This was true; Randy had heard it in Libya Hill.
“That’s what it was about,” George sneered bitterly—“that woman’s call. That’s what most of the calls are about. They want to talk to the Beast of the Apocalypse, feel him out, and tell him: ‘Ted’s all right! Now don’t you believe all those things, you hear! He was upset at first—but he sees the whole thing now, the way you meant it—and everything’s all right.’ That’s what she said to me, so maybe I’m not the fool you think I am!”
He was so earnest and excited that for a moment Randy did not answer him. Besides, making allowances for the distortion of his feelings, he could see some justice in what George said.
“Have you had many calls like that?” Randy asked.
“Oh”—wearily—“almost every day. I think everyone who has been up here from home since the book was published has telephoned me. They go about it in different ways. There are those who call me up as if I were some kind of ghoul: ‘How are you?’—in a small, quiet tone such as you might use to a condemned man just before they lead him to the death chamber at Sing Sing—‘Are you all right?’ And then you get alarmed, you begin to stammer and to stumble round, ‘Why, yes? Yes, I’m fine! Fine, thanks!’—meanwhile, beginning to feel yourself all over just to see if you’re all there. And then they say in that same still voice: ‘Well, I just wanted to know…I just called up to find out…I hope you’re all right.’”
After looking at Randy for a moment in a tormented and bewildered way, he burst out in an exasperated laugh:
“It’s been enough to give a hippopotamus the creeps! To listen to them talk, you’d think I was Jack the Ripper! Even those who call up to laugh and joke about it take the attitude that the only reason I wrote the book was to see how much dirt and filth I could dig up on people I didn’t like. Yes!” he cried bitterly. “My greatest supporters at home seem to be the disappointed little soda-jerkers who never made a go of it and the frustrated hangers-on who never got into the Country Club. ‘You sure did give it to that son-of-a-bitch, Jim So-and-so!’ they call me up to tell me. ‘You sure did burn him up! I had to laugh when I read what you said about him—boy!’ Or: ‘Why didn’t you say something about that bastard, Charlie What’s-his-name? I’d have given anything to see you take him for a ride!’...Jesus God!” He struck his fist upon his knee with furious exasperation. “That’s all it means to them: nothing but nasty gossip, slander, malice, envy, a chance of getting back at someone—you’d think that none of them had ever read a book before. Tell me,” he said earnestly, bending towards Randy, “isn’t there anyone there—anyone besides yourself—who gives a damn about the book itself? Isn’t there anyone who has read it as a book, who sees what it was about, who understands what I was trying to do?”
His eyes were full of torment now. It was out at last—the thing Randy had dreaded and wanted to avoid. He said:
“I should think you’d know more about that by this time than anyone. After all, you’ve had more opportunity than anyone else to find out.”
Well, that was out, too. It was the answer that he had to have, that he had feared to get. He stared at Randy for a minute or two with his tormented eyes, then he laughed bitterly and began to rave:
“Well, then, to hell with it! To hell with all of it!” He began to curse violently. “The small two-timing bunch of crooked sons-ofbitches! They can go straight to hell! They’ve done their best to ruin me!”
It was ignoble and unworthy and untrue. Randy saw that he was lashing himself into a fit of violent recrimination in which all that was worst and weakest m him was coming out—distortion, prejudice, and self-pity. These were the things he would have to conquer somehow or belost. Randy stopped him curtly: