"Oh, that lousy headdress! It weighed twenty pounds, and they put it on with hatpins." He caressed her absently. He had figured out that she was talking about the night New York was bombed. "I was in the middle of the big first-act curtain number when" her face was strained, even after years, even now that she was herself one of the godlike ones "when something took hold of me. I ran off the stage and right out through the front door. There was a cab waiting. As soon as I got in I was free, and the driver took off like a lunatic through the tunnel, out to Newark Airport. I tell you, I was scared! At the toll-booth I screamed but my friend let go of the driver for a minute, smashed a trailer-truck into a police car, and in the confusion we got away. He took me over again at the airport. I ran bare as a bird into a plane that was just ready to take off. The pilot was under control ... We flew eleven hours, and I wore that damn feather headdress all the way."
She held out her glass for a refill. Chandler busied himself opening the second bottle. Now she was talking about her friend. "I hadn't seen him in six years. I was just a Md, living in Islip. He was with a Russian trade commission next door, in an old mansion. Well, he was one of the ones, back in Russia, that came up with these." She touched her brow where her coronet usually rested.
"So," she said brightly, "he put me up for membership and by and by they gave me one. You see? It's all very simple, except the waiting."
Chandler pulled her to him and made a toast. "Your friend."
"He's a nice guy," she said moodily, sipping her drink. "You know how careful I am about getting exercise and so on? It's partly because of him. You would have liked him, love, only, well, it turned out that he liked me well enough, but he began to like what he could get through the coronet a lot more. He got fat. A lot of them are awfully fat, love," she said seriously. "That's why they need people like me. And you. Replacements. Heart trouble, liver trouble, what can they expect when they lie in bed day in and day out, taking their lives through other people's bodies? I won't let myself go that way ... It's a temptation. You know, almost every day I find some poor woman on a diet and spend a solid hour eating creampuffs and gravies. How they must hate me!"
She grinned, leaned back and kissed him.
Chandler put his arms around the girl and returned the kiss, hard. She did not draw away. She clung to him, and he could feel in the warmth of her body, the sound of her breath that she was responding.
And then she whispered, "Not yet, love," and pushed him away. "Time for water sports!" she cried, getting to her feet. "You've loafed here long enough, now let me show you what's fun!"
Ten minutes later, wearing scuba gear Rosalie had turned up from somewhere, he was following her out through the grayish green sea.
After the first minute, it was not like swimming at all. For one thing, you didn't feel wet. And you were breathing, through the mask and the tube in your teeth. It was interesting, he thought; but he could not help wondering if this was what Rosalie had meant by "fun."
They had weighted themselves with belts of metal slugs, but he was still buoyant and had to fight continually against rising to the surface, where Rosalie seemed to have over-weighted herself and kept sloping down toward the distant bottom. Swimming was slow, especially as Rosalie had insisted he carry a long-bladed butcher Knife "In case of sharks, love!"
But still! He was under the water and breathing. He followed her, expecting something, but not knowing quite what.
There were sharks, all right. He had seen a dozen of them, and there was something off to the side right now, circling behind him, almost invisible in the distance. He regarded it with great suspicion and dislike. Even if you couldn't get really killed in a borrowed body, you yourself couldn't; he was not prepared to think about what happened to the prisoned owner of the body, there were things that were not attractive about the prospect of great unseen jaws suddenly slicing a ham away.
Rosalie half turned to him, beckoned and started down. Dimly he could see the bottom now, or at any rate something that was where the bottom ought to be. Rosalie was spinning there below him, waiting for him.
It was quite dim, this far from the surface of the sea, but Chandler could see the gleam of her eye and her cheerful wink behind the mask. She stretched out a hand and pointed above him and behind.
Chandler half turned to see. There were five of the great shadowy bulks there now, and they seemed to be moving toward him.
Frantically he kicked and squirmed to face them, but Rosalie caught his arm. She held him, and gestured for him to hand her the knife.
Chandler was frankly terrified. Every childhood fear sprang to life in him; his breath caught, his heart pounded, something churned in his belly and forced its way into his throat. It was no good telling himself that this was not really his body, that his own flesh lay secure in a split-level living room twelve thousand miles away; he cringed from the threat of the grim, silent shapes and it was all he could do to stay in this threatened corpus to see what Rosalie wanted to do.
He gave her the knife. She glanced upward at the sharks calculatingly, then pursed her lips, winked, blew him a kiss and neatly, carefully, sliced his airhose in two. His oxygen blew out in a cascade of great, wriggling bubbles. Water rushed in. He felt her tearing his facemask off, but water was already in his eyes, mouth, nose. He coughed and strangled, more startled than he had ever been in his life; and then she touched his chest with the blade, daintily and precisely. Fire leaped along his side and a cloud of blood began to diffuse through the water. She ripped off her own facemask and slit a careful line across the eighteen-year-old's borrowed abdomen, then reached out her arms to him.
They kissed. Her arms locked around him like manacles. He felt his lungs bursting as they kissed and spun, thrashing, through the water, while the feathery clouds of blood spread out; and as they turned Chandler saw the great torpedo shapes, now incredibly close, coming toward them incredibly fast.
The last he saw was the great yawning grin of teeth; and then he could not help it, he fled. He abandoned Rosalie, abandoned the borrowed body of the carabinieri, fled and did not stop until he was back in his own flesh, still frightened, and violently ill.
CHANDLER COULD sleep only tardily that night, and not well. His sleep was punctuated with sudden wakenings, illuminated with dreams. Ellen Braisted came and spoke to him, and Margot his wife. They did not threaten or terrify him. They only looked at him with reproach... and when he woke and it was broad daylight, and the Kanaka was whirring the lawnmower across the grass outside just as though no murders had been committed by the inmates of the house, he slouched angrily around the living room for an hour and then began to drink.
By the time Rosalie Pan came downstairs, yawning and looking slaked and contented, he was drunk enough to coax her into breakfasting on Bloody Marys.
By the time she had had her third, and no longer minded the fact that she had not eaten, Chandler was stumbling and stammering. Rosalie did not object. Perhaps she understood, or understood at least that she had shown him something of herself that took getting used to. Even when the other members of the exec began calling in, usually through the person of the beach boy who was her handyman, she laughed and made excuses for Chandler.
But when they were gone, when it was only the Kanaka who was in the room with them, turning to leave with a tired fear, she reproached him gently: "Not quite so much of the arm-around-the-neck, love. Do you mind? I mean, everything in its place."
"You didn't mind yesterday," said Chandler sullenly.
"Oh, really! I'm not trying to reform you, you know. But these are members of the exec, and you need the votes." "I certainly wouldn't want to behave badly in the presence of a member of the exec," said Chandler, and lurched to the kitchen for another bottle. He was at that stage of drunkenness when he felt he was not going to be able to get drunk: he observed the symptoms of hands and feet and mouth, and cursed the clarity of his brain that would not anesthetize him. In the kitchen he paused, staggered over to the sink and on impulse put his head under the cold-water tap.