Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [85]
It was Clewes’s wife Sarah, my old girl friend, calling from their apartment. She had just come home from a private nursing case, had found his note, which said where he was and what he was doing there and how he could be reached by telephone.
He told her that I was there, too, and she could not believe it. She asked to talk to me. So Clewes handed me the plastic dog.
“Hi,” I said.
“This is crazy,” she said. “What are you doing there?”
“Drinking a pousse-café by the swimming pool,” I said.
“I can’t imagine you drinking a pousse-café,” she said.
“Well, I am,” I said.
She asked how Clewes and I had met. I told her. “Such a small world, Walter,” she said, and so on. She asked me if Clewes had told me that I had done them a big favor when I testified against him.
“I would have to say that that opinion is moot,” I told her.
“Is what?” she said.
“Moot,” I said. It was a word she had somehow never heard before. I explained it to her.
“I’m so dumb,” she said. “There’s so much I don’t know, Walter.” She sounded just like the same old Sarah on the telephone. It could have been Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five again, which made what she said next especially poignant: “Oh, my God, Walter! We’re both over sixty years old! How is that possible?”
“You’d be surprised, Sarah,” I said.
She asked me to come home with Clewes for supper, and I said I would if I could, that I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I asked her where she lived.
It turned out that she and Clewes lived in the basement of the same building where her grandmother used to live—in Tudor City. She asked me if I remembered her grandmother’s apartment, all the old servants and furniture jammed into only four rooms.
I said I did, and we laughed.
I did not tell her that my son also lived somewhere in Tudor City. I would find out later that there was nothing vague about his proximity to her, with his musical wife and his adopted children. Stankiewicz of The New York Times was in the same building, and notoriously so, because of the wildness of the children—and only three floors above Leland and Sarah Clewes.
She said that it was good that we could still laugh, despite all we had been through. “At least we still have our sense of humor,” she said. That was something Julie Nixon had said about her father after he got bounced out of the White House: “He still has his sense of humor.”
“Yes—at least that,” I agreed.
“Waiter,” she said, “what’s this fly doing in my soup?”
“What?” I said.
“What’s this fly doing in my soup?” she persisted.
And then it came back to me: This was the opening line in a daisy chain of jokes we used to tell each other on the telephone. I closed my eyes. I gave the answering line, and the telephone became a time machine for me. It allowed me to escape from Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-seven and into the fourth dimension.
“I believe that’s the backstroke, madam,” I said.
“Waiter,” she said, “there’s also a needle in my soup.”
“I’m sorry, madam,” I said, “that’s a typographical error. That should have been a noodle.”
“Why do you charge so much for cream?” she said.
“It’s because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles,” I said.
“I keep thinking it’s Tuesday,” she said.
“It is Tuesday,” I said.
“That’s what I keep thinking,” she said. “Tell me, do you serve flannelcakes?”
“Not on the menu today,” I said.
“Last night I dreamed I was eating flannelcakes,” she said.
“That must have been very nice,” I said.
“It was terrible,” she said. “When I woke up, the blanket was gone.”
She, too, had reason to escape into the fourth dimension. As I would find out later, her patient had died that night. Sarah had liked her a lot. The patient was only thirty-six,