Free We'll Always Have Paris by Ray Bradbury Page B

Up the front-porch stairs. The
    bell ringing.
    They both stiffened.
    The bell rang again.
    They sat in the dark.
    Six more times the bell rang.
    ‘Let’s not answer,’ they both said. Startled again, they looked at each
    other, gasping.
    They stared across the room into each other’s eyes.
    ‘It can’t be anyone important.’
    ‘No one important. They’d want to talk. And we’re tired, aren’t we?’
    ‘Pretty,’ she said.
    The bell rang.
    There was a tinkle as Mr Alexander took another spoonful of peppermint syrup.
    His wife drank some water and swallowed a white pill.
    The bell rang a final, hard time.
    ‘I’ll just peek,’ he said, ‘out the front window.’
    He left his wife and went to look. And there, on the front porch, his back
    turned, going down the steps, was Samuel Spaulding. Mr Alexander couldn’t remember his
    face.
    Mrs Alexander was in the other front room, looking out a window, secretly.
    She saw a Thimble Club woman walking along the street now, turning in at the sidewalk, coming
    up just as the man who had rung the bell was coming down. They met. Their voices murmured out
    there in the calm spring night.
    The two strangers glanced up at the dark house together, discussing it.
    Suddenly the two strangers laughed.
    They gazed at the dim house once more. Then theman and the woman walked down the sidewalk and away together, along the street,
    under the moonlit trees, laughing and shaking their heads and talking until they were out of
    sight.
    Back in the living room, Mr Alexander found his wife had put out a small
    washtub of warm water in which, mutually, they might soak their feet. She had also brought in
    an extra bottle of arnica. He heard her washing her hands. When she returned from the bath, her
    hands and face smelled of soap instead of spring verbena.
    They sat soaking their feet.
    ‘I think we better turn in those tickets we bought for that play Saturday
    night,’ he said, ‘and the tickets for that benefit next week. You never can tell.’
    ‘All right,’ she said.
    The spring afternoon seemed like a million years ago.
    ‘I wonder who that was at the door,’ she said.
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said, reaching for the peppermint oil. He swallowed some.
    ‘Game of blackjack, missus?’
    She settled back in her chair with the faintest wriggle of her body.
    ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ she said.

Last Laughs
    His name was Andrew Rudolph Gerald Vesalius and he was a genius of the
    world, dialectician, statistician, creator of Italian operas, lyricist, poet of German lieder,
    Vedanta Temple lecturer, intellectual Santa Barbara brainstormer, and a grand pal.
    This last seems unbelievable, for when we first met I was running on empty, a
    drab writer of pulp science fiction, earning two cents a word.
    But Gerald, if I dare use his familiar name, discovered me and warned people
    that I had the future’s eye and should be watched.
    He coached me and let me travel as lapdog when he addressed relatives of
    Einstein, Jung, and Freud.
    For years I transcribed his lectures, sat for tea withAldous Huxley, and trod speechless through art-gallery shows with Christopher
    Isherwood.
    Now, suddenly, Vesalius was gone.
    Well, almost. There were rumors that he was scribbling a book on those flying
    saucers that had hovered over the Palomar hot-dog stand and vanished.
    I found that he no longer lectured at the Vedanta Temple, but survived in
    Paris or Rome; a promised novel was long overdue.
    I telephoned his Malibu home ten dozen times.
    Finally his secretary, William Hopkins Blair, admitted that Gerald was
    stricken with some mysterious disease.
    I asked permission to visit my saintly friend. Blair disconnected.
    I called again and Blair cried, in staccato phrases, that Vesalius had
    canceled our friendship.
    Stunned, I tried to imagine how to apologize for sins which I knew I had not
    committed.
    Then one evening at midnight the phone rang. A voice gasped one word:
    ‘Help!’
    ‘What?’ I