by Jack Finney
I lied. I ran to the bed, sat down beside her, an arm around her shaking shoulders, and listening to myself I sounded convincing because I began with the truth. “I didn’t know, Jan! I came to bed after Marion’s movie. You woke up, and … I thought it was you! My God, why wouldn’t I!” Under my arm the trembling stopped, she looked up, and I saw in her face the realization that that had to be true. Then the lie began. “Same thing the next night. After the party with the Hursts. I thought it was y”
“Out in the open!? Parked in a car!? You thought that was me!?”
“Well, it sure as hell looked like you! And don’t forgetwe were drunk.”
She thought, then shook her head, shrugging her shoulders out from under my arm. “But this morning you knew. Because downstairs in the car tonight you said, ‘It was wonderful, Marion’! You’re having an affair with her!”
“Oh, for cr”
“Do you want a divorce?”
“Jan, for crysake! What for? To marry Marion?” Soothingly I said, “Baby, Baby, listen to me. Today I knew; yeah. But I didn’t find out until … during.”
“Well!?”
“Well, what?”
“When you knew it wasn’t me, why didn’t you stop!”
“STOP!? My God … what an inspiration. That idea is typical, absolutely typical of a hell of a lot that’s wrong around here!”
She jumped to her feet, gripped the hem of Marion’s dress with both fists, yanked, ripped it straight up the front, slipped it off, andbursting into tearsbegan ripping it to shreds, and the lurking headache I’d had since morning roared up like a skyrocket.
5
Sunday morning when I came out to the kitchen, breakfast was cooking, and I smiled and said, “Morning,” to Jan. But she only nodded, and didn’t speak, didn’t smile. During breakfast I let Al in to liven things up a bit, tossing him the occasional toast crust. As always with anything thrown to him, they fell to the floor or bounced off his nose, and he had to track them down, sniffing the floor like a bloodhound. Jan sat absolutely engrossed in the front page of the Sunday paper, and I began talking to her through Al: “Would you tell Jan to pass the sugar, Al? Thank you … Ask Jan if she’d like some more of this absolutely delicious coffee; and help yourself, too, of course.”
Pretty soon she smiled a little, and said to Al, “Tell him he can just help me clean the house today; it needs it!”
We got through the day then, with great politeness toward each other, a thorough reading of every last section of the Sunday paper, and in the afternoon, after the house was cleaned, Jan took a nap while I took a walk with Al.
But Monday night when I got home, she had drinks and a bowl of potato chips waiting on the living-room coffee table, and we sat down to them, on the chesterfield, our backs to Marion’s wall. Jan said she’d been thinking things over, she understood that I’d been tricked, and that it wasn’t fair to blame me. That’s what she said, but her eyes didn’t; not quite; not yet.
But at least we’d made up, officially, anyway, and Jan sat back with her drink, and in a parody voice and smile to match said, “Well, dear? And how was your day at the office?”
“Break a leg,” I said amiably, then Al came wandering in to greet me and accept a few potato chips. “And how was your day, Al?” I said.
Jan said, “Busy; both the garbage man and gas man to bark at, all in one full rich day.”
“Well, that’s his job. Isn’t it?” I said to Al. “Goes with the position of ‘Dog.’ He takes care of all the barking. Singlehanded. No one else ever helps or even offers, but he never complains.” I’d leaned forward toward him, and though I’m pretty skilled at ducking, this time he got me right on the cheek with his tongue. Wiping my face with one of the little paper napkins Jan had set out, I said, “I hesitate to mention this, but where did you dogs ever get the idea that it’s some kind of treat to be swiped over the face by a wet dog tongue? Five thousand years of domestication and you still haven’t learned that it’s no big deal. You don’t see the cats doing that.” His ears went up at “cats.” “They’re smart.” I picked up a chip, and he sat staring at it. I gave it to him and said, “You know what I’m going to do with you, Buddy-boy? I’m shipping you to Denmark.” He wiped his mouth daintily with his tongue and sat watching the potato-chip bowl. “They have an operation that will turn you into a cat.” The ears rose, head cocking. “Yep. They’ll trim those big, long, dingly-dangly, dopey-looking ears into the kind of nice, pointy, beautiful little ears that cats have.” I tossed him another chip. “Teach you to walk fencesthey use training wheels, at first, then it’s up to you. And there’s a crash course in meowing. Oh, you’ll love being a cat!” I took one of his ears and slapped him softly in the face with it. “A duel, m’sieu?” and he exposed his teeth in a lazy token threat, tail going. I picked up a last potato chip and pointed to some crumbs he’d left on the floor. “Any more of that and I’m putting out a contract on you for a hit; understand?” I tossed the chip, it bounced off his nose, and he walked around sniffing, tracking it downit was about a yard awayand Jan and I smiled at each other.
We talked. My vacation began next week, and for lack of anything special to do we’d decided to stay home; visit the museums, see a play that was supposed to be pretty good, try a couple restaurants we’d been told about. And there was still the spare bedroom to be painted. We had another drink, and Jan told me what Myrtle Platt had had to say that morning when they met at the mailboxes on the porch.
All in all we were pretty relaxed, yet at the same time we were tense and on guard, and we stayed that way all evening. Was Marion really gone? It looked like it, but stillin bed we didn’t make up in the way that counts. Jan was afraid, she said, and I couldn’t blame her. Talking in the darkness, we decided that on my vacation I’d also peel off Marion’s wall.
Tuesday I got home a little latesome solemn foolishness at the office that could just as well have waited till morning or 2001. Jan was in the kitchen fixing dinner; I heard the sounds and walked straight back. First thing I said, passing through the doorway, was “Well?” and she knew what I meant. She shook her head, smiling, and held up a hand, fingers crossed: Marion hadn’t returned. I kissed her hello, hugging her, working a free hand up under her skirt till I found something elastic to snap. Then I changed clothes, fixed drinks on the wooden drainboard, and we had them, Jan at the stove mostly, me leaning back against the sink.
I said, “Jan, how did you feel? About being … taken over?” I thought we could talk about it now.
“Horrible.” She had the oven door open and was poking with a fork at something that sizzled. “It was terrible, Nick,” she said, still poking, then closed the door and stood up. “I was appalled.” I nodded. Jan stood absently sipping her drink, staring down at Al, who sat fascinated by her stoveside activities. Then she shook her head and set her glass on the work counter next to the stove. “No,” she said. “That isn’t how I feel. It’s how it seems to me I ought to feel, but I don’t. It was sort of frightening.” She stood thinking. “Sort of … ghostly.” She smiled at the word. “I only had glimpses of what she was doing, you know. Very dim, mostly. Like looking through a dozen layers of glass. And for only a moment now and thenwhen she got tired, I think, and had to let go for an instant.”
“What were they like? Those occasional moments.”
She thought about it, then smiled in surprise at her answer. “Interesting. Life can be a little dull at times, of course; anyone’s can. And I have to admit, it was interesting to bewhat would you say? spliced right into someone else’s mind and feelings. Someone all excited and pleased with practically everything she saw. It’s fascinating to know, really know, Nick, how things seem through someone else’s mind.” She stood sipping from her glass, and lookingwas I right about this? I wasn’t surea little sad, and I had the sudden odd feeling that maybe something had gone out of her life. Absently sipping her drink, she stood staring at nothing, then her eyes focused on m
e, glaring angrily. “And she thought you were the bee’s knees!” She swung away, stooping to yank open the oven door and jab at whatever was in there.
After a little of that she stood up, said she was sorry, and I smiled, said that was okay, andwell, we got through Tuesday.
Every other Wednesday Jan played bridge downstairs with Myrtle Platt and a couple of Myrtle’s friends, and Al and I always helped with the dishes so she could get away early: Al by getting rid of scraps I tossed him while scraping plates for Jan to wash. She changed clothes then, went on downstairs, and I wandered the house a little, looking for something to read. A Blackhawk film catalog had come that day, and I sat down on the window seatthere was still some daylightand marked a couple things I’d like sometime; for Christmas, maybe: the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Nita Naldi, my second-favorite-sounding silent-movie nameLya de Putti being firstand maybe The Social Secretary, with Norma Talmadge and Erich von Stroheim.
I put the catalog down and for a few moments sat looking at Marion’s wall. Marion Marsh lived here, I read once more, June 14, 1926, the back of the chesterfield cutting off the rest. Then I stood up, walked out to the kitchen and the phone, and dialed my dad’s area code and number; it was about eight o’clock here, ten in Chicago. He answered right away, and we talked; every once in a while one or the other of us phoned, particularly when a letter was a bit overdue. He’d run into an old friend of mine in the Loop, Eddie Krueger, who’d been at our house a lot when I was in high school and when I’d come home during vacations from college, my mother still alive. “And,” he said, “the weather’s been lousy, but that’s to be expected.”
“Yeah. Something I wanted to ask you, Dad. Just idle curiosity, but I’ve been wondering about it.”
“Shoot.”
“Well. The Twenties. I’ve been wondering”
“The what?”
“The Twenties; the Nineteen-Twenties.”
“Oh, yeah; what about them?”
“Were they really as great as we’re always reading? Were they actually all that different from now? Were the people different?”
There was a long pause. I was opening my mouth to speak again, not sure we were still connected, when my father answered. “Well, I’ve given that some thought myself. You have to make allowances for the fact that at least part of the Twenties were my twenties, too. I was young, carefree, and you tend to look back at your own youth through rose-colored glasses. And in general, we tend to remember what was good in the past and forget what was bad. We’re propagandized about the Twenties, too; they’ve been glamorized. Allowing for all that, Nick, really considering those things and allowing for themthe answer is hell, yes. Ah, Nick, they were great. Such a different time, everything was different then. It was just a grand and glorious time to be alive and young in.”
“Well, why? How?”
Again there was a pause. “I won’t really be able to tell you that; things were so damn different. The times, the look of things, the country itself; hell, in the very way drugstores used to smell. And my God, yes, the people were different. We were dumber. Not nearly as smart as you. It never entered my head at twenty-one years of age to question the way things were. Any more than you’d question whether the sun should rise, or whether it ought to snow in winter. But it seems to me we were nicer. More tolerant; I don’t remember the hatred there is now. We were more easygoing, more interested in thingswe were livelier, damn it! We knew how to have fun! I think we knew what life was for. I can’t really explain it, Nick. It was just a better time. I feel I was lucky to have been young in the Twenties. And I feel sorry for young people today. It’s all so goddamn grim.”
We talked a little more; I wondered what he’d say if I told him about Marion, but of course I didn’t. When Jan came upstairs I was asleep; they’d played an extra rubber, she said at breakfast, and it turned out to be a long one.
Around ten o’clock Thursday evening, I put down a magazine and looked over at Jan, who was knitting something that was eventually supposed to turn into a sweater for me. I sat watching her, knowing factually that what she was doing would, in fact, result in a sweater. But emotionally it’s always impossible for me to believe that twitching a pair of pointed sticks at a ball of continuous yarn will somehow turn it into a usable garment; what holds it together?
Jan knew I was looking at her, and pretended she didn’t. She was wearing a plain white blouse and a black skirt, rather severe but she looked nice, very pretty. I said, “Jan,” and she looked up, smiling brightly, needles poised. “If you’ll excuse the saying, ‘We can’t go on like this.’ “
“I know”she looked quickly down at her knitting.
“Well, then, if I may offer a suggestion to a lady, why don’t we skip merrily down to the bedroom, hand in hand, and fuck?”
She blushed freight-car red.
Jan and I must be the tag ends of the very last generation brought up as kids really believing there were “bad words.” A lot of our friends are only a little younger, just a couple of years or so, but it seems to have been the dividing line, and they’re able to say these words with ease. And while they’re polite, well-bred people who wouldn’t have mentioned it if we’d never said them, still it would have been noticed. I’ve managed all right; I was in the Army, and as a child I was a boy. But Jan had a hell of a time. I learnedshe confessed thisthat she’d practiced at home. Washing the breakfast dishes, for example, alone in the house, she’d stand there, hands in the soapy water, working up her nerve, then take a deep breath and say, “Fuck!” She could tell it sounded all wrong at first, tense and strained, just not good enough for polite society. But she persevered, working it and the several other de rigueur words into casual sentences, practicing the way you would to perfect a French accent, until at last she could drop them into sentences with butter-smooth casualness, no hint of either emphasis or de-emphasis. Finally she tried it in what my father would call “mixed company” and it came out beautifully. She sounded to the manner born, the only trouble being that she turned brick-red and stayed that way for thirty minutes.
She was blushing now, but she nodded gamely. “Let me just finish this row.”
When she came into the bedroom I was buttoning my pajama coat, scratching Al’s ribs with my toes; he was lying on our furry bedside rug in his after-dinner coma. “Better cookie him out,” Jan said.
I squatted beside him and tapped him on the shoulder. A brown eye opened slightly, and I made the umpire’s out gesture, thumb jerking over shoulder, and the eye closed. “He says he doesn’t care to go out.”
“Well, he has to. Nickie … I’m scared.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” I tapped Al’s shoulder again; this time he didn’t open an eye. “He claims he has as much right in here as anyone else. Says he’s a human being, too.”
“Well, tell him that people with hair on their eyelids aren’t people at all. Are you really scared?”
“Yeah; I don’t want her back either. But still”
“I know. I know.”
“You’re not a human being at all. You’re a dog! You think we can’t tell?” I picked up Al’s limp tail“What about this?” I flipped up a long basset ear“How do you explain that!” I tapped his black-rubber nose. “And this!” I picked up a paw. “And this: there are all kinds of clues; you can’t fool us!” I looked up at Jan, who was unzipping the side of her skirt. “But if you’d really rather not.”
“Oh, no! No. We can’t. Just go on. Forever. Without.”
Al was feebly wagging his tail, and I pointed. “That movement is final conclusive proof: you’re a dog. Come on, get your cookie.” He stood, yawning, stretching, smiled up at Jan, and followed me out and down the hall. When I came back Jan was in bed, sitting up, wearing the rigid smile of a determinedly happy corpse.
These weren’t really ideal conditions for lovemaking, but we went at itslowly; tentatively; bravely. It began to go a little better, then quite a lot better, then I gave
Jan an extra-special kiss, and she returned a real post-office, special-delivery, registered-letter-with-return-receipt, and things were going fine. I said, “You’re a filthy nasty girl, and I’m going to tell your mother.”
“Go ahead; she’ll never believe you.”
I kissed her long and hard, Jan returning it. Then I rose up on one elbow and snapped on the light. Jan lay staring up at me, astonished. “Jan?”
“Yes, for heaven sakes!”
I snapped off the light, then snapped it right back on again. “Where were you born?”
“What?”
“Where were you”
“Kankakee, Illinois! My God!”
I reached for the light, then paused. “What was your mother’s name?”
“Sellers!”
I snapped off the light, Jan reaching for me in the darkness. My lips at her ear, I murmured, “What’s your social-security number?”
Softly she said, “481-03-2660.”