Far From Home Read online

  Far from Home

  Walter Tevis

  Copyright

  Far from Home

  Copyright © 1983, 2014 by Walter Tevis

  Cover art, special contents, and electronic edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795342868

  For Eleanora, Mimi, Stan, Rosemary, Bette, Frank, Amy, Lynn, Merle and Herry

  Acknowledgments

  “Rent Control” copyright © 1979 by Omni Publications International Ltd.

  “The Apotheosis of Myra” copyright © 1980 by Playboy Publications, Inc.

  “Out of Luck” copyright © 1980 by Omni Publications International Ltd.

  “Echo” copyright © 1980 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  “The Other End of the Line” copyright © 1961 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  “The Big Bounce” copyright © 1958 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  “The Goldbrick,” originally published as “Operation Goldbrick,” copyright © 1957 by Quinn Publishing Co.

  “The Ifth of Oofth” copyright © 1957 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  “The Scholar’s Disciple” copyright © 1969 by the National Council of Teachers of English.

  “Far From Home” copyright © 1958 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  Contents

  PART ONE: CLOSE TO HOME

  1. Rent Control

  2. A Visit From Mother

  3. Daddy

  4. The Apotheosis of Myra

  5. Out of Luck

  6. Echo

  7. Sitting in Limbo

  PART TWO: FAR FROM HOME

  8. The Other End of the Line

  9. The Big Bounce

  10. The Goldbrick

  11. The Ifth of Oofth

  12. The Scholar’s Disciple

  13. Far From Home

  Part One

  Close to Home

  RENT CONTROL

  “My God,” Edith said, “that was the most real experience of my life.” She put her arms around him, put her cheek against his naked chest, and pulled him tightly to her. She was crying.

  He was crying too. “Me too, darling,” he said, and held his arms around her. They were in the loft bed of her studio apartment on the East Side. They had just had orgasms together. Now they were sweaty, relaxed, blissful. It had been a perfect day.

  Their orgasms had been foreshadowed by their therapy. That evening, after supper, they had gone to Harry’s group as always on Wednesdays and somehow everything had focused for them. He had at last shouted the heartfelt anger he bore against his incompetent parents; she had screamed her hatred of her sadistic mother, her gutless father. And their relief had come together there on the floor of a New York psychiatrist’s office. After the screaming and pounding of fists, after the real and potent old rage in both of them was spent, their smiles at one another had been radiant. They had gone afterward to her apartment, where they had lived together half a year, climbed up the ladder into her bed, and begun to make love slowly, carefully. Then frenetically. They had been picked up bodily by it and carried to a place they had never been before.

  Now, afterward, they were settling down in that place, huddled together. They lay silently for a long time. Idly she looked toward the ledge by the mattress where she kept cigarettes, a mason jar with miniature roses, a Japanese ashtray, and an alarm clock.

  “The clock must have stopped,” she said.

  He mumbled something inarticulate. His eyes were closed.

  “It says nine twenty,” she said, “and we left Harry’s at nine.”

  “Hmmm,” he said, without interest.

  She was silent for a while, musing. Then she said, “Terry? What time does your watch say?”

  “Time, time,” he said. “Watch, watch.” He shifted his arm and looked. “Nine twenty,” he said.

  “Is the second hand moving?” she said. His watch was an Accutron, not given to being wrong or stopping.

  He looked again. “Nope. Not moving.” He let his hand fall on her naked behind, now cool to his touch. Then he said, “That is funny. Both stopping at once.” He leaned over her body toward the window, pried open a space in her Levolor blinds, looked out. It was dark out, with an odd shimmer to the air. Nothing was moving. There was a pile of plastic garbage bags on the sidewalk opposite. “It can’t be eleven yet. They haven’t taken the garbage from the Toreador.” The Toreador was a Spanish restaurant across the street; they kept promising they would eat there sometime but never had.

  “It’s probably about ten thirty,” she said. “Why don’t you make us an omelet and turn the TV on?”

  “Sure, honey,” he said. He slipped on his bikini shorts and eased himself down the ladder. Barefoot and undressed, he went to the tiny Sony by the fireplace, turned it on, and padded over to the stove and sink at the other end of the room. He heard the TV come on while finding the omelet pan that he had bought her, under the sink, nestling between the Bon Ami and the Windex. He got eggs out, cracked one, looked at his watch. It was running. It said nine twenty-six. “Hey, honey,” he called out. “My watch is running.”

  After a pause she said, her voice slightly hushed, “So is the clock up here.”

  He shrugged and put butter in the pan and finished cracking the eggs, throwing the shells into the sink. He whipped them with a fork, then turned on the fire under the pan and walked back to the TV for a moment. A voice was saying, “… nine thirty.” He looked at his watch. Nine thirty. “Jesus Christ!” he said.

  But he had forgotten about it by the time he cooked the omelets. His omelets had been from the beginning one of the things that made them close. He had learned to cook them before leaving his wife and it meant independence to him. He made omelets beautifully—tender and moist—and Edith was impressed. They had fallen in love over omelets. He cooked lamb chops too, and bought things like frozen capelletti from expensive shops; but omelets were central.

  They were both thirty-five years old, both youthful, good-looking, smart. They were both Pisces, with birthdays three days apart. Both had good complexions, healthy dark hair, clear eyes. They both bought clothes at Bergdorf-Goodman and Bonwit’s and Bloomingdale’s; they both spoke fair French, watched Nova on TV, read The Stories of John Cheever and the Sunday Times. He was a magazine illustrator, she a lawyer; they could have afforded a bigger place, but hers was rent-controlled and at a terrific midtown address. It was too much of a bargain to give up. “Nobody ever leaves a rent-controlled apartment,” she told him. So they lived in one and a half rooms together and money piled up in their bank accounts.

  They were terribly nervous lovers at first, too unsure of everything to enjoy it, full of explanations and self-recriminations. He had trouble staying hard; she would not lubricate. She was afraid of him and made love dutifully, often with resentment. He was embarrassed at his unreliable member, sensed her withdrawal from his ardor, was afraid to tell her so. Often they were miserable.

  But she had the good sense to take him to her therapist and he had the good sense to go. Finally, after six months of private sessions and of group, it had worked. They had the perfect orgasm, the perfect release from tension, the perfect intimacy.

  Now they ate their omelets in bed from Spode plates, using his mother’s silver forks. Sea salt and Java pepper. Their legs were twined as they ate.

  They lay silent for a while afterward. He looked out the window. The garbage was still there; there was no movement in the street; no one was on the sidewalk. There was a flatness
to the way the light shone on the buildings across from them, as though they were painted—some kind of a backdrop.

  He looked at his watch. It said nine forty-one. The second hand wasn’t moving. “Shit!” he said, puzzled.

  “What’s that, honey?” Edith said. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No, sweetie,” he said. “You’re the best thing that ever happened. I’m crazy about you.” He patted her ass with one hand, gave her his empty plate with the other.

  She set the two plates on the ledge, which was barely wide enough for them. She glanced at the clock. “Jesus,” she said. “That sure is strange…”

  “Let’s go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll explain the Theory of Relativity in the morning.”

  ***

  But when he woke up it wasn’t morning. He felt refreshed, thoroughly rested; he had the sense of a long and absolutely silent sleep, with no noises intruding from the world outside, no dreams, no complications. He had never felt better.

  But when he looked out the window the light from the streetlamp was the same and the garbage bags were still piled in front of the Toreador and—he saw now—what appeared to be the same taxi was motionless in front of the same green station wagon in the middle of Fifty-first Street. He looked at his watch. It said nine forty-one.

  Edith was still asleep, on her stomach, with her arm across his waist, her hip against his. Not waking her, he pulled away and started to climb down from the bed. On an impulse he looked again at his watch. It was nine forty-one still, but now the second hand was moving.

  He reached out and turned the electric clock on the ledge to where he could see its face. It said nine forty-one also, and when he held it to his ear he could hear its gears turning quietly inside. His heart began to beat more strongly, and he found himself catching his breath.

  He climbed down and went to the television set, turned it on again. The same face appeared as before he had slept, wearing the same oversized glasses, the same bland smile.

  Terry turned the sound up, seated himself on the sofa, lit a cigarette, and waited.

  It seemed a long time before the news program ended and a voice said, “It’s ten o’clock.”

  He looked at his watch. It said ten o’clock. He looked out the window; it was dark—evening. There was no way it could be ten in the morning. But he knew he had slept a whole night. He knew it. His hand holding the second cigarette was trembling.

  Slowly and carefully he put out his cigarette, climbed back up the ladder to the loft bed. Edith was still asleep. Somehow he knew what to do. He laid his hand on her leg and looked at his watch. As he touched her the second hand stopped. For a long moment he did not breathe.

  Still holding her leg, he looked out the window. This time there were a group of people outside; they had just left the restaurant. None of them moved. The taxi had gone and with it the station wagon; but the garbage was still there. One of the people from the Toreador was in the process of putting on his raincoat. One arm was in a sleeve and the other wasn’t. There was a frown on his face visible from the third-story apartment where Terry lay looking at him. Everything was frozen. The light was peculiar, unreal. The man’s frown did not change.

  Terry let go of Edith and the man finished putting on his coat. Two cars drove by in the street. The light became normal.

  Terry touched Edith again, this time laying his hand gently on her bare back. Outside the window everything stopped, as when a switch is thrown on a projector to arrest the movement. Terry let out his breath audibly. Then he said, “Wake up, Edith. I’ve got something to show you.”

  ***

  They never understood it, and they told nobody. It was relativity, they decided. They had found, indeed, a perfect place together, where subjective time raced and the world did not.

  It did not work anywhere but in her loft bed and only when they touched. They could stay together there for hours or days, although there was no way they could tell how long the “time” had really been; they could make love, sleep, read, talk, and no time passed whatever.

  They discovered, after a while, that only if they quarreled did it fail and the clock and watch would run even though they were touching. It required intimacy—even of a slight kind, the intimacy of casual touching—for it to work.

  They adapted their lives to it quickly and at first it extended their sense of life’s possibilities enormously. It bathed them in a perfection of the lovers’ sense of being apart from the rest of the world and better than it.

  Their careers improved; they had more time for work and for play than anyone else. If one of them was ever under serious pressure—of job competition, of the need to make a quick decision—they could get in bed together and have all the time necessary to decide, to think up the speech, to plan the magazine cover or the case in court.

  Sometimes they took what they called “weekends,” buying and cooking enough food for five or six meals, and just staying in the loft bed, touching, while reading and meditating and making love and working. He had his art supplies in shelves over the bed now, and she had reference books and note pads on the ledge. He had put mirrors on two of the walls and on the ceiling, partly for sex, partly to make the small place seem bigger, less confining.

  The food was always hot, unspoiled; no time had passed for it between their meals. They could not watch television or listen to records while in suspended time; no machinery worked while they touched.

  Sometimes for fun they would watch people out the window and stop and start them up again comically; but that soon grew tiresome.

  They both got richer and richer, with promotions and higher pay and the low rent. And of course there was now truly no question of leaving the apartment; there was no other bed in which they could stop time, no other place. Besides, this one was rent-controlled.

  For a year or so they would always stay later at parties than anyone else, would taunt acquaintances and colleagues when they were too tired to accompany them to all-night places for scrambled eggs or a final drink. Sometimes they annoyed colleagues by showing up bright-eyed and rested in the morning, no matter how late the party had gone on, no matter how many drinks had been drunk, no matter how loud and fatiguing the revelry. They were always buoyant, healthy, awake, and just a bit smug.

  But after the first year they tired of partying, grew bored with friends, and went out less. Somehow they had come to a place where they were never bored with, as Edith called it, “our little loft bed.” The center of their lives had become a king-sized foam mattress with a foot-wide ledge and a few inches of head and foot room at each end. They were never bored when in that small space.

  What they had to learn was not to quarrel, not to lose the modicum of intimacy that their relativity phenomenon required. But that came easily too; without discussing it each learned to give only a small part of himself to intimacy with the other, to cultivate a state of mind remote enough to be safe from conflict, yet with a controlled closeness. They did yoga for body and spirit and Transcendental Meditation. Neither told the other his mantra. Often they found themselves staring at different mirrors. Now they seldom looked out the window.

  ***

  It was Edith who made the second major intuition. One day when he was in the bathroom shaving, and his watch was running, he heard her shout to him, in a kind of cool playfulness, “Quit dawdling in there, Terry. I’m getting older for nothing.” There was some kind of urgency in her voice, and he caught it. He rinsed his face off in a hurry, dried, walked to the bedroom and looked up at her. “What do you mean?” he said.

  She didn’t look at him. “Get on up here, Dum-dum,” she said, still in that controlled-playful voice. “I want you to touch me.”

  He climbed up, laid a hand on her shoulder. Outside the window a walking man froze in mid-stride and the sunlight darkened as though a shutter had been placed over it.

  “What do you mean, ‘older for nothing’?” he said.

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “It’s been
about five years now, in the real world,” she said. “The real world” for them meant the time lived by other people. “But we must have spent five years in suspended time here in bed. More than that. And we haven’t been aged by it.”

  He looked at her. “How could…?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I know we’re not any older than anybody else.”

  He turned toward the mirror at her feet, stared at himself in it. He was still youthful, firm, clear complexioned. Suddenly he smiled at himself. “Jesus,” he said. “Maybe I can fix it so I can shave in bed.”

  ***

  Their “weekends” became longer. Although they could not measure their special time, the number of times they slept and the times they made love could be counted; and both those numbers increased once they realized the time in bed together was “free”—that they did not age while touching, in the loft bed, while the world outside was motionless and the sun neither rose nor set.

  Sometimes they would pick a time of day and a quality of light they both liked and stop their time there. At twilight, with empty streets and a soft ambience of light, they would allow for the slight darkening effect, and then touch and stay touching for eight or ten sleeping periods, six or eight orgasms, fifteen meals.

  They had stopped the omelets because of the real time it took to prepare them. Now they bought pizzas and prepared chickens and ready-made desserts and quarts of milk and coffee and bottles of good wine and cartons of cigarettes and cases of Perrier water and filled shelves at each side of the window with them. The hot food would never cool as long as Edith and Terry were touching each other in the controlled intimacy they now had learned as second nature. Each could look at himself in his own mirror and not even think about the other in a conscious way, but if their fingertips were so much as touching and if the remote sense of the other was unruffled by anger or anxiety then the pizzas on the shelf would remain hot, the Perrier cold, the cars in the street motionless, and the sky and weather without change forever. No love was needed now, no feeling whatever—only the lack of unpleasantness and the slightest of physical contact.