The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction Part 23

"I guess I was feeling sorry."

To which her reaction was, alarmingly, to laugh.

Feeling betrayed and p.i.s.sed-off, he grabbed the nearest can of vegetables (beets, he would later discover, and he hated beets) and handed it to Mr. Morone with the can of Spam.

"That it?" Mr. Morone asked.

"A six-pack of Schlitz," he said, quite off the top of his head.

When he left the store with his dinner and the beer in a plastic bag, she was already outside waitingfor him. "I wasn't lagging at you, young man," she told him, taking the same coolly aggrieved tone she'd taken toward the ice cream. "I was laughing at myself. Obviously, I was asking for pity. So if I should get some, I shouldn't be surprised, should I. My name's Madeline, but my friends call me Mad. You're supposed to laugh."

"Mine's Barry," he said. "Do you drink beer?"

"Oh, I'm not drunk. I discovered long ago that one needn't actually drink in order to have the satisfaction of behaving outrageously."

"I meant, would you like some now, with me? I've got a six-pack."

"Certainly. Barry, you said? You're so direct it's almost devious. Let's go to my place. It's only a couple blocks away. You see-I can be direct myself."

Her place turned out to be four street numbers away from his and nothing like what he'd been expecting, neither a demoralized wreck heaped with moldering memorabilia nor yet the sw.a.n.k, finicky pied-a-terre of some has-been somebody. It was a plain, pleasant 10-room apartment that anyone could have lived in and almost everyone did, with potted plants to emphasize the available sunlight and pictures representing various vanished luxuries on the wall, the common range of furniture from aspiring to makeshift, and enough ordinary debris to suggest a life being carried on, with normative difficulty, among these carefully cultivated neutralities.

Barry popped the tops off two beer cans and Madeline swept an acc.u.mulation of books and papers off a tabletop and onto a many-cushioned bed. They sat down at the table.

"Do you know what it's called?" he asked. "The disease you've got?"

"Sciatica. Which is more a disorder than a disease. Let's not talk about it, okay?"

"Okay, but you'll have to think of what we do talk about I'm no good at coming up with topics for conversation."

"Why is that?"

"No ideas. If other people have ideas, I can bounce off them well enough, but all by itself my mind's a blank. I envy people like you who are able to start talking out of the blue."

"Mm," said Madeline, not unkindly. "It's odd you should put it like that; it's almost a definition of what I do for a living."

"Really, what's that?"

"I'm a poet"

"No kidding. You can make a living by being a poet?"

"Enough to get by."

Barry refused to believe her. Neither the woman nor her apartment corresponded with his preconceptions of poets and the necessarily indigent life they must lead. "Have you ever published a book?" he asked craftily.

"Twenty-two. More than that, if you count limited editions and pamphlets and such." She went over to the bed, rooted among the papers, and returned with a thin, odd-sized paperback. "This is the latest"

The front cover said in tasteful powder-blue letters on a background of dusky cream: MADELINE is MAD AGAIN: New Poems by Madeline Swain. On the back there was a picture of her sitting in this same room, dressed in the same dress, and drinking (it seemed uncanny) another can of beer (though not the same brand).

Barry turned the book over in his hands, examining the cover and the photo alternately, but would no more have thought of looking inside than of lifting Madeline's skirts to peek at her underclothes. "What's it about?" he asked.

"Whatever I happened to be thinking at the moment I wrote each poem,"

That made sense but didn't answer his question. "When do yon write them?"

"Generally, whenever people ask me to."

"Could you write a poem right now? About what you're thinking?"

"Sure, no trouble." She went to the desk in the corner of the room and quickly wrote the following poem, which she handed to Barry to read:A Reflection Sometimes the repet.i.tion of what we have just said will suggest a new meaning or possibilities of meaning we did not at first suppose to be there. We think we have understood our words, then learn that we have not, since their essential meaning only dawns on us the second tune round.

"This is what you were thinking just now?" he asked skeptically. "Are you disappointed?"

"I thought you'd write something about me." "Would you like me to do that?" "It's too late now." "Not at all."

She went to her desk and returned a moment later with a second poem: Aubade I was sorry to hear That you've got to be going.

But you're not?

Then I'm sorry to hear that "What does the t.i.tle mean?" he asked, hoping it might modify the unfriendly message of the four short lines that followed.

"An aubade is a traditional verse-form that a lover addresses to his (or her) beloved at dawn, when one of them is leaving for work."

He tried to think of a compliment that wouldn't be completely insincere. "Heavy," he allowed at last.

"Oh, I'm afraid it's not much good. I can usually do better. I guess I don't trust you enough. Though you're quite likable; that's another matter."

"Now Fin likable! I thought"-he dangled the poem by one corner -"you were just hinting that I should leave?"

"Nonsense. You haven't even finished your beer. You mustn't hold what I write against me. Poets cant be held responsible for what they say in their poems. We're all compulsive traitors, you know."

Barry said nothing, but his expression must have conveyed his disapproval.

"Now don't be like that. Treason is a necessary part of the job, the way that handling trash cans is a part of being a garbage man. Some poets go to a great deal of trouble to disguise their treacheries; my inclination is to be up-front and betray everyone right from the start"

"Do you have many friends?" he asked, needlingly.

"Virtually none. Do you think I'd go around talking to myself in grocery stores if I had friends?"

He shook his head, perplexed. "I'll tell you, Madeline, it doesn't make sense to me. Surely if you were nice to other poets, they'd be nice to you, on the basic principle of scratch-my-back."

"Oh, of course. Minor poets do nothing else. They positively swarm. I'd rather be major and lonely, thank you very much."

"Sounds arrogant to me."

"It is. I am. C'est la vie." She took a long, throat-rippling sip of the Schlitz and set her can down on the table, empty. "What I like about you, Barry, is that you manage to say what you think without seeming the least homicidal. Why?"

"Why do I say what I think? It's easiest."

"No: why are you so accommodating to me, when I'm being such a b.i.t.c.h? Are you looking for an endors.e.m.e.nt?"

He blushed. "Is it that obvious?"

"Well, as you don't appear to be either a mugger or a rapist, there had to be some reason you followed a dotty old woman home from her latest nervous breakdown. Let's make a deal, shall we?"

"What sort of deal?"

"You stay around and nudge some more poems out of me. I'm feeling the wind in my sails, but I need a muse. If you give me twenty good ideas for poems, I'll give yon your endors.e.m.e.nt."

Barry shook his head. "Twenty different ideas? Impossible.""Don't think of them as ideas then, think of them as questions."

"Ten," he insisted. "Ten is a lot"

"Fifteen," she countered.

"All right, but including the two you've already written."

"Done!"

She sat down and waited for Barry to be inspired. "Well?" she inquired, after a long silence.

"I'm trying to think."

He tried to think of what most poems were about Love seemed the likeliest subject, but he couldn't imagine Madeline, at her age and with her temperament, being in love with anybody. Still, that was her problem. He didn't have to write the poem, only propose it "All right," he said. "Write a poem about how much you're in love with me."

She looked miffed. "Don't flatter yourself, young man. I may have inveigled you into my apartment, but I am not in love with you."

"Pretend then. And don't make it anything flip like that last one. Make it sad and delicate and use some rhymes."

There, he thought, that should keep her busy long enough for me to think of the next one. He opened a second beer and took a meditative swallow. Did poets ever write poems about drinking beer? Or was that too general? Better to ask her to write about her favorite brand of beer, a kind of advertis.e.m.e.nt By the time she'd finished the sonnet about how much she loved him, he had come up with all twelve other subjects.

1. A poem about her favorite beer, written as though it were an ad.

2. A poem in the form of a Christmas-shopping list.

3. A poem embodying several important long-range economic forecasts.

4. A poem about a rabbit (there was a porcelain rabbit on one of the shelves) suitable to be sung to a baby.

5. A very short poem to be carved on the tombstone of her least favorite president, living or dead.

6. A poem apologizing to the last person she had been especially rude to.

7. A poem for a Get Well card to someone who has sciatica.

8. A poem a.n.a.lyzing her feelings about beets.

9. A poem that skirts all around a secret she's never told anyone and then finally decides to keep it a secret.

10. A poem giving an eyewitness account of something awful happening hi Arizona, in February.

11. A poem justifying capital punishment in cases where one has been abandoned by one's lover.

(This in its final, expanded form was to become the longest poem in her next collection, "The Ballad of Lucius McGonaghal Sloe," which begins: I fell head over heels just four evenings ago With a girl that I'm sure you all know, But I couldn't hold her, And that's why I sold her, To Lucius McGonaghal Sloe.

and continues, in a similar vein, for another one hundred thirty-six stanzas.) 12. A poem presenting an affirmative, detailed description of her own face.

Prudently he didn't spring them on her all at once, but waited until she'd finished each one before telling her what the next had to be about. She didn't raise any further objections until he came to Number 8, whereupon she insisted she didn't have any feelings about beets whatsoever. He refused to believe her, and to prove his point he cooked up a quick dinner on her hotplate of Spam and canned beets (it was rather late by then, and they were famished). Before she'd had three mouthfuls, the poem started coming to her, and by the time she'd got it into final shape, five years later, it was far and away the best of the lot.

For the next many days Barry didn't speak to a soul. He felt no need to communicate anything toanyone. He had his three endors.e.m.e.nts-one from a poet who'd published twenty-two books-and he was confident he could have gone out and got three more a day if he'd needed to. He was off the hook.

On Christmas Eve, feeling sad and sentimental, he got out the old ca.s.settes he and Debra had made on their honeymoon. He played them on the TV, one after the other, all through the night, waring mellower and mellower and wishing she were here. Then, in February, when the world had once again refused to end, she did come home, and for several days it was just as good as anything on the ca.s.settes.

They even, for a wonder, talked to each other. He told her about his various encounters in pursuit of his endors.e.m.e.nts, and she told him about the Grand Canyon, which had taken over from the end of the world as her highest mythic priority. She loved the Grand Canyon with a surpa.s.sing love and wanted Barry to leave his job and go with her to live right beside it Impossible, he declared. He'd worked eight years at Citibank and accrued important benefits. He accused her of concealing something. Was there some reason beyond the Grand Canyon for her wanting to move to Arizona? She insisted it was strictly the Grand Canyon, that from the first moment she'd seen it she'd forgotten all about Armageddon, the Number of the Beast, and all the other accoutrements of the Apocalypse. She couldn't explain: he would have to see it himself. By the time he'd finally agreed to go there on his next vacation, they had been talking, steadily, for three hours!

Meanwhile, Columbine Brown had been putting him off with a variety of excuses and dodges. The phone number she'd given him was bet answering service, the address was an apartment building with guard dogs in the lobby and a doorman who didn't talk, or listen. Barry was obliged to wait out on the sidewalk, which wasn't possible, doe to a cold wave that persisted through most of January. He left a message at the Apollo Theater, where the pageant was held, giving three different times he would be waiting for her at Intensity Five. She never showed. By mid-February, he'd begun to be alarmed. Early one morning, defying the weather, he posted himself outside her building and waited (five miserable hours) till she appeared. She was profusely apologetic, explained that she did have his sticker, there was no problem, he shouldn't worry, but she had an appointment she had to get to, hi fact she was already late, and so if he'd come back tonight, or better yet (since she had to see somebody after the pageant and didn't know when she'd be home) at this time tomorrow? Thoughtfully, she introduced him to the doorman so he wouldn't have to wait out in the cold.

At this time tomorrow Columbine made another nonappearance, and Barry began to suspect she was deliberately avoiding him. He decided to give her one last chance. He left a message with the doorman saying he would be by to collect his you-know-what at half past twelve the next night Alternately, she could leave it in an envelope with the doorman.

When he arrived the following evening, the doorman led him down the carpeted corridor, unlocked the elevator (the dogs growled portentously until the doorman said "Aus!"), and told him to ring at door 8-C.

It was not Columbine who let him in, but her understudy, Lida Mullens, Lida informed Barry that Columbine had joined her husband in Wilmington, Delaware, and there was no knowing when, if ever, she might return to her post as Miss Georgia. She had not left the promised sticker, and Lida seriously doubted whether she had any left, having heard, through the grapevine, that she'd sold all three of them to an introduction service on the day they came in the mail. With his last gasp of self-confidence Barry asked Lida Mullens whether she would consider giving him an endors.e.m.e.nt. He promised to pay her back in kind the moment he was issued his own license. Lida informed him airily that she didn't have a license. Their entire conversation had been illegal. The guilt that immediately marched into his mind and evicted every other feeling was something awful. He knew it was irrational, but he couldn't help it. The whole idea of having to have a license to talk to someone was as ridiculous as having to have a license to have s.e.x with them. Right? Right! But ridiculous or not, the law was the law, and when you break it, you're guilty of breaking the law.

The nice thing about guilt is that it's so easy to repress. Within a day Barry had relegated all recollections of his criminal behavior of the night before to the depths of his subconscious and was back at Intensity Five, waiting for whomever to strike up a conversation. The only person who so much as glanced his way, however, was Evelyn, the woman behind the refreshment stand. He went to otherspeakeasies, but it was always the same story. People avoided him. Their eyes shied away. His vibrations became such an effective repellent that he had only to enter a room in order to empty it of half its custom. Or so it seemed. When one is experiencing failure, it is hard to resist the comfort of paranoia.

With only a week left till his temporary license expired, Barry abandoned all hope and all shame and went back to Partyland with fifteen hundred dollars in cash, obtained from Beneficial Finance.

The MacKinnons were not in their blue settee, and neither Freddy the usher nor Madge of the green sofa could say what had become of them. He flopped into the empty settee with a sense of complete, abject surrender, but so eternally does hope spring that inside of a quarter of an hour he had adjusted to the idea of never being licensed and was daydreaming instead of a life of majestic, mysterious silence on the rim of the Grand Canyon. He rolled out the console and ordered a slice of pineapple pie and some uppers.

The waitress who brought his order was Cinderella Johnson. She was wearing levis and a T-shirt with the word "Princess" in big, glitter-dust letters across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her hat said: "Let Tonight Be Your Enchanted Evening at Partyland!"

"Cinderella!" he exclaimed. "Cinderella Johnson! Are you working here?"

She beamed. "Isn't it wonderful? I started three days ago. It's like a dream come true."

"Congratulations.''

"Thanks." Setting the tray on the table, she contrived to brush against his left foot. "I see you're wearing the same shoes."

"Mm."

"Is something the matter?" she asked, handing him the uppers with a gla.s.s of water. "You look gloomy, if you'll forgive my saying so."

"Sometimes it does you good to feel gloomy." One of the pills insisted on getting stuck in his throat.

Just like, he thought, a lie.

"Hey, do you mind if I sit down on your couch a minute? I am frazzled. It's a tremendous opportunity, working here, but it does take it out of you."