“Dno. Well, baybe a liddle.”
“Want me to make an appointment with Fontaine for you?”
“Dno. I will toborrow if I don’d feel bedder.”
“You’re really stuffy.”
“Yes. The Vicks helbed for a while, bud dow-” She shrugged and smiled wanly. “I soud like Dodald Duck.”
He hesitated a moment and then said, “I’ll be home a little bit late tomorrow night.”
“Oh?”
“I’m going out to Northside to look at a house. It seems like a good one. Six rooms. A little backyard. Not too far from the Hobarts.”
Freddy said quite clearly:
Mary brightened. “That’s woderful! Cad I go look with you?”
“Better not, with that cold.”
“I’ll huddle ub.”
“Next time,” he said firmly.
“Ogay.” She looked at him. “Thang God you’re finally booing on this,” she said. “I was worried.”
“Don’t worry.”
“I wodn’t.”
She took a sip of the hot rum drink and snuggled against him. He could hear her breath snuffling in and out. Merv Griffin was chatting with James Brolin about his new movie,
After a while Mary got up and put TV dinners in the oven. He got up, switched the TV over to reruns of “F Troop” and tried not to listen to Freddy. After a while, though, Freddy changed his tune.
Do you remember how you got the first TV, Georgie?
He smiled a little, looking not at Forrest Tucker but right through him. I do, Fred. I surely do.
They had come home one evening, about two years after they were married, from the Upshaws, where they had been watching “Your Hit Parade” and “Dan Fortune,” and Mary had asked him if he didn’t think Donna Upshaw had seemed a little… well, off. Now, sitting here, he could remember Mary, slim and oddly, fetchingly taller in a pair of white sandals she had gotten to celebrate summer. She had been wearing white shorts, too; her legs looked long and coltish, as if they really might go all the way up to her chin. In truth, he hadn’t been very interested in whether or not Donna Upshaw had seemed a little off; he had been interested in divesting Mary of those tight shorts. That had been where his interest lay-not to put too fine a point on it.
“Maybe she’s getting a little tired of serving Spanish peanuts to half the neighborhood just because they’re the only people on the street with a TV,” he said.
He supposed he had seen the little frown line between her eyes-the one that always meant Mary was cooking something up, but by then they were halfway upstairs, his hand was roaming down over the seat of those shorts-what little seat there was-and it wasn’t until later, until after, that she said:
“How much would a table model cost us, Bart?”
Half asleep, he had answered, “Well, I guess we could get a Motorola for twenty-eight, maybe thirty bucks. But the Philco-”
“Not a radio. A TV.”
He sat up, turned on the lamp, and looked at her. She was lying there naked, the sheet down around her hips, and although she was smiling at him, he thought she was serious. It was Mary’s I-dare-you grin.
“Mary, we can’t afford a TV.”
“How much for a table model? A GE or a Philco or something?”
“New?”
“New?”
He considered the question, watching the play of lamplight across the lovely round curves of her breasts. She had been so much slimmer then (although she’s hardly a fatty now, George, he reproached himself; never said she was, Freddy my boy), so much more alive somehow. Even her hair had crackled out its own message:
“Around seven hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, thinking that would douse the grin… but it hadn’t.
“Well, look,” She said, sitting up Indian-fashion in bed, her legs crossed under the sheet.
“I am,” he said, grinning
“Not at that.” But she laughed, and a flush had spread prettily down her cheeks to her neck (although she hadn’t pulled the sheet up, he remembered).
“What’s on your mind?”
“Why do men want a TV?” she asked. “To watch all the sports on the weekends. And why do women want one? Those soap operas in the afternoon. You can listen while you iron or put your feet up if your work’s done. Now suppose we each found something to do-something that pays-during that time we’d otherwise just be sitting around…”
“reading a book, or maybe even making love?” he suggested.
“We always find time for that,” she said, and laughed, and blushed, and her eyes were dark in the lamplight and it threw a warm, semicircular shadow between her breasts, and he knew then that he was going to give in to her, he would have promised her a fifteen-hundred-dollar Zenith console model if she would just let him make love to her again, and at the thought he felt himself stiffening, felt the snake turning to stone, as Mary had once said when she’d had a little too much to drink at the Ridpaths’ New Year’s Eve party (and now, eighteen years later, he felt the snake turning to stone again-over a memory).
“Well, all right,” he said. “I’m going to moonlight weekends and you’re going of moonlight afternoons. But what, dear Mary, Oh-not-so-Virgin Mary, are we going to do?”
She pounced on him, giggling, her breasts a soft weight on his stomach (flat-enough in those days, Freddy, not a sign of a bay window). “That’s the trick of it!” she said. “What’s today'? June eighteenth?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, you do your weekend things, and on December eighteenth we’ll put our money together-”
“-and buy a toaster,” he said, grinning.
“-and get that TV,” she said solemnly. “I’m sure we can do it, Bart.” Then the giggles broke out again. “But the fun part’ll be that we won’t tell each other what we’re up to until after.”
“Just as long as I don’t see a red light over the door when I come home from work tomorrow,” he said, capitulating.
She grabbed him, got on top of him, started to tickle. The tickling turned to caresses.
“Bring it to me,” she whispered against his neck, and gripped him with gentle yet excruciating pressure, guiding him and squeezing him at the same time. “Put it in me, Bart.”
And later, in the dark again, hands crossed behind his head. he said: “We don’t tell each other, right?”
“Nope.”
“Mary, what brought this on? What I said about Donna Upshaw not wanting to serve Spanish peanuts to half the neighborhood?”
There were no giggles in her voice when she replied. Her voice was flat, austere, and just a little frightening: a faint taste of winter in the warm June air of their third-floor walkup apartment. “I don’t like to freeload, Bart. And I won’t. Ever.”
For a week and a half he had turned her quirky little proposal over in his mind, wondering just what in the hell he was suppose to do to bring in his half of the seven hundred and fifty dollars (and probably more like three-quarters of it, the way it’ll turn out, he thought) on the next twenty or so weekends. He was a little old to be mowing lawns for quarters. And Mary had gotten a look-a smug sort of look-that gave him the idea that she had either landed something or was land-ing something. Better get on your track shoes, Bart, he thought, and had to laugh out loud at himself.
Pretty fine days, weren’t they, Freddy? he asked himself now as Forrest Tucker and “F Troop” gave way to a cereal commercial where an animated rabbit preached that “Trix are for kids.” They were, Georgie. They were fucking great days.
One day he had been unlocking his car after work, and he had happened to look at the big industrial smokestack behind dry-cleaning, and it came to him.
He had put the keys back in his pocket and went in to talk to Don Tarkington. Don leaned back in his chair, looked at him from under shaggy eyebrows that were even then turning white (as were the hairs which bushed out of his ears and curled from his nostrils), hands steepled on his chest.
“Paint the stack,” Don said.
He nodded.
“Weekends.”
He nodded again.
“Flat fee-three hundred dollars.”
And again.
“You’re crazy.”
He burst out laughing.
Don smiled a little. “You got a dope habit, Bart?”
“No,” he said. “But I’ve got a little thing on with Mary.”
“A bet?” The shaggy eyebrows went up half a mile
“More gentlemanly than that. A wager, I guess you’d call it. Anyway, Don, the stack needs the paint, and I need the three hundred dollars. What do you say? A painting contractor would charge you four and a quarter.”
“You checked.”
“I checked.”
“You crazy bastard,” Don said, and burst out laughing. “You’ll probably kill yourself.”
