Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (29 page)

 
          
 
Now both husband and wife chattered. Getting
drunker, their voices collided, their words rose, fell, mixed, quarreled,
blended in hypnotic tides, an unending susumis.

 
          
 
"Williams," she said.
"Williams," he said. "We're going," she said. "God
damn you, Williams, I love you! Oh, you bastard, I hate you!" He beat
Williams' arm, laughing. "Where's Tom?" “Proud of you!" The
apartment blazed. The air swarmed with black wings. His arm was beaten
senseless. "It's hard to give up my job, that old check looks good .
.."

 
          
 
Paul clutched Williams' white shirt front.
Williams felt the buttons pop. It seemed as if Paul, in his pink intensity,
were going to hit him. His jowls heaved, his mouth clouded Williams' glasses
with steam. "Proud of you! Love you!" He pumped his arm, struck his
shoulder, tore at his shirt, slapped at his face. Williams' glasses flew off
and hit the linoleum with a faint tinkle.

 
          
 
"Christ, I'm sorry, Williams!"

 
          
 
"That's all right, forget it."
Williams picked up his glasses. The right lens was crazed like a ridiculous
spider web. He looked out through it and there was Paul, stunned, apologetic,
caught in the insane glass maze trying to get free.

           
 
Williams said nothing.

 
          
 
"Paulie, you're so clumsy!" shrieked
Helen,

 
          
 
The telephone and doorbell both rang at once,
and Paul was talking and Helen was talking, and Tom was gone somewhere, and
Williams thought clearly, I'm not sick, I don't want to throw up, not really,
but I will go to the bathroom now and I will be sick and I will throw up there.
And without a word, in the ringing, belling, talking, yelling, in the
apologetic confusion, in the panicking friendliness, in the hot rooms, he
walked through and beyond what seemed a crowd of people and sedately closed the
bathroom door and got down on his knees as if he were going to pray to God, and
lifted the toilet seat

 
          
 
There were three sickening gasps and plunges
of his mouth. His eyes tight, tears running from them, he was not sure it was
over, he was not certain whether he was gasping for breath or crying, whether
these were tears of pain or sadness or not tears at all. He heard the waters
vanish away in white porcelain to the sea, and he knelt there, still in an
attitude of prayer.

 
          
 
Outside the door, voices. "You all right,
you all right, Williams, you okay?”

 
          
 
He fumbled in his coat pocket, drew out his
wallet, checked it, saw his return-trip ticket on the train, closed it up, put
it in his breast pocket and held his hand tight to it. Then he climbed to his
feet, wiped his mouth carefully and stood looking in the mirror at the odd man
with the spider-webbed glasses.

 
          
 
Standing before the door, ready to open it,
his hand on the brass knob, his eyes clenched shut and his body swaying, he
felt that he weighed only ninety-three pounds.

 
          
 
The two men sat swaying side by side,
unspeaking for the long while it took for the train to move through cold
December twilight, pausing at one country station after another. As the twelfth
depot was left behind, the older of the two men muttered, "Idiot,
Idiot!" under his breath.

 
          
 
"What?" The younger man glanced up
from his Times.

 
          
 
The old man nodded bleakly. "Did you see
that damn fool rush off just now, stumbling after that woman who smelled of
Chanel?"

 
          
 
"Oh, her?" The young man looked as
if he could not decide whether to laugh or be depressed. "I followed her
off the train once myself."

 
          
 
The old man snorted and closed his eyes.
"I too, five years ago."

 
          
 
The young man stared at his companion as if he
had found a friend in a most unlikely spot.

 
          
 
"Did—did the same thing happen once you
reached the end of the platform?"

 
          
 
"Perhaps. Go on."

 
          
 
"Well, I was twenty feet behind her and
closing up fast when her husband drove into the station with a carload of kids!
Bang! The car door slammed. I saw her Cheshire-cat smile as she drove away. I
waited half an hour, chilled to the bone, for another train. It taught me
something, by God!"

 
          
 
"It taught you nothing whatsoever,"
replied the older man drily. "Idiot bulls, that's all of us, you, me,
them, silly boys jerking like laboratory frogs if someone scratches our
itch."

 
          
 
"My grandpa once said, 'Big in the
hunkus, small in the brain, that is man's fate.' "

 
          
 
"A wise man. But, now, what do you make
of her?"

 
          
 
"That woman? Oh, she likes to keep in
trim. It must pep up her liver to know that with a little mild eye-rolling she
can make the lemmings swarm any night on this train. She has the best of all
possible worlds, don't you think? Husband, children, plus the knowledge she's
neat packaging and can prove it five trips a week, hurting no one, least of all
herself. And, everything considered, she's not much to look at. It's just she
smells so good."

 
          
 
"Tripe," said the old man. "It
won't wash. Purely and simply, she's a woman. All women are women, all men are
dirty goats. Until you accept that, you will be rationalizing your glands all
your life. As it is, you will know no rest until you are seventy or
thereabouts. Meanwhile, self-knowledge may give you whatever solace can be had
in a sticky situation. Given all these essential and inescapable truths, few
men ever strike a balance. Ask a man if he is happy and he will immediately
think you are asking if he is satisfied. Satiety is most men's Edenic dream. I
have known only one man who came heir to the very best of all possible worlds,
as you used the phrase."

 
          
 
"Good Lord," said the young man, his
eyes shining, "I wouldn't mind hearing about him."

 
          
 
"I hope there's time. This chap is the
happiest ram, the most carefree bull, in history. Wives and girl friends
galore, as the sales pitch says. Yet he has no qualms, guilts, no feverish
nights of lament and self-chastisement."

 
          
 
"Impossible," the young man put in.
"You can't eat your cake and digest it, too!"

 
          
 
"He did, he does, he will! Not a tremor,
not a trace of moral seasickness after an all-night journey over a choppy sea
of innersprings! Successful businessman. Apartment in New York on the best
street, the proper height above traffic, plus a long-weekend Bucks County place
on a more than correct little coimtry stream where he herds his nannies, the
happy farmer. But I met him first at his New York apartment last year, when he
had just married. At dinner, his wife was truly gorgeous, snow-cream arms,
fruity lips,
an amplitude
of harvest land below the
line, a plenitude above. Honey in the horn, the full apple barrel through
winter, she seemed thus to me and her husband, who nipped her bicep in passing.
Leaving, at midnight, I found myself raising a hand to slap her on the flat of
her flank like a thoroughbred. Falling down in the elevator, life floated out
from under me. I nickered."

           
 
"Your powers of description," said
the young commuter, breathing heavily, "
are
incredible."

 
          
 
"I write advertising copy," said the
older. "But to continue. I met let us call him Smith again not two weeks
later. Through sheer coincidence I was invited to crash a party by a friend.
When I arrived in Bucks County, whose place should it turn out to be but
Smith's I And near him, in the center of the living room, stood this dark
Italian beauty, all tawny panther, all midnight and moonstones, dressed in
earth colors, browns, siennas, tans, umbers, all the tones of a riotously
fruitful autumn. In the babble I lost her name. Later I saw Smith crush her
like a great sun-warmed vine of lush October grapes in his arms. Idiot fool, I
thought. Lucky dog, I thought. Wife in town, mistress in country. He is
trampling out the vintage, et cetera, and all that. Glorious. But I shall not
stay for the wine festival, I thought, and slipped away, unnoticed."

 
          
 
"I can't stand too much of this
talk," said the young commuter, trying to raise the window.

 
          
 
"Don't interrupt," said the older
man. "Where was I?"

 
          
 
"Trampled. Vintage."

 
          
 
"Oh, yes! Well, as the party broke up, I
finally caught the lovely Italian's name. Mrs. Smith!”

 
          
 
"He'd married again, eh?"

 
          
 
"Hardly. Not enough time. Stunned, I
thought quickly. He must have two sets of friends. One set knows his city wife.
The other set knows this mistress whom he calls wife. Smith's too smart for
bigamy. No other answer. Mystery."

 
          
 
"Go on, go on," said the young
commuter feverishly.

 
          
 
"Smith, in high spirits, drove me to the
train station that night. On the way he said, 'What do you think of my wives?'

 
          
 
" 'Wives, plural!” I said.

 
          
 
" 'Plural, hell,' he said. 'I've had
twenty in the last three years, each better than the last! Twenty, count them,
twenty! Here!' As we stopped at the station he pulled out a thick photo wallet
He glanced at my face as he handed it over, 'No, no,' he laughed, 'I'm not
Bluebeard with a score of old theater trunks in the attic crammed full of
former mates. Look!'

 
          
 
"I flipped the pictures. They flew by
like an animated film. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, the plain, the exotic, the
fabulously impertinent or the sublimely docile gazed out at me, smiling,
frowning. The flutter-flicker hypnotized, then haunted me. There was something
terribly familiar about each photo.

 
          
 
" 'Smith,' I said, *you must be very rich
to afford all these wives.'

 
          
 
" 'Not rich, no. Look again!'

 
          
 
"I flipped the montage in my hands. I
gasped. I knew.

 
          
 
" 'The
Mrs.
Smith I met tonight, the Italian beauty, is the one and only Mrs. Smith,' I said.
'But, at the same time, the woman I met in New York two weeks ago is also the
one and only Mrs. Smith. It can only follow that both women are one and the
same!'

 
          
 
" 'Correct
!'
cried Smith, proud of my sleuthing.

 
          
 
" 'Impossible!' I blurted out.

 
          
 
"'No,' said Smith, elated. 'My wife is
amazing. One of the finest off-Broadway actresses when I met her. Selfishly I
asked her to quit the stage on pain of severance of our mutual insanity, our
rampaging up one side of a chaise-longue and down the other. A giantess made
dwarf by love, she slammed the door on the theater, to run down the alley with
me. The first six months of our marriage, the earth did not move, it shook.
But, inevitably, fiend that I am, I began to watch various other women ticking
by like wondrous pendulums. My wife caught me noting the time. Meanwhile, she
had begun to cast her eyes on passing theatrical billboards. I found her
nesting with the New York Times next-morning reviews, desperately tearful.
Crisis! How to combine two violent careers, that of passion-disheveled actress
and that of anxiously rambling ram?'

 
          
 
" 'One night,' said Smith, 'I eyed a
peach Melba that drifted by. Simultaneously, an old playbill blew in the wind
and clung to my wife's ankle. It was as if these two events, occurring within
the moment, had shot a window shade with a rattling snap clear to the top of
its roll. Light poured in! My wife seized my arm. Was she or was she not an
actress? She was! Well, then, well! She sent me packing for twenty-four hours,
wouldn't let me in the apartment, as she hurried about some vast and exciting
preparations. When I returned home the next afternoon at the blue hour, as the
French say in their always twilight language, my wife had vanished! A dark
Latin put out her hand to me. "I am a friend of your wife's," she
said and threw herself upon me, to nibble my ears, crack my ribs, until I held
her off and, suddenly suspicious, cried, "This is no woman I'm with—this
is my wife!" And we both fell laughing to the floor. This was my wife,
with a different cosmetic, different coutinier, different posture and
intonation. "My actress!" I said. "Your actress!” she laughed.
"Tell me what I should be and I’ll be it. Carmen? All right, I'm Carmen.
Brunhild? Why not? I'll study, create and, when you grow bored, re-create. Fm
enrolled at the Dance Academy. I'll leam to sit, stand, walk, ten thousand
ways. I'm chin deep in speech lessons, I'm signed at the Berlitz! I am also a
member of the Yamayuki Judo Club—“

            
"Good Lord," I cried, "what for?”

            
“This!”
she replied, and tossed me head over heels into bed!”

 
          
 
"'Well,' said Smith, “from that day on
I’ve lived Reilly and nine other Irishmen's lives! Unnumbered fancies have
passed me in delightful shadow plays of women all colors, shapes, sizes,
fevers! My wife, finding her proper stage, our parlor, and audience, me, has
fulfilled her need to be the greatest actress in the land. Too small an
audience? No! For I, with my ever-wandering tastes, am there to meet her,
whichever part she plays. My jungle talent coincides with her wide-ranging
genius. So, caged at last, yet free, loving her I love everyone. It's the best
of all possible worlds, friend, the best of all possible worlds.' "

 
          
 
There was a moment of silence.

 
          
 
The train rumbled down the track in the new
December darkness.

 
          
 
The two commuters, the young and the old, were
thoughtful now, considering the story just finished.

 
          
 
At last the younger man swallowed and nodded
in awe. "Your friend Smith solved his problem, all right”

 
          
 
"He did.”

 
          
 
The young man debated a moment, then smiled
quietly. "I have a friend, too. His situation was similar, but—different.
Shall I call him Quillan?"

 
          
 
"Yes," said the old man, "but
hurry. I get off soon."

 
          
 
"Quillan," said the young man
quickly, “was in a bar one night with a fabulous redhead. The crowd parted
before her like the sea before Moses. Miraculous, I thought, revivifying,
beyond the senses! A week later, in Greenwich, I saw Quillan ambling along with
a dumpy little woman, his own age, of course, only thirty-two, but she'd gone
to seed young. Tatty, the English would say; pudgy, snouty-nosed, not enough
make-up, wrinkled stockings, spider's-nest hair, and immensely quiet; she was
content to walk along, it seemed, just holding Quillan's hand. Ha, I thought,
here's his poor little parsnip wife who loves the earth he treads, while other
nights he's out winding up that incredible robot redhead! How sad, what a
shame. And I went on my way.