The Ultimate Egoist (39 page)

“If anything,” I said.

“Now don’t sneer! She knew what she was doing. You know, for nearly a week I went to work every day in a fog. Question mark; question mark … I doodled question marks on my scratch pads at the office and even on tablecloths in restaurants. How could a question mark help me make that hesitant young hero of mine propose? I even put on a poker face and handed him a piece of paper with a question mark on it, to see if by some remote chance that was the thing to do. He just looked blankly at me.”

“It didn’t occur to you, did it, that Mrs. Katz found the matter beyond her and took that brief and effective way of telling you so?”

“Will you stop interrupting? Come to think of it, I did wonder
a bit if that was what she meant … but I wouldn’t ask her. It was the nearest thing I had to an answer; I had to know.”

“O.K.,” I said. “What happened? The suspense is terrible.”

She smiled. “I knew I’d wear you down. Well, I just kept thinking ‘question mark … question mark’ over and over until one afternoon it dawned on me that this is leap year; and then of course I knew what to do!”

“What,” I asked in something like exasperation, “did you do?”

“Just as Mrs. Katz suggested. Her note said, ‘question mark,’ so I—” she giggled, “—questioned Mark … Here he comes now. Mark, this is our new neighbor.”

He was a nice young man. As I shook hands with him I reflected that Mrs. Katz was indeed a very clever woman.

T
HE KIND OF
understanding that existed between Matty and Grover Cleveland MacDonald was something rare and wonderful … each knew what the other wanted; to each, the attainment of the other’s desire was desire itself. They were not demonstrative, but they were used to each other. They knew each other’s habits and silently bore with each other’s bad ones.

Reasonably enough, MacDonald was more than a little interested in the great man for whom he had been named. His birthday and President Cleveland’s coincided, and so did their wedding anniversary. He had met her through her father; he had met her father through the latter’s splendid biography of Grover Cleveland.

MacDonald was a quiet little man, the personification of patience. He was a telegraph clerk, and for years had been working Sundays, Tuesday being his day off. He and Matty had nearly everything they wanted, which wasn’t very much. They had an annuity to add to Grover’s pension for their old age; they had a house of their own, a couple of thousand in the bank which they didn’t quite know what to do with, and they had—each other.

One bright Tuesday in March they went for a walk, looking very neat and very much as if there were no one else in the world. From the noisy, hurrying shopping section they walked up the avenue, a region of sedate shops with astronomical rents and the ability to subsist with almost frightening permanence on one sale every two weeks. Art shops, antique shops, fur shops, each with its discreet magnificence, its tony exclusion of all but the initiated.

They both saw it at once, staring out at them from a beautiful subdued in velvet display window: a print of Grover Cleveland—a beautiful, vaguely yellowed, microscopically perfect one. It was quite large, evidently quite old. With one accord, silent, Matty and Grover
went into the shop, where the clerk, in his own good time, greeted them.

He was tired without being worn. “Yes, sir, it is an 1872 print. Yes, it is by—” Matty and Grover fell silent in true awe at the name of the engraver. “No, madam, there are only three copies exactly like this. One is in the capitol, the other at the Metropolitan. Truly a rare piece. The price? One thousand dollars, sir.”

They nodded and thanked him and went outside to look again. Was that a half smile on the noble, sensitive face? Matty and Grover looked at each other. He knew she wanted it, and she knew he wanted it, and each made a firm and silent resolution. Next Monday was Grover Cleveland’s birthday, and Grover MacDonald’s, and Matty and Grover’s anniversary.

The next day, Wednesday, Grover came home from work ten minutes later than usual, with a small flat package. While Matty was in the kitchen, Grover went into the living room, took down Uncle Howard’s shaggy portrait from the place of honor over the mantel, and instead hung a tiny engraving of Grover Cleveland. It was much smaller than the one they had seen in the window, but it was every bit as precise. The aristocratic face looked out from a small oval in white cardboard, about an inch and a half high, an inch and a quarter wide. A tiny, perfect little thing … Grover MacDonald had a quiet but powerful dramatic sense.

“Oh!” cried Matty when she saw it later. “It’s lovely, but it’s so little.” It was, too, in that great expanse of creamy wall.

“It’ll do,” said Grover gravely, “until we can get a better one.” And he smiled.

All too slowly the great day came. Grover couldn’t wait to get home; Matty couldn’t wait until he did. She was standing by the door when he came in. He kissed her, and she took his arm and half dragged him into the living room. There it was, over the mantel—the print from the shop on the avenue.

They stood speechless, staring at it; Matty in the same delighted amazement she had felt when she hung it there, amazement that it was so perfectly fitted to the room; Grover in amazement even greater.

“Oh, Matty … Matty it’s— I can’t tell you!” After another
moment, “Darling, what did you do with the little one?”

She sniffed. “After seeing the big one hanging there I knew there was no place in this house for the other. I threw it in the furnace.”

“You” Grover sat down heavily and gazed at the exquisite print. Should he tell her? Should he tell her that he had determined to buy the big print—that he had drawn a thousand dollars out of the bank, never suspecting that she would draw out her own money for this? And should he tell her that, because of his hours, he couldn’t get to the shop, and so had put the—the small print up until Tuesday? No, he couldn’t tell her. He had wanted to pay a thousand for this print; well, he had. The one she’d thrown away—the little one—was a folded piece of paper with Grover Cleveland’s head showing through the oval hole … Grover Cleveland’s head, engraved on a thousand dollar bill!

S
O
I
WAS
holding forth as usual, finding highly audible reasons for my opinion of myself. I could do that with Judith. She was in love with me, and women in love are funny that way. You can tell them anything about yourself, and as long as it’s a buildup they’ll believe it. If they can’t they’ll try.

We were walking down to the lake for a swim. What got me started in this vein—should I say “vain”?—was the fact that Judith looked so wonderful. She was a brunette who was a redhead when she was close by, which she usually was, and turned blonde when the sun hit her. Lovely. Her transparent skin seemed proof that her flesh was rose-ivory all the way through, and she had long green eyes. She moved like a hawk tilting against the wind and she loved me. Wonderful. Since I was thinking about wonderful things I just naturally began talking about myself, and Judith held my hand and skipped along beside me and agreed with everything I said, which was as it should be.

“Let me put it this way,” I declaimed. “The world and the universe are strictly as I see them. I see no fallacy in the supposition that if I disbelieve in any given object, theory, or principle, it does not exist.”

“You’ve never seen Siam, darling,” said Judith. “Does that mean that Siam does not exist?” She was not disagreeing with me, but she knew how to keep me talking. That was all right because we enjoyed hearing me talk.

“Oh, Siam can exist if it wants,” I said generously, “providing I have no reason to doubt its existence.”

“Ah,” she said. She hadn’t exactly heard all this before because I expressed myself with a high degree of originality. There were so many ins and outs to my faceted personality that I found my ego
quite inexhaustible. Judith giggled.

“Suppose you really and truly doubted Siam, Woodie.”

“That would be tough on the Siamese.”

She laughed outright, and I joined her, because if I had not she would have been laughing
at
me, and that would have been unthinkable.

“Darling,” she said, pulling my head down so she could bite my ear, “you’re marvelous. Do you mean to tell me in so many words that you created all this—these old trees, that sprouted so many years before you were born; the stars and that nice, warm old sun, and the flow of sap, and life itself—wasn’t that quite a job, honey?”

I looked at her blankly. “Not at all. Truly, darling. I have never seen nor heard nor read anything to disprove my conviction that this universe is my product, and mine alone. Look—I exist. I can take that as a basic fact. I observe that I have a particular form; hence there must be a physical environment to suit it.”

“How about the possibility that your exquisite form might be the
result
of your physical environment?”

“Don’t interrupt,” I said patiently. “Don’t be sarcastic and above all don’t be heretical. Now.

“Since my existence requires a certain set of circumstances, those circumstances must necessarily exist to care for me. The fact that part of these circumstances are century-old trees and ageless heavenly bodies is a matter of little importance except insofar as it is a credit to the powers of my fertile imagination.”

“Whew!”
She let go of my hand. “You’re strong.”

“Thank you, darling. Do you see my point?”

“In theory, O best beloved. My, my, how you do go on. But—what’s to prevent my thinking that the universe is a figment of
my
imagination?”

“Nothing. It would be a bit fantastic, of course, in the face of my certain knowledge that it’s my creation.”

“I’ll be damned,” she said. She could say things like that—and worse—because she looked so young and sweet that most people simply wouldn’t believe it was she who spoke. “I’ll be
very
be-damned,” she said, and added under her breath a sentence containing
the word “insufferable.” I imagine she was talking about the weather.

We walked along, and she plucked a leaf of sassafras and chewed on it. The leaf was the kind of green against her lips that showed how red her lips were against her cheeks. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” she said after a bit, “if all that nonsense you drool were true, and things just stopped
being
when you doubted them?”

“Please!” I said sharply, changing my bathing trunks from my right hand to my left so I could raise a more admonitory forefinger at her. “Nonsense? Drool? Explain yourself, Judith!”

“Oh, stop it!” she shouted, quite taking me aback. “I love you, Woodie,” she went on more quietly, “but I think you’re a conceited ass. Also, you talk too much. Let’s sing songs or something.”

“I do not feel like singing songs or something,” I said coldly, “while you are so hysterically unfair. You can’t disprove a thing I’ve said.”

“And you can’t prove it. Please. Woodie—I don’t want to fight. This is a summer vacation and we’re going swimming today and I love you and I agree with everything you say. I think you’re marvelous. Now for Heaven’s sake
will
you talk about something else for a change?”

“I can’t prove it, hm-m-m?” I said darkly.

She clapped two slim hands to her head and said in a monotone, “The moon is made of green cheese. It isn’t but if it did happen to be and you found out, it certainly would be. I am going out of my mind. I am going to gnash my teeth and paw the air and froth at the mouth and you make me SICK!”

“Your reasoning is typically feminine,” I told her, “spectacular but highly inaccurate. My point is this.” I ignored her moans. “Since I am the creator of all things”—I made an inclusive gesture—“I can also be their destroyer. A case in point—we’ll take that noble old spruce over there. I don’t believe in it. It does not exist. It is but another figment of my imagination, one without a rational explanation. I do not see it any more because it is not there. It could not be there: it’s a physical and psychic impossibility. It—” At last I
yielded to her persistent yanking on my elbow.

“Woodie! Oh— Woodie … it’s gone! Th-that tree; it’s … oh, Woodie! I’m scared! What happened?”

She pointed wordlessly at the new clearing in the copse.

“I dunno. I—” I wet my lips and tried again. “My God,” I said quietly. “Oh, my God.” I was shaking and stone-cold, there in the sun, and my throat was tight. Judith had bruised my arm with her nails; I felt it sharply when she let me go and stood back from me. It wasn’t the disappearance of a thousand board feet of good spruce that bothered me particularly. After all, it wasn’t my tree. But—oh, my God!

I looked at Judith and was suddenly conscious that she was about to run away from me. I put out my arms, and she ran into them instead. She cried then. We both knew then who—what—I was; neither of us could admit it. But anyway, she cried … you know, I was quite a fellow. The miracle of growth was my invention, and the air was warm and the sky blue for me, and the moon was silver and the sun golden, all for me alone. The earth would quake beneath my feet if I so chose, and a supernova was but a flash in my brainpan. And yet when Judith cried in my arms I just did not know what to do. We sat together on a rock beside the road and she cried because she was scared and I patted her shoulder and felt perfectly rotten. I was scared too.

What was real? I dropped my fingers to the stone and stroked its mossy coolth. Something that was all legs scuttled out from under my fingertips. I glanced down at it. It was red-brown and shiny and rather horrible. What peculiar ideas I did have at times!

The stone, for instance. It didn’t
have
to be there. It wasn’t necessary to me, save as a minor element in a pretty bit of scenery that I appreciated. I might just as well not—

“Uff,” said Judith, and bit her lip as she plumped down on the bare earth where that stone had been.

“Judith,” I said weakly as I climbed to my feet and helped her up. “That was a—a trick.”

“I didn’t like it,” she said furiously. “Ooooh.”