Star Science Fiction 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  Martha: I don’t know. I really don’t know. He said he was going to get me a

  part in his new television play. A part written just for me. He was wonder-fully like you. Don’t die any more, please don’t.

  Phil: It is late, Martha, and I must go. They are getting your lunch ready.

  Halfway decent? What shall I bring you tomorrow? Okay, Martha, it will be marrons glares. So long, Martha.

  * * * *

  She is not a bad girl after all. Simple, forthright, cordial, rather generous by nature, underneath. Out of place in this career. Slithered into it God knows why. What made her act so horridly with Will?

  My Martha was different. Wicked right from the outset. A go-getter. At first she seemed nice enough, though, and active. Pretty tall blond she was.

  Dead. Destroyed. Kaputt. Won’t work no more. Slipped out of my impotent hands. And left a hard hole, hard white hole, superimposing its Martha shape, planing into its contours whoever wants to float up through.

  The other girls at the office didn’t like her, though. Fawning on the boss and bossy on the fawns. (That’s a good one. Must tell Martha. Which Martha?) She cer­tainly knew what she wanted. Spun her web round me in no time. And then the allergies. Never seemed to bother her till she had me. But then! Endless trouble and troubled end.

  * * * *

  Phil: Listen, Martha, what I made up yesterday on my way home: “Fawning on

  the boss and bossy on the fawns.” Isn’t that a good one?

  Martha: Who? What?

  Phil: Any one. I mean, I was thinking of my wife, when she was still

  working at the office. Can you imagine. She wasn’t a bit like you: all cold and calculating.

  Martha: Just the name.

  Phil: That does not create any bond.

  Martha: Maybe it does.

  Phil: There are many Marthas.

  Martha: And one proto-Martha.

  Phil: What difference does it make?

  Martha: There’s something damned about all Marthas.

  Phil: Perhaps.

  Martha: Parents ought to be more careful.

  Phil: It’s their way, their luck, they impress with that chosen name.

  Martha: I wish my name was—I can’t think of a suitable name for myself;

  but imagine if my name was—, everything would have been different. There’s something damned about all Marthas.

  Phil: About mine there was, by Jove. Hell of a life. Martha: What did she

  do to you?

  Phil: The allergies. The air-conditioned rooms and the oxygen tents. The

  fumes and the moves and the fired nurses.

  Martha: if she was sick?

  Phil: I couldn’t accept any invitations for dinner

  Martha: or bring home any guests.

  Phil: She’d be sick, infallibly. She called me at the office and she called

  me at board meetings

  Martha: and woe, if you didn’t get home on time.

  Phil: She made my life utterly impossible.

  Martha: Why didn’t you get rid of her?

  Phil: I did. Divorce, you know, has an ugly ring in the ear of a

  missionary’s son

  Martha: and I think you just wanted it like that. Some people just have to

  have hell at home. You know, Will....

  Phil: Did you run Will like that?

  Martha: I don’t know. I guess I was worried about him be-cause he took to

  drinking so heavily.

  Phil: You canceled his dinner engagements?

  Martha: Because I didn’t want people to see him so drunk.

  Phil: There’s always some because

  Martha: because he put both hands into the salad bowl at the Marchesa

  Marchesani’s

  Phil: if he didn’t do worse than that

  Martha: and he would argue. Did he argue, with Dermott, when they both

  were drunk? He was quite un­bearable.

  Phil: What did they argue about?

  Martha: Politics, lots of it. Imperialism. Socialism, and all the rest.

  Phil: Well. I know where Dermott stands on all those things

  Martha: and you can imagine what happened when Will said the Indians

  were inferior.

  Phil: Did he say that?

  Martha: And the children there get blind because they are too lazy to drive

  the flies off their eyes. He said they just sit there and let the flies eat their eyes.

  Phil: Maybe it’s true. I heard it too.

  Martha: You know, he lived with them, street urchins, for years, after he got

  lost during the earthquake —a girl named Maharata picked him up and mothered him as best she could—and he said, if he didn’t turn out to be a mess like them it was because he had the stuff it takes to be a man.

  Phil: it’s the same stuff I am made of. I can assure you.

  Martha: It hasn’t got anything to do with the “social order” he said. And the

  British officers in India did a wonderful job

  Phil: they tried to bring the natives up to their stand­ards: didn’t he say

  that?

  Martha: Why, they even left their personal silver to the Indian Officers

  Mess, when they quit, just to show them

  Phil: that was undoubtedly generous on their part.

  Martha: But the Labour Government was terrible

  Phil: that wasn’t exactly what Dermott thought.

  Martha: But Will, he turned literally green when you as much as mentioned

  one of them. Which, after all, is rather strange because he knew nothing about politics in the first place.

  Phil: What did he think was wrong?

  Martha: The way they betrayed the Empire, he said, was terrible and they

  killed initiative at home and produced soft characters, whereas, what you need to get along is to be tough, he said

  Phil: come to think about it, that’s just the way I used to feel

  Martha: you’ve got to be tough

  Phil: it was because I was so tough that I became president of the Morris

  Trust Co. at thirty years of age

  Martha: you thought the real way to start a business was to sell apples from

  an apple cart

  Phil: I even tried to write a book about these things, you know, how

  tough and self-made you’ve got to be

  Martha: and that the New Deal was terrible

  Phil: and that the government should keep off my affairs and yours

  Martha: and stuff like that.

  Phil: It was to be called: Keep Going West, Young Man, but I guess it was

  so badly written no one wanted to publish it, thank goodness.

  Martha: Why did you change your mind about these things?

  Phil: it’s all stuff and nonsense: I and I and I. Did you ever hear about a

  fellow named Plato?

  Martha: Vaguely.

  Phil: My favored author at the Great Books class.

  Martha: Your mind is wandering, Phil.

  Phil: At the beginning, he said, there were neither men nor women

  Martha: but some kind of funny beings

  Phil: male and female at once.

  Martha: I guess they must have had four arms

  Phil: and four legs and so on

  Martha: I wonder whether they were happy that way

  Phil: until, one day, a certain rude deity split them asunder

  Martha: severing boy and girl

  Phil: and they have been looking for one another ever since.

  Martha: What are you driving at, Phil?

  Phil: It’s the story of Will and me.

  Martha: Split asunder, one day, by a certain rude deity?

  Phil: A quirk of fate.

  Martha: You should have been one, are one. Don’t die any more, please don’t

  die again.

  Phil: One case of 86 works out like that: Twins. One out of ev
ery 862,

  makes triplets; one of every 863, quadruplets. The dickens knows why. But that’s the way it is

  Martha: and it had to be you

  Phil: or else it might have been one of 87

  Martha: the law upset

  Phil: a false interval, a dissonant chord: it hurts my ear to think of it

  Martha: it could not happen

  Phil: the name of the new Platonic God is Statistics.

  Martha: You are mad, Phil,

  Phil: and all that he-man stuff just to hide the half-man, you know

  Martha: and you were lonely and little and scared under­neath.

  It had gotten dark in the room.

  * * * *

  “Martha, dear, Doctor Rosselli says the trial has been set for a month from now. He is very confident it will go all right. He says he can drop the plea for temporary insanity—your nervous breakdown came after the fact—and base your case on self-defense. Accidental killing in self-defense. He says the only trouble is that there are no witnesses, and the fact that you were doped, but he hopes to get around that. But now you should tell me everything. The whole story. That may be very, very helpful. Are you strong enough to tell me everything?”

  “I’ll try. But it’s a long story. I’ll try to piece it to­gether. Well, Will was getting worse all the time. He drank terribly. For a certain time, he grew a beard, and he was wearing dark glasses. The light hurt his eyes, he said. What are you fumbling with in your pocket. Now look there, for God’s sake, dark glasses! You too! He looked terribly sick. I wanted to take him to a doctor, but he said he knew I wanted to murder him. He said that all the time. He whispered it into my ear at night. He devel­oped the strangest notions.”

  “What notions?”

  “For awhile he always thought that he ... stank. That was before he grew the beard. Later he didn’t care any more. At that time, he would constantly change his underwear, order that it be boiled, sniff at his shirts and jackets and pillow cases. He would constantly get new mouth waters and tooth pastes. When there was some bad smell somewhere—for instance, at the post office—he would say with a very loud voice, the puzzo, what a stink! And everybody would look at him—which is just what he wanted—for he wanted them all to know that it wasn’t he. At the restaurant he would order the waiter to open the windows—I smell the smell of sour feet, he would an­nounce—and when the lady at the next table protested against the draught, he said, Lady, if I were in your shoes --and I mean what 1 say, he added—1 would not pro-test against a little fresh air. But some people don’t seem to notice when they ... because the smell goes away: it doesn’t go up into your own nose. He had often noticed that, he said. It was quite embarrassing.”

  “What’s there to giggle about, Martha? Poor Will.”

  “And when I opened the door to his room, he said, why don’t you come in, does it stink here? But, as I said, it got worse and worse. He stayed up all night, trying to work. And then he would sleep for days on end. He hollered at me, even when there were other people, and he threw things at me. The telephone. He kept it unplugged most of the time. And if I forgot to unplug it and it rang, he picked it up and cooed `googlegooglegoo’ into it, and then he hit me over the head with it.”

  “He would go to any length to get you to be what you were not.”

  “Well, I guess, I got mean too. It’s contagious, you know. I smashed his bottles, and then I watched him lapping the whiskey off the ground.”

  “How ghastly, Martha.”

  “And then came the affair with Freddy. And that was the end.”

  “What do you mean, affair?”

  “I mean I had an affair with Freddy.”

  “Didn’t you say you couldn’t stand him?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. But first I must tell you about Licky. Poor Licky. She was so cute.”

  “Who was Licky?”

  “A little Dalmatian. The cutest dog you ever saw. Dermott’s wedding present. Well, Licky was in heat. And we kept her locked up in my bedroom. She could open all the doors, if you didn’t lock them with the key. She was so smart. And I would take her down, three, four times a day, on the leash, of course, and never letting go of her for a minute. When she was in her third week—which is, of course, the worst possible moment—I came home one evening and saw Licky, loose, racing around like crazy, panting, her tongue out, and Will, going his way as if there was nothing to it. I said, for Christ’s sake, Will, are you out of your mind? He said—he was so drunk—now don’t start fussing. The mutt got her too, I saw it, he said, but so what. To hell with it all. I’ll fix her up, he said. Don’t start fussing. Then he got a shot from the vet—Ergotinina —I guess he gave it the wrong way, or, at any rate, much too much of it—he should have given her 3 cc and he gave her about 10—and poor Licky, her heart was not strong ever since she had had distemper. What we went through with that dog, sitting up days and nights, and I won’t tell you what we spent on medicines and vet bills —that distemper had left her with a weak heart. And, what with that wrong shot, she beastly died.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “I am telling you all that, because he did exactly the same thing to me. He practically arranged it. He always managed to get the two of us together.”

  “But why?”

  “I guess it wasn’t enough for him to have taken me away from Derrnott. He wanted to take away Freddy too.”

  “Sheer wickedness.”

  “And jealousy. Anyway. One evening Dermott and Freddy came over, and Will said, and he was all dressed up, even with a hat, he said, Dermott and he had to go to a PEN Club meeting which was terribly important. He said he was arranging for some sumptuous prize to be awarded to Dermott—but Freddy and I couldn’t come along, he said, because we were not members, and we should wait at home, and there was a new bottle of Scotch, and we should play some records. After we were half through with the Scotch, I assure you I felt so bored and so drunk, and there was nothing we had to say to each other, and I guess so I started making love to Freddy. Freddy was puzzled; he’d never done it with a girl before. But before we knew it.”

  “Goodness gracious.”

  “When we found out that I was pregnant, Will got so disgusting it’s hard to describe. You know, he didn’t get angry or passionate about it, just cold and cynical. Quite disgusting. He said, either you pull out of here or 1’ll see to it that you get fixed up all right. He said he didn’t want a child of Freddy’s in his house. As a matter of fact he didn’t want any child at all. I felt so sick and nauseated I told him it was all the same to me, just so long as he took care of everything. And he did. But I kept having pains afterwards, and then he would get me dope but I felt just terrible, terrible. And that Sicilian woman who came in to clean up, she knew all about it. She was tiny and black and her eyes stung. I still hear the click of her clogs and she kept hissing at me ammazzalo, you should kill him.”

  “Sicilians are quick at that.”

  “Between Will’s own obessions and that Sicilian’s con­stant whispers I gradually got quite used to the idea.” “Did you really want to kill him?”

  “I guess I did not really want anything at all. One evening I said I wished I had died like Licky. And he said: But Licky was a good bitch. At that moment I picked up that pistol from his desk—I was sitting near his desk—and pointed it at him. I did not know whether it was loaded, and I don’t know how to fire a gun anyway. I just kept pointing it at him. And he grabbed a hunting knife and leapt forward and spat like a cat: So you are going to kill me, no, you aren’t. And he smiled. Now I don’t understand whether it was because he wasn’t as tough as he thought he was, or because he had the knife in his right hand—you know, he was left-handed—at any rate, I dropped the pistol and tried to wrestle the knife from him. He was so awkward and so weak, come to think of it, he practically slashed his cheek—the left one—with his own hand, and then the knife slipped and stuck in his left arm. He yelled and stepped back to pull it out and I picked
up the pistol again and pointed it against him, just in case he attacked again. But, I don’t know how, the pistol fired. And that was the end.”

  “Oh, Martha, poor poor girl. Don’t cry now. It is all too terrible for words. It is even more terrible than you think it is. But now it’s all over. Poor, poor Martha, it is not your fault, and it will be plain for every one to see. Look at the scar on my cheek . . . right check ... my right arm was badly mangled too. You asked me the first day what it was. Now I’ll tell you. It’s weird. Martha, my wife, she got pregnant too. But she did not want it at all. If you want to breast-feed him you can have him, she said to me. Her lips were pale, her cheeks drawn, her eyes shot venom.”