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Going Away

A Report, A Memoir

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

The present narrative opens on the day which was to prove his last at the agency in Hollywood ...

I awoke early in my apartment and rested quietly for an hour. Then I phoned my office to say that I would be in. Lucy, my secretary, was pleased, and said that she was thinking of getting married. We gossiped a few moments, then I got out of bed, slowly, and took a cold shower and shaved my beard off. I had let it grow while I was seeing nobody. I regretted seeing it go and made a game of shaving, first removing one sideburn, then half a mustache, then the other sideburn, until all that was left was half a mustache on a clean-shaven face. I looked like a mad Albanian peasant. I was laughing so hard I had to sit down on the edge of the bathtub.

I put on my charcoal-brown suit. I dressed neatly and carefully while listening to some of my jazz records. George Mitchell's "Tin Roof Blues," which many people take for Louis, and Brubeck's "Perdido," I put on twice, and then I went downstairs from my garage apartment and out to my car. I said hello to the woman from the yellow stucco house in front who was hanging wash in the garden we shared. "Sweet day, isn't it?" she said. It was what she said ten months out of the year whenever we chanced upon each other in the driveway. She and her family were from Eau Clair, Wisconsin. They stayed up watching television until one or two most every morning, a set of grandparents, husband and wife, three children. As I always did ten months out of each year, I smiled and agreed. It was very warm and sunny with hardly a breeze to move the leaves in the trees lining the quiet, sun-blasted street.

My car was still there. I loved it. Sixteen years old, with a crushed-in rear end, a torn right fender and a hood that was liable to fly open at speeds exceeding forty miles per hour. None of the original paint was left; before I bought it someone had scraped it down to its original rusty gray metallic finish which it must have had before it went under the paint spray at the Flint factory. Under the hot sun it look gruesome. My friends always said it was the kind of car hacked-up bodies of domestic murder victims were left in. I loved that old car. It ran smooth as cream. Coming back from my daily rounds at the film studios in the valley I used to beat Cadillacs and Lincolns because my car was so quick off the mark at traffic signals, not like those sluggish Firedome Eight battleships.

The top of the car was spattered with bird droppings and buds from the overhanging cedar tree under which it had been parked for the past month. I rolled down all the windows to air it out. I got in but it wouldn't start. I wasn't worried. It seldom did after inactivity. I got out and raised the hood and twisted the idle screw forward. When I got back in, the motor started instantly. The idle screw: it was that kind of car. I pushed open the wind vent and let the motor idle a few moments. Then I started for the office.

I felt very good driving my car for the first time in a month. I took the long way round, just to get the feel. It made the Clark Drive hill up to Sunset Boulevard in third (I had bought it for $100 after the salesman let me take it over Laurel Canyon pass without changing gears), and I turned north on the Strip towards the office, feeling better and better. The late-morning traffic was light. The Solomon Benedict Building was built into the middle of a palm-lined, grassed-up cul-de-sac where Burton Way intersected with Bedford Way and Santa Monica Boulevard. The cul-de-sac was called, legally and officially, Benedict Square. I turned in to the company parking lot and nosed in diagonally at my number, 38, between a new Chrysler convertible and a 1956 creme-and-green Cadillac belonging to fellows at the office. My car always stood out like a bloody sore thumb in that parking lot filled with gleaming new models, Lincolns, Jags, even a Mercedes, none of them ever over two years old. Status is peace carried on by other means. I had withstood a lot of pressure in not turning my old car in, and finally my bosses had put a good face on it by pointing out the old Pontiac to visiting firemen as a curio, the implication being that, of course, I had the money for a new car but felt queerly for that old wreck. Which wasn't so far from wrong either.

"Hey, stranger, where you been all our lives!" I crossed the street and shook hands with Andy and Joel, who ran the gas station across the boulevard from the agency. They were war friends, wiry and peppery, in their early forties. They had married once each, and now they were living with Joel's mother, who cooked for them and was a physiotherapist at a Jewish hospital. Joel owned a small boat which he kept down at San Pedro. For over a year he kept asking me to come sailing one weekend, and when I finally did we weren't out an hour before we ran into a small fleet of Yugoslav tuna tugs with colored lamps and gay flags hanging all over them. Joel hollered over and got us invited aboard two of the tugs lashed to each other. Those Slavs were jumping. Steaks, slivovitz, the works. It was their national feast day or something. We went down into one of the tugs and stayed all day, eating and drinking and singing to an accordion. The captain asked Joel to marry his daughter and Joel said sure, any time. Everybody pounded everybody else on the back and yelled "Muy drug" all day long. I had a ball. Joel was so drunk that one of the Yugoslav tuna sailors had to take his boat back for him. Joel's buddy, Andy, was even smaller, and a pugnacious man. He owned the parking concession for the night club next door to the gas station, and his right hand tended to be bandaged from slugging drunken playboys who cracked wise about the Jews. He was thinking of going into the picture-frame business because the oil company that controlled the property on which the station sat had decided to close out the business. Neither Andy nor Joel was bitter. "It's the way the ball bounces," shrugged Joel. "It's their way of making a living," said Andy. The friends were excellent mechanics and also thieves. Whenever my car needed repairs they fixed it up practically for free. But let a Cadillac or Lincoln roll in with a dirty spark plug, if they thought they could get away with it the boys would rip out the transmission and give in a bill for $400. That's how they were. During the war, they had been artillery officers in the Pacific. Once, over Buna, both had been flying as artillery spotters when their plane ran out of fuel and crashed to the ground. They were proud of the incident and liked to talk about it.

"Where you been, boychik?" chirped Joel. Sick for a while, I said. "Sick hell," rasped Andy, "he's just enervated on too much pooo-oo-nn tang." This like to broke the boys up laughing. I must have been paler than I thought. They were being gentle. Joel said, "Say, boychik, what's this I hear about you leaving the office?" He nodded at the four-story pale blue penthouse building across the boulevard. "Say it ain't so, Shoeless Joe." I said yes, I had given notice, though I hadn't decided just when. It might be months. My bosses were amenable. Some wanted me to stay. The consensus was, there was no rush.

Andy said disgustedly, "Ah, you're a hothead. You need a psychiatrist. A good job like that." Joel asked, with real concern, "What'll you do?" I thought and said, I'm not sure. Maybe look around.

Joel cocked a quiet look at me. "Mishuga, jobs like that don't grow on trees. Go first to a headshrinker. Andy and me went last year and he said we ought to leave Mama, remember, Andy? The goneff. He's never tasted Mama's knadlach. Still it was worth it for the laughs. I dated his receptionist until I found out she was going to him too. It's a funny world." A car drove up to the gas pumps. It was a new Imperial. Maybe it had a dirty spark plug. Joel and Andy jumped to service it, all smiles and chatter. I started to walk away. I heard Andy say, mournfully, "Hey, mister, you're leaking oil bad." I crossed the street. Just before I went into the office Joel shouted, "We'll miss you, boychik!" I waved and went inside and walked upstairs.

It was like stepping into a jungle of cold air. The air-conditioning was on. At the moment I did not feel like facing my assembled colleagues, and slipped into my private office just off the third- floor corridor. I closed the door behind me and pulled the Venetian blinds and snapped on the floor lamp. Lucy had gotten everything ship-shape for me. I sat down in my red leather chair and looked through the interoffice memos piled in my IN tray. Then I buzzed Lucy. "G'morning, sweetie," she crackled through the box. "You know, there's a meeting."

She always said it like that to me, half reprovingly, and also to let me know that she knew I was very bored by the ceremony of the Monday morning meeting. Of course, I said, come on in with your notebook. I sat back. Lucy, discreet person that she was, came in by the hall door. She was, as usual, brightly dressed and made up, her coal-black hair done up in a new-look bun, her large bright eyes heavily mascaraed. Lucy was almost fifty and had a seventeen-year-old daughter who played tennis and was doing badly in school. We talked about her problems a lot. A few months ago I had recommended a remedial teacher, a friend of mine who had been thrown out of the Pacoima school system for "past activities." Esmeralda, my friend, had been good for the girl, and Lucy had been grateful to me. She was always being grateful for something, starting with our first week together when she knew I wanted to get rid of her. Slowly I had come to like and respect Lucy. She was a lady, a confused lady, a chronic, quite secret alcoholic and way, way out on some crazy limb of her own. She had braveness. And, also, she had persisted in liking me even though I didn't treat her well those first few weeks. Later on, I realized just how clever she was. Though frightened and a little mousy now, she had been around a great deal. When we finally got to know each other we used to sit around in the afternoons laughing together while she told stories of her lovers. She was very fast at shorthand and bloody awful at typing. But she was my right arm. I could tell Lucy anything. She was the person I had bequeathed my apartment to.

She remained at the door. "Hello, sweetie, how do you feel?" Not half bad, I said. I got up and kissed her on the cheek. She began to cry. I had learned not to become angry when she did that. "I'm not sad, you know," she said. Sure, I said. She sat down on the couch and began, skillfully, to wipe away the tears. How was it, being Les's secretary? I asked.

She looked up and grinned, showing those marvelous white young teeth of hers. "Don't ask," she said. "I think he hates me." He hates everybody. How's everything around here? I asked. She gave me a run-down, what clients had departed, what new clients had come in, who was squabbling with whom, which secretary was sleeping, or militantly not sleeping, with what agent. Normal, I said. "I suppose that's one word for it," Lucy said.

I sat on the desk and told her I wanted to dictate a short letter before I went to the meeting. Lucy was great. She never once asked me when I was going to leave. The letter had been bothering me for weeks, all the time I was lying in bed and growing my beard and watching television from 8 A.M. to one in the morning, getting up to go to the bathroom or make myself a sandwich in the kitchen. I had even taken my phone off the hook.

It wasn't an important letter, merely to a corresponding agent in New York to tell him that one of my clients had gone east. It had been on my mind. The client in question, a writer-director, wasn't poor but I liked him. Also, for himself, he needed work. I consoled myself that he had probably pulled a good job his first week in New York, but I didn't like the fact that I had delayed this long, out of laziness. Before I'd gotten sick, I had been doing things like that. If it hadn't been for Lucy checking up on me I probably would have done more. Okay, I said, here goes. She flipped open her pad and I dictated the letter, making up an excuse for the delay as I went along. Lucy took shorthand with her legs crossed and in perfect posture. It was only last year that she had graduated secretarial school, and she was always trying to do things the correct way, even when she was half crocked. She had, considering her small body, rather long and beautiful legs. That was one thing, I don't think she knew I liked her legs. All the while I was dictating the telephone and buzzer kept going. Lucy told them I was out.

I got up and straightened my tie. Lucy asked, before I went down to the meeting, would I go out and say hello to Shirley, my other secretary. I said I would, later. Shirley was eighteen and cute. She had visited me during my illness and had gotten into bed to watch the Democratic convention on TV with me. We had taken off our clothes and fooled around and not much else, the kind of thing you stop doing at her age. Shirley was a nice hamisheh but I didn't feel, in view of our history, like putting her first on my list of hellos. I did not tell Lucy any of this. She had been advising me for months to get it over with already with Shirley, and I wasn't much in love with the prospect of my two secretaries coffee-klatsching over my sexual regressions. Not that I had any assurances they weren't already, anyway.

I said Geronimo! and slipped out the door. I had to walk down the stairs and out the side door to get in through the ornate front entrance. It was hot as a stove out, and the sun striking the cement pavement of the cul-de-sac like to blinded me. Just in case Joel and Andy were waving from the gas station, I waved back, and then the pneumatically operated door swung open before I touched it. It was that kind of thing, later to be found in the American Express building in Paris, which gave me the creeps. Involuntarily, as I always did upon entering the ground-floor suite where the agency brass lived, I hunched my shoulders slightly and went into a kind of subtle crouch.

"Benedict Agency, good morning ... Benedict Agency, good morning," droned the switchboard operator, Rita, whose boyfriend was one of Mickey Cohen's hoods. Rita was attractive in an inquisitive, bulky way, but men, including myself, stayed away from her. "G'morning, lover," said Estelle, the slim, harebrained receptionist, "where ya been keepin'?" Estelle had just got married and had had to fight her fiancé, an orthodox Balkan from Riverside, who insisted that she shave her head before the wedding ceremony as a good wife should. Keeping cool, honey, I replied. I reminded myself to ask Lucy if she was serious about getting married.

Walking past the rows of desks I said hello to the secretaries and answered questions about my health. The doors to the private offices were open, their inhabitants already in the boss's office for the meeting. I noticed that all the interoffice memos in the IN and OUT trays were lying face down. That was a new rule, to prevent clients from reading what the agent said about them. Clients who dropped in unannounced always complicated an agent's job, Hermione, the outlandishly brawny office manager, stopped me. "How do you feel? Everybody's been so worried about you." I said, Hermione, I feel just fine, and then stepped into the ceremony of the Monday meeting.

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Excerpted from Going Away by Clancy Sigal. Copyright © 1961 Clancy Sigal. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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