Schiff’s new on the service and I’m walking him through the procedures.”
(Well, Schiff thought, walking.)
“Hi, Jenny. Hi, Dr. Schiff.”
“Hi, Charley,” Schiff said.
“You’re coming in fine now, sir. You don’t have to shout, though. Just speak up, that’ll do it.”
“I’m sorry,” Schiff shouted.
“That’s all right, you’ll get used to it.”
Everyone kept telling him he’d get used to it. A good sign and a bad sign both. He didn’t need all that accident in his life, but it was comforting to think S.O.S. would pick him up each time he fell down. This is what it comes to, he thought. If you just hung on and managed to live long enough you turn into a bowling pin.
Now he knew he was expected to do a fair share of falling he was reluctant to be left alone. It was Schiff’s suggestion they go through the rest of the house, check out each of the base stations Miss Simmons had rigged. She had to push him in his wheelchair, help lift his feet onto the little platform of his Stair-Glide, help raise his pants up (he wore only pants with elastic waistbands these days, shirts whose buttons, except for the top button and the one beneath that, had been already buttoned so that all he had to do was slip it on over his head, his shoes were fastened with Velcro tabs, and he dressed not so much for comfort — when was the last time he’d been comfortable? — as for sitting down on toilet seats and getting up from them again, so he wore no underwear, and tended, the elastic waistband reconfiguring itself about his body each time he moved, casually to moon the world each time he stood) for him again as he got out of it and leaned into his walker. It took another forty minutes for them to do the rounds of the second floor and he was satisfied that all systems were go. Each area was a little different from the others and required, as if he were reciting from the stages of separate theaters, a slightly different projection of his voice. By the time they were finished, however, Charley was complimenting him on his levels. He sounded, Charley said, like someone who’d been doing pratfalls for years.
There was nothing left for her to do. He could stall her no longer, he’d have to let her go.
“Oh,” she said, “I forgot to get your key from you.”
“My key?”
“For the house. The service will need it if it has to get
in.”
“Gee,” Schiff said, “my key, I don’t know.”
“We take an impression, we duplicate it on our premises and get it back to you.”
“No,” Schiff said, “I mean I don’t know. Where it even is. I can’t remember the last time I used it.”
“Maybe it’s in the tchtchk,” Jenny Simmons said.
“Gosh,” he said, “you pronounced that perfectly.”
She seemed to blush. Which would make it once for him and twice for her. Were the two of them falling in love?
“I’ll look and see,” she said, and left him in his bedroom, sitting on his bed.
“That’s just where it was,” she called up in a couple of minutes. “I’ve already checked to see if it’s the right one. This is it, all right. It unlocked your front door straight off.”
“That’s terrific,” he called. “It was clever of you to think of the tchtchk.”
“People have patterns,” she called back up the stairs. “It’s human nature.”
“You’re right,” he said from where he sat on his bed, projecting perfectly now from all the practice he’d had on their dry run through the base stations, “it is human nature.”
“Goodbye,” she called. “I’ll have this duplicated ASAP. I’ll see to it someone gets it back to you. Oh, and Profesor”
“Yes?”
“You mustn’t worry about any of this. It’s like health, or fire, or automobile insurance. It’s for your peace of mind. You hope you never have to use it. You just know it’s there for you if you ever do.” It was exactly what Bill would have said. He heard the front door close behind her.
So much, Schiff thought, for love.
Well, thought dignified old Schiff, that was a close one. Because for a few minutes there he’d begun to rethink his decision to call off the party. He was going to invite Miss Simmons. If she’d come upstairs to say goodbye properly he would have. It wasn’t crazy. He could have asked without embarrassing either of them. It was perfectly natural. She’d been his student, too, once. Of course, she seemed put off when he mentioned the party, but that was because she thought he was trying to get her to stand in for Claire. She’d seen there was nothing in the fridge, that the cupboard was bare. She may have thought he wanted her to do his shopping for him. She was a busy woman, he knew that. A dozen or so phone calls, he could have taken care of it himself. What did Miss Simmons know of his arrangements with Information?
Well, he thought, there’s no fool like an old fool. Hold it right there, old fool, he told himself. Because where, really, was the foolishness in all this? Hadn’t she recognized him? It had been fifteen years. At least fifteen years. She could have been a sophomore when she’d taken his class. Even, with permission of the instructor, a freshman. So at least fifteen years, probably sixteen, but possibly seventeen or eighteen. If she wanted to get her distribution requirement in political science out of the way.
But say fifteen years. She knew him when, he’d said. She’d known him when. He didn’t kid himself. He knew well enough what he looked like these days, his frail, shot, worn-out, emeritus looks and cripple’s diminished, broken bearing. Yet she’d recognized him through all the schmutz of disability, through all the scaffolding of his wheelchairs, Stair-Glides and walkers, the heavy disguise of his ruined body. So where was the old foolishness? Where exactly? He was a geographer, show him on a map. And if it had been fifteen years since she’d graduated, that made her, what, thirty-seven? (At least thirty-seven.) Which would have made him about forty-four — she knew him when — when she knew him. Or, depending on those distribution requirements, that permission of the instructor, conceivably only forty-one. Looked at in this light, not so much sub specie aeternitatis as in the enchanted, almost charming relativity of love and other such matters, that made them practically contemporaries. So where, where was the foolishness? Where was there even such a big-deal age difference? Because didn’t young women often develop crushes — he used the lightest, most flattering term for such things — on their professors? Didn’t they fall in outright love with them? Develop grand passions for them that ended up not just in some motel room but frequently in actual officially sanctioned, ceremonially blessed marriage beds? He could name at least half a dozen such arrangements right here on this campus. Sure. Happens all the time. (And, frequently, with happier, longer-lasting outcomes than his and Claire’s.) Or maybe she didn’t care for him in that way (or it could be she knew all too well what was happening and had simply been too shy to come up), but how did no-fool-like-an-old-fool apply? He could have as easily said — this was love he was talking about, that grand enchantment, that charming relativity that smashed time’s tenses — that he’d been thinking like a high school kid, and what did he see in her, a woman at least thirty-seven?
All right, that was stretching things. But he at least wanted it on the record that he was taking back all his disclaimers. He was ruling nothing in, he was ruling nothing out. And if this was some May and December thing, okay, all right, but at least it was some late May, early December thing!