Voices From the Street

  “Another day, another dollar,” Jack White announced as he passed the counter on his way out. “Can you finish up alone, old man?”

  “Sure,” Hadley said, glad to see him go. “You run along.”

  White lingered. “Who’s the dame?”

  “What dame?” Hadley was instantly on his guard.

  “The one that was in earlier. The one who’s waiting for you up the block.”

  Hadley evaded; this was exactly what he had dreaded—and known he couldn’t possibly avoid. “How do you know some dame is waiting for me up the block?”

  “Christ, I heard her say it.” White beamed and thumped Hadley cynically on the arm. “While the cat’s away, eh? Have a good time and remember to keep your pants buttoned.” He unlocked the front door, waved cheerfully, and slammed it after him. His hard, efficient heels echoed away down the busy sidewalk, and Hadley was alone.

  Hurriedly, Hadley carried the money to the safe, tossed the sacks in, and locked it. He spun the new tape into position and closed up the register. A brief check showed that everything was turned off and in its place; he got his coat from the back closet and followed in the steps of Jack White, out the door and onto the sidewalk.

  The air was hot, stuffy, and unpleasant. The glare gave him a headache. Wishing the woman hadn’t appeared, wishing he were too sick to make it all the way to her car, he tried the door handle to be certain it was locked and then walked slowly up the sidewalk toward the liquor store.

  The first thing Marsha said to him was: “You forgot your pictures.”

  For a moment he considered the hell with the whole thing. Common sense told him to get out now, while it was still possible. With the car windows rolled down, Marsha sat listening to the radio: a Dixieland jazz band, harsh and blaring. They faced each other a moment, and then Hadley shrugged, defeated. “I’ll get them,” he agreed.

  “Want me to drive you back?”

  “No, I can walk.”

  He slowly returned to the store. His feet dragged; only with great effort was he able to turn the key in the lock and get the door open. Fatigue from eight hours of work lay over him, and his hungry, queasy stomach growled fretfully. As he was passing the counter on his way out, the package of pictures under his arm, the phone began to ring.

  Three rings passed before he answered it. The chances were that it was only a customer wanting to know why Olsen hadn’t returned her set. It might be Fergesson calling in about something. Or it might be Ellen.

  It was Ellen.

  “I’m glad I caught you.” Her voice came, soft and sad, from a vast distance. “How are you?”

  “Great,” he answered. He pulled the phone cord out as long as he could, to where he was able to reach out and lock the front door. He didn’t want Marsha showing up while he was talking to Ellen. “What do you want?”

  “I wondered—” She hesitated wistfully. “Stuart, why don’t you come over? Mother says you know you’re welcome. And Pete’s yelling his head off.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he misses you.” She added plaintively: “I miss you, too. Please, won’t you come on over? You don’t have to stay; just come by and be with us for a little while.”

  The cloying, childish tone of her voice, the pleading female sound that he hated so much, decided him. Staring fixedly up at the calendar over the tube chart, Hadley answered: “Honey, I can’t. I told some people I’d be over for dinner. I’m late as it is. If you’d called me sooner—”

  “What people?” There was no suspicion in her voice, only unhappy interest. “Dave and Laura?”

  “Customers I know,” Hadley explained, his eyes still on the calendar. He might as well do a good job of it. “I don’t think you ever met them. I was up at their place a couple of times, showing them an RCA combination. They’re nice people, about ten years older than us. He’s a stockbroker.”

  “What—time will you be home?”

  “I’m not sure. He’ll probably try to sell me some stock… It might be late.” He added: “Maybe I’ll stop off for a drink on the way back. I’m beat; I can use a drink.”

  Worry clouded his wife’s voice. “How much money do you have? It’s getting near the end of the month… I’m all out of the money you gave me.”

  “I’ve got plenty,” Hadley said impatiently; his ears had picked up the sound of a car motor outside. A car was coming into the yellow freight zone. “Look, honey, I’ve got to run. If I have a chance I’ll call you later, from their place.”

  “Have a good time,” Ellen said faintly, miserably. “And don’t eat any onions; you know how sick you are if you eat onions. Promise me?”

  “So long,” Hadley said brusquely, and broke the connection. He hurried to the door with his pictures, unlocked it, and stepped outside.

  Marsha’s gray Studebaker was parked in the freight zone. He locked the door of Modern TV and strode over. “What kept you?” she asked, opening the door for him.

  He slid in beside her. “Phone call. Some customer wanting to know about his set.”

  The car backed out expertly; a moment later they were moving down Cedar Street toward Bayshore Highway. A solid wall of traffic lay ahead of them: grim commute traffic on its way home from San Francisco.

  “We won’t have to tangle with that,” Marsha said; “it’s all coming this way.” She made a rapid, efficient left-hand turn onto the highway. “Hardly anybody going up the coast but us. This is the best time to travel.”

  As they drove along the highway, Marsha asked: “Why did you come? You don’t like me—you find me unpleasant.”

  “It was a struggle,” he admitted.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? You don’t enjoy being with me.”

  “It’s not pleasant, no. That doesn’t mean I don’t like you.” He laughed tautly. “My God, how could it be pleasant? Look at what I’m doing—I may be giving up my wife and son, my family. What am I getting out of it?”

  Marsha considered. “Well? What do you think you’re getting out of it? You must think you’re getting something.”

  It was a good question. He watched the brown fields go by on both sides of the car, flat and bleak and deserted. Now and then a faded, drab sign flashed past: WHEN YOU’RE IN SAN FRANCISCO STOP AT THE MARK HOPKINS…NEXT TIME TAKE THE TRAIN…MOBILGAS AND MOBILOIL ARE YEARS AHEAD. “Well,” he said, “I get to meet Beckheim.”

  “Is that all?” Marsha asked brightly. “That’s the only reason you’re here?”

  “If I wasn’t here, where would I be? Sitting around in my two-room apartment, watching TV or reading Time.” That seemed to express his feelings as well as he knew how. “Or maybe a show. If we can get somebody to stay with the baby. Dinner, and an hour of dancing. Some two-bit band like we had at high school dances. Guys in green tuxedos with bow ties, playing saxophones. Middle-aged couples pushing back and forth.”

  “Surely you have more imagination than that! Can’t you think up something better to do with your time?” She indicated the bundle of pictures. “What about those?”

  “That’s all in the past. Let’s face it—I’m not an artist: I’m a television salesman. Look at this suit and tell me if it’s the kind of suit an artist would wear.”

  After a moment Marsha said: “Deep down inside of you, you know you’re not a television salesman. Do you think a man is nothing more than the job he holds? Herman Melville was a customs inspector. Borodin was a doctor. Kafka worked in a bank. James Joyce was a Berlitz School translator.”

  “All right,” Hadley said irritably. “I get the idea.”

  “Do you? I wonder. The whole Communist doctrine is to get people to identify themselves with their economic function…in this country as anywhere else. But you know your inner life isn’t at all touched… Your real personality doesn’t come into play when you’re selling a television set. Don’t you feel the difference between the man who goes through the motions of selling a TV set and the man who you really are?”

  “Well,” Hadley adm
itted bitterly, “sometimes I feel as if I’m carrying out a deception. Sure, I hate my job. Sure, I don’t get any satisfaction out of it…but what choice have I got? I’m not there because I like it.”

  “Quit.”

  “And do what? Starve?”

  “You won’t starve—nobody starves in a modern industrial society. Start painting again… You have the ability.”

  Hadley flushed angrily. “You’ve never seen anything of mine; you don’t know what I can do.” He was flattered and disgusted at the same time. He wanted to hear words like that…but he couldn’t kid himself that much: it was absurd. It was a parody of praise. A woman he had met only two or three times, who knew nothing about his life, his work, telling him that he had artistic ability. “For all you know,” he said, “these canvases may be blank.”

  “I can tell they’re good,” Marsha said calmly, “because I know you. They would be an expression of yourself, of your inner being. And I know what that’s like.”

  Nettled, he gave up and didn’t comment. He retired into himself and brooded. She was serious, almost fervent—but there was no telling what went on inside her. What she did and said was separated from what she really was; there was a lapse of time, an open gap: there was no spontaneity. Everything was measured, studied out in advance. Marsha was a spectator to her own actions: she was above, remote and detached, putting a life-sized puppet through its paces. Here was real deception. Marsha was tangent to the outside world at no point: she was capable of breaking off totally, a sphere that revolved smoothly, silently, without touching the universe. Suspended in an invisible medium: an eighth of an inch from the world of matter.

  “Have you ever read Sartre?” Marsha asked.

  “No.”

  “I have a book of his I’ll lend you—it’s very small. The fundamentals of existentialism. It’s a philosophy that’s worth looking into…especially for a person like yourself.”

  “Why do you say that?” He was curious, since it had to do with him. “Why me in particular?”

  “I’d have to go into what I think are the basic causes of your dilemma.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Marsha sighed. “Do I have to? Well, You’re a renegade intellectual. That’s the main thing. You’re in hiding…going around in a powder blue suit and French cuffs, disguised as a bright eager young salesman, going up in business. And in reality, you’re not interested in business at all. Sham, all a sham, isn’t it? But you can’t go back to the world you escaped from… You don’t want that either. You don’t want to be a Dave Gold: impotent and full of words. Making extravagant gestures, mouthing intricate doctrines. You know, Louis Fischer asked an old Russian peasant woman how things had changed for her since the Revolution—am I boring you?”

  Hadley shook his head. “No.”

  “The old woman answered: ‘Well, people talk more.’ I think that sums up Marxism. You don’t want to go back to hollow words, talk for its own sake… You’ve seen the little avant-garde groups sitting around holding forth, and the little splinter socialist groups. Empty, hollow words. Talk, and no action. Words that lead only to more words. Dogmas. Vast tomes. Treatises. Books, discussion and argument, proposals, resolutions.” She made a disgusted sound. “Sartre shows that a man exists only through his actions. You understand? It’s not what you think but what you do. What you think has no meaning… You could sit and think forever—and what different would it make? It’s action that counts: the deed.”

  At dusk, they drove up the coast highway to San Francisco. Few cars were on the road; empty stretches of dim gray pavement writhed in front of and behind the little Studebaker. Tumbled bleak cliffs of scrubby green matting dropped down to the ocean. A cold wind whipped through the shrubbery, carrying bits of old newspaper, sticks and weeds, bouncing rusty beer cans and debris down the steep gullies into the leaden surf. Here and there NO DUMPING signs broke the monotony. On the right, sagging telegraph lines swayed dismally. Uniform scorched-brown hills stretched off and were lost in the thickening darkness. No living human was visible anywhere.

  “It’s dreary along here,” Hadley remarked.

  Marsha agreed as she expertly twisted the wheel. “Except for that,” she said, pointing ahead.

  Lonely and forlorn, a truck was parked on a dirt shoulder at the edge of the highway. A big hand-painted sign reading FRESH EGGS 59 CENTS DOZ whipped mournfully in the evening wind. A man and a boy were loading crates of eggs back into the truck; the day was over for them. Their shapes were barely visible in the gloom. Around the truck, debris, blown by the wind, was heaped and littered ankle deep. White urban filth that had been excreted by passing cars, then collected by the ocean wind.

  Watching the truck fall behind, Hadley was overcome with depression. The dismal, abandoned coastline unnerved him; the man and the boy toiling silently to collect their unsold eggs made him conscious of the futility of endeavor. Undoubtedly, the two of them had stood there all day while luxurious cars raced past.

  “I wonder if they sold any at all,” he said aloud. To him, the isolated man and his son represented all those he cared about, the halt and feeble and helpless about whom he was concerned. The defenseless people Marsha had dismissed with a wave of her hand.

  “Same price as the downtown supermarkets,” Marsha said. “Strictly sucker stuff.” She shifted into second gear to climb a long grade. “Motorists are always looking for roadside buys; the country people stick them good.”

  “I don’t like it here,” Hadley said. “It’s so damn deserted. What if the car broke down?”

  “It won’t,” Marsha said easily.

  “But it might. We might get stuck out here; who the hell would come along for us? Nobody. Maybe we’d stay here forever. It’s like sliding through a crack in the ground.”

  “Someday,” Marsha said, “all this will be built up. Little ranch-type California suburban homes, with Chryslers parked out front, or maybe Fords. Neat little one-story houses, all alike.”

  The car was entering San Francisco. A long park lay on their right; to the left was a ridge of trees, and beyond that the ocean.

  “This is a country club,” Marsha said. “Run for the rich colonels from the Presidio. So the plutocracy can have a place to play golf.”

  The trees were black pools of shadow. Overhead, stars had begun appearing in the dull violet night sky. Far off, beyond the country club, the massed yellow lights of the city winked and glowed, row after row, disappearing into black chunks of mountains. In the twilight gloom the city might have been some cosmic mining operation, working soundlessly, effortlessly, infinite machinery rising up from the ground, disappearing into the layer of drifting fog that hung over the Bay.

  Hadley gazed out yearningly at the lights; he drank in the vision of purposeful activity. “Beautiful,” he said softly. Cars swished past them, headlights flashing. The sounds of human life clanged against his ears: the sweet din of motors and traffic signals, radios, blaring metallic voices. He was relieved to be out of the desolate spaces between cities. That was what the country meant to him: empty wastes where nobody lived or came. The country was the arid land outside the cities, nothing more.

  “We’re here,” Marsha said grimly; her reaction was virtually the opposite of his.

  They turned off the coast highway and moved rapidly into the city itself. Modern white concrete apartment buildings whisked past on both sides; the street was broad and smooth, lit with yellow sodium vapor lamps. Hadley rolled down the window and hung out. Inhaling the presence of the city, he gratefully allowed the cold night wind to slap him across the face. He enjoyed the harsh sting; half shutting his eyes, he gazed around appreciatively.

  “You get security from it,” Marsha observed sourly. “You want to lose yourself in the mass. Make yourself indistinguishable. Safety in imitation.”

  “Damn it,” Hadley said resentfully, “I like people. I like to be with them. What’s so unnatural about that?”

  “They’re grinding you down!
They’re pulling you down to their level. Look at you—” She gestured. “You and your suit and tie and cuffs; you look like a million bright young salesmen, or vice presidents, or stock managers, or any kind of executive. But you’re not. Underneath, you’re not!”

  “What am I?” Hadley asked, eternally curious.

  “You’re an artist, of course. And you know it. So don’t try to pretend! Don’t try to creep off and hide in that salesman disguise; damn it, you’re going to have to stand up on your own two feet like a man and face your destiny.”

  Hadley scowled darkly; he knew it wasn’t true…but was it untrue? She believed it, evidently. Maybe she was right and he was wrong. Maybe it took somebody outside to know; maybe a man could never know who or what he was; he had to be told.

  “We’ll stop at my place for a drink,” Marsha said. She studied her wrist-watch. “Then we’ll go over and see Ted.”

  Hadley felt nervous cold sweat stand out on his palms. The reality of Theodore Beckheim swam closer; it was beginning to become convincing. Licking his dry lips, he said: “I don’t want to butt in, if he’s busy. He’s probably got a lot to do.”

  “Of course. But it’s important that you meet him. I’ve told him about you; he wants to meet you.”

  Hadley snorted. “That’s a laugh! What kind of a pitch are you trying to hand me? What’s in this for you? Christ, I’m not some hayseed mark to be led by the nose up to the knackers, so somebody can fleece me. I’m not walking into the slaughterhouse of my own free will—you must think I’m really in love with myself.”

  “I’m leading you away from the slaughterhouse,” Marsha said mildly.

  The street had narrowed. Up the side of a long hill the Studebaker crawled; modern apartments gave way to tall old-fashioned wooden houses, joined by a common wall. There was no grass or plants in sight, only the gray cement sidewalks. The pavement was rough and uneven. Here and there men and women shuffled along. Small stores, slatternly and dirty, winked in the evening darkness. Liquor stores, shoeshine parlors, cheap hotels, dingy grocery stores, pawnshops, bars.