In the morning, she spoke not a word. In the coolness of the separated house, he ate his breakfast, confident that things would be better by evening.
He arrived late to work. He walked between the typing, clicking rows of stenographers’ desks, passed on down the long hallway, and opened the door of his secretary’s office.
His secretary was standing against her desk, her face pale, her hands up to her lips. ‘Oh, Mr Tiller, I’m so glad you came,’ she said. ‘In there.’ She pointed at the door to the inner office. ‘That awful old busybody! She just came in and–and—’ She hurried to the door, flung it open. ‘You’d better see her!’
He felt sick to his stomach. He shuffled across the threshold and shut the door. Then he turned to confront the old woman who was in his office.
‘How did you get here?’ he demanded.
‘Why, good morning.’ Ma Perkins laughed, peeling potatoes in his swivel chair, her tidy little black shoes twinkling in the sunlight. ‘Come on in. I decided your business needed reorganizing. So I just started. We’re partners now. I had lotsa experience in this line. I saved more failing businesses, more bad romances, more lives. You’re just what I need.’
‘Get out,’ he said flatly, his mouth tight.
‘Why now, young man, cheer up. We’ll have your business turned around in no time. Just let an old woman philosophize and tell you how—’
‘You heard what I said,’ he grated. ‘Isn’t it enough I had trouble with you at my house?’
‘Who, me?’ She shook her head. ‘Sakes, I never been to your house.’
‘Liar!’ he cried. ‘You tried to break up our home!’
‘I only been here in the office, for six months now,’ she said.
‘I never saw you here before.’
‘Oh, I been around, around, I been observin’. I seed your business was bad, I thought I’d just give you some gumption you need.’
Then he realized how it was. There were two Mas. One here, one at home. Two? No, a million. A different one in every home. None aware of the others’ separate lives. All different, as shaped by the individual brains of those who heard and lived in the far homes. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘So you’re takin’ over, moving in on me, are you, you old bastard?’
‘Sech language.’ She chuckled, making a crisscross pie on his green blotter, rolling out the yellow dough with plump fingers.
‘Who is it?’ he snarled.
‘Eh?’
‘Who is it, who’s the traitor in this office?!’ he bellowed. ‘The one who listens to you in secret here, on my time?’
‘Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no fibs,’ she said, pouring cinnamon out of his inkwell onto the piecrust dough.
‘Just wait!’ He rammed the door open and ran past his secretary and out into the big room. ‘Attention!’ He waved his arms. The typing stopped. The ten stenographers and clerks turned away from their shiny black machines. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Is there a radio somewhere in this office?’
Silence.
‘You heard what I said,’ he demanded, glaring at them with hot eyes. ‘Is there a radio?’
A trembling silence.
‘I’ll give a bonus and a guarantee I won’t fire her, to anyone who tells me where the radio is!’ he announced.
One of the little blond stenographers put up her hand.
‘In the ladies’ restroom,’ she whimpered. ‘Cigarette time, we play it low.’
‘God bless you!’
In the hall, he pounced on the restroom door. ‘Is anyone in there?’ he called. Silence. He opened the door. He entered.
The radio was on the window ledge. He seized it, jerking at its wires. He felt as if he were clutching at the live intestines of some horrible animal. He opened the window and flung it out. Somewhere there was a scream. The radio burst into bomb fragments on the roof below.
He slammed the window and went back to his office door.
The office was empty.
He picked up his inkwell and shook it until it gave forth—
Ink.
Driving home, he considered what he had said to the office force. Never another radio, he had said. Whoever is responsible for another radio will be fired out of hand. Fired, did they understand!
He walked up the flight of stairs and stopped.
A party was going on in his apartment. He heard his wife laughing, drinks being passed, music playing, voices.
‘Oh, Ma, aren’t you the one?’
‘Pepper, where are you?’
‘Out here, Dad!’
‘Fluffy, let’s play spin the bottle!’
‘Henry, Henry Aldrich, put down that platter before you break it!’
‘John, oh, John, John!’
‘Helen, you look lovely—’
‘And I said to Dr Trent—’
‘I want you to meet Dr. Christian and—’
‘Sam, Sam Spade, this is Philip Marlowe—’
‘Hello, Marlowe.’
‘Hello, Spade!’
Gushing laughter. Rioting. Tinkling glass.
Voices.
Joe fell against the wall. Warm perspiration rolled down his face. He put his hands to his throat and wanted to scream. Those voices. Familiar. Familiar. All familiar. Where had he heard them before? Friends of Annie’s? And yet she had no friends. None. He could remember none of her few friends’ voices. And these names, these strange familiar names—?
He swallowed drily. He put his hand to the door.
Click.
The voices vanished. The music was cut off. The tinkling of glass ceased. The laughter faded in a great wind.
When he stepped through the door, it was like coming into a room an instant after a hurricane has left by the window. There was a sense of loss, a vacuum, an emptiness, a vast silence. The walls ached.
Annie sat looking at him.
‘Where did they go?’ he said.
‘Who?’ She tried to look surprised.
‘Your friends,’ he said.
‘What friends?’ She raised her eyebrows.
‘You know what I’m talking about,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said firmly.
‘What’d you do? Go buy a new radio?’
‘And what if I did?’
He took a step forward, his hands groping the air. ‘Where is it?’
‘I won’t tell.’
‘I’ll find it,’ he said.
‘I’ll only buy another and another,’ she said.
‘Annie, Annie,’ he said, stopping. ‘How long are you going to carry this crazy thing on? Don’t you see what’s happening?’
She looked at the wall. ‘All I know is that you’ve been a bad husband, neglecting me, ignoring me. You’re gone, and when you’re gone, I have my friends, and my friends and I have parties and I watch them live and die and walk around, and we drink drinks and have affairs, oh yes, you wouldn’t believe it, have affairs, my dear Joseph! And we have martinis and daiquiris and manhattans, my good Joseph! And we sit and talk and crochet or cook or even take trips to Bermuda or anywhere at all, Rio, Martinique, Paris! And now, tonight, we had such a grand party, until you came to haunt us!’
‘Haunt you!’ he shrieked, eyes wild.
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘It’s almost as if you’re not real at all. As if you’re some phantom from another world come to spoil our fun. Oh, Joseph, why don’t you go away.’
He said slowly, ‘You’re insane. God help you, Annie, but you’re insane.’
‘Whether I am or not,’ she said, at last, ‘I’ve come to a decision. I’m leaving you, tonight. I’m going home to Mother!’
He laughed wearily. ‘You haven’t got a mother. She’s dead.’
‘I’m going anyway, home to Mother,’ she said endlessly.
‘Where’s that radio?’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be able to go home if you took it. You can’t have it.’
‘Damn it!’
Someone knocked on the door.
r />
He went to answer it. The landlord was there. ‘You’ll have to stop shouting,’ he said. ‘The neighbors are complaining.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Joe, stepping outside and half shutting the door. ‘We’ll try to be quiet—’
Then he heard the running feet. Before he could turn, the door slammed and locked. He heard Annie cry out triumphantly. He hammered at the door. ‘Annie, let me in, you fool!’
‘Now, take it easy, Mr Tiller,’ cautioned the landlord.
‘That little idiot in there, I’ve got to get inside—’
He heard the voices again, the loud and the high voices, and the shrill wind blowing and the dancing music and the glasses tinkling. And a voice saying, ‘Let him in, let him do whatever he wants. We’ll fix him. So he’ll never hurt us again.’
He kicked at the door.
‘Stop that,’ said the landlord. ‘I’ll call the police.’
‘Call them, then!’
The landlord ran to find a phone.
Joe broke the door down.
Annie was sitting on the far side of the room. The room was dark, only the light from a little ten-dollar radio illuminating it. There were a lot of people there, or maybe shadows. And in the center of the room, in the rocking chair, was the old woman.
‘Why, look who’s here,’ she said, enchanted.
He walked forward and put his fingers around her neck.
Ma Perkins tried to get free, screamed, thrashed, but could not.
He strangled her.
When he was done with her, he let her drop to the floor, the paring knife, the spilled peas flung everywhere. She was cold. Her heart was stopped. She was dead.
‘That’s just what we wanted you to do,’ said Annie tonelessly, sitting in the dark.
‘Turn the lights on,’ he gasped, reeling. He staggered back across the room. What was it, anyway? A plot? Were they going to enter other rooms, all around the world? Was Ma Perkins dead, or just dead here? Was she alive everywhere else?
The police were coming in the door, the landlord behind them. They had guns. ‘All right, buddy, up with them!’
They bent over the lifeless body on the floor. Annie was smiling. ‘I saw it all,’ she said. ‘He killed her.’ ‘She’s dead all right,’ said one of the policemen. ‘She’s not real, she’s not real,’ sobbed Joe. ‘She’s not real, believe me.’
‘She feels real to me,’ said the cop. ‘Dead as hell.’ Annie smiled.
‘She’s not real, listen to me, she’s Ma Perkins!’ ‘Yeah, and I’m Charlie’s aunt. Come on along, fellow!’ He felt himself turn and then it came to him, in one horrid rush, what it would be like from here on. After tonight, him taken away, and Annie returned home, to her radio, alone in her room for the next thirty years. And all the little lonely people and the other people, the couples, and groups all over the country in the next thirty years, listening and listening. And the lights changing to mists and the mists to shadows and the shadows to voices and the voices to shapes and the shapes to realities, until, at last, as here, all over the country, there would be rooms, with people in them, some real, some not, some controlled by unrealities, until all was a nightmare, one not knowable from the other. Ten million rooms with ten million old women named Ma peeling potatoes in them, chuckling, philosophizing. Ten million rooms in which some boy named Aldrich played with marbles on the floor. Ten million rooms where guns barked and ambulances rumbled. God, God, what a huge, engulfing plot. The world was lost, and he had lost it for them. It had been lost before he began. How many other husbands are starting the same fight tonight, doomed to lose at last, as he lost, because the rules of logic have been warped all out of shape by a little black evil electric box?
He felt the police snap the silver handcuffs tight.
Annie was smiling. And Annie would be here, night after night, with her wild parties and her laughter and travels, while he was far away.
‘Listen to me!’ he screamed.
‘You’re nuts!’ said the cop, and hit him.
On the way down the hall, a radio was playing.
In the warm light of the room as they passed the door, Joe peered swiftly in, one instant. There, by the radio, rocking, was an old woman, shelling some fresh green peas.
He heard a door slam far away and his feet drifted.
He stared at the hideous old woman, or was it a man, who occupied the chair in the center of the warm and swept-clean living room. What was she doing? Knitting, shaving herself, peeling potatoes? Shelling peas? Was she sixty, eighty, one hundred, ten million years old?
He felt his jaw clench and his tongue lie cold and remote in his mouth.
‘Come in,’ said the old woman–old man. ‘Annie’s fixing dinner in the kitchen.’
‘Who are you?’ he asked, his heart trembling.
‘You know me,’ the person said, laughing shrilly. ‘I’m Ma Perkins. You know, you know, you know.’
In the kitchen he held to the wall and his wife turned toward him with a cheese grater in her hand. ‘Darling!’
‘Who’s–who’s—’ He felt drunk, his tongue thick. ‘Who’s that person in the living room, how did she get here?’
‘Why, it’s only Ma Perkins, you know, from the radio,’ his wife said with casual logic. She kissed him a sweet kiss on the mouth. ‘Are you cold? You’re shaking.’
He had time only to see her nod a smile before they dragged him on.
Doubles
Bernard Trimble played tennis against his wife and when he beat her she was unhappy and when she beat him he was demon-possessed and double-damn madness unhappy, to put it mildly.
One summer, on a country road, in verdant Santa Barbara, Bernard Trimble was motoring along a farmland road with a beautiful and compatible lady of recent acquaintance in the seat beside him, her hair whipping in the wind, with her bright scarf snapping, and a look of philosophic tiredness on her face as from recent pleasant exertions, when an open roadster gunned past them going in the opposite direction, with a woman driving and a young man lounging beside her.
‘My God!’ cried Trimble.
‘Why’d you just cry “my God”?’ said the beautiful temptress at his side.
‘My wife just passed with the most terrible look on her face.’
‘What kind of look?’
‘Just like the one you have right now,’ said Trimble.
And he gunned the car down the road.
At an early dinner that night at the tennis club, with the sound of the tennis balls flying back and forth like soft doves, Trimble sat between two lit candles heartily devouring a bottle of wine. He growled when his wife finally arrived after much too long a shower and sat across from him wearing a spider-woven Spanish mantilla and a phosphorescent breath, like the breath of a twilight forest, sighing from her mouth.
He bent close to examine her chin, her cheeks, and her eyes.
‘No, it’s not there.’
‘What’s not there?’ she asked.
The look, he thought, of remembered and pleasant exertion.
She in turn bent forward, searching his face.
He leaned back in his chair and at last got the courage to say, ‘A strange thing happened this afternoon.’
His wife took a sip of wine and replied, ‘Strange, I was going to say somewhat the same thing.’
‘You first, then,’ he said.
‘No, go ahead. Tell me the strange thing.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I was driving along a country road outside town when a car passed, going the other way. There was a woman in it who looked very much like you. In the seat beside her, wearing an extravagantly rich white suit, his hair whipping in the wind and looking terribly and pleasantly tired, was the billionaire tennis-playing magnate Charles William Bishop. It was all over in a second and the car was gone. After all, we were traveling forty miles an hour.’
‘Eighty,’ said his wife. ‘Two cars passing each other in opposite directions at forty miles an hour, the aggregate is
eighty.’
‘Oh yes,’ he agreed. ‘Well, wasn’t that strange?’
‘Indeed,’ said his wife. ‘Now let me tell you my strangeness. I was driving in a car this afternoon on a country road and a car passed at an accumulated eighty miles an hour and I thought I saw a man in it who looked very much like you. In the seat beside him was that beautiful heiress from Spain, Carlotta de Vega Montenegro. It was all over in a second and I was stunned and drove on. Two strange occurrences, yes?’
‘Have some more wine,’ he said quietly. He filled her glass much too full and they sat for a long while studying each other’s face and drinking the wine.
They listened to the soft sound of the dovelike tennis balls being struck and tossed through the twilight air; there seemed to be a lot of people out on the courts, enjoying themselves.
He cleared his throat and at last picked up a knife and began to run its edge along the tablecloth between them.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘this is the way we solve our two strange problems.’
With his knife he scored a long rectangle in the cloth and cut across it so that it resembled a metaphorical tennis court on the table.
Trimble and his wife looked across the net at the figures of Charles William Bishop and Carlotta de Vega Montenegro walking away, shaking their heads, their shoulders slumped in the noonday sun.
His wife lifted a towel to touch his cheek and he lifted one to touch hers.
‘Well done!’ he said.
‘Bull’s-eye!’ she said.
And they looked into each other’s face to find a look of tired contentment from recent amiable exertions.
Pater Caninus
Young Father Kelly edged his way into Father Gilman’s office, stopped, turned, and looked as if he might go back out, and then turned back again.
Father Gilman looked up from his papers and said, ‘Father Kelly, is there a problem?’
‘I’m not quite sure,’ said Father Kelly.
Father Gilman said, ‘Well, are you coming or going? Please, come in, and sit.’
Father Kelly slowly inched back in and at last sat and looked at the older man.
‘Well?’ said Father Gilman.
‘Well,’ said Father Kelly. ‘This is all very silly and very strange, and maybe I shouldn’t bring it up at all.’