Slaughterhouse-Five (30 page)

It turned out that the person who had written this letter was Eliot Rosewater, Billy’s friend in the veterans’ hospital near Lake Placid. Billy told Trout about Rosewater.

“My God—I thought he was about fourteen years old,” said Trout.

“A full grown man—a captain in the war.”

“He
writes
like a fourteen-year-old,” said Kilgore Trout.

Billy invited Trout to his eighteenth wedding anniversary which was only two days hence. Now the party was in progress.

Trout was in Billy’s dining room, gobbling canapés. He was talking with a mouthful of Philadelphia cream cheese and salmon roe to an optometrist’s
wife. Everybody at the party was associated with optometry in some way, except Trout. And he alone was without glasses. He was making a great hit. Everybody was thrilled to have a real author at the party, even though they had never read his books.

Trout was talking to a Maggie White, who had given up being a dental assistant to become a home-maker for an optometrist. She was very pretty. The last book she had read was
Ivanhoe
.

Billy Pilgrim stood nearby, listening. He was palpating something in his pocket. It was a present he was about to give his wife, a white satin box containing a star sapphire cocktail ring. The ring was worth eight hundred dollars.

The adulation that Trout was receiving, mindless and illiterate as it was, affected Trout like marijuana. He was happy and loud and impudent.

“I’m afraid I don’t read as much as I
ought
to,” said Maggie.

“We’re all afraid of something,” Trout replied. “I’m afraid of cancer and rats and Doberman pinschers.”

“I should know, but I don’t, so I have to ask,” said Maggie, “what’s the most famous thing you ever wrote?”

“It was about a funeral for a great French chef.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“All the great chefs in the world are there. It’s a beautiful ceremony.” Trout was making this up as he went along. “Just before the casket is closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley and paprika on the deceased.” So it goes.

“Did that really
happen
?” said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn’t had even one baby yet. She used birth control.

“Of course it happened,” Trout told her. “If I wrote something that hadn’t really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That’s
fraud
.”

Maggie believed him. “I’d never thought about that before.”

“Think about it now.”

“It’s like advertising. You have to tell the truth in advertising, or you get in trouble.”

“Exactly. The same body of law applies.”

“Do you think you might put
us
in a book sometime?”

“I put everything that happens to me in books.”

“I guess I better be careful what I say.”

“That’s right. And I’m not the only one who’s listening. God is listening, too. And on Judgment Day he’s going to tell you all the things you said and did. If it turns out they’re bad things instead of good things, that’s too bad for you, because you’ll burn forever and ever. The burning never stops hurting.”

Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed
that
, too, and was petrified.

Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in Maggie’s cleavage.

Now an optometrist called for attention. He proposed a toast to Billy and Valencia, whose anniversary it was. According to plan, the barbershop quartet of optometrists, “The Febs,” sang while people drank and Billy and Valencia put their arms around each other, just glowed. Everybody’s eyes
were shining. The song was “That Old Gang of Mine.”

Gee
, that song went,
but I’d give the world to see that old gang of mine
. And so on. A little later it said,
So long forever, old fellows and gals, so long forever old sweethearts and pals—God bless ’em
—And so on.

Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. He had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with chords—chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again. Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the
rack
.

He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously when the song was done. They thought he might have been having a heart attack, and Billy seemed to confirm this by going to a chair and sitting down haggardly.

There was silence.

“Oh my God,” said Valencia, leaning over him, “Billy—are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“You look so awful.”

“Really—I’m O.K.” And he was, too, except that he could find no explanation for why the song had affected him so grotesquely. He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.

People drifted away now, seeing the color return to Billy’s cheeks, seeing him smile. Valencia stayed with him, and Kilgore Trout, who had been on the fringe of the crowd, came closer, interested, shrewd.

“You looked as though you’d seen a
ghost
,” said Valencia.

“No,” said Billy. He hadn’t seen anything but what was really before him—the faces of the four singers, those four ordinary men, cow-eyed and mindless and anguished as they went from sweetness to sourness to sweetness again.

“Can I make a guess?” said Kilgore Trout. “You saw through a
time window
.”

“A what?” said Valencia.

“He suddenly saw the past or the future. Am I right?”

“No,” said Billy Pilgrim. He got up, put a hand into his pocket, found the box containing the ring in there. He took out the box, gave it absently to Valencia. He had meant to give it to her at the end of the song, while everybody was watching. Only Kilgore Trout was there to see.

“For me?” said Valencia.

“Yes.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. Then she said it louder, so other people heard. They gathered around, and she opened it, and she almost screamed when she saw the sapphire with a star in it. “Oh, my God,” she said. She gave Billy a big kiss. She said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

There was a lot of talk about what wonderful jewelry Billy had given to Valencia over the years. “My God—” said Maggie White, “she’s already got the biggest diamond I ever saw outside of a movie.” She was talking about the diamond Billy had brought back from the war.

The partial denture he had found inside his little
impresario’s coat, incidentally, was in his cufflinks box in his dresser drawer. Billy had a wonderful collection of cufflinks. It was the custom of the family to give him cufflinks on every Father’s Day. He was wearing Father’s Day cufflinks now. They had cost over one hundred dollars. They were made out of ancient Roman coins. He had one pair of cufflinks upstairs which were little roulette wheels that really worked. He had another pair which had a real thermometer in one and a real compass in the other.