Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [38]
“Yes.”
“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”
“Um,” said Billy Pilgrim.
Shortly after he went to sleep that night, Billy traveled in time to another moment which was quite nice, his wedding night with the former Valencia Merble. He had been out of the veterans’ hospital for six months. He was all well. He had graduated from the Ilium School of Optometry—third in his class of forty-seven.
Now he was in bed with Valencia in a delightful studio apartment which was built on the end of a wharf on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Across the water were the lights of Gloucester. Billy was on top of Valencia, making love to her. One result of this act would be the birth of Robert Pilgrim, who would become a problem in high school, but who would then straighten out as a member of the famous Green Berets.
Valencia wasn’t a time-traveler, but she did have a lively imagination. While Billy was making love to her, she imagined that she was a famous woman in history. She was being Queen Elizabeth the First of England, and Billy was supposedly Christopher Columbus.
Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge. He had just emptied his seminal vesicles into Valencia, had contributed his share of the Green Beret. According to the Tralfamadorians, of course, the Green Beret would have seven parents in all.
Now he rolled off his huge wife, whose rapt expression did not change when he departed. He lay with the buttons of his spine along the edge of the mattress, folded his hands behind his head. He was rich now. He had been rewarded for marrying a girl nobody in his right mind would have married. His father-in-law had given him a new Buick Roadmaster, an all-electric home, and had made him manager of his most prosperous office, his Ilium office, where Billy could expect to make at least thirty thousand dollars a year. That was good. His father had been only a barber.
As his mother said, “The Pilgrims are coming up in the world.”
The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian Summer in New England. The lovers’ apartment had one romantic wall which was all French doors. They opened onto a balcony and the oily harbor beyond.
A green and orange dragger, black in the night, grumbled and drummed past their balcony, not thirty feet from their wedding bed. It was going to sea with only its running lights on. Its empty holds were resonant, made the song of the engines rich and loud. The wharf began to sing the same song, and then the honeymooners’ headboard sang, too. And it continued to sing long after the dragger was gone.
“Thank you,” said Valencia at last. The headboard was singing a mosquito song.
“You’re welcome.”
“It was nice.”
Then she began to cry.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m so happy.”
“Good.”
“I never thought anybody would marry me.”
“Um,” said Billy Pilgrim.
“I’m going to lose weight for you,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m going to go on a diet. I’m going to become beautiful for you.”
“I like you just the way you are.”
“Do you really?”
“Really,” said Billy Pilgrim. He had already seen a lot of their marriage, thanks to time-travel, knew that it was going to be at least bearable all the way.
A great motor yacht named the Scheherezade now slid past the marriage bed. The song its engines sang was a very low organ note. All her lights were on.
Two beautiful people, a young man and a young woman in evening clothes, were at the rail in the stern, loving each other and their dreams and the lake. They were honeymooning, too. They were Lance Rumfoord, of Newport, Rhode Island, and his bride, the former Cynthia Landry, who had been a childhood sweetheart of John F. Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
There was a slight coincidence here. Billy Pilgrim would later share a hospital room with Rumfoord’s uncle, Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord of Harvard, official Historian of the United States Air Force.
When the beautiful people were past, Valencia questioned her funny-looking husband about