The Broken Bubble Read online

  His meal was cold, and he did not feel much like finishing. He paid his check and walked outside, across Geary Street, and back to the station. The impression of Art and Rachael persisted, and he stopped in the front office, marking time before he returned to his job. Over the past years it had been his custom to bring his preoccupations to Pat; he now approached her desk. But all the small objects on her desk were away in the drawers. Her desk was neat and barren. Pat had left the station and gone home.

  Was it that late? he wondered.

  Going into one of the back rooms, he spread out his records. He continued putting them in order for the evening program. With the records was the Looney Luke copy, and clipped to the copy were sixteen-inch transcription discs which the Looney Luke people had sent over. The discs were canned commercials. He put one of them on a turntable and started the first band playing.

  The speaker beneath the turntable said, “Ho-ho-ho-ha-ha-ha-ha-whee-hee-hee-ho-ho-ho-haw-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w!”

  Jim put his hands to his ears.

  “Yes sir, friends,” the speaker declared, “I’m telling you one and all to come down to Looney Luke’s, where you’ll get yourself not only one square deal like you never heard of before, but, my friends, you’ll be getting yourself a real all-around clean car you can take out on the highway, friends, and you can drive that car, my friends, all the way to Chi-cawgo…”

  In his mind he saw the Kansas City announcer with his wide empty smile, the witless smile with its hanging chin and loose lips. The tone of sincerity…faith in the overblown nonsense, in the rotgut. The giggling, vacant, fun-house face that drooled and believed, drooled and believed. He reached to lift the tone arm from the disc.

  “Ha-ha-ha, folks,” the speaker blubbered, “yes, that’s right, ha-ha, Looney Luke’ll take that old ho-ho in and give you hee-hee on the line, ha-ha!”

  Ha-ha, he thought, stopping the disc. His fingers slipped, and the tone arm swept across the soft plastic surface; the diamond stylus cut a path from the outer rim to the label. Now he had done it. The disc was ruined. Occupational hazard, he thought, listening to the fierce racket as the stylus scored and rescored the label. The label disintegrated and bits of it shredded away and were tossed at him, white particles that were flung out in all directions.

  3

  That night Bob Posin celebrated the Looney Luke account by giving away a valuable phonograph record from the record library of station KOIF. He had it at home, at his apartment.

  “I’ll be happy to pay you ten bucks for it,” Tony Vacuhhi said, comparing the number on the record label with the slip of paper he had brought with him. “I mean, you know it isn’t for me anyhow; what would I want with classical stuff like this? It’s for a client. So I’m just going to sell it anyhow; I mean, that isn’t right.”

  Tony, an agent, solicitor, man about town, wore a respectable pinstripe suit; the night hours were his business hours. His hair was greased back and combed in place. His chin was blue with talcum powder, and the glint of his chitinlike eyes had faded and mellowed at this fine acquisition.

  Bob Posin said, “It didn’t cost me anything. Take it.” He put the record in a sleeve and then into a bag. The record was dusty and worn; it was played every week or so on the Italian-language program Sunday night. The record was Gigli’s ‘Che Gelida Manina,’ an ancient Victor pressing.

  “Just so it’s the right one,” Vacuhhi said.

  “It’s the right one.” He was in a good humor. “How’s Thisbe?”

  “Now there’s a girl,” Tony said.

  Bob Posin was tempted to expand his celebration to include Thisbe. “Is she doing anything tonight, to your knowledge?”

  “Well, she’s down at the Peachbowl, singing. You want to drop down? We could drop by. But I got business; I’ll have to let you off. I mean, I can’t stick around.”

  “Wait’ll I change my shirt.” He took off his shirt and got a clean one from the dresser drawer, a brand-new pink shirt that he had never worn. This was a special occasion.

  While he was changing, he turned on the Magnavox combination in the living room. Symphonic music came from the twin speakers; the dinner music program was in progress.

  Tony Vacuhhi, reading a magazine he had picked up from the coffee table, said, “You know Thisbe cut a couple of records for Sundial; that outfit over on Columbus. Snappy tunes but nothing right out that might start trouble, if you get my point. How about if I bring them around, you maybe using them on that disc jockey show?”

  “Ask Briskin,” he said, fixing his tie.

  “Maybe she could personally appear,” Tony Vacuhhi said. “You ever do things like that? Where she ought to be is on television. Boy, that’s no lie, you know?”

  “That’s where we all ought to be,” Posin said energetically. “That’s where the money’s going; if you wonder why people aren’t sitting in bars listening to song stylists, It’s the same thing as we’ve up against with an independent AM radio station. What do people do? They turn on ‘I Love Lucy,’ the mass morons. Sometimes eighty million people at once watch that kind of escapist trash. I wouldn’t have a TV set around.”

  The music from the radio ended. Jim Briskin’s professional announcer’s voice took its place. “The Romeo and Juliet Overture, played by Edward van Beinum and the London Philharmonic.” For an interval the radio was silent.

  “I know what you mean,” Tony Vacuhhi said. “All them people at once—”

  “Shut up a second,” Posin said, smoothing his hair.

  Now, from the radio, Jim Briskin’s voice continued, “The car you buy today from Looney Luke will be a clean car. And it will stay clean.”

  Good, Bob Posin thought. He’s doing it good.

  “Looney Luke guarantees it,” Briskin went on, in a firm, clipped voice, a spirited delivery. “Clean! Clean! Clean!” he said. And then, in a reflective voice, he said, “No, I can’t give this. I gave it during the afternoon, and that’s enough.” As if he was speaking to himself.

  He said, “And now we’ll hear Richard Strauss’s tone poem Till Eulenspiegel.”

  Tony Vacuhhi laughed nervously. “That’s funny.”

  Symphonic music began again. Posin felt the back of his head heat by degrees until it was scorching red. He felt as if his scalp was shriveling under waves of blasting intensity. And all the time he went on fixing his tie, smoothing his hair. He could not believe it.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “What did he say—did he say he wasn’t going to give it?”

  “I don’t know,” Vacuhhi said uneasily, sensing that something was wrong.

  “Of course you know; you heard it, didn’t you? What did you hear him say? Did he say he wasn’t going to give it, isn’t that what he said?”

  “Something like that,” Vacuhhi muttered.

  Posin put on his coat. “I have to go.”

  “You don’t want to go over to the Peachbowl and—”

  “No, I don’t want to go over to the Peachbowl.” He pushed Tony Vacuhhi and his record out of the apartment and slammed the door. “How do you like that?” he said. As the two of them went down the hall, Tony several steps behind, he repeated, “How do you like that? What do you think of a thing like that?”

  At the sidewalk he left Tony Vacuhhi and began walking aimlessly. “I can’t believe it,” he said to himself. “What do you think of a thing like that? Can a man openly do a thing like that?”

  To his right was a drugstore. He entered the public phone booth in the rear and dialed the station. Naturally there was no answer. At night the announcer was alone; he worked the board himself, without an engineer. It was hopeless trying to get Briskin at night.

  He thought of getting his car from the garage under the apartment building and driving to the station. Leaving the drugstore, he started back up the sidewalk.

  A small grocery store was open. Inside, a radio played. The owner and his wife were at the counter listening to Marimba music. Bob Posin stopped at the doorway and yell
ed, “Hey, can I get something on your radio? I have to hear something; It’s important.”

  The owner and his wife, old people, stared at him.

  “This is an emergency,” he said, going inside, past the sausages and bins of peas, to the counter. The radio was a tiny wooden Emerson with a trailing antenna. He rotated the knob until he had found KOIF. The owner and his wife, both of them dressed in wool coats, withdrew in an injured fashion, leaving him alone with the radio. They pretended to be doing something else. They did not care what he did.

  Still music, he thought. The goddamn music.

  “Thanks,” he said, hurrying past them, out of the grocery store, and onto the sidewalk. Then he ran back to his own apartment. Panting, he reached his floor and searched in his pockets for his key.

  His Magnavox remained on. He paced back and forth as the music finished itself out. During the final coda his impatience became a frenzy. He went into the kitchen for a drink of water; his throat was dry, burned by his agitation. He thought of all the people he could ring up: Sharpstein; Ted Haynes; Patricia Gray; the station’s attorney, who was on vacation in Santa Barbara.

  The music ceased. He ran back into the living room.

  Jim Briskin’s cultivated voice came on. “Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra, in Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel. From a Columbia Masterworks long-playing record.”

  Then a pause, a mind-wracking pause.

  “I guess,” Jim Briskin said, “most of you have been over at Domingo’s lately. You’ve seen the new arrangement of the tables so you can look out over the Golden Gate while you’re eating. But I can’t help mentioning…” He went on, describing, in his usual manner, the restaurant.

  Bob Posin picked up the telephone and called Patricia Gray. “Listen,” he said. “Did you hear Briskin tonight? Do you have your radio on?” Now the music had returned.

  Patricia said, “Yes, I was listening.”

  “Well?”

  “I—listened.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  Her tone was obscure: he could not pin it down. “I guess I heard.”

  “The Looney Luke commercial!” he shouted into the phone; his voice bounced back at him, deafening him.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Did you hear it? What the hell was he doing? Is it my imagination? That’s what he said, isn’t it? He said he was fed up and he wasn’t going to read it, he was tired of reading it.”

  He got nothing out of her. Disgusted, he slammed down the phone and went back to pacing in front of the radio.

  But still the music continued, and still he had to phone somebody. He tried the station again, without results. In his mind he pictured Jim Briskin at the microphone, in the green swivel chair, with the records, turntables, scripts, and tape transport before him, showing no emotion as the red light that indicated the phone blinker! on and off.

  Standing before his Magnavox radio, Posin realized that he was never going to find out, never going to be sure; he would never get hold of Briskin if he phoned and waited a thousand years. The radio would continue playing music, and he would never hear Looney Luke mentioned again, and it would be nothing but a conjecture of his memory. Already he was losing the sense of conviction.

  “Goddamn,” he said.

  The telephone at station KOIF was still ringing as Jim Briskin shut the equipment down for the night. The time was twelve midnight. The street outside was less active; many of the neon signs were off.

  The stairs were dismal as he descended floor by floor to the lobby of the McLaughlen Building. Under his arm was his regular packet of records; they had been borrowed from record shops, and tomorrow they went back into stock.

  The night air was thin and cold. He took a full breath.

  On the sidewalk he started in the direction of the station’s parking lot. But a car at the curb honked. The door opened, and a woman’s voice said from far off, “Jim—over here.”

  He walked toward the car. Drops of night mist gleamed on the fenders and hood. “Hello,” he said to her.

  Patricia switched on the headlights and started up the engine. “I’ll drive you,” she said. She had her heavy cloth coat bundled around her, buttoned and tucked under her legs. In the cold, her face was pinched.

  “I have my own car. It’s in the lot.” He did not feel like company.

  “We can just drive around, then.”

  “Why?” But he got in. The upholstery was icy as he adjusted his packet of records beside him.

  She drove the car out into traffic among the other cars. Neon signs and headlights sparkled, colors in a variety of sizes. Words flashing on and off. “I phoned the station,” she said presently. “But you didn’t answer.”

  “Why should I answer? It’s either somebody complaining or somebody with a request. I only have the records I brought; I have to play what I planned to play.”

  She listened to his short burst of resentment without visible reaction; he saw no response. What a bleak expression, he thought. How set her face was.

  “What’s with you?” he said. “Why this?”

  “I listened,” she said. Now her eyes were fixed on him, unwinking, wet. “I heard what you said about the Looney Luke commercial. You must have practiced a long time to say it like that.”

  “I didn’t practice. I started to read it, and then I gave up.”

  She said, “I see.”

  “It’s the only way I know,” he said. “These guys who work in factories throw their shoes into the machinery.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “I guess it’s lousy.”

  “I wouldn’t say lousy. Dangerous is what I would say. Fatal, if you want to know what I think.”

  He said, “You were the one who didn’t want me to read the thing.”

  “I—” She closed her eyes for a moment.

  “Watch the traffic,” he said.

  “That’s not what I wanted you to do. I wanted you to make some sort of rational protest. Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

  “No,” he said. “I guess it doesn’t.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I can get a job easily enough. I know people in the area. If I have to, I can go to the East Coast.”

  “You don’t think this will follow you.”

  “There’s an announcer,” Jim said, “who today has a half-hour TV show coast to coast, who once on a network radio show told his listeners to pour Jergens’ lotion in their hair. He was so crocked he could barely stagger through the show. And it was only a fifteen-minute show.”

  “What are your plans? Do you have anything worked out?”

  “I just want to go home and go to bed.”

  She made a right turn and brought the car around in front of the McLaughlen. Building once more. “Look, go get your car and follow me. And we’ll both go have a drink at your place or my place.”

  “You think I’m going to go berserk?” he said.

  “And maybe listen to old Mengelberg records,” she went on, as if he had not spoken.

  “What old Mengelberg records? Those old worn-out clunks we built our marriage on?” Broodingly, he said, “I guess you did get most of them.”

  “You kept Les Préludes,” she said, “which was the only one either of us really wanted.”

  And he had kept the Leonore No. 3, but she didn’t know about that. During the vindictive days of dividing up their possessions—under the California Joint-Property Settlement Act—he had told her fables, and one of the fables was that the records in the album were broken. Sat on, he had said; one night, at a party, she had done the sitting on a whole chairful of albums.

  “Sure,” he said, “why not?”

  He went to his car, started it up, and in it followed Pat’s cream-and-blue Dodge up Geary Street, past Van Ness, and then up the hill on the far side.

  Ahead of him the taillights of the Dodge blinked red, massive coils like the turrets in a pinball machine. He could n
ot see her; he followed the taillights of her car. Here and there, he thought. Wherever she went. Uphill and down. Like a child’s fantasy of faith. And so, he thought, they lived happily ever after, the two of them in their cottage on the side of the hill, the two of them in their candy-bar home where nobody could find them. The Dodge stopped—its brake lights blazed warningly—and he wondered where he was; he had lost track of the streets. The Dodge’s turn signal blinked, and the car turned left. He followed.

  The Dodge was at the curb, and he almost went on past; he heard the sound of her horn at the instant he realized she had stopped. How few times, he thought, he had been here to this apartment. The location, the address were shut out of his mind, as if the place did not exist. Twisting his neck, he began to back the car against traffic. The Dodge was directly beside his car, and now he was pulling behind it, parking parallel to it. The red taillights dazzled him. A variety of lights, turn lights, brake lights, white backup lights; they made his head hurt. The gaudy bedroom-and-chrome cars, he thought. Carpets and record players. He shut off his headlights, rolled up his windows, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  Pat stood shivering, her arms folded, as he locked his doors.

  “It’s the fog,” she said, as they walked up the broad concrete steps of the apartment building. The door was bronze and glass, locked. They had to wait while she found her key. The hall inside was soundless. On each side of them the doors were shut. Everyone here, he thought, believed in the good solid things of life. To bed at eleven, up at six.

  Trustingly, he went along after her, icing her find the right door. She seemed to know; her long dark hair bounced at the collar of her coat as she trotted over the carpet. Her heels made no sound. Like a long vault, he thought, a passage into the side of the mountain.