A/N: You've got to pay the piper sometime, as a character finds out in the 1967 movie "Barefoot in the Park".


Flights of Fancy

"Ah!" Paul Bratter woke with a start as he bolted up with his hands in the air and looked around before falling back on the bed. He let out a "Phew!" in some type of relief.

His wife Corie lay close beside him - she had to, since the bedroom was so small the only part of the floor that wasn't covered by the single bed was immediately adjacent to the closet. "Paul, are you alright?"

He looked at her for a moment as if he had never seen his wife before, but recognition quickly registered on his face. "I...think so. I had the most horrible dream. It ended with me being in a coffin." He looked around more critically at the bedroom where he could almost touch all four walls from one position on the bed. "I wonder where I got that idea from."

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"I can feel...that's something, at least. I even think I can make a fist again," he said as he flexed his fingers a few times. "I guess the Ouzo wore off. Has it been three days already?" He continued the inventory by running his tongue around his mouth – the teeth all seemed to be there. "I'm a little rough and it feels like I spent the night licking cats. You didn't get a cat during the night, did you?"

"Not that I know of."

"Good - the idea that I licked one is more than a little bit disgusting at the moment. Come to think of it, ANY moment for that matter. I don't remember anything after coming down from the roof. I didn't fall off and die, did I?" He couldn't eliminate the possibility without at least a witness that could testify otherwise. "It might explain a lot if I did." In a fit of anger over believing he was too repressed with his emotions, he had gone on a bender the previous day and after some wandering had ended up on the roof of their apartment building.

"No. You rambled on and slipped in and out of consciousness a few times before I dragged you to bed. Don't worry, it's still February; you didn't Rip Van Winkle on me."

"You didn't hurt yourself carrying me, did you?"

"No, like I said I DRAGGED you. I think the streaks on the floor are still there if you want proof."

"No - I trust you. I'll use them to find my way back to the living room." The fifth-floor apartment was so small, walking out of the bedroom put you immediately into the living room. And the entryway. And the kitchen. And the dining area. And one step away from the bathroom. Paul finally bothered to look down. "I'm in my underwear. How did I stay warm last night?"

"I stripped you out of your cold clothes, then I took all of mine off and snuggled up to keep you warm."

"Did one of us enjoy it?"

"Of course," she said with an impish grin.

"Good. At least one should. Two is best, but one is the bare minimum, and I mean that literally and figuratively. I was pretty out of it with those dreams." Paul had gone to bed stinking drunk, with a cold from sleeping under the broken skylight the previous night, and to round off a perfectly miserable day that he had spent walking around Washington Square Park with no coat and barefoot prior to his rooftop rambling.

"What did you dream about?"

"Well, I dreamt I had won an important court case finally and the office paid me in fifty pounds of bricks."

"Gold bricks?"

"No, just bricks. Don't look at me like that - this is my dream, not yours. So, I trudged the suitcase up the stoop only to find out it was the wrong address. On the third stoop I finally got the right building. Immediately upon entering, I encountered our neighbor from 1C. I was just as stumped at whether to address the person as Mr. or Mrs as everyone else. To play it safe I introduced myself as Baul Pratter up in 5C."

"Did you find out if they were a Mr. or Mrs.?"

"No; they answered me in Albanian sign language. By the time I had climbed the flight to the second floor, I was now carrying two suitcases. I know they were both mine because one had an 'A' on it and the other had a 'B'; I was afraid for a moment the moose on the landing might attack me, but he was busy smoking a cigarette. I barely made it up the next flight to the third floor and tumbled onto the landing, where Dr. Calhoun came out of 3C and performed open-heart surgery on me. I recovered quickly, paid my bill and continued on - now with a third suitcase."

"Handy to have a doctor in the building, I guess. It was marked 'C' I imagine," Corie guessed.

"As a matter of fact, it actually had a big 'D' on it. Naturally, after climbing the next flight I knocked over a pile of tuna fish cans outside of 4D as I walked past. After that, I climbed another flight of stairs and knocked over a pile of tuna fish cans in front of 4D."

"You already told me that part."

"That's because it happened again. And again. After the third time I was getting a little suspicious even though the color of the eye looking through the cracked door was different each time, so I looked down the stairwell and saw the pile I knocked over one flight down had been stacked up again. I turned around and the pile behind me was stacked again too. I picked up one of the cans and dropped it down the stairwell."

"Why did you do that?"

"Just a wild idea I had."

"Did you hear it hit the bottom?"

"No, I got distracted by it hitting me on the back of the head. I decided not to try it again, so I grabbed the handle of my steamer trunk..."

"What steamer trunk? We don't have one."

"In my dream, my three suitcases had become a one large steamer trunk - but to relieve any worries you might have, it had the missing 'C' on the side now. Anyway, I grabbed the handle and pulled the trunk along the floor and then up the stairs one step at a time - clump, clump, clump. At the top I was a little scared to look, but it was our floor finally. I knew it was because there was a fireman's pole outside our door."

"No ladder?"

"No, a pole. I know it led to Victor's apartment though, because he and your mother slide down it while I was there. They told me they were on the way to Mexico City, and they needed to hurry if they wanted to get there in an hour. I shook hands with one and kissed the other – it didn't seem to matter which one - and they were off. I tried to get the trunk through the door, but it was too big to fit. I opened it up and Harry Pepper climbed out, telling me he had installed the telephone like we asked. He disappeared after sliding down the banister, and then I looked inside the trunk and there was a phone beside the bathtub."

"Bathtub? In a trunk?"

"Of course - there's no room for a bathtub in the bathroom. So naturally I got into the tub and took a bath while I talked with the office about how my next case I was going to be paid with twice as many bricks. While I was talking, the lid of the trunk closed, and it turned into a coffin. I wasn't too happy about that, and I was just trying to push on the lid to open it when I woke up."

"Well, you're safe now."

"That's right, perfectly safe. If anyone wants to rob the place, they'll probably have a coronary just getting to climb up to the front door. I don't know what time it is, but I have to call in sick; there's no way I'm going to make it in today."

"I already did. They said get better and come in tomorrow when you feel less under the weather. Just do something for me?"

Paul looked into her eyes. "Does it involve freezing any body parts?"

"No, just the opposite. I want you to be Paul Bratter, stuffed shirt attorney and dependable husband. That's the man I married; you are definitely NOT the barefoot in the park type."

"Not even summer?"

Corie thought about that for a moment. "Nope - I still see you wearing shoes."

"Yeah - but I can cut loose and wear tennis shoes."

She snuggled up against him. "That sounds about right."

The End


A/N: One of the filmed Neil Simon plays, a running gag in the film was the lack of elevator service when living on the top floor of an apartment building in Greenwich village in a VERY small apartment. The end of the movie left Paul Bratter hung over and with a cold and potential pneumonia - I thought I'd just bring the story up to the next morning.