Philip Dick - In Milton Lumky Territory

He tried to imagine himself at that age. Entering his parents’ bedroom. The scene remained hazy. “Maybe so,” he said.

“I’ve been married all the time she’s been on this earth,” Susan said. “Even if she had some notion of you here, it would seem natural. A man is a man. To a child that young.”

But he knew that it would have to go one way or the other. Either he would have to move out and find a place of his own, or he would go through with it and marry her. She recognized that, too.

Did he want to marry her?

What can I lose, he thought. I can always get unmarried.

Beside him, Susan had gone to sleep with his hand resting on her breast. She held it there with her own hand. Beneath his fingers he could feel her breathing, the regular, slow breathing of sleep. To go to sleep, he thought, here like this. For myself, my hand resting on her. Doesn’t that constitute the important thing in all this? Not the office or figuring out some method of making a lot of money, but times like this, late at night. And having dinner together, and the rest.

This is why I stopped in Montario, he thought. In fact, this is why I stopped at Hagopian’s drugstore. Of course he did not have to use his package of Trojans. Susan had something that she owned permanently, refills for which she had picked up on the drive home.

“Are you awake?” he said, waking her up.

“Yes,” she said.

He said, “I think I can see going ahead with it.”

In the dark she rolled over to him and put her head on his arm. “Bruce,” she said, “you know I’m a lot older than you.”

“You’re ten years older than I am,” he said. “But that’s okay. But I want to tell you one thing.”

“Tell me.”

“I was one of your pupils. In the fifth grade, in 1945.”

She said, “I don’t care whose pupil you were.” Her arms closed around him. “Isn’t that strange,” she said. “That’s why I looked familiar to you. I never would have had any reason to be conscious of it.” She yawned, settled down until she was comfortable, and then, by degrees, her hands relaxed and released themselves from him. She had again fallen asleep. Her face, against his shoulder, joggled limply.

That’s that, he said to himself, a little dazed.

But what a weight it was off his mind

On the fourth of the month, he and Susan flew down to Reno and were married. They spent three days there and then flew back. That night they told Tally at dinner. She did not seem surprised. In Reno he had bought her an electric bowling game, and the sight of that did surprise her.

He found Susan, during one of the first evenings of their marriage, off by herself in the living room with the big scrapbook on her lap.

“Show me,” she said. “Are you sure? Or did you mean you went to Garret A. Hobart.” She surrendered the scrapbook to him, and, seated beside her, he turned the pages. Over his shoulder she watched raptly.

“Here,” he said. He pointed to himself in the class picture. The round boy-face with its oblique eyes, the shapeless hair. Fat stomach bulging out over his belt. He experienced very little sense of relationship to the picture, but nevertheless it was of him.

“Is that you?” she asked, hanging against him with her hand dangling past his throat, her fingers touching him in a series of nervous digs. Her breath sounded loud and rapid in his ear. “Now don’t play coy,” she said. She traced the legend under the picture. “Yes,” she said. “It does say ‘Bruce Stevens.’ But I don’t remember anybody in that class named Bruce; I’m sure of it.” She scrutinized the photograph and then she said in a triumphant, shrill voice, “Your name was Skip!”

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh I see,” she said, excited. “You were Skip Stevens?” She eyed him minutely, comparing him with the picture. “It’s true,” she said. “I remember you. You were the boy the janitor caught downstairs at the nurse’s, trying to peep in and see the girls in their underwear.”

Coloring, he said, “Yes, that’s right.”

Her eyes grew large and then tiny. “Why didn’t you say?”

He said, “Why should I have said?”

“Skip Stevens,” she said. “You were a headache. You were Mrs. Jaffey’s special pet; she let you do anything you wanted. I soon put a stop to that. Why—” She gasped with indignation and drew away from him, growing more and more outraged. “You were running riot, all of you. You started a fire in the cloakroom; wasn’t that you?”

He nodded.

Her hand reached up toward his face. “I feel like grabbing you by the ear,” she said. “And just twisting. You were a bully! Weren’t you? Yes, you bullied the little boys; you were overweight.”

With a certain amount of bitterness he said, “You can see why I didn’t tell you. I waited until I was sure enough of our relationship. I don’t see why any of this should be brought into it.”

Her attention had returned to the class picture. Jabbing at it she said, “But you were very good in arithmetic. And you made a fine speech in assembly. I was so proud of you that day. But that business about peeping at the girls down at the nurse’s. Why did you do that? That was a disgrace. There you were, sneaking around trying to see through the keyhole.”

He said, “And you never forgot it.”

“No,” she agreed.

“You made a lot out of it every time you were sore, after that.”

“This is weird,” she said. Suddenly she closed the scrapbook. “I agree; we better forget about this. But I want to know one thing. You didn’t identify me when you first met me, did you? It was some time.”

“Not until after I left Peg’s,” he said.

“You weren’t attracted to me because—” She considered. “Your reaction wasn’t predicated on recognizing me. No, I know it wasn’t. At least not consciously.”

“I don’t think subconsciously either,” he said.

“Nobody knows what goes on in their subconscious.”

He said, “Well, there’s no use debating that.”

“You’re right,” she said. She put the scrapbook away. “Let’s think about something else. Did I tell you I got the key back from Zoe?”

“No,” he said. She had been gone for an hour or so, and she hadn’t told him what she had been up to.

“She won’t be in tomorrow. We won’t give her the money until the end of the month, but I explained to her that you and I were married and we would both be there, and she doesn’t really want to come in. So we’ve seen the last of her. She gets to draw until the end of the month, of course.”

“She’s still legally part owner?”

“I suppose so. Fancourt would know.”

That was a name new to him. “Who’s he?” he said.

“My attorney.”

“You’ve had auditors go over the books and make sure of the actual worth of the business?”

At once she became vague. “He had someone come in. They looked at everything. They made an inventory. And I believe they looked at the books and the accounts.”

“Weren’t you there?” He wondered why he hadn’t seen it.

“It was while we were in Reno,” she said. “Zoe was there, of course. He’s my attorney, not hers. So it’s all right. No, I wouldn’t let them audit the books while I wasn’t there unless it was my attorney doing it. He’s a good attorney. I met him when I was doing some political work back in ’48. He’s a very astute man. As a matter of fact, I met Walt through him.”

“What about Zoe? Didn’t she have a separate audit made?”

“Yes,” Susan said. “I’m sure she must have.”

He gave up. In one sense it was none of his concern. But in another it was very much his concern. “I hope you’re not overpaying her,” he said, “just to get rid of her.”