We'll Always Have Paris by Ray Bradbury Page A

until, at last, as
    here, all over the country, there would be rooms, with people in them, some real, some not,
    some controlled by unrealities, until all was a nightmare, one not knowable from the other. Ten
    million rooms with ten million old women named Ma peeling potatoes in them, chuckling,
    philosophizing. Ten million rooms in which some boy named Aldrich played with marbles on the
    floor. Ten million rooms where guns barked and ambulances rumbled. God, God, what a huge,
    engulfing plot. The world was lost, and he had lost it forthem. It had been lost before he began. How many other husbands are starting the
    same fight tonight, doomed to lose at last, as he lost, because the rules of logic have been
    warped all out of shape by a little black evil electric box?
    He felt the police snap the silver handcuffs tight.
    Annie was smiling. And Annie would be here, night after night, with her wild
    parties and her laughter and travels, while he was far away.
    ‘Listen to me!’ he screamed.
    ‘You’re nuts!’ said the cop, and hit him.
    On the way down the hall, a radio was playing.
    In the warm light of the room as they passed the door, Joe peered swiftly in,
    one instant. There, by the radio, rocking, was an old woman, shelling some fresh green
    peas.
    He heard a door slam far away and his feet drifted.
    He stared at the hideous old woman, or was it a man, who occupied the chair
    in the center of the warm and swept-clean living room. What was she doing? Knitting, shaving
    herself, peeling potatoes? Shelling peas? Was she sixty, eighty, one hundred, ten million years
    old?
    He felt his jaw clench and his tongue lie cold and remote in his mouth.
    ‘Come in,’ said the old woman–old man. ‘Annie’s fixing dinner in the
    kitchen.’
    ‘Who are you?’ he asked, his heart trembling.
    ‘You know me,’ the person said, laughing
    shrilly. ‘I’m Ma Perkins. You know, you know, you know.’
    In the kitchen he held to the wall and his wife turned toward him with a
    cheese grater in her hand. ‘Darling!’
    ‘Who’s–who’s—’ He felt drunk, his tongue thick. ‘Who’s that person in the
    living room, how did she get here?’
    ‘Why, it’s only Ma Perkins, you know, from the radio,’ his wife said with
    casual logic. She kissed him a sweet kiss on the mouth. ‘Are you cold? You’re shaking.’
    He had time only to see her nod a smile before they dragged him on.

Doubles
    Bernard Trimble played tennis against his wife and when he beat her she
    was unhappy and when she beat him he was demon-possessed and double-damn madness unhappy, to
    put it mildly.
    One summer, on a country road, in verdant Santa Barbara, Bernard Trimble was
    motoring along a farmland road with a beautiful and compatible lady of recent acquaintance in
    the seat beside him, her hair whipping in the wind, with her bright scarf snapping, and a look
    of philosophic tiredness on her face as from recent pleasant exertions, when an open roadster
    gunned past them going in the opposite direction, with a woman driving and a young man lounging
    beside her.
    ‘My God!’ cried Trimble.
    ‘Why’d you just cry “my God”?’ said the
    beautiful temptress at his side.
    ‘My wife just passed with the most terrible look on her face.’
    ‘What kind of look?’
    ‘Just like the one you have right now,’ said Trimble.
    And he gunned the car down the road.
    At an early dinner that night at the tennis club, with the sound of the
    tennis balls flying back and forth like soft doves, Trimble sat between two lit candles
    heartily devouring a bottle of wine. He growled when his wife finally arrived after much too
    long a shower and sat across from him wearing a spider-woven Spanish mantilla and a
    phosphorescent breath, like the breath of a twilight forest, sighing from her mouth.
    He bent close to examine her chin, her cheeks, and her eyes.
    ‘No, it’s not there.’
    ‘What’s not there?’ she asked.
    The look, he thought, of remembered and pleasant