by Jack Finney
“Well, I can tell you truthfully,” I told her truthfully, “that for me it’s as though the honeymoon had just begun.” From a corner of my eye I thought I saw a movement, the indignant swish of a departing skirt. But when I turned quickly no one was there, and now I remembered that in this world not only had I never met Hetty, but she might never even have been born. With my conscience lying on its back in a hammock sipping a tall cool glass of iced absinthe, I smiled at Tessie. “Tired, darling?” I asked.
“No,” she said, pushing back her chair, so we went to bed.
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CHAPTER SIX
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In the morning, after Tess served me a breakfast of fantastically delicious toast and coffee, I rode fearlessly downstairs in the automatic elevator, together with several other tenants: a famous Metropolitan Opera soprano; several members of the Rockefeller family; a maharajah in full costume. I bowed them out before me, then walked on across the lobby and out into an absolutely wizard spring day.
The branches of the two skinny little trees beside the doors were loaded with birds: a Great Blue Heron, a Purple Gallinule, a Bird of Paradise, a Roseate Spoonbill, a robin, a Penguin, two Marbled Godwits, a Grosbeak, a Free-flying Ferruginous Duck, and a large number of tropical macaws never before seen this far north. My own joyous whistle was instantly joined by theirs; we all stood for several seconds warbling together in tribute to the day. Then I tipped my hat, walked on out to the public sidewalk, and stopped, not knowing which way to turn.
I walked back into the building lobby, nearly bumping into Sam Donaldson on his way out. Inside I turned, walked out again, whistling even more joyously, and a number of the birds flew over to perch momentarily on my shoulders and hat. Again I walked on, this time refusing to let thought intrude, continuing to whistle mindlessly, relying entirely on habit. At the sidewalk, I noted, looking down with interest, that my feet and legs turned unhesitatingly toward Fifth Avenue, just as they did, I remembered now, every morning.
When I reached Fifth, a southbound double-decker was pulling away, and I jogged athletically across the street—I seemed to be in better condition in this world—hopped aboard, and climbed to the top, still whistling. Two men were just getting up from a front seat, and I edged forward past them and sat down. Then I rode down that wonderful sunlit old street, sniffing the delicious blue-tinted air, happy as mortal man is meant to be.
After a block or so I looked behind me and saw hardly a face: nearly everyone was reading a newspaper or turning the pages of one; the few who weren’t sat staring vacantly at the passing sidewalk. I reached into my pocket, brought out a baton, stood up, and said, “All right! Attention please, everyone,” rapping on the wooden back of my seat; everyone looked up. “This is much too nice a day to sit reading a newspaper. Put them away, please, take a deep breath of this glorious air, and—all together now!—join me in song!” I blew a note on a pitch pipe, stood with baton poised, then brought it down decisively, and rumbling along Fifth Avenue in that fine old bus, we sang “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!” and before we reached the second chorus people on the sidewalks were waving at us, and a bus passing the other way joined in.
We reached Forty-second Street on the last notes of “Blue Skies,” I turned the baton over to a Wall Street executive, and hopped off the bus, waving; they all waved back. The light turned green, they rolled across Forty-second Street and on down Fifth singing “Hello, Dolly,” while I walked east toward Lexington, leaping into the air every now and then and clicking my heels together, a trick I’d never before been able to do.
In the lobby of the Doc Pepper Building I had to step aside for a moment out of the stream of people heading toward the elevators, and stand frowning, unable to remember my floor. Then, as I’d done earlier, I walked back to the door and came in again, whistling quietly, looking happily around, letting habit run things. I stepped confidently into an elevator, and stood watching my forefinger reach out and press the button marked 11. At the eleventh floor I got off, walked down the hall, turned and pushed through a pair of glass doors—genuine cut-glass, each marked with a large gold N—and stepped into a big lobby. There was a receptionist’s desk from the Palace of Versailles before me, but no one there at the moment, and I stood looking around.
It was an expensive lobby: walls of wood panels alternating with slabs of polished green marble matching the green-and-white-patterned carpeting; a crystal chandelier. I turned and walked down a corridor into a large square area of stenographers’ desks in rows, office doors around the outer edges. I walked past doors, each bearing a name and title, the girls at their desks smiling, saying, “Morning, Mr. Bennell!” As I passed them, the successive doors increased in quality, width, and even, it seemed to me, in height, until I came to one of carved teak, bearing my name in inch-high gold metal letters.
I walked in, tossing my hat expertly and out of long habit onto the head of a life-size, full-color, photo cutout—an advertising display—standing in a corner of my office. It was of a splendidly rounded girl wearing feathers in her hair, jewel-encrusted high heels, and not too much else, actually. She was smiling and stood with a forefinger pointed discreetly at her stomach. From her mouth issued a cardboard cloud, a speech balloon like the kind in comic strips, and I started to read what it said when my office door opened, and my secretary, a lovely flower, said, “They’re ready with the new commercial, Mr. Bennell.”
I told her to send them in, and sat down behind my free-form desk, glancing at the original Picasso on the wall. Then my door opened, and in stepped a couple of advertising types with eager, clean-cut, corrupt young faces, followed by—Bert Glahn, as I lived and forgot to breathe! Bert was my boss in the other alternate world, and I almost jumped to my feet, but I stopped myself because something about him was incredibly different.
Not only was he unctuously bobbing his head and nervously dry-washing his hands, but—suddenly I realized it!—he was a good six inches shorter! As Bert humbly wished me good morning, and turned to fit a reel of video tape he’d brought with him into the works of a huge viewer across the office, I stood up, leisurely, majestically, walked over to watch, and surreptitiously measured my height against his. I was an easy three inches taller, and at least as heavy; and while Bert was still handsome enough, he looked older, more haggard, and his suit didn’t fit very well. Whatever gene or chromosome of Bert Glahn’s had been added or left out in this happy alternate world had cut him down to the size and manner appropriate to his status here of my assistant.
“Ready if you are, Mr. Bennell, sir!” said faithful old Bert, bowing, scraping, and tugging at his forelock, while one of the young ad-agency men ran across the room to draw the expensive drapes. I allowed as how I was ready, and the other young ad man touched his control, and the screen came to life.
A close head-and-shoulders shot of a doctor appeared. You knew he was a doctor because he wore a pair of heavy glasses in his hand, and a high-necked jacket of the kind worn by doctors, barbers, and Russian politicians. He had thick, wavy gray hair, a handsome face inscribed with dignified lines, and was obviously either head of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons or of the world’s most expensive fat clinic; he was smiling with the friendly open candor of an extreme right-wing fanatic.
Beside him was a cardboard display carton which was tilted toward the viewer. The carton was packed with a dozen small pink boxes wrapped in polyethylene, and the back of the carton rose up to form an advertising display-panel, showing a lovely young girl in a thin nightgown pointing to some words in a graceful flowing script.
From the carton the doc picked up one of the small pink boxes, opened a flap, and rolled out onto his palm a little cylindrical object in pink cellophane, which he unwrapped, then held up to the camera; it was a small plug of pink wax looking very much like a wax earplug. In a deep we-have-discovered-the-cure-for-cancer voice, he was saying, “We in science wholeheartedly recommend to the women of America . . .” Now he pointed to the di
splay panel, which came up big to fill the screen so that you could read the printed script, his voice continuing off screen for the benefit of viewers who couldn’t read: “ . . . Navel-O-No for beauty, health, and to show that you care!” The display panel grew some more till the girl’s printed head filled it; then the head came to life and movement. She smiled, and in a soft lilting voice said, “Yes, ladies, Navel-O-No the antiseptic flesh-colored putty that helps YOU put up a better front!” The camera moved down to her stomach, and—it was done beautifully and with exquisite taste—you could see through her filmy nightgown, and her stomach was absolutely smooth and rounded. Her voice, continuing off screen as we stared at that lovely unblemished belly, said, “Smoothes invisibly into unsightly navels! Fits any size, any shape, to form a new, flawlessly rounded LOVELIER surface! Used by stage, screen, and TV stars!” The doctor’s off-screen voice said sternly, “TODAY, banish lint-filled germ traps! Fill that ugly gaping crater!” The girl’s voice came in again as the camera moved up from her stomach to her beautiful ethereal face. “Look your smoothest,” she said, “for HIM! Navel-O-No tonight!”
Smiling, she walked off screen left as a lovely Polynesian girl, similarly dressed, crossed the screen from the right. “Also available,” she was saying, and she twitched her hips so that her gown opened momentarily to reveal a marvelously unbroken expanse of dusky skin, “in Tahiti tan!” A beautiful Chinese girl following directly behind her murmured, “ . . . in sunset yellow!” demonstrating as she walked how effective this shade was, too. “ . . . midnight black!” said a magnificent black girl as she crossed the screen. “And in the West,” said a terrific-looking Indian girl in full tribal headdress and almost nothing else, “dawnblush red!” She moved off in a cute little war dance, thrusting her unblemished red stomach forward at each step. To soft harp music, the screen went black and the film ended.
“Terrific!” I said, leaping to my feet and walking over to shake the hand of one of the ad-agency men. “Absolutely great, Perce!” I said, remembering his name, which was Perce Shelley. “You, too, Orville!” I said to the other.
“Mostly your idea,” one of them said.
“Sure, but you could have muffed the execution. Thanks a million.” They left, and I walked over to the cardboard cutout of the girl pointing to her stomach, and—it was all coming back to me now; I was general manager of this great company—I read the words printed in the cloudlike speech balloon at the side of her head. It said, Wilma Shakes-heare, Queen of the Skin Divas, says, “I look better, feel better—with Navel-O-No! And men just love its friendly fragrance. Ends cigar-ash nuisance, too!” Sales, I saw from a chart on the wall, were up 13 percent in the last quarter, which meant my stock options had become operative, and turning back to my desk, I knew that in this world I had found my metier.
At my free-form desk—beautiful, but with a tear-shaped hole in the middle through which I tended to occasionally knock one or more of my telephones with my elbow—I read my mail, dictated some replies to the lovely-limbed goddess who was my secretary, made a phone call to Frank Flannel in Production, and what with one thing and another it was nearly noon before I even leaned back in my chair to stretch. For a moment I sat there, glancing around my office, admiring the Jacob Epstein bust in one corner and the tremendous view of Manhattan to the south. Then I grinned, and on impulse pulled the Manhattan phone book over. I turned to the S’s, ran a forefinger down the first column, and sure enough, though the address was different, there it was: Saf-T Products.
“Safety Products,” the switchboard girl said when I called, and I asked for the head of the company.
When he came on I said, “This is Ben Bennell.”
“Who?” said the old familiar permanently irritated voice.
“Ben Bennell. Don’t you know me?”
“No! Who the hell are you!”
“I’m the world’s leading expert on pronunciation, and I called to tell you that S-a-f spells saff, you illiterate, power-drunk boob! It does not, and never can, spell safe; it’s SAFF! Now, I’m warning you, either change the spelling or the pronunciation, or get out of town within twenty-four hours.”
I hung up feeling great, pulled a sheet of paper toward me, sliding it around the tear-shaped hole, and in elaborate shaded italics printed, Wonderful (alternate) World, I love you! Benjamin B. Bennell I wheeled my big shiny private duplicating machine over to the window, inserted the sheet, spun the Dil-A-Copy to 5,000, opened the window, and left for lunch, the obedient machine rhythmically rolling copies out into the sunlit polluted air to swoop, glide, and dance over Manhattan like giant confetti.
The day flashed by, and at five-thirty I rode downstairs, anxious and happy to hurry home to Tess and renew our glorious acquaintance. Stepping out into the Doc Pepper lobby, I glanced into the building drugstore and on impulse turned in. It looked just about the same, it seemed to me, as the Chrysler Building drugstore. I glanced around, and yes, there it stood: the bargain counter of various doodads such as pillboxes. I began poking through the stuff and found it right away: the little gilt pillbox with the jewel-encrusted top. Walking toward the counter with it, I looked for the candy display but it wasn’t there.
“Can I help you, sir?” a man’s voice said from the counter; it was a familiar voice, though I couldn’t place it, and I looked up at him to answer. But I didn’t speak; I stopped and stood staring at the face over the tan pharmacist’s jacket.
“Good lord,” I said finally, “you look just like Paul Newman!”
“I am Paul Newman,” he said, frowning, and he pointed to a framed document hanging on the wall above his head. I looked at it: it said he was a graduate pharmacist from NYU, licensed to dispense prescriptions in the State of New York. Just over a large red seal, Paul Newman was lettered in black gothic.
“I see,” I was able to say after blinking at the certificate for a while. “Where’s the candy?” He pointed to a counter; I stepped over to it and found a small box of nougats. Opening it as I walked, I took it back to the cash register, and said, “Mr. Newman, have you ever considered acting in the movies?”
“At my age? Don’t be silly. Now, what can I do for you?”
I pushed the nougat into the pillbox; it was an even tighter fit than the last time I’d done this, and when I squashed the lid down, the nougat overflowed a bit, and Newman stared at it in distaste, then looked up at me with the same expression. Humbly I said, “Could you gift-wrap this, please?”
“Glenn!” he called across the store, and a young woman answered. “Could you come over here, please? And gift-wrap this—package? For the . . . gentleman?” He walked off, shaking his head, while I stared at the floor in embarrassment. I heard the young woman arrive, glanced up at her, and once again my mouth fell open.
“Saints preserve us,” I said, “but aren’t you Glenn Close?”
“No, I am not,” she said icily. “My first name is Glenn, but my last name is Heppelwhite. What do you want wrapped?”
I nodded even more humbly at the box. She leaned forward to stare down at it as though it were a freshly killed roach, and I said, “It’s a box of candy. For a dieting midget,” and she looked up at me, her lip curling. “There’s some gold ribbon in there,” I murmured in utter abasement, and she turned, opened the drawer I had pointed to, poked through it suspiciously, then pulled out a length of gold ribbon, looking surprised. She wrapped my package very rapidly then, refusing my offer of a nougat with a curt shake of her head.
Going out the door, I glanced back. Both Paul and Glenn were staring after me, and I stepped up my pace, turning to face front just in time to avoid banging into a policeman in a brown derby: the same one I’d talked to before. “Hi, there!” I said sickly, and—fortunately the light at the corner was green—I trotted across Lexington toward Fifth before he could think of a reason to stop me.
Then, once more, I rode along Fifth Avenue through a warm spring afternoon on an open-topped bus. The sports page of the guy next to me headlined
a spectacular ninth-inning home run, saving the game for the Giants: the New York Giants, I suddenly noticed, making a resolution to see lots of home games. I smiled serenely; I was on my way back to that vast expanse of glowing womanhood, Tessie; and all in all it was a fine world to be alive in, in spite of Paul Newman.
Tess loved the pillbox. While I stirred up a pitcherful of transfusions in the kitchen, she unwrapped it, squealed with pleasure at sight of the little gilt box, rapturously fingered the fake jewels on the lid, then opened the box and shrieked with amusement at the candy inside. She followed me into the living room, saying, “Ben, you’re an absolute darling!”
I grinned at her as she sat down on the davenport, and poured and handed her a drink. She took a sip and shuddered happily. Her pillbox lay on a table beside her, and her glance lingered on it as she set her drink down. “Remember the sweet little obscene notes you used to hide in my gloves?” she murmured, and I nodded gleefully. “And the fake tattoo I thought was real, your initials and mine intertwined in a heart? What a place to put it!” I smiled, nodding reminiscently, and she reached out to touch the pillbox again. “And now this, just like the things you always used to do.” She frowned in puzzlement and murmured almost to herself, “I don’t understand it,” and looked over at me again. “Ben, how come you’re so sweet to me all of a sudden?”
Of course I couldn’t tell her, so as a mild little joke—I have a fair enough voice and can carry a tune—I answered with the words and tune of an old song. “Because ‘I’ve got you under my skin! I’ve got you deep in the heart of me. So deep in my heart you’re really a part of me!’ ”
Her lovely brows shot up in astonishment. “Ben! What a perfectly darling little song! Did you just think of it?”
For a good three or four seconds I stared at her without answering. Then I said slowly, “Tell me, Tess, did you ever hear of Cole Porter?”
