Many Mansions
by Robert Silverberg
It’s been a rough day. Everything gone wrong. A tremendous tie-up on the freeway going to work, two accounts cancelled before lunch, now some inconceivable botch by the weather programmers. It’s snowing outside. Actually snowing. He’ll have to go out and clear the driveway in the morning. He can’t remember when it last snowed. And of course a fight with Alice again. She never lets him alone. She’s at her most deadly when she sees him come home exhausted from the office. Ted why don’t you this, Ted get me that. Now, waiting for dinner, working on his third drink in forty minutes, he feels one of his headaches coming on. Those miserable killer headaches that can destroy a whole evening. What a life! He toys with murderous fantasies. Take her out by the reservoir for a friendly little stroll, give her a quick hard shove with his shoulder. She can’t swim. Down, down, down. Glub. Goodbye, Alice. Free at last.
In the kitchen she furiously taps the keys of the console, programming dinner just the way he likes it. Cold vichyssoise, baked potato with sour cream and chives, sirloin steak blood-rare inside and charcoal-charred outside. Don’t think it isn’t work to get the meal just right, even with the autochef. All for him. The bastard. Tell me, why do I sweat so hard to please him? Has he made me happy? What’s he ever done for me except waste the best years of my life? And he thinks I don’t know about his other women. Those lunchtime quickies. Oh, I wouldn’t mind at all if he dropped dead tomorrow. I’d be a great widow—so dignified at the funeral, so strong, hardly crying at all. And everybody thinks we’re such a close couple. Married eleven years and they’re still in love. I heard someone say that only last week. If they only knew the truth about us. If they only knew.
Martin peers out the window of his third-floor apartment in Sunset Village. Snow. I’ll be damned. He can’t remember the last time he saw snow. Thirty, forty years back, maybe, when Ted was a baby. He absolutely can’t remember. White stuff on the ground when? The mind gets wobbly when you’re past eighty. He still can’t believe he’s an old man. It rocks him to realize that his grandson Ted, Martha’s boy, is almost forty. I bounced that kid on my knee and he threw up all over my suit. Four years old then. Nixon was President. Nobody talks much about Tricky Dick these days. Ancient history. McKinley, Coolidge, Nixon. Time flies. Martin thinks of Ted’s wife, Alice. What a nice tight little ass she has. What a cute pair of jugs. I’d like to get my hands on them. I really would. You know something, Martin? You’re not such an old ruin yet. Not if you can get it up for your grandson’s wife.
His dreams of drowning her fade as quickly as they came. He is not a violent man by nature. He knows he could never do it. He can’t even bring himself to step on a spider; how then could he kill his wife? If she’d die some other way, of course, without the need of his taking direct action, that would solve everything. She’s driving to the hairdresser on one of those manual-access roads she likes to use, and her car swerves on an icy spot, and she goes into a tree at eighty kilometers an hour. Good. She’s shopping on Union Boulevard, and the bank is blown up by an activist; she’s nailed by flying debris. Good. The dentist gives her a new anaesthetic and it turns out she’s fatally allergic to it. Puffs up like a blowfish and dies in five minutes. Good. The police come, long faces, snuffly noses. Terribly sorry, Mr. Porter. There’s been an awful accident. Don’t tell me it’s my wife, he cries. They nod lugubriously. He bears up bravely under the loss, though.
“You can come in for dinner now,” she says. He’s sitting slouched on the sofa with another drink in his hand. He drinks more than any man she knows, not that she knows all that many. Maybe he’ll get cirrhosis and die. Do people still die of cirrhosis, she wonders, or do they give them liver transplants now? The funny thing is that he still turns her on, after eleven years. His eyes, his face, his hands. She despises him but he still turns her on.
The snow reminds him of his young manhood, of his days long ago in the East. He was quite the ladies’ man then. And it wasn’t so easy to get some action back in those days, either. The girls were always worried about what people would say if anyone found out. What people would say! As if doing it with a boy you liked was something shameful. Or they’d worry about getting knocked up. They made you wear a rubber. How awful that was: like wearing a sock. The pill was just starting to come in, the original pill, the old one-a-day kind. Imagine a world without the pill! (“Did they have dinosaurs when you were a boy, grandpa?”) Still, Martin had made out all right. Big muscular frame, strong earnest features, warm inquisitive eyes. You’d never know it to look at me now. I wonder if Alice realizes what kind of stud I used to be. If I had the money I’d rent one of those time machines they’ve got now and send her back to visit myself around 1950 or so. A little gift to my younger self. He’d really rip into her. It gives Martin a quick riffle of excitement to think of his younger self ripping into Alice. But of course he can’t afford any such thing.
As he forks down his steak he imagines being single again. Would I get married again? Not on your life. Not until I’m good and ready, anyway, maybe when I’m fifty-five or sixty. Me for bachelorhood for the time being, just screwing around like a kid. To hell with responsibilities. I’ll wait two, three weeks after the funeral, a decent interval, and then I’ll go off for some fun. Hawaii, Tahiti, Fiji, someplace out there. With Nolie. Or Maria. Or Ellie. Yes, with Ellie. He thinks of Ellie’s pink thighs, her soft heavy breasts, her long radiant auburn hair. Two weeks in Fiji with Ellie. Two weeks in Ellie with Fiji. Yes. Yes. Yes. ‘Is the steak rare enough for you, Ted?’ Alice asks. ‘It’s fine,’ he says.
She goes upstairs to check the children’s bedroom. They’re both asleep, finally. Or else faking it so well that it makes no difference. She stands by their beds a moment, thinking, I love you, Bobby, I love you, Tink. Tink and Bobby, Bobby and Tink. I love you even though you drive me crazy sometimes. She tiptoes out. Now for a quiet evening of television. And then to bed. The same old routine. Christ. I don’t know why I go on like this. There are times when I’m ready to explode. I stay with him for the children’s sake, I guess. Is that enough of a reason?
He envisions himself running hand in hand along the beach with Ellie. Both of them naked, their skins bronzed and gleaming in the tropical sunlight. Palm trees everywhere. Grains of pink sand under foot. Soft transparent wavelets lapping the shore. A quiet cove. “No one can see us here,” Ellie murmurs. He sinks down on her firm sleek body and enters her.
A blazing band of pain tightens like a strip of hot metal across Martin’s chest. He staggers away from the window, dropping into a low crouch as he stumbles toward a chair. The heart. Oh, the heart! That’s what you get for drooling over Alice. Dirty old man. “Help,” he calls feebly. “Come on, you filthy machine, help me!” The medic, activated by the key phrase, rolls silently toward him. Its sensors are already at work scanning him, searching for the cause of the discomfort. A telescoping steel-jacketed arm slides out of the medic’s chest and, hovering above Martin, extrudes an ultrasonic injection snout. “Yes,” Martin murmurs, “that’s right, damn you, hurry up and give me the drug!” Calm. I must try to remain calm. The snout makes a gentle whirring noise as it forces the relaxant into Martin’s vein. He slumps in relief. The pain slowly ebbs. Oh, that’s much better. Saved again. Oh. Oh. Oh. Dirty old man. Ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Ted knows he won’t get to Fiji with Ellie or anybody else. Any realistic assessment of the situation brings him inevitably to the same conclusion. Alice isn’t going to die in an accident, any more than he’s likely to murder her. She’ll live forever. Unwanted wives always do. He could ask for a divorce, of course. He’d probably lose everything he owned, but he’d win his freedom. Or he could simply do away with himself. That was always a temptation for him. The easy way out, no lawyers, no hassles. So it’s that time of the evening again. It’s the same every night. Pretending to watch television, he secretly indulges in suicidal fantasies.