It

Stan shook his head at her, and then smiled a bit at something the voice on the phone was saying. 'You . . . you! Well, I'll be goddamned! Mike! How did y — '

He fell silent again, listening. As his smile faded she recognized — or thought she did — hi s analytic expression, the one which said someone was unfolding a problem or explaining a sudden change in an ongoing situation or telling him something strange and interesting. This last was probably the case, she gathered. A new client? An old friend? Perhaps. She turned her attention back to the TV, where a woman was flinging her arms around Richard Dawson and kissing him madly. She thought that Richard Dawson must get kissed even more than the Blarney stone. She also thought she wouldn't mind kissing him herself.

As she began searching for a black button to match the ones on Stanley's blue denim shirt, Patty was vaguely aware that the conversation was settling into a smoother groove — Stanley grunted occasionally, and once he asked: 'Are you sure, Mike?' Finally, after a very long pause, he said, 'All right, I understand. Yes, I . . . Yes. Yes, everything. I have the picture. I . . . what? . . . No, I can't absolutely promise that, but I'll consider it carefully. You know that . . . oh? . . . He did? . . . Well, you bet! Of course I do. Yes . . . sure . . . thank you . . . yes. Bye –bye.' He hung up.

Patty glanced at him and saw him staring blankly into space over the TV set. On her show, the audience was applauding the Ryan family, which had just scored two hundred and eighty points, most of them by guessing that the audience survey would answer 'math' in response to the question 'What class will people say Junior hates most in school?' The Ryans were jumping up and down and screaming joyfully. Stanley, however, was frowning. She would later tell her parents she thought Stanley's face had looked a little off-color, and so she did, but she neglected to tell them she had dismissed it at the time as only a trick of the table –lamp, with its green glass shade.

'Who was that, Stan?'

'Hmmmm?' He looked around at her. She thought the look on his face was one of gentle abstraction, perhaps mixed with minor annoyance. It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black.

'Who was that on the phone?'

'No one,' he said. 'No one, really. I think I'll take a bath.' He stood up.

'What, at seven o'clock?'

He didn't answer, only left the room. She might have asked him if something was wrong, might even have gone after him and asked him if he was sick to his stomach — he was sexually uninhibited, but he could be oddly prim about other things, and it wouldn't be at all unlike him to say he was going to take a bath when what he really had to do was whoops something which hadn't agreed with him. But now a new family, the Piscapos, were bein g introduced, and Patty just knew Richard Dawson would find something funny to say about that name, and besides, she was having the devil's own time finding a black button, although she knew there were loads of them in the button box. They hid, of course; that was the only explanation . . .

So she let him go and did not think of him again until the credit-crawl, when she looked up and saw his empty chair. She had heard the water running into the tub upstairs and had heard it stop five or ten minutes later . . . but now she realized she had never heard the fridge door open and close, and that meant he was up there without a can of beer. Someone had called him up and dropped a big fat problem in his lap, and had she offered him a single word of commiseration? No. Tried to draw him out a little about it? No. Even noticed that something was wrong? For the third time, no. All because of that stupid TV show — she couldn't even really blame the buttons; they were only an excuse.

Okay — she'd take him up a can of Dixie, and sit beside him on the edge of the tub, scrub his back, play Geisha and wash his hair if he wanted her to, and find out just what the problem was . . . or who it was.

She got a can of beer out of the fridge and went upstairs with it. Th e first real disquiet stirred in her when she saw that the bathroom door was shut. Not just part-way closed but shut tight. Stanley never closed the door when he was taking a bath. It was something of a joke between them — the closed door meant he was doing something his mother had taught him, the open door meant he would not be averse to doing something the teaching of which his mother had quite properly left to others.

Patty tapped on the door with her nails, suddenly aware, too aware, of the reptilian clicking sound they made on the wood. And surely tapping on the bathroom door, knocking like a guest, was something she had never done before in her married life — not here, not on any other door in the house.

The disquiet suddenly grew strong in her, and she thought of Carson Lake, where she had gone swimming often as a girl. By the first of August the lake was as warm as a tub . . . but then you'd hit a cold pocket that would shiver you with surprise and delight. One minute you were warm; the next moment it felt as if the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees below your hips. Minus the delight, that was how she felt now — as if she had just struck a cold pocket. Only this cold pocket was not below her hips, chilling her long teenager's legs in the black depths of Carson Lake.

This one was around her heart.

'Stanley? Stan?'

This time she did more than tap with her nails. She rapped on the door. When there was still no answer, she hammered on it.

'Stanley?'

Her heart. Her heart wasn't in her chest anymore. It was beating in her throat, making it hard to breathe.

'Stanley!'

In the silence following her shout (and just the sound of herself shouting up here, less than thirty feet from the place where she laid her head down a nd went to sleep each night, frightened her even more), she heard a sound which brought panic up from the belowstairs part of her mind like an unwelcome guest. Such a small sound, really. It was only the sound of dripping water. Plink . . . pause. Plink . . . pause. Plink . . . pause. Plink . . .

She could see the drops forming on the snout of the faucet, growing heavy and fat there, growing pregnant there, and then falling off: plink.

Just that sound. No other. And she was suddenly, terribly sure that it had been Stanley, not her father, who had been stricken with a heart attack tonight.

With a moan, she gripped the cut-glass doorknob and turned it. Yet still the door would not move: it was locked. And suddenly three nevers occurred to Patty Uris in rapid succession: Stanley never took a bath in the early evening, Stanley never closed the door unless he was using the toilet, and Stanley had never locked the door against her at all.

Was it possible, she wondered crazily, to prepare for a heart attack?

Patty ran her tongue over her lips — it produced a sound in her head like fine sandpaper sliding along a board — and called his name again. There was still no answer except the steady, deliberate drip of the faucet. She looked down and saw she still held the can of Dixie beer in one hand. She gazed at it stupidly, her heart running like a rabbit in her throat; she gazed at it as if she had never seen a can of beer in her whole life before this minute. And indeed it seemed she never had, or at least never one like this, because when she blinked her eyes it turned into a telephone handset, as black and as threatening as a snake.