Quicker Than the Eye (13 page)

"Oh, dear God," murmured Wetherby, "why didn't 
I 
think?"

"If you 
had 
you would've been too shy to 
ask!"

"The only place in the world with roads like future roads, paths like tomorrow's paths, boulevards without cobbles, pure as Aphrodite's cheeks! Smooth as Apollo's rump!"

And here Wetherby unlocked his eyes to let fall tears, pent up for months and long hilltop years.

"Don't cry," said Dr. Goff.

"I must, with joy, or burst. Do you mean it?"

"My good man, here's my 
hand!"

They shook and the shaking let free at least one drop of rain from the good doctor's cheek, also.

"The excitement will kill me," said Wetherby, wiping the backs of his fists across his eyes.

"No better way to die! Tomorrow night?"

"But what will people say as I lead my machine through the streets to your museum?"

"If anyone sees, say you're a gypsy who's stolen treasure from a distant year. Well, well, Elijah Wetherby, I'm off."

"Be careful downhill."

"Careful."

Half out the door, Dr. Goff tripped on a cobble and almost fell as a farmer said:

"Did you see the lunatic?"

"I did."

"Will you take him to a madhouse?"

"Yes. Asylum." Dr. Goff adjusted his cuffs. "Crazed. Worthless. You will see him no more!"

"Good!" said all as he passed.

"Grand," said Goff and picked his way down the stone path, listening.

And uphill was there not a final, joyful, wheel-circling cry from that distant yard?

Dr. Goff snorted.

"Think on it," he said, half aloud, "no more horses, no

more 
manure! 
Think!"

And, thinking, fell on the cobbles, lurching toward London and the future.

”Well,” said Sheila, chewing on her breakfast toast and examining her complexion, distorted in the side of the coffee urn, "here it is the last day of the last month of the ninth year."

Her husband, Thomas, glanced over the rampart of 
The Wall Street Journa4 
saw nothing to fasten his regard, and sank back in place. "What?"

"I said," said Sheila, "the ninth year's finished and you have a completely new wife. Or, to put it properly, the old wife's gone. So I don't think we're married anymore."

Thomas floored the 
Journal 
on his as-yet-untouched scrambled eggs, tilted his head this way and that, and said:

"Not 
married?"

"No, that was another time, another body, another me." She buttered more toast and munched on it philosophically.

"Hold on!" He took a stiff jolt of coffee. "Explain."

"Well, dear Thomas, don't you remember reading as children and later, that every nine years, I 
think 
it was nine, the body, churning like a gene-chromosome factory, did your entire person over, fingernails, spleen, ankles to elbows, belly, bum, and earlobes, molecule by molecule-"

"Oh, get 
to 
it," he grumbled. "The point, wife, the 
point!"

"The point, dear Tom," she replied, finishing her toast, "is that with this breakfast I have replenished my soul and psyche, completed the reworking of my entire flesh, blood, and bones. This person seated across from you is 
not 
the woman you married-"

"I have often 
said 
that!"

"Be serious."

"Are 
you?" 
he said.

"Let me finish. If the medical research is true, then at the end of nine years there is not an eyebrow, eyelash, pore, dimple, or skin follicle in this creature here at this celebratory breakfast that in any way is related to that old Sheila Tompkins married at eleven a.m. of a Saturday nine years ago this very hour. Two different women. One in bondage to a nice male creature whose jaw jumps out like a cash register when he scans the 
Journal. 
The other, now that it is one minute after the deadline hour, Born Free. So!"

She rose swiftly and prepared to flee.

"Wait!" He gave himself another jolt of coffee. "Where are you going?"

Hallway to the door, she said, "Out. Perhaps away. And who knows: forever!"

"Born free? Hogwash. Come here! Sit down!"

She hesitated as he assumed his lion-tamer's voice. "Dammit. You owe me an explanation. Sit!"

She turned slowly. "For only as long as it takes to draw a picture."

"Draw it, then. Sit!"

She came to stare at her plate. "I seem to have eaten everything in sight."

He jumped up, ran over to the side table, rummaged more omelet, and banged it in front of her.

"There.! Speak with your mouth full."

She forked in the eggs. "You do see what I'm driving at, don't you, Tomasino?"

"Damnation! I thought you were 
happy!"

"Yes, but not 
incredibly 
happy."

"That's for maniacs on their honeymoons!"

"Yes, 
wasn't 
it?" she remembered.

"That was then, this is 
now. Well?"

"I could feel it happening all year. Lying in bed, I felt my skin prickle, my pores open like ten thousand tiny mouths, my perspiration run like faucets, my heart race, my pulse sound in the oddest places, under my chin, my wrists, the backs of my knees, my ankles. I felt like a huge wax statue, melting. After midnight I was afraid to turn on the bathroom light and find a stranger gone mad in the mirror."

"All right, all right!" He stirred four sugars in his coffee and drank the slops from the saucer. "Sum it 
up!"

"Every hour of every night and then all day, I could feel it as if I were out in a storm being struck by hot August rain that washed away the old to find a brand-new me. Every drop of serum, every red and white corpuscle, every hot flash of nerve ending, rewired and restrung, new marrow, new hair for combing, new fingerprints even. Don't 
look 
at me that way. Perhaps 
no 
new fingerprints. But all the rest. See? Am I not a fresh-sculpted, fresh-painted work of God's creation?"

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 God 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 damned." 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 damn 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 massage 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 damn."

"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.

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 class, 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. Nobody 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, nobody, 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 Coke, 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, hell, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom.

What was it he wanted me to see?

Trophies. Big ones, little ones, solid gold and silver and brass 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 Coke.

"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 God 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 Saturday afternoon, I heard someone call:

"How about a hot dog and a Coke?"

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 embarrassed 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 Coke.

"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 Coke. "Yes, sir," he said. "I surely 
was."

"God," 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?"

"Hell, I dunno," I said. "It's just, they seemed such a part of you. I haven't thought of you often the last few years or so, to be honest, but when I do, there you are knee-deep in all those cups and mugs in your front room, out in the kitchen, hell, in your 
garage!"

"I'll be damned," said Bug. "What a memory you got."

We finished our Cokes and it was almost time to go. I couldn't help myself, even seeing that Bug had fleshed himself out over the years.

"When-" I started to say, and stopped.

"When what?" said Bug.

"When," I said with difficulty, "when was the last time you danced?"

"Years," said Bug.

"But how long ago?"

"Ten years. Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Yeah, twenty. I don't dance anymore."

"I don't believe that. Bug not dance? Nuts."

"Truth. Gave my fancy night-out shoes to the Goodwill, too. Can't dance in your socks."

"Can, 
and barefoot, too!"

Bug had to laugh at that. “You're really something. Well, it's been nice.” He started edging toward the door. "Take care, genius-"

"Not so fast." I walked him out into the light and he was looking both ways as if there were heavy traffic. "You know one thing I never saw and wanted to see? You bragged about it, said you took three hundred ordinary girls out on the dance floor and turned them into Ginger Rogers inside three minutes. But I only saw you once at that aud-call in '38, so I don't believe you."

"What?" said Bug. "You saw the trophies!"

"You could have had those made up," I pursued, looking at his wrinkled suit and frayed shirt cuffs. "Anyone can go in a trophy shop and buy a cup and have his name put on it!"

"You think I did that?" cried Bug.

"I think that, yes!"

Bug glanced out in the street and back at me and back in the street and back to me, trying to decide which way to run or push or shout.

"What's got into you?" said Bug. "Why're you talking like that?"

"God, I don't know," I admitted. "It's just, we might not meet again and I'll never have the chance, or you to prove it. I'd like, after all this time, to see what you talked about. I'd love to see you dance again, Bug."

"Naw," said Bug. "I've forgotten how."

"Don't hand me that. You may have forgotten, but the rest of you knows how. Bet you could go down to the Ambassador Hotel this afternoon, they still have tea dances there, and clear the floor, just like you said. After you're out there nobody else dances, they all stop and look at you and her just like thirty years ago."

"No," said Bug, backing away but coming back. "No, no."

"Pick a stranger, any girl, any woman, out of the crowd, lead her out, hold her in your arms and just skim her around as if you were on ice and dream her to Paradise."

"If you write like that, you'll never sell," said Bug.

"Bet you, Bug."

"I don't bet."

"All right, then. Bet you you can't. Bet you, By God, that you've lost your stuff!"

"Now, hold on," said Bug.

"I mean it. Lost your stuff forever, for good. Bet you. Wanna bet?"

Bug's eyes took on a peculiar shine and his face was flushed. "How much?"

"Fifty bucks!"

"I don't have-"

"Thirty bucks, then. Twenty! You can afford to lose that, 
can't 
you?"

"Who says I'd lose, dammit?"

"I 
say. Twenty. Is it a deal?"

"You're throwing your money away."

"No, I'm a sure winner, because you can't dance worth shoats and shinola!"

"Where's your money?" cried Bug, incensed now.

"Here!"

"Where's your car!?"

"I don't own a car. Never learned to drive. Where's yours?"

"Sold it! Jesus, no cars. How do we get to the tea dance!?" We got. We grabbed a cab and I paid and, before Bug could relent, dragged him through the hotel lobby and into the ballroom. It was a nice summer afternoon, so nice that the room was filled with mostly middle-aged men and their wives, a few younger ones with their girlfriends, and some kids out of college who looked out of place, embarrassed by the mostly old-folks music out of another time. We got the last table and when Bug opened his mouth for one last protest, I put a straw in it and helped him nurse a marguerita.

"Why are you 
doing 
this?" he protested again.

"Because you were just one of one hundred sixty-five close friends!" I said.

"We were never friends," said Bug.

"Well, today, anyway. There's 'Moonlight Serenade.' Always liked that, never danced myself, clumsy fool. On your feet, Bug!"

He was on his feet, swaying.

"Who do you pick?" I said. "You cut in on a couple? Or there's a few wallflowers over there, a tableful of women. I dare you to pick the least likely and give her lessons, yes?"

      That did it. Casting me a glance of the purest scorn, he charged off half into the pretty teatime dresses and immaculate men, searching around until his eyes lit on a table where a woman of indeterminate age sat, hands folded, face thin and sickly pale, half hidden under a wide-brimmed hat, looking as if she were waiting for someone who never came.

That 
one, I thought.

Bug glanced from her to me. I nodded. And in a moment he was bowing at her table and a conversation ensued. It seemed she didn't dance, didn't know 
how 
to dance, didn't 
want 
to dance. Ah, yes, he seemed to be saying. Ah, 
no, 
she seemed to reply. Bug turned, holding her hand, and gave me a long stare and a wink. Then, without looking at her, he raised her by her hand and arm and out, with a seamless glide, onto the floor.

What can I say, how can I tell? Bug, long ago, had never bragged, but only told the truth. Once he got hold of a girl, she was weightless. By the time he had whisked and whirled and glided her once around the floor, she almost took off, it seemed he had to hold her down, she was pure gossamer, the closest thing to a hummingbird held in the hand so you cannot feel its weight but only sense its heartbeat sounding to your touch, and there she went out and around and back, with Bug guiding and moving, enticing and retreating, and not fifty anymore, no, but eighteen, his body remembering what his mind thought it had long forgotten, for his body was free of the earth now, too. He carried himself, as he carried her, with that careless insouciance of a lover who knows what will happen in the next hour and the night soon following.

And it happened, just like he said. Within a minute, a minute and a half at most, the dance floor cleared. As Bug and his stranger lady whirled by with a glance, every couple on the floor stood still. The bandleader almost forgot to keep time with his baton, and the members of the orchestra, in a similar trance, leaned forward over their instruments to see Bug and his new love whirl and turn without touching the floor.

When the "Serenade" ended, there was a moment of stillness and then an explosion of applause. Bug pretended it was all for the lady, and helped her curtsy and took her to her table, where she sat, eyes shut, not believing what had happened. By that time Bug was on the floor again, with one of the wives he borrowed from the nearest table. This time, no one even went out on the floor. Bug and the borrowed wife filled it around and around, and this time even Bug's eyes were shut.

I got up and put twenty dollars on the table where he might find it. After all, he 
had 
won the bet, hadn't he?

Why had I done it? Well, I couldn't very well have left him out in the middle of the high school auditorium aisle dancing 
alone, 
could I?

On my way out I looked back. Bug saw me and waved, his eyes as brimmed full as mine. Someone passing whispered, "Hey, come on, 
lookit 
this guy!"

God, I thought, he'll be dancing all night.

Me, I could only walk.

And I went out and walked until I was fifty again and the sun was going down and the low June fog was coming in early over old Los Angeles.

That night, just before going to sleep, I wished that in the morning when Bug woke up he would find the floor around his bed covered with trophies.

Or at the very least he would turn and find a quiet and understanding trophy with her head on his pillow, near enough to touch.