Connie, covered with running sores, stumbled to Danny and hugged him, though he had turned to tapioca pudding and was melting. But three days later, when ghost images of people he had feared all his life came to haunt him, he broke completely and allowed Connie to call the rest home on the boa constrictor that had once been the phone. “You can come and get me when this is over,” he cried pitifully, kissing her poison ivy lips. “Maybe if we split up, he’ll have some mercy.” But they both doubted it.
When the downstairs buzzer rang, the men from the Home for the Mentally Absent came into the debacle that had been their apartment and saw Connie pulling her feet out of the swamp slime only with difficulty; she was crying in unison with Danny as they bundled him into the white ambulance. Unearthly laughter rolled around the sky like thunder as her husband was driven away.
Connie was left alone. She went back upstairs; she had nowhere else to go.
She slumped down in the pool of molten slag, and tried to think while ants ate at her flesh and rabid rats gnawed off the wallpaper.
i’m just getting warmed up, the djinn said from the lamp.
Less than three days after he had been admitted to the Asylum for the Temporarily Twitchy, Connie came to get Danny. She came into his room; the shades were drawn, the sheets were very white; when he saw her his teeth began to chatter.
She smiled at him gently. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you weren’t simply overjoyed to see me, Squires.”
He slid under the sheets till only his eyes were showing. His voice came through the covers. “If I break out in boils, it will definitely cause a relapse, and the day nurse hates mess.”
“Where’s my macho protective husband now?”
“I’ve been unwell.”
“Yeah, well, that’s allover. You’re fit as a fiddle, so bestir your buns and let’s get out of here.”
Danny Squires’s brow furrowed. This was not the tone of a woman with frogs in her hair. “I’ve been contemplating divorce or suicide.”
She yanked the covers down, exposing his naked legs sticking out from the hem of the hospital gown. “Forget it, little chum. There are at least a hundred and ten positions we haven’t tried yet before I consider dissolution. Now will you get out of that bed and come on?”
“But...”
“... a thing I’ll kick, if you don’t move it.”
Bewildered, he moved it.
Outside, the Rolls-Royce waited with its motor running. As they came through the front doors of the Institute for the Neurologically Flaccid, and Connie helped Danny from the discharge wheelchair, the liveried chauffeur leaped out and opened the door for them. They got in the back seat, and Connie said, “To the house, Mark.” The chauffeur nodded, trotted briskly around and climbed behind the wheel. They took off to the muted roar of twin mufflers.
Danny’s voice was a querulous squeak. “Can we afford a rented limo?”
Connie did not answer, merely smiled, and snuggled closer to him.
After a moment Danny asked, “What house?”
Connie pressed a button on the console in the armrest and the glass partition between front and back seats slid silently closed. “Do me a favor, will you,” she said, “just hold the twenty questions till we get home? It’s been a tough three days and all I ask is that you hold it together for another hour.”
Danny nodded reluctantly. Then he noticed she was dressed in extremely expensive clothes. “I’d better not ask about your mink-trimmed jacket, either, right?”
“It would help.”
He settled into silence, uneasy and juggling more than just twenty unasked questions. And he remained silent until he realized they were not taking the expressway into New York. He sat up sharply, looked out the rear window, snapped his head right and left trying to ascertain their location, and Connie said, “We’re not going to Manhattan. We’re going to Darien, Connecticut.”
“Darien? Who the hell do we know in Darien?”
“Well, Upjohn, for one, lives in Darien.”
“Upjohn!?! Ohmigod, he’s fired me and sent the car to bring me to him so he can have me executed! I knew it!”
“Squires,” she said, “Daniel, my love, Danny heart of my heart, will you just kindly close the tap on it for a while! Upjohn has nothing to do with us any more. Nothing at all.”
“But... but we live in New York!”
“Not any more we don’t.”
Twenty minutes later they turned into the most expensive section in Darien and sped down a private road.
They drove an eighth of a mile down the private road lined with Etruscan pines, beautifully maintained, and pulled into a winding driveway. Five hundred yards farther, and the drive spiraled in to wind around the front of a huge, luxurious, completely tasteful Victorian mansion. “Go on,” Connie said. “Look at your house.”
“Who lives here?” Danny asked.
“I just told you: we do.”
“I thought that’s what you said. Let me out here, I’ll walk back to the nuthouse.”
The Rolls pulled up before the mansion, and a butler ran down to open the car door for them. They got out and the servant bowed low to Connie. Then he turned to Danny. “Good to have you home, Mr. Squires,” he said. Danny was too unnerved to reply.
“Thank you, Penzler,” Connie said. Then, to the chauffeur, “Take the car to the garage, Mark; we won’t be needing it again this afternoon. But have the Porsche fueled and ready; we may drive out later to look at the grounds.”
“Very good, Mrs. Squires,” Mark said. Then he drove away.
Danny was somnambulistic. He allowed himself to be led into the house where he was further stunned by the expensive fittings, the magnificent halls, the deep-pile rugs, the spectacular furniture, the communications complex set into an entire wall, the Art Deco bar that rose out of the floor at the touch of a button, the servants who bowed and smiled at him, as if he belonged there. He was boggled by the huge kitchen, fitted with every latest appliance; and the French chef who saluted with a huge ladle as Connie entered.
“Wh-where did all this come from?” He finally gasped out the question as Connie led him upstairs on the escalator.
“Come on, Danny; you know where it all came from. ”
“The limo, the house, the grounds, the mink-trimmed jacket, the servants, the Vermeer in the front hall, the cobalt-glass Art Deco bar, the entertainment center with the beam television set, the screening room, the bowling alley, the polo field, the Neptune swimming pool, the escalator and six-strand necklace of black pearls I now notice you are wearing around your throat... all of it came from the genie?”
“Sorta takes your breath away, don’t it?” Connie said, ingenuously.
“I’m having a little trouble with this. ”
“What you’re having trouble with, champ, is that Mas’úd gave you a hard time, you couldn’t handle it, you crapped out, and somehow I’ve managed to pull it all out of the swamp.”
“I’m thinking of divorce again. ”
“They were walking down a long hall lined with works of modem Japanese illustration by Yamazaki, Kobayashi, Takahiko Li, Kenzo Tanii and Orai. Connie stopped and put both her hands on Danny’s trembling shoulders.
“What we’ve got here, Squires, is a bad case of identity reevaluation. Nobody gets through all the battles. We’ve been married less than two weeks, but we’ve known each other for three years. You don’t know how many times I folded before that time, and I don’t know how many times you triumphed before that time.
“What I’ve know of you for three years made it okay for me to marry you; to think ‘This guy will be able to handle it the times I can’t. ’ That’s a lot of what marriage is, to my way of thinking. I don’t have to score every time, and neither do you. As long as the unit maintains. This time it was my score. Next time it’ll be yours. Maybe.”