The Ultimate Egoist (32 page)

I put both hands around my throat and squeezed a little. My neck popped and the skin sloughed dryly off. Now that was all right. If I wore a necktie, Myra wouldn’t be able to see the crinkling edges of skin just above my collarbone.

The doorbell buzzed and I started violently. As I stood up, the skin of my calf parted and fell off like a cellophane gaiter. I snatched it up and stuffed it under a sofa pillow and ran for the door. As I reached it, one of my ears gave a warning crackle; I tore it off and put it in my pocket and swung the door wide.

“David!” She said that, and it meant that she was glad to see me, and that it had been eight months since the last time, and she was feeling fine, and she was sorry she hadn’t written, but then she never wrote letters—not to anybody.

She swooped past me into the room, paused as if she were folding wings, shrugged out of her coat without looking to see if I were there behind her to take it, because she knew I was, crossed her long legs and three-pointed gently on the rug. I put a cigarette into one extended hand and a kiss in the palm of the other, and it wasn’t until then that she looked at me.

“Why—David! You’re looking splendid! Come here. What have you done to your face? It’s all crinkly. It looks sweet. You’ve been working too hard. Do I look nice? I feel nice. Look, new shoes. Snakeskin. Speaking of snakes, how are you, anyway?”

“Speaking of snakes, Myra, I’m going to pieces. Little pieces, that
detach themselves from me and flutter in the gusts of my furious laboring. Something has gotten under my skin.”

“How awful,” she said, not really hearing me. She was looking at her nails, which were perfect. “It isn’t because of me, is it? Have you been pining away for me, David? David, you still can’t marry me, in case you were going to ask.”

“I wasn’t going to ask, but it’s nice to know, anyway,” I said. My face fell, and I grabbed it and hid it under my coat. She hadn’t seen, thank heavens! There remained only my left hand. If I could get rid of it—good heavens! It was already gone!

It might be on the doorknob. Oh, she mustn’t see it! I went to the foyer and searched hurriedly. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Suppose it had caught in her wraps? Suppose it were on the floor somewhere near where she was sitting? Now that I was faced with it, I knew I couldn’t bear to see her hysterical. She was such a—a
happy
person to have around. For the millionth time since that skinning knife had slipped, I muttered, “Now, why did this have to happen to
me?
”

I went back into the living room. Myra was still on the floor, though she had moved over under the light. She was toying curiously with the hand, and the smile on her face was something to see. I stood there speechless, waiting for the storm. I was used to it by this time, but Myra—

She looked up at me swiftly, in the birdlike way she had. She threw her glances so quickly that you never knew just how much she had seen—under all her chatter and her glittering idiosyncrasies was as calm and astute a brain as ever hid behind glamour.

The hand—it was not really a hand, but just the skin of one—was like a cellophane glove. Myra slipped it on her own and peeped through the fingers at me. “Hiya, fellow reptile,” she giggled; and suddenly the giggles changed into frightened little squeaks, and she was holding out her arms to me, and her lovely face was distorted by tears so that it wasn’t lovely any more, but sweet—oh, so darned sweet! She clung close to me and cried pitifully, “David, what are we going to
do?
”

I held her tight and just didn’t know what to say. She began talking
brokenly: “Did it bite you, too, David? It bit m-me, the little beast. The Indians worship it. Th-they say its bite will ch-change you into a snake … I was afraid … Next morning I began shedding my skin every twenty-four hours—and I have ever since.” She snuggled even closer, and her voice calmed a little. It was a lovely voice, even now. “I could have killed the snake, but I didn’t because I had never seen anything like it, and I thought you might like to have it—so I sent it, and now it’s bitten you, and you’re losing your skin all the time, too, and—oh-h-h!”

“Myra, don’t. Please, don’t. It didn’t bite me. I was skinning it, and my knife slipped. I cut myself. The snake was dead when I got it. So—
you’re
the one who sent it! I might have known. It came with no card or letter; of
course
it was you! How … how long have you been this way?”

“F-four months.” She sniffed, and blew her pink nose on my lapel because I had forgotten to put a handkerchief in my breast pocket. “I didn’t care after … after I found out that it didn’t hurt, and that I could count on when parts of my skin would come off. I—thought it would go away after a while. And then I saw your hand in a store window in Albuquerque. It was a belt buckle—a hand holding a stick, with the wrist fastened to one end of the belt and the stick to the other; and I bought it and saw what it was, because the hand was stuffed with the perfumed moulage you always use for your hummingbird brooches and things—and anyway, you were the only one who
could
have designed such a fascinating belt, or who
would
have thought to use your own skin just because … because you happened to have it around—and I hated myself then and l-loved you for it—” She twisted out of my arms and stared into my eyes, amazement written on her face, and joy. “And I do love you for it, right
now
, David,
now
, and I never loved anyone else before and I don’t care”—she plucked my other ear, and the skin rustled away in her hand—“if you
are
all dilapidated!”

I saw it all now. Myra’s crazy desire to climb a mesa, one of those island tableaux of the desert, where flora and fauna have gone their own ways these thousand thousand years; her discovering the snake, and catching it for me because I was a combination taxidermist and
jeweler, and she had never seen anything like it and thought I might want it. Crazy, brave thing; she had been bitten and had said nothing to anybody because “it didn’t hurt”; and then, when she found out that I had the same trouble, she had come streaking to New York to tell me it was her fault!

“If you feel that way about it, Myra,” I said gently, “then I don’t care at all about this … this dry rot … little snake in the grass—” I kissed her.

Amazing stuff, this cast-off skin. Regularly as clockwork, every twenty-four hours, the epidermis would toughen, loosen and slip off. It was astonishingly cohesive. My feet would leave their skin inside my slippers, keeping the exact shape of the limb on which it had grown. Flex the dead skin a couple of times, and it would wrinkle in a million places, become limp and flexible. The nails would come off, too, but only the topmost layer of cells. Treated with tannic acid and afterward with wool oil, it was strong, translucent and soft. It took shellac nicely, and a finish of Vandyke-brown oil paint mixed with bronze powder gave a beautiful old-gold effect. I didn’t know whether I had an affliction or a commodity.

That snake— It was about four feet long, thicker at head and tail than it was in the middle. It was a lusterless orange, darker underneath than it was on top, but it was highly fluorescent. It smelled strongly of honey and formic acid, if you can imagine that for yourself. It had two fangs, but one was on top of its mouth and the other on the lower jaw. Its tongue was forked, but at the roots only; it had an epiglottis, seven sets of rudimentary limbs and no scales. I call it a snake because it was more nearly a snake than anything else. I think that’s fair. Myra is mostly a Puckish angel, but you can still call her a woman. See? The snake was a little of this and a little of that, but I’ll swear its origin was not of
this
earth. We stood there hand in hand, Myra and I, staring at the beast, and wondering what to do about it all.

“We might get rich by renting it to side shows,” said Myra.

“Nobody would believe it. How about renting ourselves to the A.M.A.?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose and that was out. Tough on the A.M.A.

“What are we going to do about it, David?” She asked me as if she thought I knew and trusted me because of it, which is a trick that altogether too many women know.

“Why, we’ll—” And just then came the heavy pounding on the door.

Now, there is only one animal stupid enough to bang on a door when there is a bell to ring, and that is a policeman. I told Myra to stay there in the lab and wait, so she followed me into the foyer.

“You David Worth?” asked the man. He was in plain clothes, and he had a very plain face.

“Come in,” I said.

He did, and sat down without being asked, eyeing the whiskey decanter with little but evident hope. “M’-name’s Brett. H. Brett.”

“H. for Halitosis?” asked Myra gently.

“Naw, Horace. What do I look like, a Greek? Hey, headquarters’s checkin’ on them ornaments o’ y’rs, Mr. Worth.” The man had an astonishing ability to masticate his syllables. “They look like they’re made of human skin. Y’r a taxidoimist, ain’tcha?”

“I am. So?”

“So where’dja get th’ ror material? Pleece analysis says it’s human skin. What do you say?”

I exchanged a glance with Myra. “It is,” I said.

It was evidently not the answer Brett expected. “Ha!” he said triumphantly. “Where’d you get it, then?”

“Grew it.”

Myra began to skip about the room because she was enjoying herself. Brett picked up his hat from the floor and clung to it as if it were the only thing he could trust. I began to take pity on him.

“What did they do down there, Brett? Microscopic cross-section? Acid and base analyses?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me; what have they got down there—hands?”

“Yeah, and a pair o’ feet. Bookends.”

“You always did have beautiful feet, darling,” caroled Myra.

“Tell you what I’ll do, Brett,” I said. I got a sheet of paper, poured
some ink onto a blotter, and used it as a stamp pad. I carefully put each fingertip in the ink and pressed it to the paper. “Take that down to headquarters and give it to your suspicious savants. Tell them to compare these prints with those from the ornaments. Write up your reports and turn them in with a recommendation that the whole business be forgotten; for if it isn’t I shall most certainly sue the city, and you, and anyone else who gets in my way, for defamation of character. I wouldn’t consider it impolite, Mr. Brett, if you got out of here right away, without saying good night.” I crossed the room and held the door open for him.

His eyes were slightly glazed. He rose and walked carefully around Myra, who was jumping up and down and clapping her hands, and scuttled out. Before I could close the door again he whirled and stuck his foot in it.

“Lissen. I don’t know what’s goin’ on here, see? Don’t you or that lady try to leave here, see? I’m havin’ the place watched from now on, see? You’ll hear from me soon’s I get to headquarters, see?”

“You’re a big seesee,” said Myra over my shoulder; and before I could stop her she plucked off her nose and threw it in the detective’s face. He moved away, so fast that he left his hat hanging in midair; seconds later we heard the violence of his attempted passage down four flights of stairs when there were only three.

Myra danced three times around the room and wound up at the top of the piano—no mean feat, for it was a bulky old upright. She sat there laughing and busily peeling off the rest of her face.

“A certain something tells me,” I said when I could talk, which was after quite a while, “that you shouldn’t have done that. But I’m glad you did. I don’t think Detective Inspector Horace Halitosis Brett will be around any more.”

Myra gestured vaguely toward her bag. I tossed it to her, and she began dabbing at nose and lips in the skillful, absent way women have. “There,” she said when she had finished. “Off with the old—on with the new.”

“You’re the first woman in creation who gets beauty treatments in spite of herself. Pretty neat.”

“Not bad,” she said impersonally to her mirror. “Not bad, Myra!”

Thinking of her, watching her, made me suddenly acutely conscious of her. It happens that way sometimes. You know you love the gal, and then suddenly you
realize
it. “Myra—”

I think she had a gag coming, but when she looked at me she didn’t say anything. She hopped down off the piano and came over to me. We stood there for a long time.

“You sleep in there,” I said, nodding toward the bedroom. “I’ll—”

She put her arms around me. “David—”

“Mm-m-m?”

“I’ll—have a nice torso for you at 12:48—”

So we stuck around and talked until 12:48.

It must have been about two weeks later, after we were married, that she started breaking bottles in my laboratory. She came into the laboratory one afternoon and caught me cold. I was stirring a thick mass in a beaker and sniffing at it, and was so intent on my work that I never heard her come in. She moved like thistledown when she wanted to.

“What are you cooking, darling?” she asked as she put away a beautiful pair of arms she had just “manufactured.”

I put the beaker on the bench and stood in front of it. “Just some … sort of … er … stickum I’m mixing up for— Myra, beat it, will you? I’m busy as—”

She slid past me and picked up the beaker. “Hm-m-m. Pretty.
Snff
. Honey and—formic acid. Using the smell of that beast as a lead, are you? Dr. David Worth, trying to find a cure for a gold mine. It’s a cure, isn’t it? Or trying to be?” Her tone was very sweet. Boy, was she sore!

“Well … yes,” I admitted. I drew a deep breath. “Myra, we can’t go on like this. For myself I don’t care, but to have you spending the rest of your life shedding your epidermis like a … blasted cork oak—it’s too much. You’ve been swell about it, but I can’t take it. You’re too swell, and it’s too much for my conscience. Every time I come in here and start stuffing something of yours, I begin worrying about you. It hasn’t been bad, so far—but, woman, think of it! The rest of your life, sloughing off your hide, worrying about whether
or not you can find somewhere to take your face off when you’re not home; trying to remember where you dropped a hand or a leg. You—Myra, you’re not listening.”