Thunder and Roses (36 page)

The third hotel had one double with bath.

“Twin beds?”

The clerk nodded. Yancey looked at Lois but her eyes were cloaked. He looked at Beverly and she said, “Why not? We can fit in a twin bed. I’m not very big.”

No, Bev, he thought, you’re not.

Lois said, “Beverly—”

“Shh,” said Beverly. “We’ll take it,” she said to the clerk.

Lois turned again. Now she was looking up at the ceiling with him. Think of that! he thought acidly, here we are sharing some antiseptic moonbeams.

His biting thought was protection for a very brief while. His heart began again. It shook him with each beat. It shook the bed, the walls, the building, the beaten cliff outside, making it hurl back the sea with even greater violence.

There was the softest butterfly-wing touch on his chest. Beverly had opened her eyes.

Yancey thought madly, it’s like one of those meaningless conjugations they give you in first-year French. I stare up into the darkness, you stare up into the darkness, she stares up into the darkness.…

Beverly moved. She wriggled up closer. She put her hand behind his head, pulling it toward her. She put her mouth on his ear. He felt her warm breath. Barely audible, her breath said, “Darling. What is it? What do you want?”

What did he want? Nothing, of course. Nothing he could have. Nothing, certainly, that he should have. He shook his head.

Beverly crept back until her head was on his shoulder again. She lay still. She slid one hand over his chest, to rest lightly on his hammering heart.

Lois sighed quietly and turned over, away from them. The wind laughed and laughed outside, and another breaker smashed and spouted. The room grew black, then silver again.

An hour-long five minutes passed.

Abruptly Beverly sat up. “I can’t sleep,” she said clearly.

Lois was silent. Yancey watched Beverly. The silver light made everything in the room look like an overexposed photograph, but Beverly’s flesh seemed pink—the only thing in the whole mad, pulsing world that had any color but grey or black or silver.

Beverly swung her legs out, stood up, and stretched in the moonlight. She was small and firm and—pink? Was she really pink, or was that a memory too, like the reconstruction of the two kinds of darkness on Lois’s pillow that to his mind looked like Lois’s face and hair?

What a beautiful complementation, he thought hotly; how balanced an equation expresses this chaos! Beverly, small and fair; open, simple, direct. Lois, tall, slender, dark, devious, complex. And each so clearly lacking just what the other had.

Beverly said, “I have nineteen chapters of
Anna Karenina
to read. Take me about an hour.” She knelt on Yancey’s bed briefly, reached across to the night table, and scooped something up. Then she went to the highboy and got the book. She went into the bathroom. Yellow light appeared starkly under the closed door.

Yancey lay quite still, looking at the line of yellow light. He heard Lois’s sheets.

At last he rolled over and looked at her. He could see the sliver of yellow again, across her eyes. She was half sitting, resting her
weight on one slender arm. She was looking at him, or past him, to the closed door.

“What was it she picked up from the night table, Yancey?”

“Her watch.”

Lois made a sound, perhaps “Oh.” She sank down slowly, until she rested on her elbow. She
was
looking at him now. He would know that even if he closed his eyes.

He lay still, wondering if Lois could hear his heart. She probably could. Beverly probably could, through the door. He wondered, with shattering inconsequentiality, whether Beverly liked red curtains.

Lois made a slight motion with her chin toward the yellow gleam. She whispered, “I couldn’t do that.”

A great hungry yearning came over him, but at the moment, incredibly, it seemed to have no direction. It yawned somewhere beneath him, waiting to engulf him. A puzzlement plucked at him, and then, seeing the polished yellow lines in Lois’s eyes, it came to him which of these women was simple and direct, and which was subtle and deep and complex.

“I couldn’t do that,” Lois had said. How many other things could Beverly do that Lois could not?

What kind of a woman was Beverly?

For the very first time Yancey Bowman asked himself what had happened to Beverly the day he was killed. He’d assumed she was simply in cold storage while they put him back together. He’d assumed … how could he assume such a thing? He had never even asked about her. That was impossible! Unnatural!

But of course—he wasn’t to ask. He would not have thought of it, and the chances were that he could not have asked her even if he’d thought to.

Why could he think of it now?

It must be time to think of it. Something had happened to him, permitting him to. Qualifying him to. But he hadn’t changed; he couldn’t change. He was built and rebuilt and designed and redesigned, to be Yancey-Plus. What change could …

Supposing, he told himself, they had a very young thing to rebuild.
Wouldn’t they build it so that it could go on growing? Then he could have grown. How? How?

Well, what would he have done in this same mad situation, two years ago, even after he left the space ship? He wouldn’t have lain here these swift seconds, speculating; that was for sure.

“I couldn’t do that,” Lois had whispered. Supposing Beverly had been killed too, and changed as he had been changed. He had never told her what he knew; why would she have told him? Wasn’t the prime purpose to improve a little, but to change nothing? He was Yancey-Plus, who went right ahead ruling the roost, accepting his wife’s quiet variety of slave labor. Wouldn’t she go right on being Beverly, giving him always what he wanted?

And suppose she hadn’t been killed, hadn’t been changed. What kind of a woman was she, who could do what Lois could not do, what—it painfully occurred to him—he himself, with all his powers, could never do? Was the original Beverly a bigger person than Yancey-Plus?

Then it was, with a surge of relief that made his head spin, that his heart eased and he smiled. He knew now how he had changed, how he had grown. He knew, all at once, what to do now and what to do for the rest of his life with Beverly. Up to now he had not been able to ask her if she was the same Beverly he had married. Now, by choice, he never would ask her. Their marriage would be spiced and underscored and made most beautiful by that one mystery between them, each held from the other.

All this in seconds, and he became aware again of the yellow lights in Lois’s long eyes. Quite changing the subject, he used her exact words. “I couldn’t do that,” he whispered.

Lois nodded slowly. She sank back on the pillow and closed her eyes. He thought she trembled. He didn’t know. He didn’t much care. He turned over and filled his lungs, as he had not been able to do for more than an hour because of his leaping heart. “Beverly!” he bellowed.

The book fell on the tiles. There was silence for a moment, and then the door opened.

“Yes, Yance.”

“Get back to bed, idiot. You can read that some other time. You need your sleep.”

“I just—all right, Yance, if you want.”

She switched off the light and came in. A moonbeam swept across her face as she approached. She was looking across him at Lois, her lips trembling. She got into bed. He put his arms around her, gently, humbly. She turned to him and suddenly held him so tight that he almost cried out.

T
HERE WAS A
“psychic” operating on Vince Street. Fowler went to see her. Not that he had any faith in mumbo-jumbo: far from it. He had been told that this Mrs. Hallowell worked along strictly logical lines. That’s why he went. He liked the sound of that, being what he was. He went to her and asked her about killing himself. She said he couldn’t do it. Not “You won’t,” or “shouldn’t.” She said, “You can’t.”

This Fowler was a failure specialist, in the sense that a man is a carburetor specialist or a drainage specialist or a nerve specialist. You don’t get to be that kind of specialist without spending a lot of time with carburetors or sewers or nerves. You don’t stay nice and objective about it either. You get in it up to the elbows, up to the eyeballs. Fowler was a man who knew all that one man could know about failure. He knew all of the techniques, from the small social failure of letting his language forget what room of the house his mouth was in, through his declaration of war on the clock and the calendar (in all but style he was the latest), to the crowning stupidity of regarding his opinions as right purely because they were his opinions. So he had fallen and floundered through life, never following through, jumping when he should have crept, and lying down at sprintingtime. He could have written a book on the subject of failure, except for the fact that if he had, it might have been a success … and he hated failure. Well, you don’t have to love your specialty to be a specialist. You just have to live with it.

It was understandable, therefore, that he should be impressed by Mrs. Hallowell’s reputation for clarity and logic, for he truly believed that here was a kindred spirit. He brought his large features and his flaccid handshake to her and her office, which were cool. The office was Swedish modern and blond. Mrs. Hallowell was dark, and said, “Sit down.”

“Your name?”

“Maxwell Fowler.”

“Occupation?”

“Engineer.”

She glanced up. She had aluminum eyes. “Not a graduate engineer.” It was not a question.

“I would of been,” said Fowler, “except for a penny-ante political situation in the school. There was a fellow—”

“Yes,” she said. “Married?”

“I was. You know, the kind that’ll kick a man when he’s down. She was a—”

“Now, Mr. Fowler. What was it you wanted here?”

“I hear you can foretell the future.”

“I’m not interested in gossip,” she said, and it was the only cautionary thing she said in the entire interview. “I know about people, that’s all.”

He said, “Ever since I could walk and talk, people have been against me. I can whip one or two or sometimes half a dozen or more, but by and large I’m outnumbered. I’m tired. Sometimes I think I’ll check out.”

“Are you going to ask me if you should?”

“No. If I will. You see, I think about it all the time. Sometimes I—”

“All right,” she said. “As long as you understand that I don’t give advice. I just tell about what’s going to happen.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Give me a check.”

“What?”

“Give me a check. No—don’t write on it. Just give it to me.”

“But—”

“You wouldn’t pay me afterward.”

“Now look, my word’s as good as—” and then he looked into the eyes. He got out his checkbook. She took a pen and wrote on the check.

She gave it back to him and he looked at it and said, “That’s foolish.”

“You have it, though.”

“Yes, I have, but—”

“Sign it, then,” she said casually, “or go away.”

He signed it. “Well?”

She hesitated. There was something—

“Well?” he rapped again. “What’ll I do? I’m tired of all this persecution.”

“I take it you’re asking me what you
shall
do—not what you should or will do.”

“Lawyer’s talk, huh.”

“Laws,” she said. “Yes.” She wet her lips. “You shall live a long and unhappy life.” Then she put away the check.

Maxwell looked after it, longingly. “It can’t be unhappier than it is.”

“That may well be.”

“Then I don’t want to live a long life.”

“But you shall.”

“Not if I don’t want to,” he said grimly. “I tell you, I’m tired.”

She shook her head. “It’s gone too far,” she said, not unkindly. “You can’t change it.”

He got up. “I can. Anytime, I can. Then you’ll be wrong, won’t you?”

“I’m not wrong,” said Mrs. Hallowell.

“I’ll kill myself,” said Maxwell, and that was when she told him he couldn’t. He was very angry, but she did not give him back his check. By the time he thought of stopping payment on it, it had cleared the bank. He went on living his life.

The amount of money he had paid Mrs. Hallowell dug quite a hole, but for a surprisingly long time he was able to walk around it. However, he did nothing to fill it up, and inevitably, he had the choice of facing his creditors or killing himself. So he got a piece of rope and made a noose and put it around his neck. He tied the other end to the leg of the radiator and jumped out of the window. He was a big man, but the rope held all right. However, the leg broke off the radiator, and he fell six stories. He hit a canvas marquee, tore through it, and fell heavily to the sidewalk. There was quite a crowd there,
after a while, to listen to the noises he made because of what was broken.

Fowler took a while to mend, and spent it in careful thought. He took no comfort from his thoughts, for they were honest ones, and he did not care at all for his conclusions, which drafted a portrait no one would admire and an insight no one would want as a bedfellow. He got through it, though, and put a list of his obligations down on paper and drew up a plan for taking care of things. It was a plan that was within his capabilities and meant chip, chip, chip for a long, long time before he could ever call himself honestly broke again. The first person he tried it out on was the business manager of the hospital, and to his immense surprise it worked: that is, he wouldn’t get sued for the bill, and the hospital would go along with him until it was all straightened out. Nobody had ever given him that much of a break before; but then, he had never tackled a problem this way before.

He got out of the hospital and began chipping.

Mrs. Hallowell had a bad moment over Fowler. She started up out of her sleep one night, thinking about him.

“Oh, how awful,” she said. “I made a mistake!”

She phoned in the morning. Fowler was not there. Mrs Hallowell phoned and phoned around until she got someone who could tell her about Fowler. The tenant in the apartment next to Fowler’s had made a mistake about a gas heater, and had a bad cold, and lit a match, and blew the end of the building out. Fowler had been picked up from the wreckage, bleeding. The someone said, “Is there any message I could send to him?”