Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [61]
And we might as well have been in Darkest Africa, for all anybody knew or cared about us anymore. Most people, if they remembered us at all, believed us dead, I suppose. And we had never been as significant in American history as we had sometimes thought we were. We were, if I may be forgiven, farts in a windstorm—or, as the shopping-bag lady would have called us, “fats in a windstorm.”
Did I harbor any bitterness against him for having stolen my girl so long ago? No. Sarah and I had loved each other, but we would never have been happy as man and wife. We could never have gotten a sex life going. I had never persuaded her to take sex seriously. Leland Clewes had succeeded where I had failed—much to her grateful amazement, I am sure.
What tender memories did I have of Sarah? Much talk about human suffering and what could be done about it—and then infantile silliness for relief. We collected jokes for each other, to use when it was time for relief. We became addicted to talking to each other on the telephone for hours. Those talks were the most agreeable narcotic I have ever known. We became disembodied—like free-floating souls on the planet Vicuna. If there was a long silence, one or the other of us would end it with the start of a joke.
“What is the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?” she might ask me.
“I don’t know,” I would say.
“You can’t hear an enzyme,” she would say, and the silly jokes would go on and on—even though she had probably seen something horrible at the hospital that day.
13
I WAS ABOUT TO SAY to him gravely, watchfully but sincerely, “How are you, Leland? It is good to see you again.” But I never got to say it. The shopping-bag lady, whose voice was loud and piercing, cried out, “Oh, my God! Walter F. Starbuck! Is that really you?” I do not intend to reproduce her accent on the printed page.
I thought she was crazy. I thought that she would have parroted any name Clewes chose to hang on me. If he had called me “Bumptious Q. Bangwhistle,” I thought, she would have cried, “Oh, my God! Bumptious Q. Bangwhistle! Is that really you?”
Now she began to lean her shopping bags against my legs, as though I were a convenient fireplug. There were six of them, which I would later study at leisure. They were from the most expensive stores in town—Henri Bendel, Tiffany’s, Sloane’s. Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, Abercrombie and Fitch. All but Abercrombie and Fitch, incidentally, which would soon go bankrupt, were subsidiaries of The RAMJAC Corporation. Her bags contained mostly rags, pickings from garbage cans. Her most valuable possessions Were in her basketball shoes.
I tried to ignore her. Even as she entrapped me with her bags, I kept my gaze on the face of Leland Clewes. “You’re looking well,” I said.
“I’m feeling well,” he said. “And so is Sarah, you’ll be happy to know.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “She’s a very good girl.” Sarah was no girl anymore, of course.
Clewes told me now that she was still doing a little nursing, as a part-time thing.
“I’m glad,” I said.
To my horror, I felt as though a sick bat had dropped from the eaves of a building and landed on my wrist. The shopping-bag lady had taken hold of me with her filthy little hand.
“This is your wife?” he said.
“My what?” I said. He thought I had sunk so low that this awful woman and I were a pair! “I never saw her before in my life!” I said.
“Oh, Walter, Walter, Walter,” she keened, “how can you say such a thing?”
I pried her hand off me; but the instant I returned my attention to Clewes, she snapped it onto my wrist again.
“Pretend she isn’t here,” I said. “This is crazy. She has nothing to do with me. I will not let her spoil this moment, which means a great deal to me.”
“Oh, Walter, Walter, Walter,” she said, “what has become of you? You’re not the Walter F. Starbuck I knew.”
“That’s right,” I said, “because you never knew any Walter F. Starbuck, but this man did.” And I said to Clewes, “I suppose you know that