What do you mean, "get to when it started to go sour"? Oh. That's what you mean.

Well, it was a dynamite three months from the starting gate. We went everywhere, saw everything, did everything, and I started falling behind in the writing. So I had to spend a lot of time behind this typewriter. Katie started getting antsy. She wanted to go out and go to the beach, go water skiing, take a drive up the Coast to San Francisco. I kept promising, but I was 'way behind and my publisher was screaming at me long distance from New York every day. Right on the tick of seven A.M., ten o'clock in New York, the phone would ring and it would be Norman, calling me a rancid pyramid of pig s.h.i.t because he was missing printing deadlines. I would tell him I was working, which was true, but it wasn't coming fast enough.

So I was locked into the house. And Katie started hanging out at school longer each day, started going to evening rehearsals of "A Midsummer's Night Dream," took a flying lesson with some guy, spent lots of time in some restaurant with the "theatuh crowd" and I knew something was going on, though she kept volunteering the information that everything was cool and she loved me. She talked an awful lot of good trash at me.

Now understand something: as a card-carrying loner, I prefer, no I insist on a woman having her own thing. I definitely do not want a Stepford Wife, explaining the merits of Easy-Off Oven Cleaner or the manifest benefits of Preparation H rectal suppositories while she's whipping up my favorite dessert with one hand and polishing the slate slabs in the entranceway with the other. I want a fully-realized human being who, unlike my mother who spent twenty-five years after my father died crying and wandering through life alone and stunned, can make it on her own. But. I am not a dip. I like to think I'm pa.s.sing intelligent. And I don't mind if someone thinks I'm dumb, just as long as they don't talk to me as if they thought I was dumb. I knew something was up.

Yes, nuisance, I knew what was going down all the time. Not the specifics, but I knew there was a Baskerville hound out there on the moors, sniffing around your supple young boogie'ing body.

It wasn't till the fourth month that I learned his name was David.

Would that my name had been Goliath.

I don't remember how I found out that she'd been balling him. It doesn't matter.

I said it doesn't matter.

No, dammit, I don't want to write that part. Shut up, nuisance ... the tree is tipping. Hold it! Okay, now prop it up on the right. On the right ... yeah, there. No, I'm not going into that part of it. We talked about it, you let something slip, he called here, I got tired of playing the game of I-know-nothing-and-everything's cool, whatever it was, I found out, and you laid all that c.r.a.pola on me about how you were only nineteen and you needed to fly, to discover yourself, that it was the first relationship you'd ever had with someone who had a steady job, an occupation, a fully-established life that needed aerating and fertilizing and watering, and you were too young to handle responsibility for someone else's love and life, and I understood all that s.h.i.t, but you want to know what I thought of?

I thought of that scene out of, I guess it was Monkey Business, where Groucho is carrying-on with Margaret Dumont and he begins dancing the s.h.a.g, flinging his arms in the air, and he says, "l want to sing, I want to dance, I want to hot cha cha!" Well, I tried talking to you about it, and it didn't do any good; h.e.l.l, yes, I knew you loved me, that it was good with us, but you were being torn in two directions at once, and it wasn't even that a.s.shole David. Sure he was f.u.c.king you, but that wasn't what was important. Love ain't nothing but s.e.x misspelled anyhow. That isn't where love comes from! I've never understood how some poor slob could permit his wife or lady friend to have a deep intellectual relationship with another man, and not think anything about it, but let him get meaty about it and the slob goes out of his pithecanthropoid mind. Love isn't meat in meat. It's all in the headwork. So David was only a convenient symptom. If he was good in bed and you enjoyed it, that's fine with me. I do the best I can. If you need supplements to your diet, well, McDonald's is on every street corner these days. But it was clear you wanted to cut and run because it was getting too thick, and you saw me as an older dude strapped to a typewriter, and you wanted to find out who Katie is.

So we had our little talk, Katie and me, and I suggested we ease off and just do our things as best we could, and if one or the other of us felt the need to partake of a greaseburger at some other fast-food counter, that was okay. And you said to me ... no! And Katie said to me, "What you're proposing is a mature, adult way of handling this thing; and since I'm neither mature nor adult, it just won't work. There's no way things are going to be copacetic for both of us." (I always wondered how you knew the word copacetic; that's a word from my generation, not yours.) "There's no way to avoid one of us getting wrecked, and I've decided it ought to be you, because you can handle it better than I. That's because you're a mature adult."

And you left. No, dammit ... Katie left, and I put it all out of my mind in an hour. Don't say no one can put it out of his mind in an hour, G.o.d d.a.m.n you, I did! I learned how to do it a long time ago. Just to mortar up that alcove where the hurt is. To brick it over and keep moving, just shuckin' and jivin'.

Yeah, Merry Christmas to you, too, kiddo.

I ain't mad. I curse the lesson and bless the knowledge. It'll be a long time again between hurts.

Hold everything. My name is David Feinberg and I did not write what you have just read. There is no Thomas Kirlin Kane. What you have just read was written by a woman. Her name is Patricia Katherine Feinberg. Her maiden name was Patti Brody. She is twenty years old. I am forty-three. We have been married for almost two years. She is the dearest person I have ever known and there is nothing in this life I need more than her love and support and presence in my world. For a while, when we first met, we had problems. Not so much between us, but from the outside, from people who saw us as a mismatch of "young stuff" and "dirty old man." We got past that after a great many aggravations. And how she remembered it all!

I have been in tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the Christmas tree, which would decimate my mother if she were still alive, a good Jew like me; and I've heard Patti typing in here for days. But not till now has she suggested I come in and read what she's been writing. It's not her usual non-fiction stuff, it's a story. Her first fiction. I hope you enjoyed it. How she did it so much inside my head, writing it the way a man would write it, I'll never know. She wrote it a great deal more fairly than I would have, but for the record, I'm the one who orders c.o.ke with Canard l'Orange. How did she remember all this, all the detail, all the things I said in idle moments? I'm amazed.

But it's the best Christmas present I've ever received.

And have a happy yourself.

With love, from us, a terrific object lesson in beating the odds. Or, as Thomas Kirlin Kane would put it, everything's copacetic.

--Los Angeles, 1975

Copyright 1968, 1976 by Harlan Ellison. Electronic Edition 1998 BiblioBytes.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Author or the Author's Agent, Richard Curtis a.s.sociates, Inc. 171 E. 74th St.; Suite #2, New York, NY 10021-3221.

Trident Press hardcover edition: June 1968 Any persons, places and organizations in this book--except those clearly in the public domain--are fict.i.tious; and any resemblance to actual persons, places or organizations living, dead or defunct, is purely coincidental. These are works of fiction.

"Blind Bird, Blind Bird, Go Away from Me!"; "What I Did on My Vacation This Summer, by Little Bobby Hirschhorn, Age 27" "Neither Your Jenny Nor Mine"; and "Punky and the Yale Men" appeared in Knight magazine. Copyright 1963, 1964 and 1966 by Sirkay Publishing Co. Copyrights rea.s.signed to Author 1968.

"Riding the Dark Train Out"; "Daniel White for the Greater Good"; "The Universe of Robert Blake"; "Mona at Her Windows"; and "G.B.K.--A Many-Flavored Bird" appeared in Rogue magazine. Copyright 1961 and 1962 by Greenleaf Publishing Co. Copyrights rea.s.signed.

"A Prayer for No One's Enemy" appeared in Cad magazine. Copyright 1966 by CAD Publishing Co. Copyright rea.s.signed to Author, 1968.

"Battle Without Banners" appeared in the paperback anthology TABOO. Copyright 1964 by New Cla.s.sics House, a division of Novel Books, Inc.

"A Path Through the Darkness" appeared in Fling magazine. Copyright 1962 by Relim Publishing.

"Valerie" and "When I was a Hired Gun" appeared as a series of installments of The Harlan Ellison Hornbook, a column of personal comment in the Los Angeles Free Press (November 3-24 1972 and June 1-6 1973). Copyright 1972 and 1973 by Harlan Ellison.

"The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie" and "I Curse the Lesson and Bless the Knowledge" were written especially for this volume and appear here for the first time anywhere. Copyright 1968 and 1975 by Harlan Ellison.