Thunder and Roses (27 page)

“When Gloria met Arthur,” the man finished smoothly. “I said that if it were syzygy, you’d be all right. Well, it wasn’t, as you saw for yourself. The outside strain, even though it didn’t suit her as well as you did, was too strong. You got hurt. Well, in the workings of really basic laws, something always gets hurt.”

“What about you? Who are you?”

“I am somebody who has been through it, that’s all. You must understand that my world is different from the one you remember. Time itself is different. Though I started from a time perhaps thirty years away, I was able to open a gate near you. Just a little one, of course. I did it so that I could try to make you think this thing out in time. I believe that if you could, you would have been spared all this. You might even have been able to keep Gloria.”

“What’s it to you?”

“You don’t know, do you? You really don’t know?”

I opened my eyes and looked at him, and shook my head. “No, I don’t. I—like you, old man.”

He chuckled. “That’s odd, you know. I don’t like me.”

I craned around and looked over at Gloria and her man, still frozen in that strange kiss. “Will those dream people stay like that forever?”

“Dream people?”

“I suppose that’s what they are. You know, I’m a little proud of Gloria. How I managed to dream up anything so—so lovely, I’ll never know. I—hey—what’s the matter?”

“Didn’t you understand what I was telling you? Gloria is real. Gloria goes on living. What you see over there is the thing that happened when you were no longer a part of her. Leo: she dreamed
you!
”

I rose to my feet and put my fists on the table between us. “That’s a lie,” I choked. “I’m—I’m me, damn you!”

“You’re a detailed dream, Leo, and a splendid job. You’re a piece of sentient psyche from another world injection-molded into an ideal that Gloria dreamed. Don’t try to be anything else. There aren’t many real humans, Leo. Most of the world is populated by the dreams of a few of them; didn’t you know, Leo? Why do you suppose that so few people you met knew anything about the world as a whole? Why do you suppose that humans keep their interests confined and their environments small? Most of them aren’t humans at all, Leo!”

“I’m
me
,” I said stubbornly. “Gloria
couldn’t
have thought of all of me! Gloria can’t run a power shovel! Gloria can’t play a guitar! Gloria doesn’t know anything about the circus foreman who sang, or the Finn dynamite boss who was killed!”

“Of course not. Gloria only dreamed a kind of man who was the product of those things, or things like them. Have you run a shovel since you met her? You’d find that you couldn’t, if you really tried. You’ve played guitar for no one but her since you met her. You’ve spent all your time arranging music that no one will ever see or play!”

“I’m
not
anybody’s dream!” I shouted. “I’m not. If I was an ideal of hers, we would have stayed together. I failed with her, old man; don’t you know that? She wanted me to be aggressive, and I wasn’t.”

He looked at me so sadly that I thought he was going to cry. “She wanted you to
take
. You were a part of her, no human can take from himself.”

“She was deathly afraid of some things that didn’t bother me at all. What about that?”

“The squirrels, and the sound of all the little feet? No, Leo; they were baseless phobias, and she had the power to overcome any of them. She never tried, but it was not difficult to create you without them.”

I stared at him. “Do you mean to—Old man, are there more like me, really?”

“Many, many,” he sighed. “But few who cling to their nonexistent, ghostly egos as you are doing.”

“Do the real people know what they are doing?”

“Very few of them. Very few. The world is full of people who feel incomplete, people who have everything they can possibly want and
yet are unhappy, people who feel alone in a crowd. The world is mostly peopled by ghosts.”

“But—the war! Roman history! The new car models! What about them?”

He shook his head again. “Some of it’s real, some not. It depends on what the real humans want from moment to moment.”

I thought a minute, bitterly. Then I asked him, “What was that you said about coming back in world-time, and looking through a little gateway at things that had happened?”

He sighed. “If you
must
hang on to the ego she gave you,” he said wearily, “you’ll stay the way you are now. But you’ll age. It will take you the equivalent of thirty or so years to find your way around in that strange psychic world, for you will have to move and think like a human. Why do you want to do that?”

I said, with determination, “I am going back, then, if it takes me a century. I’m going to find me right after I met Gloria, and I’m going to warn me in such a way that I’ll figure out a way to be with Gloria for the rest of her life.”

He put his hands on my shoulders, and now there really were tears in his eyes. “Oh, you poor kid,” he said.

I stared at him. Then, “What’s—your name, old man?”

“My name is Leo.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

T
HEY SAT A
dance out, finally, because her hair was sending dark tendrils over the nape of her neck. They sat together in a wing chair under the balcony, a chair just too big for one; and she pulled pins out of her hair.

“Lovely,” he said. He touched it. “Lovely. I didn’t know it was so long.”

She smiled, arching her body to see into the wall mirror around the tall wing of the chair, and combed deftly.

“I have always—I’ve never—” he faltered. “I mean, women shouldn’t be allowed to cut their hair.”

“Didn’t you say your wife has long hair?”

“Yes, she has, but not like that. She hasn’t cut it since I married her, but it isn’t like that.”

The comb stopped, its teeth streaming little wakes like stones in a painted waterfall. He looked into the mirror and saw her face there, watching him gravely. She said, “Are you happy?”

He hesitated. None of his friends who had ever seen him with his wife had ever asked that. It would be silly to ask that.

Before he could speak, the comb finished its stroke and she half-whispered, “You said you were happy, while we were dancing.”

“Yes, I did. I was. I never danced with anyone like you. I never danced as well.”

She bent her head, making a part, looking at the mirror upward through her brows. “Your wife must be very good, judging by the way you dance.”

He almost shook his head. “She’s—She doesn’t enjoy it very much.”

She turned to him suddenly, with her eyes wide. They were green, and ever so slightly slanted. The planes of her ivory face were subtly
distinct from one another. She spoke urgently, “She’ll be back soon, won’t she? And then you and I will—Well, I’ll drop out, that’s all. She’s two thousand miles away from here, because you had to come back and make a new start alone. Well, you’ve made your new start, and it’s not
right
for you to be alone. Why can’t you—why can’t we take what we want until she comes back?”

He didn’t know which of them moved, but suddenly their lips were together, just barely touching. She closed her eyes, and her hair was softly around his face. She turned her head slightly, stroking his lips with hers, a kitten-paw touch and a high little sound spelled with m’s escaped her. His shoulders and arms were rock-hard. His eyes closed too, and then she twisted away from him and to her feet, laughing. She stood before the mirror, rapidly twisting her hair up in two great swept-back wings. She was on tiptoe as she worked, stretching tautly, and he knew he would never forget her as long as he lived.

Later, he was in his room alone, wondering why he had given the taxi-driver her address first, wondering why he had refused the nightcap she offered, and knowing that it was because ultimately he would tell his wife about it, and that would be good as long as it was not unbeautiful in the telling.

There was a blue envelope on the floor under the maildrop. He picked it up, smiled at his wife’s rounded handwriting, opened it and stood there until he had read it all. It was a very short letter, completely screened of any emotion whatsoever, and it said “I want a divorce.” It went on about not wanting any money from him, and that she was genuinely sorry, but he certainly realized that the separation consisted of more than eight months and two thousand miles. It said that they both had known for a long time that he would go farther and faster alone, and it thanked him for those good years. It was utterly sincere and irrevocable, or she wouldn’t have written it.

He laid the letter carefully on the table and removed his overcoat and hung it up. Then he went to the telephone and dialed.

“Yes?”

“I hope I didn’t wake you. I just got a letter from my wife. Listen.”
He read it to her. There was such a long silence that he thought she had hung up. “Hello?”

Surprisingly, she said, “I can’t see your face. I have my eyes closed tight and I am listening to your voice, but I’ve never seen your face like that.” She stopped, and he could hear her breathing. She said, “Are you glad?’

“Well, of course.”

“I’m coming over.”

“But you c—”

“Shush,” she said, and hung up.

He cradled the telephone, picked up the letter and read it again. At last he smiled.

It was all right. It was all perfectly all right. Obviously a change-partners deal was indicated. Nobody need be hurt. A pity, possibly—funny little words he and his wife had made up together, little tricks they used to play on each other, a way they had of saying good night. Pawing the air and gnashings of the teeth could be left to the uncivilized. He’d be all right. Nice of her to make the break so quick and clean. Change partners. All right; make it a double ceremony. The whole thing was beautifully timed.

He was suddenly conscious of perfume, for a little clung to his cheek. He thought carefully of his wife, and then of the girl, and the comparison pleased him. He moved about, emptying an ashtray, straightening the cover of the studio couch, learning as he moved how to turn his head to catch the elusive fragrance of the perfume. He was still smiling when the padded knock sounded.

“Come in.”

She was inside the room immediately, and the door was closed, with her hands behind her on the knob. “You poor darling,” she said softly, and came toward him.

Puzzlement swirled in him. Sorry. She was
sorry
for him, as if something bad had happened.

She looked up into his face, and put her hands on his chest.

She said, “Didn’t you know?”

“Not consciously. Not until tonight.” He waved at the letter. “But it’s all right. It’s all perfectly all right.”

“And she just let you have it … Just like that. What a rotten, bitchy thing to do!”

He watched her face, full of pity and passion, and he saw it go questioning. Slowly, fear crept into her eyes. She backed away from him. She opened her mouth but he said “Get out.” “Get out,” he said again, and began to move. She turned and ran, and when the door closed, he sighed. He was all twisted inside the way her face was twisted.

He slumped to the couch. He sat that way all night without moving.

I
T
’
S THE KIND
of thing you wonder about, so I went and asked him at the end of the number.

“How do you get to whip the skins in the big time?” he repeated, and grinned at his sweating combo. He racked his sticks. “Take ten,” he called to the boys, and then turned back to me. “Lead me to a cola with the emphasis on ice, and I’ll tell you.”

He was a big fellow, red-headed, with wide shoulders and a good grin. We got off the stand and around to the tables. He buried his mouth amongst the ice cubes for a long moment and came up out of it with a sigh. It was hot that night.

“Saw you stompin’,” he said. “You’re a cat.”

“You and your drums got me to jumping,” I smiled back.

“Thanks,” he said, and I could see he meant it. “Now I’ll tell you how a guy can beat his way to the top.” He leaned back and, as he spoke, looked at something over my head and quite a while ago.

“The very first combo I had,” he said, “was a five-man group—clarinet, alto, trumpet, guitar, and me. No piano—we were strictly portable. We were all in school and playing this river resort, partly for peanuts, mostly for kicks. After the first couple of weeks, we began to drag a pretty faithful public. Word got around the way it does, and pretty soon the lot began to fill up with out-of-town license plates. I can’t say that any one of us was really terrific. Thing was, we meshed. When we rode it, we rode it together. It was fine.

“Things went on that way for a while, and we were in pretty solid. There was no talk of bringing in any pro outfit, anyhow.… Oh, I might as well come out with it. This river place I’m talking about, it was my uncle’s. See what I mean? But don’t get me wrong. We delivered. At first, anyhow.

“Maybe I got a little cocky, after a while. I began to circulate
among the customers a little. Nothing wrong with that. Joey Harris was on guitar. Very solid. That was rhythm enough for some numbers, and the cats liked the drums all the better after I’d given ’em a miss for a while. Anyhow, I planned to go places in the music business, and I figured one good way to do it was to play the customers person-to-person as well as from the stand. Dig me?

“Well, you can go too far with that kind of horseplay. It had to rain sometime, and when it did, and we drew a small crowd, I couldn’t see the sense in knocking myself out. You might remember that—too much glad-handing is slow poison.

“One night it was like that—ten or a dozen couples and the band with or without me was strictly so-what. I was down in the far corner telling somebody about myself when I heard the drums.

“It was a kid called Manuel. Black-haired sleepy-looking guy, sort of round-shouldered and slow. He was crouching in my saddle up there over the suitcases, running over the trap with the brushes. Nothing loud, you know. Easy. Easy like breathing. I just relaxed. I knew the kid. His old man had a motor-launch downstream on charter. They fished some. Manuel used to hang around a lot, watching me on the drums. He knew what he’d get if he tore a head on me. He was careful. And besides, there was nothing going on.