Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer Page B

beside me long enough each night to read one poem from Louis Untermeyer’s
Treasury of Great Poems
. To her credit (and Untermeyer’s) I did not hate poetry when I was done. All the more reason I could not tell her now.
    Of course, I had to listen to my father repeat through each drink to come, “It spills the wind out of the sails.” Like many a good drinker before him, he was not above using the same remark for a different glass—but then, at this point, my recollections were shattered. The telephone began to ring for a second time this morning. I picked up the receiver with no sense of any good omen.
    It proved to be the proprietor of The Widow’s Walk. “Mr. Madden,” he said, “I hate to bother you, but I couldn’t help noticing the other nightthat you seemed to know the couple who sat in the lounge while you were there.”
    â€œOh, yes,” I said, “we had a nice drink together. Where were they from—the West, wasn’t it?”
    â€œDuring dinner,” he replied, “they told me they were from California.”
    â€œYes, I have some recollection of that,” I said.
    â€œThe only reason I ask is that their car is still in our parking lot.”
    â€œIsn’t that odd,” I told him. “Are you certain it’s their car?”
    â€œWell,” he answered, “I do think it’s theirs. I happened to notice when they came in.”
    â€œIsn’t that odd,” I repeated. My tattoo had begun to smart fiercely.
    â€œFrankly,” he said, “I was hoping you might know where they are.” Pause. “But I guess you don’t.” “No,” I said, “I don’t.”
    â€œThe name on the man’s credit card is Leonard Pangborn. If they don’t pick up the car in another day or two, I suppose I could check with Visa.”
    â€œI would think you could.”
    â€œYou didn’t get the lady’s name, did you?”
    â€œShe did tell me, but, you know, I’m just darned if I can remember it now. May I give you a ring if I do? I do remember, Pangborn was certainly
his
name.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Mr. Madden, to disturb your morning, but it’s just so peculiar.”
    Count on it. After this call I could not recover my concentration. Every thought went rushing to the woods. Find out! But this loosed an unmanageablepanic. I was like a man who is told he has a mortal illness, yet can cure it by jumping off a fifty-foot cliff into the water. “No,” he says, “I’ll stay in bed. I’d rather die.” What is he protecting? What was I? Yet the panic carried everything before it. It was as if I had been told in my sleep that the worst malignancies of Hell-Town were gathered beneath my tree in the Truro woods. If I went back, would they enter me? Was that my logic?
    Sitting beside the telephone with a panic as palpable as physical distress itself—my nostrils were colder than my feet, my lungs burned—I began the work, and it was equal to labor, of recomposing myself How many mornings had I gone from a quarrel over breakfast into my small room on the top floor where I could look on the harbor and try to write, yet each morning I had learned how to separate out—and it was much like straining inedibles from a soup—all the wreckage of my life which might inhibit writing that day. So I had habits of concentration gained first in prison and gained again from learning to do my work each morning no matter how upsetting the fracas with my wife; I could keep my mind on a course. If the seas before me now pitched uncontrollably—well, I knew, if nothing else, that I must try at this point to think of my father and not ask any question that had no answer. “Do not attempt to recall what you cannot recall” was a rule I had long kept. Memory was equal to potency. To seekto remember what one could not bring back—no matter how urgent the