Jailbird. Part 14

"Maybe she was that big black pimp that came in after you last night," Edel said to me. "I was nice to him. He was eight feet tall."

"I missed him," I said.

"You're lucky," said Edel.

"You two know each other?" said Clewes.

"Since childhood!" I said. I was going to blow this dream wide open by absolutely refusing to take it seriously. I was d.a.m.n well going to get back to my bed at the Arapahoe or my cot in prison. I didn't care which.

Maybe I could even wake up in the bedroom of my little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and my wife would still be alive.

"I can promise you she wasn't the tall pimp," said the lawyer. "That much we can be sure of: Whatever she looks like, she is not tall."

"Who isn't tall?" I said.

"Mrs. Jack Graham," said the lawyer.

"Sorry I asked," I said.

"You must have done her some sort of favor, too," the lawyer said to me, "or done something she saw and admired."

"It's my Boy Scout training," I said.

So we came to a stop in front of a rundown apartment building on the Upper West Side. Out came Frank Ubriaco, the owner of the Coffee Shop. He was dressed for the dream in a pale-blue velvet suit and green-and-white cowboy boots with high, high heels. His French-fried hand was elegantly sheathed in a white kid glove. Clewes pulled down a jumpseat for him.

I said h.e.l.lo to him.

"Who are you?" he said.

"You served me breakfast this morning," I said.

"I served everybody breakfast this morning," he said.

"You know him, too?" said Clewes.

"This is my town," I said. I addressed the lawyer, more convinced than ever that this was a dream, and I told him, "All right-let's pick up my mother next."

He echoed me uncertainly. "Your mother?"

"Sure. Why not? Everybody else is here," I said.

He wanted to be cooperative. "Mr. Leen didn't say anything specific about your not bringing anybody else along. You'd like to bring your mother?"

"Very much," I said.

"Where is she?" he said.

"In a cemetery in Cleveland," I said, "but that shouldn't slow you you down." down."

He thereafter avoided direct conversations with me.

When we got underway again, Ubriaco asked those of us in the backseat who we were.

Clewes and Edel introduced themselves. I declined to do so.

"They're all people who caught the eye of Mrs. Graham, just as you did," said the lawyer.

"You guys know her?" Ubriaco asked Clewes and Edel and me.

We all shrugged.

"Jesus Christ," said Ubriaco. "This better be a pretty good job you got to offer. I like what I do."

"You'll see," said the lawyer.

"I broke a date for you monkeys," said Ubriaco.

"Yes-and Mr. Leen broke a date for you," said the lawyer. "His daughter is having her debut at the Waldorf tonight, and he won't be there. He'll be talking to you gentlemen instead."

"f.u.c.king crazy," said Ubriaco. n.o.body else had anything to say. As we crossed Central Park to the East Side, Ubriaco spoke again. "f.u.c.king debut," he said.

Clewes said to me, "You're the only one who knows everybody else here. You're in the middle of this thing somehow."

"Why wouldn't I be?" I said. "It's my dream."

And we were delivered without further conversation to the penthouse dwelling of Arpad Leen. We were told by the lawyer to leave our shoes in the foyer. It was the custom of the house. I, of course, was already in my stocking feet.

Ubriaco asked if Leen was a j.a.panese, since the j.a.panese commonly took off their shoes indoors.

The lawyer a.s.sured him that Leen was a Caucasian, but that he had grown up in Fiji, where his parents ran a general store. As I would find out later, Leen's father was a Hungarian Jew, and his mother was a Greek Cypriot. His parents met when they were working on a Swedish cruise s.h.i.+p in the late twenties. They jumped s.h.i.+p in Fiji, and started the store.

Leen himself looked like an idealized Plains Indian to me. He could have been a movie star. And he came out into the foyer in a striped silk dressing gown and black socks and garters. He still hoped to make it to his daughter's debut.

Before he introduced himself to us, he had to tell the lawyer an incredible piece of news. "You know what the son of a b.i.t.c.h is in prison for?" he said. "Treason! And we're supposed to get him out and give him a job. Treason! How do you get somebody out of jail who's committed treason? How do we give him even a lousy job without every patriot in the country raising h.e.l.l?"

The lawyer didn't know.

"Well," said Leen, "what the h.e.l.l. Get me Roy Cohn again. I wish I were back in Nashville."

This last remark alluded to Leen's having been the leading publisher of country music in Nashville, Tennessee, before his little empire was swallowed up by RAMJAC. His old company, in fact, was the nucleus of the Down Home Records Division of RAMJAC.

Now he looked us over and he shook his head in wonderment. We were a freakish crew. "Gentlemen," he said, "you have all been noticed by Mrs. Jack Graham. She didn't tell me where or when. She said you were honest and kind."

"Not me," said Ubriaco.

"You're free to question her judgment, if you want," said Leen. "I'm not. I have to offer you good jobs. I don't mind doing that, though, and I'll tell you why: She never told me to do anything that didn't turn out to be in the best interests of the company. I used to say that I never wanted to work for anybody, but working for Mrs. Jack Graham has been the greatest privilege of my life." He meant it.

He did not mind making us all vice-presidents. The company had seven hundred vice-presidents of this and that on the top level, the corporate level, alone. When you got out into the subsidiaries, of course, the whole business of presidents and vice-presidents started all over again.

"You know what she looks like?" Ubriaco wanted to know. know what she looks like?" Ubriaco wanted to know.

"I haven't seen her recently," said Leen. This was an urbane lie. He had never seen her, which was a matter of public record. He would confess to me later that he did not even know how he had come to Mrs. Graham's attention. He thought she might have seen an article on him in the Diners Club magazine, which had featured him in their "Man on the Move" department.

In any event, he was abjectly loyal to her. He loved and feared his idea of Mrs. Graham the way Emil Larkin loved and feared his idea of Jesus Christ. He was luckier than Larkin in his wors.h.i.+p, of course, since the invisible superior being over him called him up and wrote him letters and told him what to do.

He actually said one time, "Working for Mrs. Graham has been a religious experience for me. I was adrift, no matter how much money I was making. My life had no purpose until I became president of RAMJAC and placed myself at her beck and call."

All happiness is religious, I have to think sometimes.

Leen said he would talk to us one by one in his library. "Mrs. Graham didn't tell me about your backgrounds, what your special interests might be-so you're just going to have to tell me about yourselves." He said for Ubriaco to come into the library first, and asked the rest of us to wait in the living room. "Is there anything my butler can bring you to drink?" he said.

Clewes didn't want anything. Edel asked for a beer. I, still hoping to blow the dream wide open, ordered a pousse-cafe pousse-cafe, a rainbow-colored drink that I had never seen, but which I had studied while earning my Doctor of Mixology degree. A heavy liqueur was put into the bottom of the gla.s.s, then a lighter one of a different color was carefully spooned in on top of that, and then a lighter one still on top of that, and on and on, with each bright layer undisturbed by the one above or below.

Leen was impressed with my order. He repeated it, to make sure he had heard it right.

"If it's not too much trouble," I said. It was no more trouble, surely, than building a full-rigged s.h.i.+p model in a bottle, say.

"No problem!" said Leen. This, I would learn, was a favorite expression of his. He told the butler to give me a pousse-cafe pousse-cafe without further ado. without further ado.

He and Ubriaco went into the library, and the rest of us entered the living room, which had a swimming pool. I had never seen a living room with a swimming pool before. I had heard of such a thing, of course, but hearing of and actually seeing that much water in a living room are two very different things.

I knelt by the pool and swirled my hand in the water, curious about the temperature, which was soupy. When I withdrew my hand and considered its wetness, I had to admit to myself that the wet was undreamlike. My hand was really wet and would remain so for some time, unless I did something about it.

All this was really going on. As I stood, the butler arrived with my pousse-cafe pousse-cafe.

Outrageous behavior was not the answer. I was going to have to start paying attention again. "Thank you," I said to the butler.

"You're welcome, sir," he replied.

Clewes and Edel were seated at one end of a couch about half a block long. I joined them, wanting their appreciation for how sedate I had become.

They were continuing to speculate as to when Mrs. Graham might have caught them behaving so virtuously.

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 Remagen, Germany, during World War Two. The capture of this bridge had been an immense event, allowing the Allied Armies to pour at high speed disguised as a man, though. "I sometimes think 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 transvest.i.tes," he said.

The possibility of Mrs. Graham's being a transvest.i.te 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 girl friend, 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-cafe pousse-cafe by the swimming pool," I said. by the swimming pool," I said.

"I can't imagine you drinking a pousse-cafe," pousse-cafe," she said. 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 G.o.d, 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 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. 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.