"My G.o.d," she mourned.

"What?"

"This door is heavy. I can't move it." She wept. "There. It's moving. There." She wept more. "I'm gone."

The door shut.

"Stan!" He ran to the door and grabbed the k.n.o.b. It was wet. He raised his fingers to his mouth and tasted the salt, then opened the door.

The hall was already empty. The air where she had pa.s.sed was just coming back together. Thunder threatened when the two halves met. There was a promise of rain.

He went back to the steps on October 4 every year for three years, but she wasn't there. And then he forgot for two years but in the autumn of the sixth year, he remembered and went back in the late sunlight and walked up the stairs because he saw something halfway up and it was a bottle of good champagne with a ribbon and a note on it, delivered by someone, and the note read: "Ollie, dear Ollie. Date remembered. But in Paris. Mouth's not the same, but happily married. Love. Stan."

And after that, every October he simply did not go to visit the stairs. The sound of that piano rushing down that hillside, he knew, would catch him and take him along to where he did not know.

And that was the end, or almost the end, of the Laurel and Hardy love affair.

There was, by amiable accident, a final meeting.

Traveling through France fifteen years later, he was walking on the Champs Elysees at twilight one afternoon with his wife and two daughters, when he saw this handsome woman coming the other way, escorted by a very sober-looking older man and a very handsome dark-haired boy of twelve, obviously her son.

As they pa.s.sed, the same smile lit both their faces in the same instant.

He twiddled his necktie at her.

She tousled her hair at him.

They did not stop. They kept going. But he heard her call back along the Champs Elysees, the last words he would ever hear her say: "Another fine mess you've got us in!" And then she added the old, the familiar name by which he had gone in the years of their love.

And she was gone and his daughters and wife looked at him and one daughter said, "Did that lady call you Ollie?"

"What lady?" he said.

"Dad," said the other daughter, leaning in to peer at his face. "You're crying."

"No."

"Yes, you are. Isn't he, Mom?"

"Your papa," said his wife, "as you well know, cries at telephone books."

"No," he said, "just one hundred and fifty steps and a piano. Remind me to show you girls, someday."

They walked on and he turned and looked back a final time. The woman with her husband and son turned at that very moment. Maybe he saw her mouth pantomime the words, So long, Ollie. Maybe he didn't. He felt his own mouth move, in silence: So long, Stan.

And they walked in opposite directions along the Champs Elysees in the late light of an October sun.

UNTERDERSEABOAT DOKTOR.

THE INCREDIBLE EVENT OCCURRED DURING my third visit to Gustav Von Seyfert.i.tz, my foreign psychoa.n.a.lyst.

I should have guessed at the strange explosion before it came.

After all, my alienist, truly alien, had the coincidental name, Von Seyfert.i.tz, of the tall, lean, aquiline, menacing, and therefore beautiful actor who played the high priest in the 1935 film She.

In She, the wondrous villain waved his skeleton fingers, hurled insults, summoned sulfured flames, destroyed slaves, and knocked the world into earthquakes.

After that, "At Liberty," he could be seen riding the Hollywood Boulevard trolley cars as calm as a mummy, as quiet as an unwired telephone pole.

Where was I? Ah, yes!

It was my third visit to my psychiatrist. He had called that day and cried, "Douglas, you stupid G.o.dd.a.m.n son of a b.i.t.c.h, it's time for beddy-bye!"

Beddy-bye was, of course, his couch of pain and humiliation where I lay writhing in agonies of a.s.sumed Jewish guilt and Northern Baptist stress as he from time to time muttered, "A fruitcake remark!" or "Dumb!" or "If you ever do that again, I'll kill you!"

As you can see, Gustav Von Seyfert.i.tz was a most unusual mine specialist. Mine? Yes. Our problems are land mines in our heads. Step on them! Shock-troop therapy, he once called it, searching for words. "Blitzkrieg?" I offered.

"Ja!" He grinned his shark grin. "That's it!"

Again, this was my third visit to his strange, metallic-looking room with a most odd series of locks on a roundish door. Suddenly, as I was maundering and treading dark waters, I heard his spine stiffen behind me. He gasped a great death rattle, sucked air, and blew it out in a yell that curled and bleached my hair: "Dive! Dive!"

I dove.

Thinking that the room might be struck by a t.i.tanic iceberg, I fell, to scuttle beneath the lion-claw-footed couch.

"Dive!" cried the old man.

"Dive?" I whispered, and looked up.

To see a submarine periscope, all polished bra.s.s, slide up to vanish in the ceiling.

Gustav Von Seyfert.i.tz stood pretending not to notice me, the sweat-oiled leather couch, or the vanished bra.s.s machine. Very calmly, in the fashion of Conrad Veidt in Casablanca, or Erich Von Stroheim, the manservant in Sunset Boulevard . . . he . . .

. . . lit a cigarette and let two calligraphic dragon plumes of smoke write themselves (his initials?) on the air.

"You were saying?" he said.

"No." I stayed on the floor. "You were saying. Dive?"

"I did not say that," he purred.

"Beg pardon, you said, very clearly-Dive!"

"Not possible." He exhaled two more scrolled dragon plumes. "You hallucinate. Why do you stare at the ceiling?"

"Because," I said, "unless I am further hallucinating, buried in that valve lock up there is a nine-foot length of German Leica bra.s.s periscope!"

"This boy is incredible, listen to him," muttered Von Seyfert.i.tz to his alter ego, which was always a third person in the room when he a.n.a.lyzed. When he was not busy exhaling his disgust with me, he tossed asides at himself. "How many martinis did you have at lunch?"

"Don't hand me that, Von Seyfert.i.tz. I know the difference between a s.e.x symbol and a periscope. That ceiling, one minute ago, swallowed a long bra.s.s pipe, yes!?"

Von Seyfert.i.tz glanced at his large, one-pound-size Christmas watch, saw that I still had thirty minutes to go, sighed, threw his cigarette down, squashed it with a polished boot, then clicked his heels.

Have you ever heard the whack when a real pro like Jack Nicklaus. .h.i.ts a ball? Bamm. A hand grenade!

That was the sound my Germanic friend's boots made as he knocked them together in a salute.

Crrrack!

"Gustav Mannerheim Auschlitz Von Seyfert.i.tz, Baron Woldstein, at your service!" He lowered his voice. "Unterderseaboat-"

I thought he might say "Doktor." But: "Unterderseaboat Captain!"

I scrambled off the floor.

Another crrrack and- The periscope slid calmly down out of the ceiling, the most beautiful Freudian cigar I had ever seen.

"No!" I gasped.

"Have I ever lied to you?"

"Many times!"

"But"-he shrugged-"little white ones."

He stepped to the periscope, slapped two handles in place, slammed one eye shut, and crammed the other angrily against the viewpiece, turning the periscope in a slow roundabout of the room, the couch, and me.

"Fire one," he ordered.

I almost heard the torpedo leave its tube.

"Fire two!" he said.

And a second soundless and invisible bomb motored on its way to infinity.

Struck midships, I sank to the couch.

"You, you!" I said mindlessly. "It!" I pointed at the bra.s.s machine. "This!" I touched the couch. "Why?"

"Sit down," said Von Seyfert.i.tz.

"I am."

"Lie down."

"I'd rather not," I said uneasily.

Von Seyfert.i.tz turned the periscope so its topmost eye, raked at an angle, glared at me. It had an uncanny resemblance, in its gla.s.sy coldness, to his own fierce hawk's gaze.

His voice, from behind the periscope, echoed.

"So you want to know, eh, how Gustav Von Seyfert.i.tz, Baron Woldstein, suffered to leave the cold ocean depths, depart his dear North Sea ship, flee his destroyed and beaten fatherland, to become the Unterderseaboat Doktor-"

"Now that you mention-"

"I never mention! I declare. And my declarations are sea-battle commands."

"So I noticed . . ."

"Shut up. Sit back-"

"Not just now . . ." I said uneasily.

His heels knocked as he let his right hand spider to his top coat pocket and slip forth yet a fourth eye with which to fasten me: a bright, thin monocle which he screwed into his stare as if decupping a boiled egg. I winced. For now the monocle was part of his glare and regarded me with cold fire.

"Why the monocle?" I said.

"Idiot! It is to cover my good eye so that neither eye can see and my intuition is free to work!"

"Oh," I said.

And he began his monologue. And as he talked I realized his need had been pent up, capped, for years, so he talked on and on, forgetting me.

And it was during this monologue that a strange thing occurred. I rose slowly to my feet as the Herr Doktor Von Seyfert.i.tz circled, his long, slim cigar printing smoke c.u.muli on the air, which he read like white Rorschach blots.

With each implantation of his foot, a word came out, and then another, in a sort of plodding grammar. Sometimes he stopped and stood poised with one leg raised and one word stopped in his mouth, to be turned on his tongue and examined. Then the shoe went down, the noun slid forth and the verb and object in good time.

Until at last, circling, I found myself in a chair, stunned, for I saw: Herr Doktor Von Seyfert.i.tz stretched on his couch, his long spider fingers laced on his chest.

"It has been no easy thing to come forth on land," he sibilated. "Some days I was the jellyfish, frozen. Others, the sh.o.r.e-strewn octopi, at least with tentacles, or the crayfish sucked back into my skull. But I have built my spine, year on year, and now I walk among the land men and survive."

He paused to take a trembling breath, then continued: "I moved in stages from the depths to a houseboat, to a wharf bungalow, to a sh.o.r.e-tent and then back to a ca.n.a.l in a city and at last to New York, an island surrounded by water, eh? But where, where, in all this, I wondered, would a submarine commander find his place, his work, his mad love and activity?

"It was one afternoon in a building with the world's longest elevator that it struck me like a hand grenade in the ganglion. Going down, down, down, other people crushed around me, and the numbers descending and the floors whizzing by the gla.s.s windows, rushing by flicker-flash, flicker-flash, conscious, subconscious, id, ego-id, life, death, l.u.s.t, kill, l.u.s.t, dark, light, plummeting, falling, ninety, eighty, fifty, lower depths, high exhilaration, id, ego, id, until this shout blazed from my raw throat in a great all-accepting, panic-manic shriek: "'Dive! Dive!'"

"I remember," I said.

"'Dive!' I screamed so loudly that my fellow pa.s.sengers, in shock, peed merrily. Among stunned faces, I stepped out of the lift to find one-sixteenth of an inch of pee on the floor. 'Have a nice day!' I said, jubilant with self-discovery, then ran to self-employment, to hang a shingle and next my periscope, carried from the mutilated, divested, castrated unterderseaboat all these years. Too stupid to see in it my psychological future and my final downfall, my beautiful artifact, the bra.s.s genitalia of psychotic research, the Von Seyfert.i.tz Mark Nine Periscope!"

"That's quite a story," I said.