Read Online We'll Always Have Paris by Ray Bradbury - Free Book Online Page B

to
    dusty ghosts.
    But now, on this fountain-sparkling day, their health at last miraculously
    returned, old Mr and Mrs Alexander edged down the steps and into the town, like tourists from a
    land beneath the earth.
    Reaching the main street, Mr Alexander said,
    ‘We’re not so old; we just
felt
old. Why I’m seventy-two, you’re only
    seventy. I’m out for some special shopping, Elma. Meet you here in two hours!’
    They flew apart, rid of each other at last.
    Not half a block away, passing a dress shop, Mr Alexander saw a mannequin in
    a window, and froze. There, ah, there! The sunlight warmed her pink cheeks, her berry-stained
    lips, her blue-lacquer eyes, her yellow-yarn hair. He stood at the window for an entire minute,
    until a live woman appeared suddenly, arranging the displays. When she glanced up, there was Mr
    Alexander, smiling like a youthful idiot. She smiled back.
    What a day! he thought. I could punch a hole in a plank door. I could throw a
    cat over the courthouse! Get out of the way, old man! Wait! Was that a
mirror
? Never mind. Good God! I’m really alive!
    Mr Alexander was inside the shop.
    ‘I want to buy something!’ he said.
    ‘What?’ asked the beautiful saleslady.
    He glanced foolishly about. ‘Why, let me have a scarf. That’s it, a
    scarf.’
    He blinked at the numerous scarves she brought, smiling at him so his heart
    roared and tilted like a gyroscope, throwing the world out of balance. ‘Pick the scarf you’d
    wear, yourself. That’s the scarf for me.’
    She chose a scarf the color of her eyes.
    ‘Is it for your wife?’
    He handed her a five-dollar bill. ‘Put the scarf on.’ She obeyed. He tried to
    imagine Elma’s head sticking out above it; failed. ‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘It’s yours.’ He drifted
    out the sunlit door, his veins singing.
    ‘Sir,’ she called, but he was gone.
    What Mrs Alexander wanted most was shoes, and after leaving her husband she
    entered the very first shoe shop. But not, however, before she dropped a penny in a perfume
    machine and pumped great vaporous founts of verbena upon her sparrow chest. Then, with the
    spray clinging round her like morning mist, she plunged into the shoe store, where a fine young
    man with doe-brown eyes and black arched brows and hair with the sheen of patent leather
    pinched her ankles, feathered her instep, caressed her toes, and so entertained her feet that
    they blushed a soft, warm pink.
    ‘Madame has the smallest foot I’ve fitted this year. Extraordinarily
    small.’
    Mrs Alexander was a great heart seated there, beating so loudly that the
    salesman had to shout over the sound:
    ‘If Madame will push down!’
    ‘Would the lady like another color?’
    He shook her left hand as she departed with three pairs of shoes, giving her
    fingers what seemed to be a meaningful appraisal. She laughed a strange laugh, forgetting to
    say she had not worn her wedding band, her fingershad puffed
    with illness so many years that the ring now lay in dust. On the street, she confronted the
    verbena-squirting machine, another copper penny in her hand.
    Mr Alexander strode with great bouncing strides up and down streets, doing a
    little jig of delight on meeting certain people, stopping at last, faintly tired, but not
    admitting it to anyone, before the United Cigar store. There, as if seven-hundred-odd noons had
    not vanished, stood Mr Bleak, Mr Grey, Samuel Spaulding, and the Wooden Indian. They seized and
    punched Mr Alexander in disbelief.
    ‘John, you’re back from the dead!’
    ‘Coming to the lodge tonight?’
    ‘Sure!’
    ‘Oddfellows meeting tomorrow night?’
    ‘I’ll be there!’ Invitations blew about him in a warm wind. ‘Old friends,
    I’ve
missed
you!’ He wanted to grab everyone, even the Indian. They
    lit his free cigar and bought him foamy beers next door in the jungle color of green-felt pool
    tables.
    ‘One week from tonight,’ cried Mr Alexander. ‘Open house. My wife and I
    invite you all,