We Can Build You

  “If they object,” I said, “we’ll keep plugging for our idea. In the end we’ll be able to get it because what could there possibly be against it? Except some weird puritanical notion on Stanton’s part.”

  And yet, even though it was my own idea, I felt a strange weary sensation, as if in my moment of creativity, my last burst of inspiration, I had defeated us all and everything we were trying for. Why was that? Was it too easy, this idea? After all, it was simply an adaptation of what we—or rather Maury and his daughter—had originally started out with. In the beginning they had dreamed their dream of refighting the entire Civil War, with all the millions of participants; now we were enthusiastic merely at the notion of a Civil War-type mechanical servant to relieve the housewife of her deadly daily chores. Somewhere along the line we had lost the most valuable portion of our ideas.

  Once more we were just a little firm out to make money; we had no grand vision, only a scheme to get rich. We were another Barrows but on a tiny, wretched scale; we had his greed but not his size. We would soon, if possible, commence a schlock Nanny operation; probably we would market our product by some phony sales pitch, some gimmick comparable to the classified “repossession” ad which we had been using.

  “No,” I said to Maury. “It’s terrible. Forget it.”

  Pausing at the door he yelled, “WHY? It’s terrific.”

  “Because,” I said, “it’s—” I could not express it. I felt worn out and despairing—and, even more than that, lonely. For who or what? For Pris Frauenzimmer? For Barrows … for the entire gang of them, Barrows and Blunk and Colleen Nild and Bob Bundy and Pris; what were they doing, right now? What crazy, wild, impractical scheme were they hatching out? I longed to know. We, Maury and I and Jerome and my brother Chester, we had been left behind.

  “Say it,” Maury said, dancing about with exasperation. “Why?”

  I said, “It’s—corny.”

  “Corny! The hell it is.” He glared at me, baffled.

  “Forget the idea. What do you suppose Barrows is up to, right this minute? You think they’re building the Edwards family? Or are they stealing our Centennial idea? Or hatching out something entirely new? Maury, we don’t have any vision. That’s what’s wrong. No vision.”

  “Sure we do.”

  “No,” I said. “Because we’re not crazy. We’re sober and sane. We’re not like your daughter, we’re not like Barrows. Isn’t that a fact? You mean you can’t feel it? The lack of that, here in this house? Some lunatic clack-clacking away at some monstrous nutty project until all hours, maybe leaving it half done right in the middle and going on to something else, something equally nutty?”

  “Maybe so,” Maury said. “But god almighty, Louis; we can’t just lie down and die because Pris went over to the other side. Don’t you imagine I’ve had thoughts of this kind? I knew her a lot better than you, buddy, a hell of a lot better. I’ve been tormented every night, thinking about them all together, but we have to go on and do the best we can. This idea of yours; it may not be equal to the electric light or the match, but it’s good. It’s small and it’s salable. It’ll work. And what do we have that’s better? At least it’ll save us money, save us having to hire some outside designer to fly out here and design the body of the Nanny, and an engineer to take Bundy’s place—assuming we could get one. Right, buddy?”

  Save us money, I thought. Pris and Barrows wouldn’t have bothered to worry about that; look at them send that van to carry her things all the way from Boise to Seattle. We’re small-time. We’re little.

  We’re beetles.

  Without Pris—without her.

  What did I do? I asked myself. Fall in love with her? A woman with eyes of ice, a calculating, ambitious schizoid type, a ward of the Federal Government’s Mental Health Bureau who will need psychotherapy the rest of her life, an ex-psychotic who engages in catatonic-excitement harebrained projects, who vilifies and attacks everyone in sight who doesn’t give her exactly what she wants when she wants it? What a woman, what a thing to fall in love with. What terrible fate is in store for me now?

  It was as if Pris, to me, were both life itself—and anti-life, the dead, the cruel, the cutting and rending, and yet also the spirit of existence itself. Movement: she was motion itself. Life in its growing, planning, calculating, harsh, thoughtless actuality. I could not stand having her around me; I could not stand being without her. Without Pris I dwindled away until I became nothing and eventually died like a bug in the backyard, unnoticed and unimportant; around her I was slashed, goaded, cut to pieces, stepped on—yet somehow I lived: in that, I was real. Did I enjoy suffering? No. It was that it seemed as if suffering was part of life, part of being with Pris. Without Pris there was no suffering, nothing erratic, unfair, unbalanced. But also, there was nothing alive, only small-time schlock schemes, a dusty little office with two or three men scrabbling in the sand …

  God knew I didn’t want to suffer at Pris’s hands or at anyone else’s. But suffering was an indication that reality was close by. In a dream there is fright, but not literal, slow, bodily pain, the daily torment that Pris made us endure by her very presence. It was not something which she did to us deliberately; it was a natural outgrowth of what she was.

  We could evade it only by getting rid of her, and that was what we had done: we had lost her. And with her went reality itself, with all its contradictions and peculiarities; life now would be predictable: we would produce the Civil War Soldier Nannies, we would have a certain amount of money, and so forth. But what did it mean? What did it matter?

  “Listen,” Maury was saying to me. “We have to go on.”

  I nodded.

  “I mean it,” Maury said loudly in my ear. “We can’t give up. We’ll call a meeting of the Board, like we were going to do; you tell them your idea, fight for your idea like you really believed in it. Okay? You promise?” He whacked me on the back. “Come on, goddam you, or I’ll give you a crack in the eye that’ll send you to the hospital. Buddy, come on!”

  “Okay,” I said, “but I feel you’re talking to someone on the other side of the grave.”

  “Yeah, and you look like it, too. But come on anyhow and let’s get going; you go downstairs and talk Stanton into it; I know Lincoln won’t give us any trouble—all he does is sit there in his room and chuckle over Winnie the Pooh”

  “What the hell is that? Another kids’ book?”

  “That’s right, buddy,” Maury said. “So go on down there.”

  I did so, feeling a little cheered up. But nothing would bring me back to life, not really, except for Pris. I had to deal with that fact and face it with greater force every moment of the day.

  The first item which we found in the Seattle papers having to do with Pris almost got by us, because it did not seem to be about Pris at all. We had to read the item again and again until we were certain.

  It told about Sam K. Barrows—that was what had caught our eye. And a stunning young artist he had been seen at nightclubs with. The girl’s name, according to the columnist, was Pristine Womankind.

  “Jeezus!” Maury screeched, his face black. ‘That’s her name; that’s a translation of Frauenzimmer. But it isn’t. Listen, buddy; I always put everybody on about that, you and Pris and my ex-wife. Frauenzimmer doesn’t mean womankind; it means ladies of pleasure. You know. Streetwalkers.” He reread the item incredulously. “She’s changed her name but she doesn’t know; hell, it ought to be Pristine Streetwalkers. What a farce, I mean, it’s insane. You know what it is? That Marjorie Morningstar; her name was Morgenstern, and it meant Morningstar; Pris got the idea from that, too. And Priscilla to Pristine. I’m going mad.” He paced frantically around the office, rereading the newspaper item again and again. “I know it’s Pris; it has to be. Listen to the description. You tell me if this isn’t Pris:

  Seen at Swami’s: None other than Sam (The Big Man) Barrows, escorting what for the kiddies who stay up late we like to call his “new protégé,” a sharper-than-a-s
ixth-grade-teacher’s-grading-pencil chick, name of—if you can swallow this—Pristine Womankind, with a better-than-this-world expression, like she doesn’t dig us ordinary mortals, black hair, and a figure that would make those old wooden fronts of ships (y’know the kind?) green with envy. Also in the company, Dave Blunk, the attorney, tells us that Pris is an artist, with other talents which you CAN’T see … and, Dave grins, maybe going to show up on TV one of these years, as an actress, no less! …

  “God, what rubbish,” Maury said, tossing the paper down. “How can those gossip columnists write like that? They’re demented. But you can tell it’s Pris anyhow. What’s that mean about her going to turn up as a TV actress?”

  I said, “Barrows must own a TV station or a piece of one.”

  “He owns a dogfood company that cans whale blubber,” Maury said. “And it sponsors a TV show once a week, a sort of circus and variety piece of business. He’s probably putting the bite on them to give Pris a couple of minutes. But doing what? She can’t act! She has no talents! I think I will call the police. Get Lincoln in here; I want an attorney’s advice.”

  I tried to calm him down; he was in a state of wild agitation.

  “He’s sleeping with her! That beast is sleeping with my daughter Pris! He’s corruption itself!” Maury began calling the airfield at Boise, trying to get a rocket flight to Seattle. “I’m going down there and arrest him,” he told me between calls. “I’m taking a gun along; the hell with going to the police. That girl’s only eighteen; it’s a felony. We’ve got a prima facie case against him—I’ll wreck his life. He’ll be in the can for twenty-five years.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Barrows has absolutely thought it through, as we’ve said time and again; he’s got that lawyer Blunk tagging along. They’re covered; don’t ask me how, but they’ve thought of everything there is. Just because some gossip columnist chose to write that your daughter is—”

  “I’ll kill her, then,” Maury said.

  “Wait. For god’s sake shut up and listen. Whether she’s sleeping, as you put it, with him or not I don’t know. Probably she is his mistress. I think you’re right. But proving it is another matter altogether. Now, you can force her to return here to Ontario, but there’s even a way he can eventually get around that.”

  “I wish she was back in Kansas City; I wish she had never left the mental health clinic. She’s just a poor ex-psychotic child!” He calmed a little. “How could he get her back?”

  “Barrows can have some punk in his organization marry her. And once that happens no one has authority over her. Do you want that?” I had talked to the Lincoln and I knew; the Lincoln had already shown me how difficult it was to force a man like Barrows who knew the law to do anything. Barrows could bend the law like a pipe-cleaner. For him it was not a rule or a hindrance; it was a convenience.

  “That would be terrible,” Maury said. “I see what you mean. As a legal pretext to permit him to keep her in Seattle.” His face was gray.

  “And then you’ll never get her back.”

  “And she’ll be sleeping with two men, her punk husband, some goddam messenger boy from some factory Barrows owns, and—Barrows, too.” He stared at me wild-eyed.

  “Maury,” I said, “we have to face facts. Pris probably slept with boys already, for instance in school.”

  His expression became more distorted.

  “I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but the way she talked to me one night—”

  “Okay,” Maury said. “We’ll let it go.”

  “Sleeping with Barrows won’t kill her, and it won’t kill you. At least she won’t become pregnant, he’s smart enough to make sure of that. He’ll see she takes her shots.”

  Maury nodded. “I wish I was dead,” he said.

  “I feel the same way. But remember what you told me not more than two days ago? That we had to go on, no matter how badly we felt? Now I’m telling you the same thing. No matter how much Pris meant to either of us—isn’t that so?”

  “Yeah,” he said at last.

  We went ahead, then, and picked up where we had left off. At the Board meeting the Stanton had objected to any of the Nannies wearing the Rebel gray; it was willing to go along with the Civil War theme, but the soldiers had to be loyal Union lads. Who, the Stanton demanded, would trust their child with a Reb? We gave in, and Jerome was told to begin tooling up the Rosen factory; meanwhile we at Ontario, at the R & R ASSOCIATES business office, began making the layouts, conferring with a Japanese electronics engineer whom we had called in on a part-time basis.

  Several days later a second item appeared in a Seattle newspaper. This one I saw before Maury did.

  Miss Pristine Womankind, scintillating raven-haired young starlet discovered by the Barrows organization, will be on hand to award a gold baseball to the Little League champions, Irving Kahn, press secretary for Mr. Barrows, told representatives of the wire services today. Since one game of the Little League play-offs remains yet to be played, it is still.

  So Sam K. Barrows had a press agent at work, as well as Dave Blunk and all the others. Barrows was giving Pris what she had long wanted; he was keeping his end of whatever bargain they had made—no doubt of that. And I had no doubt that she was keeping her end as well.

  She’s in good hands, I said to myself. Probably there isn’t a human being in North America more qualified to give Pris what she wants out of life.

  The article was titled BIG LEAGUE AWARDS GOLD BASEBALL TO LITTLE LEAGUERS, Pris being “big league,” now. A further study of it told me that Mr. Sam K. Barrows had paid for the uniforms of the Little League club expected to win the gold baseball—needless to say, Barrows was providing the gold baseball—and on their backs appeared the words:

  BARROWS ORGANIZATION

  On the front, of course, appeared the name of their team, whatever area or school it was the boys came from.

  I had no doubt that she was very happy. After all Jayne Mansfield had begun by being Miss Straight Spine, picked by the chiropractors of America back in the ‘fifties; that had been her first publicity break. She had been one of those health food addicts in those days.

  So look what may lie ahead for Pris, I said to myself. First she hands out a gold baseball to a kids’ ballteam and from there she goes rapidly to the top. Maybe Barrows can get a spread of nude shots of her into Life; it’s not out of the question, they do have their nude spread each week. That way her fame would be great. All she would have to do is take off her clothes in public, before an expert color photographer, instead of merely in private before the eyes of Sam K. Barrows.

  Then she can briefly marry President Mendoza. He’s been married, what is it, forty-one times already, sometimes for no longer than a week. Or at least get invited to one of the stag gatherings at the White House or out on the high seas in the Presidential yacht, or for a weekend at the President’s luxurious vacation satellite. Especially those stag gatherings; the girls who are invited to perform there are never the same again—their fame is assured and all sorts of careers are open to them, especially in the entertainment field. For if President Mendoza wants them, every man in the U.S. wants them, too, because as everybody knows the President of the United States has incredibly high taste as well as having the first choice of—

  I was driving myself insane with these thoughts.

  How long will it take? I wondered. Weeks? Months? Can he do this right away or does it take a lot of time?

  A week later, while browsing through the TV guide, I discovered Pris listed in the weekly show sponsored by Barrows’ dogfood company. According to the ad and the listing she played the girl in a knife-throwing act; flaming knives were thrown at her while she danced the Lunar Fling wearing one of the new transparent bathing suits. The scene had been shot in Sweden, such a bathing suit still being illegal at beaches in the United States.

  I did not show the listing to Maury, but he came across it on his own anyhow. A day before the program he called me over to his place a
nd showed me the listing. In the magazine there was a small shot of Pris, too, just her head and shoulders. It had, however, been taken in such a way as to indicate that she wore nothing at all. We both gazed at it with ferocity and despair. And yet, she certainly looked happy. Probably she was.

  Behind her in the picture one could see green hills and water. The natural, healthy wonders of Earth. And against that this laughing black-haired slender girl, full of life and excitement and vitality. Full of—the future.

  The future belongs to her, I realized as I examined the picture. Whether she appears nude on a goat-hair, vegetable-dye rug in Life or becomes the President’s mistress for a weekend or dances madly, naked from the waist up, while flaming knives are hurled at her during a kiddies’ TV program—she is still real, still beautiful and wonderful, like the hills and the ocean, and no one can destroy that or spoil that, however angry and wretched they feel. What do Maury and I have? What can we offer her? Only something moldy. Something that reeks—not of tomorrow—but of yesterday, the past. Of age, sorrow, and old death.

  “Buddy,” I said to Maury, “I think I’m going to Seattle.”

  He said nothing; he continued reading the text in the TV guide.

  “I frankly don’t care anymore about simulacra,” I said. “I’m sorry to say it but it’s the truth; I just want to go to Seattle and see how she is. Maybe afterward—”

  “You won’t come back. Either of you.”

  “Maybe we will.”

  “Want to bet?”

  I bet him ten bucks. That was all I could do; there was no use making him a promise which I probably could not—and would not—keep.

  “It’ll wreck R & R ASSOCIATES,” Maury said.

  “Maybe so, but I still have to go.”

  That night I began packing my clothes. I made a reservation on a TWA Boeing 900 rocket flight for Seattle; it left the following morning at ten-forty. Now there was no stopping me; I did not even bother to telephone Maury and tell him anything more. Why waste my time? He could do nothing. Could I? That remained to be seen.