Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“Sold, Denny. That is, if Jack—”

“Sounds O.K.”

“I just love it!”

He organized it, I’ll say that for him, right down to the last picture, copy, and release date, a regular southern California production job. We’d been making more money than I had really told her, so we could afford what he was doing easy enough, even if I did put the brakes on him here and there, just from habit, or sense of duty, or whatever it was. But it cost even less than I figured on, mainly because all that stuff, the domes, telescopes, brass wheels, and so on, looked a lot more expensive than they were. And whatever it cost, I think I would have O.K.’d it, because it was opening up something that until then I’d paid no attention to at all. I mean, it dealt with people. Up to then, my life had been things. Music, my voice, had been things, and a football was a thing, as a boxcar was, and a fruit spray, and a well. But this started with stars, the domes, and the glasses, and went on to how people felt about them. Denny tried his slogans, copy, and pictures, on everybody, from Rohrer and Lida and me and Hannah to Joe Doaks. Every reaction he’d get, he’d rethink and rewrite and redraw. After he’d tried the stuff on two hundred different people Sir Isaac was out. “It’s O.K., Jack, it’s simple and they can understand it, but in the first place it’s comedy and in the second place it’s crumby. I mean, we want everything streamlined, and then we show a fat old bastard in a Quaker Oats suit, sitting under a tree, rubbing his head with one hand and holding an apple with the other — and it’s wrong. We’ll take care of that stuff about the elements that were discovered on Mars before they were discovered on earth, or wherever they were discovered, but we’ll do it in copy. We’ll have a nice, refined column, no more than ten picas wide, running down one side of the page explaining about it, but the rest of it’s got to soar. It’s got to go sailing right off the page — out into the wide blue yonder so we lift ’em. You get it, Jack? It isn’t only that we got telescopes. It’s got to be a symbol of a whole world, of the world they live in — of infinity with a supercharger.”

I guess it sounds corny, more like Eddie Guest than Walt Whitman, but it was poetry, just the same, to him, and I’ve got to admit it, to me. It opened up things, not quite the world he was talking about, but another world I never heard of just the same, the world that you scored in by controlling people’s minds, and I don’t mind saying I bought it all, and hard. We made our first announcement with a page ad in Westways, which is a magazine put out by the Automobile Club of Southern California, and he knocked me over with it, because he caught me completely by surprise. For the picture, he ran a photo of her, Hannah, I mean. But it was a special kind of photo, and caught her at night, all smeared up with some kind of glycerin so she shone like a glowworm, with a white silk jersey swimming outfit that showed every curve she had, but somehow looked scientific at the same time. I mean, she had on big, wide glasses with white rims and white pieces running back over her ears, and she was standing under one of our telescopes, with her hand on it like she was just about to peep through it, but looking up at the sky like she was going to make sure, first, what she was going to peep at. And those thick, solid shoulders somehow meant business, more than a hundred slim cuties could have meant, and caught the spirit of this new world he was trying to put across, and gave it that thing he was talking about, lift, the spring that carried it right off the page. On the left, where you didn’t notice it till about the dozenth time you turned to the page, was the column of small type about the elements, and underneath a wide picture of one of our stations, showing the dome and glass sticking up. Up above were the stars, and Seven-Star had been changed from a circle cluster to the Big Dipper. But the main thing was that girl, with something classical about her pose that made it seem all right about the curves, and the way she was looking up, and the expression on her face. I went for it all, and I didn’t miss it that other people would too. He was hardly out with the ad, and some newspaper stuff that released a little later, and hadn’t even got started on the radio program yet, when he was invited up to L.A., to address the biweekly luncheon the Advertising Club holds on Tuesdays at the Biltmore. I didn’t go, but she did, and sat out in the lobby and listened, and when she came back she dropped in my office to give me a special report. Then she said: “He’s big time, your friend Mr. Deets. I hope we can hold him.”

“We’ll do our best.”

“I think he rates a bonus.”

“Just that — a bonus?”

“Well?”

“He does — but say it bigger.”

“You mean real money?”

“We’d better.”

“Jack, I’d say the main thing is: To keep building Seven-Star, so as it grows, his prospects grow and he has an incentive!”

“Yeah, but money talks.”

I guess it was two or three months after that, when Denny had been with us nearly a year, that she came up to me at the refinery, where I’d gone to talk with Rohrer about putting a new unit in. I was standing at one of the stills when she came down the concrete stairs, said she wanted to see me, and went off in the direction of the office. I went over there. I was no sooner in the room than she piled in: “Jack, why didn’t you tell me Mrs. Deets was here.”

“Denny’s wife?”

“She’s been here a week.”

“I didn’t know it.”

“He didn’t mention it to you?”

“Not a word.”

“You didn’t notice he’d moved from the Castile?”

“He hasn’t. When I stopped by the desk this morning the girl was still taking his messages. She’d never be doing that if he’d left there. She’d say he’d checked out. I was in the hotel business once. I know.”

“He’s paid up till the end of the month.”

“Then he hasn’t moved.”

“Doesn’t this all strike you as very peculiar?”

“It’s his business. And his wife.”

“Couldn’t you have made it your business? A little?”

“I like to be friendly, I like to do things for people, I like to help a guy get settled, I like to welcome a girl to a strange place, and maybe have some flowers waiting for her when she sees her new living room for the first time. But I’m no goddam mind reader.”

“You can hardly blame him, though.”

“For what?”

“For keeping it quiet. After the queer way you’ve acted.”

“I? About what?”

“His wife, Jack. Stop cracking dumb!”

“I’ve never said one word to him about his wife.”

“Well, good God! Isn’t that acting just about as queer as they come — or am I crazy? After all, you knew he was married, he’s mentioned a hundred times he was married, he talks about writing his wife, and you’ve never said a word to him about her. Is that how things are done? Is that so nice and friendly?”

“His wife is from Baltimore. Or so I suppose.”

“So what?”

“I don’t want to hear about Baltimore.”

“Jack, I’m not crazy.”

“O.K., so I am.”

She lit a cigarette, snapped the ashes at the ash tray four or five times, and began charging up and down like some kind of a leopard. I tried to talk. “Yeah, he mentioned about his wife, or tried to. He’s tried to mention about a good many things, including my family. I’ve cut him off. I’ve tried to make it plain to him I don’t want any news from home, and I’ve got my reasons. I never hid anything from you, particularly, and if you want to know what my reasons are, I guess I can tell you, but I’d prefer not to. I had a row. With my father. So I blew. I beat it out of there, but what I want to hear about him, or Baltimore, or any of it, is nothing. I’ve encouraged him strictly to keep his mouth shut about anything personal, and he’s done it.”