Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

Clewes mourned that he had not had many opportunities to be virtuous, selling advertising matchbooks and calendars from door to door. "About the best I can do is let a building custodian tell me his war stories," he said. He remembered a custodian in the Flatiron Building who claimed to have been the first American to cross the bridge over the Rhine at Remagan, Germany, during World War Two. The capture of this bridge had been an immense event, allowing the Allied Armies to pour at high speed right into the heart of Germany. Clewes doubted that the custodian could have been Mrs. Jack Graham, though.

Israel Edel supposed that Mrs. Graham could be disguised as a man, though. "I sometimes think that about half our customers at the Arapahoe are transvestites," he said.

The possibility of Mrs. Graham's being a transvestite would be brought up again soon, and most startlingly, by Arpad Leen.

Meanwhile, though, Clewes got back on the subject of World War Two. He got personal about it. He said that he and I, when we were wartime bureaucrats, had only imagined that we had something to do with defeats and victories. "The war was won by fighters, Walter. All the rest was dreams."

It was his opinion that all the memoirs written about that war by civilians were swindles, pretenses that the war had been won by talkers and writers and socialites, when it could only have been won by fighters.

A telephone rang in the foyer. The butler came in to say that the call was for Clewes, who could take it on the telephone on the coffee table in front of us. The telephone was black-and-white plastic and shaped like "Snoopy," the famous dog in the comic strip called "Peanuts." Peanuts was owned by what was about to become my division of RAMJAC. To converse on that telephone, as I would soon discover, you had to put your mouth over the dog's stomach and stick his nose in your ear. Why not?

It was Clewes's wife Sarah, my old girlfriend, calling from their apartment. She had just come home from a private nursing case, had found his note, which said where he was and what he was doing there and how he could be reached by telephone.

He told her that I was there, too, and she could not believe it. She asked to talk to me. So Clewes handed me the plastic dog.

"Hi," I said.

"This is crazy," she said. "What are you doing there?"

"Drinking a pousse- caf? by the swimming pool," I said.

"I can't imagine you drinking a pousse- caf?," she said.

"Well, I am," I said.

She asked how Clewes and I had met. I told her. "Such a small world, Walter," she said, and so on. She asked me if Clewes had told me that I had done them a big favor when I testified against him.

"I would have to say that that opinion is moot," I told her.

"Is what?" she said.

"Moot," I said. It was a word she had somehow never heard before. I explained it to her.

"I'm so dumb," she said. "There's so much I don't know, Walter." She sounded just like the same old Sarah on the telephone. It could have been Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five again, which made what she said next especially poignant: "Oh, my God, Walter! We're both over sixty years old! How is that possible?"

"You'd be surprised, Sarah," I said.

She asked me to come home with Clewes for supper, and I said I would if I could, that I didn't know what was going to happen next. I asked her where she lived.

It turned out that she and Clewes lived in the basement of the same building where her grandmother used to live — in Tudor City. She asked me if I remembered her grandmother's, apartment, all the old servants and furniture jammed into only four rooms.

I said I did, and we laughed.

I did not tell her that my son also lived somewhere in Tudor City. I would find out later that there was nothing vague about his proximity to her, with his musical wife and his adopted children. Stankiewicz of The New York Times was in the same building, and notoriously so, because of the wildness of the children — and only three floors above Leland and Sarah Clewes.

She said that it was good that we could still laugh, despite all we had been through. "At least we still have our sense of humor," she said. That was something Julie Nixon had said about her father after he got bounced out of the White House: "He still has his sense of humor."

"Yes — at least that," I agreed.

"Waiter," she said, "what's this fly doing in my soup?"

"What?" I said.

"What's this fly doing in my soup?" she persisted.

And then it came back to me: This was the opening line in a daisy-chain of jokes we used to tell each other on the telephone. I closed my eyes. I gave the answering line, and the telephone became a time machine for me. It allowed me to escape from Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-seven and into the fourth dimension.

"I believe that's the backstroke, madam," I said.

"Waiter," she said, "there's also a needle in my soup."

"I'm sorry, madam," I said, "that's a typographical error. That should have been a noodle."

"Why do you charge so much for cream?" she said.

"It's because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles," I said.

"I keep thinking it's Tuesday," she said.

"It is Tuesday," I said.

"That's what I keep thinking," she said. "Tell me, do you serve flannelcakes?"

"Not on the menu today," I said.

"Last night I dreamed I was eating flannelcakes," she said.

"That must have been very nice," I said.

"It was terrible," she said. "When I woke up, the blanket was gone."

She, too, had reason to escape into the fourth dimension. As I would find out later, her patient had died that night. Sarah had liked her a lot. The patient was only thirty-six, but she had a congenitally defective heart — huge and fatty and weak.

And imagine, if you will, the effect this conversation was having on Leland Clewes, who was sitting right next to me. My eyes were closed, as I say, and I was in such an ecstasy of timelessness and placelessness that I might as well have been having sexual intercourse with his wife before his eyes. He forgave me, of course. He forgives everybody for everything. But he still had to be impressed by how lazily in love Sarah and I could still be on the telephone.

What is more protean than adultery? Nothing in this world.

"I am thinking of going on a diet," said Sarah.

"I know how you can lose twenty pounds of ugly fat right away," I said.

"How?" she said.

"Have your head cut off," I said.

Clewes could hear only my half of the conversation, of course, so he could only hear the premise or the snapper of a joke, but never both. Some of the lines were highly suggestive.

I asked Sarah, I remember, if she smoked after intercourse.

Clewes never heard her reply, which was this: "I don't know. I never looked." And then she went on: "What did you do before you were a waiter?"

"I used to clean birdshit out of cuckoo clocks," I said.

"I have often wondered what the white stuff in birdshit was," she said.

"That's birdshit, too," I told her. "What kind of work do you do?"

"I work in the bloomer factory," she said.

"Is it a good job in the bloomer factory?" I inquired archly.

"Oh," she said, "I can't complain. I pull down about ten thousand a year." Sarah coughed, and that, too, was a cue, which I nearly missed.

"That's quite a cough you have there," I said in the nick of time.

"It won't stop," she said.

"Take two of these pills," I said. "They're just the thing." So she made swallowing sounds: "gluck, gluck, gluck." And then she asked what was in the pills.

"The most powerful laxative known to medical science," I said.

"Laxative!" she said.

"Yes," I said, "now you don't dare cough."

We did the joke, too, about a sick horse I supposedly had. I have never really owned a horse. The veterinarian gave me half a pound of purple powder that I was to give the horse, supposedly. The veterinarian told me to make a tube out of paper, and to put the powder inside the tube, and then to slip the tube into the horse's mouth, and to blow it down its throat.