The Perfect Host (25 page)

“Of course it isn’t. Cordelia’s all woman and has a wonderful mind, and that’s what I want.”

“Bless you, my children,” Dad said, and grinned.

I knew I was right, and that Dad was simply expressing a misguided caution. The Foxy Grandpa routine, I thought, was a sign of advancing age. Dad sure was changed since the old days. On the other hand, he hadn’t been the same since the mysterious frittering-out of his mysterious down-cellar project. I stopped thinking about Dad, and turned my mind to my own troubles.

I had plenty of time to think; I couldn’t get a Saturday date with her for two weeks, and I wanted this session to run until it was finished with no early curfews. Not, as I have said, that I had any doubts. Far from it. All the same, I made a little list …

I don’t think I said ten words to her until we were three blocks from her house. She quite took my breath away. She was wearing a green suit with surprising lapels that featured her fabulous profile and made me ache inside. I had not known that I was so hungry for a sight of her, and now she was more than a sight, now her warm hand had slipped into mine as we walked. “Cordelia …” I whispered.

She turned her face to me, and showed me the tender tuggings in the corners of her mouth. She made an interrogative sound, like a sleepy bird.

“Cordelia,” I said thickly. It all came out in a monotone. “I didn’t know I could miss anybody so much. There’s been a hollow place in my eyes, wherever I looked; it had no color and it was shaped like you. Now you fill it and I can see again.”

She dropped her eyes and her smile was a thing to see. “You said that beautifully,” she breathed.

I hadn’t thought of that. What I had said was squeezed out of me like toothpaste out of a tube, with the same uniformity between what came out and what was still inside.

“We’ll go to the Stroll Inn,” I said. It was where we met. We didn’t meet at the party. We just saw each other there. We met in that booth.

She nodded gravely and walked with me, her face asleep, its attention turned inward, deeply engaged. It was not until we turned the corner on Winter Street and faced the Inn that I thought of my list; and when I did, I felt a double, sickening impact—first, one of shame that I should dare to examine and experiment with someone like
this, second, because item 5 on that list was “You said that beautifully …”

The Stroll Inn, as I indicated before, has all its lights, practically, on the outside. Cordelia looked at me thoughtfully as we walked into their worming neon field. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You look pale.”

“How can you tell?” I asked, indicating the lights, which flickered and switched, orange and green and blue and red. She smiled appreciatively, and two voices spoke within me. One said joyfully, “ ‘You look pale’ is a declarative statement.” The other said angrily, “You’re hedging. And by the way, what do you suppose that subtle smile is covering up, if anything?” Both voices spoke forcefully, combining in a jumble which left me badly confused. We went in and found a booth and ordered dinner. Cordelia said with pleasure that she would have what I ordered.

Over the appetizer I said, disliking myself intensely, “Isn’t this wonderful? All we need is a moon. Can’t you see it, hanging up there over us?”

She laughed and looked up, and sad sensitivity came into her face. I closed my eyes, waiting.

“ ‘Is the moon tired? She looks so pale
—
’ ”
she began.

I started to chew again. I think it was marinated herring, and very good too, but at the moment it tasted like cold oatmeal with a dash of warm lard. I called the waiter and ordered a double rum and soda. As he turned away I called him back and asked him to bring a bottle instead. I needed help from somewhere, and pouring it out of a bottle seemed a fine idea at the time.

Over the soup I asked her what she was thinking about. “I was ruminating,” she said in a self-deprecating, tragic voice, “on the futility of human endeavor.” Oh, brother, me too, I thought. Me too.

Over the dessert we had converse again, the meat course having passed silently. We probably presented a lovely picture, the two of us wordlessly drinking in each other’s presence, the girl radiating an understanding tenderness, the young man speechless with admiration. Look how he watches her, how his eyes travel over her face, how he sighs and shakes his head and looks back at his plate.

I looked across the Inn. In a plate-glass window a flashing neon sign said bluely, “nnI llortS. NnI llortS.”

“Nnillorts,” I murmured.

Cordelia looked up at me expectantly, with her questioning sound. I tensed. I filled the jigger with rum and poured two fingers into my empty highball glass. I took the jigger in one hand and the glass in the other.

I said, “You’ve read Kremlin von Schtunk, the Hungarian poet?” and drank the jigger.

“Well, really,” she said pityingly.

“I was just thinking of his superb line, ‘Nni llorts, nov shmoz ka smörgasbord,’ ” I intoned, “which means—” and I drank the glass.

She reached across the table and touched my elbow. “Please. Don’t translate. It couldn’t be phrased as well in English.”

Something within me curled up and died. Small, tight, cold and dense, its corpse settled under my breastbone. I could have raged at her, I supposed. I could have coldly questioned her, pinned her down, stripped from her those layers of schooled conversational reactions, leaving her ignorance in nakedness. But what for? I didn’t want it … And I could have talked to her about honesty and ethics and human aims—why did she do it? What did she ever hope to get? Did she think she would ever corral a man and expect him to be blind, for the rest of his life, to the fact that there was nothing behind this false front—nothing at all? Did she think that—did she think? No.

I looked at her, the way she was smiling at me, the deep shifting currents which seemed to be in her eyes. She was a monster. She was some graceful diction backed by a bare half-dozen relays. She was a card-file. She was a bubble, thin-skinned, covered with swirling, puzzling, compelling colors, filled with nothing. I was hurt and angry and, I think, a little frightened. I drank some more rum. I ordered her a drink and then another, and stayed ahead of her four to one. I’d have walked out and gone home if I had been able to summon the strength. I couldn’t. I could only sit and stare and bathe myself in agonized astonishment. She didn’t mind. She sat listening as raptly to my silence as to my conversation. Once she said, “We’re just
being
together, aren’t we?” and I recognized it as another trick from the bag. I wondered how many she might come up with if I just waited.

She came up with plenty.

She sat up and leaned forward abruptly. I had the distinct feeling that she was staring at me—her face was positioned right for it—but here eyes were closed. I put my glass down and stared blearily back, thinking, now what?

Her lips parted, twitched, opened wide, pursed. They uttered a glottal gurgling which was most unpleasant. I pushed my chair back, startled. “Are you sick?”

“Are you terrestrial?” she asked me.

“Am I
what?
”

“Making—contact thirty years,” she said. Her voice was halting, filled with effort.

“What are you talking about?”

“Terrestrial power quickly going,” she said clearly. “Many—uh—much power making contact this way very high frequencies thought. Easy radio. Not again thought. Take radio code quickly.”

“Listen, toots,” I said nastily, “This old nose no longer has a ring in it. Go play tricks on somebody else.” I drank some more rum. An I.Q. of sixty, and crazy besides. “You’re a real find, you are,” I said.

“Graphic,” she said. “Uh—write. Write. Write.” She began to claw the table cloth. I looked at her hand. It was making scribbling motions. “Write write.”

I flipped a menu over and put it in front of her and gave her my pen.

Now, I read an article once on automatic writing—you know, that spiritualist stuff. Before witnesses, a woman once wrote a long letter in trance in an unfamiliar (to her) hand, at the astonishing rate of four hundred and eight words a minute. Cordelia seemed to be out to break that record. That pen-nib was a blur. She was still leaning forward rigidly, and her eyes were still closed. But instead of a blurred scrawl, what took shape under her flying hand was a neat list or chart. There was an alphabet of sorts, although not arranged in the usual way; it was more a list of sounds. And there were the numbers one to fourteen. Beside each sound and each number was
a cluster of regular dots which looked rather like Braille. The whole sheet took her not over forty-five seconds to do. And after she finished she didn’t move anything except her eyelids which went up. “I think,” she said conversationally, “that I’d better get home, Henry. I feel a little dizzy.”

I felt a little more than that. The rum, in rum’s inevitable way, had sneaked up on me, and suddenly the room began to spin, diagonally, from the lower right to the upper left. I closed my eyes tight, opened them, fixed my gaze on a beer-tap on the bar at the end of the room, and held it still until the room slowed and stopped. “You’re so right,” I said, and did a press-up on the table top to assist my legs. I managed to help Cordelia on with her light coat. I put my pen back in my pocket (I found it the next morning with the cap still off and a fine color scheme in the lining of my jacket) and picked up the menu.

“What’s that?” asked Cordelia.

“A souvenir,” I said glumly. I had no picture, no school ring, no nothing. Only a doodle. I was too tired, twisted, and tanked to wonder much about it, or about the fact that she seemed never to have seen it before. I folded it in two and put it in my hip pocket.

I got her home without leaning on her. I don’t know if she was ready to give a repeat performance of that goodnight routine. I didn’t wait to find out. I took her to the door and patted her on the cheek and went away from there. It wasn’t her fault.…

When I got to our house, I dropped my hat on the floor in the hall and went into the dark living-room and fell into the easy-chair by the door. It was a comfortable chair. I felt about as bad as I ever had. I remember wondering smokily whether anyone ever loves a person. People seem to love dreams instead, and for the lucky ones, the person is close to the dream. But it’s a dream all the same, a sticky dream. You unload the person and the dream stays with you.

What was it Dad had said? “When a fellow gets to be a big grownup man … he learns to make a pile of his beloved failures and consign them to the flames.” “Hah!” I ejaculated, and gagged. The rum tasted terrible. I had nothing to burn but memories and the lining of my stomach. The latter was flaming merrily. The former stayed where they were. The way she smiled, so deep and secret …

Then I remembered the doodle. Her hands had touched it, her mind had—No, her mind hadn’t. It could have been anyone’s mind, but not hers. The girl operated under a great handicap. No brains. I felt terrible. I got up out of the chair and wove across the room, leaning on the mantel. I put my forehead on the arm which I had put on the mantel, and with my other hand worried the menu out of my pocket. With the one hand and my teeth I tore it into small pieces and dropped the pieces in the grate, all but one. Then I heaved myself upright, braced my shoulder against the mantel, which had suddenly begun to bob and weave, got hold of my lighter, coaxed a flame out of it and lit the piece I’d saved. It burned fine. I let it slip into the grate. It flickered, dimmed, caught on another piece of paper, flared up again. I went down on one knee and carefully fed all the little pieces to the flame. When it finally went out I stirred the ashes around with my finger, got up, wiped my hands on my pants, said, “That was good advice Dad gave me,” and went back to the chair. I went back into it, pushed my shoes off my feet, curled my legs under me and, feeling much better, dozed off.

I woke slowly, some time later, and with granulated eyelids and a mouth full of emory and quinine. My head was awake but my legs were asleep and my stomach had its little hands on my backbone and was trying to pull it out by the roots. I sat there groggily looking at the fire.

Fire? What fire? I blinded and winced; I could almost hear my eyelids rasping.

There was a fire in the grate. Dad was kneeling beside it, feeding it small pieces of paper. I didn’t say anything; I don’t think it occurred to me. I just watched.

He let the fire go out after a while; then he stirred the ashes with his finger and stood up with a sigh, wiping his hands on his pants. “Good advice I gave the boy. Time I took it myself.” He loomed across the shadowy room to me, turned around and sat down in my lap. He was relaxed and heavy, but he didn’t stay there long enough for me to feel it. “Gah!” he said, crossed the room again in one huge bound, put his back against the mantel and said, “Don’t move, you, I’ve got a gun.”

“It’s me, Dad.”

“Henry! Bythelordharry, you’ll be the death of me yet. That was the most inconsiderate thing you have ever done in your entire selfish life. I’ve a notion to bend this poker over your Adam’s apple, you snipe.” He stamped over to the book case and turned on the light. “This is the last time I’ll ever—Henry! What’s the matter? You look awful! Are you all right?”

“I’ll live,” I said regretfully. “What were you burning?”

He grinned sheepishly. “A beloved failure. Remember my preachment a couple weeks ago? It got to working on me. I decided to take my own advice.” He breathed deeply. “I feel much better, I think.”

“I burned some stuff too,” I croaked. “I feel better too. I think,” I added.

“Cordelia?” he asked, sitting near me.

“She hasn’t got brain one,” I said.

“Well,” he said. There was more sharing and comfort in the single monosyllable than in anything I have ever heard. He hadn’t changed much over the years. A bit heavier. A bit grayer. Still intensely alive, though. And he’d learned to control those wild projects of his. I thought, quite objectively, “I like this man.”

We were quiet for a warm while. Then, “Dad—what was it you burned? The Martian project?”

“Why, you young devil! How did you know?”