Free The Comedy is Finished by Donald E. Westlake Page A

face and eyes, and she thought he might very well be serious, if the circumstances were right.
    Liz said, “Peter. Do you want to fuck?”
    He seemed to consider the question, without much enthusiasm. “Possibly.”
    “All right, then. Goodnight,” Liz said, and walked from the room. Smiling slightly, Peter followed her.
    Leaving Larry and Joyce. Open sexuality had been a postulate in the Movement in the early days, sexual relationships as a statement of political belief, so these five people had long ago completed the round of all the possible heterosexual couplings. But sex hadlong since faded as a primary factor with any of them; these days, only Liz would raise the subject in public, and particularly in that aggressive way.
    The introduction of sex in that manner and these circumstances left Joyce embarrassed and uneasy. She didn’t want Larry to feel obligated to make the same offer to her; she had no illusion that he might actually want to have sex with her. Casting about for a new topic, glancing over at the TV screen, she said, “Larry?”
    “Yes?”
    “Did that look like me?”
    “Not a bit,” Larry said. He sounded surprised at the question. “To tell the truth, I thought they did those things better.”
    “It must have looked something like me.”
    “I’ll tell you want it looked like,” Larry said, coming over and sitting at the other end of the sofa. “It looked like a category of person which includes you, but it didn’t look like you. It looked like someone who might be you for two seconds from a block away, but then you’d say, ‘Oh, no, that doesn’t look like Joyce at all .’ ”
    “It’s not that I’m being vain.” Joyce was always afraid people would think her too feminine. “It was just that she looked—dead.”
    “It wasn’t accurate,” Larry told her. “I promise.”
    She offered him a quick grateful smile. “Thank you.” Then, looking at his earnest face, all the doubts she tried to keep buried came rushing into her mind, and she cried, “Larry, is it really going to work? Will it all come out somewhere?”
    “Of course.” He was surprised, and it showed. “We’ve had victories,” he said. “We’ll have more.”
    “Yes,” she said, concealing her doubts.
    But he leaned closer, saying, “Do you mean you fight without believing in the inevitability of success? Don’t you know, historically, we must win?”
    “Yes, of course. It just seems so long sometimes.” Then she smiled at him, knowing he needed the reassurance more than she did. “And I seem so short. Goodnight, Larry.” She patted his knee, and got to her feet.
    “Good night, Joyce.”
    “Don’t bother about Davis tonight,” she told him.
    “No, that was just to protect him from Mark. He’s all right down there, he’ll keep until morning.”

7
    “My brain is happy to be here,” Koo Davis says, “but my feet wanna be in Tennessee.” That’s a line from Saturday Evening Ghost , one of a series of comic spook movies Koo made in the early forties. Portraits with moving eyes, chairs whose arms suddenly reach up and grab at the person seated there, wall panels that open so a black-gloved hand can emerge clutching a knife; and Koo Davis moving brash and unknowing through it all. It was a genre then, everybody did the same gags: the candle that slid along a tabletop, the stuffed gorilla on wheels whose finger was caught (unknown to him) in the back of the hero’s belt so he’d be tiptoeing through the spooky house with this gorilla rolling along behind him, the hero pretending to be one of the figures in a wax museum. The audiences didn’t seem to care how often they saw those gags, and a recurring bit in Koo’s movies was the point where he would suddenly notice all those weird things around him, and become terrified. Koo’s bit of going from oblivious self-assurance to gibbering terror was one of his most famous routines, so much so that Bosley Crowther wrote in a review, “No one can