The Broken Bubble Read online

  Jim said, “Suits me.”

  “Fine,” Haynes said. “You haven’t had your vacation yet this year, have you? Suppose then we give you a check for what you’ve worked this month up to now, plus pay instead of the vacation. So it won’t hit so hard in the pocketbook.”

  He nodded.

  “Shall we say starting tomorrow?” Haynes said. “Your shift begins at two, doesn’t it? I’ll have Flannery come in and take it. I suppose either Flannery or Hubble.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Either of them can handle it.”

  “How do you feel about this?” Haynes said. “Does it meet with your approval?”

  He shrugged. “Why not? Sure it meets with my approval.” He went unsteadily into the kitchen and began fixing himself a drink. “Anything for you?”

  “Too late at night,” Haynes said. He brought out his watch. “You know what I think that mobile is made out of?” he was saying to Posin, as Jim got ice cubes from the refrigerator.

  He stood alone in the kitchen, drinking. In the living room Haynes was talking.

  “There’s only one thing you can be sure of. What sells soap today, stinks tomorrow. There’s no charity in the industry. You take some body like Sherwood; they’re reeling him out on a string. A fair question would be, does he know it? Or does he think he’s getting away with something? Nobody’s going to pay his bills when he stops selling; he’s just a new way to sell.”

  “A new way,” Posin said.

  “With the illusion of independence—”

  “A trend,” Posin said.

  “If you wish, a trend. But suppose he really knocked the sponsors; suppose he stopped smiling as he spills the—what is it?—Falstaff beer. Then they yank him. Of course the problem is that nobody really knows what they want. They’re all confused; the whole industry is confused.”

  “You can say that again,” Posin’s voice sounded.

  “Sherwood is riding on a crest. They’re trying him out. If Sherwood went up to the wheels at ABC and said, what is it you really want me to do, they wouldn’t be able to tell him.”

  “They’d be able to tell him, you sell soap,” Posin said.

  “Yes, they could tell him that. But they wouldn’t.”

  “Pragmatic,” Posin was saying, as Jim finished his drink and poured himself a second.

  “What happened to Briskin?”

  Posin’s voice said, “He went into the kitchen.”

  “Well, go see if he’s all right.”

  Appearing, Posin said, “Are you okay?”

  “Sure,” Jim said. Leaning against the moist tile of the sink, he drank down his drink.

  “I think the thirty-day business is a good all-around solution,” Posin said.

  “You do?” Jim said.

  Haynes, in the living room, said, “I’m going to have to run along. Briskin, you have anything you want to say before we go? Any comments or suggestions?”

  Jim walked into the living room. “Mr. Haynes,” he said, “what do you listen to when you turn on the radio?”

  Gravely Haynes said, “I never listen to the radio if I can help it. I stopped listening years ago.”

  Both Bob Posin and Haynes shook hands with him, told him when he could expect his check, and then went out of the apartment into the hall.

  “Want a ride home?” Posin said to him.

  “No,” he said.

  “You look ready to give out.”

  He began to close the hall door between himself and them.

  “Now wait a minute,” Posin said. A slow, uneasy flush crept up in his face as he realized that Jim was going to remain behind in the apartment with Patricia.

  “Good night,” Jim said. He shut the door and locked it. The bell rang instantly, and he opened the door. “What?”

  “I think you better come along,” Posin said. He was out in the hall alone; Haynes was already on his way to the stairs.

  “I’m too sick to come along,” Jim said.

  “You’re not sick; there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just too big a slacker to do your job. You got the whole station into trouble and you’re just going to stand around slobbering in your drink—”

  “Go to hell,” Jim said, closing the door. Posin’s foot came out, wedging itself in the way.

  “Now look here,” Posin said shakily. “We’re grown men. You were married to Pat, but that’s over and done with; you have no claim on her.”

  “What’s your name on the phone book for?”

  Ted Haynes, from the end of the hall, said, “Are you coming or aren’t you?”

  After a brief conflict, Posin withdrew his foot, and Jim closed the door. He locked it and then walked back into the kitchen. Somewhere he had set down his drink; the glass was lost. In the cupboard he found another to take its place.

  Good lord in heaven, he thought. The things that could happen to a rational man.

  While he was fixing himself another drink, Pat came out of the bedroom in a long, pale blue robe. “Oh,” she said, startled to see him.

  “I’m still here,” he said. “They left.”

  “I thought you all were gone,” she said.

  “I’m suspended for a month. Without pay.” An ice cube skidded from his hands and onto the floor; he bent to pick it up.

  “Starting when?”

  “Now. Today.”

  “That’s not so bad. That’s not bad at all. He must want to keep you. That’ll give you time to think it over.” She was watching him warily. The towel was gone; in the bedroom she had combed her hair out, dried it, and fluffed it. Her hair spread out against the collar of her robe, long and soft and dark.

  “Nice,” he said. Then suddenly he said, “I give up.”

  She went and got a cigarette. “Go home and go to bed.” Clouds of cigarette smoke billowed toward the light mounted over the sink, the plastic-hooded kitchen light. She tossed the match into the sink and folded her arms. “Or do you want to stay here?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll leave.”

  Taking his glass from him, she poured the rest of the drink away. “In a month you’ll know what it is you want to do.”

  “I don’t want to do anything,” he said.

  “You will.” Again she was watching him, calmly, in her confident manner. “You’re lucky, Jim.”

  “Because he didn’t fire me?”

  Sighing, she left the kitchen. “I’m too tired to talk about it.” She went into the bedroom, put her cigarette in the ashtray on the end table by the clock, and then stretched out on the bed, in her robe, her head on the pillow, her knees drawn up. “What a day,” she said.

  He came in and sat down by her. “How about getting remarried?”

  “What do you, mean? You mean you and me again? Are you saying that seriously, or do you just want to see what sort of reaction you’ll get?”

  He said, “Maybe I’ll go up to the cabin.”

  “What cabin?”

  “Yours. On the Russian River.”

  “I sold it. Last year or the year before. I had to get rid of it… I wasn’t using it.”

  “But wasn’t that a present from your father?”

  “In his will.” Her eyes had closed.

  “That’s too bad,” he said, thinking about the cabin, the white boards of the porch, the tank of gas for the stove, half-buried in leaves and dirt, the host of long-legged spiders that had rushed from the water closet the first time he had gone with her to open the cabin up.

  “Did you want to go away? Up in the country or something?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “I’m sorry about the cabin.”

  He had met her through the cabin. In the summer of 1951, five years ago, he had wanted to rent a cabin for his two-week vacation; going through the newspaper he had come across the ad for Patricia’s cabin and had gone to see her, to find out how much she wanted.

  “What do you rent it for?” he said.

  “Sixty dollars a month. During the
summer.”

  Her family had lived in Bolinas, a fishing town set off by itself on the coast side of Mann County. Her father, before his death, was a rural real estate man, selling lots, farms, summer cabins in the resort areas. In 1951 she was working as a bookkeeper, twenty-three years old, isolated from her family. She had never respected her father; she described him as a windy, beer-drinking old man with varicose veins. Her mother, still living, was a mystic with a tea-reading shop near Stinson Beach. From that had come Patricia’s contempt for phony idealism. She lived a brisk, efficient life, rooming with another girl in the Marina, cooking her own meals, washing her own clothes; her only concession to luxury was the buying of an opera ticket or a trip on the Greyhound bus. She loved to travel. And when he had met her, she had owned a set of oil paints and did an occasional still life or portrait.

  “Sixty bucks,” he said.

  It seemed like too much for a cabin. She showed him a photograph of it tacked up beside the mirror of her dressing table. The cabin was on the river. The water was slow, and it spread out into the bushes and grass. In the photograph, Patricia rested with her hand against the railing of the cabin’s porch; she wore a wool, bathing suit, and she was smiling into the sun.

  “That’s you,” he said.

  “Yes. I used to go up there with my brother.” Her brother, she told him, was killed during the Second World War.

  He asked about seeing the cabin.

  “Do you have a car?” She had been hanging clothes on the line in the backyard of the rooming house; it was Sunday, and she was home. “I don’t have a car. I haven’t been up there since the forties. Somebody up there, a real estate man, a friend of my father’s, was keeping it fixed up for us.”

  He drove her up the coast highway in his car. They left San Francisco at eleven in the morning. At twelve-thirty they pulled off the road to have lunch. They were near Bodega Bay, in Sonoma County, and they ate a meal of prawns dipped in batter, beer, and tossed green salad.

  “I like seafood,” she said. “We always had fish of some kind. Bolinas is a dairy town, and before my father was a real estate man he was in the dairy business. We used to drive at night in the fog, over Panoramic Highway to San Francisco…the fog was so thick he had to open the car door and look down at the white line. Or we would have gone off the road.”

  She seemed a happy and bright girl. He thought she was exceptionally pretty. She wore a sleeveless blouse and a long skirt almost to her ankles. Her black hair was tied in two braids, and in each braid was a ribbon.

  At two o’clock they reached the Russian River. By that time they had stopped for gas and had gone into a roadside tavern, a redwood and neon place where the jukebox was playing ‘Frenesi.’ Kids, high school kids in white cotton shorts and shirts, filled up the booths, eating hamburgers and drinking Cokes. The racket was terrific. Both he and Pat had a couple of drinks. They felt good. When they reached Guerneville, on the Russian River, they stopped again at another tavern, also redwood and neon, and had a couple more drinks. By the time they reached the cabin, the time was three-thirty in the afternoon, and they were both pretty well looped.

  The cabin was overgrown with weeds and brambles. One of the back windows was broken. The river had, at some recent time, risen and filled the front room with mud. The porch was broken and sagging; the railing, against which she had leaned in the photograph, was gone completely. When they pried the door open—the hinges and lock were rusted—they found that mice and ground squirrels had destroyed the sofa and mattresses and chairs. Somebody had broken in and stolen the pipes from the stove. The electricity was off, and the supply of gas was almost gone.

  “Jesus,” Patricia said, walking back outside to gaze across the river. “I’m sorry.”

  He said, “In two or three days it can be fixed up.”

  “Can it? It looks dreadful.” She tossed a stone into the water. On the far side tiny children were paddling. People, on the beach, were sunning themselves. The afternoon air was hot, dry. Around them the bushes rustled with the wind.

  “It’s nice up here,” he said.

  He found a shovel and cleaned out the debris, the silt, and rubbish. With the windows and doors open, the cabin aired out rapidly. Pat, using a heavy needle and thread, managed to repair the mattresses to some degree.

  “But you can’t cook,” she said. “How can you fix meals? The stove won’t work without pipes.”

  He had lost interest in that part; he had become interested in her. “They probably have pipes around here,” he said. “And glass for the window.”

  “If you say so,” she said.

  When the sun began to set, they walked into Guerneville and had dinner at one of the restaurants. After dinner, they sat at the table drinking beer. By nine o’clock neither of them was in any condition to drive back to San Francisco.

  “This is a hell of a thing,” he said when they left the restaurant. Kids roamed the streets; kids in hot rods screeched by. The night air was pleasant. Off to their left was the river. He could see it glinting. The river did not seem to move at all. Somewhere the Sonoma County people had dammed it up.

  Beside him Pat strolled contentedly. “I like it up here.” She had changed into jeans and gone wading, her jeans rolled up to her knees. Her legs were smooth, light. She walked barefoot.

  “Don’t the stones hurt your feet?” he asked.

  “Everybody up here walks barefoot,” she said. She stumbled a little, and he caught her. “Be careful,” she said to him.

  “Why?” He held onto her arm.

  “I think I’m drunk.”

  “I think you are too,” he said. “I think we both are.”

  On the bed, her eyes shut, Pat said, “We stayed there that night, didn’t we? Was the electricity on?”

  “No,” he said. “It was still shorted.” He had got the lights working the next day.

  “Did you make love to me that night?”

  “You’re darn right I did,” he said.

  She reached out for her cigarette, stirring on the bed. “Why isn’t it like that anymore?”

  “Your fault. My fault.”

  “Nobody’s fault,” she murmured. He took the cigarette from her fingers; she was dropping it to the covers. “Thanks.”

  He said, “Remember that beanery down in the Tenderloin?”

  “Where we stood,” she said. “Where they didn’t have chairs or stools. Just the counter. That was where all the longshoremen ate…down by the produce area and the docks.” Her voice trailed off.

  All the various places, he thought. The secondhand record shop on Eddy Street where the old man fussed with the albums, not knowing what he had in stock but knowing everything there was to know about the records themselves. And the nights they had rushed upstairs floor by floor at the War Memorial Opera House, battling to get to the rail first, clutching their standing-room tickets.

  And, he thought, the day they had bought the firecrackers and given them to the kids. The illegal firecrackers. They had driven down to San Jose to buy them. Early morning in the San Francisco streets, driving with the car full of fireworks, cones and pinwheels and cherry bombs, giving them away to the kids. And, he thought, then the police.

  “They sure got us,” he said.

  “They?”

  “The police. For the firecrackers.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He leaned down and kissed her. She did not protest; she turned a little toward him, drawing her knees up and burying her head down between her arms. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, and he smoothed it away from her face, out of her eyes “Maybe I will stay,” he said. “Can I?”

  Presently she said, “Okay.”

  “I love you,” he said. He put his arm under her and lifted her up against him; she was a dead weight, sound asleep, without resistance. “You know that?” he said.

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  “But I’m not good enough for you.”

  “No.”

  “Wh
o is?” he said. She did not answer. Her hair brushed against his wrist, and he kissed her again, on the mouth. Her lips gave, and he was conscious of her teeth, her hard teeth, relaxed, apart, and the motion of—her breath in her throat.

  “No,” she said, “we better not.” She struggled up. “I’m sorry. I wish we could. We better just go to sleep… I think you should sleep above the sheet. So we can’t without going to a lot of trouble. Don’t you agree?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  She opened her eyes. “It’s not what I want. I wish we could…maybe we could. No, it wouldn’t be right. Come on, get into bed and let’s go to sleep. You don’t have to get up early tomorrow, but I do; I have to get up at six-thirty.”

  Going here and there in her apartment, he shut off the heater and the lights and made certain that the door was locked. When he reentered the bedroom, he found her standing sleepily by the bed, her robe in her arms; he took it from her and hung it in the closet.

  “How serious is this business with Posin?” he said.

  She shook her head without answering. Already she was in bed, tugging the covers over her; she wore some kind of single-piece material, but he did not see what it was. He did not recognize it. Something new. Something she had bought after she had left him.

  As he got into bed, above the sheet, separated from her by the surface of material, she put her arms against him, her fingers pressing against his head. “This is nice,” she said, but she was failing asleep; she was drifting away. The outline of her body was vague under the sheet, and he could not reach it. He could not grasp her. When he tried to take hold of her, he found himself holding nothing but material, the uniform cotton material, bleached and absolutely clean and absolutely impersonal. She turned away from him, and that was that.

  5

  No Joy in Fogville.

  The other night long- and short-hair disc jock Jim Briskin on radio (recall, you TV addicts?) station KOIF got off a doozy of a reading of a Looney Luke (three ughs and a blah!) commercial right twixt Beethoven and Brahms.

  Said Briskin: “Looney Luke sells clean cars.” Which Looney Luke thought was fine. And then he said: “That’s enough of that commercial.” Which darn near everyone else in town thought was fine. So now no more Looney Luke commercials on KOIF, because even if you weren’t listening the sponsor was.