Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [16]
In Hollywood, California, the chimes of the blue telephone in the rhinestone phone booth by Malachi Constant’s swimming pool were ringing.
It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!
Malachi Constant lay in the wide gutter of his kidney-shaped swimming pool, sleeping the sleep of a drunkard. There was a quarter of an inch of warm water in the gutter. Constant was fully dressed in blue-green evening shorts and a dinner jacket of gold brocade. His clothes were soaked.
He was all alone.
The pool had once been covered uniformly by an undulating blanket of gardenias. But a persistent morning breeze had moved the blooms to one end of the pool, as though folding a blanket to the foot of a bed. In folding back the blanket, the breeze revealed a pool bottom paved with broken glass, cherries, twists of lemon peel, peyotl buttons, slices of orange, stuffed olives, sour onions, a television set, a hypodermic syringe, and the ruins of a white grand piano. Cigar butts and cigarette butts, some of them marijuana, littered the surface.
The swimming pool looked less like a facility for sport than like a punchbowl in hell.
One of Constant’s arms dangled in the pool itself. From the wrist underwater came the glint of his solar watch. The watch had stopped.
The telephone’s chimes persisted.
Constant mumbled but did not move.
The chimes stopped. Then, after twenty seconds, the chimes began again.
Constant groaned, sat up, groaned.
From the inside of the house came a brisk, efficient sound, high heels on a tile floor. A ravishing, brassy blond woman crossed from the house to the phone booth, giving Constant a look of haughty contempt.
She was chewing gum.
"Yah?" she said into the telephone. "Oh—it’s you again. Yah—he’s awake. Hey!" she yelled at Constant. She had a voice like a grackle. "Hey, space cadet!" she yelled.
"Hm?" said Constant.
"The guy who’s president of that company you own wants to talk to you."
"Which company?" said Constant.
"Which company you president of?" said the woman into the telephone. She got her answer. "Magnum Opus," she said. "Ransom K. Fern of Magnum Opus," she said.
"Tell him—tell him I’ll call him back," said Constant.
The woman told Fern, got another message to relay to Constant. "He says he’s quitting."
Constant stood unsteadily, rubbing his face with his hands. "Quitting?" he said dully. "Old Ransom K. Fern quitting?"
"Yah," said the woman. She smiled hatefully. "He says you can’t afford to pay his salary any more. He says you better come in and talk to him before he goes home." She laughed. "He says you’re broke."
Back in Newport, the racket of Beatrice Rumfoord’s outburst had attracted Moncrief the butler to Skip’s Museum. "You called, Mum?" he said.
"It was more of a scream, Moncrief," said Beatrice.
"She doesn’t want anything, thank you," said Rumfoord. "We were simply having a spirited discussion."
"How dare you say whether I want something or not?" said Beatrice hotly to Rumfoord. "I’m beginning to catch on that you’re not nearly as omniscient as you pretend to be. It so happens I want something very much. I want a number of things very much."
"Mum?" said the butler.
"I’d like you to let the dog in, please," said Beatrice. "I’d like to pet him before he goes. I would like to find out if a chrono-synclastic infundibula kills love in a dog the way it kills love in a man."
The butler bowed and left.
"That was a pretty scene to play before a servant," said Rumfoord.
"By and large," said Beatrice, "my contribution to the dignity of the family has been somewhat greater than yours."
Rumfoord hung his head. "I’ve failed you in some way? Is that what you’re saying?"
"In some way?" said Beatrice. "In every way!"
"What would you have me do?" said Rumfoord.
"You could have told me this stock-market crash was coming!" said Beatrice. "You could have spared me what I’m going through now."
Rumfoord’s hands worked in