by Peter David
“Then you think we should forgive them?” asked Louise-as-Gwendolen.
She couldn’t tear her eyes from the empty seat and her mind from dwelling on who should have been sitting in it. “Yes… I mean no.” Never a more appropriate line for M.J.’s state of mind at that moment. Like Cecily, she was faced with poor behavior on the part of a prospective beau, and uncertain as to whether forgiveness should be extended. Her instinct was yes, but her final decision was a resounding no.
“True!” exclaimed Louise, giving it all she had as if she felt she needed to sustain the energy level for both of them. “I had forgotten. There are principles at stake that one cannot surrender. Which of us should tell them? The task is not a pleasant one.”
It never is, thought Mary Jane even as she said brightly, “Could we not both speak at the same time?”
Peter Parker and a traffic cop were speaking at the same time.
Peter had just driven the convertible up to a red zone right in front of the theater. He was tucking in his shirt as he clambered out of the battered Lincoln, and the traffic cop was striding toward him, calling out, “Hey, Mac, you park here, I’m towing it!”
As the cop shouted his warning of the car’s fate, Peter said, “Whatever,” heading into the theater.
In a completely disheveled state, his clothes in disarray, Peter yanked on his jacket as he walked quickly through the theater lobby. An usher was standing at the far side of it in front of the closed doors that led into the theater itself. He had the air of someone who did not suffer fools gladly. That was unfortunate since Peter was feeling particularly foolish at that moment. He was reaching a point in his life where he was a gazelle when bounding between skyscrapers, but an absolute klutz when it came to managing things on the ground.
“Young man,” sniffed the usher, “your shoelace.”
“Oh, thanks,” Peter mumbled as he tied the lace. Then he pulled out his ticket and extended it. “I’m a little late. I can stand in the back.”
“Sorry,” said the usher, not sounding particularly sorry at all. He pointed to a sign and read it aloud as if Peter were illiterate: “No one admitted after the doors are closed.”
“I have a ticket!”
“It’s to help maintain the illusion,” the usher explained.
“I understand, but…” Peter pointed to a poster of the cast. “Miss Watson, she’s my friend. She asked me to come.”
A snaky smile spread across the usher’s face. “Ah, but not to come late.”
Peter began to seethe. The usher simply stood there, arms folded, looking like the king of the world. Peter stepped in close and the usher looked him in the eye, serene in his smug control.
“Your shoe,” Peter said.
The usher smirked. “Nice try. Mine are tied.”
“Yes, but you appear to have stepped in something.”
The usher looked down. Some sort of thick glob was all over his right shoe. Peter, meantime, straightened his shirtsleeve, making sure that none of the webbing he’d just released had gotten on his clothes.
He watched the usher try to move his foot. Nothing doing. The webbing had seeped through the shoe and around his foot, and both were stuck to the carpet. He wasn’t going anywhere for quite a while.
“Let me help you,” said Peter, and the usher looked up hopefully… then his expression changed to fury as Peter tore his ticket, tucked one half in the usher’s jacket pocket, and stepped toward the far door. The usher tried to move in front of him and succeeded only in nearly dislocating his leg. “You wouldn’t want to tell me how far into the play they are, would you?” Peter asked as he opened the door.
From within, he heard a man say from the direction of the stage, “On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest!” And this statement was greeted with a burst of applause from the audience.
And the usher smiled in grim, had-the-last-laugh triumph. “That would be called the ‘curtain line,’ or simply ‘the end.’ ”
Peter moaned softly.
He’d tried. He’d tried so hard to balance both halves of his life… and once again, M.J. had come up short. He wondered if Mary Jane would realize the importance of his trying to be earnest, and had the sinking feeling that his earnestness was going to suffer the same fate as had his carnations.
He walked out of the theater, giving a wide berth to the traffic cop who was writing up paperwork to have the car towed. Instead, he crossed the street and leaned against a fire hydrant to wait. Nearby a young Japanese girl—a street musician—was scratching away a tune on a violin with the hope that passersby would toss money into her open case. And she was singing, with a heavy accent, “Spider-Mon, Spider-Mon, does whatever a spider con.”
Peter winced, and started to think that maybe the carnations had it lucky.
Mary Jane emerged from the stage door sometime later, Louise directly behind her. A couple of “stage door Johnnys”—autograph hounds—came up to them seeking signatures, and M.J. and Louise gladly obliged. The rest of the theatergoing audience had long dispersed. She saw Waldo, the head usher, stomp past with what appeared to be a piece of torn-up carpet attached to his foot. She had no idea why, but then again, Waldo was an odd sort.
She looked around, hoping against hope that Peter would make some sort of last-minute appearance. She wanted to be angry at him, but what if there had been some emergency? How would she feel if she were steaming about her personal inconvenience, only to find that Peter was at the hospital because Aunt May had had a stroke?
Then her heart hardened. He’d probably just forgotten, that was all. This was all some… weird game to him. And she was getting pretty damned tired of playing it.
“See you later,” called Louise, and Mary Jane was about to ask her where she was running off to when a tall, handsome man sporting an air force uniform walked up to M.J. and asked, “May I have your autograph, Miss?”
She looked up at him and it was as if a light switch had been turned on in her head. “When did you get here?” she asked.
“Got in this afternoon,” he replied. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“I was getting worried. The way you headed out of town the day after we had lunch with your father, I thought I’d never see you again.”
“It was just NASA business, M.J., and you shouldn’t worry. Believe it or not, that was the best get-together I’ve ever had with my dad.”
He moved toward her and they held each other tightly. Then she kissed him, basking in his warmth. “Usually the only people waiting here are stage door Johnnys.”
“Well, my name is John, so that works out,” he said affably. “Hungry?”
She cast one last look around the area, searching for some sign of Peter. Nothing. At that point she realized that moping around and wishing that Peter Parker had managed to carve some time out of his oh-so-busy schedule to be with her was a road leading to madness. Even worse: Maybe he was trying to exert some sort of control over her by making her believe he’d be there for her and then standing her up. Well, she already had a boatload of control issues left over from her abusive father. She certainly didn’t need more.
“Starved,” she said with conviction. John extended an elbow to her, she looped her arm around it, and together they walked off into the night.
VII
Peter Parker had remained on the far side of the street when he saw the theatergoers finally emerging from the play. He felt it would probably be better to wait until everyone had dispersed before approaching Mary Jane. She would doubtless be annoyed with him, and he didn’t want to embarrass her by causing her to lose her temper in front of audience members or castmates. Nor was he especially anxious to come face-to-face with the annoying usher again.
So he had leaned against the wall of the nearest building. The streetlight in front of him had a blown-out bulb, so he was effectively cloaked in darkness. From this vantage point he waited until he saw M.J. emerge fr
om the stage door, another actress following her. As she stood there and signed autographs for her fans, he ran through all the things he was going to say to her. If there was any way to smooth this over—any turn of phrase he could come up with—he was determined to do it.
And then, as he prepared to cross the street, he saw a guy come up to Mary Jane. She threw her arms around him, and suddenly everything just hazed over and went away.
By the time the world came into focus and the thundering in his temple eased, both M.J. and the man, who was obviously her new significant other, were gone.
The violinist, oblivious to the pain that Peter was feeling, began to play a melancholy tune. Terrific. My anguish has its own theme song. I hate this city.
Then, cutting above the music of the violin came the sound of a police siren. A cop car sped past, followed by a second. There was an emergency.
A crime was occurring. Or perhaps someone desperately needed help.
And he was right there. He could do something about it.
There were thousands of air force officers in the world. Thousands of actresses. But there was only one person who could do what he, Peter Parker, could do. And he had to do it.
Why?
The first germ of doubt began to fester within him. Why? Just because he could, why did he have to? Really?
Because you do.
It wasn’t his own voice that replied, but Uncle Ben’s. Somehow he wasn’t surprised. He was too exhausted even to debate the notion.
He pulled his mask from his pocket and stared at it. Then he turned and ran into a nearby alley.
Swiftly he was out of his street clothes and busily stuffing them in his camera bag. When he’d retrieved them earlier, there had been no rats, but a mangy-looking dog had been sizing them up and preparing to lift a leg near them. This time he was taking no chances. He zipped up the bag, tossed it into the air, then fired a web-line. It struck the camera bag just as it went as high as it could, and the web-line affixed the bag to the underside of an eave. Perfect. The only thing he need concern himself about now was pigeons.
Peter pulled on his Spider-Man mask, sprang off a crate, and leaped heavenward. He skittered up the side of a building and a moment later bounded onto a rooftop.
He stood there for what seemed an eternity.
His heart wasn’t in it this time. Not really.
You have to do it. Again, it wasn’t his voice.
“Fine, whatever,” sighed Spider-Man. It wasn’t enough that his life was turning into incessant conflict with criminals. Now his own inner conflict was growing out of control.
He fired a web-line with singular lack of enthusiasm and began swinging in the direction of the police cars. He swung down and over Fifth Avenue, his mind otherwise occupied.
As his swing reached its apex, he brought his arm around to shoot a new web-line.
Nothing happened.
At first, that was. Spider-Man felt a brief tremble of alarm as his wrist made an odd fizzing sound, but that was all. Then the web-line issued forth and he breathed a sigh of relief, chalking it up to just an odd internal glitch. Perhaps he needed to put more fiber in his diet, or eat more red meat, or less. Something like that.
He arced across the street and this time when he tried to spin a web, there was no fizz, there was nothing.
No web-line.
Not a thing.
Worse, the line he was holding on to turned out to be of such poor quality that it literally dissolved behind him.
It took a second to register on Spider-Man that he was in midair, holding on to nothing. In a dizzying moment of insane denial, he thought that perhaps if he simply didn’t look down or acknowledge his predicament, gravity would have no sway over him, as was the case with that coyote in those cartoons.
Unfortunately, without giving Spider-Man even enough time to hold up a little sign saying “Oh, No,” gravity did indeed take charge of the situation. He fell like a bag of cement, and landed just about as gracefully: about twenty feet below, on a rooftop.
He knew he should feel lucky. His momentum had carried him to the far side of the street. Another couple of feet in either direction and he’d have been nothing but a spectacular spider-splat on the middle of Fifth Avenue.
“Even my good luck hurts,” he moaned as he lay there spread-eagled on the roof. Finally, he staggered to his feet and shook off the pain. He pulled off his mask to breathe in some fresh air, gathering what he laughingly referred to as his wits.
Then he tried to fire his web once more, and there was still nothing. Either his internal supply of web-fluid had run out—although he didn’t understand how that could be—or he had lost the ability to spin webs altogether.
“Ooooookay,” he said softly.
He looked over the edge of the roof. He had to be at least sixty stories high. And considering how his web-spinning had suddenly made itself scarce, he didn’t want to think about the consequences if his wall-crawling deserted him, as well. Skidding down the side of a building, screaming and cursing all the way. A rather ignominious end to his career… such as it was.
Which was why, five minutes later, he was standing in a crowded elevator. His mask was back in place. People were glancing at him and smirking. “The Girl from Ipanema” was floating through the Muzak speakers.
One of the passengers, a tired-looking guy in a charcoal business suit, commented, “Cool Spidey outfit.”
“Thanks.”
“Where’d you get it?”
He’d gotten it from a costume-maker, actually. On the night he’d trounced pro wrestler “Bone Saw” McGraw, one of Bone Saw’s victims—the Flying Dutchman—had been so grateful to Peter for taking Bone Saw apart that he’d referred Peter to a tailor who happened to be the Dutchman’s brother. “You need anything if you turn pro, we’ll take care of you,” the groaning Dutchman had assured him as they loaded him into an ambulance.
He’d been as good as his word. When, a week later, Peter—still wearing his identity-obscuring hooded wrestling outfit—had shown up at the tailor’s shop with his drawings of the ideal costume, the tailor had set to work and produced two identical outfits, free of charge. One had been hopelessly trashed in Peter’s final confrontation with the Goblin, and he was wearing the second.
He wasn’t about to explain all that to some guy in an elevator.
“I made it,” said Peter.
The passenger looked the costume up and down. “Looks uncomfortable,” he observed.
“It kind of itches,” Peter admitted. After a moment he added, “And it rides up in the crotch sometimes.”
That seemed to be more information than anyone wanted or needed. The rest of the elevator ride passed in silence.
The next day, Peter was running to class, which was nothing new for him. What was new was that he didn’t have his motorcycle as a means of getting to school.
The cycle had been right where he’d left it when he finally went back to get it the previous night. As if his suddenly wonky spider-powers weren’t enough to deal with, he found his motorcycle battered and broken from when it had gone flipping out from under him. He couldn’t help but remember Aunt May warning him, “There are only two types of motorcyclists: those who have had accidents, and those who haven’t had accidents yet.” Well, he was now a proud member of the group who had. Somehow he didn’t think she’d be pleased for him.
He had hauled the battered cycle home and, while doing so, had walked past M.J.’s billboard. Good. Excellent. Just what he needed. A forty-foot reminder of his screwups.
Today he’d tried to put the lousy previous night behind him, dwelling instead on… well, the probably lousy day that awaited him. It was with this less-than-sterling outlook that he made it to class only five minutes late. That wasn’t bad, actually, considering his track record.
But he found it impossible to concentrate. As Doctor Connors lectured, Peter felt his attention being drawn irresistibly in several different directions. First, he couldn’t ge
t Otto Octavius out of his mind. Otto’s fusion theories seemed too good to be true. And if there was one thing Peter had learned in his fairly brief life, it was that most things that seemed too good to be true generally were. Peter scribbled notes during class, some of them reconstructions of the theorem Otto had shown him, while others were original thoughts. He kept coming back to one formula in particular, the ramifications of which he didn’t believe Octavius had fully thought through. Then again, who was he, Peter Parker, to second-guess Otto Octavius? Octavius was a genius, after all. Totally intent on his work.
Peter, on the other hand, couldn’t even keep his attention from wandering during class. When he wasn’t scribbling formulae, he was drawing hearts with M.J.’s initials in them, and then scribbling them out. As he did so, he muttered things like, “I was there… I was right there… pretzel cart flew over my head… pretzels everywhere…”
“Huh?” a pretty young student, Gwen Stacy, whispered to him.
He waved her off, shaking his head. He began scribbling out the heart and initials once more… and then stopped. One of the hearts he’d drawn was more oval than heart-shaped. Carefully he drew a line down the middle, dividing it vertically. On the left side he drew a quick sketch of his own face… and on the right, Spider-Man’s mask.
He stared at the self-portrait.
It stared back.
Mary Jane Watson was wrestling with two large grocery bags at her front door when she heard her phone ringing inside. She was trying to dig her keys out of her pocket without putting the bags down. There was no reason for it, of course. Somehow it was just a matter of pride to keep the bags suspended while searching out her keys. Eventually she managed to retrieve the keys, find the appropriate one, and shove it into the lock. As she turned it, she heard her own voice from her answering machine say, “You got M.J. Please leave me a message. Thank you.”