Floater
"You have a nice voice, sonny," Berg said, after calling Becker off the stage and offering him a seat in the nearly deserted theater.
"Thanks very much," Becker said, although the tone of Berg's voice had made the compliment sound not quite complimentary.
"Did you happen to notice the cleaning lady dusting the seats in about the fourteenth row while you were singing?"
Becker nodded.
"You may have thought she wasn't paying any attention to you because she was concentrating on her dusting," Berg went on. "Or because she hears so much singing it's become like Muzak to her. Or because she is not a connoisseur of the musical stage. Wrong. I've seen her put down her dusting rag and applaud if she's really impressed. I've seen her hold her nose when she thinks somebody up there stinks."
For just a moment - for the last moment in his musical comedy career - Becker clutched at a straw: the cleaning lady had not, after all, held her nose, and Berg had definitely used the phrase "nice voice."
"I'll tell you why she wasn't paying any attention to you, sonny," Berg said. "She couldn't hear you. She was dusting the fourteenth row, and you carry to about the twelfth. You have a nice voice, sonny, but the last of the belt-'em-out singers you are not. Do yourself a favor - do me a favor, because I like to do one mitzvah a year; this is a nasty business - go into another line of work.
Becker knew that Syd Berg was telling the truth - knew it in a way that made him realize he had, without facing up to it, known the truth himself for some time. His musical comedy career came to an end that afternoon. He didn't go back to Nebraska, though. He had, just a week before, found a rent-controlled apartment, and he simply couldn't bear to leave it. Looking for it had, at one point, become virtually a full-time job - rising early to search for the ambulances and police cars that might indicate an opening caused by a fatal heart attack, cultivating sullen West Side elevator men during the lank hours of the afternoon, showing up at Times Square late at night to get a jump on the ads in the early edition of the morning paper - and he was not about to abandon it just as the payoff arrived. The apartment seemed reason enough to remain in the city: for a few months after his watershed confrontation with Syd Berg, he tended to answer the standard cocktail-party inquiry "What do you do?" by saying, "I live in a rent-controlled apartment."
Floater by Calvin Trillin was recommended by Sara Nelson in her book "So Many Books, So Little Time." The book is quite funny all along but I specially liked the twist in the end. All in all, an enjoyable book. |
