Time Travel Omnibus, page 562
I love reading in bed, and that night I read a good half of my new Mark Twain in bed with Vera, and afterward—well, afterward she fixed me a nice cool Tom Collins. And oh, boy, this was the life all right.
In the weeks that followed—that lanky length of violet-eyed womanhood cuddled up beside me, singing softly through her nose—I read a new novel by Ernest Hemingway, the best of all, I think. I read a serious wonderfully good novel by James Thurber, and something else I’d been hoping to find for years—the sequel to a marvelous book called Delilah, by Marcus Goodrich. In fact, I read some of the best reading since Gutenberg kicked things off—a good deal of it aloud to Vera, who enjoyed it as much as I did. I read Mistress Murder, a hilarious detective story by George S. Kaufman; The Queen Is Dead, by George Bernard Shaw; The Third Level, a collection of short stories by someone or other I never heard of, but not too bad; a wonderful novel by Allen Marple; a group of fine stories about the advertising business by Alfred Eichler; a terrific play by Orson Welles; and a whole new volume of Sherlock Holmes stories by A. Conan Doyle.
For four or five months, as Vera rather aptly remarked, I thought, it was like a second honeymoon. I did all the wonderful little things, she said, that I used to do on our honeymoon and before we were married; I even thought up some new ones. And then—all of a sudden one night—I wanted to go to a night club.
All of a sudden I wanted to get out of the house in the evening and do something else for a change. Vera was astonished—wanted to know what was the matter with me, which is typical of a woman. If you don’t react precisely the same way day after endless day, they think something must be wrong with you. They’ll even insist on it. I didn’t want any black-cherry ice cream for dessert, I told Vera one night at dinner. Why not, she wanted to know—which is idiotic if you stop to think about it. I didn’t want any because I didn’t want any, that’s all! But being a woman she had to have a reason; so I said, “Because I don’t like it.”
“But of course you like it,” she said. “You always used to like it!”
You see what I mean? Anyway, we did go to this night club, but it wasn’t much fun. Vera got sleepy, and we left, and were home before twelve. Then she wasn’t sleepy but I was. Couple nights later I came home from the office and was changing my clothes; she said something or other and I didn’t hear her and didn’t answer, and we actually had a little argument. She wanted to know why I always looked at every coin in my pocket like an idiot every time I changed clothes. I explained quietly enough; told her about the ad I used to read as a kid and how I was still looking for a 1913 Liberty-head nickel worth thousands of dollars, which was the truth.
But it wasn’t the whole truth. As I looked through the coins I’d collected in my pocket during the day—the Woodrow Wilson dimes, the Grover Cleveland pennies, the nickels with George Coopernagel’s profile, and all the other familiar coins of the world I now lived in—I understood something that had puzzled me once.
These other alternate worlds in which we also live intersect here and there—at a corner newsstand, for example, on Third Avenue in New York and at many another place, too, no doubt. And from these intersecting places every once in a while something from one of these worlds—a Woodrow Wilson dime, for example—will stray into another one. I’d found such a dime and when I happened to plank it down on the counter of that little newsstand there at an intersection of the two alternate worlds, that dime bought a newspaper in the world it belonged in. And I walked off into that world with the New York Sun under my arm. I knew this now, and I’d known it long since. I understood it finally, but I didn’t tell Vera. I simply told her I was looking for a 1913 Liberty-head nickel. I didn’t tell her I was also looking for a Roosevelt dime.
I found one, too. One night finally, sure enough, there it lay in my palm—a dime with the profile of Franklin D. Roosevelt on its face. And when I slapped it down on the counter of the little newsstand next evening, there at the intersection of two alternate worlds, I was trembling. The man snatched up a paper, folding it as he handed it to me, and I tucked it under my arm and walked on for three or four steps, hardly daring to breathe. Then I opened the paper and looked at it. New York World-Telegram, the masthead read, and I began to run—all the way to Forty-fourth Street, then east to First Avenue, and then up three flights of stairs.
I could hardly talk I was so out of breath when I burst into the apartment, but I managed to gasp out the only word that mattered. “Marion!” I said and grabbed her to me, almost choking her, because my arms hit the back of her head about where Vera’s shoulders would have been. But she managed to talk, struggling to break loose, her voice sort of muffled against my coat.
“Al!” she said. “What in the world is the matter with you?”
For her, of course, I’d been here last night and every night for the months and years past. And of course, back in this world, I remembered it, too, but dimly, mistily. I stepped back now and looked down at the marvelous tiny size of Marion, at that wonderful, petite figure, at her exquisite and fragile blond beauty. “Nothing’s the matter with me,” I said, grinning down at her. “It’s just that I’ve got a beautiful wife and was in a hurry to get home to her. Anything wrong with that?”
There wasn’t; not a thing, and—well, it’s been wonderful, my life with Marion, ever since. It’s an exciting life; we’re out three and four nights a week, I guess—dancing, the theater, visiting friends, going to night clubs, having dinner out, even bowling. It’s the way things used to be, as Marion has aptly said. In fact, she remarked recently, it’s like a second honeymoon, and she’s wonderfully happy these days and so am I.
Oh, sometimes I’m a little tired at night lately. There are times after a tough day at Serv-Eez when I’d almost rather stay home and read a good book; it’s been quite a while since I did. But I don’t worry about that. Because the other night, about two thirty in the morning, just back from the Mirimba, standing at my dresser looking through the coins in my pocket, I found it—another Woodrow Wilson dime. You come across them every once in a while, I’ve noticed, if you just keep your eyes open; Wilson dimes, Ulysses Grant quarters, Coopernagel nickels. And I’ve got my Wilson dime safely tucked away, and—well, I’m sure Vera, that lithe-limbed creature, will be mighty glad to see her husband suddenly acting his old self once again. I imagine it’ll be like a third honeymoon. Just as—in time—it will be for Marion.
So there you are, brother, coin collecting can be profitable. And FUN too! Why don’t you start—tonight!
LOVE, YOUR MAGIC SPELL IS EVERYWHERE
Jack Finney
I’m a big noon-hour prowler. I like to duck out of the office when I haven’t a lunch date, grab a fast bite, pick up a Hershey bar or a Snickers or something, and then poke around—into a Second Avenue antique store with a bell that clanks when you open the door, or an unclaimed-parcel auction, a store-front judo school, secondhand bookshop, pinball emporium, pawnshop, fifth-rate hotel lobby—you know what I mean?
You do if you’ve ever been a noon-hour prowler, but there aren’t too many of them, not real ones. The only other one I ever ran into from our office—Simon & Laurentz, an advertising agency on Park near Forty-fourth—was Frieda Piper from the art department. I wandered into a First Avenue hardware store one noon this last May and there she was back in the store fiddling with a lathe. At least I was pretty sure no one else could look quite that shapeless and down-at-the-heels, though it was a little dark in there and her back was to me. But, when she turned at the sound of the door opening and her hair fell over her face, I knew it had to be Frieda.
She wore her hair like someone in an 1895 out-of-focus tin-type, parted somewhere near the middle in a jagged lightning streak, hanging straight down at the sides, and snarled up at the back in a sagging granny-knot. It covered the sides of her face as though she were peeking out through a pair of curtains, and it kept creeping out over her eyes as though she’d ducked back behind them. Walking toward her through the hardware store I was thinking that her dresses were like old ladies’ hats; you couldn’t imagine where they sold that kind. The one she had on now, like all her others, was no particular color; call it anything and you wouldn’t be wrong. It was a sort of reddish, greenish, blackish, brownish, haphazard draping of cloth that looked as though it had accidentally fallen on her from a considerable height; even I could see that the hem on one side was a good three inches lower than the other.
The heels of her shoes—not just the ones she had on now but all her shoes all the time—were so run down that her ankles bent out as though she were learning to skate, and her stocking seams were so crooked you wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d actually turned loops. It was an office joke that she bought her stockings in special unmatched pairs with the runs already in, and she’s the only young adult woman I ever saw with one of the side pieces of her glasses broken and held together with adhesive tape. They were the same kind of fancy glasses other girls wear, studded here and there with little shiny stones, but half the stones were missing, and the glasses were so knocked out of shape that they hung cockeyed on her nose, one eye almost squinting out over the top of the frame, the other trying to peer out underneath. She looked like the model for some of her own wilder cartoons.
I said, “Hi, Frieda; buying a lathe?”
She surprised me. “Hi, Ted,” she said. “Yeah, I’m thinking about it. I’ve got a drill press, a router, a planer, a belt-sander, and a nine-inch table saw; now I need a lathe.” I looked puzzled; someone had told me she lived in a little two-room apartment on upper Madison Avenue somewhere. She said, “Oh, I haven’t much room to use them, but I’m crazy about tools! I’m not too interested in clothes,” she said as though she thought I might not have noticed, “so I’m filling my hope chest with tools. Some day when I’m married, I can build all our furniture. Maybe even the house.”
I was pleased at the thought of a girl with a hope chest full of power tools, and wanted to hear a little more about it, and I brought out a Baby Ruth I’d bought, and offered Frieda some. She said no, she still had half a Love Nest left, and pulled it out of her skirt pocket, and we wandered around the hardware store for a while. She chattered away about her wood-working projects. One of them, a wedding gift for her future husband, was to be an enormous multiple-dwelling birdhouse, a sort of slum-clearance project I gathered, and I figured that the guy who married her would probably appreciate it.
She talked all the way back to the office, looking up at me eagerly through her slanted glasses, shoving the hair back off her face. The upper edge of her glasses bisected her right eye, the lower edge bisected the left; and since one lens made half her eye slightly smaller than normal, while the other lens magnified half of the remaining eye, she seemed to have four separate half-eyes of varying sizes, resembling a Picasso painting, and I got a little dizzy and tripped and nearly fell over a curb.
But I learned that Frieda was a full-fledged noon-hour prowler; she’d been to most of the places I had, and she mentioned several, including a bootleg tattooing parlor in the back of a cut-rate undertaker’s place, that I hadn’t run across. So I wasn’t surprised later that week when I passed a Lexington Avenue dance studio to see Frieda there. It was on the second floor, a corner room with big windows; I’d stopped in one noon and knew they offered you a free trial lesson when you came in. So now as I passed on the opposite side of the street, I glanced up and there was Frieda taking the free lesson, her dress billowing and flapping like loose sails in a typhoon. Her head rested dreamily on the instructor’s shoulder, her eyes were closed behind the cockeyed glasses, and she was chewing in time to the music; the hand behind the instructor’s back held half a candy bar. He was looking down at her as though he were wondering how he’d ever gotten into this line of work.
The reason I mention Frieda is because of what happened the following week. One noon hour I was clear across town wandering around west of Sixth Avenue in the Forties somewhere, and I came to a narrow little place jammed in between an all-night barbershop and a Turkish bath. It said MAGIC SHOP on the window, and down in a corner in smaller letters, NOVELTIES, JOKES, JEWELRY, SOUVENIRS. I went in, of course; there were glass showcases on three sides, practically filling the place. The proprietor was back of one, leaning on the counter reading the Daily News. He was a thin, tired-looking, bald guy about thirty-five, and he just looked up and nodded, then went back to his paper till I was ready for business.
I looked at the stuff in the showcases; it was about what you’d expect. There was some jewelry in one case—fake gold rings mounted with big zircons, imitation turquoise-and-silver Navaho jewelry, Chinese good-luck rings. On one counter was a metal rack filled with printed comic signs, and a display of practical jokes in the showcase underneath; a plastic ice cube with a fly in it; an ink bottle with a shiny metal puddle of what looked like spilled ink—that kind of stuff.
I said, “What’s new in the magic-trick line?” and the guy finished a line of what he was reading, then looked up.
“Well,” he said, “have you seen this?” and reached into the showcase and brought out a little brass cylinder with a handle, but I recognized it. It changed a little stack of nickels into dimes, and I told him I’d seen it. “Well, there’s this,” he said, and brought out a trick deck of cards, and demonstrated them, staring boredly out the window as he shuffled. I nodded when he finished, and waited. For a moment he stood thinking, then he shrugged a little, reached into the showcase, and pulled out a cheap gray cardboard box filled with a dozen or so pairs of glasses. “These are new; some salesman left them last week.” I picked up a pair, and looked at them; it was just a cheap plastic frame with clear-glass lenses, no false nose attached or anything like that, and I looked up at the guy again, and said, “What’re they for?”
He reached wearily into the showcase once more—he’d demonstrated so many little tricks for so many people and made so few sales—and brought out a thin silk handkerchief. He made a fist with his other hand, draped the handkerchief over it, and held it up. “Put on the glasses,” he said, and I did.
It wasn’t a bad trick. As soon as I put on the glasses I could see his fist under the handkerchief very clearly, the handkerchief itself barely visible. “Not bad,” I said, “How’s it work?
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Salesman said a few rays of light get through cloth if it’s thin, but not enough to see by. The lenses are ground some way to magnify the rays so you can see the hand underneath.”
I nodded, taking the glasses off to examine them. “Is that the whole trick?”
“Yeah.” He looked away boredly. “There are a couple others you can do with it, too.”
I glanced out the window. A truck and several cabs stood motionless, blocked in a traffic jam. A man in a business suit and carrying a briefcase turned to cross the street between two of the cabs. A tall good-looking showgirl type from one of the theaters around here walked along the other side of the street. I put the glasses on again absently, wondering if I wanted them; I felt I ought to buy something. The truck and the cabs sat there, the drivers leaning on their wheels trying to keep calm. The man in the business suit stepped up onto the opposite curb. The showgirl was still walking—the showgirl’s dress was gone!
There she was, walking along just as before glancing into store windows, and wearing nothing but high heels, a bra, lace-edged panties, and a purse! Then I saw the dress, ghostlike and almost invisible, swaying as she walked. I snatched off the glasses, and instantly the dress was solid—thin but nontransparent cloth. I jammed the glasses back on before she got out of sight, almost putting my eye out with one of the side pieces, the dress became ghostly, and there she was again, by George, that handsome swaying figure under the nearly vanished dress marvelously visible once more.
I rushed to the doorway, looked toward the corner, and there they all were—all the sweet young office girls, not in their summer dresses but walking delightfully along in shoes, bras, and panties. It was entrancing, and I stood there for several happy and amazing minutes. When I finally turned back into the store again the proprietor was reading the News. “Ah, look,” I said, hesitating, “these are fine, but . . . I was wondering if you had a stronger pair?”
He shook his head. “No, but it’s funny, that’s something I get a lot of calls for, and I’m going to check the salesman next time he comes in. These only work through one or two layers of pretty thin cloth; not much use for anything but tricks, far as I can see. There’s a couple of good ones, though. For example, you have someone wrap a coin in a handker—”
“Yeah, yeah; how much?”
“Buck and a quarter plus tax,” he said, and I bought them, and walked back to the office—strolled, actually, and it was wonderful. It was absolutely fascinating, in fact, and it seems to me that if girls understood how delicious they look walking along as I saw them now, they’d dress that way all the time, at least in nice weather. It’d be a lot cooler, terrifically healthy, and would bring a great deal of happiness into a drab prosaic world. It might even bring about world peace; it’s worth trying anyway.
I sauntered along observing, and grinning so happily—I couldn’t help it—that people began staring at me wonderingly, girls especially. Once, stopped on a corner waiting for the traffic cop to wave us across, I stood beside a very good-looking girl with a haughty face—the kind that shrivels you with a look if you so much as glance at her. She stood there in—I don’t know why, but it’s true—a bright blue bra and a pair of vivid orange panties; I noticed that she was slightly knock-kneed. I leaned toward her, and murmured very quietly, “Orange and blue don’t go together.” She looked at me puzzledly, then her eyes suddenly widened, and she stared at me with her mouth opening. Then she whirled and began looking frantically around her. The light changed, the cop waving us across, and she headed out into the street toward him, and I ran across to the other curb, glancing at my watch so people would think I’d suddenly remembered I was late somewhere. Then I ducked into a building lobby across the street, snatching off the glasses so I’d be harder to identify, and just as I yanked them off I passed a girl who wasn’t even wear—but I didn’t stop; I hurried on, and came out of the building a block away just across the street from my office.
