Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Which girl? Miss Tabisco? Laverne?

JACK PATTERSON: Oh, I’m sorry. Laverne. Miss Tabisco gave me the card and I saw that the garage was all the way across town. When I mentioned this, Laverne looked at her watch. “Listen,” she said, “I feel pretty grubby after that train ride. I think I’ll just get into a cab and go to my hotel.”

“Well, I can’t just let you go off by yourself like this,” I said.

“Look, really,” she said, “don’t bother. You’d better go and reclaim your car. They charge for storage after the first hour. I’ll manage. Perhaps I’ll see you afterward. I see the taxi stand.”

“At least let us drop you,” I said. “I need a cab myself.”

“Very well,” she said.

I wanted to go into the hotel with her but she assured me it wasn’t necessary. “Goodbye, Miss Tabisco, Professor.”

“So long honey,” Miss Tabisco said.

DICK: I hadn’t heard any of this.

JACK PATTERSON: It took longer than I thought to get my car, and Miss Tabisco had an exam that afternoon and had to leave. Incidentally, they do charge for storage. Well, anyway, it was almost five o’clock before I got the car business straightened out, and after the kind of day I’d had I was really tired. The idea of going home and eating and having to come back downtown for the program … Well, suddenly I thought of Laverne Luftig registered in her room in her hotel and I was envious. I mean, it had all gone so smoothly for her and so badly for me. I was the one who’d been inconvenienced; it was as if I was the stranger in town.

I can’t explain this part very well, but the fact that I knew someone who was registered in a hotel downtown made me very nervous, very edgy. Do you understand?

PEPPER STEEP: Sure I understand. This is disgusting.

JACK PATTERSON: No, you don’t. I’m talking about hotels. You sign the register, but you’re anonymous. This isn’t very clear, but nothing is ever yours so much as the room you rent. God, the assumptions a hotel makes about you! All the towels they give you. I mean, you’d have to take eight baths a day to use them up. The clean sheets and the Gideon Bible and the whisky mode. The Western Union blanks! As if all one had to do all day was fire off telegrams to people. Oh, the civilization! Everyone there — do you realize this? — everyone there will be dining out that night! And the bed like a lesson in function—

BERNIE PERK: (softly) Jack—

JACK PATTERSON: No, Bernie, it isn’t what you think. I registered in the hotel. I asked the desk clerk where Laverne Luftig was, and I took a room on the floor beneath hers. Later I called her up. “Hello, honey,” I said. “It’s Uncle Jack, sweetheart. How are you?”

“You got me out of the shower,” she said. “I thought you were Ben Meadows.”

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Ben Meadows?

MEL SON: He’s a d.j. here in Hartford. The kid was probably after him to play her record.

JACK PATTERSON: “I just called to find out if you’re all settled, Laverne. I’m sorry about the car.”

“It wasn’t your fault. Did you have much trouble?”

“No.”

“How’s Miss Tabisco?”

“She had an exam. She had to leave.” I had just come from the shower myself and was lying in my shorts on top of the bedspread. The air blowing through the air conditioning had a lemony scent. Laverne’s voice on the telephone was lower than Annette’s. “We never did get a chance to speak about the show tonight,” I told her. “I thought we ought to do that.”

“Where are you now?”

“Well, I’m still downtown.”

“Can you come to my room for a drink? Are you near the hotel?”

“Close by.”

MEL SON: Hard on.

JACK PATTERSON: “Use their underground garage,” she said.

“I will, Laverne.”

“Give me thirty minutes,” she said, and hung up.

I hate waiting. I have the impatience of a better man. The hour before an appointment is a torment for me. I have no skill for slowing down the shave or drawing out the combing of my hair. At the Modern Language Association conventions the same. I go down to the lobby for newspapers I don’t have the patience to read, or into bars and finish my drink as soon as it’s brought. I never learned to nurse a drink or brood over the salted peanuts. I gulp my food and burn my cigarettes as in a high wind. I get no value from these ceremonies.

After I dressed I still had twenty minutes. I sat for two and went up early. Laverne came to the door in towels.

“There’s scotch on the desk,” she said, and disappeared back into the bathroom. “Pour yourself a drink. I’m sorry, but there isn’t any ice.”

When she came out, in exactly the thirty minutes she had asked for, she was wearing a sort of shift, very stylish. Her hands were in her hair, fixing it, and there were hairpins in her mouth. “Meadows called just after you did,” she said. “He said he didn’t have the record, so I sent one over by messenger in a cab. What time is it?”

“Just past seven.”

“He’ll play it in the segment after the 7:30 news. We’ll listen to it here.”

DICK: This story, Jack, is it—?

JACK PATTERSON: Oh, yes. Don’t worry. It’s okay.

I told Laverne pretty much what she might expect on the show that night, and we ordered dinner from room service. She just wanted to go down to the coffee shop and grab a bite; it was for me. I wanted to eat off the cart with the big wheels and the white-on-white linen thick as blanket and spoon my fruit from the glass dish in the packed ice. I wanted napkin under my chin and the high luxury of sitting in socks and drinking scotch out of a water tumbler.

Laverne put the radio on, turned down low so we could talk while waiting for Meadows to play her song.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: What did you talk about, Jackiebunch?

JACK PATTERSON: Well, nothing. Doctor. We just talked.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Just talked.

JACK PATTERSON: Well, I guess I told her about my job, Professor Behr-Bleibtreau.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: You were boasting?

JACK PATTERSON: Well, no, I wouldn’t say I was boasting.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Was it the way you talk to Annette, to Miss Tabisco?

JACK PATTERSON: Yes, I guess. In a way. Yes.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: You were boasting to a ten-year-old girl?

JACK PATTERSON: Yes, sir.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Bragging about Harvard?

JACK PATTERSON: Yes, sir.

BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Go on.

JACK PATTERSON: Suddenly she hushed me. “Shh,” she said, “the news is finished. He’ll play it after this commercial.” She was very excited, on the edge of her chair, leaning forward, one hand above the table and making rapid motions as if bouncing a ball — you know, the way policemen hold back one line of traffic while signaling the other line to go through — and talking softly to the radio. “Come on, Meadows. Say something nice. Put it on the charts here in Hartford. Get in how I’m only ten years old.”

But Meadows only gave the title and her name.

“The fool’s never heard it,” she said. “He’s listening to it for the first time.”

Her voice was good, stronger even than her speaking voice.

“You sing very beautifully, Laverne.”

“Be quiet. I want to hear this passage. The trumpet cuts into the words. I knew I should have made him use the mute.”

We listened to see if Meadows would make any comment after the song was finished, but all he did was give the title again.

Laverne turned off the radio. “The d.j.’s aren’t playing it in the East,” she said. “I think we’re in trouble.”

“It’s a fine tune, Laverne. Did you do the words and the music?”