The Wonders of the Invisible World Read Free

Oneonta to the stationery store. You need anything from the outside world?”
    “Am I not invited?” he said.
    “Of course,” I said. “Sure. You just looked so comfortable.” How could I do what I needed to do at the liquor store with him along?
    “The master of illusion,” he said.
    “How’s the book?”
    He shrugged. “Reads about the same as last time.”
    “No, I mean the wolf book.” The children’s book he’s working on is about a lost wolf cub, which is adopted by a peasant family but finally returns to the forest to be with its own kind. The crap he’s handed is not his fault.
    “Oh, the
book,
” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?” This, Iguessed, was meant as a lighthearted peace overture. “Good,” he said. “Rockin’ right along.”
    I tried to think of a delicate way to find out if he was on the verge of another Dickens thing. Finally I said, “When do they want them by?”
    “What’s today?”
    “Thursday.”
    “Thursday,” he said. “So, a week from tomorrow. Not a problem. Barring a sudden coffee shortage.”
    What about a cigarette shortage
? I thought. He’d gone through nearly a pack last night. How could he be lying there not jumping out of his skin? Why would he want to come with me to Oneonta instead of trying to hustle me out of here so he could smoke? Then I got it. He must have run out, and at some point he would excuse himself to do an “errand.” With any luck, he’d take long enough for me to get to the liquor store. But wait: if he hustled me out of here, he could just walk down to Webster’s. I didn’t get it.
    “I was looking through this,” he said, “to see if there was anything in the Seymour stuff I could use. I always thought Phiz was way overrated, and I sort of wanted to give old Seymour a tip of the Hatlo hat. You know the story, right?”
    “What story?” I said, obediently.
    “Okay, Seymour was the first illustrator on the book—see, Dickens was just this young guy they hired to crank out text. But in the middle of the thing Seymour kills himself, and they got some bozo to fill in for a couple of weeks or whatever and then they found Phiz. Look at this, this is the last thing Seymour did.”
    It was an ugly picture of a dying man on a bed.
    “Why did he kill himself?” I said.
    “Got
me,
” he said. “I know Dickens sort of ran roughshod over him, which I guess didn’t help matters. But I think it was just, you know, his life.”
    He got up and located his boots, his checkbook, the car keys, his red plaid hat. “Carl plow the driveway?” he said, peering out the kitchen window as he zipped up his red plaid jacket over his down vest. “Did a great job.” As we walked out the door, he handed me the keys.
    In Oneonta, he came into the stationery store with me; while I bought a ream of paper I didn’t need, he picked out a half-dozen pen tips. Then he wanted to go have rice pudding at the luncheonette, where he got quarters for the jukebox and played Randy Travis singing the forever-and-ever song. How could he bear the irony? How could he put
me
through it? I watched his hand, the one with the ring, beat time on the Formica. He never announced he had an errand; I tried to think how to manage a run to the liquor store, but it couldn’t be done. On the way back out of town we hit the Grand Union, where I bought stuff for Chicken in a Bread Loaf, and craftily omitted the dried mint.
    When we got home, he kissed me—on the lips, warm—and went up to work. He hadn’t had a cigarette, apparently, since sometime last night. If he was a man who could pick up a thing and then just drop it, where did that leave me? Thinking about Marilyn, I supppose. He was married to her for fifteen years, then dumped her because she got old. (He says that’s not what happened.) She was only forty-two. I took the pad from next to the phone and figured it out. Forty-two minus twenty-nine: I would be forty-two in thirteen years. In the same thirteen years,