Andrew Shaw - Sin Hellcat

I opened the fridge and stared thoughtfully at the teevee dinner. It was a Dexter Frozen Dinner. A Square Deal on a Square Meal, I thought. And just how square could you get? It was unsettling. I was selling my own wife.

I took out the teevee dinner, the Dexter Frozen Dinner thoughtfully provided by Harvey Christopher’s Frozen Wife. I put it on the electric range and turned the dial. The burner unit glowed like neon. I looked at Dexter’s creation — pieces of unhappy chicken swimming with leaden wings through a sea of à la king. I watched the green peas in one section of the aluminum foil container grow slowly warm. The frozen French fries thawed and heated.

When the chicken bubbled the dish was prepared. Scientific eating. Scientific cooking. I took the container — dishes are a waste of time, of course, even with an electric dishwasher to care for them, and besides you can only get them in boxes of soap, and soap makes too many suds and is harmful to your new automatic, and — I took the container into the family-style living room carpeted protectively from wall to wall to hide the bad job they’d done on the floor, and I sat down in a chair no more comfortable than it looked. I placed the container on the arm of the chair, then flicked the remote switch that clued in the television set to the fact that someone, by God, was eating a teevee dinner, and while the set woke up and came to life I plunged a fork into the chicken mess and brought it to my mouth. I chewed it — it wasn’t really necessary, because the Dexterino people sort of chew the food for you, scientifically, of course, as an unbeatable aid to digestion. A western was happening on the screen. I studied it for a moment, pausing before attempting another forkful of Dexter’s Death Warmed Over.

And I thought about Jodi, and bed with Jodi, and Jodi’s happy apartment on Lexington in the very heart of Madcap Manhattan. Jodi’s apartment was not schizoid. It didn’t even have a sunken living room. It was all on one level, as, for that matter, was Jodi.

And something happened. I reached for the remote switch and killed the television set in the middle of a howdy. I stood up, slowly but quite firmly, and I carried the Dexter’s Frozen Tundra to the bathroom.

The toilet wasn’t electric but it tried. I poured the teevee dinner into it. There was no chain to pull, no handle to yank. There was instead a pedal on the floor. I trod lightly upon the pedal and the toilet gurgled pleasantly at me while Dexter’s Frozen Folderol disappeared to wherever bad food goes when it dies.

I had a shaker of martinis mixed before I remembered that I didn’t really like martinis. I poured them down the toilet and pedaled the pedal. It was damned enjoyable. Then I looked for the Scotch, and we were out of it. I started for the carport, stopped suddenly, and returned to the kitchen. I scrawled a note for Helen Hel — it began. Went out for Scotch. Couldn’t wait until you got home. I didn’t sign it, because I figured she would know who it was from.

Then I got into the ranch wagon and pointed it at Manhattan. I didn’t really have to do much more than that. The car knew the way. I pointed it, and I let it drive, which it did very well with its automatic transmission and its power steering and its power brakes and its power windows and power doors. And while we rode along, the car and I, I thought about Jodi some more, and about me. My mind must have been as properly primed as the car. The memories flowed easily...

It was a strange affair, if you could call it an affair. I don’t think you could. Affair means several things, and none of the things is what we had. Affair means contemporary adultery, or it means modern people having a go at it, or it means a Radcliffe girl having a mad fling before she marries a stockbroker’s son. And Jodi and I were none of these things, so what we had wasn’t really an affair, evidently.

But whatever it was, it was fine with me. We were at college, and we were young, and there is no better time nor place for falling happily and heedlessly into the hay. We were at college, and we were young, and we were not in love, and we realized this.

After the wonderful night in the wonderful hotel, after the wonderful leading up to it and the wonderful doing it and the wonderful lying there and thinking about it, there was a period of about a week during which I avoided Jodi. No, that’s not it, not quite. I didn’t avoid her like the plague, or walk away when I saw her coming, or steer clear of her favorite haunts. I simply made no attempt to seek her out. Our paths did not cross by accident and I did not cause them to cross by design.

I suppose I was shy, or embarrassed, or merely young. It was the way my mind worked at that period of my life. I had made love to Jodi, and it had been more fun than a beer-drinking contest, but it was over. Make love to her again? Hell, man, I already did! Why do it again, for God’s sake?

Fear of foreign alliances, perhaps, or fear of rejection, or just stupidity. But I went on with classes and beer and rides and assorted nonsense, and I dated a few girls and caressed their breasts. Their breasts were nice, if not quite so nice as Jodi’s. And at that stage of my life, the skirt of one girl was much the same as the skirt of another. If something was missing with those other girls I was barely conscious of it. Something was missing, of course. I didn’t get to sleep with them. But I would, in due time, and I was busy making plans.

Then I ran into Jodi. Quite literally, as a matter of fact. I was strolling down the campus oblivious to mostly everything, and so was she. I didn’t see her coming and I don’t know whether she saw me or not, but we bumped chests, always a nice way to say hello. She started to topple over and I grabbed her and hoisted her upright again and we looked deeply into one another’s eyes. I remember feeling very ashamed of myself and not knowing why.

“Harvey,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

There was not much to say, so I mulled bashfully and took her arm. “Buy you a beer,” I suggested.

“Wine,” she said.

The liquor store in the silly little town closed at dusk. “I don’t have any wine,” I said. “And it’s too late to buy any. Unless you want to go to the bar.” I left the rest unsaid. You didn’t go to the bar for anything but beer. If you had hard liquor you were a lush. If you had wine you were obviously trying too hard. So the hell with it.

“I have wine,” she said, “In my room.”

“Fine. Where will we drink it?”

“In my room.”

I thought that one over. It was against the rules, a boy and a girl in a dormitory room, but so, for that matter, was a love bout in a faraway hotel. As seems to be usual, the rules of the college had little connection with reality. But, since the fundamental rule was Don’t get caught, this being a Spartan sort of a college, and since we stood a great chance of getting caught in her room, I was a little bit worried.

“We’ll get caught,” I said.

She tossed her head, sort of, and looked every inch a queen. I mean it. There was something regal about her, something I should have been able to notice long ago. It was an air that said that she not only didn’t give a warmed-over damn for the rules but that the punishment was equally unimportant to her. A sound attitude. One that I, unfortunately, was unable to carry off.

“If they catch us,” I said, “they’ll give us the old heave-ho. We won’t graduate.”

“So what?”

“You need a diploma,” quoth I, “to be a success.”

“At what?”

I wondered at what, since I had not made up my mind just what I was going to be a success at. There was a cartoon once which summed things up — a guidance counselor studying a small boy, both counselor and boy wearing thick glasses. But Arnold, said the caption, plaintively, it’s not enough to be a genius. You have to be a genius AT something. That was I, with success instead of genius. I was majoring, theoretically, in English, which meant that I read books instead of tables. But I didn’t want to be a writer or a reader or, God save us, a professor.