Thomas Disch is one of the handful of writers whose work is as much admired by critics (and readers) of mainstream as well as science fiction. He wrote six fine stories for F&SF in the 1960s. Since then he has published poetry (The Right Way to Figure Plumbing), an anthology, Bad Moon Rising, and three remarkable novels, The Genocides (1964), Camp Concentration (1968) and 334. He has just completed a new sf novel, On Wings of Song.

The Man Who Had No Idea
THOMAS M. DISCH
From The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction #23

At first he'd assumed that he'd failed. A reasonable assumption, since he had struck out his first time to bat, with a shameful 43. But when two weeks had gone by and there was still no word from the Board of Examiners, he wondered if maybe he'd managed to squeak through. He didn't see how he could have. The examiner, a wizened, white-haired fuddy-duddy whose name Barry instantly forgot, had been hostile and aggressive right from the word go, telling Barry that he thought his handshake was too sincere. He directed the conversation first to the possible dangers of excessive sunbathing, which was surely an oblique criticism of Barry's end-of-August tan and the leisure such a tan implied, then started in on the likelihood that dolphins were as intelligent as people. Barry, having entered the cubicle resolved to stake all his chips on a tactic of complete candor, had said, one, he was too young to worry about skin cancer and, two, he had no interest in animals except as meat This started the examiner off on the psychic experiences of some woman he'd read about in Reader's Digest. Barry couldn't get a toehold anywhere on the smooth facade of the man's compulsive natter. He got the feeling, more and more, that he was keeping score and the old fart was being tested, an attitude that did not bode well. Finally, with ten minutes left on the clock, he'd just up and left, which was not, strictly speaking, a violation. It did imply that some kind of closure had been achieved, which definitely was not the case; he'd panicked, pure and simple. A fiasco from which he'd naturally feared the worst in the form of a letter addressed to Dear Applicant. ("We regret to inform you, etc. . . .") But possibly the old fart had been making things deliberately difficult, testing him, possibly his reactions hadn't been that entirely inappropriate. Possibly he'd passed.
When another two weeks went by without the Board of Examiners saying boo, he couldn't stand the suspense any longer and went down to Center St. to fill out a form that asked basically where did he stand. A clerk coded the form and fed it into the computer. The computer instructed Barry to fill out another form, giving more details. Fortunately he'd brought the data the computer wanted, so he was able to fill out the second form on the spot After a wait of less than ten minutes, his number lighted up on the board and he was told to go to Window 28.
Window 28 was the window that issued licenses: he had passed!
"I passed," he announced incredulously to the clerk at the window.
The clerk had the license with his name on it, Barry Riordan, right there in her hand. She inserted it into the slot of a gray machine which responded with an authoritative chunk. She slid the validated license under the grille.
"Do you know-I still can't believe it. This is my license: that's really incredible."
The clerk tapped the shut-up button pinned on the neckband of her T-shirt.
"Oh. Sorry, I didn't notice. Well. . .thanks."
He smiled at her, a commiserating guilty smile, and she smiled back, a mechanical next-please smile.
He didn't look at the license till he was out on the street Stapled to the back of it was a printed notice:
IMPORTANT
Due to the recent systems overload error, your test results of August 24 have been erased. Therefore, in accordance with Bylaw 9(c), Section XII, of the Revised Federal Communications Act, you are being issued a Temporary License, valid for three months from the date of issue, subject to the restrictions set forth hi Appendix n of the Federal Communications Handbook (18th edition).
You may reapply for another examination at any time. An examination score in or above the eighth percentile will secure the removal of all restrictions, and you will immediately receive your Permanent License. A score in the sixth or seventh percentile will not affect the validity of your Temporary License, though its expiration date may be extended by this means for a period of up to three months. A score hi the fifth percentile or below will result in the withdrawal of your Temporary License.
Holders of a Temporary License are advised to study Chapter Nine ("The Temporary License") in the Federal Communications Handbook. Remember that direct, interactive personal communications are one of our most valuable heritages. Use your license wisely. Do not abuse the privilege of free speech.
So in fact he hadn't passed the exam. Or maybe he had. He'd never find out.
His first elation fizzled out and he was left with his usual flattened sense of personal inconsequence. Tucking the license into his ID folder, he felt like a complete charlatan, a nobody pretending to be a somebody. If-he'd scored in the first percentile, he'd have been issued this license the same as if he'd scored in the tenth. And he knew with a priori certainty that he hadn't done that well. The most he'd hoped for was another seven points, just enough to top him over the edge, into the sixth percentile. Instead he'd had dumb luck.
Not to worry, he advised himself. The worst is over. You've got your license. How you got it doesn't matter.
Oh, yeah, another and less friendly inward voice replied. Now all you need are three endorsements. Lots of luck.
Well, I'll get them, he insisted, hoping to impress the other voice with the authenticity and vitality of his self-confidence. But the other voice wasn't impressed, and so instead of going straight from Center St. to the nearest speakeasy to celebrate, he took the subway home and spent the evening watching first a fascinating documentary on calcium structures and then Celebrity Circus, with Willy Marx. Willy had four guests: a famous prostitute, a tax accountant who had just published his memoirs, a comedian who did a surrealistic skit about a speakeasy for five-year-olds, and a novelist with a speech impediment who got into an argument with the comedian about whether his skit was essentially truthful or unjustifiably cruet In the middle of their argument Barry came down with a murderous headache, took two aspirins, and went to bed. Just before he fell asleep, he thought: I could call them and tell them what I thought.
But what did he think?
He didn't know.
That, in a nutshell, was Barry's problem. At last he had his license and could talk to anyone he wanted to talk to, but he didn't know what to talk about. He had no ideas of his own. He agreed with anything anyone said. The skit had been both essentially truthful and unjustifiably cruel. Too much sunbathing probably was dangerous. Porpoises probably were as smart as people.
Fortunately for his morale, this state of funk did not continue long. Barry didn't let it. The next night he was off to Partyland, a 23rd St. speakeasy that advertised heavily on late-night TV. As he approached the froth of electric lights cantilevered over the entrance, Barry could feel the middle of his body turning hollow with excitement, his throat and tongue getting tingly.
There was only a short line, and in a moment he was standing in front of the box office window. "Ring?" the window asked. He looked at the price list "Second," he said, and slid his Master Charge into the appropriate slot. "License, please," said the window, winking an arrow that pointed at another slot. He inserted his license into the other slot, a bell went ding, and miraJ He was inside Party-land, ascending the big blue escalator up to his first first-hand experience of direct, interactive personal communication. Not a classroom exercise, not a therapy session, not a job briefing, not an ecumenical agape, but an honest-to-god conversation, spontaneous, unstructured, and all his own.
The usher who led him to his seat in the second ring sat down beside bun and started to tell him about a Japanese department store that covered an entire sixteen and a half acres, had thirty-two restaurants, two movie theaters, and a children's playground.
"That's fascinating, isn't it?" the Usher concluded, after setting forth further facts about this remarkable department store.
"I suppose it is," Barry said noncommittally. He couldn't figure out why the usher wanted to tell him about a department store in Japan.
"I forget where I read about it," the usher said. "In some magazine or other. Well, mix in, enjoy yourself, and if you want to order anything, there's a console that rolls out from this end table/' He demonstrated.
The usher continued to hover, smiling, over his chair. Finally Barry realized he was waiting for a tip. Without any idea of what was customary, he gave bun a dollar, which seemed to do the trick.
He sat there in his bulgy sponge of a chair, grateful to be alone and able to take in the sheer size and glamor of the place. Partyland was an endless middle-class living room, a panorama of all that was gracious, tasteful, and posh. At least from here in the second ring it seemed endless. It had a seating capacity, according to its ads, of 780, but tonight wasn't one of its big nights and a lot of the seats were empty.
At intervals that varied unpredictably the furniture within this living room would rearrange itself, and suddenly you would find yourself face-to-face with a new conversational partner. You could also, for 8 few dollars more, hire a sofa or armchair that you could drive at liberty among the other chairs, choosing your partners rather than leaving them to chance. Relatively few patrons of Partyland exercised this option, since the whole point of the place was that you could just sit back and let your chair do the driving.
The background music changed from Vivaldi's Four Seasons to a Sondheim medley, and all the chairs in Barry's area suddenly lifted their occupants up in the air and carried them off, legs dangling, to their next conversational destination. Barry found himself sitting next to a girl in a red velvet evening dress with a hat of paper feathers and polyhedrons. The band of the hat said, "I'm a Partyland Smarty-pants."
"Hi," said the girl in a tone intended to convey a worldly-wise satiety but achieved no more than blank anomie. "What's up?"
Terrific, just terrific," Barry replied with authentic warmth. He'd always scored well at this preliminary stage of basic communication, which was why, at the time, he'd so much resented his examiner's remark about his handshake. There was nothing phoney about his handshake, and he knew it.
"I like your shoes," she said.
Barry looked down at his shoes. "Thanks."
"I like shoes pretty much generally," she went on. "I guess you could say I'm a kind of shoe freak." She snickered wanly.
Barry smiled, at a loss.
"But yours are particularly nice. How much did you pay for them, if you don't mind my asking?"
Though he minded, he hadn't the gumption to say so. "I don't remember. Not a lot. They're really nothing special."
"I like them," she insisted. Then, "My name's Cinderella. What's yours?"
"Is it really?"
"Really. You want to see my ID?"
"Mm."
She dug into her ID folder, which was made of the same velvet as her dress, and took out her license. It was blue, like his (a Temporary License), and, again like his, there was a staple in the upper left-hand comer.
"See?" she said. "Cinderella B. Johnson. It was my mother's idea. My mother had a really weird sense of humor sometimes. She's dead now, though. Do you like it?"
"Like what?"
"My name."
"Oh, yeah, sure."
"Because some people don't. They think it's affected. But I cant help the name I was born with, can I?"
"I was going to ask you—"
Her face took on the intent, yet mesmerized look of a quiz show contestant "Ask, ask."
"The staple on your license—why is it there?"
"What staple?" she countered, becoming in an instant rigid with suspicion, like a hare that scents a predator.
"The one on your license. Was there something attached to it orignally?"
"Some notice ... I don't know. How can I remember something like that? Why do you ask?"
"There's one like it on mine."
"So? If you ask me, this is a damned stupid topic for a conversation. Aren't you going to tell me your name?"
"Uh. . .Barry."
"Barry what?"
"Barry Riordan."
"An Irish name: that explains it then."
He looked at her questioningly.
That must be where yon got your gift of gab. You must have kissed the Blarney stone."
She's crazy, he thought
But crazy in a dull, not an interesting way. He wondered how long they'd have to go on talking before the chairs switched round again. It seemed such a waste of time talking to another temp, since he could only get the endorsements he needed from people who held Permanent Licenses. Of course, the practice was probably good for him. You can't expect to like everyone you meet, as the Communications Handbook never tired of pointing out, but you can always try and make a good impression. Someday you'd meet someone it was crucial to hit it off with and your practice would pay off.
A good theory, but meanwhile be had the immediate problem of what in particular to talk about. "Have you heard about the giant department store in Japan?" he asked her. "It covers sixteen acres."
"Sixteen and a half," she corrected. "You must read Topic too."
"Mm."
"It's a fascinating magazine. I look at it almost every week. Sometimes I'm just too busy, but usually I skim it, at least"
"Busy doing . .,. ?"
"Exactly." She squinted across the vast tasteful expanse of Party-land, then stood up and waved. "I think I've recognized someone," she said excitedly, preening her paper feathers with her free hand. Far away, someone waved back.
Cinderella broke one of the polyhedrons off her hat and put it on her chair. "So I'll remember which it is," she explained. Then, contritely, "I hope you don't mind."
“Not at all."
Left to himself be couldn't stop thinking about the staple he'd seen on her license. It was like the seemingly insignificant clue in a detective story from which the solution to the whole mystery gradually unfolds. For didn't it strongly suggest that she too had been given the benefit of the doubt that she'd got her license not because her score entitled her to it, but thanks to Bylaw 9(c), Section XII? The chagrin of being classified in the same category with such a nitwit! Partyland was probably full of people in their situation, all hoping to connect with some bona fide Permanent License holder, instead of which they went around colliding with each other.
A highly depressing idea, but he did not on that account roll out the console to select a remedy from the menu. He knew from long experience that whatever could make him palpably happier was also liable to send him into a state of fugue in which conversation in the linear sense became next to impossible. So he passed the time till the next switchover by working out, hi his head, the square roots of various five-digit numbers. Then, when he had a solution, he'd check it on his calculator. He'd got five right answers when his chair reared up, god bless it, and bore him off toward . . . Would it be the couple chained, wrist to wrist, on the blue settee? No, at the last moment, his chair veered left and settled down in front of an unoccupied bent-wood rocker. A sign in the seat of the rocker said: "I feel a little sick. Back in five minutes."
Barry was just getting used to the idea of going on to six-digit figures when a woman in a green sofa wheeled up to him and asked what kind of music he liked.
"Any kind, really."
"Any or none, it amounts to much the same thing."
"No, honestly. Whatever is playing I usually like it. What are they playing here? I like that."
"Muzak," she said dismissively.
It was, in fact, still the Sondheim medley, but he let that pass. It wasn't worth an argument.
"What do you do?" she demanded.
"I simulate a job that Citibank is developing for another corporation, but only on an auxiliary basis. Next year I'm supposed to start full-time."
She grimaced. "You're new at Partyland, aren't you?"
He nodded. "First time tonight. In fact, this is my first time ever in any speakeasy. I just got my license yesterday."
"Well, welcome to the club." With a smile that might as well have been a sheer. "I suppose you're looking for endorsements?"
Not from you, he wanted to tell her. Instead he looked off into the distance at the perambulations of a suite of chairs in another ring. Only when all the chairs had settled into place did he refocus on the woman in the foreground. He realized with a little zing of elation that he had just administered his first snub!
"What did Freddy say when you came in?" she asked in a conspiratorial if not downright friendly tone. (His snub had evidently registered.)
"Who is Freddy?"
"The usher who showed you to your seat. I saw him sit down and talk with you."
"He told me about some Japanese department store."
She nodded knowingly. "Of course—I should have known. Freddy shills for Topic magazine and that's one of their featured stories this week. I wonder what they pay him. Last week their cover story was about Ireina Khokolovna, and all Freddy could talk about was Ireina Khokolovna."
"Who is Ireina Khokolovna?" he asked.
She hooted a single derisory hoot. "I thought you said you liked music!"
"I do," he protested. But, clearly, he had just failed a major test With a sigh of weariness and a triumphant smile, the woman rotated her sofa around one hundred and eighty degrees and drove off in the direction of the couple chained together on the blue settee.
The couple rose in unison and greeted her with cries of "Maggie!" and "Son of a gun!" It was impossible for Barry, sitting so nearby and having no one to talk to himself, to avoid eavesdropping on their conversation, which concerned (no doubt as a rebuke to his ignorance) Ireina Khokolovna's latest superb release from Deutsche Grammophon. She was at her best in Schumann, her Wolf was comme ci, comme fa. Even so, Khokolovna's Wolf was miles ahead of Adriana Motta's, or even Gwyneth Batterham's, who, for all her real intelligence, was developing a distinct wobble in her upper register. Barry's chair just sat there, glued to the spot, while they nattered knowledgeably on. He wished he were home watching Willy Marx— or anywhere but Partyland.
"Mine's Ed," said the occupant of the bentwood rocker, a young man of Barry's own age, build, and hair style.
"Pardon?" said Barry.
"I said," he said, with woozy precision, "my name is Ed."
"Oh. Mine's Barry. How are you, Ed?"
He held out his hand. Ed shook it gravely.
"You know, Barry," Ed said, "I've been thinking about what you were saying, and I think the whole problem is cars. Know what I mean?"
"Elaborate," Barry suggested.
"Right. The thing about cars is ... Well, I live in Elizabeth across the river, right? So any time I come here I've got to drive, right? Which you might think was a drag, but in fact I always feel terrific. You know?"
Barry nodded. He didn't understand what Ed was saying in any very specific way, but he knew he agreed with him.
"I feel . . . free. If that doesn't seem too ridiculous. Whenever I'm driving my car."
"What have you got?" Barry asked.
"A Toyota."
"Nice. Very nice."
"I don't think Pm unique that way," said Ed.
"No, I wouldn't say so."
"Cars are freedom. And so what all this talk about an energy crisis boils down to is—" He stopped short. "I think I'm having a fugue."
"I think maybe you are. But that's all right. I do too. It'll pass."
"Listen, what's your name?"
"Barry," Barry said. "Barry Riordan."
Ed held out his hand. "Mine's Ed. Say, are you trying to pick up an endorsement?"
Barry nodded. "You too?"
"No. In fact, I think I've still got one left. Would yon like it?"
"Jesus," said Barry. "Yeah, sure."
Ed took out his ID folder, took his license from the folder, tickled the edge of the endorsement sticker from the back of the license with his fingernail, and offered it to Barry.
"You're sure you want me to have this?" Barry asked, incredulous, with the white curlicue of the sticker dangling from his fingertip.
Ed nodded. "You remind me of somebody."
"Well, I'm awfully grateful. I mean you scarcely know me."
"Right," said Ed, nodding more vigorously. "But I liked what you were saying about cars. That made a lot of sense."
"You know," Barry burst out in a sudden access of confessional bonhomie, "I feel confused most of the time."
"Right."
"But I can never express it. Everything I say seems to make more sense than what I can feel inside of me."
"Right, right."
The music changed from the Sondheim medley to the flip side of The Four Seasons, and Barry's chair lifted him up and bore him off toward the couple in the blue settee, while Ed, limp in the bentwood rocker, was carried off in the opposite direction.
"Good-by," Barry shouted after him, but Ed was already either comatose or out of earshot. "And thanks again!"
The MacKinnons introduced themselves. His name was Jason. Hers was Michelle. They lived quite nearby, on West 28th, and were interested, primarily, in the television shows they'd seen when they were growing up, about which they were very well-informed. Despite a bad first impression, due to his associating them with Maggie of the green sofa, Barry found himself liking the MacKinnons enormously, and before the next switchover he put his chair in the LOCK position. They spent the rest of the evening together, exchanging nostalgic tidbits over coffee and slices of Partyland's famous pineapple pie. At closing time be asked if they would either consider giving him an endorsement. They said they would have, having thoroughly enjoyed his company, but unfortunately they'd both used up their quota for that year. They seemed genuinely sorry, but he felt it had been a mistake to ask.
His first endorsement proved to have been beginner's lock. Though he went out almost every night to a different speakeasy and practically lived at Partyland during the weekends, when it was at it's liveliest, he never again had such a plum fall in his lap. He didn't get within sniffing distance of his heart's desire. Most people he met were temps, and the few Permanent License holders inclined to be friendly to him invariably turned out, like the MacKinnons, to have already disposed of their allotted endorsements. Or so they said. As the weeks went by and anxiety mounted, he began to be of the cynical but widely held opinion that many people simply removed the stickers from their licenses so it would seem they'd been used. According to Jason MacKinnon, a completely selfless endorsement, like his from Ed, was a rare phenomenon. Quid pro quos were the general rule, in the form either of cash on the barrel or services rendered. Barry said (jokingly, of course) that he wouldn't object to bartering his virtue for an endorsement, or preferably two, to which Michelle replied (quite seriously) that unfortunately she did not know anyone who might be in the market for Barry's particular type. Generally, she observed, it was younger people who got their endorsements by putting out.
Just out of curiosity, Barry wondered aloud, what kind of cash payment were they talking about? Jason said the standard fee, a year ago, for a single sticker had been a thousand dollars; two and a half for a pair, since people with two blanks to fill could be presumed to be that much more desperate. Due however to a recent disproportion between supply and demand, the going price for a single was now seventeen hundred; a double, a round four thousand. Jason said he could arrange an introduction at that price, if Barry were interested.
"I will tell you," said Barry, "what you can do with your stickers."
"Oh, now," said Michelle placatingly. "We're still your friends, Mr. Riordan, but business is business. If it were our own personal stickers we were discussing, we wouldn't hesitate to give you an endorsement absolutely gratis. Would we, Jason?"
"Of course not, no question."
"But we're middlemen, you see. We have only limited flexibility in the terms we can offer. Say, fifteen hundred."
"And three and a half for the pair," Jason added. "And that is a rock-bottom offer. You won't do better anywhere else."
"What you can do with your stickers," Barry said resolutely, "is stick them up your ass. Your asses, rather."
"I wish you wouldn't take that attitude, Mr. Riordan," said Jason in a tone of sincere regret "We do like you, and we have enjoyed your company. If we didn't, we would certainly not be offering this opportunity."
"Bullshit," said Barry. It was the first time he'd used an obscenity conversationally, and he brought it off with great conviction. "You knew when my license would expire, and you've just been stringing me along, hoping I'd get panicky."
"We have been trying," said Michelle, "to help."
"Thanks. Ill help myself."
"How?"
“Tomorrow I'm going back to Center St. and take the exam again."
Michelle MacKinnon leaned across the coffee table that separated the blue settee from Barry's armchair and gave him a sound motherly smack on the cheek. "Wonderful! That's the way to meet a challenge —head on! You're bound to pass. After all, you've had three months of practice. You've become much more fluent these past months."
"Thanks." He got up to go.
"Hey—" Jason grabbed Barry's hand and gave it an earnest squeeze. "Don't forget, if you do get your Permanent License—"
"When he gets it," Michelle amended,
"Right—when you get it, you know where you can find us. We're always here on the same settee."
"You two are unbelievable," Barry said. "Do you honestly think rd sell you my endorsements? Assuming"—he knocked on the varnished walnut coffee table—"I pass my exam."
"It is safer," Michelle said, "to work through a professional introduction service than to try and peddle them on your own. Even though everyone breaks it, the law is still the law. Individuals operating on their own are liable to get caught, since they don't have an arrangement with the authorities. We do. That's why, for instance, it would do you no good to report us to the Communications Control Office. Others have done so in the past, and it did them no good."
"None of them ever got a Permanent License, either," Jason added, with a twinkle of menace.
"That, I'm sure, was just coincidence," said Michelle. "After all, we're speaking of only two cases, and neither of the individuals in question was particularly bright. Bright people wouldn't be so quixotic, would they?" She underlined her question with a Mona Lisa smile, and Barry, for all his indignation and outrage, couldn't keep from smiling back. Anyone who could drop a word like "quixotic" into the normal flow of conversation and make it seem so natural couldn't be all wrong.
"Don't worry," he promised, tugging his hand out of Jason's. "I'm not the quixotic type."
But when he said it, it sounded false. It wasn't false.
Barry was as good as his word and went to Center St. the very next morning to take his third exam. The computer assigned him to Marvin Kolodny, Ph.D. in cubicle 183. The initials worried him. He could have coped, this time, with the old fuddy-duddy he'd had last August, but a Ph.D.? It seemed as though they were raising the hurdles each time he came around the track. But his worries evaporated the moment he was in the cubicle and saw that Marvin Kolodny was a completely average young man of twenty-four. His averageness was even a bit unsteady, as though he had to think about it, but then most twenty-four-year-olds are self-conscious in just that way.
It's always a shock the first time you come up against some particular kind of authority figure—a dentist, a psychiatrist, a cop—who is younger than you are, but it needn't lead to disaster as long as you let the authority figure know right from the start that you intend to be deferential, and this was a quality that Barry conveyed without trying.
"Hi," said Barry, with masterful deference. “I’m Barry Riordan."
Marvin Kolodny responded with a boyish grin and offered his hand. An American flag had been tattooed on his right forearm. On a scroll circling the flagpole was the following inscription: Let's All Overthrow the United States Government by Force & Violence
On his other forearm there was a crudely executed rose with his name underneath: Marvin Kolodny, Ph.D.
"Do you mean it?" Barry asked, marveling over Marvin's tattoo as they shook hands. He managed to ask the question without in the least seeming to challenge Marvin Kolodny's authority.
"If I didn't mean it," said Marvin Kolodny, "do you think I'd nave had it tattooed on my arm?"
"I suppose not. It's just so... unusual."
“I’m an unusual person," said Marvin Kolodny, leaning back in his swivel chair and taking a large pipe from the rack on his desk.
"But doesn't that idea"—Barry nodded at the tattoo-"conflict with your having this particular job? Aren't you part of the U. S. Government yourself?"
"Only for the time being. I'm not suggesting that we overthrow the government tomorrow. A successful revolution isn't possible until the proletariat becomes conscious of their oppressions, and they can't become conscious of anything until they are as articulate as their oppressors. Language and consciousness aren't independent processes, after all. Talking is thinking turned inside-out. No more, no less."
"And which am I?"
"How's that?"
"Am I a proletarian or an oppressor?"
"Like most of us these days, I would say you're probably a little of each. Are you married, uh . . ." (He peeked into Barry's file.) ". . . Barry?"
Barry nodded.
"Then that's one form of oppression right there. Children?"
Barry shook his head.
"Do you live with your wife?"
"Not lately. And even when we were together, we never talked to each other, except to say practical things like 'When is your program going to be over?' Some people just aren't that interested in talking. Debra certainly isn't. That's why—" (He couldn't resist the chance to explain his earlier failures.) "—I did so poorly on my earlier exams. Assuming I did get a low score last time, which isn't certain since the results were erased. But assuming that I did, that's the reason. I never got any practice. The basic day-to-day conversational experiences most people have with their spouses never happened in my case."
Marvin Kolodny frowned—an ingratiating, boyish frown. "Are you sure you're being entirely honest with yourself, Barry? Few people are completely willing to talk about something. We've all got hobbyhorses. What was your wife interested in? Couldn't you have talked about that?"
"In religion, mostly. But she didn't care to talk about it, unless you agreed with her."
"Have you tried to agree with her?"
"Well, you see, Dr. Kolodny, what she believes is that the end of the world is about to happen. Next February. That's where she's gone DOW—to Arizona, to wait for it. This is the third time she's taken off."
"Not an easy woman to discourage, by the sound of it."
"I think she really wants the world to end. And, also, she does like Arizona."
"Have you considered a divorce?" Marvin Kolodny asked.
"No, absolutely not. We're still basically in love. After all, most married couples end up not saying much to each other. Isn't that so? Even before Debra got religious, we weren't in the habit of talking to each other. To tell the truth, Dr. Kolodny, I've never been much of a talker. I think I was put off it by the compulsory talk we had to do in high school."
"That's perfectly natural. I hated compulsory talk myself, though I must admit I was good at it. What about your job, Barry? Doesn't that give you opportunities to develop communication skills?"
“I don't communicate with the public directly. Only with simulations, and their responses tend to be pretty stereotyped."
"Well, there's no doubt that you have a definite communications problem. But I think it's a problem you can lick! I'll tell you what, Barry: officially, I shouldn't tell you this myself, but I'm giving you a score of 65." He held up his hand to forestall an effusion. "Now, let me explain how that breaks down. You do very well in most categories—Affect, Awareness of Others, Relevance, Voice Production, et cetera, but where you do fall down is in Notional Content and Originality. There you could do better."
"Originality has always been my Waterloo," Barry admitted. "I just don't seem to be able to come up with my own ideas. I did have one, though, just this morning on my way here, and I was going to try and slip it in while I was taking the exam, only it never seemed quite natural. Have you ever noticed that you never see baby pigeons? All the pigeons you see out on the street are the same size-full-grown. But where _do they come from? Where are the little pigeons? Are they hidden somewhere?" He stopped short, feeling ashamed of his idea. Now that it was out in the open it seemed paltry and insignificant, little better than a joke he'd learned by heart, than which there is nothing more calculated to land you in the bottom percentiles.
Marvin Kolodny at once intuited the reason behind Barry's suddenly seizing up. He was in the business, after all, of understanding unspoken meanings and evaluating them precisely. He smiled a sympathetic, mature smile.
"Ideas . . ." he said, in a slow, deliberate manner, as though each word had to be weighed on a scale before it was put into the sentence. ". . . aren't. . . things. Ideas—the most authentic ideas—are the natural, effortless result of any vital relationship. Ideas are what happen when people connect with each other creatively."
Barry nodded.
"Do you mind my giving you some honest advice, Barry?”
"Not at all, Dr. Kolodny. I'd be grateful."
"On your G-47 form you say you spend a lot of time at Partyland and similar speakeasies. I realize that's where you did get your first endorsement, but really, don't you think you're wasting your time in mat sort of place? It's a tourist trap!"
"I'm aware of that," Barry said, smarting under the rebuke.
"You're not going to meet anyone there but temps and various people who are out to fleece temps. With rare exceptions."
"I know, I know. But I don't know where else to go."
"Why not try this place?" Marvin Kolodny handed Barry a printed card, which read:

INTENSITY FIVE
A New Experience in Interpersonal Intimacy
5 Barrow Street
New York 10014
Members Only

“I’ll certainly try it," Barry promised. "But how do I get to be a member?"
"Tell them Marvin sent you."
And that was all there was to it-he had passed his exam with a score just five points short of the crucial eighth percentile. Which was a tremendous accomplishment but also rather frustrating in a way, since it meant he'd come that close to not having to bother scouting out two more endorsements. Still, with another three months in which to continue his quest and an introduction to Intensity Five, Barry had every reason to be optimistic.
"Thank you, Dr. Kolodny," Barry said, lingering in the doorway of the cubicle. "Thanks terrifically."
"That's all right, Barry. Just doing my job."
"You know ... I wish ... Of course, I know it's not permissible, you being an examiner and all... but I wish I knew yon in a personal way. Truly. You're a very heavy individual."
Thank you, Barry. I know you mean that, and I'm flattered Well, then—" He took his pipe from his mouth and lifted it in a kind of salute. "So long. And Merry Christmas."
Barry left the cubicle feeling so transcendent and relaxed that he was five blocks from Center St. before he remembered that he'd neglected to have his license revalidated at Window 28. As he beaded back to the Federal Communications Building, his senses seemed to register all the ordinary details of the city's streets with an unnatural, hyped clarity: the smell of sauerkraut steaming up from a hot dog cart, the glint of the noon sun on the mica mixed into the paving blocks of the sidewalk, the various shapes and colors of the pigeons, the very pigeons, perhaps, that had inspired his so-called idea earlier that day. But it was true, what he'd said. All the pigeons were the same size.
A block south of the Federal Communications Building, he looked up, and there strung out under the cornice of the building was the motto, which he had never noticed before, of the Federal Communications Agency:

PLANNED FREEDOM  IS  THE
ROAD  TO  LASTING
PROGRESS.

So simple, so direct, and yet when you thought about it, almost impossible to understand,
Barrow St being right in the middle of one of the city's worst slums, Barry had been prepared (he'd thought) for a lesser degree of stateliness and bon ton than that achieved by Partyland, but even so the dismal actuality of Intensity Five went beyond anything he could have imagined. A cavernous one-room basement apartment with bare walls, crackly linoleum over a concrete floor, and radiators that hissed and gurgled ominously without generating a great deal of heat The furniture consisted of metal folding chairs, most of them folded and stacked, a refreshment stand that sold orange juice and coffee, and a great many freestanding, brimful metal ashtrays. Having already forked out twenty-five dollars upstairs as his membership fee, Barry felt as though he'd been had, but since the outlay was nonrefundable, he decided to give the place the benefit of his doubt and loiter awhile.
He had been loitering, alone and melancholy, for the better part of an hour, eavesdropping to his right on a conversation about somebody's drastic need to develop a more effective persona and to his left on a discussion of the morality of our involvement in Mexico, when a black woman in a white nylon jumpsuit and a very good imitation calf-length mink swept into the room, took a quick survey of those present, and sat down, unbelievably, by him!
Quick as a light switch he could feel his throat go dry and his face tighten into a smile of rigid insincerity. He blushed, he trembled, be fainted dead away, but only metaphorically.
“I’m Columbine Brown," she said, as though that offered an explanation.
Did she expect him to recognize her? She was beautiful enough, certainly, to have been someone he ought to recognize, but if he had seen her on TV, he didn't remember. In a way she seemed almost too beautiful to be a noted personality, since there is usually something a little idiosyncratic about each of them, so they can be told apart. Columbine Brown was beautiful in the manner not of a celebrity but of a deluxe (but not customized) sports car.
"I'm Barry Riordan," he managed to bring out, tardily.
"Let's put our cards on the table, shall we, Mr. Riordan? I am a Permanent Card holder. What are you?"
"A temp."
"It's fair to assume then that you're here to find an endorsement."
He began to protest. She stopped him with just one omniscient and devastating glance. He nodded.
"Unfortunately, I have used up my quota. However"—she held up a single perfect finger—"it's almost the New Year. If you're not in a desperate hurry . . . "
"Oh, I've got till March."
“I’m not promising anything, you understand. Unless we hit it off. If we do, then fine, you have my endorsement. Fair enough?"
"It's a deal."
"You feel you can trust me?" She lowered her eyes and tried to look wicked and temptress-like, but it was not in the nature of her kind of beauty to do so.
"Anywhere," he replied. "Implicitly."
"Good." As though of its own volition her coat slipped off her shoulders onto the back of the folding chair. She turned her head sideways and addressed the old woman behind the refreshment counter. "Evelyn, how about an orange juice." She looked at him. He nodded. "Make it two."
Then, as though they'd been waiting for these preliminaries to be concluded, tears sprang to her eyes. A tremor of heartfelt emotion colored her lovely contralto voice as she said, "Oh Jesus, what am I going to do? I can't take any more! I am just so ... so goddamned wretched! I'd like to kill myself. No, that isn't true. I'm confused, Larry. But I know one thing—I am an angry woman and I'm going to start fighting back!"
It would have been inconsiderate to break in upon such testimony by mentioning that his name was not, in fact, Larry. What difference does one letter make, after all?
"Have you ever been to the Miss America Pageant on 42nd St.?" she asked him, drying her eyes.
"I can't say I have. I always mean to, but you know how it is. It’s the same with the Statue of Liberty. It's always there, so you never get around to it"
"I'm Miss Georgia."
"No kidding!"
"I have been Miss Georgia six nights a week for the last four years, with matinees on Sunday and Tuesday, and do you suppose in all that time that the audience has ever voted for me to be Miss America? Ever?"
"I would certainly vote for you."
"Never once," she went on fiercely, ignoring his supportiveness. "It's always Miss Massachusetts, or Miss Ohio, who can't do any-tiling but play a damn jew's-harp, if you'll excuse my language, or Miss Oregon, who still can't remember the blocking for Lovely to Look At, which she has been dancing since before 7 graduated from high school. There's no one in the whole damn line-up who hasn't been crowned once. Except me."
“I’m sorry to hear it."
"I am a good singer. I can tap dance like a house on fire. My balcony scene would break your heart. And I can say objectively that I've got better legs than anyone except, possibly, Miss Wyoming."
"But you've never been Miss America," Barry said sympathetically.
"What do you think that feels like, here?" She grabbed a handful of white nylon in the general area of her heart.
"I honestly don't know, Miss . . ." (He'd forgotten her last name.) ". . . Georgia."
"At Intensity Five I'm just plain Columbine, honey. The same as you're just Larry. And not knowing isn't much of an answer. Here I am exposing myself in front of you, and you come back with ‘No Opinion.' I don't buy that."
"Well, to be completely candid, Columbine, it's hard for me to imagine your feeling anything but terrific. To be Miss Georgia and have such a lot of talent—isn't that enough? I would have thought you'd be very happy."
Columbine bit her lip, furrowed her brow, and evidenced, in general, a sudden change of heart. "God, Larry—you're right! I've been kidding myself: the pageant isn't my problem—it's my excuse. My problem"—her voice dropped, her eyes avoided his—"is timeless and well-known. I fell in love with the wrong man for me. And now it's too late. Would you like to hear a long story, Larry? A long and very unhappy story?"
"Sure. That's what Fm here for, isn't it?"
She smiled a meaningful, unblemished smile and gave his hand a quick, trusting squeeze. "You know, Larry-you're an all-right guy."
Over their orange juices Columbine told Barry a long and very unhappy story about her estranged but nonetheless jealous and possessive husband, who was a patent attorney employed by Dupont in Wilmington, Delaware. Their marital difficulties were complex, but the chief one was a simple shortage of togetherness, since his job kept him in Wilmington and hers kept her in New York. Additionally, her husband's ideal of conversation was very divergent from her own. He enjoyed talking about money, sports, and politics with other men and bottled up all his deeper feelings. She was introspective, outgoing, and warmhearted.
"It would be all right for a while," she recalled. "But the pressure would build until I had to go out and find someone to talk to. It is a basic human need, after all. Perhaps the basic need. I had no choice."
"And then he'd find out, I suppose," said Barry.
She nodded. "And go berserk. It was awful. No one can live that way."
Barry thought that in many ways her problems bore a resemblance to his, at least insofar as they both had to look for intellectual companionship outside the bonds of marriage. But when he began to elaborate upon this insight and draw some interesting parallels between his experience and hers, Columbine became impatient. She did not come right out and tell him that he was in breach of contract, but that was definitely the message conveyed by her glazed inattention. Responsive to her needs, he resisted the impulse to make any further contributions of his own and sat back and did his level best to be a good listener and nothing more.
When Columbine had finally run the gamut of all her feelings, which included fear, anger, joy, pain, and an abiding and entirely unreasoning sense of dread, she thanked him, gave him her address and phone number, and said to get hi touch in January for his endorsement
Jubilation, he thought. Bingo. Hallelujah.
But not quite. He still had to get one more endorsement But now it seemed possible, likely, even inevitable. A matter, merely, of making the effort and reaping the reward.
Dame Fortune had become so well-disposed to him that he got his third endorsement (though in point of hard fact, his second) the very next night. The fated encounter took place at Morone's One-Stop Shopping, a mom-and-pop mini-grocery on Sixth Ave. right next to the International Supermarket. Although Morone's charged more for most items, Barry preferred shopping there because it offered such a limited and unchallenging range of choices (cold meats, canned goods, beer, Nabisco cookies) that he never felt intimidated and ashamed of his selections at the check-out counter. He hated to cook, but was that any reason he should be made to feel inadequate? Morone's was made to order for people like Barry, of which there are great numbers.
That night, as he was hesitating between a dinner of Spam and Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli or Spam and Green Giant com niblets, the woman who had been standing in front of the frozen food locker suddenly started talking to herself. The Morones looked at each other in alarm. Neither of them were licensed talkers, which was a further attraction of their store, since one's exchanges with them were limited to such basic permissible amenities as "How are you," "Take care," and giving out prices.
What the woman was saying was of a character to suggest that she had just that minute gone crazy. "The pain," she explained calmly to the ice cream section of the freezer, "only comes on when I do this." She stooped closer to the ice cream and winced. "But then it's pure hell. I want to cut my leg off, have a lobotomy, anything to make it stop. Yet I know the problem isn't in my leg at all. It's in my back. Here." She touched the small of her back. "A kind of short circuit Worse than bending over is twisting sideways. Even turning my head can set it off. Sometimes, when I'm alone, I'll start crying just at the thought of it, at knowing I've become so damned superannuated." She sighed. "Well, it happens to everyone, and I suppose it could be worse. There's no use complaining. Life goes on, as they say."
Having come round to a sensible, accepting attitude, she turned from the freezer to witness the effect of her outburst on the Morones, who looked elsewhere, and on Barry, who couldn't resist meeting her eyes head-on. Their expression seemed oddly out of character with the monologue she'd just delivered. They were piercing (as against vulnerable) steely-gray eyes that stared defiance from a face all sags and wrinkles. Without the contradiction of such eyes, her face would have seemed ruined and hopeless; with them, she looked just like an ancient centurion in a movie about the Roman Empire.
She grimaced. "No need to panic. It's not an emergency. I’m licensed."
Barry proffered his most harmless smile. "I wasn't even thinking of that."
She didn't smile back. "Then what were you thinking?"
"I guess I was feeling sorry."
To which her reaction was, alarmingly, to laugh.
Feeling betrayed and pissed-off, he grabbed the nearest can of vegetables (beets, he would later discover, and he hated beets) and handed it to Mr. Morone with the can of Spam.
“That it?" Mr. Morone asked.
"A six-pack of Schlitz," he said, quite off the top of his head.
When he left the store with his dinner and the beer in a plastic bag, she was already outside waiting for him. "I wasn't lagging at you, young man," she told him, taking the same coolly aggrieved tone she'd taken toward the ice cream. "I was laughing at myself. Obviously, I was asking for pity. So if I should get some, I shouldn't be surprised, should I. My name's Madeline, but my friends call me Mad. You're supposed to laugh."
"Mine's Barry," he said. "Do you drink beer?"
"Oh, I'm not drunk. I discovered long ago that one needn't actually drink in order to have the satisfaction of behaving outrageously."
"I meant, would you like some now, with me? I've got a six-pack."
"Certainly. Barry, you said? You're so direct it's almost devious. Let's go to my place. It's only a couple blocks away. You see—I can be direct myself."
Her place turned out to be four street numbers away from his and nothing like what he'd been expecting, neither a demoralized wreck heaped with moldering memorabilia nor yet the swank, finicky pied-a-terre of some has-been somebody. It was a plain, pleasant 10-room apartment that anyone could have lived in and almost everyone did, with potted plants to emphasize the available sunlight and pictures representing various vanished luxuries on the wall, the common range of furniture from aspiring to makeshift, and enough ordinary debris to suggest a life being carried on, with normative difficulty, among these carefully cultivated neutralities.
Barry popped the tops off two beer cans and Madeline swept an accumulation of books and papers off a tabletop and onto a many-cushioned bed. They sat down at the table.
“Do you know what it's called?" he asked. "The disease you've got?"
"Sciatica. Which is more a disorder than a disease. Let's not talk about it, okay?"
"Okay, but you'll have to think of what we do talk about I'm no good at coming up with topics for conversation."
"Why is that?"
"No ideas. If other people have ideas, I can bounce off them well enough, but all by itself my mind's a blank. I envy people like you who are able to start talking out of the blue."
"Mm," said Madeline, not unkindly. "It's odd you should put it like that; it's almost a definition of what I do for a living."
"Really, what's that?"
“I’m a poet"
"No kidding. You can make a living by being a poet?"
"Enough to get by."
Barry refused to believe her. Neither the woman nor her apartment corresponded with his preconceptions of poets and the necessarily indigent life they must lead. "Have you ever published a book?" he asked craftily.
"Twenty-two. More than that, if you count limited editions and pamphlets and such." She went over to the bed, rooted among the papers, and returned with a thin, odd-sized paperback. "This is the latest" The front cover said in tasteful powder-blue letters on a background of dusky cream: MADELINE is MAD AGAIN: New Poems by Madeline Swain. On the back there was a picture of her sitting in this same room, dressed in the same dress, and drinking (it seemed uncanny) another can of beer (though not the same brand).
Barry turned the book over in his hands, examining the cover and the photo alternately, but would no more have thought of looking inside than of lifting Madeline's skirts to peek at her underclothes. "What's it about?" he asked.
"Whatever I happened to be thinking at the moment I wrote each poem,"
That made sense but didn't answer his question. "When do yon write them?"
"Generally, whenever people ask me to."
"Could you write a poem right now? About what you're thinking?"
"Sure, no trouble." She went to the desk in the corner of the room and quickly wrote the following poem, which she handed to Barry to read:

A Reflection
Sometimes the repetition of what we have just said will suggest a new meaning or possibilities of meaning we did not at first suppose to be there. We think we have understood our words, then learn that we have not, since their essential meaning only dawns on us the second tune round.

"This is what you were thinking just now?" he asked skeptically. "Are you disappointed?"
"I thought you'd write something about me." "Would you like me to do that?" "It's too late now." "Not at all."
She went to her desk and returned a moment later with a second poem:

Aubade
I was sorry to hear 
That you've got to be going. 
But you're not? 
Then I'm sorry to hear that

"What does the title mean?" he asked, hoping it might modify the unfriendly message of the four short lines that followed.
"An aubade is a traditional verse-form that a lover addresses to his (or her) beloved at dawn, when one of them is leaving for work."
He tried to think of a compliment that wouldn't be completely insincere. "Heavy," he allowed at last.
"Oh, I'm afraid it's not much good. I can usually do better. I guess I don't trust you enough. Though you're quite likable; that's another matter."
"Now Fin likable! I thought"—he dangled the poem by one corner —"you were just hinting that I should leave?"
"Nonsense. You haven't even finished your beer. You mustn't hold what I write against me. Poets cant be held responsible for what they say in their poems. We're all compulsive traitors, you know."
Barry said nothing, but his expression must have conveyed his disapproval.
"Now don't be like that. Treason is a necessary part of the job, the way that handling trash cans is a part of being a garbage man. Some poets go to a great deal of trouble to disguise their treacheries; my inclination is to be up-front and betray everyone right from the start"
"Do you have many friends?" he asked, needlingly.
"Virtually none. Do you think I'd go around talking to myself in grocery stores if I had friends?"
He shook his head, perplexed. "I’ll tell you, Madeline, it doesn't make sense to me. Surely if you were nice to other poets, they'd be nice to you, on the basic principle of scratch-my-back."
"Oh, of course. Minor poets do nothing else. They positively swarm. I’d rather be major and lonely, thank you very much."
"Sounds arrogant to me."
"It is. I am. C'est la vie." She took a long, throat-rippling sip of the Schlitz and set her can down on the table, empty. "What I like about you, Barry, is that you manage to say what you think without seeming the least homicidal. Why?"
"Why do I say what I think? It's easiest."
"No: why are you so accommodating to me, when I'm being such a bitch? Are you looking for an endorsement?"
He blushed. "Is it that obvious?"
"Well, as you don't appear to be either a mugger or a rapist, there had to be some reason you followed a dotty old woman home from her latest nervous breakdown. Let's make a deal, shall we?"
"What sort of deal?"
"You stay around and nudge some more poems out of me. I'm feeling the wind in my sails, but I need a muse. If you give me twenty good ideas for poems, I'll give yon your endorsement."
Barry shook his head. “Twenty different ideas? Impossible."
"Don't think of them as ideas then, think of them as questions.”
"Ten," he insisted. "Ten is a lot"
"Fifteen," she countered.
"All right, but including the two you've already written."
"Done!"
She sat down and waited for Barry to be inspired. "Well?" she inquired, after a long silence.
"I’m trying to think."
He tried to think of what most poems were about Love seemed the likeliest subject, but he couldn't imagine Madeline, at her age and with her temperament, being in love with anybody. Still, that was her problem. He didn't have to write the poem, only propose it
"All right," he said. "Write a poem about how much you're in love with me."
She looked miffed. "Don't flatter yourself, young man. I may have inveigled you into my apartment, but I am not in love with you."
"Pretend then. And don't make it anything flip like that last one. Make it sad and delicate and use some rhymes."
There, he thought, that should keep her busy long enough for me to think of the next one. He opened a second beer and took a meditative swallow. Did poets ever write poems about drinking beer? Or was that too general? Better to ask her to write about her favorite brand of beer, a kind of advertisement
By the time she'd finished the sonnet about how much she loved him, he had come up with all twelve other subjects.
1. A poem about her favorite beer, written as though it were an ad.
2. A poem in the form of a Christmas-shopping list.
3. A poem embodying several important long-range economic forecasts.
4. A poem about a rabbit (there was a porcelain rabbit on one of the shelves) suitable to be sung to a baby.
5. A very short poem to be carved on the tombstone of her least favorite president, living or dead.
6. A poem apologizing to the last person she had been especially rude to.
7. A poem for a Get Well card to someone who has sciatica.
8. A poem analyzing her feelings about beets.
9. A poem that skirts all around a secret she's never told anyone and then finally decides to keep it a secret.
10. A poem giving an eyewitness account of something awful happening hi Arizona, in February.
11. A poem justifying capital punishment in cases where one has been abandoned by one's lover. (This in its final, expanded form was to become the longest poem in her next collection, "The Ballad of Lucius McGonaghal Sloe," which begins:

I fell head over heels just four evenings ago 
With a girl that I'm sure you all know,
But I couldn't hold her,
And that's why I sold her, 
To Lucius McGonaghal Sloe.

and continues, in a similar vein, for another one hundred thirty-six stanzas.)
12. A poem presenting an affirmative, detailed description of her own face.
Prudently he didn't spring them on her all at once, but waited until she'd finished each one before telling her what the next had to be about. She didn't raise any further objections until he came to Number 8, whereupon she insisted she didn't have any feelings about beets whatsoever. He refused to believe her, and to prove his point he cooked up a quick dinner on her hotplate of Spam and canned beets (it was rather late by then, and they were famished). Before she'd had three mouthfuls, the poem started coming to her, and by the time she'd got it into final shape, five years later, it was far and away the best of the lot.
For the next many days Barry didn't speak to a soul. He felt no need to communicate anything to anyone. He had his three endorsements—one from a poet who'd published twenty-two books—and he was confident he could have gone out and got three more a day if he'd needed to. He was off the hook.
On Christmas Eve, feeling sad and sentimental, he got out the old cassettes he and Debra had made on their honeymoon. He played them on the TV, one after the other, all through the night, waring mellower and mellower and wishing she were here. Then, in February, when the world had once again refused to end, she did come home, and for several days it was just as good as anything on the cassettes. They even, for a wonder, talked to each other. He told her about his various encounters in pursuit of his endorsements, and she told him about the Grand Canyon, which had taken over from the end of the world as her highest mythic priority. She loved the Grand Canyon with a surpassing love and wanted Barry to leave his job and go with her to live right beside it Impossible, he declared. He'd worked eight years at Citibank and accrued important benefits. He accused her of concealing something. Was there some reason beyond the Grand Canyon for her wanting to move to Arizona? She insisted it was strictly the Grand Canyon, that from the first moment she'd seen it she'd forgotten all about Armageddon, the Number of the Beast, and all the other accoutrements of the Apocalypse. She couldn't explain: he would have to see it himself. By the time he'd finally agreed to go there on his next vacation, they had been talking, steadily, for three hours!
Meanwhile, Columbine Brown had been putting him off with a variety of excuses and dodges. The phone number she'd given him was bet answering service, the address was an apartment building with guard dogs in the lobby and a doorman who didn't talk, or listen. Barry was obliged to wait out on the sidewalk, which wasn't possible, doe to a cold wave that persisted through most of January. He left a message at the Apollo Theater, where the pageant was held, giving three different times he would be waiting for her at Intensity Five. She never showed. By mid-February, he'd begun to be alarmed. Early one morning, defying the weather, he posted himself outside her building and waited (five miserable hours) till she appeared. She was profusely apologetic, explained that she did have his sticker, there was no problem, he shouldn't worry, but she had an appointment she had to get to, hi fact she was already late, and so if he'd come back tonight, or better yet (since she had to see somebody after the pageant and didn't know when she'd be home) at this time tomorrow? Thoughtfully, she introduced him to the doorman so he wouldn't have to wait out in the cold.
At this time tomorrow Columbine made another nonappearance, and Barry began to suspect she was deliberately avoiding him. He decided to give her one last chance. He left a message with the doorman saying he would be by to collect his you-know-what at half past twelve the next night Alternately, she could leave it in an envelope with the doorman.
When he arrived the following evening, the doorman led him down the carpeted corridor, unlocked the elevator (the dogs growled portentously until the doorman said "Aus!"), and told him to ring at door 8-C.
It was not Columbine who let him in, but her understudy, Lida Mullens, Lida informed Barry that Columbine had joined her husband in Wilmington, Delaware, and there was no knowing when, if ever, she might return to her post as Miss Georgia. She had not left the promised sticker, and Lida seriously doubted whether she had any left, having heard, through the grapevine, that she'd sold all three of them to an introduction service on the day they came in the mail. With his last gasp of self-confidence Barry asked Lida Mullens whether she would consider giving him an endorsement. He promised to pay her back in kind the moment he was issued his own license. Lida informed him airily that she didn't have a license. Their entire conversation had been illegal. The guilt that immediately marched into his mind and evicted every other feeling was something awful. He knew it was irrational, but he couldn't help it. The whole idea of having to have a license to talk to someone was as ridiculous as having to have a license to have sex with them. Right? Right! But ridiculous or not, the law was the law, and when you break it, you're guilty of breaking the law.
The nice thing about guilt is that it's so easy to repress. Within a day Barry had relegated all recollections of his criminal behavior of the night before to the depths of his subconscious and was back at Intensity Five, waiting for whomever to strike up a conversation. The only person who so much as glanced his way, however, was Evelyn, the woman behind the refreshment stand. He went to other speakeasies, but it was always the same story. People avoided him. Their eyes shied away. His vibrations became such an effective repellent that he had only to enter a room in order to empty it of half its custom. Or so it seemed. When one is experiencing failure, it is hard to resist the comfort of paranoia.
With only a week left till his temporary license expired, Barry abandoned all hope and all shame and went back to Partyland with fifteen hundred dollars in cash, obtained from Beneficial Finance.
The MacKinnons were not in their blue settee, and neither Freddy the usher nor Madge of the green sofa could say what had become of them. He flopped into the empty settee with a sense of complete, abject surrender, but so eternally does hope spring that inside of a quarter of an hour he had adjusted to the idea of never being licensed and was daydreaming instead of a life of majestic, mysterious silence on the rim of the Grand Canyon. He rolled out the console and ordered a slice of pineapple pie and some uppers.
The waitress who brought his order was Cinderella Johnson. She was wearing levis and a T-shirt with the word "Princess" in big, glitter-dust letters across her breasts. Her hat said: "Let Tonight Be Your Enchanted Evening at Partyland!"
"Cinderella!" he exclaimed. "Cinderella Johnson! Are you working here?"
She beamed. "Isn't it wonderful? I started three days ago. It's like a dream come true."
"Congratulations.''
"Thanks." Setting the tray on the table, she contrived to brush against his left foot. "I see you're wearing the same shoes."
"Mm."
"Is something the matter?" she asked, handing him the uppers with a glass of water. "You look gloomy, if you'll forgive my saying so."
"Sometimes it does you good to feel gloomy." One of the pills insisted on getting stuck in his throat. Just like, he thought, a lie.
"Hey, do you mind if I sit down on your couch a minute? I am frazzled. It's a tremendous opportunity, working here, but it does take it out of you."
"Great," said Barry. "Fine. Terrific. I could use some company."
She sat down close to him and whispered into his ear, "If anyone, such as Freddy, for instance, should happen to ask what we were talking about, say it was the New Wooly Look, okay?"
"That's Topic's feature story this week?"
She nodded. "I guess you heard about the MacKinnons."
"I asked, but I didn't get any answers."
"They were arrested, for trafficking, right here on this couch, while they were taking money from the agent that had set them up. There's no way they can wiggle out of it this time. People say how sorry they are and everything, but I don't know: they were criminals, after all. What they were doing only makes it harder for the rest of us to get our endorsements honestly."
"I suppose you're right."
"Of course I'm right."
Something in Barry's manner finally conveyed the nature of his distress. The light dawned: "You have got your license, haven't you?"
Reluctantly at first, then with the glad, uncloseted feeling of shaking himself loose over a dance floor, Barry told Cinderella of his ups and downs during the past six months.
"Oh, that is so terrible," she commiserated at the end of his tale. "That is so unfair."
"What can you do?" he asked, figuratively.
Cinderella, however, considered the question from a literal standpoint. "Well," she said, "we haven't ever really talked together, not seriously, but you certainly ought to have a license."
"It's good of you to say so," said Barry morosely.
"So—if you'd like an endorsement from me ... ?" She reached into her back pocket, took out her license, and peeled off an endorsement sticker.
"Oh, no, really, Cinderella. . . ." He took the precious sticker between thumb and forefinger. "I don't deserve this. Why should you go out on a limb for someone you scarcely know?"
"That's okay," she said. "I'm sure you'd have done just the same for me."
"If there is anything I can do in return . . . ?"
She frowned, shook her head vehemently, and then said, "Well . . . maybe. . . ."
"Name it."
"Could I have one of your shoes?"
He laughed delightedly. "Have both of them!"
"Thanks, but I wouldn't have room."
He bent forward, undid the laces, pulled off his right shoe, and handed it to Cinderella.
"It's a beautiful shoe," she said, holding it up to the light, "Thank you so much."
And that is the end of the story.