Mine picked up the slack. But when they threw me out, the shrewd little bastard cut her off. Maybe he even smiled while doing it, if he was sure a smile wouldn’t fracture his teeth.
She clung to me and wept wildly and said the world couldn’t lick us. She would scrub floors, wait on tables, wear rags. Maybe if we’d had kids … but we’d agreed they were for later, because they’d cut down our fun life. A month later, after being restless, bitchy and violent, she packed and went home to Wilmington, claiming she would rejoin me afterI got located. (I was still running doggedly through my list of fair weather friends.)
I got a sprawled, unpunctuated, confusing letter from her, averaging ten words to the page. I flew to Wilmington. In a frenzy of tears she told me she was no good, had no character, couldn’t love a poor man. I gathered she was either going to kill herself, go into a convent, take acting lessons, become a model, devote her life to good works, write a sensitive novel or take up nursing. But she made it clear that whatever she did, I wasn’t in the picture. She wept out her guilt and shame. She fled. The princess went back into the castle and they yanked up the drawbridge.
My next communication was from a Nevada lawyer. I knew then how completely they had whipped me, so I came home for good. It seems to be standard practice to do that. You make them stop the world and let you off, or you go home.
As the morning world was turning from gray to gold on Thursday morning, and a bank of mist was rising from the gun-metal water, I looked south along the beach and saw a distant manikin, limber and moving well, unmistakably female at even twice that range, walk down to the water and stand knee deep to make the final adjustment of a bright yellow swim cap, then wade and plunge and begin swimming straight out, in the sleek, slow, powerful cadence that can be achieved only through lessons and work and a desire for excellence.
So I began to make the motions of the shell collector, moving down the brittle windrow at the high tide line, dropping plausible items in the paper sack I was carrying, trying to move at the pace which would guarantee the stylized interception. She floated out there, and I knew that when she looked toward shore she could not fail to see me. There was a continual increase in the heat of the sun on my shoulders.
Soon I was within fifteen feet of the towel she had dropped. A bushy salmon-pink towel, a new pack of Viceroys, a narrow gold lighter, a pair of sunglasses with yellow plastic frames. I made like a sheller working a fruitful area. She started in. I did not resume forward movement until I heard the sloshing as she was wading out. I did not look at her.
I watched her bare tan feet as she crossed my bows, perhaps eight feet away. Nice feet. Tan and narrow with a high arch.
“Excuse me,” I said, standing up, reaching into my paper sack and fumbling for the
Livona pica
, and looking at all the rest of her.
There is one demon loose upon the world who spends all his infinite time and energy on the devising of all the vicious little coincidences which confound mankind. His specialty is to confront the unwary with coincidences so eerie, so obviously planned by a malevolent intelligence, that time itself comes to a full stop and his victim stands transfixed by a conviction of unreality, while in infra-space, the demon hugs his hairy belly, kicks his hooves in the air, rolling and gasping with silent laughter.
The busy demon had clad this woman in a strapless swim suit of lavender-blue, spangled with stars. It was a perfect copy of the one Judy was wearing in the color picture in the magazine. The morning sun touched the water droplets on her golden shoulders. I knew at once that this one was Judy’s height—to the half-inch—her weight to the quarter-pound. The build was the same, short-waisted, long-legged. It was a figure without that mammillary opulence which has become a fetish
She clung to me and wept wildly and said the world couldn’t lick us. She would scrub floors, wait on tables, wear rags. Maybe if we’d had kids … but we’d agreed they were for later, because they’d cut down our fun life. A month later, after being restless, bitchy and violent, she packed and went home to Wilmington, claiming she would rejoin me afterI got located. (I was still running doggedly through my list of fair weather friends.)
I got a sprawled, unpunctuated, confusing letter from her, averaging ten words to the page. I flew to Wilmington. In a frenzy of tears she told me she was no good, had no character, couldn’t love a poor man. I gathered she was either going to kill herself, go into a convent, take acting lessons, become a model, devote her life to good works, write a sensitive novel or take up nursing. But she made it clear that whatever she did, I wasn’t in the picture. She wept out her guilt and shame. She fled. The princess went back into the castle and they yanked up the drawbridge.
My next communication was from a Nevada lawyer. I knew then how completely they had whipped me, so I came home for good. It seems to be standard practice to do that. You make them stop the world and let you off, or you go home.
As the morning world was turning from gray to gold on Thursday morning, and a bank of mist was rising from the gun-metal water, I looked south along the beach and saw a distant manikin, limber and moving well, unmistakably female at even twice that range, walk down to the water and stand knee deep to make the final adjustment of a bright yellow swim cap, then wade and plunge and begin swimming straight out, in the sleek, slow, powerful cadence that can be achieved only through lessons and work and a desire for excellence.
So I began to make the motions of the shell collector, moving down the brittle windrow at the high tide line, dropping plausible items in the paper sack I was carrying, trying to move at the pace which would guarantee the stylized interception. She floated out there, and I knew that when she looked toward shore she could not fail to see me. There was a continual increase in the heat of the sun on my shoulders.
Soon I was within fifteen feet of the towel she had dropped. A bushy salmon-pink towel, a new pack of Viceroys, a narrow gold lighter, a pair of sunglasses with yellow plastic frames. I made like a sheller working a fruitful area. She started in. I did not resume forward movement until I heard the sloshing as she was wading out. I did not look at her.
I watched her bare tan feet as she crossed my bows, perhaps eight feet away. Nice feet. Tan and narrow with a high arch.
“Excuse me,” I said, standing up, reaching into my paper sack and fumbling for the
Livona pica
, and looking at all the rest of her.
There is one demon loose upon the world who spends all his infinite time and energy on the devising of all the vicious little coincidences which confound mankind. His specialty is to confront the unwary with coincidences so eerie, so obviously planned by a malevolent intelligence, that time itself comes to a full stop and his victim stands transfixed by a conviction of unreality, while in infra-space, the demon hugs his hairy belly, kicks his hooves in the air, rolling and gasping with silent laughter.
The busy demon had clad this woman in a strapless swim suit of lavender-blue, spangled with stars. It was a perfect copy of the one Judy was wearing in the color picture in the magazine. The morning sun touched the water droplets on her golden shoulders. I knew at once that this one was Judy’s height—to the half-inch—her weight to the quarter-pound. The build was the same, short-waisted, long-legged. It was a figure without that mammillary opulence which has become a fetish
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