“But we had to bother, we had to go on.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s the wonderful and the silly part of it. We went on even when we knew we were walking into the kiln. That’s one thing we can say right up to the last, almost, we were fiddling and painting and reproducing and talking and acting as if this might go on forever. Once I kidded myself that, somehow, part of Earth might remain, that a few fragments might carry over, Shakespeare, Blake, a few busts, a few tidbits, perhaps one of my short stories, remnants. I thought we’d go and leave the world to the Islanders or the Asiatics. But this is different. This is en toto.”
“What time do you think it will happen?”
“Any hour now.”
“They don’t even know what the bomb’ll do, do they?”
“There’s an even chance either way. Forgive my pessimism, I happen to think they have miscalculated.”
“Why don’t you come over to my place?” she asked.
“Why?”
“We could at least talk—”
“Why?”
“It would be something to do—”
“Why?”
“It would give us something to talk about.”
“Why, why, why!”
She waited a minute.
“Bill?”
Silence.
“Bill!”
No answer.
He was thinking of a poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, he was thinking of a scrap of film from an old picture called Citizen Kane, he was thinking of the white feather-soft haze in which the Degas ballerinas poised, he was thinking of a Braque mandolin, a Picasso guitar, a Dalí watch, a line from Houseman, he was thinking of a thousand mornings splashing cold water on his face, he was thinking of a billion mornings and a billion people splashing cold water on their faces and going out to their work in the last ten thousand years. He was thinking of fields of grass and wheat and dandelions. He was thinking of women.
“BILL, ARE YOU THERE?”
No answer.
At last, swallowing, he said, “Yes, I’m here.”
“I—” she said.
“Yes?”
“I want—” she said.
The earth blew up and burned steadily for a thousand million centuries…
The Cricket on the Hearth
The door slammed and john martin was out of his hat and coat and past his wife as fluently as a magician en route to a better illusion. He produced the newspaper with a dry whack as he slipped his coat into the closet like an abandoned ghost and sailed through the house, scanning the news, his nose guessing at the identity of supper, talking over his shoulder, his wife following. There was still a faint scent of the train and the winter night about him. In his chair he sensed an unaccustomed silence resembling that of a birdhouse when a vulture’s shadow looms; all the robins, sparrows, mockingbirds quiet. His wife stood whitely in the door, not moving.
“Come sit down,” said John Martin. “What’re you doing? God, don’t stare as if I were dead. What’s new? Not that there’s ever anything new, of course. What do you think of those fathead city councilmen today? More taxes, more every goddamn thing.”
“John!” cried his wife. “Don’t!”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t talk that way. It isn’t safe!”
“For God’s sake, not safe? Is this Russia or is this our own house?!”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“There’s a bug in our house,” she whispered.
“A bug?” He leaned forward, exasperated.
“You know. Detective talk. When they hide a microphone somewhere you don’t know, they call it a bug, I think,” she whispered even more quietly.
“Have you gone nuts?”
“I thought I might have when Mrs. Thomas told me. They came last night while we were out and asked Mrs. Thomas to let them use her garage. They set up their equipment there and strung wires over here, the house is wired, the bug is in one or maybe all of the rooms.”
She was standing over him now and bent to whisper in his ear.
He fell back. “Oh, no!”
“Yes!”
“But we haven’t done anything—”
“Keep your voice down!” she whispered.
“Wait!” he whispered back, angrily, his face white, red, then white again. “Come on!”
Out on the terrace, he glanced around and swore. “Now say the whole damn thing again! They’re using the neighbor’s garage to hide their equipment? The FBI?”
“Yes, yes, oh it’s been awful! I didn’t want to call, I was afraid your wire was tapped, too.”
“We’ll see, dammit! Now!”
“Where are you going?”
“To stomp on their equipment! Jesus! What’ve we done?”
“Don’t!” She seized his arm. “You’d just make trouble. After they’ve listened a few days they’ll know we’re okay and go away.”
“I’m insulted, no, outraged! Those two words I’ve never used before, but, hell, they fit the case! Who do they think they are? Is it our politics? Our studio friends, my stories, the fact I’m a producer? Is it Tom Lee, because he’s Chinese and a friend? Does that make him dangerous, or us? What, what?!”
“Maybe someone gave them a false lead and they’re searching. If they really think we’re dangerous, you can’t blame them.”
“I know, I know, but us! It’s so damned funny I could laugh. Do we tell our friends? Rip out the microphone if we can find it, go to a hotel, leave town?”
“No, no, just go on as we have done. We’ve nothing to hide, so let’s ignore them.”
“Ignore!? The first thing I said tonight was political crap and you shut me up like I’d set off a bomb.”
“Let’s go in, it’s cold out here. Be good. It’ll only be a few days and they’ll be gone, and after all, it isn’t as if we were guilty of something.”
“Yeah, okay, but damn, I wish you’d let me go over and kick the hell out of their junk!”
They hesitated, then entered the house, the strange house, and stood for a moment in the hall, trying to manufacture some appropriate dialogue. They felt like two amateurs in a shoddy out-of-town play, the electrician having suddenly turned on too much light, the audience, bored, having left the theater, and, simultaneously, the actors having forgotten their lines. So they said nothing.
He sat in the parlor trying to read the paper until the food was on the table. But the house suddenly echoed. The slightest crackle of the sports section, the exhalation of smoke from his pipe, became like the sound of an immense forest fire or a wind blowing through an organ. When he shifted in the chair the chair groaned like a sleeping dog, his tweed pants scraped and sandpapered together.
From the kitchen there was an ungodly racket of pans being bashed, tins falling, oven doors cracking open, crashing shut, the fluming full-bloomed sound of gas jumping to life, lighting up blue and hissing under the inert foods, and then when the foods stirred ceaselessly under the commands of boiling water, they made a sound of washing and humming and murmuring that was excessively loud. No one spoke. His wife came and stood in the door for a moment, peering at her husband and the raw walls, but said nothing. He turned a page of football to a page of wrestling and read between the lines, scanning the empty whiteness and the specks of undigested pulp.
Now there was a great pounding in the room, like surf, growing nearer in a storm, a tidal wave, crashing on rocks and breaking with a titanic explosion again and again, in his ears.
My God, he thought, I hope they don’t hear my heart!
His wife beckoned from the dining room, where, as he loudly rattled the paper and plopped it into the chair and walked, padding, padding on the rug, and drew out the protesting chair on the uncarpeted dining-room floor, she tinkled and clattered last-minute silverware, fetched a soup that bubbled like lava, and set a coffeepot to percolate beside them. They looked at the percolating silver apparatus, listened to it gargle in its glass throat, admired it for its protest against silence, for saying what it felt. And then there was the scrape and click of the knife and fork on the plate. He started to say something, but it stuck, with a morsel of food, in his throat. His eyes bulged. His wife’s eyes bulged. Finally she got up, went to the kitchen, and got a piece of paper and a pencil. She came back and handed him a freshly written note: Say something!
He scribbled a reply:
What?
She wrote again: Anything! Break the silence. They’ll think something’s wrong!
They sat staring nervously at their own notes. Then, with a smile, he sat back in his chair and winked at her. She frowned. Then he said, “Well, dammit, say something!”
“What?” she said.
“Dammit,” he said. “You’ve been silent all during supper. You and your moods. Because I won’t buy you that coat, I suppose? Well, you’re not going to get it, and that’s final!”
“But I don’t want—”
He stopped her before she could continue. “Shut up! I won’t talk to a nag. You know we can’t afford mink! If you can’t talk sense, don’t talk!”
She blinked at him for a moment, and then she smiled and winked this time.
“I haven’t got a thing to wear!” she cried.
“Oh, shut up!” he roared.
“You never buy me anything!” she cried.
“Blather, blather, blather!” he yelled.
They fell silent and listened to the house. The echoes of their yelling had put everything back to normalcy, it seemed. The percolator was not so loud, the clash of cutlery was softened. They sighed.
“Look,” he said at last, “don’t speak to me again this evening. Will you do me that favor?”
She sniffed.
“Pour me some coffee!” he said.
Along about eight-thirty the silence was getting unbearable again. They sat stiffly in the living room, she with her latest library book, he with some flies he was tying up in preparation for going fishing on Sunday. Several times they glanced up and opened their
