The Troubled Air Read Online Free

toward the phone in the back room.
    Archer watched his friend stride easily and gracefully past the tables. He noticed with amusement that, as usual, two or three ladies looked away from their escorts to examine Herres as he passed. One hard-faced woman in a veil got out her handbag mirror and surreptitiously followed Herres’ progress over her shoulder. What went on in women’s minds, behind those weighing faces at a moment like this? Archer wondered: Better never to know. A bald man, he thought ruefully, is in no position to speculate on this subject, just as a starving man could not judge a banquet. He looked at himself in the mirror on the other side of the bar. Gold-tinted in the soft light above the bottles, his face stared back at him. I have lost weight, Archer decided, and I look a lot better than I did five years ago. The prime of life, he said to himself, smiling at what he thought was vanity, the prime man. Good for another five years without refrigeration.
    Herres came back and Archer looked away a little guiltily from the mirror. “Nancy on her way?” he asked.
    “No,” Herres said. He seemed worried. “Young Clem woke up yelling, with a hundred and three fever. She’s waiting for the doctor.”
    Archer made the usual face of the adult confronted by the report of the wanton and inconvenient illnesses of the young. “That’s too bad,” he said, hoping it wasn’t polio or meningitis or a psychosomatic symptom of a mental disorder that would send young Clement to a psychiatrist twenty years later. “But you know how kids’ fevers are. They don’t mean anything.”
    “I know,” said Herres. “But I’d better get home.”
    “One more drink?”
    “Better not.” Herres started to leave. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” He stopped. “Oh,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “The bill …”
    “Forget it.” Archer waved him away.
    “Thanks.” Herres strode swiftly out of the bar.
    Archer looked after him for a moment and asked for the check. Nearly four dollars, nearly five with the tip. He felt the recurrent twinge of extravagance as he paid. Some day, he thought, for the hundredth time, I am going to keep an account of what I spend in bars for one month. Probably be scandalizing. We live to support the Scotch. And three hundred dollars promised to Burke, staring at his twelve-year-old whiskey down the bar with a cold, unthankful eye. That shiver you feel each month is your bank balance opening and closing.
    He got his coat, regretting the necessity of tipping the girl a quarter, and went out. I really should go by subway, he thought, standing in the dark wind, feeling tired and economical, and looked for a taxi.
    Then he heard his name called. “Clement … Clement …” It was O’Neill, bulky in his coat, hurrying up the street toward him. “Wait a minute.”
    “I thought you were going to a party,” Archer said as O’Neill came up to him.
    “I have to talk to you,” O’Neill said.
    “We have a date for tomorrow at eleven-thirty,” Archer reminded him.
    “I just saw Hutt and the sponsor,” O’Neill said, “and I have to talk to you tonight.” He peered at the dark fronts of the buildings, broken here and there by a restaurant’s lights. “Where can we go?”
    “I just came from Louis’,” Archer said. “I guess they’ll take me back.”
    O’Neill shook his head impatiently. “No,” he said. “Some place quiet. Where nobody knows us. I don’t want anybody barging in.”
    “What’s the matter, Emmet?” Archer asked as O’Neill took his arm and started toward a little Italian restaurant on the other side of the street. “The police after you? Have they finally got you for double-parking?”
    O’Neill didn’t smile, not even politely, and Archer wondered whether he had had time to get drunk since the program went off the air. The radio business, Archer thought resignedly, as O’Neill held the door open for him; everything is treated as though it’s a matter