Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

The stiff shirt is torture. But the daughters at table 103 don’t know the meaning of fatigue.

After midnight, the family at table 103 is preparing to leave. Papa pays, Mama pulls her sable up over her bare shoulder, and the daughters powder their cheeks, hot from dancing. The family at table 103 is moving toward the exit. As chance would have it, I am standing right next to it. The youngsters nod, Mama looks past me, but Papa goes straight up to me, holds out his hand to me, “Goodbye.” I feel something in my palm, paper. They are already at the cloakroom. I put my hand into my pants pocket and run, red as a freshly boiled crab, right to the men’s room, lock myself in, then slide the thing out of my pocket with two fingers.

A five-mark bill.

At one o’clock I’m allowed to go home.

Dead tired. I want to hang up my tuxedo in the closet, but my eyes fall shut. During this night I dream:

A man comes into my room, very close to my bed. He is slim and tall and gray, his threadbare overcoat going down to the floor. In his right hand he holds a bunch of files, in his left a tall top hat. His small, colorless mouse eyes are trained on me. Now the man places the top hat onto the night table and pulls a sheet of yellowed paper out of his bundle of documents. His thin blue lips part, and slowly and softly utter these words, “I’m garnishing you!”

“Me?” I shout. But the Tall One continues, “You owe your landlady the rent for these months: May, June, July, August, September, October.” I leap out of bed, “No, that’s a lie. Paid, all paid. The receipt’s in the drawer.”

The Tall One doesn’t make a move, his mouse eyes remain inert, only his blue lips part. “You’re a dancer. I’m garnishing your knees.” I raise my fists at him and holler, “No!” Suddenly I feel the blood freeze in my veins, I’m seized with horror, and my throat tightens: the Tall One doesn’t hear, because he has no ears, just rosy skin, no ears.

In front of me it is the dead of night; I grow dizzy and faint back onto the bed. But the man comes at me, extends a frosty red hand to my legs, pulls the knees out of them, and gently places them into the top hat. Then he takes the hat from the night table, shoves the files under his arm, and heads to the door. I want to follow him, but I fall.

“My job, my joooob!” I babble. The Tall One stands in the doorway, turns his head, and grins. Loathsome.—I see myself again, in the ballroom. The Tall One is sitting at every table. I dance with him, in raving rhythm, Herr Isin’s red eyes play ring-around-the-rosy around us, my legs buckle in a hundred places, Roberts slaps me, someone is throwing around five-mark bills, a woman cries out, and I sink, fall deep down …

IV. The Daily Deal

My day goes well.

I sleep well into the afternoon, until about three o’clock. Right after I was hired, I bought an alarm clock; it works flawlessly. My dressing routine now takes a good hour, and it is so grotesquely complex that I am beginning to feel ashamed of myself in front of the landlady. A whole series of new acquisitions are now in the room, beautification implements and primping potions of the kind you would expect only on ladies’ vanity tables: perfume bottles, French soaps, complexion creams, white eau de cologne, violet eau de cologne, skin lotion in all colors, powder in all shades, lavender water, pomades, eyebrow brushes, fingernail polish, hair gel, this and that.

A massage is part of my bathing routine. My legs float in the soapy water, and I notice that this new job is good for their muscles. My dutiful legs, my breadwinners.

Then four minutes shaving, four minutes hairstyling, ten minutes getting my clothing ready, ten minutes necktie, eight minutes suit, five minutes final look into the mirror.

By quarter after four I have to leave the house, because the people at the hotel are punctilious about punctuality. Four thirty is the time to make my appearance.

I basically already feel at home. I actually say little to my colleagues, I’m merely there, like someone at the office. Just: Good day, adieu, earned something? Who was the snazzy lady, you know, the one with the two gentlemen in the car? Do you have an extra cigarette? Lousy weather today—and so forth.

I actually have the first stage of my training behind me. Herr Isin no longer points out the ladies I am to dance with; I choose them myself.

“Bear in mind that you are not here for your own enjoyment. You are here to dance. Including with ladies who don’t appeal to you. In fact, the less they appeal to you, the more honestly and conscientiously you are doing your job. The dancer’s First Commandment is: there can be no wallflowers. He needs to pluck them, because that is what he is getting paid for. Bear that in mind.”

I make my living honestly, honestly and with difficulty, because I dance honestly and conscientiously. No wishes, no desires, no thoughts, no opinions, no heart, no brain. All that matters here are my legs, which belong to this treadmill and on which they have to stomp, in rhythm, tirelessly, endlessly one-two, one-two, one-two.

I dance with young and old; with the very short and those who are two heads taller than I; with the pretty and the less attractive; with the very slender and those who drink teas designed to slim them down; with ladies who send the waiter to get me and savor the tango with eyes closed in rapture; with wives, with fashion plates sporting black-rimmed monocles, and whose escorts, themselves utterly unable to dance, hire me; with painfully inept out-of-towners who think an excursion to