Eyes in the Fishbowl Read online

  Josh rolled his eyes up at me from under his wad of hair without uncurling from around the guitar. “Yeah?” he said. “Like what?”

  “Oh, I just had a melody and a rhythm beat going at the same time. But it wasn’t quite like that.”

  “So show us,” Josh said, unwrapping himself and sticking his guitar out in my direction, like he thought I was going to drop my bread and leap across the room to take it.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I gave it up.”

  “Gave what up?” he said, still holding the guitar out sort of limply.

  “The guitar habit. I quit. It takes too much time.”

  Josh went on looking at me, and then he looked at Phil and Dunc, and then he shrugged and pulled in his arm. He hunched over and began to strum. “Man,” he muttered into his beard, “this kid has a problem. What is he—about twelve? And already he’s running out of time.”

  Phil laughed. “Oh, Di’s all right. It’s just that he’s a throwback. A typical member of the younger generation of 1910.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what he was driving at, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking; so I went back to my bread and sugar, and in a little while Phil and Dunc and their crummy friend straggled out to go to some coffee shop where a lot of their other friends hung out. So Matt and I were left alone in the kitchen.

  It was getting cold and Matt got up and rummaged through the wood box for some more stuff to throw on the fire. There wasn’t much left but he managed to stir up a little heat and we both moved closer.

  “Is that the straight scoop?” Matt asked. “Have you really quit playing the guitar for good?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? As far as I can see, this whole music thing is for suckers. There’s almost nothing you can do that takes so much time and work, and what do you get out of it? Maybe one guy in a couple of million gets to where he can make any real money with it. Besides, I’ve got my future all planned and there just isn’t going to be much time for music.”

  “I see,” Matt said. Then he just sat there for a long time fooling with his beard and looking at me in a funny way, like he was half amused and half disgusted. I was already beginning to get mad when he started out. “Well, there’s just one thought I’d like to offer. You might very well get to be the one in a couple of million who makes it with music. I’ll bet the odds against being born with the kind of musical talent you have are almost that extreme.”

  I laughed. “Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve been through that stage. Daydreaming about being some big star or concert artist. Fat chance. And besides, I don’t have the personality for it. To be a big star, more than half of it is personality—the way you come on. And I just don’t have it.”

  “How do you know you don’t?”

  “I know. When I went to Lincoln, I used to have to play violin solos with the orchestra.” All of a sudden I was remembering those solos—in the bottom of my stomach. Me limping on stage in my outgrown suit and frozen smile, and the guys from my class giggling in the front row. “It made me sick,” I said. “I mean sick!”

  “Okay. Okay,” Matt said. “So you don’t want to be a professional musician. You still wouldn’t have to quit music altogether. You used to play and sing for hours at a time, with nobody ever twisting your arm or even telling you to practice. And now—nothing. I don’t get it.”

  “I told you. I don’t have time anymore,” I said. “I have plans, other things to do.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Matt grinned. “Phil was right when he called you a throwback. With half the kids in the country rebelling against the whole scene, here you are knocking yourself out to be a part of it. How come?”

  I got up and slammed the milk into the refrigerator and started out of the room. “Di! Di, wait a minute,” Matt said.

  So I stopped halfway out the door, without turning around. “I’m sorry,” Matt said. “I wasn’t trying to put you down. I really just want to know. How come?”

  “How come!” I said. “How do I know how come? I haven’t figured it out. I don’t have time. And I can’t help it if I’m not rebelling in the right direction. Everybody has to rebel against what he has to rebel against. Not what somebody else has.”

  Chapter 9

  WHEN I GOT to my room, I slammed the door and threw myself down on my bed. I lay there for about thirty seconds and then I sat up and punched my pillow, took off my shoes, turned off the light and lay back down. In about thirty seconds more, I got up again, turned on the light and put my shoes back on. I found a book I’d been reading, took it over to my desk and got out a pencil and ruler to mark important passages. After I’d read about two sentences, I put the book down, grabbed my jacket, and left the house.

  I didn’t have any idea where I was going. I just felt I had to get out. I hunched my head down inside my turned-up collar, stuck my hands in my pockets and started to walk. But I’d only gone a few blocks when I realized I was heading toward Alcott-Simpson’s. I knew it would be closed, but I told myself that as long as I was walking, there wasn’t any reason why I shouldn’t walk in that direction if I felt like it.

  It was a strange night. There was a low misty overcast, so thick that in spots it was almost like walking through drifting clouds. There wasn’t any wind, though, so after a few fast blocks I didn’t feel the cold at all. In what seemed like only a few minutes, I’d reached the corner of Palm and Eighth.

  I looked around. The cold mist was thicker than it had been down in our part of town. The street lights were only small fuzzy glares, and José’s shuttered-up flower stand was draped in a floating white veil. There was a stillness, as if the city sounds were deadened, drowned in the fog. Except for a car or a scurrying pedestrian appearing and quickly disappearing into the gloom, the city looked deserted, like a land of the dead. I decided to walk around the block once quickly and then go right on home.

  All around Alcott-Simpson’s the fog was almost like a living thing, clammy cold and dripping; but inside the display windows, the lighting had a golden tone, warm and rich. More than ever it was like looking into a separate world. I walked by windows set up as rooms beautifully furnished, windows full of haughty manikins dressed in the latest styles, and one that was an elaborate ski lodge scene with a bunch of manikins in ski clothes standing around a fireplace with lots of skiing equipment carefully scattered around. When I came to the west entrance, I stopped and peered into the ground floor.

  The huge stretch of the main floor of Alcott-Simpson’s was almost dark. Dim lights were on in just a few places, and here and there a pale glow lit a length of gilded pillar or reflected in a mirror or counter top. In between and back behind, the rest of the floor seemed to go on forever, dim and shadowy. It made me think of a huge cave, maybe the treasure cavern in the Arabian Nights with endless riches making golden sparkles in the gloom. I leaned against the fog-wet glass and whispered “Open Sesame” but nothing happened. I went on around the block, and it wasn’t until I had stopped again at the east entrance that I saw something moving way back in the shadows.

  It was a long way off at first among the potted trees at the edge of the Garden Court and it appeared and then disappeared among the deeper shadows. Two or three times I told myself that I was only imagining it; but then suddenly it was close enough so that I knew I wasn’t. I wasn’t imagining it, and when she turned into the main aisle that led to the east entrance I could see that it was a girl—a girl wearing a long white dress with dark hair hanging down over her shoulders. Even before she was near enough for me to see her face, I knew it was Sara. When she was quite close, she began to run and in a second she was unlocking the door; I was inside before I had time to think.

  The minute I heard the door locking behind me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be inside Alcott-Simpson’s again after closing time. The first time had been bad enough. “Hey,” I whispered, “what’s going on? What are you doing in here? I mean, what are we
doing in here?”

  For a second she didn’t say anything; she just looked at me and smiled that all-out smile, like a little kid on Christmas morning. Then suddenly she looked behind me at the door and said, “Hurry. This way.” We ducked back into a side aisle as some people walked by on the sidewalk outside.

  We stood there in the shadows waiting for them to get out of sight, and I said, “Look, this is crazy. I don’t want to go through this again.”

  “It’s all right,” Sara said. “The dogs are gone now. And the guards are all in the watchman’s room. I know all about when they come and where they look. They won’t see us. If we go upstairs, no one will see us.”

  I don’t know why, but I believed her absolutely. I was sure that she knew what she was talking about; I was sure that the police dogs were gone and that the watchman would only be where she expected them to be and that she was right about us being safe upstairs. But there was one thing I wasn’t sure about, and I was thinking about that all the time as Sara led the way through the shadowy aisles and up the escalator. I was wondering how she knew and why she knew and what part she played in the whole big mystery that had been going on at Alcott-Simpson’s.

  When we got to the mezzanine, she stopped and waited for me.

  “I didn’t believe it,” she said in a breathless rush. “When they said you were right outside, I didn’t believe it.”

  For a second I thought I mustn’t have heard her right. “When who said?” I gasped. “Who said I was right outside?”

  Sara looked startled for a split second, but then she laughed. “Oh just some friends of mine,” she said. “I have some other friends in the store.”

  I looked around. “But who—and where are they? I haven’t seen anyone except you—and the guards that time. Is that it? Are the guards your friends?”

  She laughed. “Oh no. The guards aren’t my friends. My friends are—they’re here someplace, in the store. It’s a very big store.”

  “It’s a very big store,” I said in a sarcastic tone of voice. “Well, thanks for the news. Now look. You’ve said something about other people, other people in the store, before. I want to know what you’re talking about. I want to know what I’m getting into. These friends of yours, are they people who work here or are they—the ones the guards have been hired to catch? The ones who’ve been stealing things. I’m not going to rat on anybody, but I don’t want to get mixed up in—”

  I faded out about then because all of a sudden I noticed that Sara was—well, not crying exactly, but her eyes had an underwater look and her chin was moving. It shook me up. I’d never seen a girl cry before, except a few real little ones, and I’d sure as hell never made a girl cry before. I don’t remember exactly what I said next, but I do know I stopped asking questions. I just began talking and I kept on until she smiled again, and when I was through I knew I’d said things I hadn’t meant, or at least I hadn’t meant them until I said them. I’d said that it didn’t matter to me who the others were and it didn’t matter what they were doing in Alcott-Simpson’s and that I wouldn’t ask her about them any more. She looked up at me then and smiled, and her eyes were fantastic. For just a minute I felt my skin prickle all over the way it does when music is beautiful beyond any sort of reason or expectation.

  “Let’s go up to the second floor,” she said, and her voice sounded normal and cheerful. “I left some things up there, and I have to put some dresses away.”

  So we went on up to the second floor and walked way back through the women’s clothing departments to where evening dresses and coats were sold. Near some tall three-sided mirrors there was a chair piled high with evening dresses. Sara began putting the dresses on hangers and putting them away. “I was looking at them,” she explained. “But I always put things away when I’ve finished.” One of the dresses she put away was very much like the one she was wearing, long and white and floaty. I wondered if she’d just borrowed it off the rack, too.

  On another chair near the mirrors was a bouquet of flowers, some kind of very small orchids—golden tan flecked with brown. When Sara finished putting away the dresses, she picked up the flowers. “I got these downstairs,” she said. “Would you like one?” She gave me an orchid, and I put it in the buttonhole of my jacket. Sara stood in front of the mirror and put the others in her hair—crisp dark gold against soft black.

  “What do you want to see?” she asked then.

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “All right,” she said, “I think I’d like a necklace. Shall we go find me a necklace?” I guess I looked worried at that because she added, “It’s all right. I’ll put it back after a while.”

  I was afraid she meant to go back down to the Gem Shop on the first floor where there were real diamonds and other jewelry that cost an awful lot of money. I didn’t much like the idea of fooling around with that sort of thing, even if she did mean to put it back. But it turned out that she was only heading for a costume jewelry counter on the second floor. When we got there, she took all kinds of things out of the cases and tried them on—earrings, necklaces, bracelets. She kept asking me what I thought about each one, but they all looked okay to me and I said so. At last she put everything back except a long string of green beads and a heavy medallion of some kind of metal. After she put them on she said, “Where shall we go now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but then I had an idea. “I always used to have dreams about having the Alcott-Simpson’s toy department all to myself. It might be fun to see what it’s like—just for old time’s sake.”

  Sara paused for a minute, and I thought she looked uncertain, maybe even worried, but then she nodded. “All right, let’s go to the toy department.”

  So we started on up to the fourth floor, but not very directly. Walking with Sara was not like walking with anyone else. We moved in the same direction but not in the same way or at the same rate of speed. I walked slowly, trying hard not to make any noise, straining my ears and eyes against the unaccustomed silence and shadows. And all the time Sara came and went around me so that it was almost like walking with an unleashed puppy. She kept going and coming—skipping ahead and running back—telling me to come see something or else bringing something back to me. Once she was gone for a second and came back with a big hat made of pink ostrich feathers. “Isn’t it beautiful—so beautiful,” she said, holding it out for me to touch. She put it on her head and pulled the feathery brim down around her face and laughed and ran back to put it away. We made detours to look at some golden slippers, a manikin in a wedding dress, and some home gym equipment. Sara wanted to touch everything, try it out, and she kept saying that everything was beautiful. After a while I felt a little less nervous, and I tried out a few things, too. I rowed on the rowing machine and rode the stationery bicycle in the gym display, while Sara sat on a balancing horse and watched and laughed. I laughed, too, but I couldn’t hold on to the feeling of having a good time. There was a kind of frustration in the strangeness of the situation that kept bothering me, when Sara was out of sight, and other times, too. The other times were now and then when Sara would stop and a shadow would pass over her face, like a memory of something terrible and hopeless.

  We had just gotten to the top of the escalator at the fourth floor when Sara stopped and stood for a second as if she were listening. “Wait,” she said. “Wait here a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Where are you going?”

  Sara motioned to the left where you could see the top of the arch that led to the toy department. “There,” she said. “To see if everything is all right. I’ll be right back. Stay here until I come back. Please stay here.”

  “But—but,” I said, and I was still protesting when she ran away. I hadn’t really promised, and I had almost decided to follow her anyway when she came running back.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s not go there now. We’ll go there later. Let’s go back downstairs now.”

  She started back down t
he escalator, and I followed after her feeling stranger than ever. Like having the kind of dream where crazy unexplainable things keep happening and you realize it’s crazy but you can’t wake up and make it stop.

  When we got back to the ground floor, we went to the left around the Mall. I tried to question Sara about the toy department and why we couldn’t go there, but she only shook her head. Except for that, she seemed the same as before, laughing and talking and rushing around. We stopped for a while in the Music Shop. There were a lot of guitars in some big glass cabinets and I mentioned to Sara that I played. Right away she wanted me to play one. “Sure,” I said. “That’s all we need to bring every guard in the place down on our necks.”

  “Oh no,” Sara said. “It’s all right. The guards don’t go on their rounds very often anymore. They have a place down in the basement where they all stay together. They won’t hear.”

  If I’d really stopped to think about it, I would have realized that that didn’t make much sense, but at that point I was ready to believe just about anything Sara said. I was starting to see if I could get a guitar out of the cabinet when all of a sudden I heard voices. I froze on the spot, listening. In a minute I could tell that I wasn’t hearing loud voices still a long way off, but very soft voices coming from someplace very near. My heart went limp for a second and then caught up with a huge thudding rush. I reached for Sara’s hand to pull her away, but she dodged away from me and stood still, listening.

  “Come on,” I barely breathed. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She shook her head. “Stay here,” she said. “I have to find out. I’ll be right back.”

  She moved in the direction of the voices, and after a minute I followed. By the time she got to the arch that led into the next department, I was only a few steps behind. We went around the corner—and then I started to laugh. We were in the TV shop and all it was was a big color TV set that had been left on by some careless clerk.

  I began laughing like crazy; it really wasn’t that funny but I was feeling dizzy with relief. Then all at once I noticed Sara’s face. She wasn’t laughing, and she looked hard at the TV and then very quickly all around the shop as if she were looking for something. She was frowning a little and pressing her lips together hard.