Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

“Which?”

“About what you did when the plane—”

“It was a statement of fact.”

At Arlo’s apartment, after she had hung things up to dry, he offered her an omelet. “I can make seven different varieties, all delicious.”

She aimed a finger at him. “You’re lucky I share an apartment with a light sleeper, because underwear or no underwear, I wouldn’t have let you con me into coming up here.”

“Spanish, Viennese, Ranch-style, Albanian—”

“You have an indomitable will. Nothing seems to get to you. Brick walls and your head have much in common.”

“Corsican, Paraguayan—”

“Look: I’m very hungry, mostly because you had the bad taste to remind me, and I’d like nothing better than a good omelet; but when I say nothing better, I mean exactly that. You are still a casual pick-up, even though for some nutty reason we have managed to travel along this far together and my bikini briefs are drying over your shower curtain. Does my message penetrate?”

Arlo grinned infectiously. “Like a call from the spirit world. My father taught me. He was a master chef in New York hotels most of his life, except for a couple of years when he was captaining the kitchen of a luxury liner. Spanish, Corsican, Tibetan, German-Bavarian—”

She sat down on the arm of an overstuffed Morris chair, courtesy of the landlord. She pulled his blue bathrobe closer around her. A flash of leg reminded him there was nothing between them but the robe. “You know, Arlo, I have to tell you, concisely, I think you are the bummest trip I have ever been on. Not only are you funny looking, but there is a perceptible animal cunning in your face, and very frankly, but nothing could get me to go to bed with you, so forget the whole idea right now. How the hell do you make an Albanian omelet?”

Any second now, she’ll notice them, Arlo gloated.

He moved in and kissed her. It was an act of humor on his part, an act of politeness on hers. “Now that we have that out of the way,” he smiled, “one Albanian omelet coming up.”

He vanished into the utility kitchen, tiny for the white stucco unit (furniture courtesy of landlord and Thrift Shops; what might have been termed Early Impecunity) but more than sufficient for his needs. He proceeded to make a Spanish omelet, which was, in actuality, the only kind he could make, and that the result of endless hours following the recipe in Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cookbook. Escoffier had no trepidation about living in the same universe with Arlo. But this he had learned (Arlo, not Escoffier): one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. Arlo had broken dozens.

He threw in a palmful of paprika and brown sugar and oregano.

“You collect coins,” she called from the other room.

Beachhead secured! he rejoiced.

“My father did,” he answered, without turning from the stove. He had no need to go in the other room to see what she was doing. He could picture it perfectly. The picture was always the same, because it always happened just this way. She was standing before the flat, glass-covered case about the size of an opened newspaper. It stood on its own black wrought iron pedestal, a Herman Miller design that had been bolted to the underside of the case. The little Tensor lamp was turned in such a way that the beam fell directly on the arrangement of coins lying on their black velvet pad in the case.

“They’re very handsome,” she called.

“Yes, they were Dad’s pride and joy,” he said, not turning from the stove.

“They must be valuable,” she said.

He turned from the stove, smiling a secret smile. Then he turned back to the stove, and scraped the ruined omelet into the sink disposal, started over again with gritted teeth, and knew he shouldn’t have turned from the stove.

When he brought out their plates, and set them on the coffee table, she was still leaning over the case, mesmerized, hands behind her back, not wanting to put fingerprints on the carefully polished glass. Arlo smiled his own Spanish omelet of a secret smile.

She looked at the omelet uneasily as he went back to get the quart of milk from the refrigerator. She was back at the coin case when he returned with it. “Your omelet’ll get cold,” and she came over to the sofa, sat down and addressed herself to the egg without realizing Arlo was looking at the exposed left thigh.

“You keep them out where anyone could steal them?”

Arlo shrugged and ate a bite of omelet. It was awful. She wasn’t saying anything about hers, however. “I seldom have people over,” he explained. And mused that while he had just lied outrageously, the usual modus operandi had not been like this evening’s. Underwear. He’d have to examine the ramifications of that ploy, at his leisure.

“It took Dad over thirty years to find all those. Myself, I could never understand the kick he got out of it. They never meant much to me—until he died…”

He choked up. She paused with a forkful on her way to mouth. The appraisal she gave him was the crucial one: if he could pass the sincerity test, the rest was downhill.

“But when he died… ?” she prompted him.

Arlo plunged on. “It was all he left me. All those years he worked so damned hard, and he had so little to show for it. Just those coins. He left them to me, and well, it may have seemed a dumb way to spend time, collecting coins, when I was younger and he was around. But when he was gone, they became very important. It was like keeping a little bit of him with me. He was a good guy—never really understood me, but I suppose that’s typical with the parents of our generation.”

Lofty. Very lofty, and as far away from sex talk as he could get without going into withdrawal. “They must be quite valuable,” she said again.

He nodded, munching. “ As a matter of fact, they are. Twice I got real flat and decided to sell them, but when it got right down to the old nitty-gritty, I couldn’t do it. Once I took a job selling shoes and the other time I hocked my tape recorder. I didn’t realize how important they’d become to me till then. They were worth about fifteen hundred when he died, but by now I could probably trade the collection in on a Maserati if I wanted to.”

She seemed appalled. “That’s a terrible idea.”

He chuckled. “I was only kidding. I wouldn’t do it. They meant so much to Dad, I guess it’s rubbed off. They’re important to me now. That nickel in the upper left hand corner is worth about two hundred and fifty bucks alone. How’s the omelet?”

“Good.” She smiled at him. He had depth now. Substance. A past. A present, lying there on black velvet.

When they finished eating she took the plates to the sink and washed them, and used a Brillo pad on the gooey skillet. Arlo watched quick flashes of her through the doorway, as she moved back and forth from the sink. He sank down in the sofa and felt secure. When she was finished and had dried her hands on the little dish towel, he called in to her, “There’s a bottle of hand lotion under the sink.”

He heard her open the cabinet. A few minutes later she reentered the living room, dry-washing her hands. “I gather you often have ladies wash your dishes; that bottle of lotion is almost empty.”

“Not too often.”

“It’s a kindness only a man with female companions would appreciate.”

“I appreciate all sorts of things; like your doing the dishes. That was very nice. You looked at home in there.” He extended his hands. She took them.

“The least a girl can do is pay for her supper.” He drew her down beside him on the sofa, but she scrunched away. “Whoops. Let me rephrase that.”

Arlo scrunched closer, tried for a kiss, aimed for her lips, landed on her cheek.