•
I couldn’t answer; my throat closed, and I ran back to the front door. There I stopped, my hand on the knob; I didn’t know what to do or say, and I turned to look back at the kitchen door. “Ben,” the voice repeated, “is that you?” and my head nodded, my lungs inhaled, and my voice spoke.
“Yes, darling, it’s me; I’m home,” I heard myself say. A refrigerator door slammed in the kitchen, a spoon clattered on the enamel top of a stove, and high heels crossed linoleum toward the closed kitchen door—and me.
I stood like a hypnotized bird; I forgot to breathe. Who in the world was coming through that door? Who in this world? It swung open toward me; I saw fingers on its edge, a flash of green skirt, then a woman was crossing the living room toward me: a tall young woman, wide-hipped but thin, lean-faced, very, very good-looking, and with dark-red hair. “Tessie!” I yelled, and she stopped abruptly.
“Well, who in the fat hell else were you expecting? Or should I say hoping to see?”
I stood waggling a hand in protest until I was able to speak. “Believe me, there’s nobody I’d rather see,” I said then. Looking her over, head to foot then back again, enjoying the trip a little more each time, I suddenly grinned. “My god, what a preposterously good-looking female you are!” I said, and she walked up to me, stood very close, lifted her lovely freckled face to mine, and as my eyes began closing in swooning anticipation she sniffed my breath.
“No,” she said, shrugging thoughtfully, “you’re sober,” and started to turn away.
“Hey! You didn’t kiss me hello.”
“Oh. Yeah. How could I possibly have forgotten that?” She gave me a dismal peck on the cheek, turning away in almost the same motion, and my arms reached out and grabbed her. Then, that long lush length of scenic womanhood in my arms, I gave her a kiss that would have been censored from a porn movie. It lasted, I estimate, an hour and forty-five minutes during the last half of which she sighed a little, squirmed a little, then responded deliriously; air tanks finally exhausted, we rose to the surface just in time to escape the bends. Tess stood blinking at me then, her hands rising to push a few pounds of hair out of her eyes, and eventually she recalled how to formulate words. “Good god almighty!” she said. “What the hell has got into you!”
“Nothing that hasn’t been there since I was thirteen years old. Why? What’s wrong? Guy comes home to something as fantastically assembled as you, my good, good friend, and what’s he supposed to do? Sit down and read the paper or something?”
“Well, that’s exactly what you’ve been doing, kiddo, every night starting a month after our honeymoon a hundred and five years ago!” Then she smiled. “But don’t think I’m complaining,” she murmured, stepping close, and poured herself against me from shoulder to ankle like a giant pitcherful of hot fudge.
As though by magic we found ourselves wafted effortlessly to the davenport, and there we kissed without breathing, absorbing air through vestigial gills. The legerdemain continued; having done nothing I could recall to bring this about, we found ourselves comfortably lying at full length. “Ben, darling,” she said presently, her lashes sweeping her cheeks as her eyes fluttered, “I left dinner on the stove.”
“Let it burn, too,” I said. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!” My eyes blinked lazily, and I found myself staring at Tessie’s entrancingly freckled shoulder off which her blouse seemed somehow to have slipped. “Hey,” I said, “the Big Dipper!”
“What, darling?”
“Half a dozen of your freckles—they form the Big Dipper.”
“Oh, yes. Look a little lower, and you can see Orion.”
“I will, I will! Then on to other galaxies!” I studied the Big Dipper, Orion, then Gemini, Sagittarius, Leo, and was looking for the Southern Cross when my eyes blurred. Blinking to clear them, I glanced up—I was lying on the inside of the davenport as it happened—and there standing on the rug, transparent, furious, arms folded in rage, foot tapping, eyes flashing ghostly sparks, stood Hetty.
It was a figment of conscience, of course, and instantly disappeared as I jerked with a shock equivalent to six thousand volts applied to a shaved scalp and wet soles, spilling Tessie, a veritable Niagara of goodies, over the edge of the davenport. I grabbed instinctively, yanking her back before she could actually drop, and by sheer strength held her there on the knife edge of balance. She took this for passion, responding with girlish abandon by pulling me toward her, and the davenport slowly tipped up onto its front legs, then dumped us onto the floor and rolled over us like a tent. “How perfectly disgusting!” it seemed to me I could hear Hetty saying. I yelled, “Something’s burning!” and Tessie rolled right on out from under the overturned davenport, landing on her feet and running toward the kitchen.
She was gone, I would say, just under three seconds, during which I gestured apologetically and helplessly at the indignant, transparent Hetty. Tessie, sprinting, came back even faster than she’d left, yelling, “I turned everything off; we’ll have dinner later! When it’s cooler!” But in those two and six-tenths seconds I had moved even faster, heaving the davenport upright, running across the room, snatching the evening paper from the piano, then hurtling back through the air in a sitting position to land on the davenport apparently reading just as Tess skidded into sight around the corner from the kitchen.
She sat down next to me, fitting herself to my right side like spray paint. I felt the column of her breath, essence of a thousand springs, press my cheek, and Hades—not hot and sulphurous but cozy and perfumed—yawned at my feet. My fists up at ear level, I had the evening paper clutched in both hands, almost wrapped around my head. “Good god, they’ve torn down Brooklyn Bridge!” I babbled.
Zephyr-borne words floated erotically into my ear. “So you like coming home to me? You haven’t said so in years . . .”
“Central Park invaded by giant ants! Macy’s blown up!”
“Preposterously good-looking, am I? Darling, look: here’s Scorpio! And Sirius!”
“Library sold to Burger King!”
I heard the click of metal on the wood surface of the end table beside us, the preliminary snick-snick of a pair of scissors; then a horizontal slit appeared in my newspaper, was immediately enlarged by two hooked fingers, then filled by an enormous jewellike brown eye which stared into mine, then slowly winked.
I surrendered. I plumped for the life of sin, heigh-ho, turned and gathered up that big bundle of joy, mentally screaming to Hetty for forgiveness, when all of a sudden it really dawned on me: for the first time I understood that it was actually true in this world, and I yelled it aloud. “Hey, we’re MARRIED, aren’t we?” and Tessie drew back to stare at me. “As a matter of fact,” I said wonderingly, “not only are you and I married in this world, long since, but I’ve never even met Het—”
“Never met who?”
“Never met anyone, Taffyapple, as packed with enriched goodness as you. Imagine us married! Holy cow, it means this is okay! For a moment there, I almost forgot.”
“Well, forget again, handsome,” she murmured, closing her eyes, I closed mine, and what then transpired was so good it would require not only new words to describe, but eleven new letters in the alphabet.
We had dinner on the balcony overlooking the river. Tonight Tess had candles on the table, the living-room lights off. There was wine, it was balmy outside, and a long block away we could hear a vague murmur, the sound of the Second Avenue el, and I said, “Hear that, ma petite? It is the whisper of the Seine,” and when she looked at me to smile, her eyes were awash with love.
“Tonight it doesn’t seem that we’ve been married for years,” Tess said. “It’s like a honeymoon. Remember the darling way you proposed?”
“Good lord! Don’t tell me it was . . . ?”
“And I’ve still got it.” She stood, walked to a closet beside the front door, fumbled on the top shelf, and—I’d known she would, of course—came back opening a familiar green box: in this world I’d still been going with Tessie when I’d wandered through Macy’s and seen the stationery display. “Such a charming idea,” she said, sitting down and opening the lid. “My name as it would be if I married you.” She sat brushing her fingertips over the engraving. “The very moment I saw it, I knew I was going to accept.”
I reached over and put my hand on hers, lying on the tabletop, the way they do in the brandy ads. I said, “Terrible price to pay just to make your name match ten bucks’ worth of stationery.”
She turned her hand over and squeezed mine. “I’m so happy tonight I don’t know what to say. Imagine feeling the way we do, four years, five months, and twenty-two days after we were married.”
“Well, I can tell you truthfully,” I told her truthfully, “that for me it’s as though the honeymoon had just begun.” From a corner of my eye I thought I saw a movement, the indignant swish of a departing skirt. But when I turned quickly no one was there, and now I remembered that in this world not only had I never met Hetty, but she might never even have been born. With my conscience lying on its back in a hammock sipping a tall cool glass of iced absinthe, I smiled at Tessie. “Tired, darling?” I asked.
“No,” she said, pushing back her chair, so we went to bed.