Caviar

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Sorry,” I lied.

  A winged eyebrow went up as two heavy lids went down.

  “That’s all right,” she said in a voice like the sound of a cello whispering in the low register. “But you really ought to signal for a turn.” I’d been trying to whip in front of a rotund individual who was about to climb into the taxi I wanted to get, and in doing so had almost knocked the girl off her feet. She turned away just in time to miss the practiced click of my heels as I tipped my hat. I sighed and flagged another cab. I had a lot of friends and knew a lot of glamour, and until this minute I had flattered myself on having a pretty picturesque string of ’em in my little black book. But now—well, I could only wish I had seen her somewhere before. She reminded me of someone I used to know a few years back, when I really was a bigshot. Instead of running an all-night radio program and writing feature articles on the side, I used to be a Power. I was in high school and managed the basketball team. I cut a lot of ice and a lot of corners.

  I stepped into the cab and gave the address of the restaurant where I was supposed to meet Sylvia. That was a date I’d worked hard to get, and now for some strange reason, I had little stomach for it. I stared out of the side window as the taxi drew past the girl I’d just run into. She was walking slowly, apparently looking at something beautiful two miles away and two hundred feet up, and there was an entrancing half-smile on her face. Her hair was long and black and it turned under just about where her straight back started to make her waist so slim; I’d never seen hair like that, but there was something about the strong, clean curve of her jaw and the way the inside corners of her eyes were lower than they should be—

  “Stop!” I screamed to the cabby. He must have thought that I was about to have some kind of an attack. He was wrong, then. I had already had the attack but it had just now hit me. Anyway, he did a dollar and a half’s worth of damage to his brake linings, took the dollar I threw at him as I dived out, and went his unprofitable way.

  I ran to her, caught her elbow. “Hey! I—”

  “Ah,” she contraltoed. “My friend the Juggernaut.”

  “Amend that,” I said quickly. “Your very dear friend Eddie Gretchen.”

  “Oh?” said her eyebrow, and she said, “And when and where did Eddie Gretchen become my very dear friend?”

  “Damfino,” I said, and we began walking. By glancing at me without turning her head, she conveyed the general idea that we were walking the same way but not together. “That’s for you to figure out,” I went on, “and in all sincerity I wish you would. I know you. I used to circulate around you like a bloodstream. But I honestly can’t remember when it happened. You’re a dream that got broken up by an alarm clock. Come on now—you have my face and you have my name. What do they mean to you?”

  “I was never married to you,” she said distantly. “So I haven’t your name. And I don’t want your face.”

  “With a face like yours,” I said, “I can’t blame—”

  She actually smiled at me. “You haven’t changed a bit, Eddie.”

  I glowed for a second and then realized that she didn’t intend to help any. “All right—when was it?”

  “The year Covina High beat your Filthy Five 48 to 17.”

  “It was 48 to 19,” I said furiously, “And they were the Fighting Five.”

  “They were filthy,” she said, and laughed richly.

  “Fighting,” I growled. “And besides, the referees—hey! You’re not Underhanded Mazie?”

  “I am not! No one knows me well enough to call me that! I’m Maria Undergaard—Miss Undergaard to you, Mr. Gretchen.”

  “Aha! Er—Mazie, m’love, what was it they called the team?”

  “The Fighting Five,” she acknowledged.

  “Okay, Maria.” I took her arm happily.

  “But they were filthy,” she muttered. I let it go at that.

  We found a table off the avenue on which to hook our elbows and gab. I don’t think I took my eyes from her once in three hours. It was unbelievable. When I had first met her, she’d been a refugee from one of the low countries, in this country about four years. She had, then, an utterly charming clipped accent, which was now replaced by beautifully schooled diction—the pluperfect English achieved only by those who have thoroughly learned it as a strange language. Ah, she’d been a kiIler-diller in her school days. She’d always had an odd seriousness about her, a deep and unwavering intensity; and my strongest memory of her was the sleepless night I spent after our first—and only—date. It was all wonderment. I wondered what a girl like that would ever develop into. I wondered how in blue hell she had kept me at a respectable distance all evening without using her hands. And most of all I wondered at the overwhelming sense of satisfaction I had got out of it. I never spoiled that satisfaction by asking for another date—it was too complete. For the kind of wild Indian I used to be, that was quite something. And now here she was, telling me how she had inherited a little money after she graduated, had spent four years at a small college up on the Lakes, and had been studying herself myopic ever since.

  “Studying what?”

  She looked at me oddly. “Spiritism. Psychic manifestations. Possession, more than anything else. I’ve read a million books and barked up a million wrong trees, but I—think I proved what I thought all along.”

  “What?”

  “That possession is an established fact. That anyone can be possessed. That I myself can be possessed.”

  “I’d like to be sure of that,” I said. She took it the nice way, though her eyes told me that she hadn’t missed anything. “Psychic possession is a very strange thing. But it is not strange in the way you might think. I’m sure you’ve read stories—books, articles—about it. How spirits drift about in and among us, how, as elementals and familiars, they sometimes take possession, causing us to do things completely alien to ourselves. Well, it isn’t like that at all. It isn’t psychic—it’s psychological. I have proof of that.” As she spoke her eyes began to wander and her voice to fade and come in strong with her wavering gaze. She seemed to be struggling desperately to keep her attention on what she was saying; but it seemed as if she were being distracted by some conversation inaudible to me. “Did you know that a vibrating string never gives off the fullest tone unless it has a sounding board back of it? The ‘spirit’ that possesses people is like that. My vibrating string in the analogy is the source of that spirit—a mind emanating suspicion. The sounding board is—” She broke off, looking over her shoulder at the woman who sat alone at the next table. I’d noticed her before, because of the remarkable viciousness of her expression, and the brittle politeness of the man who had sat there with her. They seemed to be a little bit married and finding it quite a strain. Maria half rose, glanced at me, and with an effort sat down again.

  “What’s the matter—don’t you feel well?” I asked.

  “Oh no—no, I’m perfectly all—I was just …” She sipped at her drink, glanced over her shoulder again, took a deep breath, smiled at me.

  “Someone you know?” I queried.

  She shook her head. “Where was I?”

  “You were here with me, looking very lovely, and you had just told me that the possessing spirit is in reality an emanation of suspicion.”

  “Oh. Well, it has its sounding board in a mind which bears a guilty conscience. Suspicion and guilt; when the two of them combine, they form a very powerful psychological entity, which is actually the thing which possesses a mind opened to it.”

  “Sounds very involved and not overly important to me,” I said, scratching my ear. “Now that you’ve got it, what’s it get you?”

  She shrugged. “What good is any knowledge, once achieved? Maybe some day someone cleverer than I will find out how to use what I have learned. As far I’m concerned, I’ve learned all I—care to about it.” She looked at me; there was something behind that statement and the poignant glance that went with it. She was smooth, svelte; the most equable and poised human bei
ng I had ever seen; and yet under that knee-action armor she wore was a pleading, little-girl kind of terror at something she couldn’t understand. It didn’t fit. It didn’t make sense. It made me frightened, too, a little, and hugely anxious to share it with her, whatever it was. No matter what it was!

  She giggled suddenly. I said. “Huh?”

  “I just thought of something, Eddie. You were in an awful rush when you swept me off my feet on the Avenue. Whatever became of that appointment you had to keep?”

  “Oh, that. Well, I—holy smoke!”

  I leaped up, a horrible picture of Sylvia sitting in a restaurant for three hours, waiting for me, wafted through my mind. I excused myself to Maria’s laughing face and hightailed for a phone. Halfway there it occurred to me that Maria had come out with her little reminder with peculiar suddenness. One phone booth was occupied, I noticed, by the frozen-faced gentleman lately from the table next to ours. He was ogling into the phone with a real genuine sugar-candy ogle. I hate guys like that. I slid into the next booth, dialed. While I was waiting for my connection I glanced back at my table. Maria wasn’t there. I froze. This was dandy. Call up one babe to fix a stand-up while another was doing precisely the same thing to me.

  I got helloed at through the receiver and asked to have Sylvia paged. Sitting back to wait, I looked out again. I’d been wrong. Maria hadn’t gone, she was over at the next table, talking earnestly to the basilisk who sat there. I felt my eyebrows go up. What did she mean by lying to me about not knowing those people? And why lie about it?

  I could see even at that distance how the woman’s face was lowering and setting as Maria spoke swiftly in her ear. When her countenance had achieved the general lines of the bulbous bow on a battleship, she got up and started over toward the phones. I had an impulse to pop into the next booth and warn the man in there that she was coming, but I didn’t want to miss my call. Just as she reached the booths and plastered her ear against the glass, I heard Sylvia’s voice in my receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Sylvia? This is Eddie Gretchen.”

  “Ah. Eddie Gretchen. I wish I didn’t know you well enough to remember your name. Where have you been? Where are you?”

  “It was this way,” I said gently. “An old friend of mine is in trouble. I just had to lend a hand—couldn’t help myself.” That’s true enough, I thought, and anyway, she’s not listening to me.

  “Too bad,” she said bitterly. “Meanwhile I’ve waited for two and a half hours in a restaurant where I’m not known, in which I have eaten a substantial lunch and from which I have secured a pack of expensive cigarettes, and to which I have brought no money. I am to assume that you will not be here?”

  “Oh, Sylvia, I can’t possibly. About the check, put the manager on. He knows me. I can fix that. And Sylvia—I’m terribly sorry. I—” but she had put down the receiver. In a moment the manager’s voice came over. I explained the situation, got his okay, and asked for Sylvia.

  “I’m sorry,” said the manager. “The lady seemed—well, miffed. Definitely miffed. She said to tell you not to hold your finger down your throat until you hear from her again, because you’ll sure digest it off. Heh heh.”

  “Heh heh,” I mimicked, and hung up. I stepped out of the booth into the messiest piece of publicized domesticity I had ever seen. It was the woman Maria had spoken to. She was just in the act of bursting into the next booth. Piling in practically on top of the hapless man inside, she gave vent to her emotions in a screaming falsetto.

  “You moth-eaten old billygoat! How dare you leave me sitting alone in a fourth-rate dive while you call up that sleazy little tramp? Take your hand away from the mouthpiece, you crumb. Let her hear me. Here—get away. (into the phone:) Listen, you home-wrecker. If you want my filthy husband you can have him. But you just better think it over. If you want his money, he hasn’t any. I haven’t had a new dress in six months, although I’ll bet you have, you—ah, she hung up.” She banged the receiver violently onto its hook and turned to her palsied spouse. “Things have come to a pretty pass,” she shrieked, “when total strangers can walk up to me and tell me about your goings-on! You—”

  Along about then she began to repeat herself, and my interest dwindled. I pushed my way through the crowd that had collected, and went back to Maria. She sat with her head bowed, and I really don’t think she knew I had returned until I was seated and spoke to her.

  “Maria—”

  “Oh, Eddie—” with a bright, phony smile, “did you get it fixed up all right?”

  “Yeh.” I sat looking at her somberly. “You did, too.”

  “What?” all innocence.

  “Fixed something up all right. I hate to pry, Mazie, but you just caused a hell of a stink over there. What was the idea of tipping that woman off that her husband was daddying some sugar over the phone? How did you know what he was up to in the first place? And why the devil did you tell me you didn’t know those people?”

  She was a little panicked. Her eyes went wide, and she reached over and clutched my wrist. She didn’t know it, but her touch on my arm clinched any argument, forever and ever. As long as she held me that way, looked at me that way, she was right; I was wrong. “Please don’t be angry, Eddie. I hoped you hadn’t noticed. No, I didn’t lie to you. I never saw them before. How did I know what was going on? I just—knew, Eddie. Please believe me—please don’t catechize me! Will you forget it—just this once? I’ll try not to let it happen again! Truly I will, Eddie!”

  I tried to grin those bright tear-stars out of her eyes. I put one fist under her chin, punched it gently, shaking my head. “Sure, Maria. Sure. Heck—it was nothing. Skip it.”

  Why I hadn’t sense enough to tie the incident up with her theory of possession, I’ll never know.

  The fourth time I saw her I proposed. That was three hours after the third time, which was one day after the second time, which was five solid weeks after the first time. Yes, it took five weeks for me to persuade her to entrust herself to me for an evening after that occasion in the little bar off the Avenue. Twice she almost cried over the phone, and after that she laughed it off; and when she had run out of reasons for not seeing me she broke down and confessed that it was because she was afraid she would embarrass me the same way again. I had to tell her that in the first place I hadn’t been embarrassed and in the second place I didn’t give a damn about its happening again; I just wanted to see her. It wasn’t until I threatened to walk out of a window at the studio that she finally made that second date. Eighty-seven floors is a long way, and I meant what I said.

  She always insisted on going to places where we’d be more or less alone, whether it was in a hansom cab in Central Park or a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. That suited me so well I didn’t bother to wonder about it. But she’d go to any lengths to avoid being with me and strangers at the same time. So it was there in the park, at four o’clock in the afternoon on the day I’d rolled out of bed early to take her to lunch, that I proposed. It was easy. I just held both her hands and felt afraid to look into her eyes when I said,

  “Hey. We got to get married.”

  And she smiled her very own smile and nodded. I kissed her. When a passing cop grinningly broke it up, she straightened her hat, parted the back of my hand and shook her head. “I wouldn’t marry you, Eddie,” she said quietly. My blood turned to salt water and began to ooze coldly out of my pores. I didn’t have to ask her to say it again because she did. Then she stood up. “Let’s get out of here, Eddie.” One of my arms went up and yanked her back down on the bench. I stared woodenly at some kids who were feeding the ducks down on the lake.”

  “For a minute I was scared,” I said. My voice hurt me. “I thought you said you wouldn’t marry me.”

  “I did, Eddie.”

  “Yeah.” I turned to her and when she saw my face she lifted her hands a little and shrank back. “Why?” I asked. “Single, aren’t you?”

  She nodded. “It’s something that—Eddie,
will you take my word for it—just this once?”

  “No,” I said, “I already took your word for something ‘just this once.’ Spill it.”

  “It’s—about the things I studied. I spent a month or so by myself up in the mountains not long ago—did I tell you? I didn’t see a soul for forty-two days. I was always susceptible to what has been called the psychic. Up there, I studied, and I tried out a lot of things, and experimented a lot. That was when I got on the right track. About possession, I mean. I found out how to open my mind to possession. I went too far. I held it open too long. It—grew that way. I can’t close it. I’m a permanent susceptible, Eddie. When I came down from the mountains I was different. I always will be.”

  “What the hell’s this all about?” I snarled. “Do you love me?”

  “You don’t have to ask me that,” she whispered. I looked at her. I didn’t have to ask her. I put my arms around her and said, with my teeth on the lobe of her ear, “Tell the rest of that nonsense to your husband on your honeymoon.”

  The cop came along again. I thumbed at the lake over my shoulder and told him to go jump in it. He went away laughing.

  Different she might have been but her only difference was in being better, finer, sweeter than any other woman on earth. That’s what I believed after our honeymoon. I believe it now, with an amendment. Then, I thought that what I just said covered everything. Since, I learned a little more. Maria did have a profound difference from other women.

  It didn’t show up until we came back to the city and I got back on the air again. I had a nice stretch, and she adjusted herself to it gracefully. I m.c.’d an all-night radio program from two to seven in the morning, which meant getting up around four and breakfasting at suppertime. Great stuff. That way you’re fresh and ready to go in the evening when everyone else who has to work for a living is tired out from a day’s work. Before I got married I had a thousand friends and a thousand places to go every night. Afterward, I couldn’t see why Maria shouldn’t go to at least five hundred of them with me. She didn’t like the idea. Acted afraid of it. I kidded her and swore at her and annoyed her and persuaded her. “A guy like me has to have friends,” I said. “Look. My program has sponsors. As long as people wire in requests for phonograph records, the sponsors know that if they’re hearing the music they can’t very well avoid the plugs. They renew their contracts and that’s what gives me nickels and dimes to buy you ice cream cones and automobiles and stuff. You’d be surprised how many people wire in from bars and restaurants, whether they know me personally or not, just because they saw me there during the evening. I got to get around. I can notice the slack-off already, when I’ve only been off the stem for a couple of weeks. Last night I played fifty-eight minutes of records and transcriptions without getting a single wire. That isn’t good, babe.”