“They make really cool spaceships,” said Harry. He sagged to his knees and began to sweep up the broken dishes with his hands. “When you turn the dial, you can pop the pills out like little, uh, hormone bombs. Pow. Pow. An entire population suddenly unable to conceive.”
“Harry,” I said. “Come on upstairs. I’m going to bed now.”
“There’s this way you can make them shoot really far.”
“Leave the mess. Come on.”
I took him by the arm, guided him to the steps, and gave him a little push. He returned the push, more forcefully, and I fell backward. My head cracked against the floor and I heard within my skull the sound of a rock hitting a sheet of taut aluminum. I smelled blood in my nose and I imagined, for a half second, that I was about to pass away. I lived.
“Stay away from her,” he said. “I know what you have in mind.”
It was a while before I was able to speak. “You asshole,” I said. “I don’t have anything in mind.”
This was not, I realized as I said it, entirely true. I had already begun to form vague plans to unbutton Kim’s blouse, remove her cowboy boots, peel off her blue jeans, and lick her body from sole to crown. The pain in my head was all at once as nothing.
“Oh, my God, you’re bleeding, Vince,” said Harry. He extended a hand and then pulled me to my feet. I touched a finger to my nose and smiled at him.
“You just made a big mistake,” I said.
I awoke early that afternoon, showered, and performed my toilet with the care of a man intent on seduction. Kim worked as a waitress at the Squirrel Cage and did not go on until evening, and I expected to find her at home. I had come to believe in my interchangeability with Harry so completely that it did not occur to me that Kim would have any qualms about going to bed with a new partner while still in the midst of a painful breakup; I simply assumed that she would have me, as she would have had Harry, as though he’d called in sick and I were the equally qualified temporary sent by some Kelly Services of love. I had known her as long as he had, and we got along well. She was a thin, raspy-voiced woman with a sarcastic manner, expressive hands, and a respectable knowledge of what is sometimes known as industrial rock — a particular favorite of mine. I had taken her once to see my friend Lee Skirboll perform in a band called Hex Wrench, for which Lee beat on a steel filing cabinet with an assortment of golf clubs and spatulas while his partner sat in on tape deck, amplified shortwave radio, and a bank of old-fashioned Philco sine-wave generators supplied, without his knowing it, by Mr. Levinsky. Kim had enjoyed it, and, I now reminded myself, lathering my chin with increasing zeal, there had been a furtive kiss and hand squeeze in the instant before we’d gone into the bar, where we were rendezvousing with Harry, who liked only Debussy, DeFalla, and Erik Satie.
When I came out to the dining table — the heat was turned off again, and I wore my gloves and a hat — there was a note from Harry propped against the sugar bowl. “SORRY,” it read, “JESUS, WHAT A HEADACHE I HAVE, YOU MUST TOO. SORRY SORRY SORRY. H” As a matter of fact, I had a rather large lump on the back of my head, and a faint sensation of pain if I turned too quickly; otherwise I was all right. Beside the note were looped five dozen yards of very thin telephone wire, in seven colors with contrasting stripes, that Harry had been experimenting with recently for his long-planned masterpiece, Aporia — ran “inverted board game” whose rules changed unpredictably with each roll of the dice but whose outcome was always the same. I sat down with a cup of coffee and idly picked up a length of yellow-and-blue wire. I had grown up in a young community in which there was a continual construction of houses all through my youth, and I remembered finding this kind of wire at the building sites and twisting it into finger rings, single loops of wire — about that wide for Kim’s finger, I guessed — along which you wrapped little coils, like this, pressed together so that in the end each coil made a bead, yellow or blue. After ten minutes’ work I had a handsome piece, the sight of which recalled to me a hopeful love offering of my boyhood that had not been rejected. I slipped it into my pocket and went, almost skipping, out the front door.
It was much warmer outside than inside, and I soon shed my hat and gloves and stuffed them into the pocket of my coat. The sun shone most promisingly, there was a slight gasoline hint of summer traffic in the air, and on the lawn of the Methodist church on the corner I saw blades of early daffodils where a few days before there had been a crust of old snow. A warm breeze blew up along the sidewalk, and it seemed to me I had only to kick twice and thrust upward my chin in order to lift off the pavement and glide, touching down every twenty feet or so, toward the house of my slender love. People in cars had their windows rolled down, and I could hear the airy music from their radios as they passed. Now I unzipped my coat and rocked my head from side to side. The resultant ache was poignant and appropriate. Two elderly men emerged from Isaly’s, both of them biting into the first Klondikes of the season, and I sailed after them along Murray Avenue, listening as they argued about the potential of a good-hitting shortstop the Pirates had decided to promote from the minors. Oh, I thought, it is almost Opening Day!
When I arrived at Kim’s door I found to my surprise that I had lost the better part of my desire to sleep with her. It would be nice to see her, to sit down in her sunny kitchen and look at some absurd daytime program on the television — we had done that many times before — but I was so happy just then, slapping up the concrete steps with my coat flapping behind me and the warmth of my body rising up through my open collar in a fragrant column of air, that I didn’t think anything, not even taking her into my arms, could improve my mood. The sexual act, in prospect, seemed to offer only danger and regret.
I proceeded more cautiously up the three steps of her front porch and across to her front door, and as soon as I rang her doorbell I wished that I had not. I wavered a moment on the welcome mat, then fled back down the steps; but there was no time to get away without being seen. I looked this way, then that, turned back toward the door, turned away. I heard her tread in the hallway, her hand on the knob, and at the last possible moment I ducked between the concrete skirt of the porch and the low hedge of holly that concealed it, crouching in the dirt, in the narrow space between the prickling holly and the house. A thorn scratched my cheek as she opened the door, and it was all I could do to keep from cursing.
There was a long pause during which I had time to realize that I was crouching in a hard pile of snow and my butt was getting very wet. I heard Kim sniffle a few times, as though she were smelling me out, and then a beleaguered sigh.
“You have hat-head, Vince,” she said. “As usual.”
I rose, pulled the hat from my pocket, and put it back on my head. It might have been the hat — perhaps it was enchanted — or simply the sight of Kim in a long cable sweater that sagged at the neck and reached down to the tops of her knees; in any case, as soon as I saw her I wanted her again. Harry was my best friend, but millionaires have squandered their fortunes, and men have lost their minds, and friends have tracked each other down for less than the sight of a lovely woman in nothing but a sweater.
“I slept in my hat,” I said. “As usual. Don’t ever let your life get to the point where you have to sleep with your hat on.”
“Come on in. It’s nice and warm.”
“I know it is.”
I followed her into the house and down her long front hallway to the kitchen, where the radio played and there was a smell of bay leaf, onion, and fresh dirt.