Deadeye Dick Page 0,43

a much more interesting story than that to tell. It means “outside the herd.”

Imagine that—thousands of people, outside the herd.

• • •

I let myself into Felix’s duplex. The place was faintly reminiscent of our childhood home, since the master bedroom was upstairs, and opened onto a balcony that overhung the living-dining room. Felix and I had already rearranged some of the furniture—to better accommodate the party we would be giving after the show. Caterers would bring the food. As I say, I didn’t give a damn about food anymore.

And nobody in his right mind was going to come to the party anyway.

It wasn’t my party anyway, any more than it was my stupid play. I had regressed to being the boy I used to be— before I shot Mrs. Metzger. I was barely twelve years old.

I supposed that I would have the place to myself all afternoon. Felix and his wife Geneviève, “Anyface,” were at radio station WOR, I thought. She still had her job as a receptionist there, and Felix was cleaning out his desk there, preparing to move on to bigger things at Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn.

They, in turn, had every reason to assume that I would be at the theater, making last-minute changes in the play. I had not told them that I had been barred from there.

So I wandered up on the balcony, and I sat on a hard-backed chair there. It must have been something I used to do in the carriage house when I was genuinely innocent and twelve years old—to sit very still on the balcony, and to appreciate every sound that floated up to me. It wasn’t eavesdropping. It was music appreciation.

And thus it was that I overheard the final dissolution of my brother’s second marriage, and some unkind character sketches of Felix and myself and our parents and Geneviève, and some others I did not know. Geneviève came bursting into the apartment first, so angry that she was spitting like a cat, and then, half a minute later, Felix entered. She had come in one cab, and he had chased her in another. And down below me, and out of my line of sight, an acrimonious, atonal duet for viola and string bass was improvised. They both had such noble voices. She was the viola, and he was the bass.

Or maybe it was a comedy. Maybe it is amusing when physically attractive, well-to-do great apes in an urban setting hate each other so much:

DUPLEX

A NEW COMEDY

BY RUDY WALTZ.

The curtain rises on a Greenwich Village duplex, severely modern, expensive, white. There are fresh flowers. There is fresh fruit. There is impressive electronic apparatus for reproducing music. GENEVIEVE WALTZ, a beautiful young woman whose features must be painted on like those of a China doll, enters through the front door, terminally furious. Her young and successful husband, FELIX, wearing clothes made in London, follows almost at once. He is just as mad. On the balcony sits RUDY WALTZ, a neutered pharmacist from Ohio, FELIX’S kid brother. He is large and good-looking, but is so sexless and shy that he might as well be made out of canned tuna fish. Incredibly, he has written a play which is going to open in a few hours. He knows it is no good. He considers himself a big mistake. He considers life a big mistake. It probably shouldn’t be going on. It is all he can do to give life the benefit of the doubt. There is a frightful secret in his past, which he and his brother have withheld from GENEVIEVE, that he is a murderer. All three are products of public school systems in the Middle West, although GENEVIEVE now sounds vaguely British, and FELIX sounds like a Harvard-educated secretary of state. Only RUDY is still a twanging hick.

GENEVIEVE: Leave me alone. Go back to work.

FELIX: I’ll help you pack.

GENEVIEVE: I can pack all right.

FELIX: Can you kick your own butt as you go out the door?

GENEVIEVE: You’re sick. You’re from a very sick family. Thank God we never had a child.

FELIX: There was a young man from Dundee, Who buggered an ape in a tree. The results were most horrid, All ass and no forehead, Three balls and a purple goatee.

GENEVIEVE: I didn’t know your father was from Dundee. (She opens a closet) Look at all the pretty suitcases in here.

FELIX: Fill ’em up. I want every trace of you out of here.

GENEVIEVE: Some of my perfume may have gotten into the