Two Much!

37

Less than three minutes after Gloria left, while I was still battening down the office hatches for an extended separation, the hall door opened and two guys walked in, strangers to me. They were wearing identical short-sleeved white shirts open at the neck, and they seemed larger than most people. “Sorry, gents,” I said, “I’m just closing up.”

“That’s okay,” one of them said, coming in the rest of the way, and shut the hall door behind himself.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m in something of a hurry. I’m going away and—”

“That’s right,” the other one agreed, and extended a white envelope toward me. “Here’s your ticket.”

“Ticket?” Frowning at them, trying to connect the idea of a ticket with Liz having told me earlier that she’d send a car for me, thinking confusedly that these people must be from Liz or how would they know I was going away, I now saw that they were really very large indeed, thicknecked and broad-shouldered and heavy-armed. They looked like football players arriving at the stadium.

I took the envelope. They watched me with their heavy faces, neither of them saying anything, so I opened the envelope and took out what was obviously an airline ticket. Opening that, I saw my own name, plus those ranks of letters and numbers by means of which airline employees manage to communicate with one another without being overheard by the customer. It took a few seconds to sort out: the “JFK” after “From” would be Kennedy airport, where Bart had soared off for California. And the destination? “To: St. Martin.”

“St. Martin?”

“That’s right,” one of them said. “It’s an island.”

“In the Caribbean,” the other one said. “You’ll love it.”

“Wait a minute, now,” I said. “Miss Kerner sent you here with this?”

They both chuckled, which sounded like the bass fiddle section tuning up. “It don’t matter where the ticket come from,” one of them said. “What matters is that you use it.”

“I don’t get this.” Maybe I was slow, but I actually didn’t get it. Tell me a joke and I’ll get it; lean on me and you’ll just confuse me.

“You’re gonna take a trip,” one of them said. “You’re gonna lie around on the sand and enjoy yourself.”

“And every day,” the other one said, “you’ll go to the post office at Marigot, on the French side of the island, and you’ll ask is there a letter for you.”

“And some day,” the first one said, “there will be a letter. And in it will be a ticket to come back again.”

“And,” the second one said, “you won’t come back until you get that letter.”

“Are you two crazy?”

“Not likely, friend.”

“What — what — who’s idea is this?” I was trying to think: a joke? Some confusion with Liz? It made no sense to me.

“You don’t need to know who it is,” the first one said. “Just think of him as a benefactor.”

“A secret admirer,” the second one said, and they both nodded and smiled at me.

“Volpinex!” I said, and I suddenly saw the whole thing.

Their smiles turned to frowns. The first one said, “Throwing names around, that’s not a nice thing to do.”

“He’s not getting away with it.” Angry, I tossed the ticket on Gloria’s desk and said, “You can give him that, and tell him I’m staying here and getting married.”

“You’re a very dumb fella,” the first one told me.

“He needs an explanation,” the second one suggested.

“Maybe so.” The first one frowned — his manner was a bit impatient, a bit pedantic, but mostly disappointed in my denseness — and he said, “See, what our job is, my friend here and me, we send people away. This fella doesn’t want that fella around any more, so we send him away.”

“That’s right,” the second one said.

“Now, we got two different ways,” the first one said, holding up two meaty fingers, “to send people away. The first is we take a fella to the bus station or the airport or whatever, and put him on board, and wish him like a bon voyage.”

“That’s right,” the second one said.

“Now, the second way,” the first one said, “is we take people to the hospital after some bones have been broken. Like leg bones, or maybe a back, maybe a shoulder. All depends how long the fella’s supposed to be away.”

“That’s right,” the second one said.

I stared at them. They were talking like the heavies in a B movie, they were talking melodrama. Therefore I laughed at them, right? Wrong. I looked at them, and I saw that if they wanted to pretend I was a beachball and toss me back and forth, then that’s what they would do, and no way would I stop them. And I noticed that I was alone in this office with these two guys, and I further noticed that they seemed to be very conscientious workmen, dedicated to their job. I backed a step away from them, wondering if I could make it into my inner office, lock the door, phone the police (no, they’d break the door down before I finished dialing), and I said, “Now, look.”

“What our job is this time,” the first one said, going on placidly with his explanation, “is to take you to your apartment and help you pack, and then take you to the airport and put you on the plane.”

“Unless you argue with us,” the second one said.

The first one nodded. “That’s right.”

“In that case,” the second one said, “our job is to take you to the hospital.”

Comedy: The Coward’s Response to Aggression. Inside I was raging, a death-red glow of fury and hate. I said, “Well, I’ll go away with you, but I just know you won’t respect me in the morning.”