“I don’t mind. In fact I’m glad; now I know you didn’t bring any of those women of yours up here.”
“What women?”
“You know darn well what women. If you had been planning this as a nest, you would have included a woman’s bathroom.”
“You know too much.”
She did not answer but wandered on out into the kitchen. I heard her squeal. “What’s the matter?” I asked, following her out.
“I never expected to find a real kitchen in a bachelor’s lodge.”
“I’m not a bad cook myself. I wanted a kitchen so I bought one.”
“I’m so glad. Now I will cook you dinner.”
“It’s your kitchen; suit yourself. But don’t you want to wash up? You can have first crack at the shower if you want it. And tomorrow we’ll get a catalog and you can pick out a bathroom of your own. We’ll have it flown in.”
“No hurry,” she said. “You take the first shower. I want to start dinner.”
So I did. I guess she did not have any trouble figuring out the controls and filing system in the kitchen, for about fifteen minutes later while I was whistling away in the shower, letting the hot water soak in, I heard a tap on the shower door. I looked through the translucent panel and saw Mary silhouetted there.
“May I come in?” she called out.
“Sure, sure!” I said, “Plenty of room.” I opened the door and looked at her. She looked good. For a moment she stood there, letting me look but with a sweet shyness on her face that I had never seen before.
I put on an expression of utter surprise and said, “Honey! What’s the matter? Are you sick?”
She looked startled out of her wits and said, “Me? What do you mean?”
“There’s not a gun on you anywhere.”
She giggled and came at me. “Idiot!” she squealed and started to tickle me. I got her left arm in a bonebreaker but she countered with one of the nastiest judo tricks that ever came out of Japan. Fortunately I knew the answer to it and then we were both on the bottom of the shower and she was yelling, “Let me up! You’re getting my hair all wet.”
“Does it matter?” I asked, not moving. I liked it there.
“I guess not,” she answered softly and kissed me. So I let her up and we rubbed each other’s bruises and giggled. It was quite the nicest shower I have ever had.
Mary and I slipped into domesticity as if we had been married for twenty years. Oh, not that our honeymoon was humdrum, far from it, nor that there weren’t a thousand things we still had to learn about each other—the point was that we already seemed to know the necessary things about each other that made us married. Especially Mary.
I don’t remember those days too clearly, yet I remember every second of them. I went around feeling gay and a bit confused. My Uncle Egbert used to achieve much the same effect with a jug of corn liquor, but we did not even take tempus pills, not then. I was happy; I had forgotten what it was like to be happy, had not known that I was not happy. Interested, I used to be—yes. Diverted, entertained, amused—but not happy.
We did not turn on a stereo, we did not read a book—except that Mary read aloud some Oz books that I had. Priceless items, they were, left to me by my great-grandfather; she had never seen any. But that did not take us back into the world; it took us farther out.
The second day we did go down to the village; I wanted to show Mary off. Down there they think I am a writer and I encourage the notion, so I stopped to buy a couple of tubes and a condenser for my typer and a roll of copy tape, though I certainly had no intention of doing any writing, not this trip. I got to talking with the storekeeper about the slugs and Schedule Bare Back—sticking to my public persona of course. There had been a local false alarm and a native in the next town had been shot by a trigger-happy constable for absent-mindedly showing up in public in a shirt. The storekeeper was indignant. I suggested that it was his own fault; these were war conditions.