Three by Finney

by Jack Finney

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  CONTENTS

  I. THE WOODROW WILSON DIME

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  II. MARION’S WALL

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  III. THE NIGHT PEOPLE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  •

  THE WOODROW WILSON DIME

  •

  •

  CHAPTER ONE

  •

  At 6:30 A.M. of a dishwater-gray, electric-lighted dawn, the echo of the alarm clock still in my ears, I felt my way into the bathroom with my eyes shut, thus gaining an extra six seconds’ sleep. At the medicine-cabinet mirror, eyes still closed, I stood, hoping as always that when I opened them something would have happened overnight, and I’d see a change. But nothing had changed, not for the better anyway.

  There was the same old unshaven, dumb-looking, twenty-nine-year-old face; the same drab, straight, brownish-red hair sticking out in all directions like a pile of rusty nails; the same bloodshot, basset hound eyes. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” I said, “who’s the biggest slob of all?”

  “No change today,” said the familiar, deep voice. “Still a three-way tie between an alcoholic Australian sheepherder, a Beirutian loan shark, and you. If anything, you’ve got the edge.” A huge Hand, protruding from the wide gold-embroidered sleeve of a long white robe, descended from the ceiling and clapped me across the forehead with an enormous rubber stamp, leaving the word FAILURE in black capital letters stretching from temple to temple.

  I washed it off in the lukewarm, permanently dripping bathtub shower, but back in the bedroom, dressing, I knew it was still branded deep in my soul. I knew it from the inept way I then treated Hetty; later I figured out that it was four years, three months, eleven days, and thirteen hours after we’d been married.

  Still blear-eyed and stupefied, I stood buttoning my shirt, feeling guilty because I was able to wish, as I did every morning now, that we each had our own bedroom. Small as the room was, we didn’t quite bump into each other. Our paths were long since taped out, crossing and recrossing but rarely colliding. We missed only fractionally though, shoulders brushing, hands reaching just past noses and eyes; and since my wattage is low first thing in the morning, the bulb of life flickering orangely, the idea of dressing alone was as irresistibly attractive as the opposite had once been, four years, three months, eleven days, and thirteen hours before.

  Today I couldn’t find my belt; it wasn’t in the pants I’d worn yesterday, and I thought maybe I’d tossed it onto the room’s one chair last night. Hetty was sitting there, smoothing a stocking up her leg, and I walked over, lifted the hem of her slip, and looked carefully at the chair, but no belt, and I stepped to the closet and found it on the floor.

  Hetty stood up as I threaded my belt through the pants loops, and she walked to the dresser mirror. There’s only one dresser, which we shared about 60-40, and you know who had the 40. Hetty stood there, her hands working on her back hair, elbows winged out, and I needed my wallet, keys, change, and stuff from the dresser top. I reached past her, under one upraised arm, my hand brushing her chest, got my wallet, stowed it in my hip pocket, started to reach for my keys and change, and saw Hetty’s eyes in the mirror staring at me.

  There was something about her expression I couldn’t quite figure out that warned me of something I wasn’t sure of, and I warily postponed keys and change. I walked—one step—to the closet, took a tie, stepped back to the dresser, and with knees bent, my neck barely visible in the lower left corner of the mirror so I wouldn’t interfere with Hetty’s view, I began tossing the long end of my tie around the short end. I kept an eye on Hetty in the mirror, and watched her place a hand on one hip. When she saw I’d noticed, she began walking back and forth in tiny mincing steps, her shoulders swaying exaggeratedly the way models walk in the movies. I stared for a moment, hands on my tie, then turned around, and Hetty clasped her hands on the back of her neck, thrust her hips toward me, did a couple of vicious bumps and grinds, and burst into tears.

  My lower jaw dropped like a gallows trapdoor, I stepped toward Hetty, and she ran—half a step—and fell face down on the bed, sobbing, and I thought momentarily of all the many little-appreciated values of being dead. Squatting uncomfortably beside the bed, I began poking, stroking, patting, prodding, murmuring, soothing, and pretty soon Hetty lifted her head, saying, “So you finally saw me? I was afraid I might have to strip and paint myself blue!”

  “What’s the matter, honey?”

  “Matter!? Ben, you’re how old, twenty-nine? Or ninety-nine? Or am I so damned homely and repulsive? My god, you’re alone in a bedroom with a young, nubile, half-dressed girl—”

  “But I have to get to work.”

  “—and you can actually pick up the hem of her slip, and not even see her! You can brush against her in about as intimate a way possible, without a flicker of expression, just as though I were a door or something—”

  “Honey—”

  “Look, Ben,” she said in a dry, calm, I’m-through-with-tears voice, “I don’t want to sound like a comic-strip bride. But it’s obviously true, something, quite simply, to be faced and accepted, that you just don’t love me any more.” And oh boy, there at 6:43 A.M. she began to bawl again.

  I killed her. Later, pacing the Death Cell, my pants legs slit, I regretted it, but now I took her soft white throat tenderly in my hands . . . What I actually did was just what you do: I stroked her hair, occasionally patting her head and scratching behind her ears and assuring her that yes, I did too love her, a statement—have you noticed?—almost impossible to pronounce out loud.

  But I did it; my tongue shoved the words out over the edge of my teeth so that they sounded aloud in the room, and after a while Hetty lifted her head and asked me to tell her truthfully, honestly, whether I really meant it, and I smiled tenderly and sneaked a look at my watch and knew that while I’d have to skip the book review and James Reston at breakfast, I was still going to have time for the bridge column.

  We smiled at each other a lot during breakfast, teeth shining, eagerly passing things. I finished my coffee, put down the paper and said gaily, “Well, off to Saf-T Products, I guess!”

  She smiled brilliantly and said, “Darling, why must you always say Saff-T? It’s Safe-T!”

  Lovingly I said, “No, dear. The T is pronounced tee, I’ll grant you. But S-a-f must be pronounced as spelled: saf. However much my idiot boss may want it to, S-a-f cannot possibly oblige him by spelling safe. It spells saf, damn it!” Hetty smiled so widely her eyes were narrowed to slits, and I continued reasonably, “It’s like Holsum, as I’ve often pointed out; you simply canno
t pronounce it wholesome. H-o-l must rhyme with s-o-l, it’s Holsum bread, and if you want it pronounced wholesum, you’ve got to spell it that way! And take TraveLodges; as long as there is still an English language they are not Travel Lodges; they’re Trave Lodges! A Ranchotel is not a Ranch Hotel, it’s a Ran-chotel! As for Do-nut Shoppes, you canNOT buy doughnuts in them! The only things they can possibly sell—”

  “What in the hell does it matter!”

  “What does anything matter, for that matter! It matters as much—”

  She said, “Dear, you’ll be late. Better hurry,” and we smiled enchantingly, quick-kissed goodbye, and I rode downstairs in the automatic elevator, wondering as always if this would finally be the time when it would stick between floors. A woman was in it, about sixty, face coated with white powder, smelling like the main floor of a large department store. I pointed to the emergency phone and said, “You suppose this is actually connected to anything?” and she glanced at the phone, looked startled, glared at me, then looked away quickly, and got off fast when we hit the street floor.

  Our apartment was on Twenty-eighth Street and I worked in the Chrysler Building, so I generally walked to work. Today, as on more than one morning lately walking along the street, I tried to explain things to Hetty. I said “Look, honey,” and she appeared beside me, transparent and still wearing the pink terry-cloth robe with the rip in the sleeve that she’d worn at breakfast, “it isn’t that I don’t love you. Of course I do! It’s just that people get used to anything—to being rich, blind, in jail, or President. So it’s only natural—inevitable—that eventually a man gets used to his wife.” I chuckled affectionately, nudging her in the ribs. “So if sometimes I seem to take you just a little for granted, you can understand that, can’t you!”

  She didn’t seem to, refusing to answer or look at me, staring sullenly across the street, so I switched to stern reality. “Het, you’ve got to realize that for a man there are basic contradictions in marriage. He has been ingeniously designed to father hundreds of children by a spectacular variety of females”—I gestured appreciatively at some of them walking along to work. “While you, however lovely, are only one woman. You are a five-foot-two, nicely made, though somewhat overweight,” I added maliciously, “blonde. With a pretty and reasonably intelligent face. None of this is to be deprecated. Not even the extra poundage. But it also means—and why can’t women ever understand this?—that you are not a tall, curvy-hipped, gracefully undulating redhead.” I pointed to a tall, curvy-hipped, gracefully undulating redhead in front of us. “It means, unfortunately for both of us, that you can never possibly be a slim willowy brunette,” I said, nodding at a slim willowy brunette just getting off a bus. “Or even a buxom little brown-head, a China doll, a Japanese—” I sensed that I was getting carried away and calmed down.

  “So if at times, dear,” I resumed, but Hetty wasn’t even trying to understand; she glanced at me with veiled, questioning, inscrutable eyes, and faded away.

  I appealed to the men around us, speeding past in cabs, pouring up out of subway exits, sitting at crumby little lunch counters fortifying themselves with one more cup of vile coffee for the long sick day ahead. “The honeymoon fades, and vision returns!” I yelled. “That’s easy to understand, isn’t it!” And all up and down the street as far as you could see they nodded in sad agreement.

  Encouraged, I appealed to the young women on the sidewalk around me; waiting at the lights; sitting at the coffee counters. “Surely you can all see that, too!” I called to them, smiling encouragingly. “That after a time—” But they couldn’t. On both sides of the street and for blocks ahead and behind, they leaned away from me, repulsed, staring down their shoulders at me in disgust and apprehension, and I knew they saw the truth: I was no good; I was rotten; I didn’t deserve even the least among them, let alone Hetty.

  At Forty-second and Vanderbilt I cut through Grand Central Station. There was a new machine standing in a little alcove; it looked like the old take-your-own-photo booth that had once been there, with a place to sit and curtains for privacy, but the sign on this one said TELL ME YOUR TROUBLES! I sat down, drew the curtains, dropped in my quarter, and behind a glass panel, tape began slowly revolving on reels to show me it was listening.

  “I’m a failure,” I said, “maritally, financially, socially, creatively, and employment-wise. Where is the bright promise of youth? I can’t communicate!” From a small loudspeaker in the ceiling there came frequent gentle sounds of “Tsk, tsk, tsk! . . . That’s too bad. . . . Oh, you poor boy!”

  “I still like Hetty, you understand,” I said. “Always glad to see her. Any wife of old Ben Bennell is a wife of mine! It’s just that I don’t seem to love her any more.”

  “What a shame!” the machine was saying. “I’m so sorry! Chin up!” And I felt a little better when I peeked through the drawn curtains, saw no one I knew passing by, and ducked out.

  I intend to sturdily resist the temptation, of which I feel none whatever, to tell you all about my work and just what I do every day at the office. You may want this information for an in-depth psychological understanding of me, but I’m damned if I want you to have it. Ever think of that? I’m ashamed of what I do, it’s so dumb, it’s so dull, so routine, uncreative and underpaid. Anyway, what I do and what we all do at my office is just what they do in all the others. Charter a helicopter and fly low around New York peeking in the windows of the taller buildings, and you’ll see that we’ve built twenty-odd bridges and several tunnels in order to fill Manhattan with people in offices passing pieces of paper around. And of course we now duplicate these papers on expensive machines, which, as a matter of fact, is kind of fun; I often stand for minutes dreamily duplicating sheet after sheet simply for the narcotic effect.

  So that’s what we do at my office; we fool around with paper while trying to hold insanity, raging and snapping at the edges of vision and mind, at bay with frequent cups of kidney-destroying coffee and nervous trips to the washroom. As for what Saf-T Products actually are, I couldn’t possibly bring myself to tell you except that they’re useless, foolish, and made of easily breakable and dangerous plastic.

  “Well, why don’t you get another job,” Hetty always says, “if you hate this one so much?” In the calm reasonable way that I know infuriates her, I reply, “Doing what else? Serving humanity in what rich and rewarding way while still managing to pay the rent on this hovel?” She generally answers, “What do you want to do? What do you really want to do?” and since the answer is “I don’t know. Something . . . creative,” I shrug and change the subject, and continue reporting to Saf-T Products eleven mornings a week.

  Today at my desk I drew the morning’s first sheet of blank paper toward me, thinking (a little cloud appeared over my head, just the way it does in comic strips) of the picturesque Canadian lumberjacks who were even now leveling forests to bring me next month’s supply. They disappeared, and the words What is love? appeared in their place in the cloud. The cloud disappeared, and I printed Love in the middle of the sheet, sat back to look at it, then drew a heart around it. I fancied up and shaded the letters, then drew an arrow piercing the heart, working carefully on the feathers. I added a realistic jagged crack plunging down the middle of the heart, and a line of drops descending from its point, and realized that I’d just defined love pictorially. All day I felt sad, depressed, guilty about Hetty, not liking the feeling at all, and wanting to do something about it.

  Skip to that night: Should I buy Hetty some flowers? I wondered, stepping out of the elevator into the lobby of the Chrysler Building. No, I thought, flowers are kind of a phony thing to bring your wife; Holden Caulfield would never approve. There’s a drugstore in the building with a door from the lobby, and I walked in and stood looking around. Scattered on a display table I saw a lot of fancy little pillboxes on sale for a buck. I picked one out, a tiny rectangular box of gilt metal, less than an inch wide and not much longer, the lid crusted with glass jewels. I took it over to th
e counter, where the girl was checking her register, and while I stood waiting noticed some candy hanging from a wire stand on the counter. It was a long thin cellophane sack of four or five chocolate-covered nougats and creams; regular candy in little brown waxed-paper dishes like the kind that comes in boxes.

  I opened one of the sacks, took out a nougat, and put it in the little box. It just fitted, as I’d thought it would, though it was a shade too high I found as I closed the lid; I could feel it squash a little. The girl was watching when I looked up, and I nodded at the little box.

  “Could you gift-wrap it, please?” I said, and when she just stared at me I said, “It’s for a dieting midget,” and her eyes narrowed evilly. “Actually, it’s for my wife,” I said, laughing ruefully and shyly scraping my foot on the floor. “She’s mad at me, and it’s either make her laugh or kill myself.” The girl smiled delightedly then, all eager to join the cause, and did a fine job of gift-wrapping the tiny box in a little hunk of white paper and some narrow gold ribbon she found in a drawer behind the counter. She wasn’t bad-looking, and while she worked I offered her a chocolate cream, which she took, and I ate the others myself, leaning on the counter pretending to watch her work while I looked her over.

  The signs were everywhere, it occurred to me walking out of the store; even buying some lousy little gift for Hetty I was eyeing another girl, and I felt more than ever depressed and increasingly tired of myself. At the green-painted newsstand down the street I bought a paper as always, from Herman or whatever his name is. He’s supposed to be a character; everybody who works around there knows him—wears enormous fuzzy earmuffs in winter, and an old-style flat straw hat with a fancy band in the summer. Sometimes he calls out funny fake headlines, about the Titanic sinking or something like that. A real pain, eh, Holden? Nearly every night I urged myself to find a new place to buy the evening paper but I never remembered to do it. Tonight I laid my dime down on the counter as always, he snatched up a Post saying, “Yes, sir!” with humorously exaggerated servility, and I smiled with delight, both our lives a little richer. Someday, I promised myself, I would heat up the dime with a cigarette lighter, and when he snatched it up he’d know from thence forward how things really stood between us.