There was a man sitting a few seats away, reading a magazine. You’re it, she thought. You’ll have to be it. Gritting her teeth, she somehow forced herself to stand up, take a swaying step down the aisle toward him. He was probably a goy, but he was clean-looking anyway, his hair a bit longer than she liked it (and—ugh!—a mustache), dressed in slacks and a workshirt and an Eisenhower jacket, hushpuppies, plastic eyeglasses . . . She took another step toward him, feeling her legs turning to rubber, her knees buckling, the fluttery panic coming up inside her.
At least he was old—he must be twenty-one, maybe even twenty-two. An older man, that should make it easier . . .
The bus accelerated with a jolt, and Marcy took the next few steps in a stumbling half-run, almost falling, sprawling into the seat next to the man and then lurching against him as the bus took a sharp curve, knocking the magazine out of his hands. He stared at her, startled, and Marcy drew herself up and said “Hi!” brightly, showing all of her teeth to him in what was supposed to be a smile. He kept staring at her, blankly, and so she leaned in until their faces were nearly touching, and said “Hiiiii there,” making her voice low and drawly, fanning her eyelashes, trying desperately to remember what the vamps on television did. He blinked, and then said “Uh . . . hi.”
There was a long silence then, and they stared at each other through it while the bus bounced and swayed around them.
My God, my god, say something.
What?
“You know,” she said, her voice harsh with tension, so that she had to swallow and start speaking again, “you know, you’re a very good-looking man.”
“I am?” he said, gaping at her.
“Yes, you’re a very attractive guy.” She looked up sidelong at him, up from under her eyelashes. “I mean—really you are. You know, really.” She batted her eyelashes at him again. “What’s your name, anyway? Mine’s Marcy.”
“Uh . . . Alan,” he said. He was beginning to smile in a sort of tentatively fatuous way, although he still looked puzzled. “My name’s Alan.”
She leaned in even closer, until she could feel his breath on her face. It smelled faintly of pepperoni, faintly of mouthwash. She fixed him with a long, smolderingly significant look, then said, “Hi, Alan,” in a breathless whisper.
“Hi . . . um, Marcy . . .” he said. He still looked nervous, glancing around to see if anyone else was watching him. She took his arm, and he jumped a little. She could feel herself blushing, but she couldn’t stop now. “I was sitting over there watching you,” she said, “and I said to myself, you can’t let a guy this gorgeous get away without even saying hello or something, you know? No matter how forward he thinks you are . . . I mean, I’d like to get to know you better, Alan. Would you like to get to know me better, too? Would you?”
Alan licked nervously at his lips. “Why sure. We could go out. We could, uhhh, go to the movies or something, I guess, or go get a coke . . .”
Too long! This was all taking too long!
She gritted her teeth, and put her hand in his lap.
He goggled at her, and through buzzing waves of embarrassment she was surprised to see that he was blushing too, blushing red as a beet.
“Jesus Christ . . .” he whispered.
No turning back now. “I . . . I want to be alone with you,” Marcy said, her voice wavering, forcing herself to keep her hand there. “Don’t you have someplace we can go?”
“Yeah,” he said in a strangled voice, “we can go to my place . . .”
They got off a few stops later, and walked down half-lit streets to Alan’s apartment. Marcy was hanging on to Alan’s arm as though he might float up and away into the evening sky if she didn’t guy him down, and he was walking so quickly that he was dragging her along, her feet almost not touching the sidewalk. He was chattering nervously, talking a mile a minute, but she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. She could feel the tension building higher and tighter inside her, she could almost smell it, a scorched smell like insulation burning. She was almost out of time—she knew it, she knew it. Dammit, hurry up.
Alan’s apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up in a battered old brownstone building that had seen better centuries, let alone better years. There was a shag couch, a bookcase made of boards and bricks, a coffee table, empty wine bottles with candles melted into them, a lamp with a red light bulb in it, rock posters on the walls. He took her coat and threw it over a chair, and then turned to her, rubbing his hands on his hips, looking uncertain again. “Ah, would you like a drink, or . . .”
“Don’t talk.” She slid into his arms. “I . . . I need you, Alan,” she said huskily, remembering lines from a romance novel, too young to realize that he was young enough not to giggle. “Take me, take me now!”
Then—thank God! at last!—he was kissing her, while she tried not to fidget with impatience. After a moment’s reluctance, she opened her lips and let him put his tongue in her mouth; she could feel it wandering clumsily around in there, bumping into her teeth, wagging back and forth like some kind of spongy organic windshield-wiper. His tongue felt huge and bloated in her mouth, and it made her feel a little ill, but he was making a sort of low moaning noise while he was kissing her, so apparently she was on the right track.
After a moment, he began fumbling with the buttons on her cardigan sweater, so clumsily that she had to help him, her own fingers shaking with nervousness. Then he was easing her blouse off. It felt odd to be standing in a strange room, in front of a stranger, in her brassiere, but she didn’t have time to worry about it. It couldn’t be much longer before they caught up with her . . . Somehow he had figured out how to get the hooks undone. He tugged her brassiere off, and ran his hands over her breasts. She still felt nothing but anxiety, but the room was chilly, and if he took the hardening of her nipples as a sign of passion, well, all the better . . .
He leaned down and put his mouth to her breast, his tongue encircling the nipple, and that was pleasurable in a low-key way, as if there were a mild electric current shooting through her, but she didn’t have time for all these frills. “Hurry up,” she snarled, tugging clumsily at his belt, breaking a fingernail, finally getting his pants open.
Alan would have been gratified to know that to her his penis looked enormous—a terrifying purplish spear of flesh, a foot long at least.
He threw her down on the couch, and they wrestled inconclusively together for a while—she staring up at the water-pocked ceiling with dread, and thinking hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, banging her chin on his shoulder for emphasis—but of course he was too nervous, and he went soft. He smiled weakly at her and said something apologetic, but she ignored all that and reached for him determinedly. His penis felt warm and dry and rubbery under her hands. She was blushing furiously now, blushing to her hair-roots, but she worked grimly away at him, telling herself that it was not that much different from milking a cow, something she’d done one summer at 4H Camp.
He rolled onto her again, hovered fumblingly above her, poised, and at that moment a loud furious voice said “You slut!!”
Alan jerked and gasped, startled, and began to pull away, but Marcy growled “Oh, no, you don’t!”—not yet! not after all that trouble!—and grabbed him back down. “Whore!” Arnold was screaming, “Filthy strumpet!” and Alan was saying “What?! What?!” in a kind of wild dazed panic, but she kept rubbing herself up against him, hugging him with her arms and legs, saying “Don’t worry about that! Don’t pay any attention!” until at last he gave a convulsive shudder and lunged forward. She felt a sharp, tearing pain, and then he was gasping stertorously next to her ear as Arnold screamed and raved and gibbered incoherently from the ceiling. After a few moments Arnold’s voice fell silent, and she smiled.
At last Alan moaned and collapsed crushingly on top of her. She lay unprotestingly under his weight, not even caring if she’d gotten pregnant.
Free of him at last, she thought.
Alan sat up, still bewildered.
“You can p
ut your pants on now,” she said dryly.
A few minutes later, her father began to pound at the door.
###
There was the expected scene. Screaming, slapping, crying, hysteria. “You’re not my daughter—you’re no daughter of mine.” Slut. Whore. Etcetera. Marcy remained dry-eyed and unmoved through it all. Alan cowered in a corner, wrapped in a sheet, looking tousled and terrified, occasionally opening his mouth to speak, only to shut it again when one of Marcy’s parents advanced shrieking upon him. Her parents swore that they would press charges against Alan—especially if (God forbid) she was pregnant—and hurled sulfurous threats involving jail and lawyers back at him as they left, but eventually they would give up on the idea of prosecution, fearing more scandal. Fortunately, Marcy was not pregnant. She said goodbye politely to Alan—he gaped at her, still looking bewildered, still wrapped in a sheet, and said nothing—and calmly followed her sputtering parents out of his apartment. She never saw him again. She packed a bag, took the money she had been saving, and moved out of her parents’ house that very night. She never saw them again, either.
She stayed that night in a Holiday Inn, and spent the next few weeks in an inexpensive boardinghouse. She got a job at a five-and-dime, later worked as a counter-girl in a second-rate greasy spoon. After a couple of months, she landed a better job in the accounting department of a moderate-sized engineering firm, and was able to afford a small apartment of her own in a shabby-genteel neighborhood on the far side of town.
For the first few weeks she stayed in her apartment every night, scared and lonely, still more than half-expecting to hear Arnold’s voice at any second. Then she went into what she herself would later refer to as her “slut phase,” haunting bars and discos, dragging a different man home with her nearly every night. Some of these men were much more attractive and skillful than Alan, but she felt nothing with any of them, no pleasure, not even the mild tingle she had felt during the tussle in Alan’s apartment. She tried getting drunk, and stoned, let lovers ply her with cocaine and buzzing electric novelties and mildly kinky sexual variations, but nothing worked. After a few months of this, she got tipsy after work and let one of the salesgirls coax her into bed—but sex was just as unexciting with Sally as it had been with the faceless parade of male pickups. No matter how desperately she tried to be abandoned and wild, it seemed that she could not make herself stop listening for Arnold’s disapproving voice, listening for it and dreading it with some deep and unreasoned part of her mind, and for her sex remained only a mildly unpleasant form of exercise, like being forced to do a hundred sit-ups or jumping jacks in a row.
She got another, and better, job, with a larger engineering firm, and stopped dating at all. She worked with impressive efficiency and a total concentration that brought her rapid promotions; after a while she was doing very well financially, and she moved into a much better apartment in a quiet residential high-rise whose other occupants were almost all over fifty years of age. She was generally popular with her co-workers, although she only occasionally joined them on Bowling Night or went with them on their expeditions to movies or restaurants or bars, and never showed the slightest hint of romantic interest in anyone, not even engaging in the harmless “social flirting” that went on almost constantly in the office. Those few who resented her reserve sometimes called her “Little Mary in Sunshine” or “The Nun,” but most of her colleagues appreciated her even-tempered disposition and her calm unflappable efficiency, and the speculation that she “just didn’t go out much” because she was still recovering from an unhappy love affair soon became an unquestioned part of office mythology—some people could even tell you all about the guy and why they’d broken up (in one version he’d turned out to be married; in another, he’d died slowly and dramatically of cancer).
A few of the more perceptive of her friends noticed that occasionally, right in the middle of things—while she was chatting over morning coffee, or discussing an audit with a section head, or telling the latest Polack joke in a bar during Happy Hour—Marcy would suddenly fall completely silent and freeze motionless for a heartbeat or two, as if she had abruptly and magically been turned to stone. None of them noticed, however, that at such times her eyes would invariably and almost imperceptibly flick upwards, as if she had suddenly sensed someone looking over her shoulder.
###
Marcy only ever actually saw Arnold in the flesh once, and that was years after she had left home, at a party.
It was a reception given for the opening of the new wing of the Museum, and Marcy was sipping pale sherry and talking to Joanne Korman when she heard an unmistakable voice, a voice that she hadn’t actually heard since she was eighteen, although it had often whispered through her dreams at night. She turned around, and there was Arnold, eating cucumber sandwiches and blathering pompously about something or other to a Museum staffer. Arnold turned out to be a short, potbellied man with a large nose and a receding chin, impeccably groomed—his hair was slick and shiny and combed into photographically exact furrows—and expensively, if somewhat conservatively, dressed. He held his cucumber sandwich as if he was a praying mantis, holding it up near his chin with both hands and turning it around and around and around before taking a small surgical bite out of it. His eyes were small, humorless, and opaque, and he never seemed to blink. Marcy watched him in fascination. It was so strange to see Arnold’s lips move and hear that familiar voice—sanctimonious, self-righteous, self-satisfied—issue from them instead of from the empty air . . .
Arnold felt her watching him, and looked up. They stared at each other for a moment across the crowded room. There was no doubt that he recognized her. She saw his lips purse up tight, as if he had tasted something foul, and then he sneered at her, his face haughty and smugly contemptuous. Slowly, deliberately, disdainfully, he turned his back on her.
###
Marcy could never remember how she got back to her apartment that night.
She woke from abstraction, hours later, to find herself sitting at her kitchen counter, her mind full of circular, tail-swallowing thoughts about rope, and razor blades, and a long slow fall into dark water.
With an immense effort of will, she wrenched her mind out of this downward spiral, and forced herself to think about Arnold for the first time in a very long time, really think about him, and the more she thought about him the more her hands began to shake, until the coffee cup she was clutching (the cup she couldn’t remember filling) cracked and clattered and spilled.
He was so smug. That was what was not to be borne—after everything that he’d done to her, he still considered himself to be the injured party! He was so goddamned sleek and smug and self-satisfied, it made her feel dizzy with hate just to think of it. Undoubtedly, he was smirking at himself in the mirror right now and telling himself how right he had been about her, how he had tried and tried to help her lead a decent life, but she just wouldn’t listen, how she had proved herself unworthy of him . . .
She couldn’t stand to think of it.
He had won! In spite of everything, he had won. He had shamed and warped and twisted her, tormented her for a decade, ruined her childhood, blighted her life, and then he had simply turned and walked away, congratulating himself that all his worst expectations had come true.
And she had let him get away with it. That was the worst thing of all, the most unbearable part. She had let him get away scot-free.
She spent the long, sleepless night pacing restlessly up and down the length of her apartment, seeming with every step she took to hear Arnold’s gloating voice saying “every cent—it’s worth it,” repeating obsessively to the rhythmic clicking of her heels, “every cent—it’s worth it, every cent—it’s worth it, every cent—it’s worth it,” until long before dawn she had decided that somehow—anyhow—she would have to make him pay, pay more than he had ever been willing to spend.
Early the next day, she went shopping.
Later that night, long after the technicians h
ad left, she sat in her darkened living room before the newly installed console and ran her fingers caressingly over the switches and keyboards. She had been practicing for hours, and now she thought that she’d gotten the hang of it. She touched the keyboard, and the viewscreen lit up with a misty collage of moving images. She punched in the coordinates, and then used the fine-tuning to hunt around until she found a place where the young Arnold Waxman—pimply-faced and fat, just barely post-pubescent—was standing alone in his bathroom at night. His pants were down around his knees, and he had a Playboy gatefold in one hand. He had a stupid, preoccupied look on his face, and there was a strand of saliva glistening in the corner of his half-opened mouth.
Marcy leaned forward and touched the Transmit button. “Arnold!” she said sternly, watching him jump and gasp, “Arnold, you mustn’t do that!”
Then, slowly, she smiled.
AFTERWORD TO TIME BRIDE
I can’t pinpoint exactly what the specific trigger for this story was, but no doubt I was thinking at some point about the moderately large body of stories in which someone invents a device to let you see into the past, and it probably occurred to me that there were areas of human life that usually weren’t spied upon by time-peering future scientists in those stories, and that the potentials there for abuse—and thus, for interesting fictional conflicts—were fairly large. At any rate, the plot of this story was sketched out pretty completely in my story-idea notebook, pretty close to the way it actually came out, and sat there for a couple of years in that form, only—“only”—needing to be translated into an actual story: to have characters invented for it to fit it, and then to have those characters live through the plot in narrative.
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