“Madame Bovary takes a course in Television Appreciation. God, if you knew how—”
“All right, all right. You realize this isn’t getting us anyplace,” the gray-haired man said. He turned and gave the girl a sign, with two fingers near his mouth, that he wanted a cigarette. “In the first place,” he said, into the phone, “for a helluvan intelligent guy, you’re about as tactless as it’s humanly possible to be.” He straightened his back so that the girl could reach behind him for the cigarettes. “I mean that. It shows up in your private life, it shows up in your—”
“Brains. Oh, God, that kills me! Christ almightyl Did you ever hear her describe anybody—some man, I mean? Sometime when you haven’t anything to do, do me a favor and get her to describe some man for you. She describes every man she sees as `terribly attractive.’ It can be the oldest, crummiest, greasiest—
“All right, Arthur,” the gray-haired man said sharply. “This is getting us nowhere. But nowhere.” He took a lighted cigarette from the girl. She had lit two. “Just incidentally,” he said, exhaling smoke through his nostrils, “how’d you make out today?”
“What?”
“How’d you make out today?” the gray-haired man repeated. “How’d the case go?”
“Oh, Christ! I don’t know. Lousy. About two minutes before I’m all set to start my summation, the attorney for the plaintiff, Lissberg, trots in this crazy chambermaid with a bunch of bedsheets as evidence—bedbug stains all over them. Christ!”
“So what happened? You lose?” asked the grayhaired man, taking another drag on his cigarette.
“You know who was on the bench? Mother Vittorio. What the hell that guy has against me, I’ll never know. I can’t even open my mouth and he jumps all over me. You can’t reason with a guy like that. It’s impossible.”
The gray-haired man turned his head to see what the girl was doing. She had picked up the ashtray and was putting it between them. “You lose, then, or what?” he said into the phone.