In Other Worlds

Caitlin's daughter had been sixteen then, tall and lean-limbed, with green, youthless eyes and a lispy smile. Carl was twice her age, and he lost his heart to her that first day, which was no common event with him. He had experienced his share of crooked romance and casual affairs in college, and for the last ten years he had lived alone out of choice sprung from disappointment. No woman whom he had found attractive had ever found him likewise. He was gangly, nearsighted, and bald, not ugly but lumpy-featured and devoid of the conversational charm that sometimes redeemed men of his mien. – So instead of contenting himself with the love of a good but not quite striking woman, he had lived alone and close to his indulgences: an occasional spleef of marijuana, a semiannual cocaine binge, and a sizable pornography collection stretching back through the kinky Seventies to the body-painting orgies of the Sixties. Sheelagh made all the years of his aloneness seem worthwhile, for she was indeed striking-a tall, lyrical body with auburn tresses that fell to the roundness of her loose hips-and, most exciting of all, she needed him.

When Carl had arrived, the Shamrock was brinking on bankruptcy. He would never have had anything to do with a business as tattered as the one riven-faced Caitlin had revealed to him were Sheelagh not there. She was a smart kid, finishing high school a year ahead of her class and sharp enough with figures and deferredpayment planning to keep the Shamrock floating long after her besotted mother would have lost it. Sheelagh was the one, in her. defiant-child's manner, who had shown him' that the business could be saved. The neighborhood was growing with the artistic overflow from Greenwich Village, and there was hope, if they could find the money and the imagination, to draw a new, more affluent clientele. After talking with the girl, Carl had flared with ideas, and he had backed them up with the few thousand dollars he had saved. The debts were paid off, old Caitlin reluctantly became the house chef, and Carl took over the bartending, the books, and the refurbishing. A year later, the Shamrock had almost broken even as the Blue Apple, a name Carl had compressed from the Big Apple and the certain melancholy of his hopeless love for Sheelagh. That love had recently increased in both ardor and hopelessness now that Sheelagh had finished high school and had come to work full-time in the Blue Apple while she saved for college..

On Carl Schirmer's last day as a human, when he entered ,the restaurant with his collar of red hair sticking out from his head, his clothes knotted with static, and his eyes shining with the beauty of the day, Sheelagh was glad to see him. The new tables they had ordered had come in and were stacked around the bar, legs up like a bamboo forest. "Aren''t they fine?" Sheelagh asked.

In the year since they had first met, she had filled out to the full dimensions of a woman, and Carl was not