Курт Воннегут - Player Piano (Utopia 14)

"Is Doctor Proteus on?" said Kroner's secretary. "Doctor Kroner is in."

"Just a moment," said Katharine. "Doctor Proteus, Doctor Kroner is in and will speak to you."

"All right, I'm on."

"Doctor Proteus is on the line," said Katharine.

"Doctor Kroner, Doctor Proteus is on the line."

"Tell him to go ahead," said Kroner.

"Tell Doctor Proteus to go ahead," said Kroner's secretary.

"Doctor Proteus, please go ahead," said Katharine.

"This is Paul Proteus, Doctor Kroner. I'm returning your call." A little bell went " tink-tink-tink, " letting him know his conversation was being recorded.

"Shepherd said you'd been having trouble with your nerves, my boy."

"Not quite right. A touch of some kind of virus."

"Lot of that floating around. Well, do you feel well enough to come over to my house tonight?"

"Love it. Is there anything I should bring - anything in particular you want to discuss?"

"Like Pittsburgh?" said Shepherd in a stage whisper.

"No, no, purely social, Paul - just good talk is all. We haven't had a good, friendly talk for a long while. Mom and I would just like to see you socialwise."

Paul thought back. He hadn't been invited to Kroner's socialwise for a year, since he'd been sized up for his last raise. "Sounds like fun. What time?"

"Eight, eight-thirty."

"And Anita's invited too?" It was a mistake. It slipped out without his thinking about it.

"Of course! You never go anywhere socially without her, do you?"

"Oh, no, sir."

"I should hope not." He laughed perfunctorily. "Well, goodbye."

"What did he say?" said Shepherd.

"He said you had no damn business signing those reports for me. He said Katharine Finch was to take off your name with ink-eradicator at once."

"Say, now just hold on," said Shepherd, standing.

Paul saw that all of the desk drawers were ajar. In the bottom drawer the neck of the empty whisky bottle was in plain view. He slammed each of the drawers shut in quick succession. When he came to the bottom one, he took out the bottle and held it out to Shepherd. "Here - want this? Might be valuable sometime. It's got my fingerprints all over it."

"Are you going to get me canned - is that it?" said Shepherd eagerly. "You want to make an issue of it in front of Kroner? Let's go. I'm ready any time. Let's see if you can make it stick."

"Get down where you belong. Go on. Clear out of this office, and don't come back unless I tell you to come back. Katharine!"

"Yes?"

"If Doctor Shepherd comes in this office again without permission, you're to shoot him."

Shepherd slammed the door, railed against Paul to Katharine, and left.

"Doctor Proteus, the police are on the phone," said Katharine.

Paul stalked out of the office and went home.

It was the maid's day off, and Paul found Anita in the kitchen, the picture, minus children, of domesticity.

The kitchen was, in a manner of speaking, what Anita had given of herself to the world. In planning it, she had experienced all the anguish and hellfire of creativity - tortured by doubts, cursing her limitations, at once hungry for and fearful of the opinions of others. Now it was done and admired, and the verdict of the community was: Anita was artistic.

It was a large, airy room, larger than most living rooms. Rough-hewn rafters, taken from an antique barn, were held against the ceiling by concealed bolts fixed in the steel framing of the house. The walls were wainscoted in pine, aged by sandblasting, and given a soft yellow patina of linseed oil.

A huge fireplace and Dutch oven of fieldstone filled one wall. Over them hung a long muzzle-loading rifle, powder horn, and bullet pouch. On the mantel were candle molds, a coffee mill, an iron and trivet, and a rusty kettle. An iron cauldron, big enough to boil a missionary in, swung at the end of a long arm in the fireplace, and below it, like so many black offspring, were a cluster of small pots. A wooden butter churn held the door open, and clusters of Indian corn hung from the molding at aesthetic intervals. A colonial scythe stood in one corner, and two Boston rockers on a hooked rug faced the cold fireplace, where the unwatched pot never boiled.

Paul narrowed his eyes, excluding everything from his field of vision but the colonial tableau, and imagined that he and Anita had pushed this far into the upstate wilderness, with the nearest neighbor twenty-eight miles away. She was making soap, candles, and thick wool clothes for a hard winter ahead, and he, if they weren't to starve, had to mold bullets and go shoot a bear. Concentrating hard on the illusion, Paul was able to muster a feeling of positive gratitude for Anita's presence, to thank God for a woman at his side to help with the petrifying amount of work involved in merely surviving. As, in his imagination, he brought home a bear to Anita, and she cleaned it and salted it away, he felt a tremendous lift - the two of them winning by sinew and guts a mountain of strong, red meat from an inhospitable world. And he would mold more bullets, and she would make more candles and soap from the bear fat, until late at night, when Paul and Anita would tumble down together on a bundle of straw in the corner, dog-tired and sweaty, make love, and sleep hard until the brittle-cold dawn. . . .

" Urdle-urdle-urdle, " went the automatic washing machine. " Urdle-urdle-ur dull! "

Reluctantly, Paul let his field of vision widen to include the other side of the room, where Anita sat on a ladder-back chair before the cherry breakfront that concealed the laundry console. The console had been rolled from the breakfront, whose facade of drawers and doors was one large piece, making the breakfront sort of a small garage for the laundry equipment. The doors of a corner cabinet were open, revealing a television screen, which Anita watched intently. A doctor was telling an old lady that her grandson would probably be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.

" Urdle-urdle-urdle, " went the console. Anita paid no attention. " Znick. Bazz-wap! " Chimes sounded. Still Anita ignored it. " Azzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Froomp! " The top of the console popped open, and a basket of dry laundry burst from it like a great chrysanthemum, white, fragrant, and immaculate.

"Hello," said Paul.

Anita motioned for him to be silent, and wait until the program was over, which meant the commercial too. "All right," she said at last and turned down the volume. "Your blue suit is laid out on the bed."

"Oh? What for?"

"What do you mean, what for? For going over to Kroner's."

"How did you know that?"

"Lawson Shepherd called to tell me."

"Deuced nice of him."

"Nice of someone to tell me what's going on, since you won't."

"What else'd he say?"

"He supposed you and Finnerty must have had a wonderful time, judging from how terrible you looked this afternoon."

"He knows as much about it as I do."

Anita lit a cigarette, shook out the match with a flourish, and squinted through the smoke she let out through her nose. "Were there girls, Paul?"

"In a manner of speaking. Martha and Barbara. Don't ask me who had who."

"Had?"

"Sat with."

She hunched in the chair, looked out the window soberly, and kept her cigarette hot with quick, shallow puffs, and her eyes watered in the dramatic gusts from her nose. "You don't have to tell me about it, if you don't want to."

"I won't, because I can't remember." He started to laugh. "One was called Barbara, and the other was called Martha, and beyond that, as the saying goes, everything went black."

"Then you don't know what happened? I mean, anything could have happened?"

His smile withered. "I mean everything really went black, and nothing could have happened. I was clay curled up in a booth."