Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction Read online

  In he went.

  The cool, deep water did not fail him. It shocked him delightfully, stripped away his feelings of paleness and scrawniness. When Fuzz came to the surface after his first plunge, his lungs were filled with a mixture of laughter and shouts. He barked like a dog.

  Fuzz gloried in the echoes of the barking, so he barked some more. And then he heard answering barks, much higher in pitch, and far away. Francine could hear him and was barking back at him through the ventilator system.

  “Does it help?” she called.

  “Yes!” Fuzz yelled back, without hesitation or restraint.

  “How’s the water?” said Francine.

  “Wonderful!” yelled Fuzz. “Once you get in.”

  Fuzz went upstairs to the first floor of the gym again, fully dressed, tingling, virile. Again there was music to lead him on.

  Francine was dancing in her stocking feet on the basketball court, gravely, respecting the grace God had given her.

  Factory whistles blew outside—some near, some far, all mournful.

  “Lunchtime,” said Fuzz, turning off the phonograph. “Already?” said Francine. “It came so fast.”

  “Something very peculiar has happened to time,” said Fuzz.

  “You know,” said Francine, “you could become bowling champion of the company, if you wanted to.”

  “I never bowled in my life,” said Fuzz.

  “Well, you can now,” said Francine. “You can bowl to your heart’s content. In fact, you could become an all-round athlete, Mr. Littler. You’re still young.”

  “Maybe,” said Fuzz.

  “I found a whole bunch of dumbbells in the corner,” said Francine. “Every day you could work with them a little till you were just as strong as a bull.”

  Fuzz’s toned-up muscles tightened and twisted pleasurably, asking to be as strong as the muscles of a bull. “Maybe,” said Fuzz.

  “Oh, Mr. Littler,” said Francine beseechingly, “do I really have to go back to the Girl Pool? Can’t I stay here? Whenever there’s any work to do, I’ll be the best secretary any man ever had.”

  “All right,” said Fuzz, “stay.”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” said Francine. “I think this must be the best place in the whole company to work.”

  “That may well be,” said Fuzz wonderingly. “I—I don’t suppose you’d have lunch with me?”

  “Oh, I can’t today, Mr. Littler,” she said. “I’m awfully sorry.”

  “I suppose you have a boyfriend waiting for you somewhere,” said Fuzz, suddenly glum again.

  “No,” said Francine. “I have to go shopping. I want to get a bathing suit.”

  “I guess I’d better get one, too,” said Fuzz.

  They left the building together. The entrance door closed behind them with a great, echoing ka-boom.

  Fuzz said something quietly as he looked back over his shoulder at Building 523.

  “Did you say something, Mr. Littler?” said Francine.

  “No,” said Fuzz.

  “Oh,” said Francine.

  What Fuzz had said to himself so quietly was just one word. The word was “Eden.”

  SHOUT ABOUT IT FROM

  THE HOUSETOPS

  I read it. I guess everybody in Vermont read it when they heard Hypocrites’ Junction was actually Crocker’s Falls.

  I didn’t think it was such a raw book, the way raw books go these days. It was just the rawest book a woman ever wrote—and I expect that’s why it was so popular.

  I met that woman once, that Elsie Strang Morgan, the one who wrote the book. I met her husband, the high school teacher, too. I sold them some combination aluminum storm windows and screens one time. That was about two months after the book came out. I hadn’t read it yet, hadn’t paid much attention to all the talk about it.

  They lived in a huge, run-down old farmhouse five miles outside of Crocker’s Falls back then, just five miles away from all those people she gave the works to in the book. I don’t generally sell that far south, don’t know many people down that way. I was on my way home from a sales meeting in Boston, and I saw that big house with no storm windows, and I just had to stop in.

  I didn’t have the least idea whose house it was.

  I knocked on the door, and a young man in pajamas and a bathrobe answered. I don’t think he’d shaved in a week. I don’t think he’d been out of the pajamas and bathrobe for a week, either. They had a very lived-in look. His eyes were wild. He was the husband. He was Lance Magnum in the book. He was the great lover in the book, but he looked like one of the world’s outstanding haters when I met him.

  “How do you do,” I said.

  “How do you do?” he asked. He made it a very unpleasant question.

  “I couldn’t help noticing you don’t have any storm windows on this beautiful old home,” I said.

  “Why don’t you try again?” he said.

  “Try what?” I said.

  “Try not noticing we don’t have any storm windows on this beautiful old home,” he said.

  “If you were to put up storm windows,” I said, “do you know who would pay for them?” I was going to answer the question myself. I was going to tell him that the money for the windows would come out of his fuel dealer’s pocket, since the windows would save so much fuel. But he didn’t give me a chance.

  “Certainly I know who’d pay for ’em—my wife,” he said. “She’s the only person with any money around here. She’s the breadwinner.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t know what your personal situation here happens to be—”

  “You don’t?” he said. “Everybody else does. What’s the matter—can’t you read?” he said.

  “I can read,” I told him.

  “Then rush down to your nearest bookstore, plunk down your six dollars, and start reading about the greatest lover boy of modern times! Me!” he said, and he slammed the door.

  • • •

  My conclusion was that the man was crazy, and I was about to drive off when I heard what sounded like a scream from the back of the house. I thought maybe I’d interrupted him while he was murdering his wife, thought he’d gone back to it now.

  I ran to where the screaming was coming from, and I saw that an old rusty pump was making all the noise.

  But it might as well have been a woman screaming, because a woman was making the pump scream, and the woman looked like she was just about to scream, too. She had both hands on the pump handle, and she was sobbing, and she was putting her whole body into every stroke. Water was going into a bucket that was already full, splashing down over the sides, spreading out on the ground. I didn’t know it then, but she was Elsie Strang Morgan. Elsie Strang Morgan didn’t want water. What she was after was violent work and noise.

  When she saw me she stopped. She brushed the hair off of her eyes. She was Celeste in the book, of course. She was the heroine in her own book. She was the woman who didn’t know what love was till she met Lance Magnum. When I saw her, she looked as though she’d forgotten what love was again.

  “What are you?” she said. “A process server or a Rolls-Royce salesman?”

  “Neither one, lady,” I said.

  “Then you came to the wrong house,” she said. “Only two kinds of people come here anymore—those who want to sue me for a blue million and those who think I ought to live like King Farouk.”

  “It so happens that I am selling a quality product,” I said. “But it also happens that this product pays for itself. As I was telling your husband—”

  “When did you see my husband?” she said.

  “Just now—at the front door,” I said.

  She looked surprised. “Congratulations,” she said.

  “Pardon me?” I said.

  “You’re the first outsider he’s faced since the school board fired him,” she said.

  “I’m sorry to hear he was fired,” I said.

  “This is the first you heard of it?” she said.

/>   “I’m not from around here, lady,” I said. “I’m from the northern part of the state.”

  “Everybody from Chickahominy to Bangkok knows he was fired,” she said, and she started to cry again.

  I was sure now that both the husband and the wife were crazy, and that, if there were any children, the children would be as crazy as bedbugs, too. There obviously wasn’t anybody around who could be counted on to make regular payments on storm windows, and, looking about the yard, I couldn’t even see the makings of a down payment. There was about three dollars’ worth of chickens, a fifty-dollar Chevrolet, and the family wash on the clothesline. The blue jeans and the tennis shoes and the wool shirt the woman was wearing wouldn’t have brought a dollar and a half at a fire department rummage sale.

  “Lady,” I said, getting ready to leave, “I’m sorry you feel so bad, and I sure wish I could help. Things are bound to get better by and by, and when they do, I’d certainly like to show you the Rolls-Royce of the storm window field, the American Tri-trak, made of anodized aluminum with disappearing lifetime screen.”

  “Wait!” she said as I turned away.

  “Ma’am?” I said.

  “How would you act,” she said, “if your wife had done what I did?”

  “Ma’am?” I said.

  And then she grabbed the pump handle and started making the pump scream again.

  A lot of people have asked me if she really looks as tough as her picture on the back of her book. If she didn’t want everybody to think she was a beer truck driver, I don’t know why she chose that picture for the book, because she could certainly look nicer than that. In real life she doesn’t look anything like Jimmy Hoffa.

  She’s got a low center of gravity, that’s true. And she is maybe a little heavy, but I know plenty of men who would like that. The main thing is her face. It’s a pretty, sweet, loving face. In real life she doesn’t look as though she’s wondering where she’d put down her cigar.

  The second time she got going, the pump screamed so loud it brought her husband to the kitchen door. He had a quart of beer with him.

  “It’s full!” he yelled at her.

  “What?” she said, still pumping.

  “The bucket’s full!” he said.

  “I don’t care!” she said.

  So he took hold of the handle to make her stop. “She isn’t well,” he said to me.

  “Just rich and famous is all,” she said, “and sick as a dog.”

  “You better get out of here,” he said to me, “or you’ll wind up in bed in the middle of her next book—with God knows who.”

  “There isn’t going to be any next book!” she said. “There isn’t going to be any next anything! I’m getting out of here for good!” And she got into the old Chevrolet, got in and punched down the starter. Nothing happened. The battery was dead.

  And then she went dead, too. She closed her eyes, rested her head on the steering wheel, and she looked like she wanted to stay there forever.

  When she stayed like that for more than a minute, her husband got worried. He went over to the car barefooted, and I could see that he really loved her. “Honey?” he said. “Honeybunch?”

  She kept her head where it was. Her mouth was all that moved. “Call up that Rolls-Royce salesman that was here,” she said. “I want a Rolls-Royce. I want it right away.”

  “Honey?” he said again.

  She raised her hand. “I want it!” she said. She certainly looked tough now. “And I want a mink! I want two minks! I want a hundred dresses from Bergdorf Goodman! A trip around the world! A diamond tiara from Cartier!” She got out of the car, feeling pretty good now. “What is it you sell?” she asked me.

  “Storm windows,” I said.

  “I want those, too!” she said. “Storm windows all around!”

  “Ma’am?” I said.

  “That’s all you sell?” she said. “Isn’t there something else you could sell me? I have a check for a hundred and sixty thousand dollars in the kitchen, and you haven’t even made a dent in it.”

  “Well,” I said, “I also handle storm doors and tub enclosures and jalousies.”

  “Good!” she said. “I’ll take ’em!” She stopped by her husband, looked him up and down. “Maybe you’re through living,” she said to him, “but I’m just starting. Maybe I can’t have your love anymore, if I ever had it—but at least I can have everything money can buy, and that’s plenty!”

  She went into the house, and she slammed the kitchen door so hard she broke the window in it.

  Her husband went over to the bucket that was already so full, and he poured his quart of beer into it. “Alcohol is no help,” he said.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.

  “What would you do if you were in the middle of this situation?” he asked me. “What would you do?”

  “I suppose I’d commit suicide after a while,” I said, “because nothing anybody’s said or done has made any sense at all. The human system can stand only so much of that.”

  “You mean we’re being immature?” he said. “You mean you don’t think our problems are real? Just think a minute about the strain that’s been placed on this marriage!”

  “How can I,” I said, “when I don’t even know who you are?”

  He couldn’t believe it. “You don’t?” he said. “You don’t know my name?” He pointed after his wife. “Or her name?”

  “No,” I said, “but I certainly wish I did, because she just gave me the biggest order for windows I’ve had since I did the Green Mountain Inn. Or was she kidding?”

  He looked at me now as though I were something rare and beautiful, as though he were afraid I would disappear. “I’m just one more plain, ordinary human being to you?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. That wasn’t strictly true, after the show he and his wife put on.

  “Come in—come in,” he said. “What would you like? Beer? Coffee?”

  Nothing was too good for me. He hustled me into the kitchen. Nothing would do but I pass the time of day with him. I never knew a man to be so hungry for talk. In about half an hour there we covered every subject but love and literature.

  And then his wife came in, all charged up for a new scene, the biggest scene yet.

  “I’ve ordered the Rolls-Royce,” she said, “and a new battery for the Chevrolet. When they come, I’m leaving for New York City in the Chevrolet. You can have the Rolls as partial compensation for all the heartaches I’ve caused you.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Elsie,” he said.

  “I’m through crying out loud,” she said. “I’m through crying any which way. I’m going to start living.”

  “More power to you,” he said.

  “I’m glad to see you’ve got a friend,” she said, looking at me. “I’m sorry to say I don’t have any friends at the moment, but I expect to find some in New York City, where people aren’t afraid to live a little and face life the way it really is.”

  “You know who my friend is?” he said.

  “He’s a man who hopes to sell storm windows,” she said. And then she said to me, “Well, you sold ’em, Junior. You sold an acre of ’em, and my deepest hope is that they will keep my first husband from catching cold. Before I can leave this house in good conscience, I want to make sure it’s absolutely safe and snug for a man who lives in his pajamas.”

  “Elsie—listen to me,” he said. “This man is one of the few living creatures who knows nothing about you, me, or the book. He is one of the few people who can still look upon us as ordinary human beings rather than objects of hate, ridicule, envy, obscene speculation—”

  Elsie Strang Morgan thought that over. The more she thought about it, the harder it hit her. She changed from a wild woman to a gentle, quiet housewife, with eyes as innocent as any cow’s.

  “How do you do?” she said.

  “Fine, thank you, ma’am,” I said.

  “You must think we’re kind of crazy here,” she said.

&
nbsp; “Oh, no ma’am,” I said. The lie made me fidget some, and I picked up the sugar bowl in the middle of the table, and there underneath it was a check for one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. I am not fooling. That is where they had the check she’d gotten for the movie rights to her book, under a cracked five-and-ten-cent-store sugar bowl.

  I knocked my coffee over, spilled it on the check.

  And do you know how many people tried to save that check?

  One.

  Me.

  I pulled it out of the coffee, dried it off, while Elsie Strang Morgan and her husband sat back, didn’t care what happened to it. That check, that ticket to a life of ease and luxury, might as well have been a chance on a turkey raffle, for all they cared.

  “Here—” I said, and I handed it to the husband. “Better put this in a safe place.”

  He folded his hands, wouldn’t take it. “Here,” he said.

  I handed it to her. She wouldn’t take it, either. “Give it to your favorite charity,” she said. “It won’t buy anything I want.”

  “What do you want, Elsie?” her husband asked her.

  “I want things the way they were,” she said, clouding up, “the way they never can be again. I want to be a dumb, shy, sweet little housewife again. I want to be the wife of a struggling high school teacher again. I want to love my neighbors again, and I want my neighbors to love me again—and I want to be tickled silly by dumb things like sunshine and a drop in the price of hamburger and a three-dollar-a-week raise for my husband.” She pointed out the window. “It’s spring out there,” she said, “and I’m sure every woman in the world but me is glad.”

  And then she told me about her book. And while she talked she went to a window and looked out at all that useless springtime.

  “It’s about a very worldly, virile man from New York City,” she said, “who comes to a small town in Vermont to teach.”

  “Me,” said her husband. “She changed my name from Lawrence Morgan to Lance Magnum, so nobody could possibly recognize me—and then she proceeded to describe me right down to the scar on the bridge of my nose.” He went to the icebox for another quart of beer. “She worked on this thing in secret, understand. I had no idea she’d ever written anything more complicated than a cake recipe until the six author’s copies of the book came from the publisher. I came home from work one day, and there they were, stacked on that kitchen table there—six copies of Hypocrites’ Junction by—good God in Heaven!—Elsie Strang Morgan!” He took a long pull from the beer bottle, banged the bottle down. “And there were candies all around the stack,” he said, “and on the top was one perfect red red rose.”