The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike

  “How much do you have to put up?” she asked, with tension.

  He shrugged. “Oh, around six five. I can raise it. Don’t kid yourself about that; I’m good for that kind of money, any time. With or without the sale to Diters.” After all, the man could back out and forfeit his deposit. But he won’t, Runcible decided. Not that guy.

  Triumph filled him. Finally he could really buy into something big. And without Paul Wilby, he thought. Without anybody on earth helping him.

  In his underpants Walter Dombrosio stood before the bathroom mirror, shaving. He moved the razor methodically, getting no pleasure from the task. The door was open and he could hear the din of Sherry hurrying to get the dishes cleared from the breakfast table.

  “Are you almost finished?” she said, appearing in her robe and slippers. Her hair, up in metal curlers, clung tightly to her skull, giving her a priestly, ascetic appearance. Without makeup her face had a wan quality.

  He said, “Almost. You want to hear the dream I had last night?” He had been thinking about it while shaving.

  “Sure,” she said. Ever since having psychoanalysis she had liked to hear people’s dreams. She seemed to feel that she learned things about them that they did not know themselves.

  “I was in the market for a car,” he said. “An elderly man, well-dressed, came by with his 1946 Willys. It was pink.”

  “A pink Willys,” she repeated, seated on the chair at the vanity table and beginning to remove the curlers from her hair.

  “The upholstery was excellent quality,” he said. “Like an old Cadillac that had been pampered.”

  Sherry said, “The Willys comes from my step-father’s name. I wonder why pink. Wouldn’t a ’46 Willys be an awfully old car? That would be—sixteen or seventeen years old.”

  “It showed four hundred thousand miles,” he said. “But in the dream I thought it was a terrific car. Very high class.” In the dream he had wanted it very much; he had got the elderly gentleman to drive him around the block again and again.

  “Did you buy it?”

  “No,” he said. “The man wanted a hundred dollars for it.” In the dream that had seemed too much.

  “Did you actually dream that?” she said. She regarded him; he saw her reflection in the steamed-up mirror. “I wonder what it means. You didn’t buy it. I imagine it’s a wish-fulfillment dream. Unconsciously you yearn for quality but you’re unwilling to pay the price. Pink. I wonder why pink.”

  “Like a pink jellybean,” he said.

  “Childhood,” she said. “That’s why the car was so old. And showed so many miles. You want to go back to a safer, more simple time, when you were a boy. When candy was important; the oral stage.” The curlers were off, and she had started brushing her hair. “The old gentleman would be a father-figure.”

  “Four hundred thousand miles are a lot of miles,” he said, as he washed the lather from his face.

  Later, at nine-thirty that morning, he and his wife sat in Norm Lausch’s office. Norm had not showed up. The two of them waited without speaking, both of them tense.

  “Now I’m beginning to wonder if this is a good idea,” Sherry said. She put her cigarette out in the ashtray on Norm Lausch’s desk and, getting her pack from her purse, lit another. “It seemed like a good idea last night…to clear the air.” Sitting stiffly, very straight in the chair, her legs crossed and her skirt smoothed in place, she blew jets of smoke from her nostrils.

  “You look very nice,” he said to her. And he did not mean it ironically or maliciously; she did look nice, even more so than usual.

  “Thank you,” she said, with a smile in his direction. She seemed, now, to relax a trifle. Reaching out her hand, she took hold of his fingers and squeezed. “We’ve moved so far apart,” she said. “The last few weeks.”

  “Longer than that,” he said.

  “You make me so angry,” she said. “Breaking those things. You really hate me sometimes, don’t you? All your hostility comes out.”

  All, he thought. Is it all? He said, “Maybe there’s more.”

  “More hostility?” She put her face close to his; he smelled her hair, the faint odor, familiar and fine.

  Suddenly there stood Norm Lausch in the doorway of the office, in his pottery-colored suit, beaming down at them benevolently. “Hi, kids,” he said.

  Turning so that she faced him, Sherry said, “We were making up.”

  “So I see,” Lausch said. “Everything smoothed over?” Then his smile departed; he became serious. “Listen, kids. I know you’ve been waiting a long time to see me—” He yanked back his sleeve to study his watch. “I have a lot of business I have to get to; I’ve got to leave the building and drive down to Menlo Park.”

  And then his expression became benevolent once more.

  Reaching his pale, clean hand into his coat pocket he lifted out an envelope. He opened it. Dombrosio saw small colored cards.

  With a grin, a sly, pleased, winking grin, Lausch waved a finger at Dombrosio. “Teekits,” Lausch said.

  “What kind of tickets?” Sherry said in a conversational voice. Clearly, she did not follow what was happening.

  Dombrosio rose to his feet. “For tonight?” he said, holding out his hand. Lausch tapped his hand with the tickets and then let him look at them. They were for tonight, all right. And for box seats.

  “Giants play Chicago,” Lausch said. “Under the lights. Be my guests. Three box seats, right along the first base line. We can talk on the way down and back. Okay?” Leaving the tickets with Dombrosio he moved back out of the office. “Okay, keeds?”

  “Fine,” Dombrosio said, overcome with pleasure and surprise.

  Before Sherry could speak. Norm Lausch had departed. She and Dombrosio were by themselves, as before; it had taken only a moment for Lausch to appear and disappear.

  “That means we won’t get home until two or three in the morning,” Sherry said, with aggravation in her voice. “Well, I guess since you accepted there’s nothing we can do. But I don’t see how you plan to get up tomorrow morning; and I’ll have to get up, too, to get you in.”

  “We’ll make it,” he said. With satisfaction, he put the three tickets into his wallet, for safekeeping.

  A respite, he thought. Almost an omen. As if some force from above had reached down, for a moment, to relieve him.

  Maybe Norm Lausch sees how I feel, he said to himself.

  “Nothing pleases a man more than a couple of baseball tickets,” Sherry said. “It’s interesting that when something important comes up, some difficult problem that has to be solved, you retreat from it and take refuge in a ballgame.” Her exasperation and jumpiness came out clearly in her voice and made it ring. “Well, now I’ve got the problem of amusing myself until dinner time. I presume you and I will eat dinner together somewhere in town. When does the game start?”

  He told her when the game started and when they would have to meet Norm Lausch to be sure of getting there in time to find a parking place. And then he left her and walked downstairs to the ground-floor workshop to begin work for the day. He did not bother to say good-bye to her; he left her and went about his own business.

  “You’re not even going to say good-bye?” she called after him. “You really are in a foul mood. Or is it that you’re in a good mood and you can afford to be rude to me?”

  Alone, Sherry Dombrosio wandered about the main floor of Lausch Company, her purse and coat in her arms. She felt like a little girl roaming through some toy store. Santa’s workshop, she thought to herself with delight. The very air smelled of activity; she took a deep breath. She savored each sight she saw, each smell and sound.

  The high ceiling with its massive rafters caught her eye. And in the corners curly shavings of wood still remained. Sawdust on tables. The place boomed with far-off noises, intimations of happenings that she could not see. She could only imagine. What do they do here? she asked herself. They make things. All kinds of things. Out of paint and plaster and wood and m
etal and plastic and glue; they use every sort of material.

  Collecting her courage, she peeked through a half-open door marked NO ONE PERMITTED ENTRY WITHOUT WRITTEN AUTHORITY. At work tables the designers…hard at their tasks. Cellini’s workshop, she thought. Santa and Cellini. Silver salt shakers and candy canes.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Dombrosio,” one of the designers said.

  She took in the sight of the easel at which he worked. Could she come in? Of course. Maybe I’ll be working here, she thought. Like the rest of them.

  “Can I peek?” she asked, entering the room.

  In his white smock, the designer continued to work, his eyes on the paper tacked to the easel. Before him, in a row, he had conté crayons, brushes, turpentine, rags…she saw all sorts of paints and pigments, some in bottles, some in tubes. The scent of color filled her nose.

  “I guess I’m not supposed to look,” she said. But she did look. Quietly, with awe, she peeped past him. The designer was drawing a spray gun. Like a Flit gun, she thought. How fast his fingers moved as he rubbed a line. He gave the drawing depth; she marveled at his skill.

  Of course, she thought, what Mr. Lausch wants me for is actually a public relations job. She had no illusions about that. I wouldn’t be behind an easel. Not for a while.

  Since the designer paid no attention to her she felt free to explore. This was a tiny private room that she had never been in before; she took her opportunity and inspected a row of sketches tacked up on a beaver board display. The sketches, she discovered, were photostats, not the originals; they were black and white, now. The colors had of course not been reproduced. Below, in an open leather binder, she saw photographs of models. Cans and cartons…she thumbed through, taking them in as fast as she could. Cigarette packages…one which was quite familiar to her. Had Lausch Company designed it? So it seemed. She came to a photograph not yet clipped in, still loose. A shallow box with large letters. KATTY KLOSET.

  There, in the margin of the photograph, in pencil: the name Dombrosio. With a start she identified it as her husband’s name. This was his work. For a moment she had thought it was hers; in her art classes in recent years she signed herself that way, too.

  Aloud, she said, “Say, I have an idea.”

  The designer said nothing.

  She said, “Instead of calling it Katty Kloset, why don’t they call it Katty Korner?”

  Still the designer said nothing.

  “Like the game,” she said.

  After a time the designer said, “Nobody wants their cat to go to the toilet in the corner. That’s the whole point of the box.”

  She felt her ears redden. “That’s so,” she said.

  Raising his head, the designer looked at her over the top of his glasses. “Kloset for water closet,” he said. “You get it?” His tone was dry, hard, even a little ironic. Suddenly she felt out of place, as if she had transgressed. Maybe I went too far, she thought. I shouldn’t be here; it does say private on the door.

  “I guess I’m bothering you,” she said.

  To that, the designer said nothing.

  “Did you know,” she said, “that I might start work here?”

  The designer said, “Oh yes. You’re the woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “The one Teddy calls the mingei-ya woman.”

  “Who is Teddy?” Then she remembered; he was the Japanese artist they had hired. “What does mingei-ya mean?” she said.

  After a pause, still working at his sketch, the designer said in an abstracted, slow voice, “It’s a word they have for people like you.”

  She felt herself flush to the roots of her hair. “I’d like you to amplify that,” she said, as matter-of-factly as possible. “There’s an unpleasant implication in your remarks, don’t you think? Or am I mistaken?”

  “Nothing unpleasant,” the designer said, absorbed in his work. He seemed only barely aware of her, and that maddened her; she had seen Walt this way, when he was involved in some project, either in his garage workshop or upstairs with his easel. Clearly, these men, this type of person, withdrew into some private realm when they were at work. “It’s hard to translate it,” the designer said.

  “Try.”

  He said, presently. “It means folk art. What you do at home.”

  “I’ve had enough of what I do at home,” she said. “I want to get away from that and do the kind of thing you people are doing. Something important, that matters. Something creative.”

  “Can’t—” He mixed pigments, squeezing tubes and dabbing, with a spatula. “Can’t you be creative at home?”

  “I’m not interested in bohemian artistic expression,” she said. “I’ve had my fill of that, when I was in college.”

  The designer said, “Yes, I guess we all go through that. In our time. Sandals and beards. Turtleneck sweaters.”

  “I want to produce something—” She could not phrase it.

  “Cans for flyspray,” the designer said.

  When he put it that way, it did not sound so exalted; she knew that. She did not deny that.

  “You make a new package,” the designer said. “To make some housewife, when she goes into the supermarket, reach up and take down that package of soap. That particular package. Not another.”

  “Yes,” she said, with excitement.

  “Do you shop?” the designer said. “You shop for your family.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know how it feels, going along the soap counter. The aisle. I always look for one on sale.”

  “That little handwritten piece of paper thumbtacked to the shelf. That says ‘limit one to a customer.’”

  She nodded. “I never pay more than fifty-nine cents for a box of detergent, if I can help it.”

  “You price buy. You don’t impulse buy.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  The designer said, “It’s supposed to be impulse buying. Color has a lot to do with it. Position on the shelf. Brand name, of course. Ads on TV that set up conditioned responses. Press the button and the housewife jumps. Salivates at the sight of Dreft. Fels-Naptha.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said. Now she had found a way to put it. Seating herself in a chair opposite him she spread her coat and purse over her lap; opening her purse, she got out her cigarettes. “I read that book about persuasion, how the consumer is manipulated into buying things he doesn’t want.”

  The designer eyed her with ironic curiosity.

  “And that’s why this is so exciting,” she said, lighting her cigarette.

  “Sweet Jesus,” the designer said. “You want to be on the other end of it.” He paused in his work of spraying his sketch.

  She felt a rush of pleasure. A tingle that entered each part of her and made her shiver. Not looking directly at the designer she said, “What is that phrase? Hammer or anvil; you’re one or the other. I can never remember which signifies what, but—isn’t that the choice?” She laughed with delight. “It’s a very exciting thing, even being here. I can feel it coming in through the pores of my body.”

  “You can feel what?”

  “The—” She gestured. “The importance of it all.”

  For a time the designer stared at her. Then he returned to his spraying. His face had a dark, reddened quality, and he did not speak.

  Suddenly she longed to tell him about Willis. She wanted to let this man know about her step-father. But there was not the time, now; glancing at her watch she saw that she had to leave. At ten-forty she had to be across town for a class at California Arts and Crafts.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said, sliding to her feet and putting out her cigarette. “I have an appointment.”

  As she left the room the designer raised his head. He watched her go; she was aware of his eyes fixed on her as she shut the door. Feeling light-headed, even a little giddy, she made her way down the corridor. Following the arrow marked EXIT she arrived at a flight of stairs. Descending, she came out in the ground floor workshop. T
he noise of lathes and saws filled the air as she passed through.

  At the rear, by a worktable, stood her husband with Bob Fox; they were conferring over blueprints.

  “I’m just leaving,” she said merrily, pausing.

  In a somber voice, Walt said, “I thought you were already gone.”

  “No,” she said. “I stopped to talk.” The conversation with the designer upstairs had buoyed her up; she went on quickly, “Am I dressed right for the game tonight? Is this what women are supposed to wear to the ballgame?”

  To Fox, her husband said, “We’re going to take in the Giants game tonight.”

  “Lucky guys,” Fox said. “I envy you. Where are you sitting?”

  “Box seats,” Sherry said. “Mr. Lausch invited us; we’re going with him.”

  At that, Fox opened his eyes wide. “Not bad,” he said.

  Going to her husband, she leaned up and kissed him good-bye. “I’ll see you about six,” she said. “Here—right?”

  He nodded and touched her briefly on the shoulder, the merest return greeting. “You look nice,” he said. “In your brown suit.”

  At that, she laughed. “My brown suit?” She touched the lapels of her suit. “Do you call this brown?”

  “Sure,” Walt said.

  “Does it look brown to you?”

  With a stir of resentment and suspicion he said, “Sure it does.”

  Now she could not contain her merriment. Putting her hand to her mouth she said chokingly, “Walt—”

  “What?” he demanded. And, on his face, she saw fear.

  “This isn’t brown I’m wearing. This is gray. Look at the weave.” She held her sleeve up close to his eyes; he backed away, scowling, apprehensive. “You are. You’re a little color blind.”

  He stared at her, not at the suit but directly at her.

  “What color are my eyes?” she said. “Are they brown, too?”

  “No,” he said slowly.

  To Bob Fox she said, “Did you know Walt was a little color blind? I’ve always known it.”

  In a frighteningly loud voice her husband yelled, “God damn it, what do you mean? For christ’s sake, answer me!”