“Man has just had the greatest insult of all thrown at him! “That planet
The Very Last Day of a Good Woman
You know the world is going to end. There’s no question about it, no supposition, no ravings from a bushy-bearded fanatic that may prove false…this is the real thing, we all go splat a week from next Wednesday. What do you do? What if you were a young man who had never enjoyed the manifest pleasures of a woman’s body? What if you had been hidebound and stultified all your days, when you got wind of the coming Boom? What then? Why, perhaps you would follow a course of action similar to the hero of this little piece, in which I tried to say that everything is relative, and even dross, under the proper conditions, can be as good as gold. And you know, it’s indicative of our current Clipster Culture that very often the ones who would rob are the ones who get robbed, the fleecers get fleeced, and hypocrisy counts for nothing when the chips are down. In other words, the love of a less than kindly creature can be the single most important possession in the universe on
Finally, he knew the world was going to end. It had grown in certainty with terrible slowness. His was not a perfect talent, but rather, a gem with many small flaws in it. Had he been able to see the future clearly, had he not been a partial clairvoyant, his life might not have come to what it had.
His hunger would not have been what it was.
Yet the brief, fogged glimpses were molded together, and he knew the Earth was about to end. By the same rude certainty that told him it was going to end, he knew it was not self-deception—it was not merely
His name was Arthur Fulbright, and he wanted a woman.
How strange or odd. To know the future. To know it in that most peculiar of fashions: not as a unified whole, as a superimposed something on the image of now, but in bits and snatches, in fits and starts. In humming, deliberate quickness
For years, a soft, brown shambling man all hummed words and gentle glances, living with his widowed mother in an eight-room house set about with honeysuckle and sweet pea. For years, working in a job of unidentifiable type and station; for years returning to the house and the comforting pastel of Mother.
Years that held little change, little activity, little of note or importance. Yet good years, and silent.
Then Mother had died. Sighing in the night, she had slowed down like a phonograph, like the old crank phonograph covered under a white sheet in the attic, and had died. Life had played its melody for her, and just as naturally had trembled to an unsatisfactory end.
For Arthur it had meant changes.
Now, no more the nights of sound sleep, the evenings of quiet discussion and backgammon or whist, the afternoons of lunch prepared in time for a return to the office, the mornings with cinnamon toast and orange juice ready. Now it was a single-lane highway that he would travel alone.
Learning to eat in restaurants, learning where the fresh linens were kept, sending his clothes out to be mended and cleaned.
And most of all, coming to realize in the six years since Mother’s death, that he could see the future once in a while. It was in no way alarming, nor even—after living with it so long—surprising. The word terrifying, in connection with his sight of the future, would never have occurred to him; and had he not seen that night of flame and death, the end of the world, the power would never have troubled him.
But he did see it, and it made a difference.
Because now that he was about to die, now that he had two weeks and no more, he had to find a purpose. There had to be a reason to die without regret. Yet here he sat, in the high-backed wing chair in the darkened living room, with the empty eight-room house around him, and there was no purpose. He had not considered his own demise; Mother’s going had been hard enough to reconcile, but he had known it would come some day (though the ramifications of her death had never dawned on him).His own death was something else.
“How can a man come to thirty-nine years, and have nothing?” he asked himself. “How can it be?”
It was true, of course. He had nothing. No talent, no mark to leave on affairs, no wake, no purpose.
And with the tallying of his lacks, he came to the most important one of all. The one marking him as not yet a man, no matter what he thought. The lack of a woman. He was a virgin; he had never had a woman.
With two weeks left on Earth, Arthur Fulbright knew what he wanted, more than anything, more than fame or wealth or position. His desire for his last days on Earth was a simple one, an uncluttered one. Arthur Fulbright wanted a woman.
There had been a little money. Mother had left over two thousand dollars in cash and savings bonds. He had been able to put away two thousand in his own account. That made four thousand dollars, and it became very important, but not till later.
The idea of buying a woman came to him after many other considerations. The first attempt was with a young woman of his acquaintance, who worked as a steno-typist in the office, in the billing section. “Jackie,” he asked her, having passed time with her on occasion, “would you—uh—how would you like to go to a—uh—show with me tonight…or something?”
She stared at him curiously, seeing a cipher; but having mentally relegated the evening to smoking a little grass and washing her hair with a girl friend, accepted.
That evening she doubled her fist and gave him such a blow beneath his rib cage, that his eyes watered and his side hurt for almost an hour.
The next day he avoided the girl with the blonde, twirled ponytail who was browsing in the HISTORICAL NOVELS section of the Public Library. He had had a glimpse often enough—of the future—to know what this one meant. She was married, despondent, and did not wear her ring out of hostility for her husband. He saw himself in an
