Three by Finney

by Jack Finney

  At home I found Hetty stirring something on top of the stove, and I kissed the back of her neck, feeling nothing but hair tickling my nose, and said, “Brought you something!”

  “You did?” She whirled around so fast a drop of gravy flew off her spoon and caught me on the forehead, her eyes lighting up with excitement, and my distaste for Benjamin Bennell, Boy Bounder, increased.

  “Yep,” I said, spuriously cheerful, “a box of candy!” and opened my hand to show her the little package. Her mouth actually hung open in anticipation as she stood unwrapping it, and when she came to the tiny box I’d picked up in a drugstore in one minute flat, she exclaimed with pleasure, and I could tell from the sound that she meant it and wasn’t faking. She lifted the lid, saw the squashed nougat inside, and for a terrible instant I thought she was going to cry with delight at my loving whimsy, and I grinned quickly to keep things at the smile level, and condemned myself to solitary confinement in the Dry Tortugas for one hundred and forty-five years.

  “A box of candy,” she said in fond scorn, prying the nougat out. “What a perfectly darling idea! Wait’ll I tell Jenny. Oh, Ben,” she said, as though certain recent doubts had suddenly been resolved, “you are sweet.” For a moment she stood staring down at the nougat in her palm, then popped it into her mouth; Hetty sometimes goes on a sort of diet which consists of frowning at anything she shouldn’t eat, then eating it.

  I mixed a quick pitcherful, and we had drinks in the living room, Hetty in the chair beside the end table on which she’d set her pillbox so she could smile down at it frequently. I sat on the davenport across the room—on the broken spring to punish myself. Hetty chattered about other cute things I’d done; mostly, it seemed to me, before we were married: the phone calls in a slightly disguised voice at odd times of day and night; the little notes, generally containing lewd suggestions, that I’d slip into her purse or the finger of a glove where she’d find them later; the telegram to her office that all the other girls thought was so cute. I sat nodding happily, reached up to my ear, and surreptitiously turned a tiny switch in my brain which cut off all sound. Hetty’s lips continued to move in the silence, and I sipped my drink, occasionally smiling, even laughing out loud.

  I saw from her expression that she’d asked a question, and I said, “What?” reaching quickly to my ear as though it itched, and turning the switch back on.

  “Remember the darling way you proposed?” she repeated, for what may well have been the one-thousandth time, and I smiled and nodded. “I didn’t know what to think,” she went on, “when you brought me a box of stationery; it seemed such an odd kind of gift, even a little dull. I’d noticed right away, of course, that my name was printed on the envelopes and paper. I’d noticed my first name, that is. Then all of a sudden I saw the Mrs. printed in front of it, and I looked closer and just couldn’t believe my eyes! I actually blinked, I remember, to make certain I was right; but sure enough, it said Mrs. Hetty H. Bennell, and the address was your apartment! Well, then I knew. I knew what you meant, and that I was going to say yes, and absolutely everyone I’ve ever told thinks it was the most original proposal they ever heard of.”

  I sat smiling and apparently listening to all this, even lifting my glass once in a silent toast to our married bliss, but though I hadn’t turned the switch and could still hear Hetty, the volume was way down because I wasn’t listening; I was sneaking looks at Tessie.

  She’d come walking into the room, transparent but perfectly visible, to me anyway, during Hetty’s reminiscence about notes in purse and gloves. She sat down opposite me, crossing her splendid knees, and as Hetty finished the lewd-note story, Tessie said, “Hey, Ben, how about the notes you sent me!” and winked.

  She hadn’t changed a bit, looking as completely edible as the last time I’d seen her, long ago. There she sat, the wallpaper and davenport visible through that luxurious big body—oh boy, she’d been a fine big girl, I remembered. She was tall as I was; lavishly, even extravagantly built, no skimping at all. She had a bushel of dark dark red hair that hung, swaying like spun lead, to her shoulders, which, I now recalled with pleasure, were lightly peppered with golden freckles. So was her face, the skin paper-white, and her eyes were the deep red-flecked brown that goes with that kind of complexion and hair. Her figure was just great, and she was also as amiable and likable a human being—man, woman, or child—as I’ve ever known. She was looking at Hetty now, frowning a little; then she drew back her shoulders, expanded her chest, and turned to me. “How could you ever give me up for her?” she said, and all I could do was give her a sneaky little one-shoulder shrug. Sitting there looking her over, I suddenly smiled with pleasure, and Hetty smiled lovingly back.

  “ . . . most original proposal they ever heard of,” she was saying, suddenly loud and clear as my inner monitor flashed a red alert. “And I’ve still got the stationery. Want to see it?”

  She was up and turning toward the dining nook without waiting for my answer—which was a silent scream of No-o-o-o!, both hands cupped at my mouth. Hetty walked over to the battered old china cabinet her mother had given us, probably because the Salvation Army had indignantly refused it. Kneeling before it, she opened the lower doors, the oval panes of which were made of stained glass salvaged from the washroom windows of one of the first Pullman cars, and began poking through the bundled-up Christmas cards, flat glossy department-store boxes of place mats, and shoe boxes full of partly used candles from ancient dinner parties saved in case the lights went out in a storm. With Hetty’s back turned to the living room, Tess hopped up, darted across the room, and dropped onto the davenport beside me, where she began gently blowing into my ear, and my arm came up involuntarily to lie along the back of the davenport, my hand cupping that smooth, round, entrancingly freckled shoulder.

  The good old days Hetty had been talking about apparently jogged the needle of her memory into the same grooves as it had mine, because she turned to look over her shoulder at me—Tessie instantly disappearing—and said casually, “What was that girl’s name you were seeing just before you met me?”

  I frowned at the difficulty of remembering any girl but Hetty. “What girl?”

  “You know. You ought to, anyway; you were with her the night you met me! Tessie or Bessie or some such unlikely name. That big cowlike girl.” She turned back to the china cabinet, and Tessie reappeared, glaring at Hetty in complete disdain, in about the way I’d imagine Linda Evans appraising Cyndi Lauper; then she turned back to me and began nibbling the lobe of my ear.

  I looked at the box of stationery Hetty brought me, while she stood before me intently watching my face for an appropriate reaction. I knew I couldn’t manage ecstatic delight, so I settled for riffling the little stack of notepaper with my thumb, fingering the envelopes reminiscently, and finally shaking my head in rueful deprecation of my famous premarital charm. Just behind Hetty, watching over her shoulder, Tess stood looking with some interest at the stationery on my lap. Then she quirked a corner of her mouth and strolled off, fingering one of the drapes as she passed it and shrugging. I set the stationery on the coffee table—which I’d made, not very successfully, from a flush door—stood up, put my arm around Hetty’s waist, and walked her to the kitchen, my empty glass in hand. Just as we turned in at the kitchen door, ushering Hetty on before me, I looked over my shoulder wistfully, but Tessie had disappeared, and I went into the kitchen and mixed another drink: a double.

  •

  CHAPTER TWO

  •

  “Mirror, mirror,” I began next morning, but before I could finish the voice replied.

  “The Australian sheepherder joined AA; today it’s neck and neck between you and the pimp from Beirut.”

  “I thought he was a loan shark!”

  “He’s branching out, he’s ambitious. A lot more than I can say for you,” and the Hand came down, smacking my forehead with another stamp. This time, I saw in the mirror, the letters were in Old English script and even larger but they still
spelled FAILURE, as I proceeded to demonstrate again, this time at the office.

  Today more than ever I dreaded going, and wanted company, lots of it. Walking desperately along Forty-second Street, I shouted alliteratively to the men in the buses and speeding cabs: “Avoid strokes; strike!” Sticking my head in the doorways of coffee shops, I yelled, “Do what you really want to do; don’t show up!” But today they didn’t hear me, and I turned to the girls.

  Walking directly behind the choice ones, I murmured into their ears, “Come dally with me today; let’s slip off, just you and I beneath the sky, wrapped in the arms of sweet romance!” But they kept right on glancing at their watches and at their own sweet faces in the store windows, hurrying to their ten thousand paper-filled offices.

  In my minuscule office I sat down at my desk, pulled the first sheet of paper toward me, and the little cloud appeared over my head; in it giant logs floated down a tree-lined river, spinning under the spiked feet of tassel-capped lumberjacks singing Alouette. I picked up my ball-point, and stared down at the final result of their dangerous, romantic work: clean white paper, ready to receive anything I wanted to say—a sonnet, a manifesto, a ringing reaffirmation of the truths that set men free. In capital letters I printed HELP! in the center of the page.

  During the next half hour I added serifs, shaded in the thick strokes, fancied up the letters into pseudo Roman. Then I walked out to our mighty new beige-plastic and chrome duplicating machine, put a finger in the Dil-A-Copy dial (pronounced dill-a-copy), set it for 25, and fed in the sheet. Back came the copies, faintly smudged, redolent of chemicals, slightly tanned, drifting into the receiving tray like autumn leaves—HELP! . . . HELP! . . . HELP!—while I watched soporifically, my nerve ends unknotting.

  Back at my desk, I let them slide one at a time off my hand and out the window, watching them sail in great sweeps over Manhattan. When I turned from the window, my boss, Bert Glahn—two years younger, three inches taller, thirty pounds heavier, mostly in the shoulders, making twice as much money as I did, and considerably handsomer—was standing in the doorway of my tiny office, stroking his chin with thumb and forefinger, staring at me thoughtfully. “Morning, Ben,” he said, glancing at his watch.

  “Oh, hi! Hi! Hi!” I said, perhaps a bit nervously. “I was just, ah . . .” I didn’t know what the rest of that sentence was, so I sort of moved my hand through the air and shrugged, smiled brilliantly, then frowned deeply, but by that time he was gone. I cupped a hand at my mouth and shouted after him, silently, “I hate you, Glahn! Come back here, and I’ll judo-chop you down to size!” I made a fast cut through the air with the back of my hand, and felt better but not much.

  A little after ten I had coffee in the drugstore downstairs with Ralph and Eddie at a crumb-littered, strawberry-jam-smeared table, ankle-deep in lipsticked paper napkins, discarded straw-wrappers, and crumpled cigarette packages. In a flurry of time-tested whimsy we matched to see who’d pay, and Ralph lost, pantomiming chagrin, while Eddie and I joshed him humorously. “You just don’t live right, Ralph!” I said; then we crept upstairs again, and I found a note from the boss’s secretary on my desk. He’d been looking for me; he was in a hurry to see a copy of a report I had, and it took me forty-five minutes to find it, in a folder it had no business being in.

  The red second-hands of the office clocks continued to revolve in perfect, irritating synchronization sixty times every hour, and another lost day slipped by. About four-thirty I walked down the hall, and turned into Accounting to see Miss Wilmar, high priestess of our office computers. “Hi, honey. Do me a favor.”

  “Sure.”

  “Slip off your dress and lie down.” She grinned happily, shivering her shoulders. “But first,” I added, “multiply 365 days by, let’s say, 74 years, if I’m lucky.”

  She poked keys, sparks flickered across the screen, a jet of blue flame shot from a chromed orifice, smoke puffed, and the machine waited, panting. “27,010 days.”

  “Subtract one-third for time spent in the blessed Nirvana of sleep.” A high electronic whine rose to supersonic pitch. “18,0062/3 days.”

  “Drop the 62/3 for oversleeping, and divide the single horrible day I have just spent by the eighteen thousand waking days of a brief lifetime.”

  Transistor relays relayed, a violet light pulsed like a hummingbird’s heart and the smell of ozone twitched our nostrils. “.0000555. Why do you want to know?”

  “That is the precise fraction of my life I have today given to Saff-T Products in exchange for the dubious benefit of the means to continue living it. ’Night.”

  “G’night, Ben. Honestly, you’re a card.”

  At eleven minutes past five I stepped safely out of the automatic elevators for one more time, fully aware that the odds against me increased each time I used them. I walked out of the building, toward Herman’s newsstand, a dime in one hand, the other gripping the butt of a Colt .45 Frontier model with a filed hair trigger, Holden beside me murmuring encouragement and all. At the counter I put down my dime, and in one blurred motion Herman snatched up a New York Post, simultaneously folding it and humorously slipping it under my gun arm. To raise my arm and fire meant losing my paper, so, outwitted again, I smiled weakly and walked on, letting the gun slide from my fingers and drop in the gutter as I stopped at the curb for the DON’T WALK sign. Without glancing at me or moving her lips, a lovely black-haired girl who was standing beside me murmured, “I’ve been following you for days; the very way you hold the paper under your arm thrills me. I have a suite just down the street at the Commodore Hotel; please come with me!”

  Seeming merely to glance around, I looked at her, and—lips motionless—whispered, “I can’t. Gotta get home. The wife’s expecting me.”

  “Just for half an hour! She’ll never know; tell her you had to work late. Please? Oh, I beg you: please, please, please, please, please!” The light changed to SPRINT, and, knowing her cause was almost hopeless, she hurried bravely on without a glance at me as I followed, observing the charming flash of her ankles till she turned uptown on the other side.

  “ . . . will let me know the number of the pattern,” Hetty was saying when I got home, following me down the hall toward the bedroom, “and I can knit it myself if I get the blocking done.”

  I think she said blocking, whatever that means. I nodded, unbuttoning my shirt as I walked, anxious to get out of my office uniform; I was thinking about a dark-green forty-two-thousand-dollar sports car I’d seen during noon hour.

  “ . . . kind of a ribbed pattern with a matching freggelheggis,” Hetty seemed to be saying as I stopped at the dresser. I tossed my shirt on the bed and turned to the mirror, arching my chest and sucking my stomach in.

  “ . . . middly collar, batten-barton sleeves with sixteen rows of smeddlycup balderdashes . . .” Pretty good chest and shoulders.

  “ . . . dropped hem, doppelganger waist, maroon-green, and a sort of frimble-framble daisystitch . . .” Probably want ten thousand bucks down on a car like that; the payments’d be more than the rent on this whole apartment.

  “So what do you think?” Hetty said. “You think they’d go well together?”

  “Sure! They’d look fine.” I nodded at her reflection in the mirror, and her eyes narrowed, she folded her arms, and stood leaning in the bedroom doorway, glaring at me. I walked to the closet and began looking for some wash pants, trying to figure what I’d done wrong. “What’s trouble?” I said finally.

  “You don’t listen to me! You really don’t! You don’t hear a word I say!”

  “Why, sure I do, honey. You were talking about . . . knitting.”

  “An orange sweater, I said: orange. I knew you weren’t listening, and I asked you how an orange sweater would go with—close your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “No, don’t turn around! And close your eyes.” I closed them, and Hetty said, “Now, without any peeking, because I’ll see you if you do, tell me what I’m wearing right now.”

  I
t was ridiculous. In the last five minutes, since I’d come home from the office, I must have glanced at Hetty maybe two or three times. I’d kissed her when I walked into the apartment, I was pretty sure. Yet standing at the closet now, eyes closed, I couldn’t for the life of me say what she was wearing. I worked at it; I could actually hear the sound of her breathing just behind me and could picture her standing there, five feet two inches tall, twenty-four years old, nice complexion, honey-blond hair, and wearing . . . wearing . . .

  “Well, am I wearing a dress, slacks, medieval armor, or standing here stark-naked?”

  “A dress.”

  “What color?”

  “Ah—dark green?”

  “Am I wearing stockings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is my hair done up, shaved off, or in a pony-tail?”

  “Done up.”

  “Okay, you can look now.”

  Of course the instant I turned around, I remembered; there she stood, eyes blazing, her bare foot angrily tapping the floor, and she was wearing sky-blue wash slacks and a white cotton blouse. As she swung away to walk out of the bedroom and down the hall, her pony tail was bobbing furiously.

  Well, brother—and you, too, sister—unless the rice is still in your hair you know what came next: the hurt indignant silence. I finally found my pants, and got into them, a short-sleeved shirt, and the running shoes I walk around the house in, strolled into the living room, and there on the davenport sat Madame Defarge grimly studying the list, disguised as a magazine, of next day’s guillotine victims. I knew whose name headed the list, and I walked straight on into the kitchen, mixed up some booze, and found a screwdriver in a kitchen drawer.