“Oh, Mr. Junoff? Of course,” said a woman’s voice as if the description fit.
Junoff came on. “Yesss... ?” He was one to make two or three syllables out of an affirmative.
“My wife’s name is not Constance,” said the husband.
“Who ever said it was? Who is this?”
“Sorry.” The husband gave his name. “Look here, just because in a moment of tired blood four years ago I let you rack me on your couch and probe the gumball machine in my head, doesn’t give you the right to send me an invitation to your saps-and-boots literary get-together next month. Especially when, at the end you add, “bring Constance.’ That is not my wife’s name.”
There was a long silence. Then the psychologist sighed. “Are you sure?”
“Been married to her for twenty years. I should know.”
“Perhaps I inadvertently—”
“No, not even that. My mistress, when she was alive, which I some days doubt, was named Deborah.”
“Damn,” said Junoff.
“Yes. I am. And you did.”
The telephone was dropped and picked up again. The man sounded like he was pouring a stiff drink and giving an easy answer at the same moment.
“What if I wrote Constance a letter—”
“There is no Constance! Only my wife. Whose name is—” He hesitated.
“What’s wrong?”
The husband shut his eyes. “Hold on. Annette. Yes. That’s it. Annette. No, that’s her mother. Anne. That’s better. Write to Anne.”
“What shall I say?”
“Apologize for making up Constance. You’ve got me in a real pickle. She actually thinks the woman was real.”
“Constance does?”
“Annette. Anne. Anne! I’ve already said—”
“There is no Constance, I get it. Hold on.”
He heard more liquid being poured at the far end.
“Are you pouring gin instead of listening to me?”
“How did you know it was gin?”
“Shaken, not stirred.”
“Oh. Well. Do I or do I not write the letter?”
“What good would it do? My wife would only think you were lying to save my skin.”
“Yes, but the truth—”
“Is absolutely worthless with wives!”
There was a long silence from the far end in the villa up by the edge of the lake.
“Well?” said the husband.
“I’m waiting.”
“For what, for God’s sake?”
“For you to tell me what to do.”
“You’re the psychologist, you’re the expert, you’re the adviser, you’re the guy who puts together mystical bathe-ins for unwashed minds, you’re the chap with gum or something on the bottom of his shoes, you think of something!”
“Hold on,” said the voice up at Lake Arrowhead.
There was a sound like the snapping of fingers or the adding of more ice.
“Holy Cow,” said the psychologist. “I think I’ve got it. Yes. I have! I have. My God, I’m brilliant! Keep your pants on.”
“They were never off, damn it!”
“Be prepared. I am raising the Titantic!”
Click.
There was a sound like more fingers being snapped or more ice added or the phone being hung up.
“Junoff!”
But he was gone.
The husband and wife battled through the morning, yelled at lunch, shrieked over coffee, took the fight to the pool around two, napped briefly at four to waken fresh with vitriol and drinks at four thirty, and at five minutes to five, there was an imperious ring of the front doorbell. Both of them trapped their mouths, she on her righteous indignation, he on his now increasingly maddened denials.
They both stared from the bar to the front door.
The royal ring came again. Something mighty and majestic leaned against the bell not caring if it rang forever to call an entire peasant countryside to kneel. They had never heard such a discourteous ring before. Which meant it could be a lout messenger who knew nothing, or a person of such grandiosity as to be forever important.
Husband and wife marched toward the door.
“Where are you going?” cried the wife.
“To answer it, of course.”
“Oh, no you don’t! And cover up!”
“Cover what up?”
“Liar! Gangway!”
And she left him in her dust. He went back to the bar and drank heavily for thirty seconds.
Only to see her standing in the doorway at the end of thirty-one seconds. She seemed stunned or frozen or both. With her back to the door, she summoned one hand to gesture strangely toward the entranceway. He stared.
“It’s Constance,” she said.
“Who?” he shouted.
“Constance, of course!” a voice whooped.
And the tallest and most beautiful woman he had ever seen charged into the room, looked around as if evaluating everything, and loped at a good pace to squeeze his elbows, grab his shoulders, and plant a kiss in the middle of his brow, which grew an extra eye immediately.
She stood off and looked him up and down as if he were not a man but an athletic team and she was here to award medals.
He looked into her great bright face and whispered:
“Constance?”
“You’re damn tootin’!”
The tall woman spun about to give a similar regard to the wife, and the wife, if not an athletic team of winners, was at least a mob of admirers come along for the game.
“So this is—?” she asked.
“Annette,” said the husband.
“Anne,” said the wife.
“Yeah, that’s it,” said the husband. “Anne.”
“Anne! What a great name. May I have a drink, Anne?”
The tall and beautiful woman with the huge halo of blond hair and the steady early morning fog gray eyes and the marching stride and the dancer’s arms and hands, folded herself neatly into a chair and stretched out her from-here-to-there-and-happily-back-again legs.
“My God, I’m martini famished. Can it be possible?”
The husband stirred but his wife cried, “Don’t move!”
The husband froze.
The wife leaned forward to gauge this creature, top to bottom, even as the creature had gauged her.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“What are you doing here—ah—”
“Constance!”
The wife looked at the husband. “So there’s no Constance, eh?”
The tall woman blinked at the husband. “What have you been telling Anne?”
“Nothing.” And that was the truth. “Well, she must know everything. I leave tonight on the jet to New York and then tomorrow on the Concorde to Paris. I heard there was a misunderstanding—”
“Sure as hell has been—” said the husband.
“And I thought I’d just race over and clear things up before I was gone forever.”
“Okay,” said the wife. “Clear?
“First, do I get a drink?”
The husband stirred.
“Don’t move,” said the wife, with a deadly coldness in her voice.
“Well, then,” said the lady as long as the lovely rivers of France and as beautiful as all of its towers and castles, “here goes. What an incredible woman you are!”
“Me?” said the wife.
“Your husband speaks of nothing else.”
“Him!?” cried the wife.
“Goes on and on. Drives me wild. Makes me mad with jealousy. How you met, how you courted, where you dined, what your favorite food is, the name of your perfume, Countessa, your favorite book, War and Peace, which you’ve read seven times—”
“Only six—” said the wife.
“But you’re on your way through seven!”
“True,” admitted the wife.
“Your favorite films, Pinocchio and Citizen Kane—”
The wif
e glanced at the husband, who shrugged sheepishly.
“Your favorite sport, tennis, and mighty good at it, beat the hell out of him. Good at bridge and poker, beat him again, four times out of five. Were the bright whirl at high school proms, in college, and on board the United States ship for England on your honeymoon and last year on a Caribbean cruise. How you won a Charleston contest on board the Queen Elizabeth II coming home from France the year before. Your love of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Your playing Desdemona in a little theater group eight years ago to great reviews. Your tender loving care when he was in the hospital five years back. Your treating his mother as if she were fine Dresden china. Your placing flowers on his father’s grave at least four times a year. Your resisting buying two-thousand-dollar Dior dresses in Paris. Your dinner with Fellini in Rome when Federico fell in love with you and almost carried you off. Your second honeymoon in Florence where it poured for a week but you didn’t care, for you never went out. The short story you published in the Ohio State Monthly; superb...”
The husband was leaning forward now, entranced.
And the wife had grown immensely quiet.
“On and on,” said the woman whose name had caused all the commotion. “Babble babble. How he fell in love with you when you were twelve. How you helped him with algebra when you were fourteen. How you decorated this place from parquetry to chandeliers, from bathroom to back porch, and loomed the rug in the front hall and made the pottery on the sideboard. My God, dear Lord, would he never stop! Gibber-gibber. I wonder—”
The tall, the long, the lovely lady paused.
“Does he ever talk about me this way, when he’s with you?”
“Never,” said the wife.
“I sometimes feel,” said the beautiful woman, “that I do not exist when I am with him. That he is with you!”
“I—” said the husband.
“Be still,” said the wife.
He was still.
“Continue.” The wife leaned forward.
“No time. Must go. May I have that drink?”
The wife went and mixed a martini and came back as if bringing a blue ribbon to best cat of the show. The beautiful woman sipped it and said, “That’s the best damned martini I ever had. Do you foil at nothing?”
“Let me think.” The wife sat down slowly and eyed her competition. “So he speaks of me, does he?”
“That’s why it’s all over,” said the lovely lady. “I can’t stand it anymore. If you are so crazy for her, if you love her so much, I said, for God’s sake, what you are doing with me! Get. Go! Vamoose. One more day of The Greatest Wife that God Ever Created will drive me absolutely bonkers. Scram!”
The lovely woman finished her drink, closed her eyes on the savor, nodded, and arose, story after story, lovely battlement after battlement. She stood above them, like a summer cloud, motioning them not to get up.
“Now it’s scram for me, too. I’m off to the airport. But I had to come clear up a few things. It’s not fair to ruin lives and not rebuild. It’s been fun, George—”
“My name is Bill.”
“Oops. Dear Bill, much thanks. And Annette—”
“Anne.”
“Anne, you’ve won. I’ll be gone four months. When I’m back, don’t call me, I’ll call you. So long, good wife. So long, Charlie.” She winked and charged for the door, where she turned.
“Thanks for listening. Have a great life.” The front door slammed. The taxi, out front, could be heard motoring away.
There was a long silence. At last the wife said, “What was that?”
“One of those hurricanes,” said the husband, “that they name for women.”
He wandered off toward the bedroom where she found him packing a suitcase. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said, in the doorway. “Well, after all this, I thought you’d want me to get out—”
“What, and move into a hotel?”
“Maybe—”
“Where she could come get her hooks into you?”
“I just imagined—”
“You think I’m going to let you run free in a world where people like that are lying in wait? Why, you poor custard—”
“You can’t get hooks into a custard.”
“But she’s got a big spoon! Take those shirts out of the suitcases. Now put those ties over there, and put those shoes under the bed, and come out and have a drink, dammit, and sit down and eat any damn dinner I make for you.”
“But—”
“You’re a beast and a rat and a bum,” she said.
“But—”
Tears ran down her cheeks.
“I love you! God help me. I do.”
And she ran but of the room.
He heard her fiercely rattling ice into a shaker, as he dialed the phone.
“Put the stupid son of a bitch on,” he said.
“Junoff here. Well?”
“Junoff, you brilliant mastermind, you incredibly inventive helpmate friend! Who is she? How did you do it?”
“She? Who?” said the voice from Lake Arrowhead.
“How did you remember so much from my sessions with you years ago? How could you tell her? What theater group is she from and is she a fast learner and quick read?”
“Haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about Who is this?”
“Liar!”
“Is your wife there? What’s her name?”
“Annette. No. Anne.”
“Put her on!”
“But—”
“Get her!”
He walked out to the bar and picked up the extension phone and handed it to his wife.
“Hello,” said Junoff’s voice, one hundred miles away on top of a mountain near a lake.
His voice was so loud his wife had to hold the phone an inch away from her ear. Junoff shouted:
“Anne? I’m giving a party up here next weekend!”
And then:
“Come. And bring Constance!”
Junior
It was on the morning of October 1 that Albert Beam, aged eighty-two, woke to find an incredible thing had happened, if not in the night, miraculously at dawn.
He witnessed a warm and peculiar rise two-thirds of the way down the bed, under the covers. At first he thought he had drawn up one knee to ease a cramp, but then, blinking, he realized—
It was his old friend: Albert, Junior.
Or just Junior, as some as some frolicsome girl had dubbed it, how long, oh God... some sixty years ago!
And Junior was alive, well, and freshly alert.
Hallo, thought Albert Beam, Senior, to the scene, that’s the first time he’s waked before me since July, 1970.
July, 1970!
He stared. And the more he stared and mused, the more Junior blushed unseen; all resolute, a true beauty.
Well, thought Albert Beam, I’ll just wait for him to go away.
He shut his eyes and waited, but nothing happened. Or rather, it continued to happen. Junior did not go away. He lingered, hopeful for some new life.
Hold on! thought Albert Beam. It can’t be.
He sat bolt upright, his eyes popped wide, his breath like a fever in his mouth.
“Are you going to stay?” he cried down at his old and now bravely obedient friend.
Yes! he thought he heard a small voice say.
For as a young man, he and his trampoline companions had often enjoyed Charlie McCarthy talks with Junior, who was garrulous and piped up with outrageously witty things. Ventriloquism, amidst Phys Ed. II, was one of Albert Beam’s most engaging talents.
Which meant that Junior was talented, too.
Yes! the small voice seemed to whisper. Yes!
Albert Beam bolted from bed. He was halfway through his personal phonebook when he realized all the old numbers still drifted behind his left ear. He dialed three of them, furiously, voice cracking.
“Hello.”
“Hello!”
“Hello!”
Fr
om this island of old age now he called across a cold sea toward a summer shore. There, three women answered. Still reasonably young, trapped between fifty and sixty, they gasped, crowed, and hooted when Albert Beam stunned them with the news:
“Emily, you won’t believe—”
“Cora, a miracle!”
“Elizabeth, Junior’s back.”
“Lazarus has returned!”
“Drop everything!”
“Hurry over!”
“Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!”
He dropped the phone, suddenly fearful that after all the alarums and excursions, this Most Precious Member of the Hot-Dog Midnight Dancing-Under-the-Table Club might dismantle. He shuddered to think that Cape Canaveral’s rockets would foil apart before the admiring crowd could arrive to gape in awe.
Such was not the case.
Junior, steadfast, stayed on, frightful in demeanor, a wonder to behold.
Albert Beam, ninety-five percent mummy, five per cent jaunty peacock lad, raced about his mansion in his starkers, drinking coffee to give Junior courage and shock himself awake, and when he heard the various cars careen up the drive, threw on a hasty robe. With hair in wild disarray he rushed to let in three girls who were not girls, nor maids, and almost ladies.
But before he could throw the door wide, they were storming it with jackhammers, or so it seemed, their enthusiasm was so maniac.
They burst through, almost heaving him to the floor, and waltzed him backwards into the parlor.
One had once been a redhead, the next a blonde, the third a brunette. Now, with various rinses and tints obscuring past colors false and real, each a bit more out of breath than the next, they laughed and giggled as they carried Albert Beam along through his house. And whether they were flushed with merriment or blushed at the thought of the antique miracle they were about to witness, who could say? They were scarcely dressed, themselves, having hurled themselves into dressing-gowns in order to race here and confront Lazarus triumphant in the tomb!
“Albert, is it true?”
“No joke?’
“You once pinched our legs, now are you pulling them?!”
“Churns!” Albert Beam shook his head and smiled a great warm smile, sensing a similar smile on the hidden countenance of his Pet, his Pal, his Buddy, his Friend. Lazarus, impatient, jogged in place.
“No jokes. No lies. Ladies, sit!”
The women rushed to collapse in chairs and turn their rosy faces and July Fourth eyes full on the old moon rocket expert, waiting for countdown.