Cabin on the Coast question

Roy C. Lackey · 28 May 2008, 08:09 · from 2008-May.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 03:09:39 -0500
Subject: (urth) Cabin on the Coast question
Message-ID: <000e01c8c09a$30115d00$55d24a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Dave Tallman wrote:
>I was rereading some stories in "Endangered Species" and I had a
>question: what is Tim wearing in the final scene?
>
>There are two possible answers:
>1) Swimming trunks.
>He swam out to the black freighter in his trunks, so it would make sense
>for him to return in them, if they still fit...
>
>2) Nothing.
>If things will "stand so again" as on the day Lissy vanished, Tim
>started that day naked in bed.
>
>In either case, especially the latter, Lissy's reaction to "Big Tim" is
>disturbing. She doesn't scream at a naked or almost-naked man barging in
>on her. She talks to him casually. Are we to infer that she has also
>been the lover of "Big Tim?"

No. She had never met Tim's father; she had seen him only in pictures. In
the pictures, he was very gaunt. Though the fairy King had promised things
would be just as they were for Lissy "and all the country round" on the
morning she disappeared, that didn't apply equally for Tim. The King had
promised that Tim would remember his time in the otherworld, but that didn't
turn out to be true. Neither did the King mention that Tim would be at least
twenty years older when he was released from service, but that is what
happened. Fairies lie and otherwise deceive.

When Tim returned to the cabin and opened the door, Lissy saw an older,
thinner man who looked just like the man in the pictures she had seen. Tim
had earlier told her that he would come to look just like his father,
because he then looked just as his father had looked when his father was the
same age. She mistook Tim for his father. I don't think she spoke to him
"casually". She was trying to make the best of a compromising situation by
blurting out to "Big Tim" that she and his "son" were planning to get
married.

After all, regardless of whatever the man she thought was "Big Tim" was
wearing, or not wearing, she was herself conspicuously naked in Big Tim's
bed. She was in no position to say anything about the other's wardrobe, or
lack thereof.

-Roy

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