Deliverance - James Dickey [5]
and shellacked and swirled and horned, and almost every one stiff, filled me with desolation. I kept looking for a decent ass and spotted one in a beige skirt, but when the girl turned her barren, gum-chewing face toward me, it was all over. I suddenly felt like George Holley, my old Braque man, must have felt when he worked for us, saying to himself in any way he could, day after day, I am with you but not of you. But I knew better. I was of them, sure enough, as they stretched out of sight before me up the hill and into the building. And I was right in one of the lines that ceremoniously divided around a modern fountain full of dimes and pennies. The door swung and a little beehived girl ducked under my arm into the cold air. The lunch hour exhaled from several women and me with a long low sound as we revolved in the door. Muzak entered the elevator and we rose on "Vienna Blood," played with lots of strings. Between the beginning and end of one chorus my stomach fell like a stone. I let out my belt a notch and the beer settled as I wiped my forehead on the inner part of my jacket sleeve. At the sixth floor there were only two female survivors and myself; the others worked in the larger, open bay offices on the lower floors -- insurance companies. I walked down the clean, walled-in corridor to the horse-headed glass of our studio. The only good thing Holley had done for us was to turn one of Braque's birds into a Pegasus. It flew delicately aside and around me as I went in. "Any calls?" "Not any awfully interesting ones, Mr. Gentry. Shadow-Row Shell Homes would like to see the comps next week. You had a request for a job interview from a young lady who wouldn't give her name, says shell call back. And the model is here for Kitts." "Thank you very much," I said to Peg Wyman, who had been with us the whole time and showed it. "I'll go on back." I went down the office hallway taking my coat off pinch by pinch. It was the first time I had thought to notice that the hall was inside a larger hall, part of the length of the building and the floor. It was a very tasteful place, though. Thad and I had really nice offices with tensor lights all over the place, and the longer-lasting or more highly paid art directors had small offices or at least cubicles. The rest of the studio was a large open bay with drawing boards, and I watched for a minute the gray and bald beads in their places, the shiny black ones, the curly ones and lank ones returning. I may not have had everything to do with this -- with creating this -- I said to myself in a silent voice that was different from my usual silent voice, but I have had something to do with it. Never before had I had such a powerful sense of being in a place I had created. Alton Rogers would not be sitting there, dreaming of flying the Hump in the old days. If it weren't for me, George Holley's cubicle would still be full of Utrillo. The arrangement of heads and fingers and glasses would not be like it is, at this moment, if it were not for me. These people would probably be working for somebody else, but they would not be here. They are in some way my captives; their lives -- part of some, most of some are being spent here. But then so was mine. I was not really thinking about their being my prisoners, but of being my own. I went into the office and hung up my coat, and for a second put one hand down on my drawing board, as though posing for a house ad: Vice-President Gentry makes important decision. It would be one of those poses that aspires to show you that such decisions by middle-aged responsible men are an important factor in maintaining the economy and the morale of the whole Western world. This could have been true, so far as I was able to tell. Probably in some ways it was. There were piles of roughs, among which sat my wife and my little boy, Dean. There were stacks of copy, approved and tentative, from agencies, and I made a note to remind Thad that certain of the less inventive outfits were pressing us into service as agency art departments, which neither of us liked at all.