"I'm sorry, madam," I said, "that's a typographical error. That should have been a noodle."

"Why do you charge so much for cream?" she said.

"It's because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles," I said.

"I keep thinking it's Tuesday," she said.

"It is Tuesday," I said.

"That's what I keep thinking," she said. "Tell me, do you serve flannelcakes?"

"Not on the menu today," I said.

"Last night I dreamed I was eating flannelcakes," she said.

"That must have been very nice," I said.

"It was terrible," she said. "When I woke up, the blanket was gone."

She, too, had reason to escape into the fourth dimension. As I would find out later, her patient had died that night. Sarah had liked her a lot. The patient was only thirty-six, but she had a congenitally defective heart — huge and fatty and weak.

And imagine, if you will, the effect this conversation was having on Leland Clewes, who was sitting right next to me. My eyes were closed, as I say, and I was in such an ecstasy of timelessness and placelessness that I might as well have been having sexual intercourse with his wife before his eyes. He forgave me, of course. He forgives everybody for everything. But he still had to be impressed by how lazily in love Sarah and I could still be on the telephone.

What is more protean than adultery? Nothing in this world.

"I am thinking of going on a diet," said Sarah.

"I know how you can lose twenty pounds of ugly fat right away," I said.

"How?" she said.

"Have your head cut off," I said.

Clewes could hear only my half of the conversation, of course, so he could only hear the premise or the snapper of a joke, but never both. Some of the lines were highly suggestive.

I asked Sarah, I remember, if she smoked after intercourse.

Clewes never heard her reply, which was this: "I don't know. I never looked." And then she went on: "What did you do before you were a waiter?"

"I used to clean birdshit out of cuckoo clocks," I said.

"I have often wondered what the white stuff in birdshit was," she said.

"That's birdshit, too," I told her. "What kind of work do you do?"

"I work in the bloomer factory," she said.

"Is it a good job in the bloomer factory?" I inquired archly.

21

"Oh," she said, "I can't complain. I pull down about ten thousand a year." Sarah coughed, and that, too, was a cue, which I nearly missed.

"That's quite a cough you have there," I said in the nick of time.

"It won't stop," she said.

"Take two of these pills," I said. "They're just the thing." So she made swallowing sounds: "gluck, gluck, gluck." And then she asked what was in the pills.

"The most powerful laxative known to medical science," I said.

"Laxative!" she said.

"Yes," I said, "now you don't dare cough."

We did the joke, too, about a sick horse I supposedly had. I have never really owned a horse. The veterinarian gave me half a pound of purple powder that I was to give the horse, supposedly. The veterinarian told me to make a tube out of paper, and to put the powder inside the tube, and then to slip the tube into the horse's mouth, and to blow it down its throat.

"How is the horse?" said Sarah.

"Oh, the horse is fine," I said.

"You don't look so good," she said.

"No," I said, "that is because the horse blew first."

"Can you still imitate your mother's laugh?" she said.

This was not the premise of yet another joke. Sarah genuinely wanted to hear me imitate my mother's laugh, something I used to do a lot for Sarah on the telephone. I had not tried the trick in years. I not only had to make my voice high: I also had to make it beautiful.

The thing was this: Mother never laughed out loud. She had been trained to stifle her laughter when a servant girl in Lithuania. The idea was that a master or guest, hearing a servant laughing somewhere in the house, might suspect that the servant was laughing about him.

So when my mother could not help laughing, she made tiny, pure sounds like a music box — or perhaps like bells far away. It was accidental that they were so beautiful.

So — forgetful of where I was, I now filled my lungs and tightened my throat, and to please my old girlfriend, I reincarnated the laughing part of my mother.

It was at that point that Arpad Leen and Frank Ubriaco came back into the living room. They heard the end of my song.

I told Sarah that I had to hang up now, and I did hang up.

Arpad Leen stared at me hard. I had heard women speak of men's undressing them mentally. Now I was finding out what that felt like. As things turned out, that was exactly what Leen was doing to me: imagining what I would look like with no clothes on.

He was beginning to suspect that I was Mrs. Jack Graham, checking up on him while disguised as a man.

22

I could not know that, of course — that he thought I might be Mrs. Graham. So his subsequent courting of me was as inexplicable as anything that had happened to me all day.

I tried to believe that he was being so attentive in order to soften the bad news he had to give me by and by: that I was simply not RAMJAC material, and that his limousine was waiting down below to take me back, still jobless, to the Arapahoe. But the messages in his eyes were more passionate than that. He was ravenous for my approval of everything he did. He told me, and not Leland Clewes or Israel Edel, that he had just made Frank Ubriaco a vice-president of the McDonald's Hamburgers Division of RAMJAC.

I nodded that I thought that was nice.

The nod was not enough for Leen. "I think it's a wonderful example of putting the right man in the right job," he said. "Don't you? That's what RAMJAC is all about, don't you think — putting good people where they can use their talents to the fullest?"

The question was for me and nobody else, so I finally said, "Yes."

I had to go through the same thing after he had interviewed and hired Clewes and Edel. Clewes was made a vice-president of the Diamond Match Division, presumably because he had been selling advertising matchbooks for so long. Edel was made a vice-president of the Hilton Department of the Hospitality Associates, Ltd., Division, presumably because of his three weeks of experience as a night clerk at the Arapahoe.

It was then my turn to go into the library with him. "Last but not least," he said coyly. After he closed the door on the rest of the house, his flirtatiousness became even more outrageous. "Come into my parlor," he murmured, "said the spider to the fly." He winked at me broadly.

I hated this. I wondered what had happened to the others in here.

There was a Mussolini-style desk with a swivel chair behind it. "Perhaps you should sit there," he said. He made his eyebrows go up and down. "Doesn't that look like your kind of chair? Eh? Eh? Your kind of chair?"

This could only be mockery, I thought. I responded to it humbly. I had had no self-respect for years and years. "Sir," I said, "I don't know what's going on."

"Ah," he said, holding up a finger, "that does happen sometimes."

"I don't know how you found me, or even if I'm who you think I am," I said. i

"I haven't told you yet who I think you are," he said.

"Walter F. Starbuck," I said bleakly.

"If you say so," he said.

"Well," I said, "whoever I am, I'm not much anymore. If you're really offering jobs, all I want is a little one."

"I'm under orders to make you a vice-president," he said, "orders from a person I respect very much. I intend to obey."

"I want to be a bartender," I said.

"Ah!" he said. "And mix pousse-caf?s!"

"I can, if I have to," I said. "I have a Doctor of Mixology degree."