Small world, p.8
Small World, page 8
‘Why not?’ she persisted. Her cigarette was getting the shit ground out of it in the ashtray.
‘Because I can’t.’
‘Oh. You’re sure?’
it’s much too complicated. There’s probably only two or three people in the whole world capable of understanding how it works, assuming they had the proper theoretical information. And me, of course, and I’m not too sure myself sometimes that I’ve got it right.’
Roger felt the pack of Winstons carefully. She was going through them fast. He hesitated, then offered it to her again.
‘I think I understand what you’re saying,’ she said slowly. She lit up again, taking the match from his hand. ‘Can’t you tell me a little of the theory. I’ll try hard not to be stupid.’ She smiled dazzlingly.
It didn’t matter if he did tell her, he knew. She couldn’t do anything with it.
He sat down in the chair opposite hers.
‘You sure?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Her eyes all bright and eager.
He thought for a minute and then plunged.
‘Well, when I was a little kid, I used to think the world was run by buttons. I suppose I heard people talking about pushing The Button and just figured if there was a button that could destroy the world, then there must be other buttons. Maybe even buttons that ran people. It’s crazy, but I really thought everything that happened, happened because someone, somewhere, pushed a button. Some adult. I used to go around feeling under chair arms and things, looking for the buttons.
it really worried me. I didn’t know how you were supposed to know which button did what. I was afraid I might accidentally hit one, maybe the button, and, whoosh, there goes the world, down the hopper. Or the one that would kill my mother.
‘Probably it seems like a silly story to you.’
She looked puzzled but was still listening.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘in the course of the research I was doing for the project, I found out that my crazy kid idea was right. I found one of the buttons. Yeah, there really are buttons.’
He was wet with sweat but somehow relieved, as if he had confessed some childhood transgression to his mother. Someone else knew, now.
‘Someday,’ he mused, ‘when I get enough money, I’m going to look for the other buttons.’
The lady’s cigarette had gone dead between her fingers. Her mouth was a little open, the tip of her tongue slipping nervously along the inside margin of her upper lip. She cleared her throat.
‘But you can control it effectively?’
Roger nodded. He leaned forward, his hands clasped on
hisknees. ‘You mean, can I shrink what I want as much as I want?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Sure,’ Roger said casually. He gestured to the painting and the car, sitting on the table between them. ‘You want either of these things? I have to make back my investment.’
She started, apparently thinking about something else. She sat a little straighter, and sucked in a long, shaky breath.
‘I have no use for the car. My dollhouses are period pieces, you know. It wouldn’t do to have anachronisms in them. None of them even has a garage.’
That was fine with Roger. He had a soft spot for the little car. It was a good-luck charm. It had been luck that he wandered into that shopping center just as the old cock walked away from his gorgeous racer. It had been luck to have the minimizer with him. He couldn’t question, whenever he held it in his hand, that in some fundamental, mysterious way, his luck had changed.
‘The painting,’ she paused delicately, ‘well, I can’t hang it in one of the dollhouses, now, can I?’
Not good news, but Roger understood. He was prepared to write it off. How was he supposed to know stuff like that? It seemed this business was a little more complicated that he had figured. But at least he had proved to the lady that he could produce a better miniature anything than her daughter-in-law.
‘Still,’ she continued, startling him, i’ll take the painting. It has associations for me. And I suppose I could hang it privately.’
Roger clapped his hands. ‘Great.’
She fondled her cigarette and smiled at him. Then she socked him again. ‘I don’t suppose you’d let me buy the device from you?’ she asked lightly.
Roger was stunned to silence. He glanced nervously at the closet and then reddened when he realized she’d seen him look. Now her smile said she shared his secret. He felt panicky.
‘No,’ he blurted. ‘No.’
‘Just thought I’d ask,’ she said soothingly. ‘But we’ll have to work out financial arrangements and what exactly I will be buying.’ She relaxed into her chair.
‘Sure. ’ He was willing and eager to get down to brass tacks. And change the subject.
She looked at her wrist watch and frowned, it’s getting on. Perhaps the best course of action would be for you to come to my apartment and see the dollhouses I have there. Unfortunately, my best one isn’t there right now.' She smiled apologetically. ‘We can talk more comfortably there. Have dinner. I can teach you a lot about miniatures.’
Roger’s heartbeat bounded. She was right. And he’d never had dinner with a beautiful woman in a fancy apartment before. It was not an experience he was going to pass up. She was still beaming at him, as if she wanted to pat him on the head.
Almost without being aware of it, he went to the closet and retrieved the minimizer from the closet.
‘Might want to take some pictures, for reference,’ he mumbled.
She stood up and slipped her hand around his left arm. Roger breathed heavenly air. He allowed himself to be led away.
Dorothy Hardesty Douglas lived in one of those glass towers. Roger wondered, staring up at it as they passed it on the street below, how much window washers were paid for a job like that.
They entered through an underground garage packed like a box of Christmas ornaments with Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls-Royces, and a sprinkling of yet more expensive and exotic vehicles. Roger could imagine the lot of them shrunk to matchbox size and tucked neatly into a shoebox. The place smelled like a garage and looked like a garage, but it summoned for Roger memories of celebrity funerals at Forest Lawn, when there were lines of dinosaur cars like these, rolling slowly by, as if to some nearby tar pit.
A pair of security guards watched a short, glossy lobby that led to elevators. The guards were courteous but not what Roger would call warm. They looked about eight feet tall. Their eyes passed over Roger, seeing him and not seeing him, like the klieg lights in prison movies. Or perhaps more like X rays, looking for malignancies, but not much interested in recording the presence of healthy tissue.
The elevator was empty but for Roger and the lady. It carried a perpetual passenger, a rubber plant in a glass booth. The plant looked healthy enough, but Roger thought it must be boring, riding up and down in that glass booth day in and day out. Better the rubber plant than Roger.
The lady did not seem to be in a communicative mood. In fact, she was about as stiff as the rubber plant. Roger examined the control panel, the only other thing to look at besides the plant and his withdrawn companion. One button indicated the building had its own swimming pool and some kind of health club.
Rich people lived different from regular people, that was something Roger knew. They owned apartments instead of renting them, and had these little private clubs together. They must feel safer in gangs.
The lady’s apartment was impressive. It wasn’t what his mother would call cozy. It was . . . glamorous. About what he’d expect his fairy godmother to live in. The colors were all shimmery.
A doughy-looking woman in a charcoal-gray uniform appeared and Mrs. Douglas instructed her to fetch Roger a beer. Then she excused herself and disappeared on the heels of the maid. Nobody told Roger to go sit in the kitchen, so he sat down. He presumed the lady wanted to fix her face, not that it didn’t look fine to him, or visit the can, or something private like that. He savored the luxury around him. A maid, for Christ’s sake.
Wallowing in the pale blue sofa, he studied the picture over the fireplace. He recognized the woman, Elizabeth Payne Hardesty, the lady’s mother, may she rest in peace, and probably a saint by now, considering who she married. Roger struggled to summon up a faint, ghostly memory of a ceaselessly, painfully, smiling woman trailing around after the old toad, Mike Hardesty. He didn’t recall her as being as beautiful as the picture painted her, but then he’d been just a kid. It was a funny painting; just the woman’s head and shoulders, life size, with hardly a brushstroke visible. The colors were translucent, filmed over the canvas. It gave Roger the spooks.
He hauled himself out of the sweet embrace of the sofa and looked out a big window at the city, spread out like a canival midway, far below him.
The maid came back with his beer, poured into a glass and presented on a silver tray. She looked down her nose at him. He ignored her and took the beer. It didn’t taste American, but it was beer okay. He sipped it happily, reflecting happily that the maid could sneer all she wanted. She was serving the beer; he was drinking it.
The lady returned, dressed in different clothes. She had swapped her tailored suit for some funny material that Roger could only fumble to name, a shimmery loose thing that sort of went with the room. She asked if the beer was acceptable and offered him a cigarette, out of a little silver box shaped like a vampire’s coffin. Roger was amused; someone’s little joke about coffin nails. He was also relieved. He was running low. supplying her with his butts. Politely, he accepted one but he didn’t figure he would ever catch up with her.
They didn’t talk much for a while. He finished his beer and she did in another cigarette and there they were.
‘Would you like to see the dollhouses?’ she asked.
He jumped up, relieved. ‘That’s what I’m here for, ma’am.’
‘I wish the Doll’s White House was here,’ she fussed, leading the way.
It wasn’t as big a room as the living room. There was a whole wall of glass and no conventional furniture at all. Two large dollhouses on what appeared to be specially constructed tables filled two corners. A half dozen boxes containing single suites of furnishings hung on the walls. The middle of the room was dominated by a great empty plain of a table.
Dorothy Hardesty Douglas skirted the empty table, avoiding even looking at it.
‘This is the Gingerbread Dollhouse.’ She touched the roof on her left gently, and then gestured, like a stewardess pointing out the exits, across the room. ‘That is the Glass Dollhouse.’
The Gingerbread House was a re-creation of one of Roger’s favorite fairy tales. Each Christmas, he ordered a gingerbread house, usually faked from plastic or cardboard with a little edible trim, from one of the catalogs that peddled cheese and smoked sausages. It was supposed to be his contribution to the Christmas decorations, but he often left it sitting on the coffee table until Easter.
This was the best he’d ever seen. Even the ones blueprinted in his mother’s women’s magazines didn’t come near it. It was about four feet high and constructed of wood that had been painted to resemble gingerbread, frosting, and candy. The trim seemed to have been molded or carved into the most pleasing and whimsical arrangement of candy canes, gum drops, and assorted other goodies.
There was a cage suspended near the hearth. Roger was delighted to see the little wooden boy inside, a fair-haired kid in shorts and a hand-knitted sweater, a little ragged at the elbows. His little cheeks were flushed with the mock fire in the fireplace nearby and his eyes glittered, with the reflected fire, or with terror. A girl was chained to a table leg and sat cross-legged and morose on the stone-flagged floor.
The witch was not at home, in any of the four rooms, up or down. Not in the low attic of the cottage, hung with arcane herbs and lined with colored glass bottles of unidentified substances, or in the bedroom where black robes and pointed hats hung on pegs, and the four-poster’s canopy was woven with the night sky. Nor in the kitchen, where the children waited, with plates of cookies near at hand, fresh from the brick oven alongside the open hearth. Nor in the smaller room, for which Roger had no name, where the floor was drawn with mystic patterns, and there were no
furnishings, except a cheval mirror.
Roger loved it. He loved the bundle of faggots on the hearth, within reach of little Gretel, and the cauldron hanging on the spit, and the table set for one, with the wicked-looking knife plunged into the carving board.
‘Wow,’ he said simply. Dorothy Hardesty Douglas accepted the compliment gravely.
The Glass Dollhouse was more like a sculpture than any house Roger had ever known or imagined. It was like origami, all angles, facets, and sides and shadows of itself, only transparent. Roger was bemused to see that it was empty, unfurnished, undecorated. Just itself, playing abstract games with light.
The woman laughed at his transparent puzzlement.
‘Who could live here?’ he blurted.
She nodded. This man had a knack for the central questions, the bottom line, in the current cliche. No doubt it was one of the characteristics that made him such an extraordinary scientist or inventor or whatever he was. She shook her head as if to clear away a sudden puff of smoke. It was all unbelievable. But she had seen the painting. She had no doubt of what it was.
‘Well,’ she said in a teasing drawl, ‘I can think of two sorts of individuals who might live in this house.’
Roger studied the house. He couldn’t imagine living in it himself. No Fortress of Solitude, no solid-walled bathroom.
‘Ghosts or flashers.’ Mrs. Douglas grinned. They laughed, united in a larger joke.
The Glass Dollhouse was like modern art to Roger, mostly incomprehensible. He preferred the Gingerbread House, the sticky seductive trap for children, a house where devilment dwelled. It whetted his desire to examine this other dollhouse, the miniature White House.
She led him away again, this time to dinner. It was a scanty feast by Roger’s standards: too many raw vegetables, thin little pancakes of no substance filled with seafood in a sauce, and not a plate of bread or rolls to be seen. There was at least beer for Roger, and a bottle of French wine for the lady.
Roger did most of the eating, and Mrs. Douglas, beginning with ‘Call me Dolly, darling,’ did most of the talking, and a lot of wine-drinking. Roger himself had no taste for wine at all. He associated it with the sourest of vomit and the foulest of hangovers in his college days, and, at the other end of the spectrum, with food snobs.
He was happy to listen, while sponging up the available food and knocking down beer from a glass that seemed to have no bottom. She talked well, this fine-boned, porcelain-skinned lady he was now free to call Dolly. It wasn’t at all like listening to his mother. She knew a lot about dollhouses and miniatures and she was making that information available to him. He recognized a seminar when he heard one, even if this one had fancy restaurant-style grub, Dutch beer, and French wine laid on. When the meal was over, he knew what Dorothy Hardesty Douglas wanted for her Doll’s White House.
They left the table, when he allowed he didn’t want any coffee, tea, or dessert, and he would be very happy if he had just a few more beers within reach. He felt comfortable asking for them, buoyed on what he had already consumed, and since she took the remnants of the wine with her. He heard her tell the maid to clear up and out as he shambled back to the living room. There was a pleasant buzz in his ears. He felt so good, he just glowed.
i’ve got to see this Doll’s White House,’ he told her, when she joined him.
'You will,'she promised.
Roger liked that cozy future tense. It would be nice to see something more of this warm, elegant woman. A pleasure for his eyes and nose. It was incredible to think she was old enough to have had a son who if he’d lived would have been less than five years younger than himself; that she had grandchildren. Bluntly, she was old enough to be his mom, had she gotten a precocious start. He wondered foggily if he should bring up money again, and then it went right out of his mind.
Dolly was suddenly sitting a lot closer to him than he’d realized. Had he moved or had she? She sighed in a contented, cat-by-the-fire way, and leaned against him, batting her silvery eyelashes at him.
At once, Roger’s hands and armpits were nearly as wet as the rock that Moses smote. He slipped one arm around her gingerly, and waited for her to crack him one across the face, or jam her wine glass up his nose, or possibly drive a fist into his crotch. She just cuddled closer and giggled, to his complete astonishment. He closed his eyes. It couldn’t possibly be this easy. He and/or she must be drunker than he thought. Surely now the phone would peal obscenely, like the stroke of midnight, and his mother would turn him back into a pumpkin with one searing scold. But she couldn’t; she didn’t know he was here, did she?
He moved his hands through the shimmery stuff of Dolly’s gown and shivered all over. His throat went dry and he wanted, desperately, another beer. He couldn’t figure out how to extricate himself to grab one of the enticing bottles on the tray. She was positively mewing now, rubbing along his thigh and torso.
Black panic descended on him like a hangman’s hood. He told himself to open his eyes; if she were still there and he wasn’t stiffening embarrassingly against the sofa pillows or her fat maid, he would believe what was happening to him.
Since she had knocked at his door, he had had the sensation of walking the rim of a maelstrom. He was out of his native element, walking a razor’s edge, risking everything from one moment to the next. Now the silken rush of her dress caught at him, caught him, it seemed, feet first, and he felt himself slipping, letting her catch him up in her own churning, centrifugal power. Into the whirlpool, he slipped, into the eye of the hurricane, into the tornado, with a woman named Dorothy.
Sex was not as he had ever imagined it. It was less and it was more, like a whole cheesecake eaten in a frenzy. How long had he persuaded himself that there could be only marginal differences between what a person got out of making love to another person, and what they got out of making love to their own good fist? Another theory disproved. But he discovered something much more important. Another button.
