He searched her up and down with a razor glare.
"I hear Mad Carlotta maundering," he said. "I see a woman hyperventilated by a midlife frenzy. Why don"t you just say it? Do you want a divorce?"
"Not necessarily."
"Not necessarily?" he shouted.
"I"ll just simply ... go away."
"Where will you go?"
"There must be some place," she said vaguely, stirring her omelet to make paths.
"Is there another man?" he said at last, holding his utensils with fists.
"Not quite yet.
"Thank G.o.d for small favors." He let a great breath gust out. "Now go to your room."
"Beg pardon?" She blinked.
"You"ll not be allowed out for the rest of this week. Go to your room. No phone calls. No TV. No-"
She was on her feet. "You sound like my father in high school!"
"I"ll be d.a.m.ned." He laughed quietly. "Yes! Upstairs now! No lunch for you, my girl. I"ll put a plate by your door at suppertime. When you behave I"ll give you your car keys. Meanwhile, march! Pull out your telephone plugs and hand over your CD player!"
"This is outrageous," she cried. "I"m a grown woman."
"Ingrown. No progress. Re-gress. If that d.a.m.n theory"s true, you didn"t add on, just sank back nine years! Out you go! Up!"
She ran, pale-faced, to the entry stairs, wiping tears from her eyes.
As she was hallway up, he, putting his foot on the first step, pulled the napkin from his shirt and called quietly, "Wait ..."
She froze in place but did not look back down at him, waiting.
"Sheila," he said at last, tears running down his cheeks now.
"Yes," she whispered.
"I love you," he said.
"I know," she said. "But it doesn"t help."
"Yes, it does. Listen."
She waited, hallway up to her room.
He rubbed his hand over his face as if trying to ma.s.sage some truth out of it. His hand was almost frantic, searching for something hidden around his mouth or near his eyes.
Then it almost burst from him. "Sheila!"
"I"m supposed to go to my room," she said.
"Don"t!"
"What, then?"
His face began to relax, his eyes to fix on a solution, as his hand rested on the banister leading up to where she stood with her back turned.
"If what you say is true-"
"It is," she murmured. "Every cell, every pore, every eyelash. Nine years-"
"Yes, yes, I know, yes. But listen."
He swallowed hard and that helped him digest the solution which he now spoke very weakly, then quietly, and then with a kind of growing certainty.
"If what you say happened-"
"It did," she murmured, head down.
"Well, then," he said slowly, and then, "It happened to me, too."
"What?" Her head lifted a trifle.
"It doesn"t just happen to one person, right? It happens to all people, everyone in the world. And if that"s true, well, my body has been changing along with yours during all the last nine years. Every follicle, every fingernail, all the dermis and epidermis or whatever. I never noticed. But it must have."
Her head was up now and her back was not slumped. He hurried on.
"And if that"s true, good Lord, then I"m new, too. The old Tom, Thomas, Tommy, Tomasino is left behind back there with the shed snakeskin."
Her eyes opened and she listened and he finished. "So we"re both brand-new. You"re the new, beautiful woman I"ve been thinking about finding and loving in the last year. And I"m that man you were heading out to search for. Isn"t that right? Isn"t that true?"
There was the merest hesitation and then she gave the smallest, almost imperceptible nod.
"Mercy," he called gently.
"That"s not my name," she said.
"It is now. New woman, new body, new name. So I picked one for you. Mercy?"
After a moment she said, "What does that make you?"
"Let me think." He chewed his lip and smiled. "How about Frank? Frankly, my dear, I do give a d.a.m.n."
"Frank," she murmured. "Frank and Mercy. Mercy and Frank."
"It doesn"t exactly ring, but it"ll do. Mercy?"
"Yes?"
"Will you marry me?"
"What?"
"I said, will you marry me. Today. An hour from now. Noon?"
She turned at last to look down at him with a face all freshly tanned and washed.
"Oh, yes," she said.
"And we"ll run away and be maniacs again, for a little while "No," she said, "here is fine. Here is wonderful."
"Come down, then," he said, holding his hand up to her. "We have another nine years before another change. Come down and finish your wedding breakfast. Mercy?"
She came down the steps and took his hand and smiled.
"Where"s the champagne?" she said.
BUG.
Looking back now, I can"t remember a time when Bug wasn"t dancing. Bug is short for jitterbug and, of course, those were the days in the late thirties, our final days in high school and our first days out in the vast world looking for work that didn"t exist when jitterbugging was all the rage. And I can remember Bug (his real name was Bert Bagley, which shortens to Bug nicely), during a jazz-band blast at our final aud-call for our high school senior cla.s.s, suddenly leaping up to dance with an invisible partner in the middle of the front aisle of the auditorium. That brought the house down. You never heard such a roar or such applause. The bandleader, stricken with Bug"s oblivious joy, gave an encore and Bug did the same and we all exploded. After that the band played "Thanks for the Memory" and we all sang it, with tears pouring down our cheeks. n.o.body in all the years after could forget: Bug dancing in the aisle, eyes shut, hands out to grasp his invisible girlfriend, his legs not connected to his body, just his heart, all over the place. When it was over, n.o.body, not even the band, wanted to leave. We just stood there in the world Bug had made, hating to go out into that other world that was waiting for us.
It was about a year later when Bug saw me on the street and stopped his roadster and said come on along to my place for a hot dog and a c.o.ke, and I jumped in and we drove over with the top down and the wind really hitting us and Bug talking and talking at the top of his lungs, about life and the times and what he wanted to show me in his front parlor-front parlor, h.e.l.l, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom.
What was it he wanted me to see?
Trophies. Big ones, little ones, solid gold and silver and bra.s.s trophies with his name on them. Dance trophies. I mean they were everywhere, on the floor by his bed, on the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, but in the parlor, especially, they had settled like a locust plague. There were so many of them on the mantel, and in bookcases instead of books, and on the floor, you had to wade through, kicking some over as you went. They totaled, he said, tilting his head back and counting inside his eyelids, to about three hundred and twenty prizes, which means grabbing onto a trophy almost every night in the past year.
"All this," I gasped, "just since we left high school?"
"Ain"t I the cat"s pajamas?" Bug cried.
"You"re the whole darned department store! Who was your partner, all those nights?"
"Not partner, partners," Bug corrected. "Three hundred, give or take a dozen, different women on three hundred different nights."
"Where do you find three hundred women, all talented, all good enough, to win prizes?"
"They weren"t talented or all good," said Bug, glancing around at his collection. "They were just ordinary, good, every-night dancers. I won the prizes. I made them good. And when we got Out there dancing, we cleared the floor.
Everyone else stopped, to watch us there out in the middle of nowhere, and we never stopped."
He paused, blushed, and shook his head. "Sorry about that. Didn"t mean to brag."
But he wasn"t bragging. I could see. He was just telling the truth.
"You want to know how this all started?" said Bug, handing over a hot dog and a c.o.ke.
"Don"t tell me," I said. "I know."
"How could you?" said Bug, looking me over.
"The last aud-call at L.A. High, I think they played "Thanks for the Memory," but just before that-"
" "Roll Out the Barrel"-"
"-"the Barrel," yes, and there you were in front of G.o.d and everyone, jumping."
"I never stopped," said Bug, eyes shut, back in those years. "Never," he said, "stopped."
"You got your life all made," I said.
"Unless," said Bug, "something happens."
What happened was, of course, the war.
Looking back, I remember that in that last year in school, sap that I was, I made up a list of my one hundred and sixty-five best friends. Can you imagine that? One hundred and sixty-five, count "em, best friends! It"s a good thing I never showed that list to anyone. I would have been hooted out of school.
Anyway, the war came and went and took with it a couple dozen of those listed friends and the rest just disappeared into holes in the ground or went east or wound up in Malibu or Fort Lauderdale. Bug was on that list, but I didn"t figure out I didn"t really know him until half a lifetime later. By that time I was down to half a dozen pals or women I might turn to if I needed, and it was then, walking down Hollywood Boulevard one Sat.u.r.day afternoon, I heard someone call: "How about a hot dog and a c.o.ke?"
Bug, I thought without turning. And that"s who it was, standing on the Walk of Stars with his feet planted on Mary Pickford and Ricardo Cortez just behind and Jimmy Stewart just ahead. Bug had taken off some hair and put on some weight, but it was Bug and I was overjoyed, perhaps too much, and showed it, for he seemed embarra.s.sed at my enthusiasm. I saw then that his suit was not half new enough and his shirt frayed, but his tie was neatly tied and he shook my hand off and we popped into a place where we stood and had that hot dog and that c.o.ke.
"Still going to be the world"s greatest writer?" said Bug.
"Working at it," I said.
"You"ll get there," said Bug and smiled, meaning it. "You were always good."
"So were you," I said.
That seemed to pain him slightly, for he stopped chewing for a moment and took a swig of c.o.ke. "Yes, sir," he said. "I surely was."
"G.o.d," I said, "I can still remember the day I saw all those trophies for the first time. What a family! Whatever-?"
Before I could finish asking, he gave the answer.
"Put "em in storage, some. Some wound up with my first wife. Goodwill got the rest."
"I"m sorry," I said, and truly was.
Bug looked at me steadily. "How come you"re sorry?"