One More for the Road by Ray Bradbury Page B

comic strip Desperate Ambrose? The world swarms with men wanting, not getting, sleepless night Ambroses. Desperate. My God. Body says this, mind that. Men say yes, women no ! Were you ever fourteen?”
    â€œFor a few years, yes.”
    â€œ Touché! You discovered wild hot flesh, but it was years before you touched someone else’s arm, elbow, mouth. How long?”
    â€œSix years.”
    â€œForever! Alone twenty thousand nights. Loving mirrors. Wrestling pillows. Damnation! Use the new number. Come back tomorrow.”
    â€œYou’ve told me nothing! ”
    â€œ Everything . Act! If you cancel now, to rejoin listening again costs six hundred!”
    â€œBased on what!? ”
    â€œOn the heavy breathing that made you trash your phone. The Bell Company reported the repairs.”
    â€œHow could you know that? ”
    â€œNo comment.”
    â€œSmith?”
    Smith waited, smiling.
    â€œAre you,” said Conway, “God’s Angel, or his dark son?”
    â€œYes,” said Smith, and left.
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    Conway telephoned Norma to have the phone canceled.
    â€œWhy, for God’s sake?” said Norma.
    â€œGet the phone out. Out!”
    â€œMadness,” she said, and hung up.
    He arrived home at five. Norma toured him through the house.
    â€œHold on,” he protested, “the phone’s still in the library and—”
    He glanced toward their bedroom.
    â€œThey’ve put a new phone in there!”
    â€œThey said you insisted. Did you change the order from take out to put in? ”
    â€œMy God, no,” he said and walked over to stand by the new device. “Why would I do that?”
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    At bedtime he pulled both phones’ jacks, slapped his pillow, lay down, and shut his eyes.
    At three in the morning the phones rang and kept ringing. Norma’s put the jacks back in the wall, he thought.
    Finally, Norma stirred. “God, I’ll do it!” She sat up.
    â€œNo!” he cried.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNo, me!” he shouted.
    â€œCalm down.”
    â€œI’m calm!” He seized the phone, which rang and rang as he carried it on its long cord to the other phone, which still rang and rang. He stood motionless. The bedroom door opened wider.
    â€œWell, what are you waiting for?” Norma said.
    Ignoring her, he bent to touch and then take the phone but only hold it away. The phone whispered.
    At last Norma said: “So? Private calls? Is that some male-menopausal bimbo?”
    â€œNo,” he said. “It is not a floozie-bubblehead-camp-follower bimbo!”
    The list was so headlong that Norma laughed and shut the door.
    No lie, he thought. No bimbo, floozie, bubble-head … It’s—he hesitated, what? Cloud-cuckoo-land, a sinking loveboat of lost women, crazed bachelors, dry heaves, plea-bargaining, salmon migrations upstream to nowhere! What?
    â€œWell,” he said at last and went to open the bedroom door and study the cold white arctic wilderness of bed and its snowblinding empty sheets.
    There was a faint rattling behind the bathroom door. The sound of aspirin shaken out as a faucet filled a glass.
    He stood by the glacier bed where the floe moved never, and shivered.
    The bathroom light went off. He turned and went away.
    He sat quietly for an hour and then dialed the new number.
    No answer. And then …
    A whisper so vast, so loud, it might comb the dead to wakening. The whispers panted from one line, two, four, ten dozen voices erupting, fused.
    And it was the sound of all the girls and women he had always wanted but never had, and it was the sound of all the women he had wanted and had never wanted again, their whispers, their cries, their laughter, their mocking laughter.
    And it was the sound of a sea moving in on a shore, but not the tidal floe beyond the trembling surf but a flood of flesh striking other flesh, bodies rising to fall, rising to fall and fall again with vast murmurs,