Oh, tell the truth! As long as the scales are dropping from your eyes, you might as well drop all of them, don't you think? You got no business lying to yourself; the hour's gotten too late for that. Just the facts, ma'am.
All right, the facts. The fact was that Heidi's unexpected move had excited him tremendously, probably because it had been unexpected. He had reached for her with his right hand and she had pulled her skirt up, exposing a perfectly ordinary pair of yellow nylon panties. Those panties had never excited him before, but they did now … or perhaps it was the way she had pulled up her skirt that had excited him; she had never done that before, either. The fact was that about eighty-five percent of his attention had been diverted from his driving, although in nine out of ten parallel worlds, things probably still would have turned out perfectly okay; during the business week, Fairview's streets were not just quiet, they were downright somnolent. But never mind that, the fact was that he hadn't been in nine out of ten parallel worlds; he had been in this one. The fact was that the old Gypsy woman hadn't darted out from between the Subaru and the Firebird with the racing stripe; the fact was that she simply walked from between the two cars, holding a net bag full of purchases in one gnarled and liver-spotted hand, the sort of net bag Englishwomen often take with them when they go shopping along the village high street. There had been a box of Duz laundry powder in the Gypsy woman's net bag; Halleck remembered that. She had not looked; that was true enough. But the final fact was just that Halleck had been doing no more than thirty-five miles an hour and he must have been almost a hundred and fifty feet from the Gypsy woman when she stepped out in front of his Olds. Plenty of time to stop if he had been on top of the situation. But the fact was that he was on the verge of an explosive orgasm, all but the tinest fraction of his consciousness fixed below his waist as Heidi's hand squeezed and relaxed, slipped up and down with slow and delicious friction, paused, squeezed, and relaxed again. His reaction had been hopelessly slow, hopelessly too late, and Heidi's hand had clamped on him, stifling the orgasm that shock had brought on for one endless second of pain and a pleasure that was inevitable but still gruesome.
Those were the facts. But hold it a second., folks! Hang on a bit, friends and neighbors! There were two more facts, weren't there? The first fact was that if Heidi hadn't picked that particular day to try out a little autoeroticism, Halleck would have been on top of his job and his responsibility as the operator of a motor vehicle, and the Olds would have stopped at least five feet short of the old Gypsy woman, stopped with a screech of brakes that would have caused the mothers wheeling their babies across the common to look up quickly. He might have shouted, 'Why don't you look where you're going?' at the old woman while she looked at him with a species of stupid fright and incomprehension. He and Heidi would have watched her scurry across the street, their hearts thudding too hard in their chests. Perhaps Heidi would have wept over the fallen grocery bags and the mess on the carpet in the back.
But things would have been all right. There would have been no hearing, and no old rotten-nosed Gypsy waiting outside to caress Halleck's cheek and whisper his dreadful one-word curse. That was the first ancillary fact. The second ancillary fact, which proceeded from the first, was that all of this could be traced directly back to Heidi. It had been her fault, all of it. He had not asked her to do what she had done; he had not said, 'Say! How about you jack me off while we drive home, Heidi? It's three miles, you got time.' No. She had just done it … and, should you wonder, her timing had been ghastly.
Yes, it had been her fault, but the old Gypsy hadn't known that, and so Halleck had received the curse and Halleck had now lost a grand total of sixty-one pounds, and there she sat, and there were brown circles under her eyes and her skin looked too sallow, but those brown circles weren't going to kill her, were they? No. Ditto the sallow skin. The old Gypsy hadn't touched her.
So the moment when he might have confessed his fears to her, when he might have said simply: I believe I'm losing weight because I have been cursed – that moment passed. The moment of crude and unalloyed hate, an emotional boulder shot out of his subconscious by some crude and primitive catapult, passed with it.
Listen to me, he said, and like a good wife she had responded: What, Billy?
'I'll go back and see Mike Houston again,' he said, which was not what he had originally intended to say at all. 'Tell him to go ahead and book the metabolic series. As Albert Einstein was wont to say, “What the fuck.”'
'Oh, Billy,' she said, and held her arms out to him. He went into them, and because there was comfort there, he felt shame for his bright hate of only moments ago … but in the days which followed, as Fairview spring proceeded at its usual understated and slightly preppy pace into Fairview summer, the hate recurred more and more often, in spite of all he could do to stop it or hold it back.
Chapter Ten
He made the appointment for the metabolic series through Houston, who sounded less optimistic after hearing that Halleck's steady weight-loss had continued and that he was, in fact, down twenty-nine pounds since his physical the month before.
'There still may be a perfectly normal explanation for all this,' Houston said, calling back with the appointment and the information three hours later, and that told Halleck all he needed to know. The perfectly normal explanation, once the odds-on favorite in Houston's mind, had now become the dark horse.
'Uh-huh,' Halleck said, looking down at where his belly had been. He never would have believed you could miss the gut that jutted out in front of you, the gut that had eventually gotten big enough to hide even the tips of your shoes – he'd had to lean and peer to find out if he needed a shine or not – especially he never would have believed it if you'd told him such a thing was possible while he was climbing a flight of stairs after too many drinks the night before, clutching his briefcase grimly, feeling a dew of sweat on his forehead, wondering if this was the day the heart attack was going to come, a paralyzing pain on the, left side of his chest which suddenly broke free and ripped down his left arm. But it was true; he missed his damn gut. In some weird way he couldn't understand even now, that gut had been a friend.
'If there's still a normal explanation,' he said to Houston, 'what is it?'
'This is what those guys are going to tell you,' Houston said. 'We hope.'
The appointment was at the Henry Glassman Clinic, a small private facility in New Jersey. They would want him there for three days. The estimated cost of his stay and the menu of tests they expected to run on him made Halleck very glad he had complete medical coverage.
'Send me a get-well card,' Halleck said bleakly, and hung up.
His appointment was for May 12 – a week away. During the days between, he watched himself continue to erode, and he strove to contain the panic that nibbled slowly away at his resolve to play the man.
'Daddy, you're losing too much weight,' Linda said uneasily at dinner one night – Halleck, sticking grimly by his guns, had downed three thick pork chops with applesauce. He'd also had two helpings of mashed potatoes. With gravy. 'If it's a diet, I think it's time you quit it.'
'Does it look like I'm dieting?' Halleck said, pointing at his plate with his fork, which dripped gravy.
He spoke mildly enough, but Linda's face began to work and a moment later she fled from the table, sobbing, her napkin pressed to her face.