Harvey Kepplemen never knew that he had a talent for anything, until one Sunday morning at breakfast he plucked a crisp water roll right out of the air.
It balanced the universe; it steadied the order of things. Man is man, and particularly in this age of equality, when uniformity has become both a passion and a religion, it would be unconscionable that a decent human being of forty years should have no talent at all. Yet Harvey Kepplemen was so obviously and forthrightly an untalented man—until this morning—that the label was pinned on him descriptively. As one says, He is short, She is fat, He is handsome, so they would say of Harvey: Nothing there. No talent. No verve. Pale. Colorless. No bent. No aptitude. He was a quiet, soft-spoken person of middle height, with middling looks and brown eyes and brown hair that was thinning in a moderately even manner, and he had passable teeth with good fillings and clean fingernails, and he was an accountant with an income of eighteen thousand dollars a year.
Just that. He was not given to anger, moods, or depression, and if any observer had cared to observe him, he would have said that Harvey was a cheerful enough person; except that one never noticed whether he was cheerful or not. Suzie was his wife. Suzie’s mother once put the question to her. “Is Harvey always so cheerful?” Suzie’s mother wanted to know.
“Cheerful? I never think of Harvey as being cheerful.”
Neither did anyone else, but that was because no one ever gave any serious thought to Harvey. Perhaps if there had been children, they might have had opinions concerning their father; but it was a childless marriage. Not an unhappy one, not a very happy one. Simply childless.
Nevertheless, Suzie was quite content. Small, dark, reasonably attractive, she accepted Harvey. Neither of them was rebellious. Life was just the way it was. Sunday morning was just the way it was. They slept late but not too late. They had brunch at precisely eleven o’clock. Suzie prepared toast, two eggs for each of them, three slices of crisp bacon for each of them, orange juice to begin and coffee to finish. She also set out two jars of jam, imported marmalade, which Harvey liked, and grape jelly, which she liked.
On this Sunday morning, Harvey thought that he would have liked a crisp roll.
“Really?” Suzie said. “I never knew that you liked rolls particularly. You do like toast.”
“Oh, yes,” Harvey agreed. “I do like toast.”
“I mean, we always have toast.”
“I have toast for lunch, too,” Harvey agreed.
“I could have bought rolls.”
“I don’t think so, because I guess I was thinking about the kind of rolls we had when I was a kid. They were light and crisp, and they were two for a nickel. Can you imagine paying only a nickel for two rolls?”
“No. Really, I can’t.”
“Well, no more light, crisp water rolls, two for a nickel.” Harvey sighed. “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just reach up like this and pluck one out of the air?”
And then Harvey reached up and plucked a crisp, brown water roll right out of the air, and sat there, arm frozen into position, mouth open, staring at the water roll; then he lowered his arm slowly and placed the roll on the table in front of him and continued to stare at it.
“That’s very clever, Harvey,” Suzie said. “Is it a surprise for me? I think you did it perfectly.”
“Did what?”
“You plucked the roll right out of the air.” Suzie picked up the roll. “It’s warm—really, you are clever, Harvey.” She broke it open and tasted it. “So good! Where did you buy it, Harvey?”
“What?”
“The roll. I hope you bought another one.”
“What roll?”
“This one.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Harvey, you just plucked it right out of the air. Do you remember the magician who entertained at Lucy Gordon’s party? He did it with white doves. But I think you did it just as nicely with the roll, and it’s such a surprise, because I can imagine how much you practiced.”
“I didn’t practice.”
“Harvey!”
“Did I really take that roll out of the air?”
“You did, Mr. Magician,” Suzie said proudly. She had a delicious feeling of pride, a very new feeling. While she had never been ashamed of Harvey before, she had certainly never been proud of him.
“I don’t know how I did it.”
“Oh, Harvey, stop putting me on. I am terribly impressed. Really I am.”
Harvey reached out, broke off a piece of the roll, and tasted it. It was quite good, fresh, straightforward, honest bread, precisely like the two-for-a-nickel rolls he had eaten as a child.
“Put some butter on it,” Suzie suggested.
Harvey buttered his piece and then topped it with marmalade. He licked his lips with appreciation. Suzie poured him another cup of coffee.
Harvey finished the roll—Suzie refusing any more than a taste—and then he shook his head thoughtfully. “Damned funny,” he said. “I just reached up and took it out of the air.”
“Oh, Harvey.”
“That’s what I did. That’s exactly what I did.”
“Your eggs are getting cold,” Suzie reminded him.
He shook his head. “No—it couldn’t have happened that way. Then where did it come from?”
“Do you want me to put them back in the pan?”
“Listen, Suzie. Now just listen to me. I got to thinking about these rolls I ate when I was a kid, and I said to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to have one right now, and wouldn’t it be nice just to reach up and pick it out of the air—like this.” And suiting his action to the thought, he plucked another roll out of the air and dropped it on the table like a hot coal.
“See what I mean?”
Suzie clapped her hands. “Wonderful! Beautiful! I was staring right at you and I never saw you do it.”
Harvey picked up the second roll. “I didn’t do it,” he said bleakly. “I haven’t been practicing sleight of hand. You know me, Suzie. I can’t do the simplest card trick.”
“That’s what makes it so wonderful—because you had all these hidden qualities and you brought them out.”
“No—no. Remember how it is when we play poker, Suzie, and it’s my deal, and it’s the big laugh of the evening when I try it and the cards are all over the table. You don’t unlearn something like that.”
Suzie’s eyes widened, and for the first time she realized that her husband was sitting at the table in a T-shirt, with no sleeves and no equipment other than two cold eggs and three strips of bacon.
“Harvey, you mean—”
“I mean,” he said. “Yes.”
“But from where? Gettleson’s Bakery is four blocks away.”
“They don’t make water rolls at Gettleson’s Bakery.”
They sat in silence then and stared at each other.
“Maybe it’s something you have a talent for,” Suzie said finally.
More silence.
“Do you suppose it’s only rolls?” Suzie said. “I mean just rolls? Suppose you tried a Danish?”
“I don’t like Danish,” Harvey answered miserably.
“You like the kind with the prune filling. I mean, when they’re crisp and have a lot of prune filling and they’re not all that limp, squishy kind of dough.”
“You don’t get them like that anymore.”
“Well, you remember when we drove down to Washington, and we stopped at that motel outside of Baltimore, and you remember how they told us they had their own chef who worked in one of the big hotels in Germany, only he wasn’t a Nazi or anything like that, and he made the Danish himself and you remember how much you liked it. So you could just think about that kind of Danish, full of prune filling.”
Harvey thought about it. His hand was shaking as he reached out to a spot midway between himself and Suzie, and there it was be tween his thumb and his forefinger, a piece of Danish so impossibly full of sweet prune filling that it almost came to pieces in Harvey’s fingers. He let it plop down on the cold eggs.
“Oh—you’ve spoiled the eggs,” Suzie said.
“Well, they were cold anyway.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I can make you some fresh eggs.”
Harvey put a finger into the prune filling and then licked it thoughtfully. He broke off a corner of the Danish, ignoring the cold egg yellow that adhered, and munched it.
“There’s no use making fresh eggs,” Suzie observed, “because now that sweet stuff will ruin your appetite. Is it good?”
“Delicious.”
Then, in a squeak that was almost a scream, Suzie demanded to know where the Danish came from.
“You saw it. You told me to get a Danish.”
“Oh, my God, Harvey!”
“That’s the way I feel about it. It’s damn funny, isn’t it?”
“You took that Danish right out of the air.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“It wasn’t a trick,” said Suzie. “I think I am going to be sick, Harvey. I think I am going to throw up.”
She rose and went to the bathroom, and Harvey listened unhappily to the sound of the toilet being flushed. Then she brushed her teeth. They were both of them very clean and neat people. When she returned to the breakfast table, she had gotten a grip on herself, and she told Harvey matter-of-factly that she had read an article in the magazine section of The New York Times to the effect that all so-called miracles and religious phenomena of the past were simply glossed-over scientific facts, totally comprehensible in the light of present-day knowledge.
“Would you repeat that please, darling?” Harvey asked her.
“I mean that the Danish must have come from somewhere.”
“Baltimore,” Harvey agreed.
“Do you want to try something else?” she asked tentatively.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then I think we ought to call my brother, Dave.”
“Why.”
“Because,” Suzie said, “and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Harvey, but simply because Dave knows what to do.”
“About what?”
“I know you don’t like Dave—”
Dave was heavy, overbearing, arrogant, insensitive, and contemptuous of Harvey.
“I don’t like him very much,” Harvey admitted. Harvey disliked feelings of hostility toward anyone. “I can get along with him,” he added. “I mean, Suzie, you cannot imagine how much I try to like Dave because he is your brother, but whenever I approach him—”
“Harvey,” she interrupted, “I know.” Then she telephoned Dave.
Dave always had three eggs for breakfast. Harvey sat at the table and watched gloomily as Dave stuffed himself and Dave’s wife, Ruthie, explained about Dave’s digestion. Dave had never taken a laxative. “Dave has a motto,” Ruthie explained. “You are what you eat.”
“The brain needs food, the body needs food,” Dave agreed. “What kind of trouble are you in, Harvey? You’re upset. You’re down. When I see a man who’s down, I know the whole story. Up and down, which is the secret of life, Harvey. It’s as simple as that. Up. As simple as that. You got any more bacon, Suzie?”
Suzie brought the bacon to the table, sat down, and carefully explained what had happened that morning. Dave grinned but did not stop eating.
“I don’t think you understand me,” Suzie said.
Dave cleared his mouth, chewed firmly, and congratulated the Kepplemens. “Ruthie,” he said, “how many times have I said to you, the trouble with Harvey and Suzie is they got no sense of humor? How many times?”
“Maybe fifty times,” Ruthie replied amiably.
“It’s not the biggest shtick in the world,” Dave said charitably. “But it’s cute. Harvey takes things out of the air. It’s all right.”
“Not things. Water rolls and a piece of Danish.”
“What are water rolls?” Ruthie wanted to know.
“They’re a kind of roll,” Harvey explained uncomfortably. “They used to make them when I was a kid. Crisp outside and soft inside.”
“Here is half of the second one,” Suzie said, handing it to Ruthie. Ruthie examined it and nibbled tentatively. “You remember the way Pop used to dip his water rolls into the coffee,” Suzie said to Dave.
“You got to butter it first,” Dave told Ruthie. “Go ahead, try it.”
“You don’t believe one word I have said.” Suzie turned to her husband. “Go ahead, Harvey. Show them.”
Harvey shook his head.
“Come on, Harvey—come on,” Dave said. “One lousy roll. What have you got to lose?”
For the first time that morning, Harvey felt good, really good. He reached across the table and from the airspace directly in front of his brother-in-law’s nose he extracted a warm, crisp brown roll, held it for a long moment, and then placed it on Dave’s plate.
“Oh, my God!” Ruthie cried.
Suzie grinned with delight, and Dave, his mouth open, stared at the roll and said nothing. He just stared and said nothing.
“It’s still warm. Eat it,” Harvey said with authority. It was possibly the first thing he had ever said to Dave with any kind of authority.
Dave shook his head.
Harvey broke open the roll and buttered it, the butter melting on the hot white bread. He handed it to Dave, and Dave nibbled at it tentatively. “Not bad, not bad.” Dave took two large bites. He was beginning to be himself again. “You’re not crapping around, are you, Harvey?” he asked. “No—no, it’s impossible. You’re the clumsiest jerk that ever tried to shuffle a deck of cards, so how could it be sleight of hand? Then what is it, Harvey?”
Harvey shook his head hopelessly.
“It’s a gift,” Suzie said.
“Did you feel it coming on, Harvey?” Dave wanted to know. “I mean, did it grow on you—or what?”
“Is it only rolls?” Ruthie asked.
“Also Danish,” Suzie said.
“What’s Danish?”
“Danish pastry with prune filling.”
“I got to see that,” Dave said, and then Harvey took a Danish out of the air. Dave stared and nodded, and he took a bite of the Danish. “Just rolls and Danish?”
“That’s all I tried.”
A slow, crafty grin spread over Dave’s face as he reached into his pocket and took out a roll of bills. He peeled off a ten-dollar bill and pressed it flat on the table. “You know what this is, Harvey?”
Harvey stared at it without comment.
“How about it?”
“It could get us into a lot of trouble,” Harvey said thoughtfully.
“How?”
“Counterfeit.”
“Come off it, Harvey. What’s counterfeit? Are you counterfeiting rolls? Danish?”
“Rolls are different. This is larceny, Dave.”
The two ladies listened and watched, their eyes wide, but said nothing. Morality had reared its ugly head, and suddenly what had been very simple was becoming most complicated.
“There never was an accountant who didn’t have larceny in him. Come on, Harvey.”
Harvey shook his head.
“It’s a gift,” Suzie explained. “It’s spooky. I don’t think you should talk Harvey into doing anything that he doesn’t want to do. You don’t want to do this, do you, Harvey?” she asked her husband. “I mean, unless you really want to.”
“Listen, Harvey, level with me,” Dave said. “Did you ever do anything like this before? Have you been working up to this?”
“How do you work up to it?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. Because this is big—big, Harvey. If it’s just a gift, you know, all of a sudden, then you got no obligations to anyone. You can take Danish out of the air, you can take a ten-dollar bill out of the air. What’s the difference?”
“Counterfeit,” said Harvey.
“Balls. Are the rolls counterfeit, or are they the real thing?”
“It’s still counterfeiting.”
“Harvey, you are out of your ever-loving mind. Look, you’re sitting here in the bosom of- your family—those closest to you, your own loved ones. You’re protected. Suzie is your wife. I’m her brother. Ruthie is my wife. Flesh and blood. Who’s going to turn you in? Myself—would I kill the goose that laid the golden egg? Ruthie—I’d break every bone in her body.”
“That’s right, he would,” Ruthie said eagerly. “I can promise you that, Harvey. He would break every bone in my body.”
“Suzie? Suzie, would you turn Harvey in? Like hell you would. A wife can’t testify against her husband. That’s what I have been telling you, Harvey. Flesh and blood.”
“When you think about it,” Suzie said, “it’s just like a parlor game, Harvey. I mean, suppose we were playing Monopoly or something like that. I mean, if you just did it for laughs. Dave says, take a ten-dollar bill out of the air. You do it. So what?” “Maybe a dollar bill,” Harvey said, for the arguments were very convincing.
“Right on,” said Dave, taking a dollar bill out of his pocket. “I should have thought of that myself, Harv. Today a dollar is worth nothing. Nothing. It’s like a gag.” He spread the dollar on the table. “You know, when I was a kid, this could buy something. Not today. No, sir.”
Harvey nodded, took a deep breath, reached for a spot two feet in front of his nose, and plucked a dollar bill out of the air. Suzie squealed with pleasure and Ruthie clapped her hands with delight. Dave grinned and took the dollar bill from Harvey, laid it on the table next to the one he had produced from his pocket, and scrutinized it carefully. Then he shook his head.
“You missed, Harvey.”
“What do you mean, I missed?”
“Well, it’s sort of a dollar bill. You got Washington’s face all right, and it says ‘one dollar,’ but the color’s not exactly right, it’s too green—”
“You left out the little print,” Ruthie exclaimed. “Here where it says that it’s legal tender for all debts, public and private—you left that out.”
Harvey could see the difference. The curlicues were different, and the bright green stamp of the Department of the Treasury was the same color as the rest of it. The serial numbers had been left out, and as for the reverse side, it bore only a general resemblance to a real dollar bill.
“OK, OK—don’t get nervous,” Dave told him. “You couldn’t be expected to hit it the first time. What you have to do is to take a real good look at the genuine article and then try it again.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Come on, Harv—come on. Don’t chicken out now. You want to try a ten?”
“No, I’ll try the one again.”
He reached into the air and returned with another dollar bill between his fingers. They all examined it eagerly.
“Good, good,” Dave said. “Not perfect, Harvey—you missed on the seal, and the paper’s not right. But it’s better. I’ll bet I could pass this one.”
“No!” Harvey grabbed both spurious bills and stuffed them into his pocket.
“All right, all right—don’t blow your cool, Harv. We try it again now.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“No. I’m tired. Anyway, I got to think about this. I’m half out of my mind the way it is. Suppose this happened to you?”
“Man oh man, I’d buy General Motors before the week was out.”
“Well, I’m not sure that I want to buy General Motors or anything else. I got to think about this.”
“Harvey’s right,” Suzie put in. “You always come on too strong, Dave. Harvey’s got a right to think about this.”
“And while he thinks, the gift goes.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, it came on sudden. Suppose it goes the same way?”
“I don’t care if it does,” Suzie said loyally. “Harvey’s got a right to think about it.”
“OK. I’m not going to be unreasonable. Only one thing—when he thinks his way out of this, I want you to call me. I’m going to get some twenties and some fifties. I don’t think we should go in for anything bigger than that right now.”
“I’ll call you.”
“OK. Just remember that.”
When Dave and Ruthie had departed, Harvey asked his wife why she had agreed to call. “I don’t need Dave,” he said. “You and Dave treat me like an imbecile.”
“I just agreed to get rid of him.”
“I’d just like to think once that you were on my side and not on his.”
“That’s not fair. I’m always on your side. You know that.”
“I don’t know it.”
“All right, make a big federal case out of it. They’re gone, so if you want to think about it, why don’t you think about it?” And she stalked into the bedroom, slammed the door, and turned on the television.
Harvey sat in the living room and brooded. He took out the dollar bills, studied them for a while, and then tore them up and made a trip to the bathroom to flush them down the drain. Then he returned to the couch and brooded again. It had been late afternoon by the time Dave and Ruthie left, and now it was early in the evening and darkening, and he was beginning to be hungry. He went into the kitchen and found beer and bread and ham, but his inner yearning was for a hamburger sandwich, not the way Suzie made hamburgers, dry, tasteless, leathery, but tender and juicy and pink in the middle. Reflecting on the fact that he was married to a rotten cook, he took a hamburger sandwich out of the air. It was perfect. Suzie entered as he took his first bite.
“Don’t think about me,” she said. “I could starve to death while you sit here stuffing yourself.”
“Since when do I let you starve to death?”
“Where did you get the hamburger?”
He took one out of the air and put it in front of her.
“It’s full of onions,” Suzie said. “You know how I hate onions.”
Harvey rose and dropped the hamburger into the garbage pail.
“Harvey, what are you doing?”
“You don’t like onions.”
“Well, you can’t just throw it away.”
“Why not?” Harvey felt himself changing, and the change was encompassed in those simple words—why not? Why not? He plucked a hamburger without onions out of the air, dry and hard, the way his wife cooked them.
“Be my guest,” he said coolly.
She took a bit of the hamburger and then informed him through a mouth filled with food that he was acting very funny. “What do you mean, funny?”
“You’re just acting funny, Harvey. You got to admit that you are acting funny.”
“All right, it’s a different situation.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I can take things out of the air,” said Harvey. “That’s pretty different. I mean, it’s not something that you go around doing. For example, you want some chocolate cake?” He reached out and retrieved a piece of chocolate layer cake and placed it in front of Suzie. “How does it taste? Try it.”
“Harvey, I’m still eating the hamburger, and don’t think I don’t realize that, it’s very unusual what you can do.”
“It’s not like I’m just a kid,” Harvey said. “I’m a forty-one-year-old loser.”
“You’re not a loser, Harvey.”
“Don’t kid yourself. I am a loser. What have we got? Five thousand dollars in the bank, a four-room apartment, no kids, nothing, absolutely nothing, a great big fat zero, and I am still forty-one years old.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk like that, Harvey.”
“I am just making the point that I got to think this through. I got to get used to the fact that I can take things out of the air. It’s an unusual talent. I got to convince myself.”
“Why? Don’t you believe it; Harvey?”
“I do and I don’t. That’s why I have to think about it.”
Suzie nodded. “I understand.” She ate the chocolate cake and then went into the bedroom and turned on the television again.
Harvey followed her into the bedroom. “Why do you say you understand? Why do you always tell me that you understand?” She was trying to concentrate on the television screen, and she shook her head. “Will you turn off that damn box!” Harvey shouted.
“Don’t shout at me, Harvey.”
“Then listen to me. You watch me take things out of the air and tell me you understand. I take a piece of chocolate cake out of the air, and you tell me that you understand. I don’t understand, but you tell me that you understand.”
“That’s the way it is, Harvey. They send people up to the moon, and I don’t know any more about it than you do, but that’s the way science is. I think it’s very nice that you can take things out of the air. I think that if one of those computer places put it on a computer, they would be able to tell you just how it works.”
“Then why do you keep saying that you understand?”
“I understand that you want to think about it.”
Harvey closed the door of the bedroom and went back into the living room and thought about it. It was actually the first moment he had really thought about it, and suddenly his head was exploding with ideas and notions. Some were what his friends in the advertising agencies would have called very creative notions, and some were not. Some were simply the crystallization of his own dissatisfactions. If someone had suggested to him the day before that he was a seething mass of dissatisfactions, he would have denied the accusation hotly. Now he could face them as facts. He was dissatisfied with his life, his job, his home, his past, his future, and his wife. He had never set out to be an accountant; it had simply happened to him. He had always dreamed of living in a large, spacious country home, and here he was in a miserable apartment with paper-thin walls in an enormous jerry-built building on Third Avenue in New York City. As far as his past was concerned, it was colorless and flat, and his future promised nothing that was much better. His wife—?
He thought about his wife. It was not that he disliked Suzie; he had nothing against her, nor could he think of very much that he had going for her. She was short, dark, and pretty, but he couldn’t remember why or exactly how he had come to marry her. The plain fact of the matter was that he adored oversized blondes, large, tall, buxom, beautiful blondes. He dreamed about such women; he turned to watch them on the street; he fell asleep thinking about them and he awakened thinking about them.
He thought about one of them now. And then he began to grin; an idea had clamped onto him and it wouldn’t let go. He sat up in his chair and stared at the bedroom door. He straightened his spine. The television blared from behind the door.
“To hell with it!” he said. It was a new Harvey Kepplemen. He stood up, his spine erect. “Tall, blond, beautiful—” he whispered, and then hesitated over the notion of intelligence. “To hell with intelligence!”
He reached out into the air in front of him with both hands now, and suddenly there she was, but he couldn’t hold her and she fell with an enormous thud and lay sprawled on the floor, a blond, naked woman, very beautiful, very large, magnificently full-breasted, blue eyes wide open and very motionless and apparently lifeless.
Harvey stood staring at her.
The bedroom door opened, and there was Suzie, who also stood and stared at her.
“What is that?” Suzie cried out.
The answer was self-evident. Harvey swallowed, closed his mouth, and bent over the beautiful blonde.
“Don’t touch her!”
“Maybe she’s dead,” Harvey said hopelessly. “I got to touch her to find out.”
“Who is she? Where did she come from?”
Harvey turned to meet Suzie’s eyes.
“No.”
Harvey nodded.
“No. I don’t believe it. That?” Now Suzie walked over to the large blonde. “She’s seven feet long if she’s an inch. Harvey, what kind of a creep are you?”
Harvey touched her, discreetly, on the chest just below the enormous breasts. She was as cold as a dead mackerel.
“Well?”
“She’s as cold as a dead mackerel,” Harvey replied bleakly.
“Try her pulse.”
“She’s dead. Look at her eyes.” He tried the pulse. “She has no pulse.”
“Great,” Suzie said. “That’s just great, Harvey. Here we are with a dead seven-foot-long blonde with oversized mammaries, and now what?”
“I think you ought to cover her up,” Harvey suggested meekly.
“You’re damn right I’m going to cover her up!” And Suzie marched off to the bedroom and returned with a blanket which just about fitted the enormous body.
“What do I do now?” Harvey wondered.
“Put her back where you got her from.”
“You must be kidding.”
“Try it,” said a new Suzie, cold and nasty. “If you can take things like this out of the air, maybe you can put them back.”
“How? Just suppose you tell me how, being such a great smart-ass about everything else.”
“I’m not a prevert.”
“You mean pervert. Who’s a pervert? That’s a hell of a thing to say.”
Suzie swept the blanket aside. “Look at her.”
“All right, I’ve seen her. Now what do we do with her?”
“What do you do.”
“OK, OK—what do I do?”
“Lift her up and put her back.”
“Where?”
“Wherever you take these damn things from, back with your lousy water rolls and Danish pastry.”
Harvey shook his head. “We been married a long time, Suzie. I never heard you talk like that before.”
“You never made me a present of a seven-foot dead blonde before.”
“I guess not,” Harvey agreed, reaching out and obtaining a prune Danish.
“What’s that for?”
“I want to see if I can put it back.”
“Look, Harvey,” Suzie said, her voice softening a little, “it’s no use putting back a prune Danish. You got to put back big Bertha there.” Harvey, meanwhile, was stabbing the air with the prune Danish. “Harvey—forget the Danish.”
He let go of it, hoping and praying that it would return to whatever unknown had produced it, but instead it dropped with a wet plop on one of the huge breasts, dripping its soft prune filling all over the beautiful oversized mammary. Harvey ran for a napkin, wiped frantically, and only made the situation worse. Suzie joined him with a wet sponge and a handful of paper towels.
“Let me do it, Harvey.”
She cleaned up the mess while Harvey managed to heave one of the long, meaty legs into the air. “Put her back,” he said. “Suzie, I could never lift her. It would take one of those hoist cranes. She must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds.”
“I suppose that’s what you always wanted. Do you know, she’s as cold as ice.”
“Do you suppose I killed her?” he asked woefully.
“I don’t know. I think I’ll telephone Dave.”
“Why?”
“He’ll know what to do.”
“As far as I am concerned, your brother Dave can drop dead.”
“Like this one. Sure. Wish me dead too.”
“I never wished you dead. I am talking about your brother, Dave.”
“At least he’d have an idea.”
“So have I,” Harvey said. “My idea is very simple and right on it. Call the cops.”
“What? Harvey, are you out of your ever-loving mind? She’s dead. You made her dead. You killed her.”
“So I made her dead. What do we do? Cut her up and flush her down the toilet? Neither of us can stand the sight of blood. Do we dump her in an empty lot? Even with your lousy brother Dave, we couldn’t lift her up.”
“Harvey,” she pleaded, “let’s think about it.”
They thought about it, and then Harvey called the cops.
A dead body, Harvey discovered, was a communal enterprise. Nine men prowled around the little apartment. Eight of them were ambulance attendants, uniformed officers, fingerprint expert, medical examiner, photographer, etc. The ninth was a heavy-shouldered man in plain clothes, whose name was Lieutenant Serpio, who told everyone else what to do, and who never smiled. Harvey and Suzie sat on the couch and watched him.
“All right, take her out,” said Serpio.
They tried.
“Never saw the like of it,” the Medical Examiner was muttering. “She’s seven feet tall if she’s an inch.”
“Kelly, don’t stand there on your feet, give them a hand!” Serpio said to one of the uniformed cops.
Kelly joined with the ambulance attendants, and with the help of another cop they got the oversized blonde onto a stretcher. She hung over either end as they staggered through the door with her, and Suzie said to her husband:
“You’re not a pervert, Harvey. You’re just a lousy male chauvinist. I have been thinking about you. You are a sexist pig.”
“That’s great,” Harvey agreed. “I never did anything to anyone, and the whole world falls on me.”
“You are a sexist pig,” she repeated.
“I find it hard to think of myself that way.”
“Just try. You’ll get used to it.”
“What did she die from, Doc?” Lieutenant Serpio asked the Medical Examiner.
“God knows. Maybe she broke her back carrying that bust around. I’ll go downtown and chop her up a little, and I’ll let you know.”
The apartment cleared out. Only Serpio and a single uniformed cop remained. Serpio stood in front of Harvey and Suzie, staring at them thoughtfully.
“Tell me again,” he said.
“I told you.”
“Tell me again. I got plenty of time. In twenty years of practicing my profession in this town, I thought I had seen everything. Not so. This enlivens my work and gives me a new attitude. Now who is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where did she come from?”
“I took her out of the air.”
“I know. You took her out of the air. I could send you down to Bellevue, only I am intrigued. Do you make a habit out of taking things out of the air?”
“No, sir,” Harvey answered politely. “Only since this morning.”
“What about you?” he said to Suzie. “Do you take things out of the air?”
She shook her head. “It’s Harvey’s gift.”
“What else does Harvey take out of the air?” the Lieutenant asked patiently.
“Danish.”
“Danish?”
“Danish pastry with prune filling,” Harvey explained.
The Lieutenant considered this. “I see. Tell me, Mr. Kepplemen, why Danish pastry with prune filling—if it’s not too much to ask?”
“I can explain that,” Suzie put in. “You see, we were down in Baltimore—”
“Let him explain.”
“I like it,” Harvey said.
“What about Baltimore?”
“They make it very good down there,” Harvey said.
“Danish pastry?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now do you want to tell me who the blonde is?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to tell me how she died?”
“I don’t know.”
“The doctor says she’s been dead for hours. When did she come here?”
“I told you.”
“Where are her clothes, Harvey?”
“I told you. I got her just the way she was.”
“All right, Harvey,” the Lieutenant said with a sigh. “I am going to have to arrest you and your wife and take you downtown, because with an explanation like this, I have absolutely no alternative. Now I am going to tell you your rights. No, the hell with that. Tell you what, Harvey—you and your wife come downtown with me, and we’ll let the arrest set for a while, and we’ll see if the boys downstairs figured out what she died from. How does that grab you?”
Harvey and Suzie nodded bleakly.
On the way down to Centre Street, they sat in the back seat of Lieutenant Serpio’s car and argued in whispers.
“Show him with a Danish,” Suzie kept whispering.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Well, he doesn’t believe you. That’s plain enough. If you take out a Danish, maybe he’ll believe you.”
“No.”
“A hamburger?”
“No.”
Lieutenant Serpio led them into an office where there were a lot of cops in uniform and some not in uniform, and he led them to a bench and said, with some solicitude, “Both of you sit down right here, and just take it easy and don’t get nervous. You want anything, you ask that fella over there by the desk.”
Then he went over to the desk and spoke softly to the cop behind it for a minute or so; and then the cop behind the desk came over to Suzie and Harvey and said, “Now just take it easy, and don’t get nervous, and everything’s going to be all right. You want a prune Danish, Harvey?”
“Why?”
“If you’re hungry. Nothing to it. I send the kid out for it, and in five minutes you got a prune Danish. How about it?”
“No,” replied Harvey.
“I think we ought to call our lawyer,” said Suzie.
The cop went away, and Harvey asked her whom she expected to call, since they never had a lawyer.
“I don’t know, Harvey. Somebody always calls a lawyer. I’m scared.”
“Either they think I am crazy or they think I am a murderer. That’s the way it goes. I wish I had never seen that lousy brother of yours.”
“Harvey, you took the Danish out of the air before my brother set foot in the house.”
“That’s right, I did,” said Harvey.
At which moment the Medical Examiner sat facing both Lieutenant Serpio and the Chief of Detectives, and said to them, “It is not a murder, because that large blond tomato was never alive.”
“I’m a busy man,” said the Chief of Detectives. “I have eleven homicides tonight—just tonight on a Sunday night, not to mention two suicides. So don’t confuse me.”
“I’m confused.” “Good. Now what have you got on that dead blonde?”
“She is only dead in a technical sense. As I said, she was never alive. She is the incredible construction of a bewildered Dr. Frankenstein or some kind of nut. Mostly on the outside she is all right, except that whoever put her together forgot her toenails. Inside, she has no heart, no kidneys, no liver, no lungs, no circulatory system, and practically no blood, and what blood she has is not blood, because nothing she has is like what it’s supposed to be.”
“Then what’s inside of her?” Serpio demanded.
“Mostly a sort of crude beefsteak.”
“Just what in hell are you talking about?” demanded the Chief of Detectives.
“You got me,” said the Medical Examiner.
“Come on, come on, I bring you a dead seven-foot blonde that makes you wish you were a single basketball player even when she’s dead, and you tell me she never was alive. I seen many tomatoes that are more dead than alive, but there has to be a time when they’re alive.”
“Not this one. She hasn’t even a proper backbone, so she could not have stood up to save her life, and I think I’ll write a paper about her, and if I do I’ll get it published in England. You know, it’s a funny thing, you can get a paper like that published in England and it commands respect. Not here. By the way, where did you get her?”
“Serpio brought her in.”
“Naked?”
“Just like she is,” Serpio said. “We found her on the floor, stretched out like a lox, in the apartment of two people whose name is Kepplemen. He’s an accountant. I got them upstairs.”
“Did you charge them?”
“With what?”
“Absolutely beautiful,” said the Medical Examiner. “You know, you go on with this lousy job for years and nothing really interesting ever comes your way. Now did they say where she came from?”
“This Harvey Kepplemen,” Serpio replied, watching the Chief of Detectives, “says he took her out of the air.”
“Oh?”
“Serpio, what the hell are you talking about?” from the Chief of Detectives.
“That’s what he says. He says he takes prune Danish out of the air, and he got her from the same place.”
“Prune Danish?”
“Danish pastry.”
“All right,” the Chief of Detectives said. “I got to figure you’re sane and you’re not drunk. If you’re insane, you get a rest cure. If you’re drunk, you get canned. So bring them both to my office.”
“I got to be there,” said the Medical Examiner. “I just got to be there.”
This time Serpio called Harvey Mr. Kepplemen. “Mr. Kepplemen,” he said politely, “the Chief of Detectives wants to see you in his office.”
“I’m tired,” Suzie complained.
“Just a little longer, and maybe we can clear this up—how about that, Mrs. Kepplemen?”
“I want you to know,”. Harvey said, “that nothing like this ever happened to me before. I have good references. I have worked for the same firm for sixteen years.”
“We know that, Mr. Kepplemen. It won’t take long.”
A few minutes later they were all gathered in the office of the Chief of Detectives, Harvey and Suzie, Serpio, the Chief of Detectives, and the Medical Examiner. The Chief of Detectives poured coffee.
“Go ahead, Mr. and Mrs. Kepplemen,” he said. “You’ve had a long day.” His voice was gentle and comforting. “By the way, I am told that you can take Danish pastry out of the air. I can send out for some, but why do that if you can take it out of the air. Right?”
“Well—”
“Harvey doesn’t really like to take things out of the air,” Suzie said. “He has a feeling that it’s wrong. Isn’t that so, Harvey?”
“Well,” Harvey said uneasily, “well—I mean that all my life I never had a talent for anything. My mother was Ruth Kepplemen …” He hesitated, looking from face to face.
“Go on, Harvey,” said the Chief of Detectives. “Whatever you want to tell us.”
“Well, she was an artist. I mean she painted lots of pictures, and she kept telling her friends, Harvey hasn’t a creative bone in his body—”
“About the Danish, Harvey?”
“Well, Suzie and I were driving through Baltimore—”
“Detective Serpio told me about that. I was thinking that here we all are with coffee, and it’s past midnight, and maybe you’d like to reach out into the air and get us some prune Danish.”
“You don’t believe me?” Harvey said unhappily.
“Let’s say, we want to believe you, Harvey.”
“That’s why we want you to show us, Harvey,” said Serpio, “so we can believe you and wind this up.”
“Just one moment,” the Medical Examiner put in. “Did you ever study biology, Harvey? Physiology? Anatomy?”
Harvey shook his head.
“How come?”
“We kept moving around. I just missed out.”
“I see. Come on, now, Harvey, let’s have that Danish.”
Harvey reached out, two feet in front of his nose, and plucked at the air and emerged with air. His face revealed his confusion and disappointment. He plucked a second time and a third time, and each time his fingers were empty.
“Harvey, try water rolls,” Suzie begged him.
He tried water rolls with equal frustration.
“Harvey, concentrate,” Suzie pleaded.
He concentrated, and still his fingers were empty.
“Please, Harvey,” Suzie begged him, and then when she realized it was all to no end, she turned on the policemen and informed them that it was their fault, and threatened to get a lawyer and to sue them and to do all the other things that people threaten to do when they are in a situation such as Suzie was in.
“Serpio, why don’t you have a policeman drive the Kepplemens home?” the Chief of Detectives suggested; and when Serpio and Harvey and Suzie had gone, he turned to the Medical Examiner and said that one thing about being a cop was that if you only kept your health, you would see everything.
“Now I have seen everything,” he said, “and tell me, Doc, did you lift any fingerprints off that big tomato downstairs?”
“She hasn’t any.”
“Oh?”
“That’s the way it crumbles,” said the Medical Examiner. “Every American boy’s dream—seven feet high and a size forty-six bust. How do I write a death certificate for something that was never alive?”
“That’s your problem. I keep feeling I should have held those two.”
“For what?”
“That’s just it. Are you religious, Doc?”
“I sometimes wish I was.”
“What I mean is, I keep thinking this is some kind of miracle.”
“Everything is, birth, death, getting looped.”
“Yeah. Well, make it a Jane Doe DC, and put her in the icebox before the press gets a look. That’s all we need.”
“Yeah, that’s all we need,” the Medical Examiner agreed.
Meanwhile, back in the four-room apartment, Suzie was weeping and Harvey was attempting to comfort her by explaining that no matter how much he tried, he would have never gotten the ten-dollar-bill problem completely licked.
“Who cares about the damn bills?”
“What then, kitten?”
“Kitten! All these years, and what do you want but an enormous slobbering seven-foot blonde with a forty-six bust.”
“It’s just that I never got anything that I really wanted,” Harvey tried to explain.
“Not even me?”
“Except you, kitten.”
Then they went to bed, and everything was about as good as it could be.