It was triangular, blue, dated, and cuter’n hell:
Welcome, welcome, wherever you
are. Problem: to make perfect
beef Stroganoff exactly as
you like it, without knowing
when you’ll come.
Need one ingredient:
Dearest you.
Waiting,
Leaning over the table to read it without touching it, Merrihew noticed the funny little crossbar on the 7 of the date, European style, and could admire the firm, strong, straight, yet completely feminine handwriting. He backed off a pace to look at the note from a distance. From the way it was placed on the table, he had a strong feeling that it had not been read and tossed there. It had been so carefully centered most likely by the sender, not the receiver.
And the date? Yesterday.
He continued his hands-off inventory: bathroom (where he detected moisture not only on the toothbrush but on the soft bristles of an old-fashioned badger shaving brush) and in the tiny kitchenette, where he made his big find.
It—they, rather, were in the cupboard over the chopping block. The small spice rack contained salt, pepper, seasoned salt, seasoned pepper—and that was all. Beside the rack was an array of vitamin capsules—B complex, glutamic acid and the usual vitamin-mineral once-a-day pill. What faintly caught his eye, just as he turned away, was a glimpse of something stashed behind the little spice rack.
Feeling that perhaps he was carrying caution to a ludicrous extreme—yet silently chanting his mantra again—Merrihew got out his needle-beam torch and peeked. He had to be mildly acrobatic to be able to read the labels, but what he found was vitamins—two bottles. One was B complex and iron, the other Vitamin E. Unlike the B complex out front, which bore the name of a reputable drugstore chain, these hidden ones were from Let’s Live! —one of those natural-food emporia of which Merrihew, a confirmed carnivore, once had said, “They sell fruits and nuts to the nuts and fruits.” It happened that he knew this one; it wasn’t far from his office.
What the hell was Lazvogel doing in a place like that? And why should he have bought more when he already had had (Merrihew bent to check) two thirds of a bottle of B Complex? And if Lasvogel were simply storing this new bottle—why wasn’t the Vitamin E out front?
It looked almost as if he had hidden them.
Resisting the temptation to find out if the bottles really were the genuine article—for the screw-on caps were sealed with shrunk plastic—Merrihew turned away and scanned the counters, the miniscule stove. In the wastebasket was a piece of paper—a small bag with the colophon of the Let’s Live! store on it. Merrihew’s eye photographed just how it lay before he reached down and took it by the smallest possible corner and lifted it out.
Handwriting.
One of these you really need. So much better for you. Please take them. The other one you don’t need at all (!!!) Please take them away!
Love and love
Ruthie
Merrihew replaced the crumpled bag in the wastebasket precisely as he had found it, took one more careful look at the whole place and let himself out.
In the envelope Dr. Poole had given him there was no Ruthie. Hm.
He walked softly down the hall, checking his watch. Still plenty of time. He let himself into Apartment 8D rather more quickly.
Apartment 8D was much more to his taste. In its way as well ordered as Lasvogel’s, It was warm, colorful and lived-in—lived-in, too, by someone who could own a green glass pear and the portrait of a smiling collie because they were beautiful and not because they did anything. The kitchenette was no longer than Lasvogel’s but marvelously equipped and organized. The bed could sleep two and the presence of drapes and spreads, rugs and cushions had eliminated that acoustically-live effect Lasvogel’s place generated, wherein one’s very thoughts echoed and there was nothing to absorb a human error. Merrihew, while retaining his detachment, could not control the thought that if Lasvogel was throwing this away he ought to have his glands candled.
Against one wall was a drop-leaf table, serving as a desk but ready to be used for meals. It bore at the moment a block of triangular notepaper, blue. He ran a fingertip lightly over its edges and nodded. Practical, too. This was Institute stationery with the letterhead guillotined off (making a square) and cut again on the diagonal, making that charming triangular paper.
A piece of it lay on the desk, a felt-tipped pen next to it. In the strong feminine handwriting he had seen on Lasvogel’s table, he read:
Actually I have no claim on you in
any way, not even in the simple
matter of expecting promises
to be kept, and there is obviously
no reason for me
to oh, damn, what’s the
USE …
The last words sprawled across the paper—he could see where the violent pen had run clear off onto the table top.
Merrihew’s eyebrows twitched. Time was when he might have raised them. This was obviously the end of a long series. The rest should be—ahh.
The wastebasket was half full of them. The ones on top were unruffled, the ones lower down crushed, the ones at the very bottom torn into little bits or twisted into tight little knots.
It must have been a long night.
He sampled the many drafts.
Cheerful: Hello there! Remember me? I’m the one with the secret vice—elaborate beef Stroganoff alone in my room. This could lead to—
Indignant: It may be that there are things in your life far more important than—
Comic: HELP! I am a prisoner in a Stroganoff factory!
Comitragic: To whom it may concern: I am an orphaned beef Stroganoff. Nobody wants me. My noodles are withered and my gravy cold.
Tragicomic: Oh pity the poor mathematician with her shining hair brushed bright and the bed turned down, the wine untouched and the Stroganoff cleaving to the cold old chafing-dish—
Distraught: Perhaps I needed this. In no other way could I have learned how much I want you, need you. It’s so much more than mutual pleasure and the joy of your nearness. I should be angry but instead I’m grateful, but oh, it hurts—
Furious: You rotten bastard, you icy son of a bitch, whatever gave you the idea that you could treat me like—
Maternal: Nothing matters if you’re all right, my dear. There will be other times—any time you say—or none. If I can help in any way, I’m here. If I can help most by leaving you alone while you work things out, I’ll do that. But I am rather desperately worried about you. Please eat.
“Bastard,” Merrihew murmured as he carefully replaced the papers in the wastebasket.
It must have been a long night.
III
He wondered if she had used her key and how often, “her shining hair brushed bright—” she had run down the hall to that monkish cell, only to find it dark and silent and her welcoming note unread on his table? Had she dozed off some time in the early hours and awakened, stiff and cramped at her writing table, to run down once more and perhaps done as Merrihew had just done—checked the untenanted cot and the damp toothbrush, realizing that Lasvogel had come home in the gray light to wash and change and leave again—smelling probably of another woman’s perfume? Smelling of organic soy sauce and sesame seed, rather. Who the hell was Ruthie?
What was a guy like Lasvogel, with the fate of a whole planet in his hands, doing with two absolutely superfluous time-consuming body-and-mind-consuming entanglements like this.
Merrihew thought about those organic vitamins.
One of them you need …
That would be the B complex. These health nuts were ape for B complex and the synthetics just would not do.
… you don’t need the other one, but take them anyway.
Oh, boy. There used to be a whole megillah about the language of the flowers, you’d send irises and a rose and a hunk of Queen Anne’s lace and it meant I am panting for you, or some such. Nowadays you bring a bottle of pills.
/>
You don’t need these (!!!)….
Oh, this Ruthie, she is a cutie. Everyone knows Vitamin E’s the wildest thing since the prairie oyster and Spanish fly. Lasvogel, you busy, busy boy, you. So you have a date with this Hungarian slip-stick and her Stroganoff and instead you’re out all night with your dish of yogurt and her triple exclamation points—and you with all that homework to do. And you bring home your trophies and hide them because you know the other chick has a key.
And suddenly Merrihew knew what he must do. He knew it as he knew that he must do it absolutely invisibly.
He had not the compunctions, here in Katrin Szabo’s apartment, that he had had in Lasvogel’s austere environment; yet when he used the telephone he was careful not to move it and to hold the receiver with his handkerchief. He got his number.
“Let’s live!” said the telephone.
“Hey man, amen,” said Merrihew, who hated people who said “man!”
“Is Ruthie there?”
“You mean Ruthie Gordoni.”
“Godbless, man.” You just told me what I wanted to know. But Merrihew didn’t say that last part out loud. “Look around and see is she there for me, man.”
A pause, then: “Not here. Wish she was,” the telephone added garrulously. “This is a whole different place when she walks in. Someone said just last night she’s a regular Earth Mother.”
“Far out,” said Merrihew, who hated people who say “far out.” “She’s the one turned me on to your B and liver. I wanted to find her and thank her, man. I’m really somebody different, man.”
“That’s Ruthie,” said the telephone with pride and joy. “Well she lives right across the street, so she’ll be in. Who shall I say—”
“I’ll fall by myself soon, man. I’m almost out of pork fat molasses anyway.”
“Blackstrap.”
“That’s what I said, man. So later, man.”
“Right on,” said the telephone fashionably and Merrihew hung up. He glared sourly at it. “Far goddam out, man,” he murmured and went looking for the phone book.
He found what he wanted and then, pausing only long enough to check out the whole place for his spoor and finding none, he let himself out and returned through the deserted hall way to Lasvogel’s door, which he now opened in even less time than he had the girl’s. He was there only long enough to fish the Let’s Live! bag out of the wastepaper basket and, in an absolutely perfect copy of her handwriting, add the earth mother’s last name and street address to her arch little note. He did not, however, put it back. He left it on the floor beside the basket. In that environment it shouted, it screamed, it stood out like an oil-spill on a talcum beach.
He went back to his office and called Dr. Poole. “Finished,” he told that startled gentleman. “I got to tell you this: he’ll get worse before he gets better—and if you try to do anything about it you’ll screw everything up. And if you call me to tell me bad things have happened to him I’ll just say I know, I know.”
Dr. Poole said, “But—”
Merrihew was already saying, “Goodbye.”
He then went where phones couldn’t reach him for a while.
What a way to save the world.
The waiter went away with the order and Merrihew shot a look at Dr. Poole. He looked older, a little, though it had been barely three weeks since the last time. He also looked a hell of a lot happier.
“I can’t tell you exactly what he did, of course,” said Dr. Poole.
Merrihew nodded understandingly.
“Secrets, secrets,” he said.
“Nonsense, man! There are two kinds of secrets—the security kind, where someone mustn’t find out something or you’ll get hurt—and the other kind, where you’re expected to explain polymer transformations to a four-year-old. You just can’t. So as one four-year-old to another, I can merely bumble to you about DNA analogs, a chemical integument forming temporarily around ripe ova, selectivity rather like the clumping that forms sickle cells—and an overlooked environmental factor.”
“You mean there’s no smog in West Ecuador.”
“Jesus! How did you know that?”
“You told me. Most of it at lunch that time. I mean, West Ecuador could only be one place in the whole world, from what you told me. And now you mentioned ‘an overlooked environmental factor.’ ”
“Ah. Ah.” Dr. Poole nodded vehemently. “Good thing we—he cleared it up as soon as he did. Anyway, it’s reformulated completely and if anyone should ever make the same mistake again we can straighten it out in a matter of hours. To put it as simply as possible, we now have something which nullifies conception in any warm-blooded vertebrate—but only for the current cycle. It doesn’t affect the cycle either and it has no side effects. It can be taken as an individual dose or fogged—the way we did it at West Ecuador—to affect millions. We can bend the population curve downward anywhere—to any degree.”
“And now who gets it? Government? U.N.? Or just you?”
“You don’t want to know that.”
“You’re right.”
The drinks came. Rather happily they silently toasted one another. “Now,” said Dr. Poole, “tell me. How did you do it? Matter of fact, what did you do?”
“Maybe I should keep my secrets, too.”
“There are two kinds of secrets,” Dr. Poole reminded him.
Most uncharacteristically, Merrihew laughed. He did not do it very well. Not enough practice. “Touché. Uh—I drew a hell of a slice out of that account you set up. I wouldn’t want you to regret paying out all that money for the little I did.”
Dr. Poole waved that away. “There’s an old story about a mechanic who fixed a big rotary printing press by going inside and whacking something once with a hammer. He billed for $2500.25, and when they asked for an accounting and itemization, he said the quarter was for whacking it with the hammer. The $2500 was for knowing where to whack.”
“Goddam,” said Merrihew. “I was going to tell you that very same story.”
“Tell me what you did.”
“I studied your envelope pretty carefully. Your Lasvogel shows an interesting pattern. He’s a multi talented man—and I don’t think his talents are completely under his conscious control. Some people blow up under stress. Some people sharpen up. Lasvogel sharpens. The tougher the problem—and/or the more urgent—the sharper he gets. The West Ecuador problem could hardly have been tougher or more urgent. Every second it got more so. Lasvogel, I think, began to get a little frantic. I think that maybe for the first time in his life he began to feel that the problem wasn’t going to produce enough pressure to squeeze out an answer. It began to show.”
“Oh, it did,” breathed Dr. Poole.
Merrihew said, “I don’t for a minute believe that Lasvogel consciously realized why he then did what he did. Which was to go out and get himself another chick.”
The waiter came, puttered, chuntered and ultimately went away, during which whole time Dr. Poole frowned unseeingly at the puttering and chuntering.
“I suppose,” he said when they were private again, “that he needed to get his mind off the—”
“He got a new chick without getting rid of the old one,” said Merrihew. “There is in all the world no more certain way for a man to get himself into trouble than that. There’s no more efficient method for a man to complicate things for himself, to face more unpredictable and unmanageable hassle.”
“And you were able to stop it.”
“Haven’t you been listening? My God, you know him better than I do or ever will! Lasvogel has total confidence in his ability and he had total devotion to the West Ecuador problem. I mean he knew the answer was in there somewhere and he knew he wasn’t getting enough pressure out of the work. Even if it was about to squash him flat it still wasn’t enough to make the answer come. So he just went out and bought more pressure.”
“Without knowing why?”
“I really don’t think so,” said Merrihew. “Consciou
sly knowing it would make it game-playing, not real—and the pressures then wouldn’t be real either. Which is why playing tricks on yourself never works.”
“Incredible. So—what did you do?”
“Nothing essential. What happened was inevitable, so in a way you didn’t need me at all. On the other hand, I did make the inevitable happen a hell of a lot sooner, which is why you got your problem solved when you did.”
“Why we got it solved, period,” Dr. Poole asserted warmly. “Lasvogel was at the bitter end, believe me.”
“You’d know,” conceded Merrihew. “I don’t—I never saw the guy. Or the chicks. That was the only real trouble I had—making it happen without touching anybody. So I just did what you scientist types called bringing in a force or factor which is necessary and sufficient. I saw to it that the two girls got to know each other. I knew your Miss Szabo was due home before Lasvogel, and that she would sit down and brood a bit, that she would get mad and barge into his place—and that she would not only see the evidence I left for her but would snatch it up and take it away with her.”
“What evidence?”
“The other woman’s name and address.”
“But how would that guarantee—”
“It was guaranteed, if you know Miss Szabo.”
“You seem to have gotten to know her quite well.”
“Never saw her,” said Merrihew, watching, behind his eyes, a succession of careful blue triangles, lines of strong, angry, devoted, injured handwriting. “But in a way you’re right. I knew she’d go straight there and have it out.”
“What happened?”
“We’ll never know. Whatever it was, Lasvogel walked in on it.”
“That must have been the night he limped into the lab with the scratches on his face and the big bruise on his cheekbone.”
“Language of love,” said Merrihew. “One of ’em.”
“And by morning he had the new formulation.”
“Pressure enough,” said Merrihew, spreading his hands in a Q.E.D. gesture. “Necessary and sufficient.”
“Oh, dear,” said Dr. Poole thoughtfully.
Slow Sculpture Page 23