Science Fiction Discoveries

by Carol

John shook his head and smiled. He handed her a book he’d seen in the bookcase, that had a lovely picture on its cover.

  “Oh, good,” said Anthea. “It’s my favorite, too.” And for two chapters she read aloud from The Wind in the Willows. She’d have read further, but John began to yawn.

  After a while the rain stopped and they walked, saying very little.

  “What can we do tomorrow?” said John. “Shall I stay here?”

  “Well, no, I don’t think so,” said Anthea. “I’ll tell you what. Suppose we meet in town and take the train out to Oxford. It’s very beautiful, and—”

  “Okay,” said John. “Will you call for me at my hotel?”

  “Well, yes, if you like,” said Anthea.

  After tea she drove John to the station and waited until his train came. Then she went back to the cottage and cleared away the cups and poured herself a drink. She tried not to think about the things that were troubling her; she tried to convince herself that John was an eccentric millionaire who played a child’s role in some elaborate defense of—of what?

  * * *

  Anthea brought along sandwiches and fruit for their lunch. It was a lovely Sunday morning, and she knew a place where they could have their picnic, John was wearing the same things he had on the day before. He explained: “I didn't know what else to wear; Peter usually tells me, but he isn’t here, but my underwear is clean.”

  “Oh, good,” said Anthea, with a small smile.

  Oxford’s buildings made John stop and stare. After a long while she steered him toward the gardens at St. John’s. The flowers were at their peak, and when John saw them he squeezed Anthea’s arm. “Oh. Look!” he said.

  The pinks were sending out urgencies of odor, the peonies overwhelmed everything, the lawns were fragrant and striped with mowing.

  “I didn’t know there was any place like this,” said John. “What is it?”

  And it was at that moment Anthea understood John to be what her Scottish relatives of long ago would have called a natural.

  “Oxford is a very old university,” she said slowly. “It is the most famous in the world. It dates way, way back into English history. Many people from many countries have come here. People like us visit it to see its beauty. You do like it, don’t you?”

  “I love it,” said John. “It’s as beautiful as you are. Can we have lunch now?”

  A bench nearby had only pyracantha petals for its occupant. Anthea brushed some of them off and they sat down as birds began a shy assembly. John threw some crumbs, and a robin came quite close to him.

  “Look at that,” whispered John. “He likes me!”

  Anthea gathered up their leavings, tossing crumbs to the birds and putting papers into bins.

  Then she took out her newspaper.

  “Do you ever do the puzzles in the London Times?" asked Anthea. “I know they’re different from The New York Times crosswords, but in a way these are more fun. Any time I’ve done one from the New York paper, I’ve had to think of things like ‘River to Baltic.' or ‘Wife of Bragi.' ‘Husband of Gudrin’ or ‘Geologist’s Tech. Degree.' No romance at all-anybody could look those things up. Now when you get a real challenge like “Journey on a single ticket to find lead ore in heap, four and five . .

  “Single ticket is when you ride alone,” said John. Anthea blinked. “Of course it is,” she said, and wrote it in. “See ... ‘ore’ is jumbled in a heap in it—the letters of ore, that is, and—why thank you, John. Ride alone it is.”

  “You’re welcome,” said John.

  Anthea shut her eyes. “Now let’s see. ‘Mother goes by automobile on one way to get food. ”

  “Automobile is a car,” John said. “So—”

  “You’re absolutely right. Ma—in a car, that’s macaroni, a food. You’re an old hand at these, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” said John pleasantly. “I never saw one before. I never look at the newspaper except the one on Sunday with the color comics. I don’t like them very much, though.”

  “Mmmm,” Anthea was not paying attention. “‘An evil article surrounded by immortality—sweet!’ Seven and three ...”

  “Vanilla ice?” asked John, who had had one that morning at the station.

  “Of course. V and ice at the ends and there’s our evil article, too. How clever you are.”

  “I don’t think so,” said John. “There’s so much I don’t know that ...” He stopped, unable to tell even Anthea about his continuing nightmare of being found out as a crybaby.

  “Would you,” Anthea asked, bent over, her face hidden by her screen of yellow-silk hair, “like to see anything while you’re here? There’s a very famous museum—”

  “Well, I like it so much here." said John. “Let’s stay here and go to sleep on the bench for a while.”

  While John slept, Anthea closed her eyes. The sun was sweet and strong on her face. When he woke he smiled at her. She kissed him very quickly and said, “Time to go.”

  “Please don’t go to work tomorrow,” said John, his hair rumpled and his eyes clouded with sleep. “Please. Take me some other place like this. They won’t know about it at the store, or at least they won’t care and even if they do care ..he frowned. Then he sighed. “It’s all right. I’m the president.”

  “I know,” said Anthea.

  Anthea watched John’s train pull out in the direction of Paddington.

  “My God,” she thought. ‘If we ever married and if we ever had a child and if it had our looks and my brains, how splendid. But if we ever married and if we had a child with our looks and his brains ... well, there’s the new Frankenstein film right there.” She frowned as she climbed into her car and started home. Whoever she was, or whatever cosmic error had been committed, she hadn’t ever forseen falling in love with an amiable, beautiful moron. She remembered dimly how—in the other life—she had achieved a certain parochial immortality for wit in her chiding of the stupid, the pretentious and the silly. Perhaps this was some sort of recompense. No. This was a new situation with no background and no precedent. It would have to work itself out.

  They used her car to drive to Sonning the next day, a town not far from Anthea’s cottage. She took him to a beautiful restaurant with a huge garden and a private lake. “It’s wickedly expensive,” she said, "but you are the president.”

  “I know,” said John. “I can go any place I want, but I don’t always know exactly where I want to go. One of the directors of my company, Lester Kearns,

  says he never knows what to do—no, that isn’t what he said, he said, 1 can’t make decisions.’ So I asked him how he knew what to wear in the morning or what train to take, and he said ‘Sure, kick me while I’m down, you All-American rat, and the next thing I knew Mr. Wanger had fired him and he didn’t work there any more and he was going to a doctor who told him he wasn’t oriented to the right kind of ... hey, Anther? You know what?”

  “What?” said Anthea.

  “Your car has the steering wheel on the wrong side. It should be on the left side of the car. Didn’t you know that?”

  “In England we drive on the left-hand side of the road,” began Anthea, and then thought, what difference does it make? I seem to know these things as though they had been gathered into a hypodermic needle and pushed into my veins last week; how can I explain them to somebody who didn’t ever know am/thing.

  Not much more was said during the ride back to London. John had fallen asleep.

  Part VII

  “That nut is planning something sneaky,” said Wanger to Branch on Tuesday morning, “He disappeared with the PR woman all day yesterday. God knows what he’s up to. There’s no use putting a bug in his hotel room because he never talks to anybody. In fact, I did sort of put just a little bug up there in the flowers, and all it picks up is ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.’ Jesus!”

  “Well, then we ought to get somebody to make him talk,” said Branch. They were walking through Polyester Knits, noting the crowds of w
omen and the occasional shoplifters, nodding pleasantly and democratically to all.

  “Too bad that PR woman is so damn goodlooking,” said Wanger. They were pausing to examine some marked-down jeans. Everything in the store was marked down; it said so on the tickets. London stores seldom had sales and it made the customers happy to think of the lovely bargains they were getting in the American Emporium. “She’s so goodlooking I don’t like her. There’s something the matter. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she was one of these robots you see on TV. No real person looks like that. Personally, it turns me off.”

  Branch nodded. “Me, too. I like a woman who looks available and has to watch her crow’s feet lines. Like Kirbye.”

  “Kirbye,” echoed Wanger. “Hey, why don’t we do something nice for Kirbye, like give her a bonus ...?”

  “She’s already had two bonuses,” said Branch.

  “Well, this is important. Because any man with sense who isn’t a fag, and I don’t think this nut is a fag, not that he would be smart enough to know if he was or not, would go for Kirbye. That’s the way a woman ought to look. All shiny and glamorous on top and cheap underneath. That’s more American—it makes sense.”

  “Just what do you have in mind?” asked Branch. He changed a pair of yellow double-knit pants into its right size-niche. “Say, these pants are really nice. Were doing something really generous for the average Englishwoman. It makes me sort of glow, you know?”

  “Well, why don’t we ask John to join Kirbye and you and me for tea, see, because that smug schemer never takes a drink, and then you and I remember we have this appointment...”

  “That sounds kind of simpleminded,” said Branch. “He’d see through it. Remember, he sounds like a kid but he comes out with some real zingers every once in a while.”

  “Forget that. I’m relying on good old ess ee ex. Let Kirbye really get going on him. I mean, she’s really a looker, and we are sure he's a red blooded man. And if there's anything in the works we should know about, some plan about this international setup he's going to kick us out of—trust Kirbye."

  ‘I'll trust her with her third bonus," said Branch. “Sure. Why not?"

  Kirbye's suite at a hotel overlooking Hyde Park was filled with jars and bottles and mirrors and photographs of Kirbye. “I hate the mindless impersonalities of hotel rooms," she had told John. “I bring a little piece of me, a sliver of self, into whatever environment I happen to be a part of. I know I’m a nonconformist, but anyone who has really come to terms with herself in a sense of identity-finding and consciousness-raising has got to be aware of hangups versus pressures."

  “Where did they go?" asked John. He was watching the door close behind Wanger and Branch, both of whom had drunk briefly out of tea cups and then muttered something that sounded like a foreign language and raced each other to the door.

  “Alone at last," said Kirbye. She sat on the sofa next to John and touched his cheek with her index finger.

  “Stop that," said John.

  “What?”

  “Don't touch my face like that. It feels funny.”

  Kirbye wrinkled her nose, which had been altered by plastic surgery just enough so that when it wrinkled something odd happened to the nostrils.

  “Hey," she said. “You know what?"

  John stared at her.

  “I think you're the best-looking man I've ever seen. But no bull. You are. You're gorgeous."

  “I know," said John. “Other people say that, too.”

  “And a sense of humor," said Kirbye. “Which is for me. I can't stand people with no sense of humor. They bother me. Hey!” She moved closer and put her cheek next to his. Hers was covered with Moisture-Go #45 and liquid rouge and pressed powder; it felt sticky. John frowned.

  “How do you think of me” she asked.

  “How how?"

  “I mean do you think I’m your type, do you feel we could ever achieve a meaningful relationship?”

  “I don’t think about that at all,” said John. “Yesterday Anthea and I went to a park and we sat on a bench and did a crossword puzzle and we fed the birds. Then I fell asleep and she took me home.” “Anthea Evan? The PR woman?”

  “Yes. Do you know her?” For the first time John looked interested.

  “Yeah, I know her. The great beauty. The perfect specimen. She doesn’t look right to me, she looks like some land of phony with that complexion and all.”

  She rubbed her nose against John’s.

  “John, what do you think about me? Be honest.”

  John pushed her away a bit and considered the world’s most photographed face in the models-under-thirty division.

  “Your face is full of stuff and it doesn’t feel nice. But I’m sure you are nice, or you wouldn’t be taking so much trouble over me.” He got up and walked to the window. “It looks like rain. Anthea doesn’t take in her garden furniture when it rains. It can stay right where it is.”

  “Look, are you trying to con me, or something?” asked Kirbye. She came over to the window and stood next to John. “Do you know how many people, I don’t care which sex, would give anything to be in your shoes now? I can’t tell you how many really intellectual types, athletic types, all your top-grade recognizables, have wanted to be in your shoes. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “Anthea and I played Happy Families.” John’s eyes opened wide.

  Kirbye was silent for a moment, always reluctant to admit not being aware of future-slang. Okay, so he was for plurals. Was that really what he meant, or was it something she didn’t know about? That was her ultimate fear, as well as the unacknowledged fear of everyone else in her eccentric social bracket. Whenever anything was said, however bizarre, one’s answer had to sound as though previous experience was implicit.

  “Do you want to play Happy Families now?” she asked, shrugging.

  John stared at her some more.

  Then he said he had to go, and he did.

  “There’s a man out there who wants to interview you for something,” said Anthea’s secretary, whose North Country accent had become so BBC that it was almost impossible to understand anything she said.

  “Who is he?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said the secretary, clearly offended. “He said he wanted to write something about the store for something. I really can’t say.”

  The young man, a pale, fat-faced limpet, slid into a chair facing Anthea’s desk. He turned out to be connected with a highly reputable paper. He asked for coffee, got it and brought out a pad and pencil.

  “Do you like working for Americans?” he asked.

  “Well,” began Anthea, and the young man immediately told two anecdotes involving himself and famous Americans.

  “... feel about liberated woman?” was the conclusion of something; Anthea gathered the question was directed at her.

  “Not a very novel idea,” she replied. “A spirited woman has always been ruler of her own domain. De Maupassant pointed out how fortunate a woman was, in whatever class, since by beauty, charm and wit she could rise above any social disadvantages. In earlier days, women had definite goals. Some will never be achieved, some already have been.” Good Lord, she thought, was that really me talking? How splendid!

  The limpet was busy with his pencil. “. .. importance of public relations in today’s society?”

  “I don’t know,” said Anthea, in imitation of her secretary.

  “What are your hobbies?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know,” said the young man. “Well, do you go to theater or read or any of that?”

  “I used to read a great deal,” said Anthea, “when there was something to read. There is mainly pretentious nonsense now. I go to theater, but only to The Mousetrap. Is it still playing?”

  “What books do you read?” insisted the young man.

  “The History of the French Revolutionsaid Anthea. I am unconscionably familiar with it, as, on a smaller scal
e, with Vanity Fair and Copperfield.” “What about contemporary writing?”

  “The wise egg-os? I read them sparingly. A hundred years ago people worked at writing. They may have been overly conscientious and often dull, but they knew what they were doing. If they had any self-pity it was saved for their wives and families, not for their readers. These days, the driving force behind literature, which is in itself a dead word, is self-pity. It is a mistake to display it publicly. The great Victorians often verged on the tedious, but there was a minimum of drivel. These days, it seems, to publish a really good novel would be like dropping a flower petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. The difficulty may be rooted in the fact that hard work has gone out of style, and there are no longer in the world the two roots of civilization: taste and style.

  The limpet stared and gathered up his belongings. “That’s an eerie bit,” he mumbled to himself as he backed out the door.

  “Oh, blast,” thought Anthea as she watched his exit, “I forgot to tell him that at supermarkets I know the value of everything and the price of nothing.”

  She tapped her pencil against her teeth. "I suppose that outburst was quite inevitable, considering my conversations with John, but perhaps I can make a list of things John is able to talk about. Flowers, houses, weather, colors—what else, I wonder . ..”

  Then her telephone rang. It was Johns secretary, and then John.

  "Please, Anthea,” he said. "When will I see you? Now?”

  “There is quite a bit more,” continued the Teacher. “Too much publicity has occurred in connection with some of your mishaps. Do you remember the case of the American brigantine Marie Celeste? According to the London Times of February 14, 1873, the vessel was sighted by a British ship, Dei Gratia. She was tacking erratically, her sails set. The Britons boarded her and found everything in perfect order. Dinner was on the table, half-eaten. A bottle of sewing-machine oil stood half-full on a table, indicating there had been no bad weather, there were no indications of mutinous struggles; yet no one teas aboard. I demand to know, Dix, how this came about?*,