“The view was spectacular,” answered Patsy, chewing on a cuticle.
“I went to see the Incubator babies,” said Shirley. “I cried. Everyone around me was wiping their eyes with handkerchiefs. The guide said that the survival rate for these itty-bitty babies is very high. It’s a miracle of science. Forget your television and your what-have-you, this is technology that makes a difference. One of the babies weighed less than twenty-four ounces. Can you imagine?”
Norman shook his head. “Patsy and I are having an affair. What’s more, we have no desire to end it.”
John stood up. It was a sudden move, and his chair nearly tipped over backward. “What the hell are you saying, Pomeroy?”
“Sit down, John,” said Patsy. “Don’t make a scene.”
John sat down.
Patsy took her husband’s hand and spoke in a dulcet tone, after detaching a large crumb of glazed doughnut from the corner of her mouth with her blood-red-polished fingernail. “Neither of us wants a divorce. We are both quite happy with our marriages and all of our lovely children.”
The lovely children were promised a visit to the fair in the company of their parents next month. But this particular trip was just for their parents. There was to be dancing and drinking and Sally Rand and her naughty feathers. The two couples were slightly more sophisticated than most of the other couples of Kenosha, Wisconsin. The question, however, was whether this level of sophistication extended to the concept of companionate marriage.
John removed his hand from his wife’s grip. “You’re asking Shirley and me if we will allow the two of you to sleep with one another right under our noses.”
Norman nodded. He dunked his doughnut with a nonchalant flick of the wrist and then took a sloppy bite.
Now Shirley spoke. She was upset. When Shirley got upset, her voice jumped into a high register like that of a beset schoolteacher. “If you don’t love me, Norman, why don’t you simply ask for a divorce? I’ll take the children and we’ll go to Reno.”
“Because I don’t want a divorce. I want to stay married to you. I still love you, Shirley. But there’s someone else I love as well.”
Shirley began to cry. She pulled out the handkerchief that was already damp from seeing the squirming preemie babies.
“You think I’m that evolved, Norman?” she asked between sniffles.
“We’re not evolved at all,” added John. “We’re like those dinosaurs out there. I’m a Sinclair brontosaurus. I’m not a mastodon.”
“I cannot believe you would do this here at the fair,” said Shirley to her husband Norman. “When we were all having so much fun. Why didn’t you wait until we got back home?”
“Because we can’t live the lie another minute,” said Patsy without much animation.
“We’ve been wanting to level with you two for some time,” said Norman.
“Would you like some more coffee?” asked the waitress. She wore a spiffy little felt hat that had the words “Mayflower Doughnut Restaurant” stitched on it.
John did not even wait until the waitress had left with her coffee pot to say that he and Shirley had already suspected the affair. They weren’t born yesterday, or in the Pleistocene epoch, for that matter.
Shirley nodded. Then she tightened her brow and said to her husband and her best friend, “I had hoped that your rocket car would come loose and the two of you would plummet to your deaths.”
The third conversation of the day took place between Shirley and John in the McKaycraft Lounge. The McKay Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, made spring-action, chromium-plated metal furniture for porch, lawn, and solarium. Shirley and John sat on a glider and drank from bottles of Coca-Cola. Next to them a woman spoke to her friend in a muted voice about a woman she had met in the Kraft Mayonnaise Kitchen in the Foods Building, who had just the night before dipped her dress in the blood of John Dillinger as he lay dying on the sidewalk in front of the Biograph Theatre. “Everybody was dipping something into that puddle of blood,” said the woman with squeamish delight. “And the G-men were letting them do it. Like the ‘G’ in G-man stood for ‘Go right ahead and get your liquid souvenir.’”
Shirley held her handkerchief to her mouth as if she might throw up a little. Then she turned to John and said, “I didn’t see this coming. I knew all about the affair. I know you did, too. But I thought that it would either run its course or they would come to their senses. At the very worst, I thought they’d come to us asking for divorces. But this.” Shirley shook her head, her hands poised limply in the air.
A smartly dressed woman with fashionably large epaulettes and a disc hat that clung to the side of her head as if it were glued on came up and asked if Shirley and her “husband” would like to know about some of the features of the McKaycraft porch furniture.
John shook his head politely. “It’s very chic, though. Very moderne. And comfortable, too.”
“Take this brochure with you,” the woman said. “Thank you for visiting the lounge.”
After she moved away, John looked at Shirley and said, “You want to fuck each other?”
Shirley stared at John. It took a full fifteen seconds for her to reply, “I’m not attracted to you.”
“Really? Not even a little bit? I give a damned good foot massage. Dr. Scholl taught me.”
Shirley swallowed and then put her hand to her throat as if it were tightening up.
“Well, I thought I’d ask. We both seem to be in companionate marriages now.”
“Yours may be like that, John. Mine isn’t. I wasn’t brought up that way.”
“So what do we do now?” John pulled a chrome-plated ashtray stand over to his side of the glider and lit up.
Shirley shook her head wearily. Then she let her chin fall, the tears flowing freely.
“We should really just, you know, go somewhere and fuck,” said John “You and me. That’ll show ’em.”
Shirley stood up. She had forgotten that there was a purse in her lap, and when her lap disappeared, the purse tumbled to the floor and everything spilled out of it. She got down on her hands and knees and began scooping everything up. A woman came over to help and Shirley waved her away with her compact. John crouched down next to her.
“This is happening to me too, you know.”
“It all seems like one big joke to you.”
“It isn’t. I don’t know what to do, either.”
“I can’t find my lipstick.”
“Here it is.” John handed Shirley the lipstick, which had rolled under the glider.
“I can’t go back to the Blackstone. I can’t face him. The two of us alone in that hotel room. I just can’t do it.”
“Then let’s not go back. Let’s not meet them at the Midget Village. Let’s make them worry about us. Do they think of us? Have they thought of us at all?”
Shirley shook her head. John helped her to her feet. “Take me to Italy,” she said. “Then I want to go to Belgium. Norman says the Belgian village looks just like the one he visited during the war.”
John nodded.
“Did you know that Patsy wasn’t visiting her mother last year? Did you know she was here with Norman?”
John nodded.
“Were you never going to say anything to me?”
“What could I have said?”
Shirley brushed the dust from her hands. “This means the affair has been going on for over a year.”
“Maybe two.”
John took Shirley’s hand. He led her out of the McKaycraft Lounge.
The fourth conversation of the day took place on a bench in Midget Village. Nearby, two Little People — both middle-aged men — were shaking their tiny fists at one another over some small thing that one had allegedly done to assault the dignity of the other. It was of no large concern to Norman and Patsy, just slightly annoying.