Time and Again Page 2

  I felt my lips compressing, and I shook my head.

  Rube smiled and reached out to touch my arm. "I'm teasing you a little. But I hope you don't mean that. I'm offering you a crack at the damnedest experience a human being has ever had."

  "And you can't tell me anything about it? I'm surprised you got seven people, or even one."

  Rube stared down at the grass; thinking about what he could say; then he looked up at me again. "We'd want to know more," he said slowly. "We'd want to test you in several other ways. But we think we already know an awful lot about the way you are, the way you think. We own two original Simon Morley paintings, for example, from the Art Directors' Show last spring, plus a watercolor and some sketches, all bought and paid for. We know something about the kind of man you are, and I've learned some more today. So I think I can tell you this: I can just about guarantee you, I believe I can guarantee you, that if you'll take this on faith and commit yourself for two years, assuming you get through some further testing, you will thank me. You'll say I was right. You'll tell me that the very thought that you might have missed out on this gives you the chills. How many human beings have ever lived, Si? Five or six billions, maybe? Well, if you should test out, you'll become one of maybe a dozen out of all those billions, maybe the only one, who just might have the greatest adventure any human being has ever had."

  It impressed me. I sat eating an apple, staring ahead, thinking. Suddenly I turned to him. "You haven't said a damn thing more than you did in the first place!"

  "You noticed, did you? Some don't. Si, that's all I can say!"

  "Well, you're too modest; you've got your sales pitch worked out beautifully. Will you accept a down payment on the Brooklyn Bridge? My God, Rube, what am I supposed to tell you? 'Sure, I'll join; where do I sign?' "

  He nodded. "I know. It's tough. There's just no other way it can be done, that's all." He sat looking at me. Then he said softly, "But it's easier for you than most. You're unmarried, no kids. And you're bored silly with your work; we know that. As why shouldn't you be? It doesn't amount to anything, it's not worth doing. You're bored and dissatisfied with yourself, and time is passing; in two years you'll be thirty. And you still don't know what to do with your life." Rube sat back against the warm rock, staring off at the path and the people strolling along it through the sunny fall noon-hour, giving me a chance to think. What he'd just said was true.

  When I turned to look at him again, Rube was waiting. He said, "So this is what you have to do: take a chance. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, grab your nose, and jump in. Or would you rather keep on selling soap, chewing gum, and brassieres, or whatever the hell it is you peddle down the street? You're a young man, for crysake!" Rube sliced his hands together, dusting off crumbs, and shoved several balls of waxed paper into his lunch sack. Then he stood up quickly and easily, the ex-footballer. "You know what I'm talking about, Si; the only possible way you can do this is to just go ahead and do it."

  I stood up too, and we walked to a wire trash-basket chained to a tree, and dropped our wastepaper into it. Turning back toward the path with Rube, I knew that if I took my wrist between thumb and forefinger my pulse rate would be up; I was scared. With an irritation that surprised me, I said, "I'd be taking a hell of a lot on the say-so of an absolute stranger! What if I joined this big mystery and didn't think it was all that fascinating?"

  "Impossible."

  "But if I did!"

  "Once we're satisfied you're a candidate and tell you what we're doing we have to know that you'll go through with it. We need your promise in advance; we can't help that."

  "Would I have to go away?"

  "In time. With some story for your friends. We couldn't have anyone wondering where or why Si Morley disappeared."

  "Is this dangerous?"

  "We don't think so. But I can't truthfully say we really know."

  Walking toward the corner of the park at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, I thought about the life I'd made for myself since I'd arrived in New York City two years ago looking for a job as an artist, a stranger from Buffalo with a portfolio of samples under my arm. Every now and then I had dinner with Lennie Hindesmith, an artist I'd worked with in my first New York job. We'd generally see a movie after dinner or go bowling or something like that. I played tennis fairly often, public courts in the summer, the armory in the winter, with Matt Flax, a young accountant in my present agency; he'd also brought me into a weekly Monday-night bridge game, and we were probably on the way to becoming good friends. Pearl Moschetti was an assistant account executive on a perfume account at the first place I worked; ever since, I'd seen her now and then, once in a while for an entire weekend, though I hadn't seen her for quite a while now. I thought about Grace Ann Wunderlich, formerly of Seattle, whom I'd picked up almost accidentally in the Longchamps bar at Forty-ninth and Madison when I saw her start crying out of overwhelming loneliness brought on from sitting at a table by herself having a drink she didn't want or like when everyone else in the place seemed to have friends. Every time I'd seen her after that we drank too much, apparently following the pattern of the first time, usually at a place in the Village, a bar. Sometimes I stopped in there alone because I knew the bartenders now and some of the regulars, and it reminded me of a wonderful bar I'd been to a few times on a vacation, in Sausalito, California, called the No-Name Bar. Mostly I thought about Katherine Mancuso, a girl I'd been seeing more and more often, and the girl I'd begun to suspect I'd eventually be asking to marry me. At first a lot of my life in New York had been lonely; I'd have left it willingly then. But now, while I still spent two or three and sometimes more nights a week by myself—reading, seeing a movie I wanted to see that Katie didn't, watching television at home, or just wandering around the city once in a while—I didn't mind. I had friends now, I had Katherine, and I liked a little time to myself.

  I thought about my work. They liked it at the agency, they liked me, and I made a decent enough salary. The work wasn't precisely what I'd had in mind when I went to art school in Buffalo, but I didn't know either just what I did have in mind then, if anything.

  So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there. I said to Rube, "Quit my job. Give up my friends. Disappear. How do I know you're not a white slaver?"

  "Look in the mirror."

  We turned out of the park and stopped at the corner. I said, "Well, Rube, this is Friday: Can you let me think about it? Over the weekend, anyway? I don't think I'm interested, but I'll let you know. I don't know what else I can tell you right now."

  "What about that permission? I'd like to make my phone call now. From the nearest booth, in fact, at the Plaza"—he nodded at the old hotel just across Fifty-ninth Street—"and send a man over to search your apartment this afternoon."

  Once more I felt a flush rise up in my face. "Everything in it?"

  He nodded. "If there are letters, he'll read them. If anything's hidden, he'll find it."

  "All right, goddammit! Go ahead! He sure as hell won't find anything interesting!"

  "I know." Rube was laughing at me. "Because he won't even look. There's no man I'm going to phone. Nobody's going to search your crummy apartment. Or ever was."

  "Then what the hell is this all about!"

  "Don't you know?" He stood looking at me for a moment; then he grinned. "You don't know it and you won't believe it; but it means you've already decided."

  2

  Saturday morning Katie and I drove up into Connecticut for the day. The clear sunny weather still held, as long a fall as I could remember. It was weather that couldn't last, we didn't want to waste it, and we drove up in Katie's MG. It was the old-style model with running boards and exposed radiator-front, and although New York is really no place to own a car, Kate had this because it just exactly fitted into a narrow area way beside h
er shop if she illegally drove up over the curb. When it was parked you had to climb in and out over the back end, but it saved garage rent, making it possible for Kate to have it.

  Katie had a tiny antique shop on Third Avenue in the Forties. Her foster parents—she'd been adopted when she was two—had died two years ago within six months of each other; they were elderly, older than her own parents would have been. She'd moved to New York then, from Westchester, worked as a stenographer, didn't like it, and opened the shop a year later with the few thousand dollars she'd inherited. It was failing. She'd added greeting cards and a little rental library which hadn't helped, and we both knew she'd have to give up the shop when the lease expired in the spring.

  I was sorry, both for Kate and because I liked the place. I liked poking around it, discovering something I hadn't seen before: a box of old political-campaign buttons under a counter, maybe, or something new she'd just bought such as an admiral's hat I could try on. And whenever there's been time or when I've had to wait for Kate as I did this morning, I'd usually sit down with one of the stereoscopes—the viewers—she had, and one of several big boxes loaded with old stereoscopic views, mostly of New York City. Because I've always felt a wonder at old photographs not easy to explain. Maybe I don't need to explain; maybe you'll recognize what I mean. I mean the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you're seeing was once real. That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects. That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera. You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can—what was just inside the door.

  The wonder is even stronger with old stereoscopic views—the almost, but not quite, identical pair of photographs mounted side by side on stiff cardboard, that, looked at through the viewer, give a miraculous effect of depth. It's never been a mystery to me why the whole country was once crazy about them. Because the good ones, the really clear sharp photographs, are so real: Insert a view, slide it into focus, and the old scene leaps out at you, astonishingly three-dimensional. And then, for me, the awe becomes intense. Because now you really see the arrested moment, so actual it seems that if you watch intently, the life caught here must continue. That the raised horse's hoof so startlingly distinct in the foreground must move down to the solidness of pavement below it again; those carriage wheels revolve, the girl walk closer, the man move on out of the scene. The feeling that the tantalizing reality of the vanished moment might somehow be seized—that if you watch long enough you might detect that first nearly imperceptible movement—is the answer to the question Kate has asked me more than once: "How can you sit there so long—you hardly move!—staring endlessly at the very same picture?" So I liked the shop; it had things like stereoscopic views to stare at. And I liked it because I'd met Katie through it; it's the only time in my life I ever worked up the nerve to do what I did.

  I'd needed a certain kind of antique table lamp to sketch into an ad I was working on, and I came to Katie's shop and stopped to look into the window just as she was taking something out of it. I looked at her; she's a nice-looking girl with that kind of thick dark-brown coppery hair that just misses being red, and the lightly freckled skin and the brown eyes that so often go with it. But it was her face that hooked me; I mean the look of it, the expression. It's the face, you know at first sight, of an extremely nice person, that's all. I liked her instantly, the person as much as the nice-looking girl. And I'm sure that's why, when she glanced up at me, I had the nerve—before I could remember that I didn't have the nerve—to touch my lips with my bunched fingers and toss her a kiss through the glass, at the same time crossing my eyes. She smiled, and before I could lose this new untypical courage I walked right on into the shop, trusting that I'd think of something to say, which I did. I said I was looking for another Napoleon hat, that they'd taken my old one away. She smiled again, which shows how kind she was, and we talked. And while she couldn't come out for a cup of coffee with me then, I was back next day, and we went out to dinner.

  Katie came down now—her apartment is over the shop—in a short brown-canvas car coat, a yellow scarf over her hair, which was a great combination, and she gave me the car keys, asking if I'd mind driving; she knew I liked to drive the MG.

  We had a good time, a nice day, and in the late afternoon I was driving along a little country road I'd found—a dirt road, farmland on each side, occasional stone fences, and a lot of trees, some still with fall foliage. I was going no more than twenty, just lazing along, one hand on the wheel, not thinking of anything much. Off and on during the day I'd thought of Rube Prien, wishing I could talk to Katie about it; I couldn't quite remember whether or not I'd promised I wouldn't mention even the conversation with Prien, so I didn't say anything.

  It was still fairly warm, lots of late-afternoon sun, and Katie untied her scarf, pulled it off, then tossed her head to shake out that thick handsome hair, very coppery now in the slanted sunlight, then fluffing it up at the back with one hand—a great combination of feminine gestures—and I glanced at her and smiled. She smiled back, sitting there smoothing her scarf flat on her lap; she was wearing a green tweed skirt. Then she looked at me and slid closer, which was pleasant and flattering. She was holding the scarf by the front two corners now, stretching it out tight between her hands. She lifted it to just above windshield level and the air took it, fluttering it tautly back from the corners she held. She moved it directly over my head, and then very quickly—a scurry of motion—she drew the two corners down past my face to below my chin and let go the scarf. The wind instantly plastered it tight to my face like a pale-yellow skin, and I was absolutely blind. I couldn't even breathe very well, or thought I couldn't, and I let out a strangled yelp and was in a panic for a second or so, unable to think.

  Just try it some time: driving along a road with a damn scarf plastered over your eyes. You don't know what to do; whether to hang onto the wheel trying to steer from memory, braking as fast as you can without skidding off the road; or whether to let go and try to snatch off the scarf before piling up.

  I tried both. One hand still on the wheel, and trying to remember exactly what there'd been along the sides of the road here, I grabbed at the scarf with my other hand but got a handful of hair along with it, and the scarf wouldn't budge. I was braking too hard and felt the rear end swing into a slide and knew that if the ditches were at all deep along here, the car couldn't help but go into one. I was trying to scoop the scarf off my face but my fingers only scrabbled over glossy nylon. Then we were stopped, the motor killed, car slewed halfway around in the road, the rear end off it, and when I finally plucked and dragged that scarf from my face, Kate was leaning back against her door, an arm raised limply to point a finger at me, almost helpless with laughter.

  The instant I could see, I checked the road ahead and behind as fast as I could swivel my head, and of course nothing was in sight in either direction or Katie wouldn't have done it; and the ditches beside us were so shallow they were almost nonexistent and entirely dry. I said, "Marvelous. Absolutely great. Let's do it again! On the parkway coming home tonight."

  "Oh, God, you were funny," she said, hardly able to get out the words. "You looked so funny!" I grinned at her, very pleased with this nutty girl, and at that moment and for all that weekend Rube Prien's mystery project had no chance at all with me.

  I'm not going to say everything there is to say about Kate and me. I've read such accounts, completely explicit and detailed, nothing omitted; and when they've been good I've liked them. Sometimes I've even learned something about people from them, almost like an actual experience, and that's very good indeed. But my nature is different, that's all. I don't like to and I could not reveal everything about myself. I like to read them, but I wouldn't like to write one. I'm not holding back anything all that unique, in any case. So if now and
then you think you can read between the lines, you may be right; or may not. Anyway, everything I might possibly find to say about Kate and me isn't what I'm trying to get down.

  During that weekend I didn't believe I was even thinking very much about Rube and his proposal. Yet at two-thirty Monday afternoon I finished the last of my "lovelier you" soap sketches, walked into Frank Dapp's office, laid them on his desk, started to turn and leave, and instead my mouth opened, and I stood listening to myself give notice. I'd saved some money, I told Frank; now, before it was too late, I was going to take some time and see if I could make it as a serious artist. It was a lie, and yet something I'd often thought of. "You want to paint?" Frank said, leaning back in his chair.

  "No. Painting's pretty much all abstract and non-representational these days.''

  "You anti-abstract or something?"

  "No. Actually I'm kind of a Mondrian fan, though I think he painted himself into a corner. But my talent, if any, is all representational; so I'm going to draw."

  Frank nodded, looking wistful. It's what he wanted to do, but he had two kids in high school who'd be expecting to go to college. He said if I was in a hurry I could leave as soon as I got rid of my current work, that he wanted to buy me a good-luck drink before I left, and I thanked him, feeling lousy about the lie, and took the elevator to the building lobby and the public phone booths. There I dialed the number Rube had given me.

  It took a long time to get him on the line. I had to speak to two people, first a woman, then a man, and then wait for what must have been two full minutes; the operator came on for more money. Finally Rube spoke, and I said, "I phoned to say that if I do this I'll have to tell Katherine what's going on."