“I’m buying,” he said.

“What’s that”

“Two Eldorados. One 1970, one 1972. One gold, one cream. I spoke to Mr. Magliore about them last week. It’s a business deal.”

“Oh yeah, right. He really isn’t here now, Mr. Dawes. To tell you the truth, he’s in Chicago. He’s not getting in until eleven o’clock tonight.”

Outside, Duncan was hanging a sign on the Bowl-a-Score. The sign said:

“Well he be in tomorrow?”

“Yeah, sure will. Was this a trade deal?”

“No, straight buy.”

“One of the specials?”

He hesitated a moment, then said: “Yes, that’s right. Would four o’clock be okay?”

“Sure, fine.”

“Thanks, Mr. Mansey.”

“I’ll tell him you called.”

“You do that,” he said, and hung up carefully. His palms were sweating.

Merv Griffin was chatting with celebrities when got home. There was nothing in the mail; that was a relief. He went into the living room.

Mary was sipping a hot nom concoction in a teacup. There was a box of Kleenex beside her and the room smelled of Vicks.

“Are you all right?” He asked her

“Don’d kiss be,” she said, and her voice had a distant foghorning quality. “I cabe downd with sobething.”

“Poor kid.” He kissed her forehead.

“I hade do ask you, Bard, bud would you ged the groceries tonighd? I was goig kith Meg Carder, bud I had to call her ad beg off.”

“Sure. Are you running a fever?”

“Dno. Well, baybe a liddle.”

“Want me to make an appointment with Fontaine for you?”

“Dno. I will toborrow if I don’d feel bedder.”

“You’re really stuffy.”

“Yes. The Vicks helbed for a while, bud dow-” She shrugged and smiled wanly. “I soud like Dodald Duck.”

He hesitated a moment and then said, “I’ll be home a little bit late tomorrow night.”

“Oh?”

“I’m going out to Northside to look at a house. It seems like a good one. Six rooms. A little backyard. Not too far from the Hobarts.”

Freddy said quite clearly: Why, you dirty low-life son of a bitch.

Mary brightened. “That’s woderful! Cad I go look with you?”

“Better not, with that cold.”

“I’ll huddle ub.”

“Next time,” he said firmly.

“Ogay.” She looked at him. “Thang God you’re finally booing on this,” she said. “I was worried.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I wodn’t.”

She took a sip of the hot rum drink and snuggled against him. He could hear her breath snuffling in and out. Merv Griffin was chatting with James Brolin about his new movie, Westworld. Soon to be showing at barbershops all over the country.

After a while Mary got up and put TV dinners in the oven. He got up, switched the TV over to reruns of “F Troop” and tried not to listen to Freddy. After a while, though, Freddy changed his tune.

Do you remember how you got the first TV, Georgie?

He smiled a little, looking not at Forrest Tucker but right through him. I do, Fred. I surely do.

They had come home one evening, about two years after they were married, from the Upshaws, where they had been watching “Your Hit Parade” and “Dan Fortune,” and Mary had asked him if he didn’t think Donna Upshaw had seemed a little… well, off. Now, sitting here, he could remember Mary, slim and oddly, fetchingly taller in a pair of white sandals she had gotten to celebrate summer. She had been wearing white shorts, too; her legs looked long and coltish, as if they really might go all the way up to her chin. In truth, he hadn’t been very interested in whether or not Donna Upshaw had seemed a little off; he had been interested in divesting Mary of those tight shorts. That had been where his interest lay-not to put too fine a point on it.

“Maybe she’s getting a little tired of serving Spanish peanuts to half the neighborhood just because they’re the only people on the street with a TV,” he said.

He supposed he had seen the little frown line between her eyes-the one that always meant Mary was cooking something up, but by then they were halfway upstairs, his hand was roaming down over the seat of those shorts-what little seat there was-and it wasn’t until later, until after, that she said:

“How much would a table model cost us, Bart?”

Half asleep, he had answered, “Well, I guess we could get a Motorola for twenty-eight, maybe thirty bucks. But the Philco-”

“Not a radio. A TV.”

He sat up, turned on the lamp, and looked at her. She was lying there naked, the sheet down around her hips, and although she was smiling at him, he thought she was serious. It was Mary’s I-dare-you grin.

“Mary, we can’t afford a TV.”

“How much for a table model? A GE or a Philco or something?”

“New?”

“New?”

He considered the question, watching the play of lamplight across the lovely round curves of her breasts. She had been so much slimmer then (although she’s hardly a fatty now, George, he reproached himself; never said she was, Freddy my boy), so much more alive somehow. Even her hair had crackled out its own message: alive, awake, aware…

“Around seven hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, thinking that would douse the grin… but it hadn’t.

“Well, look,” She said, sitting up Indian-fashion in bed, her legs crossed under the sheet.

“I am,” he said, grinning

“Not at that.” But she laughed, and a flush had spread prettily down her cheeks to her neck (although she hadn’t pulled the sheet up, he remembered).

“What’s on your mind?”

“Why do men want a TV?” she asked. “To watch all the sports on the weekends. And why do women want one? Those soap operas in the afternoon. You can listen while you iron or put your feet up if your work’s done. Now suppose we each found something to do-something that pays-during that time we’d otherwise just be sitting around…”

“reading a book, or maybe even making love?” he suggested.

“We always find time for that,” she said, and laughed, and blushed, and her eyes were dark in the lamplight and it threw a warm, semicircular shadow between her breasts, and he knew then that he was going to give in to her, he would have promised her a fifteen-hundred-dollar Zenith console model if she would just let him make love to her again, and at the thought he felt himself stiffening, felt the snake turning to stone, as Mary had once said when she’d had a little too much to drink at the Ridpaths’ New Year’s Eve party (and now, eighteen years later, he felt the snake turning to stone again-over a memory).

“Well, all right,” he said. “I’m going to moonlight weekends and you’re going of moonlight afternoons. But what, dear Mary, Oh-not-so-Virgin Mary, are we going to do?”

She pounced on him, giggling, her breasts a soft weight on his stomach (flat-enough in those days, Freddy, not a sign of a bay window). “That’s the trick of it!” she said. “What’s today'? June eighteenth?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, you do your weekend things, and on December eighteenth we’ll put our money together-”

“-and buy a toaster,” he said, grinning.

“-and get that TV,” she said solemnly. “I’m sure we can do it, Bart.” Then the giggles broke out again. “But the fun part’ll be that we won’t tell each other what we’re up to until after.”

“Just as long as I don’t see a red light over the door when I come home from work tomorrow,” he said, capitulating.

She grabbed him, got on top of him, started to tickle. The tickling turned to caresses.

“Bring it to me,” she whispered against his neck, and gripped him with gentle yet excruciating pressure, guiding him and squeezing him at the same time. “Put it in me, Bart.”

And later, in the dark again, hands crossed behind his head. he said: “We don’t tell each other, right?”

“Nope.”

“Mary, what brought this on? What I said about Donna Upshaw not wanting to serve Spanish peanuts to half the neighborhood?”