Orbit 3 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  Once she had asked him to tell her about his life.

  “What about it?” he had asked.

  “All about it,” she’d said.

  “That would be a lot to tell.”

  “As much as you want to, then, Mr. Ralph.”

  Without a word of introduction he would start: “I was sixteen when I first kissed a girl. Awfully old . . .”

  He’d always thought it shameful that he’d been un-kissed so long and had never confessed it before. It was years later before Siss got up the courage to say: “Mr. Ralph, you told me once you didn’t get a kiss till you were sixteen and that’s too bad, but do you know how old I was?”

  And he had said No, he didn’t and she’d said:

  “Twenty-eight, Mr. Ralph: that’s how old. So don’t you feel so bad.”

  And he’d asked her, though he was practically certain: “You mean I was the first one ever to kiss you?”

  “The first man, except my father, yes, sir, Mr. Ralph. And do you know what? I’m awfully glad it was you that was the first, and that now nobody else ever will. I’m glad of that.”

  And so he had to postpone his confession. He had been on the point of telling Siss about his previous marriage—how he had chosen his wife from those available for matrimony among the fairly large number of women he had known.

  What a fantastically wide choice he had had! The irony of now, with no choice at all, made him marvel to think that he could have picked from among millions, had he known doom was to come and that he and his mate, if she too were saved, would be parents to the entire human race. With what care he would have searched, what exacting tests he would have applied, to screen the mass of womanhood for a fitting mate for the last man!

  But because he had expected all life to continue he had chosen from an extremely small sample. Nevertheless he had chosen well.

  Later he would tell Siss; not now. He would not hurt her at this time with talk about what, by hindsight, had been a perfect marriage; nor did he feel like hurting himself by contrasting a happy past marriage to an intelligent woman with what he had now.

  Now he would tell Siss about another time in his adult past, a sad interlude during which he and his perfect wife had separated and he was living alone.

  How foolish to have had that quarrel with his dead perfect wife, he thought. How senseless to have lost all the time that they might have had together.

  Yet he had achieved a certain peace in his solitude. And their marriage had been stronger when he returned to her.

  “I’m going to tell you about a time I was living all alone in a little trailer in the woods,” he told Siss.

  He had been a free-lance editor in those days, doctoring doddering magazines, doing articles for his editor friends, and reading for a publishing house, and so was able to avoid the frenzied daily commute. He used the mails and phone and got into the city a couple of times a month.

  He enjoyed an occasional dinner or cocktail party in his exurb; but he valued his privacy enough to decline many invitations and to withdraw to his trailer.

  Rolfe himself never entertained. His truck-back trailer home was unsuited for anything but the shortest of visits. He’d have the mailman in for a drink of Bourbon on Christmas Eve, or chat with the man who came around to collect for the volunteer ambulance corps, or play ten-second-move chess with the route man who delivered the only food Rolfe ate at home—eggs, and the butter he fried them in.

  The truck-back home normally sat in the middle of Rolfe’s eighteen acres—far enough out of town so that there were woods to surround him and a dammed-up stream in which to swim, but close enough for an electric power line to be run in.

  If Rolfe’s choice of this way to live during his separation was an eccentricity, then he was eccentric. One other thing about him was a little odd. He had nailed a sign to a tree at the beginning of the track which led off the county road to his place. It said:

  private road

  mined

  The police came around after he put up the sign, which he’d burned into the end of an egg crate with an electric pen. The policemen, a lieutenant and a sergeant, left their car at the county road and walked carefully along the edge of Rolfe’s track to the pickup truck in the clearing near the dammed-up stream. A pheasant moved without haste into some undergrowth as they came up to the door over the tailgate.

  Rolfe invited them in, making room for them to sit down by lifting a manuscript off the one easy chair and motioning the sergeant to the camp chair in front of the typewriter on the bracket that folded down from the wall. Rolfe sat on the single bunk along the driver’s side, having first got cokes out of the tiny refrigerator. He knew better than to offer liquor to policemen on duty. They chatted for a while before the lieutenant said: “About your sign, Mr. Rolfe; we’ve had some complaints.”

  “Call me Martin. Complaints? I like my privacy, that’s all.”

  “My name’s Sol,” the lieutenant said, “and this is Eric.” They shook hands all round again, now that the first-name basis had been established, and Sol said: “About the road being mined. Sure it’s private property and nobody respects the principle of that more than I do, but somebody might get hurt. Somebody who couldn’t read, maybe, or who wandered in after dark—not really meaning to trespass, you know.”

  “Sure,” Rolfe said. “I can understand that.”

  “Besides,” the sergeant—Eric—said, “anybody with war surplus ammunition was supposed to have turned it in years ago. It’s the law.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Rolfe said. “I haven’t booby-trapped the road. I wouldn’t hurt a rabbit, much less a human being. Why, I’m so soft-hearted I don’t even fish the stream.”

  Sol said: “I get it. You just put up the sign to keep people away—like ‘Beware of the Dog,’ even if you don’t have a dog.”

  “And there really aren’t any bouncing Bettys out there then?” Eric said. “I’m relieved. Believe me, we walked mighty easy along the edge.”

  Martin Rolfe grinned. “Gentlemen, I think I begin to understand. And it’s all my fault because I’m such a poor speller. What I was trying to do was to call attention to the fact that it isn’t a public road or a hiking trail or a place for young vandals to go if they have a hankering to break windows or set fires in out-of-the-way places. I believe there’ve been a few such incidents around town.”

  “Too many,” Sol said. “But I still don’t know what you mean about being a poor speller.”

  “What I intended to say on the sign, I guess, was ‘Mind you, this is a private road.’ It’s a kind of New England expression.”

  “I’ve heard it,” Eric said. “They have signs like that in London, where my wife’s from—she was a war bride, you know, Lieutenant—that say ‘Mind the step.’ “

  “That’s m-i-n-d, not m-i-n-e-d,” Sol said.

  “Is that right?” Rolfe asked with a grin. “I told you I wasn’t much of a speller. I’d better change the sign, then, hadn’t I?”

  Instead of replying directly, Sol asked: “Ever have trouble with kids back in here?”

  “Kids and grown-ups both,” Rolfe said. “Different kinds of trouble. Kids broke a window one night. I was asleep and got a shower of broken glass all over my face. Another time a big brave man with a gun shot the hell out of a mother partridge and her brood and left them flopping around. He wasn’t even planning to eat them. Did you ever put a living thing out of its misery with your bare hands, Sol? That same day I put up the sign. The partridges and I haven’t been bothered since.”

  Sol got up and let himself out into the clearing. “I had to kill a doe once that some mighty hunter put a hole into but didn’t think worth following into the brush.” Eric went out with Martin Rolfe behind him and all three walked along the middle of the track to the county road. Birds chirped at them and a leisurely rabbit hopped away.

  At the blacktopped road Martin Rolfe went to his sign. He took a pencil out of his shirt pock
et and scratched a vertical line through the E in mined. Then he joined the N and D with a copyreader’s mark.

  The sergeant said, “I don’t know that that’s too highly visible. Besides, a couple of rains’ll wash it off.”

  “Oh, come on, Eric,” the lieutenant said, getting into the car. “It’s as plain as day.”

  “Thanks, lieutenant,” Martin said, going over to the police car to say goodbye. “I never could spell worth a damn.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Eric said. “I’ll bet you can outspell both of us any day.” He was looking back at the sign as he got into the car and he tripped, so that he had to grab for the door to steady himself.

  “Mind the step,” Martin said.

  * * * *

  It was achingly poignant for him to leaf through the pages of a copy he’d saved ofThe New York Times Magazine.

  How lovable and childlike seemed the people doing the weird things fashion advertising demanded of them! How earnest were the statements made in the articles and the letter pages. For example, there was the ironic, the heart-breakingly laughable article about the population explosion—about the insupportable hundreds of millions there soon would be in India, or the six billion there’d be on Earth in just a few more years.

  Would that there were only as many people as had read that particular Sunday issue of the Times. A million and a half? World enough. Or even if there existed on Earth only the few hundred people it had taken to write, edit and print that particular issue of The New York Times Magazine. Even if there were only one other than Siss and himself. One man to play chess with, or to philosophize with.

  He thrust away from him the thought that the third person on Earth might be another woman. It was too dangerous, too explosive a thought. Would he betray Siss for a normal woman? Certainly he would never abandon her, but betrayal was certain—she would be so easy to fool. What form, other than an intellectual one, would it take? Would he take the new woman blatantly as his mate, with a facile explanation to Siss? Would the new one try to banish Siss (he’d never stand for that—would he?), or decree a demeaning role for her in a reorganized household—something he might rationalize himself into accepting? (He could hear the new one saying: “You want our children—Earth’s only children—to be intelligent, don’t you? You don’t want the new world peopled with feeble-minded brats, do you?”)

  His thoughts went back to the possible consequences if a third person were male. Suppose the man were not a chess player? Suppose he were a mere brute, with brutish instincts? Would Martin have to share Siss with him, Eskimo style? Even if he could bring himself (or Siss) to accept such an arrangement, how long could it continue without an explosion?

  No—as long as he was fantasizing it would be simpler to dream up two other people, a man and a woman who had already arranged their own lives, who had made the adjustment.

  Still—how long could two couples—and only two— live side by side without something boiling over? Wife-swapping was too prevalent an institution in the bad old days, when there was all kinds of other entertainment, not to be a daily temptation in an all-but-depopulated world.

  No—it would be best to have no third or fourth person —not unless there could be an infinity of others besides . . .

  Ah, but he was so lonely!

  * * * *

  “I’m going to the city,” he told Siss.

  They had done without the city for a long time. They had made do with the things they had, or could make; they’d let their clothing drop away and hadn’t replaced it; they’d grown their own food; made their country house the center of their universe. But now he wanted to go back.

  She must have seen something in his eyes. “Let me go for you,” she said. “Just tell me what you want.”

  Sometimes she chose such an ironic way of saying things that he fleetingly suspected her of having not only intelligence but wit.

  “Just tell you what I want! As if—” He stopped. As if he could tell her. As if he knew.

  He knew only that he had to get away for a little while. He wanted to be alone, with his own memories of a populated Earth.

  He also wanted a drink.

  Long ago he had made it a rule never to have liquor in the house. It would be too great a temptation to have it handy. He could see himself degenerating into a drunken bum. With an unlimited supply close at hand and a devoted woman to do all the work that needed to be done, he could easily slip into an animalistic role—become a creature with a whiskey-sodden, atrophied brain.

  A fitting father and mother to the world such a pair would be!

  And so he had made his rule: drink all you want when you have to—in the city—but never bring it home.

  And so he had told Siss: “I don’t know what I want, exactly. I just want to go to the city.”

  And she had said: “All right, Mr. Ralph, if you have to.”

  There was her perception again, if that’s what it was. “If you have to,” she’d said, though he’d talked of want, not need.

  “I do,” he said. “But I’ll come back. Is there anything I can bring you?” She looked around the kitchen and began to say something, then stopped and said instead: “Nothing we really need. You just go, Mr. Ralph, and take as long as you have to. It’ll give me a chance to go do that berry-picking I been wanting to.”

  She was so sweet that he almost decided not to go. But then he kissed her—very thankful, just then, that she was his Siss and not some too-bright shrew of a problem wife —and went. He drove in, naked in a Cadillac.

  * * * *

  He had rolled the swivel chair out of the store onto the sidewalk and was sitting in it in the afternoon sunshine. Beside him on the pavement were half a dozen bottles, each uncapped. He was talking to himself.

  “As the afternoon sun, blood-red through the haze of the remnants of a once overpopulated world, imperceptibly glides to its bed, one of the two known survivors becomes quietly plastered.” He had a drink on that, then went on:

  “What thoughts pass through the mind of this pitiful creature, this naked relic of a man left to eke out the rest of his days on a ruined planet?

  “Does he ever recall the glory that once was his and that of his fellows? Or is he so sunk in misery—in the mere scratching of a bare existence from an arid soil— that he has forgotten the heights to which his kind once had risen? Subject pauses in thought and reaches for bottle. Drinks deeply from bottle, but not so deeply as to induce drunken sickenness. Aim of subject is quiet plasterization, happy drunkdom, a nonceness of Nirvana, with harm to none and bitterness never. Sicken drunkenness?

  “A respite of reverie, perhaps, as subject casts mind back to happy past. Mr. Martin Rolfe in Happier Days.”

  He picked up his New York Times Magazine and leafed through it. It was almost as good as having another drink. There they were—they couldn’t have been more than 17 —leaping in their panty girdles to show the freedom of action and the elasticity of the crotch. He remembered once having heard a newsman, waiting in the rain for the arrival of a President, say: “Being a reporter is essentially an undignified occupation.” So had been being a model, obviously.

  Things of the past ... He thought: “A title for my memoirs—Things of the Past.” He took up theTimes again and turned to an ad of a debonair young man in a revolving door holding a copy of the Wall Street Journal. “I dreamt I was trapped in a revolving door in my Arcticweave tropical worsted,” Rolfe said, summing up the situation. He looked like the 28-year-old Larchmont type; five years out of college, with a Master’s, two kids, wife beginning to drink a little bit too much. “If he’s trapped there long enough he may read the paper right through to the shipping pages and ship out to the islands.”

  Rolfe looked pityingly at the trapped Larchmont type, armed against his predicament only with his Arcticweave suit, his Wall Street Journal and, presumably, a wallet full of wife-and-baby pictures, credit cards and a commutation ticket issued by a railroad company petitioning to suspend passenger service.


  “You poor bastard,” Rolfe said.

  Of course he was saying it to himself, too. He said it all the way home: “You poor bastard. You poor bastard.”

  Siss was waiting for him in the cool garden. Gently she led him indoors. She said, with only the slightest hint of reproach (he could stand that much—he deserved more): “You been drinking too much again, Mr. Ralph. You know it’s bad for you.”

  “You’re right, Siss. Absolutely right.”

  “You got to take care of yourself. I try to, but you got to try, too.”

  Tenderly she put him to bed. He knew then, among other times, how much he needed her, and he struggled to say something nice to her before he dropped off to sleep. Finally he said: “You know, Siss, you’re nicer than all those crazy leaping girls in the York Times.” That’s what she called it, the York Times. “You got a lot more sense, too, than they look as if they had.”