. “We were out after the curfew.”

  For some reason it had never occurred to him that there was a curfew for kids. “You mean they can pick you up if you’re on the street at night?”

  “Any kids,” Art said. He and his wife nodded somberly.

  “And they didn’t believe we were married,” Rachael said. “We had to go with them in the police car to our place, and show them the license. And while they were inside, in the apartment, they looked all around; you know? They sort of poked into things. I don’t know what they were looking for, just looking I guess.”

  “Well, what did they say?”

  “Nothing. They just asked us questions.”

  “Th-th-they asked what I did for a living,” Art said.

  “I’ll, be darned,” he said. It was macabre.

  “There’s a lot of places we can’t go,” Rachael said. “I mean, even though we’re married. They think we’re going to bust something or steal something. Because we’re kids. Like one time we went into this restaurant, when we were just married. I got my job, this job with the airline I have. I figure out how much tickets cost.”

  “She’s real good at math,” Art said.

  “And we wanted to go out and have a good time. Go to dinner and everything. And they asked us to leave. That was at this real nice-looking restaurant.”

  “We didn’t have the right clothes,” Art said.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t think that was it.”

  “If we’d had the right clothes, they wouldn’t have thrown us out—” He nodded vigorously.

  “No, it was because we were kids.”

  Jim Briskin said, “Didn’t anybody do anything? Protest or anything?”

  “When the police car stopped us that night,” Rachael said, “a bunch of people—they were coming out of bars, I guess—stood around and watched. There was these old women, these fat old women in ratty-looking furs. They were yelling something at us. I didn’t hear what it was.”

  “And,” Art said, “they’re always telling us what to do. Like Mr. Larsen, this old guy I work for, this printer; he’s always got some sort of a-a-advice. Like one day he said to me, d-d-don’t never give any credit to Negroes. He really hates Negroes. And he does business with them all the time. But he doesn’t give them any credit; they have to pay cash.”

  Rachael said, “I used to know this Negro boy, and my mother and father almost went: crazy; the were afraid I might—you know—start going around with him.”

  “Delinquents,” Jim Briskin said, following her account and finding in it no humor, whether in her attitude or in the account itself.

  Art said, “That’s what one of those old dames was yelling. Delinquents. I heard what she said.”

  Rachael looked up at him. “Is that what they were saying? I couldn’t hear. So much was happening.”

  “It seems as if there ought to be something you can do,” Jim said. “Curfews for kids…they could extend that to men in their twenties or whatever they wanted. Why not forty-year-old men with red hair?” Anybody, he thought. Whatever they wanted.

  Now, he thought, he was saying ‘they.’ He was thinking as Art and Rachel were thinking: in terms of the unyielding ‘they.’ But to him the ‘they’ would not be adults; they would be—what? He pondered, drawn into this in spite of himself. Looney Luke, perhaps. Or Ted Haynes. Or, for that matter, anyone and everyone.

  But nobody was keeping him out of restaurants. Nobody had halted him at night and shoved him against a wall. So it was in his mind; it was not real. For these kids it was real enough. Civil rights, he thought. The good people talk about civil rights, the protection of minority groups. And then they passed a curfew.

  “No children and dogs,” he said.

  “What?” Art said. “Oh yeah, r-r-restaurants.”

  He had not expected either of them to understand. But they had. The sign in the restaurant windows in the South: no niggers or dogs. But here it was not Negroes. Not exclusively, anyhow.

  Art said, “H-h-hey, how’d you get to be a disc jock?”

  “It must make you feel strange,” Rachael said, “to know when you say something everybody’s listening. I mean, anything you say, like you always say to drive carefully. It’s not as if you were just talking to one person.”

  “It’s a living,” he said.

  “Don’t you enjoy it?” The girl’s eyes, the immense dark eyes, fixed themselves on him. “It must be very strange. I mean, you must feel funny.”

  She did not seem able to make herself any clearer than that. Both of them were agitated, trying to put something across to him; the tension reached him but not the meaning.

  “No,” he said, “you get used to it. You mean if I fluff a line or something? Get a word backwards?”

  Rachael shook her head. “No,” she said, and she seemed then to drop into a mood; she no longer was trying to talk to him.

  Art said, “We better get going. We have to get home.”

  “Excuse me,” Rachael said. She slid to the edge of the seat and stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

  As she went off among the patrons, Jim and Art watched her. />
  Jim said, “I never realized you were married.”

  “Just for three months.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  “Y-y-yeah,” Art said, scratching with his nail at the table.

  “How’d you meet her?”

  “Bowling. We used to bowl. I mean, I knew her in school. And then we were in this bowling alley, me and Joe Mantila, you know? A-a-and I saw her and I recognized her.”

  Rachel returned. She carried a small white paper bag, which she placed in front of Jim. “For you.”

  Opening the bag, he found she had bought him a roll, a sweet Danish pastry roll.

  “She likes to do that,” Art said, standing up beside his wife. He put his arm around her. “She buys people stuff.”

  Rachael said, “Would you like to come over sometime and have dinner with us? Maybe some Sunday. We don’t know an awful lot of people.”

  “Sure,” he said, also getting up. Automatically he began closing up the white paper bag. Nobody had given him a roll before. He did not know how to react. He was deeply distressed, and he wondered what he could do for them. He grasped the fact that he owed them something.

  Pushing back his sleeve to uncover his watch, he said, “You have a car to get home in? Maybe I could—”

  “We’re not going home,” Rachael said. “We thought maybe we’d go to a show.”

  “Thanks,” Art said.

  “Maybe some other time,” he said. Casting about for something more to offer them, he said, “How would that be?”

  “Okay,” Art said.

  Rachael said, “I’m very glad to have met you.” It was a formal little set of words, but she gave the words an energetic push; she twisted them and squeezed them and put them forward in a carefully worked fashion. And then she said, “Did you really mean that, about coming by sometime?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. And he did.

  He watched the two of them go out of the café. Art walked ahead, leading her, holding on to her hand. Her movement was slow. The weight, he thought. Already she was beginning to bulge; the dress lifted out before her, and she walked with her head down, as if she were meditating. At the sidewalk they halted. They did not give the impression of going anywhere in particular, and he had a vision, an image of them wandering along the sidewalk, not noticing anybody, not aware of where they were, drifting on and on until they became tired and went home.