"Aha!" The man sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room wore an expensive lounge robe with conspicuously narrow lapels. "Aha!" He stared at them through horn-rimmed glasses, and his blond crewcut seemed to stand on end. "Aha!" He extended his arm, and an impeccably manicured finger pointed at Sammy. "Don't let her do it to you," he advised. "There's still time to save yourself. Fire the maid, and force her to wash the diapers. Had I been strong, Mrs. Karp would not have succeeded. Beware the ids of Marsha!"
"Who is Marsha? Who is Mrs. Karp? And what did she succeed at?" Sammy asked.
"Marsha is Mrs. Karp, my wifey-image. And she succeeded in driving me-overdrive all the way, that is- into this nut-hatch. Which I presume is what your spouse-type there is about to do to you." He leveled the manicure accusingly at Llona.
"I'm not his wife," Llona protested for the second time that night.
"Silence!" Mr. Karp thundered. He turned his attention to Sammy and spoke more gently. "Learn from my experience," he counselled. "You are looking at the remnants of a very successful man. You are looking at the ultimate fulfillment of feminine unfulfillment. You are looking at a disaster area leveled by the shot and shell of a female mystique turned cannibalistic. You see before you the result, the casualty I should say, of wifely potential realized at last and to the utmost."
"I don't understand," Sammy said truthfully.
"You don't understand? Then let me elucidate. One short year ago I was a very successful businessman with a house in the suburbs, an attractive and industrious wife, and two normal children. I was thirty-three years old. My wife was twenty-nine. We lived an ideal life in an idyllic setting. The world was our oyster, ripe, zesty, filling. And now look at me!"
"But what happened?" Llona wondered.
"Quiet, Lilith! You know very well what brought about my destruction. Don't play innocent with me. Every woman is in on the plot. It's to your man that I speak. To warn him of your perfidy, of the perfidy all women hold in common, before it's too late. Now listen to me!" he urged Sammy.
"I'm listening."
"Very well! As I was saying, our life was ideal, mine and wifey's. Until one day she decided she was a cultural under-achiever. I will never forget that day. The scene is etched clearly in my mind. We were seated at the breakfast table and the toast was burning. 'I am a cultural under-achiever,' she said to me. 'Marsha, the toast is burning,' I replied. 'I have never had the opportunity to realize my full potential as a human being,' she said. 'The kitchen is filling up with smoke,' I pointed out. 'I am a prisoner in this house, a serf, a servant to wait on you and the children, a lackey with no outlet for my creativity!' Marsha complained. 'If you don't take the toast out, crumbs will get in the filament and we'll have to throw the toaster away and get a new one,' I chided her gently. It was at that point, if memory serves me correctly, that she threw the toaster at me."
"I don't blame her," Llona murmured.
"You wouldn't," young Mr. Karp sneered at Llona. "Conspirator! Provocateur! Woman!" He took a breath and regained control. "Anyway," he continued to Sammy, "when the smoke cleared-literally-we talked it out. That's Marsha's expression: ''talk it out.' The result of that talk was a sleep-in maid. Well, we could afford it. I didn't begrudge Marsha the help. And I saw no harm in her using the time it afforded her in furthering the development she felt had been stifled by me. Ha! Little did I know!"
"What happened?" Sammy asked.
"Ceramics! That's what happened first. She took an adult-education course at the local community center. She started expressing herself with ceramics. And before she was through, she'd tiled over our entire front lawn. I had to fire the gardener and hire an expert to care for it. Of course, Marsha wouldn't let the kids or me walk on it. We had to use the back door. All of that I would have put up with cheerfully, but when she petitioned the village in my name to let her ceramic over the sidewalk to match the lawn, I began to get my back up. We fought about it, but in the end I lost. So did the village. Marsha had organized the other wives to back her up. So she tiled the sidewalk. And when it was done she asked me how I liked it. I told her. As it turned out, that was a serious mistake."
"You could have been tactful," Llona remarked.
"Oh? Could I now? Bah!" Mr. Karp dismissed her with a wave of his hand. "Would you have been tactful?" he asked Sammy, a note of pleading in his voice. "If you came home and found that the sidewalk in front of your house had been transformed into a multi-colored representation of a phallus, would you have been tactful? And if you said mildly that you thought it was a bit much and your wife replied that your inferiority complex was showing, would you have been tactful? And if she further informed you that she had to have some outlet for her libido which you were incapable of satisfying -which was news to you, by the way-would you have been tactful?"
"No, I wouldn't have been tactful," Sammy granted. "I would have belted her," he added. (Considering Sammy's own home background, Llona decided his affair with Hannah was really changing him.)
"I should have. She told me that herself later. It was during one of those discussions where she was proving to me that the trouble with me is that I'm overcivilized. Okay. I am. Which is why I indulged her ambition to realize her potential even further. She gave up the ceramic bit because she concluded it wasn't truly widening her horizons. She needed a more direct means of expression, she said. And that's when the curtain went up on Little Theatre. My wife, with a voice that can throw the entire stadium off key when 'The Star-Spangled Banner' is sung, was given the lead in our local thespian production of My Fair Lady. Inside of a week both kids were talking with cockney accents. A singing teacher appeared on the scene with cotton in his ears, and the scales were scalily scaled from morn to night including Sundays. As the big night came closer, the he-she who was playing Professor Higgins all but moved in with us. It was one long rehearsal with me banished from the premises so they could practice perfecting the kiss for that final clinch scene. Seems I made the Professor nervous. I can't imagine why. I sure wasn't jealous of him. He fluttered too much for that. But then that was a mistake on my part, too. I let Marsha know I wasn't jealous. Which led to the question of why I wasn't jealous. Which led to my pointing out that Higgins was more than somewhat effeminate. Which led to her pointing out my lack of sensitivity, et cetera. Higgins, it seems, was very long on sensitivity, understanding, rapport, et cetera, et cetera. I was an unfeeling clod. And besides that, I had no musical sense. No rhythm-in or out of bed. At which point I gave her back her knife, hilt first, and retired to the bathroom to nurse the rather large wound it had left. Marsha continued on her merry way with a solid week of all-night rehearsals climaxing with the performance itself. The sensitive swish playing Higgins is so damn sensitive that he comes down with psychosomatic laryngitis just before the curtain is set to go up. Panic. But he does have an understudy. Local druggist with a baritone voice and eight hands. Right up on stage where there wasn't a helluva lot she could do about it, Marsha haitch-drops her way into this guy's clutches. All but rapes her in full view of one hundred roped-in playgoers. Very embarrassing. 'Why didn't I do something?' Marsha wants to know later while she's crying her eyes out. 'Didn't want to spoil the show for her,' says I. I'm more concerned with appearances and with what people think than I am with her honor, she tells me, and besides that, I'm a coward. Since this roamin'-fingered druggist is maybe one-ten pounds wringing wet and flabby besides, I object to this. Not that it does me any good. Marsha insists I lack aggression-and again it's both out of and in bed. This time, though, she doesn't even give me time to latch onto some umbrage before she's hitting the hysterical high-C's and swearing she'll never set foot on a stage again."