Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man

1

Mrs. Lisa Clarke

219 Maple Rd.

Richmond, VA.

Dear Lisa:

I trust you’ve already established that there’s no check in this envelope. No matter how long this letter turns out to be, no matter how many sheets of paper wind up folded together and stuffed into this envelope, the first thing you’ll do is shake everything out looking for a check, and there won’t be one. So you’ve done that by now, and you said, “The dirty rat bastard said he’d send a check and there’s no check here and this better be good.”

I’ll make it as good as I can, Lisa.

But where to start? Why, at the beginning of this beautiful day, dear Lisa, when Laurence Clarke sprang out of bed with a smile on his lips and a glint in his eye and—

Oh, hell.

Rome must have fallen on just this sort of day. A bright sun shining, a ghost of a breeze toying with the garbage in the gutters and plucking the hems of the mini-skirts, even the air pollution in the acceptable range. I actually hummed on the way to the office. Hummed! And some of the people I passed in the streets were smiling. Genuine New Yorkers with discernible smiles on their faces. I know it sounds impossible, but they couldn’t all have been tourists. Some of them must have been natives, and here they were smiling at one another.

Extraordinary.

I picked up a Times in the lobby, let the elevator levitate me to the twelfth floor, helloed and nodded and — yes — smiled my way through the outer office, and was at my own desk with my own door snugly closed by five after nine. I spent half an hour reading the paper. There was nothing particularly ominous in it, for a change. I finished it and chucked it into the wastebasket, opened a desk drawer and got out my current book, a first novel by a young person who had distinguished himself in several student riots before entering the world of letters. The publisher and a variety of critics were spread all over the dust jacket, applauding the author for telling it like it is.

Yecchhh. The book was a 300-page refutation of the Winston commercial — it proved you could sacrifice good grammar without even approaching good taste. The person (the author’s name was sexless, and the dust-jacket photograph sexually ambivalent) threw words about like paving stones, and all he told me was that verbal communication may well be obsolete after all.

(But not for us, Lisa the formerly-mine. By God, woman, I’m enjoying this! Do you know I haven’t written this much in a couple of years? All these words winding up on all these pages, and all with no discernible effort on my part. I just sit here at this typewriter and let it all hang out, as the children say. Are you my Muse, Lisa? And are you amused, Lisa? I know you’d rather have the check—)

Ah, well. I went on slogging my way through muddy prose until ten-thirty, slipped downstairs for coffee and prune Danish, came upstairs again and read some more until lunchtime.

I lunched with a friend who has an expense account. Do you remember Bill Adams? He’s over at Ogilvy now, doing something that sounds boring enough. Got married about two years ago, I think it was, and just last month bought a home on the Island. We went to an Italian place on Second Avenue and ate cannelloni and killed a liter of red while I listened to him talk about how great it was to be out of the city and how his job seemed secure although half the advertising business was on the beach and how much he loved his wife and what a good marriage they had going. He talked and I listened and he paid and I burped and we left, and it was still the same beautiful day outside.

Then he said, “Listen, you don’t have to go back to that office, do you? I mean, not right now. Because there are these two chicks with an apartment just around the corner, and it’s a shame to be in the neighborhood without dropping in on them. What do you say?”

“Hookers?”

“Well, they get twenty, so you couldn’t call them virgins. But nice girls. One of them used to be a stewardess.”

“What did the other one used to be?”

“A virgin, I guess. I used to be a virgin, come to think of it. You game, Larry?”

I said I couldn’t afford it.

“Oh, shit,” he said. “You’re making good dough.”

“I have two wives to support,” I said. “One current and one former.”

“I have one wife and one house. Believe me, a house is worse than a wife in that respect, past or present. I have crabgrass to kill. Come on, I hate to sin alone.”

“You’re happily married,” I said.

“What the hell does that have to do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t fuck around.”

“So?”

“Christ, I’ll loan you the twenty.”

I thought about it. “I just don’t really feel like it,” I said. “Look, it’s not as though you can’t go alone. What’s the problem?”

“I’ll tell you, I get very awkward going there alone. Because there’s the two of them.”

“So?”

“So I hate to choose between them. It’s like rejecting one of them. It’s like picking one and telling the other ’You’re a nice kid but I’d rather fuck your roommate.’ So she’s rejected, and she sits in the other room watching the fucking television set, and the whole thing puts me off stride.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“I just don’t like to reject people.”

He was serious. I looked at him thoughtfully. “Go to bed with both of them,” I said.

“Huh?”

“No rejection. Take them both to bed, lie there in the middle and ball them both. So it costs you forty instead of twenty and you kill a little less crabgrass next week.”

“Jesus,” he said. “You ever do that?”

“Kill crab grass?”

“Two girls at once.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Not hookers, and not recently, but yeah.”

“Is it great?”

“The only problem is that it can sometimes get hard to keep your mind on both of them at the same time. For me, anyway. I’m generally better on one-to-one relationships. But with paid talent I don’t think it would matter that much.”

His jaw set and he gripped my arm. “You’re a brother,” he said. “I’m gonna do it.”

“Hang loose.”

“I will. You’re a prince, Larry, I mean it. We’ll have lunch again soon. Call me.”

“I will.”

“My love to Fran.”

“And my love to Paula.”

He looked at me. “Their names are Bunny and Aileen,” he said. “Aileen was the stewardess.”

“And Bunny was the virgin, I know. Paula’s your wife, schmuck.”

“She’s a wonderful girl,” he said automatically. “She really is, Larry. She’s good for me.”

I went back to the office and tried reading some more, but I kept imagining myself lying between a former stewardess and a former virgin, one of them asking me to be gentle and the other offering me coffee, tea or milk. As I pictured them, the stew looked a lot like Fran and the virgin looked a lot like Jennifer. (I never told you about Jennifer, did I?) I’m sorry to say that neither of them looked like you, Lisa. You do worm your way into my fantasies from time to time, but you weren’t in this one. Sorry about that.

Then my phone rang.

This wasn’t alarming. I have this phone on my desk, and now and then it rings. Sometimes it’s Fran asking me to pick up something on my way home. Sometimes it’s Jennie wondering if I can duck out on Fran for a couple of hours that evening. Sometimes, God help us, it’s you, wanting to know why the alimony check hasn’t turned up yet.

So it was a beautiful day, and my phone was ringing, and I picked up the phone, and in my little world the sun hid behind panther-colored clouds, the carbon-monoxide and sulfurdioxide levels soared, the stock market sank without a trace, and the sword of Damocles began its swift descent.

“Laurence Clarke? This is Mr. Finch’s secretary. Mr. Finch would like to see you in his office.”

“In his office,” I said. I have a tendency in moments of stress to repeat the last three words of other people’s sentences. When Fran and I were married, I said “Help you God” instead of “I do.” Which gave a few people a few bad moments until I corrected myself.

“Yes,” said Mr. Finch’s secretary.

“Now?”

“Now, Mr. Clarke.” Yecchhh.

Mr. Clayton Finch’s office is on the fourteenth floor, which is one floor above the twelfth. Clay Finch is not, as one might understandably guess, a target for particularly adept skeet shooters. He is in fact the president of Whitestone Publications, the fount from whence flows a torrent of paperback books and magazines of no particular distinction. In this capacity he has been, for just less than ten months, the employer of yours truly, Laurence Clarke.

He looked more like a cast-iron owl than a clay finch, anyway. He gazed at me over his desk, all eyes and a couple of yards wide. His was a much larger desk than mine, and his office, unlike mine, had windows. Several of them. Let it be known, though, that I in no way begrudged him these trappings of status. I was perfectly content with my little desk and my airless cubbyhole and my subsistence-level salary.

“Laurence Clarke,” he said.

“Mr. Finch,” I said.

“Laurence with a U,” he said. “Clarke with an E.”

“With an E,” I echoed.

He closed his eyes. He opened them, and he shook his head sorrowfully from side to side, and then he closed his eyes again. “I suppose you ought to sit down,” he said.

I sat down.

“You’ve been with us since September,” he said. “You were hired as the editor-in-chief of Ronald Rabbit’s Magazine for Boys and Girls. We pay you” — he consulted a scrap of paper — “a salary of $16,350 annually.”

I nodded.

He picked up a pipe, turned it around and around in his manicured hands. He said, “Ronald Rabbit’s Magazine for Boys and Girls suspended publication with its January issue. I suspect the publicity had something to do with it. Your predecessor Haskell; even though we fired him, the story couldn’t be hushed up. An eleven-year-old boy, for heaven’s sake. And then offering the defense that the boy told him he was fourteen. A bad hat, Haskell. And the scandal inevitably rubbed off on Ronald Rabbit.”

“It hardly seemed fair,” I put in.

He sighed. “You prepared the December and January issues,” he said. “After which time the magazine ceased publication. Since then you seem to have continued to come to your office every day, Monday through Friday, except for a week’s vacation in April and four days in February when you were ill.”

“Asian flu.”

“You’ve continued to draw your full salary. You’re listed in the books as the editor of this Ronald Rabbit thing.” His eye focused thoughtfully upon me. “Mr. Clarke,” he said, “just what on earth do you do?”

I swallowed, but that didn’t seem to answer his question. I said, “Uh, I get a lot of reading done.”

“I imagine you do.”

“And I, uh, keep myself available.”

“Whatever for?”

“For anything that might come up.”

“No doubt.” He closed his eyes for a longer period of time. He opened them and sighed, perhaps because I was still there. “It must be very boring for you,” he said. “Doing absolutely nothing, day after day, week after week, month after month.”

“Month after month,” I said.

“Eh?”

“I haven’t minded it, Mr. Finch.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. Of course at first I hoped someone would find something for me to do, but after a while I began to get used to it. To having nothing to do, that is.”

“You never went looking for another job.”

“No, I’ve been happy here.”

“And you never tried to find anything else you could do here?”

“I didn’t want to call attention to myself.”

He winced. “Eight months of well-paid inactivity,” he said. “Two months of work and eight months of total sloth. I’ve never heard of anything like it. Do you realize what you’ve done, Clarke? You’ve stowed away on a corporation.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“It’s quite incredible. When this came to my attention I was fully prepared to be furious with you. For some curious reason I find myself unable to work up any genuine rage. Astonishment, yes. Even a sort of grudging admiration. I have to admit that I found myself looking around for something else you could do for us. But of course there’s nothing open. Everybody in the industry is busy reducing staff these days; combining jobs, eliminating deadwood. You’re the deadest possible sort of wood, Clarke. No offense intended, but you’re the rottenest limb on the Whitestone tree.”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did he, so I finally broke the silence. “Then I’m fired,” I said.

“Fired? Of course you’re fired.”

I nodded. “I knew it would have to happen sooner or later. It was too good to last.”

“Fired? What else could you be but fired? Promoted, perhaps? Rewarded with a raise?”

“I’ll miss working here,” I said. To myself more than to Finch.

He stood up. “Oh, we’ll miss having you, Clarke. I don’t know how we’ll get on without you.” He started to chuckle, then broke it off sharply and resumed the head-shaking routine. “Well,” he said, “I’ve had a check drawn. Your salary through today plus two weeks’ severance pay and six days’ sick leave.” He picked up a check and frowned at it. “Of course you weren’t here five years or you would have been participating in the profit-sharing plan. Suppose you’d stowed away for five years? Or forever? The mind boggles. Well, I don’t suppose it will take you long to find something suitable. We’ll give you a good reference, needless to say. We’ve had no complaints about your performance of assigned tasks, have we?”

I laughed politely.

“And in the meantime you can begin collecting unemployment benefits. A comedown from your present salary, but your duties will be essentially the same.”

“Essentially the same.” I took a breath. “Could you tell me how you happened to, uh, find out about me?”

“Your expense account,” he said.

“My expense account?”

“Part of the current austerity program. I had someone going over expense account records for the past half year to see who might have been taking a bit of advantage. And your records immediately attracted attention.”

“I never used my expense account, Mr. Finch.”

“Precisely. An editor who doesn’t charge a minimum of three lunches a week to the company stands out like a sore thumb. Surprising you weren’t detected earlier. Why, you should have been gouging us for an extra twenty-five or thirty dollars a week at the least.”

“It didn’t seem honest,” I said, thoughtfully.

“Honest,” he said. “Well,” he said. “I won’t keep you, Clarke. You’ll want to clean out your desk. If there’s anything in it. And you’ll want to say goodbye to some of your coworkers, if you’ve happened to meet any of them in the course of your stay here. It’s been a pleasure, Clarke. An educational experience.”

We shook hands. I said, “If you should ever decide to reactivate Ronald Rabbit—”

“Oh, we’ll keep you in mind, Clarke. We’ll certainly keep you in mind. Count on it.”

I got back to my own desk and sat at it and thought how I was going to miss it. I had a check in my pocket for almost a thousand dollars. There was another hundred in my wallet and something like fifteen hundred in our joint checking account. In a drawer at the apartment, there were bills running to perhaps a thousand dollars. Fran earned $130 a week before deductions, considerably less after them. Presumably we wouldn’t starve, with her salary added to my unemployment. Not right away, at least.

But what was I going to do?

It was a very weird moment or three, Lisa love. A very weird couple of moments indeed. Larry Clarke, Laurence with a U and Clarke with an E — and wouldn’t it be nice, by the by, to have a name one didn’t have to spell for people. Laurence Clarke himself, a poet whose Muse went into retirement a year and a half ago. Born thirty-two years and ten days ago, a Gemini with Scorpio rising and Moon in Leo. Unemployed, and presumably unemployable. A lad with talents unexciting enough in a booming labor market, and here we were in a labor market that could hardly have been less booming. If the economy got a little worse I could respectably sell apples on street corners, but what would I do in the interim?

Consider this: In all my life I had only found one job that I truly and unequivocally enjoyed, and now I was fired from it.

I picked up the phone and called Fran’s office. She had not come in to work, someone told me, nor had she called in. I tried her at home and the phone rang for a while before I gave up on it.

I decided it was just as well. Conversations with Fran had been difficult enough lately, even when I had good news. But I had to talk to someone, so I called Steve Adel. Of course you remember Steve, old college buddy and best friend in all the world. Best man at our wedding, you recall. Best man again, when I married Fran. He’s still in photography, has a loft of his own on Centre Street. He wasn’t around, though, and I sat there trying to think of someone else to call, and the phone rang, and although you might think I’d have known better, I answered it.

A collect call from Richmond, Virginia. There is only one person who calls me collect, and only one person I know in Richmond. Both of those people are you, Lisa. I accepted the call on behalf of Whitestone Publications — it was all I could do to compensate them for not having made use of my expense account. And there you were, as you perhaps remember.

You may remember the conversation as well, but I’m going to reproduce it here just for the sake of continuity.

LISA: Sweetie, it’s good to talk to you.

LARRY: You’ve eloped.

LISA: No, honey—

LARRY: You’ve moved up the wedding, though.

LISA: (Giggles deep in her throat. There was a time, you know, when I loved the sound of that giggle. There was also a time when I wanted to be a fireman when I grew up.) No, just the opposite, lover. Last night Wally and I called the whole thing off. No wedding bells for Lisa.

LARRY: No wedding bells.

LISA: ’Fraid not. Oh, it just wouldn’t have worked out, honey. Just no way. He’s a sweet guy and I do love him some, but as far as marriage goes, no, it just couldn’t have worked out for us.

LARRY: You don’t want to jump to such an important decision, Lisa.

LISA: Oh, be sure I gave it mucho thought, honey.

LARRY: I see.

LISA: But there is no way to make it work. Oh, we’re fine in bed, lover, but that’s just not enough to build a marriage around. As far as that goes, you and I were good in bed, Larry. I can still say that you were one of the best lovers I’ve ever had.

LARRY: I don’t know how to thank you.

LISA: Of course we were both a good deal younger then. You’ve probably learned a lot more since those days. God knows I have.

LARRY: I can imagine.

LISA: Can you? But as far as marriage goes, I think it can go without me. Honestly, darling, there are times when I think I’ll stay single for the rest of my life. So I’m afraid those alimony checks won’t stop next month after all, sugar. As a matter of fact—

LARRY: I was fired today.

LISA: Fired?

LARRY: Today. The magazine ceased publication, so they let me go. So as far as the checks are concerned—

LISA: Oh, I’m sure you’ll be able to keep them coming.

LARRY: You are, eh?

LISA: I have confidence in you. But this does change things, doesn’t it? You see, Daddy has been after me to increase the checks. He says with the way inflation is going, and the increase in the cost of living...

(I missed a lot of what followed there, Lisa. When you quote your father you talk the same legal bullshit he talks. But the gist of it seemed to be that the old bastard wanted you to petition the court for an increase of a third in your alimony payments.)

LISA: (Cont’d.) But of course this changes things. I still consider myself your friend, lovie, and what are friends for if not to be understanding in times of stress?

LARRY: Times of stress.

LISA: So we’ll just let it stand at $850 a month until you get things straightened out. I just hope you won’t be unemployed for too very long.

LARRY: So do I, actually.

LISA: Oh, just incidentally, I didn’t get this month’s check yet. I suppose it’s in the mail?

LARRY: You know how the mails are.

LISA: But I suppose it’ll get here within a day or two, don’t you think?

LARRY: You’ll get your money.

LISA: I’m sure I will, doll.

LARRY: But I wish to hell you would marry the son of a bitch.

LISA: Men are supposed to be upset when their ex-wives remarry. A virility-anxiety thing, I think it is. They don’t like to be replaced. I read that many of them even enjoy paying alimony, that they get their kicks out of the measure of control it lets them keep over their ex’s life.

LARRY: You read that, huh?

LISA: It makes sense, don’t you think? Except for those men who don’t have much virility to be anxious about.

LARRY: I’ve got to go now. My other phone is ringing.

LISA: Fun-nee.

LARRY: It was good talking to you, Lisa. It always is.

LISA: Sometimes I think it’s a shame we didn’t work out, Larry. But we had some good times, didn’t we?

LARRY: Some good times. No argument there.

LISA: How’s Fran?

LARRY: Fine.

LISA: Give her my love.

LARRY: Will do.

LISA: Bye, hon. And don’t forget the check, huh? I’m kind of broke.

LARRY: I won’t forget.

Outside, away from the air conditioning, the weather had gone to hell along with the rest of my life. It had turned hot and damp, and the air was foul. I took a taxi. Pecuniary emulation, your father would call it. Spending money unnecessarily because one lacks it. Ego food. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t hack the subway.

Bleecker Street had never looked bleaker. I dogged it up the stairs through the cooking smells and let myself in.

Nobody home. I had a drink and was building another when I found the note. It was on the kitchen table, and I suppose I must have looked at it several times without seeing it. The work of a benign Providence. Obviously God knew I ought to have a drink inside me and another close at hand before I read that fucking note.

I reproduce it for you, Lisa:

I went around the corner to the bank, and she was right. The checking account was gone. I sat down with a vice-president and we figured out how many checks were outstanding and cashed my final Whitestone check and put in enough money so none of the checks would bounce. I wound up with a couple of hundred dollars. There were still all those bills upstairs, and I still owed you $850, Lisa, the very $850 which I am not sending with this letter. The bank officer asked me if I wanted to open a new account; I decided to keep the money in cash. Not that I would be keeping it very long.

Then I came back here and finished the drink, and then I read Fran’s letter a few more times.

Friday, June 12^th. It should have been the thirteenth. I had just lost my job and my wife and most of my money. I had retained my ex-wife and the privilege of defusing my virility-anxiety by paying her four times as much each month as I would receive in unemployment compensation. The only person I really felt like talking to about all of this was on his way to Monterrey with Fran. (And why, I wonder, did the silly cunt insist on furnishing me with their itinerary? Could I look forward to a parade of postcards? Having wonderful time. X marks our room. Wish you were here.)

I called Jennifer, who lives on East Seventh Street and weaves rugs and tapestries. We have an undemanding sort of relationship, Jennie and I. I drop over there once or twice a week and we smoke a little grass and listen to a little music and fuck a little. I told her I was at loose ends, which was as true a statement as any I have ever uttered, and that I thought I might go over and see her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m kind of uptight. I just got my period yesterday and I had this hassle with the super and I’m in a shitty mood. If you just wanted to talk a little and watch me weave—”

Jennifer is twenty-two, with a supple body and pale skin and long mahogany hair and trusting acidhead eyes. All of this makes her a yummy fuck but a verbal nothing. Going over to her place just for conversation is like going to a Chinese restaurant just for dessert. This is all right on grass — ten-minute silences aren’t bothersome then — but I felt not at all like getting high. I wanted to close the doors of perception, not open them.

And what’s deadlier than watching someone weave?

“Maybe some other time would be better,” I said.

“Actually, we could ball. Not balling during your period is just a hangup, you know. You probably wouldn’t want to go down on me, but—”

“It’s not that,” I said, truthlessly. “I’m uptight myself. I think the vibrations would be bad.”

Jennie is one of those young female persons who will accept any explanation that has the word vibrations in it. She agreed that we would make it another time, and I picked up the phone again and tried to think of somebody to call. Or someplace to go. Or something to do. And managed to think of none of these things.

I came very close to calling you, Lisa, as a matter of fact. The only thing that stopped me was that I didn’t want to hear your voice. I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds. I had some things to tell you, but I didn’t want you talking back to me while I tried to get it all out.

So I decided to write a poem, and set the typewriter upon the kitchen table, and rolled a sheet of paper into it, and spent a long time looking at it. Which made it as close as I had come to writing a poem in about a year and a half.

And then I thought, well, I can’t send Lisa a check, and I’d better tell her as much before her father sends his bloodhounds after me. Does the old bastard still raise bloodhounds? I’m sure he does.

So I started to write you a letter, and I seem to have gotten carried away. Ridiculous, isn’t it? All of this just to tell you that there’s no check in the envelope, when you found that out before you read a word.

Christ, Lisa, I’ve written twenty goddamn pages of this. I can’t believe it. This stupid letter is the first thing I’ve written in a year and a half. It is already longer than either of the two attempts I made at writing novels, and probably more cogent than either in the bargain.

All those months at Ronald Rabbit’s, with a desk and a chair and a typewriter and nothing but solitude, and I never wrote a fucking word. And here I am beating this typewriter to a pulp, the words just rolling straight from my brain through my fingers and onto the page. Pages. Page after page after page.

Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. We did have some good times, damnit. We truly did. And I think it’s nice we haven’t let the fact that we sort of hate each other keep us from loving each other a little.

Ah, Lisa. Here’s your letter, and I’m sorry there’s no check to go with it, but there isn’t, and God knows when there will be. You don’t have to answer this letter. You don’t even have to keep it. I have a carbon. I just never did get out of the habit of keeping carbons of things, and when I first put the sheet of paper in the typewriter I hoped it would turn out to be a poem. But maybe this is better. The world has enough poems, and maybe it needs more prose.

Anyway, I’ve solved a problem. When I started this I didn’t know what to do, and now I do. I’m going to tuck this into an envelope and go downstairs and mail it, and then I’m going over to the Kettle to get drunk.

You may be hearing more from me, Lisa.

With love (but without $850),