“Funny! I always thought FKIP picked its own casts. What’s he getting?”
“Fifty per cent until I’m twenty-one.”
Wylie made a sound with his lips. “Think you could leave word some place that Carver’d pick up?”
Joe nodded. “I think so.”
“When I use an actor who has an agent, I like to talk to that agent. Tell Carver I’ll be looking for him to-morrow.”
There was an oasis of light and life outside the FKIP Building where a loudspeaker from the hall brought the blare of a late program to the street. The Northend bus carried a handful of sleepy passengers. Joe thought with surprise: “I’m not tired to-night.” Radio dealt you a life that was so full, so packed with surprise, so different. Amby Carver, for instance. He had ideas about Amby, but he wasn’t quite sure. Archie Munn in a tilted chair, philosophic, resigned. Did all radio performers haunt producers’ offices and spend anxious hours in anterooms? Lucille Borden, too hard, too tough for the lead in the Munson show. Two young singers “at liberty,” probably almost broke in a strange city, looking for an engagement and trying to hide their worry behind a mask of sparkling animation. Show business! Vic Wylie going into wild, creative trances. Vic Wylie pleading, Vic Wylie storming, Vic Wylie cutting you into inch pieces, Vic Wylie insulting you with maddening sarcasm. You hated him. You loathed him. You—you’d do anything for him any day in the week, every week.
A light burned upstairs in the Carlin home. “That you, Joe?” his mother called.
“A late rehearsal,” said Joe. “You’d never guess where. In a restaurant.” All at once he began to laugh.
And yet, as he dropped off to sleep, his thoughts were not with a strange rehearsal in a restaurant, but with books. Romance and adventure! How could his father sell romance and adventure on the air?
A nervous Ambrose Carver telephoned him in the morning. “What does Vic want, Joe?”