AS HE FORKS DOWN HIS steak he imagines being single again. Would I get married again? Not on your life. Not until I’m good and ready, anyway, maybe when I’m fifty-five or sixty. Me for bachelorhood for the time being, just screwing around like a kid. To hell with responsibilities. I’ll wait two, three weeks after the funeral, a decent interval, and then I’ll go off for some fun. Hawaii, Tahiti, Fiji, someplace out there. With Nolie. Or Maria. Or Ellie. Yes, with Ellie. He thinks of Ellie’s pink thighs, her soft heavy breasts, her long, radiant auburn hair. Two weeks in Fiji with Ellie. Two weeks in Ellie with Fiji. Yes. Yes. Yes. ‘Is the steak rare enough for you, Ted?’ Alice asks. ‘It’s fine,’ he says.
SHE GOES UPSTAIRS TO CHECK the children’s bedroom. They’re both asleep, finally. Or else faking it so well that it makes no difference. She stands by their beds a moment, thinking, I love you, Bobby, I love you, Tink. Tink and Bobby, Bobby and Tink. I love you even though you drive me crazy sometimes. She tiptoes out. Now for a quiet evening of television. And then to bed. The same old routine. Christ. I don’t know why I go on like this. There are times when I’m ready to explode. I stay with him for the children’s sake, I guess. Is that enough of a reason?
HE ENVISIONS HIMSELF RUNNING HAND in hand along the beach with Ellie. Both of them naked, their skins bronzed and gleaming in the tropical sunlight. Palm trees everywhere. Grains of pink sand under foot. Soft transparent wavelets lapping the shore. A quiet cove. “No one can see us here,” Ellie murmurs. He sinks down on her firm sleek body and enters her.
A BLAZING BAND OF PAIN tightens like a strip of hot metal across Martin’s chest. He staggers away from the window, dropping into a low crouch as he stumbles toward a chair. The heart. Oh, the heart! That’s what you get for drooling over Alice. Dirty old man. “Help,” he calls feebly. “Come on, you filthy machine, help me!” The medic, activated by the key phrase, rolls silently toward him. Its sensors are already at work scanning him, searching for the cause of the discomfort. A telescoping steel-jacketed arm slides out of the medic’s chest and, hovering above Martin, extrudes an ultrasonic injection snout. “Yes,” Martin murmurs, “that’s right, damn you, hurry up and give me the drug!” Calm. I must try to remain calm. The snout makes a gentle whirring noise as it forces the relaxant into Martin’s vein. He slumps in relief. The pain slowly ebbs. Oh, that’s much better. Saved again. Oh. Oh. Oh. Dirty old man. Ought to be ashamed of yourself.
TED KNOWS HE WON’T GET to Fiji with Ellie or anybody else. Any realistic assessment of the situation brings him inevitably to the same conclusion. Alice isn’t going to die in an accident, any more than he’s likely to murder her. She’ll live forever. Unwanted wives always do. He could ask for a divorce, of course. He’d probably lose everything he owned, but he’d win his freedom. Or he could simply do away with himself. That was always a temptation for him. The easy way out, no lawyers, no hassles. So it’s that time of the evening again. It’s the same every night. Pretending to watch television, he secretly indulges in suicidal fantasies.
BARE-BODIED DANCERS IN GAUDY LUMINOUS paint gyrate lasciviously on the screen, nearly large as life. Alice scowls. The things they show on TV nowadays! It used to be that you got this stuff only on the X-rated channels, but now it’s everywhere. And look at him, just lapping it up! Actually she knows she wouldn’t be so stuffy about the sex shows except that Ted’s fascination with them is a measure of his lack of interest in her. Let them show screwing and all the rest on TV, if that’s what people want. I just wish Ted had as much enthusiasm for me as he does for the television stuff. So far as sexual permissiveness in general goes, she’s no prude. She used to wear nothing but trunks at the beach, until Tink was born and she started to feel a little less proud of her figure. But she still dresses as revealingly as anyone in their crowd. And gets stared at by everyone but her own husband. He watches the TV cuties. His other women must use him up. Maybe I ought to step out a bit myself, Alice thinks. She’s had her little affairs along the way. Not many, nothing very serious, but she’s had some. Three lovers in eleven years, that’s not a great many, but it’s a sign that she’s no puritan. She wonders if she ought to get involved with somebody now. It might move her life off dead center while she still has the chance, before boredom destroys her entirely. “I’m going up to wash my hair,” she announces. “Will you be staying down here till bedtime?”
THERE ARE SO MANY WAYS he could do it. Slit his wrists. Drive his car off the bridge. Swallow Alice’s whole box of sleeping tabs. Of course those are all old-fashioned ways of killing yourself. Something more modern would be appropriate. Go into one of the black taverns and start making loud racial insults? No, nothing modern about that. It’s very 1975. But something genuinely contemporary does occur to him. Those time machines they’ve got now: suppose he rented one and went back, say, sixty years, to a time when one of his parents hadn’t yet been born. And killed his grandfather. Find old Martin as a young man and slip a knife into him. If I do that, Ted figures, I should instantly and painlessly cease to exist. I would never have existed, because my mother wouldn’t ever have existed. Poof. Out like a light. Then he realizes he’s fantasizing a murder again. Stupid: if he could ever murder anyone, he’d murder Alice and be done with it. So the whole fantasy is foolish. Back to the starting point is where he is.
SHE IS SITTING UNDER THE hair-dryer when he comes upstairs. He has a peculiarly smug expression on his face, and as soon as she turns the dryer off she asks him what he’s thinking about. ‘I may have just invented a perfect murder method,’ he tells her. “Oh?” she says. He says, “You rent a time machine. Then you go back a couple of generations and murder one of the ancestors of your intended victim. That way you’re murdering the victim too, because he won’t ever have been born if you kill off one of his immediate progenitors. Then you return to your own time. Nobody can trace you because you don’t have any fingerprints on file in an era before your own birth. What do you think of it?” Alice shrugs. “It’s an old one,” she says. “It’s been done on television a dozen times. Anyway, I don’t like it. Why should an innocent person have to die just because he’s the grandparent of somebody you want to kill?”
THEY’RE PROBABLY IN BED TOGETHER right now, Martin thinks gloomily. Stark naked side by side. The lights are out. The house is quiet. Maybe they’re smoking a little grass. Do they still call it grass, he wonders, or is there some new nickname now? Anyway the two of them turn on. Yes. And then he reaches for her. His hands slide over her cool, smooth skin. He cups her breasts. Plays with the hard little nipples. Sucks on them. The other hand wandering down to her parted thighs. And then she. And then he. And then they. And then they. Oh, Alice, he murmurs. Oh, Ted, Ted, she cries. And then they. Go to it. Up and down, in and out. Oh. Oh. Oh. She claws his back. She pumps her hips. Ted! Ted! Ted! The big moment is arriving now. For her, for him. Jackpot! Afterward they lie close for a few minutes, basking in the afterglow. And then they roll apart. Goodnight, Ted. Goodnight, Alice. Oh, Jesus. They do it every night, I bet. They’re so young and full of juice. And I’m all dried up. Christ, I hate being old. When I think of the man I once was. When I think of the women I once had. Jesus. Jesus. God, let me have the strength to do it just once more before I die. And leave me alone for two hours with Alice.
SHE HAS TROUBLE FALLING ASLEEP. A strange scene keeps playing itself out obsessively in her mind. She sees herself stepping out of an upright coffin-size box of dark gray metal, festooned with dials and levers. The time machine. It delivers her into a dark, dirty alleyway, and when she walks forward