Two Much!

31

Was that a thoughtful look in Betty’s eye when she saw me off at the ferry? Was she remembering last night’s joke, about never having seen the two of us together? Would that thought return to her? “See you soon,” I said, as the ferry started away from the dock.

Standing there in the sunlight in her white tennis shorts and yellow-and-white striped blouse, she smiled through her frown and called, “See you.” And was her frown caused only by the sunlight?

Too many problems. I went into the cabin to sit down and try to think, and they all kept crowding in on me.

Liz, for instance. She had not come back at all last night, and still hadn’t returned. I’d seen on the schedule that this ferry was leaving just after one o’clock, so at twelve-thirty I told Betty I was going back to the city, and I handed her a sealed envelope containing a note for Liz. “When you’re ready to get married,” the note said, “call me at the office.”

Betty had said, “Do you have to go?” We’d started the day with another sexual encounter, but since then by unspoken mutual consent we’d returned to our previous friendly distant relationship.

“I can’t stay here like a lapdog,” I’d told her, “waiting for Liz to come back whenever she feels like it.”

Betty had sympathized, had agreed, had promised to turn over the note, and now I was on the ferry, a nearly empty Sunday midday ferry, and I was heading back to the city with a full cargo of problems. Liz, and the contract, and Volpinex. Betty and her budding suspicions. My own continuing bewilderment about my attitude toward last night’s fornication.

Ferry to cab, cab to train. On the train I wrote, “If I were twins — we’d want you all to ourselves.” But no, that was the wrong image for Folksy Cards; I crumpled the piece of paper and threw it away.

Manhattan. I couldn’t very well go to the Kerner apartment, so it was the sleeping bag in the office after all. Walking north from Penn Station into the garment district, deserted today, I found myself brooding over and over on the same phrase: “It’s all done with mirrors, it’s all done with mirrors.”

Sure, mirrors. I remembered that bathroom morning at the Kerner apartment when I’d tried to recruit my reflection. Fat chance.

And then it dropped into my head, or popped up, or whatever the right image. John Dickson Carr. Years and years ago in some summer cottage somewhere I’d come across and read a mystery novel by John Dickson Carr, and in it the guy...

Adaptable? I tried to visualize the whole thing, my outer office, my inner office, the hall door. Why wouldn’t it work? No reason I could think of, not one.

“All right. All right.” I said it aloud, and a twitching moustached old woman festooned with shopping bags looked up from the litter basket she was rifling and backed away from me as though I were the crazy one. I grinned at her, though probably not in a way she found reassuring, and said, “So she wants to see us both at the same time, does she? She’ll see us both at the same time.”

The woman fled, shopping bags aflutter. Cupping my hands around my mouth, I shouted after her, “It’s all done with mirrors!”