Thisbe said matter-of-factly, “I get inside the bubble.”
“You do?” Collins said, enthralled.
“Yes, I get in it. Of course, I can’t do it now. I can’t do it without removing my garments.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Yeah,” Vacuhhi said, “she really gets into it. It’s a tight fit, but she manages. There’s this aperture.” He showed Collins how a section of the bubble could be twisted loose. “It didn’t come that way originally; we altered it for her. She crawls into the bubble with nothing on—” He led Collins off where Thisbe could not hear. “And then they sort of boot her around, you get me?” He gave the empty bubble a shove with his foot and the bubble rolled across the living room, striking the far wall “Like that. Only she’s in it. She turns with it on account of it’s so tight in there.”
“How does she breathe?” he asked.
“Oh, there’s a bunch of tiny holes. You think you could use this for your entertainment program?”
“Yes,” he said, “I certainly can.”
Thisbe said, “But you guys have to be careful and not kick the bubble too hard. Sometimes I’m black and blue for weeks afterward, after a lot of you convention guys have kicked me around.”
After Thisbe and Tony Vacuhhi had departed, Hugh Collins began to dwell on the arrangement he had made, the acquisition of Thisbe for the entertainment of himself and his fellow optometrists.
Good lord, he thought, feeling weak. A girl who would get into a plastic float and allow herself to be rolled around on the floor would be willing to do anything.
This was going to be the best doggone convention yet.
12
Jim Briskin spent most of the next day getting his car back from the San Francisco police. They neither recognized him nor knew where his car was; according to a well-padded cop in a blue shirt, his car could be at one of several town-way depots. Along with a group of others in the same fix, he trailed off in search of his car. At one-thirty in the afternoon his car was found. He paid his fines and the amount virtually wiped out his cash on hand. He emerged in the midday sunlight blinking, shaken, and scathingly hostile to the San Francisco police department.
A punishment, he thought. After he had eaten lunch in a downtown café, he got his car from the lot—this time he had taken it off the street—and drove, alone, to Golden Gate Park.
Under his shoes the lawns were wet. He walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down. Ahead of him was Stow Lake. In the center of the lake was an island connected to the shore by a stone bridge. At the peak of the island was a grove of trees, and a Jesus Christ cross, and an artificial fountain, the waters of which were pumped up and released. Ducks paddled in the water of the lake, small brown ducks, not the eating kind. Boats with children were here and there. At the boat house was a candy counter. Old men dozed on benches with their legs stuck out.
As a boy of nineteen, he had come here with a notion which at the time had seemed illicit and lewd, not to say uncommon; he had arrived with a portable radio and a blanket, hoping to meet some pretty girl in a bright, colorful, laundered dress. Now those days, those desires, did not seem lewd; they seemed to him sad.
He thought, I can’t blame him. Any boy of seventeen or eighteen or nineteen with a grain of sense in his head would have done the same thing. I would have. How perfect Patricia was. What a wonderful woman for a boy to get hold of. For any man, he thought. But especially for a boy, aching to touch and hold a full-grown woman. A woman who wore a coat and rust-colored suit and whose hair was dark, long, soft to the touch. Once in a lifetime. It would have been lunacy to turn her down.
A dream, he thought. Fulfillment of a dream. A dream of pure life.
Anybody, he thought, who would call such a response a sin was either a hypocrite or a fool.
A fat, dangerous-looking squirrel was preparing to approach him. First the squirrel advanced and then retreated, his brush undulating. What sturdy hams the squirrel had. And the grip of his claws. Revolving, the squirrel again came in his direction, halting to rise up, clasping and unclasping his paws. He had a mean expression; he looked like an older squirrel, a veteran.
Jim stopped at the candy window of the boat house and bought a package of peanuts.
Once, years ago, when he and Pat had walked through the Park, a squirrel had followed them for blocks, hoping for a handout. But that time, alas, neither he nor Pat had had anything to give him. Now, if they were in the Park, they bought peanuts.
“Here,” he said, tossing a shelled peanut at the squirrel.
The squirrel scuttled after it.
Off on a slope a gang of kids in jeans and T-shirts were playing softball. Jim seated himself to watch. Eating the peanuts which he had bought for the squirrel, he enjoyed the noisy, disorganized game.
He thought to himself: I’m glad I’m not in her shoes. I’m glad Rachael isn’t after me.
A baseball rolled across the grass and stopped at his foot. One of the kids cupped his hands and yelled. Jim picked up the baseball and tossed it. The ball fell short.
Christ, he thought. He could not even do that.
If he were in her shoes, he thought, he would be scared. Because Rachael was a tough little urchin, and she would not listen to the usual hocus-pocus, the verbal, clouds thrown up to protect the guilty. She knew Pat was guilty. She knew how her husband’s mind worked, how it had to work under the circumstances.
He thought of Jim Briskin, the nineteen-year-old kid, back in the early days, the kid mooning along the path by Stow Lake; his head was too big, too heavy, and his arms flapped foolishly. He was altogether a dopey kid. He was not good in sports, and his complexion was only fair; like Art Emmanual, he had a tendency to stammer, and when it came to girls, well, the truth of the matter was that at nineteen he had never done more than put his arm around a pretty, bouncy-haired high school girl in skirt and blouse. Once, at a dance, a girl had kissed him. Once—and what a once that had been—he had talked a girl (what was her name?) into sliding off her shirt long enough for him to see that it was true, it was all true; what they said was so—the source of immortality on earth, the source of everything warm and good and important in life, was somewhere inside a girls blouse, if the girl was fresh and pretty and as shy as that girl. But he did not count that; he still thought of himself as not having done more than walk a girl to the show and put his arm around her when the lights were down; the reaching into the girl’s blouse did not belong to him because he had gotten nothing, he had gained nothing permanent. For that, he realized, for that kind of moment to mean something, the woman had to be completely taken over. It was nothing to peek, to touch, to be present. That was a mockery. That was pain the like of which he had never again experienced.
At nineteen he had strolled around Stow Lake, hoping plaintively. He had strolled literally for months, in all varieties of weather, and one afternoon on a cloudy day, about four o’clock, he had come upon a girl and a man waxing a diminutive foreign car. The car was parked out of the sunlight—what little there was—and the two of them were working vigorously, both of them perspiring, both in cotton shorts and heavy gray sweaters.
As he passed, the girl had smiled at him and he had said, “A lot of work.”
“You want to help?” the man said.
So he took a chamois rag and helped. When the car (a French Renault) was shiny and the rags and wax cans were put away, the two of them invited him to come along with them and have a drink. They were a young married couple with a six-month-old baby; they lived in a housing development, and the man was an engineering student at Cal. They lived in Berkeley—so did he—and he hung around them, off and on, for almost a year. Then the husband, who, it developed, was queer, disappeared with a queer friend, leaving his wife and baby. And with her Jim Briskin had a long, involved, deeply experienced affair, his first affair, until all at once the husband came back, beating his chest with remorse, and the family reformed.