Microcosmic God (19 page)

All of which gave Gabe much food for thought. One, or two, or half a dozen “friendly” girls, all envious of the fiancée, all trying desperately to break things up between them by their innuendoes—any man can handle them, if the fiancée in question has him properly hooked. But with Gabe, there were scores of them. Every single female of his acquaintance worked her malicious wiles on him, until he was embroiled in a mass of dreary conjectures about Chloe. His mind was not very fast; things occurred to him with startling suddenness, and he brought himself up sharply after a particularly harrowing session with the realization that he had cold feet. He was actually becoming afraid of Chloe and the fast-approaching connubial state. He locked himself in his room and faced himself sternly. He was frightened by his own fright, and stubbornly began to beat
it down, point by point. He was still in love, and so he reasoned as a lover, and therefore came to many satisfactory conclusions about her. If she couldn’t cook, then they’d eat in restaurants or hire someone who could. If she turned out to be a bad manager, then he’d do the managing. He glossed over her more evident faults, excused those which might have existed, and forgot those he was tempted to investigate. It was a close thing, but he emerged again into the everyday world a man with an ideal—Chloe. “And,” he swore dramatically to himself, “If I’m not good enough for Chloe, then by damn, I’ll make myself over the way she wants me.” Lousy technique. But then, what man who is truly in love can hang on to his technique?

So he became humble to Chloe, and defiant to the “friendly” girls who swarmed around increasingly as the wedding date approached. That was the cause of all his trouble—his stubborn determination to make himself over.

For Chloe, having achieved her goal, was foolish enough to believe that she could keep him by continuing to act the way she had to get him, not knowing that the girl who continually surprises her man is the one who marries him. She was persistently destructive in her comments and her conversation. Every time she was secretly thrilled by his word or gesture, she kept it a secret, and loudly demanded that he remove the thrilling characteristic. He looked absolutely stunning, for instance, in a dark green gabardine; and as soon as she saw it she refused to go out with him in it, saying that it was too informal-looking for the black cire satin she had on. She didn’t like the red pinstriped serge he substituted after a frenzied and expensive taxi ride home and back, but she said nothing about it. She didn’t particularly care whether or not she changed him for the better; so long as she changed him she was satisfied. She felt that he was happier with her if she was persistently waspish and bullying. She went, eventually, a little too far.

For after Gabe had completely replaced his wardrobe, changed his diction, acquired new reading habits, learned to play bridge, joined four lodges so she could force him to break off any time she wished it, and innumerable other impositions, there was nothing left for her to work on but the very thing about him that made him desirable—his
looks. And she hadn’t sense enough not to stop there. She criticized the color of his hair, his eyes, his skin. She accused him of vanity, of posing, and of playing to his feminine galleries. She—well, let’s listen in to a conversation.

It was at Romany Joe’s place, which Gabe didn’t like, and to which Chloe had therefore dragged him. Romany Joe’s was a gypsy restaurant whose cuisine was as authentically gypsy as chop suey is Chinese. It was complete with a string orchestra, flowing flowered organdies wrapped around cigarette girls, wandering violinists, and fortune tellers.

Chloe, radiant in something pale-green and fluffy, was in her stride, while Gabe diffidently yessed her. “Stop admiring your reflection in the waitresses’ eyes,” she said pleasantly, “And see if you can’t get another wine. Your taste in wines is foul.” She daintily pushed away a crystal goblet of genuine 1923 Oporto.

Gabe stirred uneasily—he had spent half the previous evening boning up on the subject. “All right, darling.” Chloe fought down an impulse to fling herself into his arms at the gentle, caressing tones of his voice and said,

“Gabe, for once and all—you’ve got to learn to keep your endearments to yourself in public places. I won’t have you making a spectacle of yourself any longer. Keep that sort of thing for when we’re alone.”

“But we’re never alone,” he said sadly.

“Well, we will be after we’re married. Don’t stare at me that way, just so you can turn your profile to that minx at the other table. She saw it when you came in.”

Gabe sighed miserably and turned his head away. Chloe followed his gaze, rather hoping that it would be resting on something luscious enough to arouse her audible jealousy. But Gabe was looking at an old, old gypsy woman who hobbled down the line of booths, stopping at each to mumble a few words. Chloe turned over a couple of scathing remarks and finally settled on, “Gabe! You’re disgusting! Stop your ogling—have you no age limit?”

Gabe looked at her apologetically, remembered her warning about the brunette over there with the profile-fixation, looked up at the
old woman, and then dropped his eyes to his long brown hands, really not knowing what to do with his eyes. Chloe said, “Stop trying to look penitent. You know I can see through you.” And just then the old gypsy stopped at their booth.

“I tal fortune, pretty lady? Gen-tul-mun?”

Gabe thought as rapidly as his permanently fuzzy mind would permit. Chloe would doubtless feel that to give the woman any money would be wanton extravagance, and that to listen to her mumbo-jumbo would be childish. He shook his head and said, “Thanks, no.” So Chloe leaned over and whispered viciously in his ear, “What’s the matter with you? Do you begrudge a poor old woman a living? Call her back, Gabe! Or is she too old for you to waste any time with her?” Gabe passed up this astonishing reversal and beckoned to the crone. She showed her gums and limped back.

“Will you tell the lady’s fortune?” Gabe asked. The old woman stared at Chloe with bright button-eyes.

“Maybe the lady no like,” she said.

“What do you mean?” asked Gabe.

“Maybe I tal true fortune, maybe true fortune not good. Maybe”—she raised her arms and let them fall—“the lady no like.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Chloe, and laughed. “You fortune tellers are all alike. I’ll take a trip, there’s danger ahead but it’ll be all right in the end, there will be two men in my life and one of them will win out, beware of—”

“Ax-cuze me, lady,” said the old woman gently. “Bot you are not right. All fortune tellers are not alike, no. Many tal you zis stuff, but only I tal you true. I have—” she waved a floppy reticule “—real magics an’ spells in zis bag. I can tal you what weel happen if you don’t use one of my spells, an’ what will happen if you do. I can make your wishes come true. You will see, no?”

“We will see, yes,” said Chloe. “Gabe, cross the old palm with silver and let’s see what happens.”

Gabe reached into his pocket, but the gypsy put out her hand and stopped him. “Not yat, good mister,” she said. “Wait first.”

That radical departure from custom should have been proof enough to both of them that this gypsy was indeed not like other gypsies!

The old lady busily opened her bag and drew out several things which she laid on the table. There was a hank of coarse black hair, a gold button, a half-dozen odd-sized jars of salve, and four old sheepskin scrolls. She arranged them in the shape of an unequal pentagon, and then began making the motions of taking more objects out of her bag and placing them carefully in the air over those on the table. Gabe and Chloe watched, entranced by the seriousness with which she worked.

The gypsy paused a moment, to see if her invisible structure would stand firm without her steady old hands on it, and then swiftly reached out and ran a lock of Chloe’s hair through her fingers. Chloe would be appalled to discover when she reached home and a mirror later that that one lock had returned to its natural shade, a striking but unfashionable red-gold.

“Ah!” she cackled, peering through what must have been an aperture in the unseen pile of intangibles on the table.
“Orel … orel … adartha cay.…”

“Wh—?” asked Gabe.

“Shh. Is gypsy language. Lady has color-hair to make veree easy gypsy spells. This one good now—watch.”

A man strolled close by playing a violin, and the old woman whirled and snatched at the air, tying swift, elaborate knots out of nothing and twining them about and through the Thing on the table. Gabe had the odd feeling that she was stringing out the notes from the violin, tying them into a strong, thin, sweet pattern.

“Now. Is ready. I tal you fortune.” The gypsy stared through nothingness at Chloe for so long that the girl shifted uneasily in her chair and said lightly, “Well? What’s going to happen to me?”

“You will make wan wish,” said the gypsy. “An’ the wish will come true. An’ then you will be as you were, an’ for years you will be sorry for what you have done.”

Gabe and Chloe turned puzzled eyes to each other; and whether the old lady vanished into her house of mystic cards between them, or sank into the floor, or simply scuttled off, they never knew. But in the time it took them to look away and then look back, she was—gone.

“Well!” said Chloe.

“I didn’t pay her yet,” said Gabe, looking vainly around.

“Why should you?” snapped Chloe. “She didn’t do anything to earn her money.”

“But you just said I shouldn’t begrudge—”

“I said nothing of the kind, and you have no right to put that interpretation on it if I did. Is that what life with you is going to be, Gabe—bickering all the time, and having you throw everything I’ve ever said in my face? You’re a stupid arrogant fool, and I really fail to see why I—”

“Chloe!” he cried before she could get the cruel words out. “Oh, Chloe, don’t ever say you’re sorry! Darling, I’ll do anything to be worthy of you. Please don’t keep telling me how poor a match I make for you—please. I’ll do anything—what do you want me to be? What’s the matter with me?” The poor, lovely, love-lorn lug was positively abject. He was leaning close to her, pleading in his eyes and his voice and his pose; and then he made one of those perfectly sincere gestures which are sneered at by you and you as melodramatic and laughable—he buried his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook.

Chloe was touched, but she would stick by her guns until death parted her from them. She looked down her nose at the handsome back of his neck, and sneered. A complementary sobbing caught her ear; she turned and saw the brunette at the other table, who had been eagerly watching the discussion, sobbing quite openly with Gabe. She was a sympathetic soul, and then, of course, she was more than taken with Chloe’s spectacular escort.

Chloe was furious. The cloying mass of females that circulated about Gabe’s beautiful but disinterested head had bothered her many a time before, but never to this extent. Oh, why did he have to make such a hopeless idiot of himself? She leaned closely to him and snarled in his ear,

“All right, pretty boy, I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you. You’re too wonderful-looking to be alive. You attract too much attention. You have too long a string of stupid females trailing around after you, and I’m sick and tired of it and—” here she waxed very intense and lost all pretense of being a lady
“
—
and I wish to God
you had the most ordinary-looking mug on earth!”

He raised his head and their eyes met; and then, up between them flared a cloud of blinding purple flame, shot with yellow and blue-white. It hung for a split second over the table—over the paraphernalia the gypsy had left there; and even in that brief interval, Gabe saw that the flame was five-sided, irregular, exactly in the form of the thing the gypsy had built there. Then their eyes gave out. Chloe said “Eek!” and sat for a moment frozen, and Gabe said “Ulp!” and followed suit. When sight returned to Chloe, she was quite alone. She sat where she was, her hands on her cheeks, her eyes wide and frightened, watching the startled darknesses receding. That she couldn’t see Gabe at first was, she thought, a trick of the light. Then the old oak seat showed itself, and then its grain and the soft play of the lamps on it, and Gabe just wasn’t there.

It had taken but the tiniest fraction of moments, and only now she realized that the music had stopped, that people were chattering and turning her way, and that two waiters and an unremarkable man were around her, asking questions.

“W’at ees eet, modom?”

“Are you hurt?”

“What happened?”

Chloe stared at them blankly. “I—wh-where’s Gabe?”

One of the men put a hand on her shoulder and she shook it off. “Where did he go?” she demanded. She didn’t like the business of people disappearing from the booth.

“Gayub?” queried one of the waiters. “Vat ees dis Gayub?”

The anonymous man leaned over to speak to her, his face working. She rose and pushed him away. “The man who was with me,” she said. “Find him!”

The waiter looked about and scurried off. Chloe stood, very much alone, amid the gathering crowd. Someone said something about a bomb, and there was a tidal movement toward the door. Chloe ceased to be interesting, the music began, so that in very little time she was standing fretfully by herself beside the booth. She felt a timid hand on her arm and turned to look distantly at the nondescript character beside her.

He was a man somewhere between five and a half and six and a half feet, medium build, dressed in clothes which suited his height and weight. His eyes were either blue or brown and his complexion was halfway between light and dark. His manner was not quite retiring and almost aggressive, and there was something annoying and something likable about him. And he said,

“I don’t like it here. Let’s go home.”

She flared up at him. “How
dare
you! Leave me alone!” She picked up her bag and wrap and walked away from him, toward the door. The man followed her; she knew he was close by her, yet when she glanced over her shoulder he had mingled with the crowd, like a praying mantis on a bean-vine.