A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  Sonia looked at Loren almost ruefully. “I’m afraid you’re in for it now,” she said. “The end of my carefully cultivated intellectual image.”

  “I would love to see.”

  “Come along then while I change. You can see my room too.”

  She took his hand and led him downstairs where the bedrooms were. Her room was so feminine that he felt almost wrong to be in it, as though he had walked by mistake into a Ladies’ Room. She smiled at his reaction. “When people who have traveled all their lives finally settle, they really do. I always dreamed of having a bedroom of my own. And by the time I did, I had been furnishing it in my mind for years.” She ran her hand over the lace counterpane. Then she knelt down beside the bed to open a drawer in its base.

  Sonia rose with an armful of clothes. Loren could feel his cheeks coloring. Then she took him by the shoulders and turned him toward the wall. He listened to the sound of her undressing. The sounds seemed magnified. He thought he could detect the specific sound of her sweater passing over her blouse as she lifted it off, of her fingernails against the buttons of her blouse. He was blushing still. His inexperience was total: He had never been in the presence of a woman undressing. He focused his eyes dreamily on the bookshelf in front of him on a framed black and white photo of the child Sonia in a first communion dress. Next to the photo was a handbook of integrals and a tensor calculus text. When Sonia turned him around again, she was dressed all in black, black tights and close fitting jersey top with a black warmup jacket over it.

  Back in the living room he noticed for the first time that there was a high bar between the two beams overhead. Matthew was standing under the bar; he crossed his hands at the wrist and held them out to Sonia. She crossed her own and gripped his two hands. With no sound and no apparent effort, she somersaulted forward and swung herself upside down so that her feet were pointing straight into the air, an elegantly executed handstand on the platform of his two hands. Her back was a perfect arc, her legs together, her arms straight and un-quivering. Matthew lowered her slightly and then with a quick motion tossed her into the air. Sonia came to rest in a seated position on the bar. She was smiling shyly at Loren.

  “It’s all yours, Darling,” Matthew said. “Show him.”

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “No, just you.”

  “Daddy, Loren is quite the nicest young man I have met on this campus and you’re going to have me frighten him away.”

  “If he’s frightened away by the sight of a perfect, healthy young female body in action, well we won’t miss him.”

  Sonia took off the jacket and folded it over the end of the bar. Then she began to perform. For the minute and a half he watched her, Loren had to keep telling himself to close his mouth. After a few turns, things that Loren simply could not imagine himself doing, she vaulted off the bar in a perfect turn and came to rest in front of him.

  “Hooray,” he said, clapping his hands. “I never would have guessed. Never. More magic.”

  “No, not magic. It’s only practice, a lifetime of practice.” She was warm but not even breathing hard. Loren’s heart was pounding.

  The rest of the visit was a haze. They drank something and ate something and listened to Matthew and Margaret’s tales of days gone by. When he left, Sonia accompanied him outside onto the porch and kissed him sweetly. Then she went back in to visit some more with her parents. Loren looked around, wondering which way to go.

  The period from his arrival the previous spring until their first kiss had been a time of great happiness. And since then? It was something more. He thumbed through his dictionary and found the word bliss. He would have to ask Sonia how to use the word without sounding too sentimental. “I feel bliss”? It didn’t matter how it sounded because he was too sentimental, certainly blissful. There was a line from a poem by Antonio Machado that he had memorized years ago, knowing that one day it would come true for him. He recited it for her solemnly.

  “Tu eres mi sed y mi agua. You are both my thirst and my drink.”

  “And you are mine,” she said.

  Almost every night near midnight they would climb the stairs together at Clark Hall to do battle with the two projects. For the hours until breakfast, they would become immersed in their work and not think very much of being in love. Their eyes would meet from time to time and they would share a secret smile. But the work was as narcotic as ever. They would eat breakfast in the morning with Homer and Edward and sometimes Claymore. Then each would go home for a few hours of sleep. The afternoons and evenings they spent together.

  There were glorious times skating on Lake Beebe. Loren had never before skated on ice. They played pickup hockey with a group of students, both male and female. Sonia was a superb athlete, she could do anything well. So she was a wonderful skater. She could slide past a defender, making the poor fellow look like he was trying to remember where his feet were. As she cut toward the goal with her dark eyes flashing, a little voice inside Loren would be screaming, Yes Yes Yes. When they were alone on the ice, they would dance in each others arms.

  In the late afternoons they would go back to Sonia’s cottage for a bite to eat and usually a nap together on her bed. Just before their early evening nap was their most intimate time. It was in some ways the only troubling time of the day. He would not have traded those minutes for anything, but they were only minutes at a time. They would always end the same way: Sonia would simply stop. She would sit up, smiling, usually a bit distracted, and it was over. She was done. Or she would turn him over to face away from her, wrap herself around his back and go to sleep, leaving him wide awake and wondering if this was the way things were supposed to be.

  In an era of permissiveness and sexual liberation, they were both virgins. He thought they might well be the only two virgins left on the campus. She would stop herself, but not because she didn’t want to go on. He could feel that she did. Their lovemaking had just not yet come to its conclusion. He tried to persuade himself that there was no hurry. If some of the act was for the moment forbidden to them, she still managed to be the most generous lover he could imagine. She seemed always to be giving herself to him, only the giving was never quite done. She led his hands over her body, pressing up into them. She would let him unbutton her blouse, though she sometimes made him pause between the buttons, savoring the slowness of the pace she held them to. He could undo all of her buttons and untuck her blouse from her waistband all around. She would hold his head against her as he kissed the upper part of her bosom and moved his fingers over the slick fabric to feel her hardening under his caress. But then it would be over again. She would kiss him differently, fondly, but without the hunger, and that would be the signal. In a few minutes she would sit up and begin to pull herself together.

  One time he had reached for the light as she lay resting, with her blouse open. “Wait Loren,” she said, annoyed, and sat up, covering herself.

  “But it’s only your underwear I would see, Sonia, only your…” He couldn’t think of the word.

  “But I’m shy.”

  “Sonia. I know about these things. I mean, I have sisters.”

  “Liar. Your sisters sound like very sensible girls. I don’t doubt they are as modest as I am.”

  She was right about that, of course: His sisters were all terribly proper. But still, it didn’t make very much sense to him. He felt he had slipped back into a different age where chastity and modesty and decorum had renewed life, back into a Victorian time. Sonia was struggling against her own sexuality. She was losing, but it was going to take a while, perhaps a long while.

  It was as if she were blocked. Now, he thought, she is looking to me to help her along, it is time for me to be forceful, just a little bit. But he knew it wasn’t so. On one day he would tell himself, There is no hurry, and on the next he would be wondering again if he should press. He kept thinking back to the only advice anyone had ever offered him on the subject, the words of his oldest sister, Asunción.


  It had been on the morning of his 15th birthday. In Spain, the age of 15 marks the change from boy to man. At breakfast that morning, each of the girls had given him a hug and each one had called him a ‘young man.’ Even little Ana-Lucia said very formally, “Our brother is a young man now.” After the meal, Asunción shoo’ed the others out and sat down with Loren at the kitchen table. It was a rare day that she was there so early instead of breakfasting with her own husband and two small kids. She took his hands in hers and then blushed.

  “We have to talk, my young man. And you know what we have to talk about.”

  “Yes.” He knew because of the blush. There were embarrassing things that he needed to be told. As their parents were both gone, it would be Asunción’s task to tell him. She had raised him, almost as her own child.

  “You know all of the mechanical things from your book.”

  “Yes.”

  “What you don’t know is how to think about these things. How to be true to yourself and true to those who love you, and still not to withdraw from what is so important in life. This you need to know.”

  “You will tell me, Asunción.”

  “I am going to tell you what I feel in my heart of hearts, about young men and young women. It’s going to be hard for me to tell you this because I am a woman, not so much older than yourself, only nine years. It will be hard for you too. But hardest of all will be to follow my advice.”

  “Tell me.”

  What his sister explained through her embarrassment was that slowness was everything. No matter how urgent his needs, they counted for nothing. What he would want to do in minutes had to be stretched out over months. When he was 100 years old, she assured him, he would look back over those months and wish he had stretched them into years. Even though the one you love is ready, she said, you must go slower still, slower even than she wants to. Slow, slow, hold her back. You have to be a tease, Loren, she said. And the closer you get, the slower you go. No matter what she says. So that when you finally come to the end, you have grown up together. That is how it has to be at the beginning of a life-long love.

  But would Asunción have said the same thing had she known Sonia?

  One spring afternoon he found a note on Sonia’s door saying that she’d be back in a few hours, she had some errands to run. Loren found himself at loose ends. He stopped at the Duryeas’ house to lure Matthew out for a walk. They wandered back toward the campus, finally ending up on a sunny bench on Library Slope.

  “Help me understand better, Matthew, how her mind works. Do you think, for instance, that religion is important to her?”

  “Well, I really don’t know, Loren. Perhaps it is. She doesn’t talk very much about it. As a child she went through phases, I guess like all kids.”

  “But you must know. Was it important to you and Margaret? I mean, didn’t she get whatever beliefs she has from the two of you?”

  Matthew looked uncomfortable. He stared down at his hands, clasped in his lap. “I don’t know whether you know this Loren, but Sonia is adopted.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Oh. Well, the adoption agency insisted she have a religion. They would have let us bring her up in our own faith if we’d had one. But we were never very inclined toward such things. No religion at all was not an acceptable option to them. They made us agree, as a condition of the adoption, to provide a religious orientation.”

  “But which religion?”

  “Well, they picked one. They assigned it to her. We didn’t have anything to say about it, really. She could have been assigned to be anything.”

  “That was how it happened?”

  “Luck of the draw. From the child’s point of view, of course, it’s always luck of the draw. Anyway we had to sign papers agreeing to her religious education. Then we just did what we had agreed to. We would drop her off at church on Sunday morning and pick her up after it was over. The nuns would come to us at various times and say she had to pass through some class or rite, and we would do our best to comply. I never quite figured out what it was all about. It was just an enigma to us.”

  It was an enigma to Loren too. Wait a year, he thought, a year to make love to this almost perfect woman is not too much. It was inevitable, so why worry if it took its own sweet time? Sometimes she would moan in his arms, her hunger greater than ever. She would crawl on top of him to press her body down on his. He would think, this time she will give in to herself and begin to lead us where we both long to go. But she would find the resolve somewhere within her to sit up and begin to dress herself, her hands unsteady.

  “Wait for me Loren. Wait for me. When the time is right we can make lovely love together.”

  “I will wait, Sonia. I will wait until you are ready.”

  Sonia in the afternoons and evenings. Then work through the nights. Sleep when it fit. Homer applied no pressure at all to the team, but there was pressure still. They knew that other groups were working on Peculiar Motion, as a result of Homer’s paper, published a year ago in Science. It would have been better, Homer sometimes ventured, to have kept his silence until it was all clear. But he had been in a hurry to publish the first speculations. He had wanted the other universities to look into the idea because it was too important to hush up. But now they all felt the pressure of the competition. Princeton or Berkeley or M.I.T. or even Johns Hopkins could beat them to the final result.

  The Simula-7 study was causing pressure too. Homer was reluctant to stop work on the project in spite of the implicit urging of the client. The Honduras incident had persuaded him that there were factions in the administration that saw the present US power advantage as a rare opportunity to act decisively. The Simula-7 scenarios might be the only thing that kept the adventurists from blundering into trouble: “We have to keep sending in the scenarios, so that none of them happen,” he told them.

  With the pressure and the strange hours, they were all falling behind on sleep. Loren would sometimes lose an entire day at a time when his body claimed priority and caught up. He would wake up on Sonia’s bed as she was coming in in the morning, or he would sleep through the day in his own bed and then through most of the night and miss his time with Sonia as well as much of a night’s work. The little tasks of a normal life, shopping and haircuts and laundry were neglected.

  On one rare weekend, there was a night, a whole night, slated for sleep alone in his own bed. What a luxury: To turn in in the evening after a normal meal, fresh linen and fresh pajamas, darkness outside the window. Just to sleep and then to wake up in the morning like anyone else. He pulled the covers up to his chin, listened to the outside sounds: steps on the pavement, murmurs of passers-by. There was the humming of a breeze in the power lines overhead. All the sounds were of the night. His own sleeping sounds would be part of the harmony. He would sleep the whole night through.

  Immersed in empty darkness, floating on the edge of sleep. Wordless thoughts, sentences terminated in dots…. Sonia was beside him now in the night. How was it that she was here? She almost never came to his apartment, but she was here now. She was speaking. He listened to her voice but not to the words, he was so sleepy. She chattered on gaily. Only the tone came through the fog. The whole world was asleep and Sonia was being silly and girlish, giggling over something, but what? He sat up in his bed. She was seated at the foot, gesturing in animation. Her lips were moving, but no meaning came to him. He could see her clearly, she was bubbling with enthusiasm. She had on a cream-colored satin dress that shone in the half light. He was naked under the sheet, and erect. He had had pajamas on but they were gone now. The form of his body was clearly visible under the sheet. He lifted one knee to conceal himself from her, tried to hide his nakedness.

  They were interacting, he in the bed and Sonia seated across from him. Through a subterfuge, he had made her believe that he was someone else, a woman. It was a trick to learn what she would say, only to another woman. He had to smile at his own cleverness. She was utterly fooled. She spoke as women spea
k to women, the tone gave her away. Then suddenly, she was on her feet undressing. She lifted her dress over her head in a smooth motion and stood proudly in her slip. It had a laced bodice like a nightgown which she was now undoing. “I must show you my bra,” she said. “It is my prettiest one.” She opened the front of her bodice to show him the lacy white garment with pink ribbon around the edges. She had no idea who he really was. The trick was working, he thought, almost giggling. She advanced toward him into the light, twirling for him to see. “And there are these to match,” she said and cast the slip aside. She began to turn in front of him, to show him everything, twirling, twirling, white lace and pink ribbon edges. Then she was standing by his side in her underpants, smiling, Sonia, who was so modest. He began to feel guilty for his trick. He should tell her that it was he, but she would be hurt and angry. “I’m going to take them all off,” she said.

  She looked directly at him, suddenly seeing through his disguise. Her mouth formed an O of surprise. But she was indulgent, not angry. And then smiling, she said, “Now, Loren, now. This is what we have been waiting for, this moment when all is allowed.” She was unfastening her bra at a bow in front, pulling back its separated parts to the two sides for him to see. The outline of the fabric was still visible although she had taken it off. Inside the outline were not her breasts, but simply nothing, he could see directly through her body in that uncovered part. He could see the pattern of the drapes behind her. She stepped out of her underpants and there too the outline remained, the line across her waist and across each thigh, and behind the uncovered area, nothing. She opened the bed and lowered herself slowly onto him. Her whole body was on him now, warm and wet and shaking. “Now Loren! Nothing more is forbidden. Nothing.” She closed her lips over his. He could not speak and she could not speak.

  But someone was speaking.

  At first it was just the drone of a familiar voice. It was a discourse that was more than half over: “…not what you would expect. But instead an alternate kind of place. Just imagine,” the voice said, “just imagine a universe like our own in every way except one.” A low chuckle.