Is That What People Do?

by Robert Sheckley

  “I think I am infatuated,” Cordle said to himself on the seventh day. He realized at once that he had made a slight understatement. He was violently and hopelessly in love.

  But what did Mavis feel? She seemed not unfond of him. It was even possible that she might, conceivably, reciprocate.

  At that moment, Cordle had a flash of prescience. He realized that one week ago, he had stepped on the toe of his future wife and mother of his two children, both of whom would be born and brought up in a split-level house with inflatable furniture in Summit, New Jersey, or possibly Millburn.

  This may sound unattractive and provincial when stated baldly, but it was desirable to Cordle, who had no pretensions to cosmopolitanism. After all, not all of us can live at Cap Ferrat. Strangely enough, not all of us even want to.

  That day, Cordle and Mavis went to the Marshall Gordon Residence in Belgravia to see the Byzantine miniatures. Mavis had a passion for Byzantine miniatures that seemed harmless enough at the time. The collection was private, but Mavis had secured invitations through a local Avis manager, who was trying very hard, indeed.

  They came to the Gordon Residence, an awesome Regency building in Huddlestone Mews. They rang. A butler in full evening dress answered the door. They showed the invitations. The butler’s glance and lifted eyebrow showed that they were carrying second-class invitations of the sort given to importunate art poseurs on 17-day all-expense economy flights, rather than the engraved first-class invitations given to Picasso, Jackie Onassis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Norman Mailer, Charles Goren, and other movers and shakers of the world.

  The butler said, “Oh, yes...” Two words that spoke black volumes. His face twitched, he looked like a man who has received an unexpected visit from Tamerlane and a regiment of his Golden Horde.

  “The miniatures,” Cordle reminded him.

  “Yes, of course...But I am afraid, sir, that no one is allowed into the Gordon Residence without a coat and necktie.”

  It was an oppressive August day. Cordle was wearing a sport shirt. He said, “Did I hear you correctly? Coat and necktie?”

  The butler said, “That is the rule, sir.”

  Mavis asked, “Couldn’t you make an exception this once?”

  The buder shook his head. “We really must stick by the rules, miss. Otherwise...” He left the fear of vulgarity unsaid, but it hung in the air like a chrome-plated fart.

  “Of course,” Cordle said, pleasantly. “Otherwise. So it’s a coat and tie, is it? I think we can arrange that.”

  Mavis put a hand on his arm and said, “Howard, let’s go. We can come back some other time.”

  “Nonsense, my dear. If I may borrow your coat...”

  He lifted the white raincoat from her shoulders and put it on, ripping a seam. “There we go, mate!” he said briskly to the butler. “That should do it, n’est-cepas?”

  “I think not,” the butler said, in a voice bleak enough to wither artichokes. “In any event, there is the matter of the necktie.”

  Cordle had been waiting for that. He whipped out his sweaty handkerchief and knotted it around his neck.

  “Suiting you?” he leered, in an imitation of Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto, which only he appreciated.

  “Howard! Let’s go!”

  Cordle waited, smiling steadily at the butler, who was sweating for the first time in living memory.

  “I’m afraid, sir, that that is not—”

  “Not what?”

  “Not precisely what was meant by coat and tie.”

  “Are you trying to tell me,” Cordle said in a loud, unpleasant voice, “that you are an arbiter of men’s clothing as well as a door opener?”

  “Of course not! But this impromptu attire—”

  “What has ‘impromptu’ got to do with it’ Are people supposed to prepare three days in advance just to pass your inspection?”

  “You are wearing a woman’s waterproof and a soiled handkerchief,” the butler stated stiffly. “I think there is no more to say.”

  He began to close the door. Cordle said, “You do that, sweetheart, and I’ll have you up for slander and defamation of character. Those are serious charges over here, buddy, and I’ve got witnesses.”

  Aside from Mavis, Cordle had collected a small, diffident but interested crowd.

  “This is becoming entirely too ridiculous,” the butler said, temporizing, the door half closed.

  “You’ll find a stretch at Wormwood Scrubs even more ridiculous,” Cordle told him. “I intend to persecute—I mean prosecute.”

  “Howard!” cried Mavis.

  He shook off her hand and fixed the butler with a piercing glance. He said, “I am Mexican, though perhaps my excellent grasp of the English has deceived you. In my country, a man would cut his own throat before letting such an insult pass unavenged. A woman’s coat, you say? Hombre, when I wear a coat, it becomes a man’s coat. Or do you imply that I am a maricon, a—how do you say it?—homosexual?”

  The crowd—becoming less modest—growled approval. Nobody except a lord loves a butler.

  “I meant no such implication,” the butler said weakly.

  “Then it is a man’s coat?”

  “Just as you wish, sir.”

  “Unsatisfactory! The innuendo still exists. I go now to find an officer of the law.”

  “Wait, let’s not be hasty,” the butler said. His face was bloodless and his hands were shaking. “Your coat is a man’s coat, sir.”

  “And what about my necktie?”

  The buder made a final attempt at stopping Zapata and his blood-crazed peons.

  “Well, sir, a handkerchief is demonstrably—”

  “What I wear around my neck,” Cordle said coldly, “becomes what it is intended to be. If 1 wore a piece of figured silk around my throat, would you call it ladies’ underwear? Linen is a suitable material for a tie, verdad? Function defines terminology, don’t you agree? If I ride to work on a cow, no one says that I am mounted on a steak. Or do you detect a flaw in my argument?”

  “I’m afraid that I don’t fully understand it...”

  “Then how can you presume to stand in judgment over it?”

  The crowd, which had been growing restless, now murmured approval.

  “Sir,” cried the wretched butler, “I beg of you...”

  “Otherwise,” Cordle said with satisfaction, “I have a coat, a necktie, and an invitation. Perhaps you would be good enough to show us the Byzantine miniatures?”

  The butler opened wide the door to Pancho Villa and his tattered hordes. The last bastion of civilization had been captured in less than an hour. Wolves howled along the banks of the Thames, Morelos’ barefoot army stabled its horses in the British Museum, and Europe’s long night had begun.

  Cordle and Mavis viewed the collection in silence. They didn’t exchange a word until they were alone and strolling through Regent’s Park.

  “Look, Mavis,” Cordle began.

  “No, you look,” she said. “You were horrible! You were unbelievable! You were—I can’t find a word rotten enough for what you were! I never dreamed that you were one of those sadistic bastards who get their kicks out of humiliating people!”

  “But, Mavis, you heard what he said to me, you heard the way—”

  “He was a stupid, bigoted old man,” Mavis said. “I thought you were not.”

  “But he said—”

  “It doesn’t matter. The fact is, you were enjoying yourself!”

  “Well, yes, maybe you’re right,” Cordle said. “Look, I can explain.”

  “Not to me, you can’t. Ever. Please stay away from me, Howard. Permanently. I mean that.”

  The future mother of his two children began to walk away, out of his life. Cordle hurried after her.

  “Mavis!”

  “I’ll call a cop, Howard, so help me, I will! Just leave me alone!”

  “Mavis, I love you!”

  She must have heard him, but she kept on walking. She was a sweet and beautiful girl and d
efinitely, unchangeably, an onion.

  Cordle was never able to explain to Mavis about The Stew and about the necessity for experiencing behavior before condemning it. Moments of mystical illumination are seldom explicable. He was able to make her believe that he had undergone a brief psychotic episode, unique and unprecedented and—with her—never to be repeated.

  They are married now, have one girl and one boy, live in a split-level house in Plainfield, New Jersey, and are quite content. Cordle is visibly pushed around by Fuller Brush men, fund solicitors, head-waiters and other imposing figures of authority. But there is a difference.

  Cordle makes a point of taking regularly scheduled, solitary vacations. Last year, he made a small name for himself in Honolulu. This year, he is going to Buenos Aires.

  IS THAT WHAT PEOPLE DO?

  Eddie Quintero had bought the binoculars at Hammerman’s Army & Navy Surplus of All Nations Warehouse Outlet (“Highest Quality Goods, Cash Only, All Sales Final”). He had long wanted to own a pair of really fine binoculars, because with them he hoped to see some things that he otherwise would never see. Specifically, he hoped to see girls undressing at the Chauvin Arms across the street from his furnished room.

  But there was also another reason. Without really acknowledging it to himself, Quintero was looking for that moment of vision, of total attention, that comes when a bit of the world is suddenly framed and illuminated, permitting the magnified and extended eye to find novelty and drama in what had been the dull everyday world.

  The moment of insight never lasts long. Soon you’re caught up again in your habitual outlook. But the hope remains that something—a gadget, a book, a person—will change your life finally and definitively, lift you out of the unspeakable silent sadness of yourself, and permit you at last to behold the wonders which you always knew were there, just beyond your vision.

  The binoculars were packed in a sturdy wooden box stenciled, “Section XXII, Marine Corps, Quantico, Virginia.” Beneath that it read, “Restricted Issue.” Just to be able to open a box like that was worth the $15.99 that Quintero had paid.

  Inside the box were slabs of styrofoam and bags of silica, and then, at last, the binoculars themselves. They were like nothing Quintero had ever seen before. The tubes were square rather than round, and there were various incomprehensible scales engraved on them. There was a tag on them which read, “Experimental. Not To Be Removed from the Testing Room.”

  Quintero hefted them. The binoculars were heavy, and he could hear something rattle inside. He removed the plastic protective cups and pointed the binoculars out the window.

  He saw nothing. He shook the binoculars and heard the rattle again. But then the prism or mirror or whatever was loose must have fallen back into place, because suddenly he could see.

  He was looking across the street at the mammoth structure of the Chauvin Arms. The view was exceptionally sharp and clear: he felt that he was standing about ten feet away from the exterior of the building. He scanned the nearest apartment windows quickly, but nothing was going on. It was a hot Saturday afternoon in July, and Quintero supposed that all the girls had gone to the beach.

  He turned the focus knob, and he had the sensation that he was moving, a disembodied eye riding the front of a zoom lens, closer to the apartment wall, five feet away, then one foot away and he could see little flaws in the white concrete front and pit marks on the anodized aluminum window frames. He paused to admire this unusual view, and then turned the knob again very gently. The wall loomed huge in front of him, and then suddenly he had gone completely through it and was standing inside an apartment.

  He was so startled that he put down the binoculars for a moment to orient himself.

  When he looked through the glasses again, it was just as before: he seemed to be inside an apartment. He caught a glimpse of movement to one side, tried to locate it, and then the part rattled and the binoculars went dark.

  He turned and twisted the binoculars, and the part rattled up and down, but he could see nothing. He put the binoculars on his dinette table, heard a soft clunking sound, and bent down to look again. Evidently the mirror or prism had fallen back into place, again, for he could see.

  He decided to take no chances of jarring the part again. He left the glasses on the table, knelt down behind them and looked through the eyepieces.

  He was looking into a dimly lighted apartment, curtains drawn and the lights on. There was an Indian sitting on the floor, or, more likely, a man dressed like an Indian. He was a skinny blond man with a feathered headband, beaded moccasins, fringed buckskin pants, leather shirt and a rifle. He was holding the rifle in firing position, aiming at something in a corner of the room.

  Near the Indian there was a fat woman in a pink slip sitting in an armchair and talking with great animation into a telephone.

  Quintero could see that the Indian’s rifle was a toy, about half the length of a real rifle.

  The Indian continued to fire into the comer of the room, and the woman kept on talking into the telephone and laughing.

  After a few moments the Indian stopped firing, turned to the woman and handed her his rifle. The woman put down the telephone, found another toy rifle propped against her chair and handed it to the Indian. Then she picked up his gun and began to reload it, one imaginary cartridge at a time.

  The Indian continued firing with great speed and urgency. His face was tight and drawn, the face of a man who is single-handedly protecting his tribe’s retreat into Canada.

  Suddenly the Indian seemed to hear something. He looked over his shoulder. His face registered panic. He twisted around suddenly, swinging his rifle into position. The woman also looked, and her mouth opened wide in astonishment. Quintero tried to pick up what they were looking at, but the dinette table wobbled and the binoculars clicked and went blank.

  Quintero stood up and paced up and down his room. He had had a glimpse of what people do when they’re alone and unobserved. It was exciting, but confusing because he didn’t know what it meant. Had the Indian been a lunatic and the woman his keeper? Or were they more or less ordinary people playing some sort of harmless game? Or had he been watching a pathological killer in training; a sniper who in a week or a month or a year would buy a real rifle and shoot down real people until he himself was killed? And what happened there at the end? Had that been part of the charade, or had something else occurred, something incalculable?

  There was no answer to these questions. All he could do was see what else the binoculars would show him.

  He planned his next move with greater care. It was crucial that the binoculars be held steady. The dinette table was too wobbly to risk putting the binoculars there again. He decided to use the low coffee table instead.

  The binoculars weren’t working, however. He jiggled them around, and he could hear the loose part rattle. It was like one of those puzzles where you must put a little steel ball into a certain hole. But this time he had to work without seeing either the ball or the hole.

  Half an hour later he had had no success, and he put the glasses down, smoked a cigarette, drank a beer, then jiggled them again. He heard the part fall solidly into place, and he lowered the glasses gently onto a chair.

  He was sweaty from the exertion, and he stripped to the waist, then bent down and peered into the eyepieces. He adjusted the focus knob with utmost gentleness, and his vision zoomed across the street and through the outer wall of the Chauvin Arms.

  He was looking into a large formal sitting room decorated in white, blue, and gold. Two attractive young people were seated on a spindly couch, a man and a woman. Both were dressed in period costumes. The woman wore a billowing gown cut low over her small round breasts. Her hair was done up in a mass of ringlets. The man wore a long black coat, fawn-gray knee-pants, and sheer white stockings. His white shirt was embroidered with lace, and his hair was powdered.

  The girl was laughing at something he had said. The man bent closer to her, then kissed her. She stiffened for
a moment, then put her arms around his neck.

  They broke their embrace abruptly, for three men had just entered the room. They were dressed entirely in black, wore black stocking-masks over their heads and carried swords. There was a fourth man behind them, but Quintero couldn’t make him out.

  The young man sprang to his feet and took a sword from the wall. He engaged the three men, circling around the couch while the girl sat frozen in terror.

  A fourth man stepped into the circle of vision. He was tall and gaudily dressed. Jeweled rings flashed on his finger, and a diamond pendant hung from his neck. He wore a white wig. The girl gasped when she saw him.

  The young man put one of his opponents out of action with a sword thrust to the shoulder, then leaped lightly over the couch to prevent another man from getting behind him. He held his two opponents in play with apparent ease, and the fourth man watched for a moment, then took a dagger from beneath his waistcoat and threw it, and it hit the young man butt-first on the forehead.

  The young man staggered back, and one of the masked men lunged. His blade caught the young man in the chest, bent, then straightened as it slid in between the ribs. The young man looked at it for a moment, then fell, blood welling over his white shirt.

  The girl fainted. The fourth man said something, and one of the masked men lifted the girl, the other helped his wounded companion. They all exited, leaving the young man sprawled bleeding on the polished parquet floor.

  Quintero turned the glasses to see if he could follow the others. The loose part clattered and the glasses went dark.

  Quintero heated up a can of soup and looked at it thoughtfully, thinking about what he had seen. It must have been a rehearsal for a scene in a play...But the sword thrust had looked real, and the young man on the floor had looked badly hurt, perhaps dead.

  Whatever it had been, he had been privileged to watch a private moment in the strangeness of people’s lives. He had seen another of the unfathomable things that people do.