'But when I thought it over, I saw that that was no stranger than eating everything on the table and finding out I'd lost three pounds,' he said. 'And having that idea was what finally got me out of the mental rut I'd been in. I spent another day in that motel room doing some of the hardest thinking of my life. I started to realize they could have been right at the Glassman Clinic after all. Even Michael Houston could have been at least partly right, as much as I dislike the little prick.'
'Billy . . .' She touched his arm.
'Never mind,' he said. 'I'm not going to sock him when I see him.' Might offer him a piece of pie, though, Billy thought, and laughed.
'Share the joke?' She gave him a puzzled little smile.
'It's nothing,' he said. 'Anyway, the problem was that Houston, those guys at the Glassman Clinic – even you, Heidi -were trying to rani it down my throat. Trying to force-feed me the truth. I just had to think it all out for myself. Simple guilt reaction, plus – I suppose – a combination of paranoid delusions and willful selfdeception. But in the end, Heidi, I was partly right, too. Maybe for all the wrong reasons, but I was partly right I said I had to see him again, and that was what turned the trick. Just not in the way I had expected. He was smaller than I remembered, he was wearing a cheap Timex watch, and he had a Brooklyn accent. He said "coise " for "curse." It was that more than anything that broke through the delusion, I think – it was like hearing Tony Curtis say "Yonduh is da palace of my faddah" in that movie about the Arabian Empire. So I picked up the telephone and -'
In the parlor, the clock on the mantel began bonging musically.
'It's midnight,' he said. 'Let's go to bed. I'll help you stack the dishes in the sink.'
'No, I can do it,' she said, and then slipped her arms around him. 'I'm glad you came home, Billy. Go on upstairs. You must be exhausted.'
'I'm okay,' he said. 'I'll just . . .'
He suddenly snapped his fingers with the air of a man who has just remembered something.
'Almost forgot,' he said. 'I left something in the car.'
'What is it? Can't it wait until the morning?'
'Yes, but I ought to bring it in.' He smiled at her. 'It's for you.'
He went out, his heart thudding heavily in his chest. He dropped the car keys on the driveway, then thumped his head on the side of the car in his haste to pick them up. His hands were trembling so badly that he could not at first stick the key into the trunk slot.
What if it's still pulsing up and down like that? his mind yammered. Christ almighty, she'll run screaming when she sees it!
He opened the trunk and when he saw nothing inside but the jack and the spare, he almost screamed himself. Then he remembered – it was on the passenger side of the front seat. He slammed the trunk down and went around in a hurry. The pie was there, and the crust was perfectly still – as he had known, really, that it would be.
His hands abruptly stopped trembling.
Heidi was standing on the porch again, watching him. He crossed back to her and put the pie into her hands. He was still smiling. I'm delivering the goods, he thought. And delivering the goods was yet another of the many things it was all about: His smile widened.
'Voila,' he said.
'Wow!' She bent down close to the pie and sniffed. 'Strawberry pie … my favorite!'
'I know,' Billy said, smiling.
'And still warm! Thank you!'
'I pulled off the turnpike in Stratford to get gas and the Ladies' Aid or something was having a bake sale on the lawn of the church that was right there,' he said. 'And I thought … you know … if you came to the door with a rolling pin or something, I'd have a peace offering.'
'Oh, Billy . . .' She was starting to cry again. She gave him an impulsive one-armed hug, holding the pie balanced on the tented fingers of her other hand the way a waiter balances a tray. As she kissed him the pie tilted. Billy felt his heart tilt in his chest and fall crazily out of rhythm.
'Careful!' he gasped, and grabbed the pie just as it started to slide.
'God, I'm so clumsy,' she said, laughing and wiping her eyes with the corner of the apron she had put on. 'You bring me my favorite kind of pie and I almost drop it all over your sh-sh . . .' She broke down completely, leaning against his chest, sobbing. He stroked her new short hair with one hand, holding the pie on the palm of the other, prudently away from her body should she make any sudden moves.
'Billy, I'm so glad you're home,' she wept. 'And you promise you don't hate me for what I did? You promise?'
'I promise,' he said gently, stroking her hair. She's right, he thought. It's still warm. 'Let's go inside, huh?'
In the kitchen she put the pie on the counter and went back to the sink.
'Aren't you going to have a piece?' Billy asked.
'Maybe when I finish these,' she said. 'You have one if you like.'
'After the dinner I put away?' he asked, and laughed.
'You're going to need all the calories you can pack in for a while.'
'This is just a case of no room in the inn,' he said. 'Do you want me to dry those for you?'
'I want you to go up and get into bed,' she told him. 'I'll be up right behind you.'
'All right.'
He went up without looking back, knowing she would be more likely to cut herself a slice of the pie if he wasn't there. But she probably wouldn't, not tonight. Tonight she would want to go to bed with him – might even want to make love with him. But he thought he knew how to discourage that. He would just go to bed naked. When she saw him …
And as far as the pie went …
“'Fiddle-de-dee,” said Scarlett, “I'll eat my pie tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.”' He laughed at the sound of his own dismal voice. He was in the bathroom by then, standing on the scales. He looked up into the mirror and in it he saw Ginelli's eyes.
The scales said he was now all the way up to 131 again, but he felt no happiness. He felt nothing at all – except tired. He was incredibly tired. He went down the hallway that now seemed so queer and unfamiliar and into the bedroom. He tripped over something in the dark and almost fell. She had changed some of the furniture around. Cut her hair, got a new blouse, rearranged the positions of the chair and the smaller of the two bedroom bureaus – but that was only the beginning of the strangeness that was now here. It had grown somehow while he was away, as if Heidi had been cursed after all, but in a much more subtle way. Was that really such a foolish idea? Billy didn't think so. Linda had sensed the strangeness and had fled from it.
Slowly he began to undress.
He lay in bed waiting for her to come up, and instead he heard noises which, although faint, were familiar enough to tell him a story. Squeak of an upper cupboard door – the one on the left, the one where they kept the dessert plates – opening. Rattle of a drawer; subtle clink of kitchen implements as she selected a knife.
Billy stared into the darkness, heart thumping.
Sound of her footsteps crossing the kitchen again – she was going to the counter where she had set the pie down. He heard the board in the middle of the kitchen floor creak when she passed over it, as it had been doing for years.
What will it do to her? Made me thin. Turned Cary into something like an animal that after it was dead you'd make a pair of shoes out of it. Turned Hopley into a human pizza. What will it do to her?
The board in the middle of the floor creaked again as
she went back across the kitchen – he could see her, the plate held in her right hand, her cigarettes and matches in her left. He could see the wedge of pie. The strawberries, the pool of dark red juice.