He stares at the $265 worth of painting stuff
and tries to convince her of the terrific advantages to moving in
here with him in a completely renovated house. The savings on rent
for her. Space. He points at Untermeyer. They could have
talking-sessions every day. Now he remembers her big thing. He
points at the brand-new spade and rake, expensive Swedish steel,
leaning against the wall. They’ll turn the jungle into a Garden of
Eden, he says. Roses and lilies everywhere. She must miss her
garden. She says, oh, she still gardens, small-scale, raises
miniature plants in big corked bottles with cute tiny tools. It’s
an art, a real challenge.
He’s depressed at the way everything’s shrunk
for her. Then he has an inspiration. She’ll have to see. He goes
over and pries open the lid of one of the pails of paint with the
screwdriver. She asks in an alarmed voice what he’s doing.
“Just a sample,” he says, dipping the widest
brush in the white paint and starting in on the wall, flip-fluck,
flip-fluck.
“Just the first coat but it’ll give you an
idea. You won’t recognize the place. Listen, we could begin right
now, both of us. You could take that blouse off and put on one of
my shirts. There must be a cap somewhere, Huck.”
“Stop that,” she says over and over.
He explains: “I don’t want to impose my own
tastes on you. We can tint it any color you like. Blue. Pink, even.
Anything you like, Beth.” Flip-fluck. Flip-fluck.
“I’m leaving if you don’t stop immediately,”
she says.
He stops immediately. It looks lousy anyhow.
He’d forgotten to stir the paint. And of course the walls have to
be washed rinsed and prepared. The soiled white crisscrosses look a
little like a cryptic Chinese ideogram. Otherwise crazy.
“You’ve got paint all over you.” She looks
around for something to remove the stains and sees a pile of papers
on a chair. When she sees what they are (each time he comes Ricky
plants them all over the living room) she forgets his stains, sits
down in front of him, gazes up at him and says:
“I’m trying so hard to believe. We have to
believe. That’s your problem too, Jerry, you have to believe. If
you did we’d be together again, one great family and you part of it
too. We’d be spiritually wedded, Jerry. Wouldn’t you like that?”
She reaches out and touches his hand.
JW finds himself kneeling before her,
gripping her bare arms, his face in her lap, almost in shameful
territory, and stammering muffled and desperately, “Yes, I want to
marry you.”
She displaces his head a little, strokes it
and says, “A spiritual marriage, of course.”
“Oh, any kind of marriage, Beth. Beggars
can’t be choosers. As long as it’s with you.”
“Come on, Jerry. Let’s get out of this place.
Right away. I have to see my dentist anyhow. Where do you want to
go after the dentist? Any place special?”
“I’d like to go to the beach with you.”
Her unaged blue eyes widen. “That’s uncanny.
And you say you don’t believe in thought transmission. A beach was
just what I was going to suggest but for tomorrow. Have you ever
been to Coney Island?”
Why Coney Island? he asks suspiciously. Why
not? she asks. I’ve never been there. He says: I was thinking of a
real beach, not so crowded. Oh but we could do that too, the next
day. After Coney Island (unless something happens, she says
mysteriously) we’ll drive back to my flat. There’s a sofa in the
living room. Then (unless something happens) they’ll go to any
beach he likes. “It’ll be a beach weekend. Wouldn’t you like that?”
He doesn’t answer.
“So you’ll come with me tomorrow to Coney
Island?” Her haggard painted face is alight, loses a year or so
with it. He doesn’t deprive her of that, doesn’t say no even if he
doesn’t say yes. “Oh, my sweetheart, you’re coming!” So he has to
say yes.
She gets up and brings back her bag and sits
down again. Very solemnly she whispers: “Stand up, Jerry.” She
remains seated, rummaging in the bag on her lap. A lock of new pure
blonde hair swings before her eyes. She comes up with a little
jewel-box like the one she kept the Valium in except there’s no
simpering shepherdess and swain on the lid. There’s a multitude of
stars on it. She chooses something, stands up and tosses the bright
lock out of her eyes. The movement reveals she’s salvaged a little
of her throat too. “Now give me the finger of your left hand,
Jerry. Not the pinky, for heaven’s sake. I don’t want to bet with
you. Your ring-finger, of course.”
She slips a ring loosely on his ring finger.
It looks like a gold ring but hasn’t got the weight of gold. It’s
set with a great big red stone, a fortune if it had been a ruby or
even semi-precious. “It doesn’t fit. You’re so thin. You used to be
so big. I’ll fatten you up though. Wait, I’ve got another one.” She
rummages again and comes up with an identical ring: underweight
imposter gold again, set, this one, with a great big green stone.
“It’s a perfect fit, Jerry. You promise you’ll never remove it?
Whatever happens?”
She chooses another ring from the case and
hands it to him. “Now you slip this one on my finger.” Most of her
fingers are occupied by similar-looking rings. She points at her
ring finger. There’s her diamond wedding ring and above that a copy
of the first ring she tried out on him. He slips the green one
above the red one. It produces a traffic-light effect. “My
sweetheart, we’re spiritually wedded now.”
JW puts his hand in his pocket for a
handkerchief for his eyes and nose. “You don’t have to pay for the
rings now,” she says. He doesn’t dare pull the handkerchief out.
He’s not sure of the next move, now that they’re wedded. For old
time’s sake he touches her left breast. She lets him do that but
says something about celibacy. “Anyhow, we’re too old for that,”
she adds, but without pulling her breast back. They stand in that
posture for a while like statuary. Finally JW withdraws his hand,
takes out the handkerchief and wipes his eyes and blows his
nose.
She takes him in charge, totally. What a
relief that is. She maps out their immediate future. After he packs
urgent things he’ll accompany her to the dentist’s and wait maybe
an hour. Then this evening a restaurant and then he can sleep on
her living room sofa. Then tomorrow Coney Island. Then if there’s a
next day they’ll drive out to any other beach he liked. Why not
that beach they’d already gone to that cold rainy March weekend two
years ago? Then on Monday job-hunting for her and apartment-hunting
for him. Okay, my darling? He nods. Everything goes very fast then.
She unearths two valises and a flight bag and supervises
packing.
On the threshold of the house he tells her
the telluric wave machine has to be shut off, definitively. It may
take a few hours. She should go by herself to the dentist’s. When
she comes back they’ll leave as planned. She agrees reluctantly and
drives off.
I go down the cellar steps for the last time,
I know, either way. I turn on the red lamps, like a muted fire. I
go over to the console and sit down. The cassette is still there
with its fading contents. In real travel it must be different. My
hands are autonomous. They crown me with the helmet, set at 1:
9999. It’s plugged in now. The image swims up: the vertical blur
motionless and then moving slowly toward the horizontal blur.
On the threshold of entry for I don’t know
how long my finger is rigid on the red button. Twenty years gazing
at her from the threshold of her room or clasping her, time halted.
But what if old time, programmed, can’t be halted and we have to
endure what followed for twenty years? Or faulty navigation and
then fire for twenty years?
It’s bitterly dank down here. Quench my
thirst O Lord. More. Aren’t those rats stirring about? The rim of
the metal cap bites into my forehead. More. In the faint reflection
of the screen I look like an old madman condemned to death. Isn’t
it unconstitutional, cruel and unusual punishment, to condemn an
old man to the electric chair? No, now the thing on my head looks
more like a dunce cap than anything else. I should have torn up his
check that day. I’d be 2000 miles from this place in my nice warm
bed right now. Probably having nightmares, that’s true, but at
least ones I could wake up out of. I can’t help going back in my
own private built-in time machine (far more efficient than his) to
the day I got fatally involved. That was how long ago? I can’t
remember. What did I want to remember? I can’t remember.
Somebody’s poking around upstairs. The
woman’s back. The neighbor across the way. My memory’s going too,
fading like the girl, what’s her name? She’s calling my name now
(the woman), so she knows me better than I know her. The button
feels smooth beneath my index finger. I can hear the woman calling
my name louder. She must be just on the other side of the locked
door. What’s her name? Now she’s turning the cellar doorknob.
Opening the door. How is it I forgot to triple-bolt it? “Jerry?”
she says a couple of times. That’s my name. Now silence. Maybe
she’s gone, whoever she is.
“Jerry, come on up out of there,” she’s just
said.
Suddenly a name comes back to me.
Beth. Beth Something.
Somehow, I can’t remember how, she has to do
with tulips.
“Jerry, come on up out of there,” she’s just
said again.
Beth Anderson.
Yes, I remember now. If I don’t push the
button (What for? Something desirable but fearful, is all I know)
we’ll be leaving this house and be going to the seaside as I always
wanted.
That’s tomorrow.
Suddenly I see them as they’ll be tomorrow:
massed on the beach prone and gleaming, waving, shouting,
wrestling, burrowing, raising structures of sand, flying kites,
leaping to volley-balls. I can smell tomorrow’s suntan lotion,
hot-dogs and waffles, something of the sea way beyond. Now I see
tomorrow’s Ferris Wheel and the Loop-the-Loop and the shrieking
roller coaster, the crowded boardwalk, hot-dogs with chili and
mustard, ice-cream cones, popcorn, the mica-flashes of trillions of
grains of sand of nowness.
But wait: those one-piece bathing suits,
those concealed belly buttons, those rubber bathing caps, that
cotton-candy cloud and lemon lollipop sun in the momma-eyed sky:
this is Coney Island in the 1930’s so not now and to come, so a
fraud, the terrible late discovery.
Who can save us?
O I see them now in solemn procession across
those sands: bearded to the eyes under their broadbrimmed black
hats and now turning unanimous toward the multitude of time-trapped
unbelievers. One of us suddenly falls to his knees in the firm
sand, stricken with enlightenment, and isn’t it possible? After all
that time at last the ultimate conversion, number one billion,
three hundred thousand four hundred and twenty three? He-I the
Elect, freed from his doomed moment of triviality? And yes with the
burning focus of his yearning and belief, critical mass attained,
all in-gathered, the balance-tipping, the end of now and then and
to come: the beach, the sea, the sky, that painted theatrical veil
lifting, and time vanquished for all time and we’re together again,
all of us, the dead and the living, all with pardoning smiles.
The End