No, it was the timing of the trip that gave her this terrible hollow-stomach feeling.
He had forgotten.
How could he forget? Next Monday, the eighteenth of July, 1999, was not only her forty-fifth birthday, but their twentieth anniversary.
To be sure, he had been busier this last year, since the news of his brain-stem matching process had become public knowledge, than ever before in their lives. His grasp on minutiae had begun to slip; he tended to be absentminded at times now. Nonetheless, he should have remembered.
She finished her caff and looked at his going-away present. As was their custom when he went on a trip, they had given each other erotic videotapes; “a little something to keep you company,” was the ritual phrase. The one she had given him was a homemade job, featuring her in a nurse’s uniform (at least at the outset), since she knew that nurses figured prominently in his fantasy life. Paul and Ruby had made a few erotic tapes together—most couples did nowadays—but somehow, from a vestige of old-fashioned shyness, perhaps, she had never made a solo tape for him until now. She had intended it for an anniversary present, one of several she had hidden away, and she resented a little not getting to see his reactions as he premiered it. But there had been no time to slip out to the store and pick up something else before his semiballistic had lifted for Zurich.
In fact, she had secretly hoped that he would express surprise at her having a present on hand for an unexpected trip, thereby forcing her to explain. But he truly was getting absentminded, for he had simply thanked her for the gift and put it into his luggage.
She unwrapped his gift now. It was a thoughtful selection; from the still on the box-cover she could see that it starred an actress she liked, a woman who had the same general build, coloration, and hairstyle as Ruby, and generally seemed to share an interest in multiple partners. She would probably enjoy the tape—would probably have enjoyed it, rather, if it had been given to her on July eighteenth. Somehow that made it worse.
She tossed the tape into the back of a drawer, poured more caff, and went into her office to forget her resentment in work. Working on a novel always cheered her when she was down; her characters’ problems always seemed so much more immediate and urgent than her own.
He’ll remember, she thought just before sinking entirely into the warm glow of creation. Sometime between now and next Monday he’ll see a calendar, or something will jog his memory, and boy will he be contrite when he calls! Why, he might even cancel and come right home.
But he did not call that night, or Friday night, or Saturday night, and by Sunday she had stopped believing that he would.
So she thought of calling him. But if she told him, reminded him of the date, she would spoil his trip. And if she didn’t, she would hurt even more when she hung up. Besides, to contact Paul she would have to go through Sam Hamill, and if she called Sam he would want to come over and chat—Sam was a lonely divorcé—and a wise instinct told her not to spend time with a single man, about whom she had frequently fantasized, at a time when she was mad as hell at her absent husband. It was wisdom of the kind that had kept Paul and Ruby’s marriage alive for twenty years.
So she took refuge in logic. My husband is a good and kind and considerate man who has dedicated himself to making me happy since 1979. He is as good and as successful in his profession as I am in mine. He is trustworthy and responsible. He is a gifted lover and a valued friend, and surely I cannot be so irrational as to stack up against all that something as trivial as a single memory-lapse, and I’m going to kill the son of a bitch if he hasn’t called me in ten seconds, I swear I will.
Unfortunately, she finished her novel that afternoon.
Late that night she selected one of her favorite tapes, an “old reliable” that starred the actress who vaguely resembled her, and popped it into the deck. But halfway to her orgasm the tape reminded her of Paul’s going-away gift, which reminded her of her gift to him and the warm glow in which it had been recorded, the happy expectation of sharing it with him on their anniversary. Suddenly, and for Ruby unusually, orgasm was unattainable. Shortly she gave up, popped the tape, and cried herself to sleep.
And of course the next day was Monday. She woke sad and stiff and horny in equal proportions, and her house had never seemed emptier. Three times before lunch she was strongly tempted to call him, once coming so close as to put on make-up preparatory to getting his number from Sam. But she could not. She thought of rereading the new book to see if it was any good, but knew she should give it a week to seep out of her short-term memory before tackling it. At four in the afternoon the phone rang and she ran the length of the house…to find that the call was from their son Tom in Luna City. He wanted to wish them both a happy anniversary and her a happy birthday, and he expressed great tactless surprise that Paul was away from home on this day of days. She loved Tom dearly, but he was no diplomat, and although she kept a cheerful mien through the conversation, she hung up in black depression. It had occurred to her briefly to have Tom call Paul, but it was not fair to involve the boy, and besides, he could not really afford a second interplanetary call. But an opportunity just out of reach is even worse than no opportunity at all.
Finally she decided that horniness was churning up her emotions unnecessarily. What she wanted, of course, was Paul, his lips and fingers and penis. She reckoned that the closest available substitute was to masturbate to the new tape he had given her. But her subconscious recalled her failure of the night before; she found herself taking the slidewalk to a pharmacy for a tube of Jumpstarts. It was a particularly hot day; the sun baked thoughts and feelings from her brain, and she was grateful to get back indoors again.
Ruby had never taken libido-enhancers in her life before, had never expected to need to. But she was in a go-to-hell mood, she was forty-five and alone on her anniversary, and she was determined to have herself a good time if it killed her. She took two Jumpstarts from the tube and washed them down with vodka. Then she got the new tape and took it into the bedroom, whistling softly. She stripped quickly. As she broke open the seal on the tape box, the drug smacked her, suddenly and hard: the hollow feeling in her stomach moved downward about a third of a meter, and she felt herself smiling a smile that Paul was going to regret having missed. She slid the tape home into the slot, acutely conscious of the sexual metaphor therein, and rummaged in her nighttable for her favorite vibrator, the one that strapped to her pubis and left both hands free. As she finished putting it on, she started to the window to polarize it. But when she was halfway there the TV screen lit up with the tape’s teaser, and she stopped in her tracks. Her first impulse was to laugh—when Paul heard about this, he would just die!—which sparked her second impulse, to burst into tears, but both of these were washed away in an elapsed time of about half a second by her third impulse, which was to switch on the vibrator and jump into bed. No, she corrected just in time, the other way round!
The actor who shared the screen with her doppelganger was an unknown. Not only had she never seen him before, the tape’s producers had not seen fit to use his face on the cover. Paul could not have known. But the resemblance that the star bore to Ruby was nothing compared to the resemblance that this rookie bore to Sam Hamill.
Jumpstart is a time-release drug. It keeps the user on a rising crest of excitement for anywhere from a half hour to an hour before it permits climax. The tape was perhaps twenty minutes along, in the midst of an especially delicious scenario, when Ruby thought she heard a noise outside her bedroom window. She cried out and tore her eyes from the screen, and was not sure whether or not she caught a flicker of a head pulling away from view. At once she put the tape on pause and darkened the screen, her pulse hammering in her ears, and decided she should grab a robe and then phone the police. No, dammit, the other way round! Occasionally the MD plates on the car in the garage attracted a junkie. She shut down the vibrator to hear better.
The front door chimed.
Awash in adrenaline, she grabbed h
er robe, got the family pistol and went to the door. She activated the camera—and this time she did burst out laughing. Standing on her doorstep, looking not in the least like a junkie or a man who had just been peering in a lady’s bedroom window, was Sam.
Either the drug is making me hear things, she decided, or Sam scared him away. She safetied the pistol and put it aside, and activated the door mike. “Hi, Sam. What’s up?”
“Hi, Ruby. Nothing much. Paul asked me to look in on you while he was away.”
He did, did he? she thought, and without thinking about what she was doing she shrugged on the robe and let him in.
She had forgotten what she must look and smell like. As he cleared the door he raised his eyebrows and said, “Oh, I—uh, I hope I’m not…disturbing you.”
She blushed and then recovered. “Not at all, Sam, really. What are you drinking?”
“Anything cold would be wonderful,” he said gratefully. “I’ve been walking for hours. God, it’s hot out there. Look, do you suppose I could use your shower before we get talking?”
“Of course. You know where it is. Wups—half a minute.”
She went quickly to the bedroom, shut the door behind her, popped the tape and put it and its box under the bed. After a second’s hesitation she took off the vibrator and put that under the bed too. Then she adjusted the air unit to sweep the musk from the room, opened the door, and told him to come ahead. She was dimly aware that she was on dangerous ground. But she heard herself say, “I’ll bring you that drink,” as he disappeared into the master bathroom.
She was back with the drink nearly at once. She saw her hand reach for the bathroom doorknob, and forced it to knock instead. “Here’s a knock for you,” she punned, and he reached out for the drink. “Thanks, Ruby.” She glimpsed a third of his bare upper torso and kept her face straight with a great effort until the door had closed again. Then she stood there, wrestling with her thoughts, until she heard the shower start up. The urge to go through that door was nearly overwhelming.
Well, she thought, there’s only one way to defuse this. She went to her bed and stretched out on it. She switched the TV to the movie channel with the sound suppressed. I’m perfectly safe until the water stops, she thought, and when it does I just turn the sound up and pull the robe over me. Between my hair-trigger and this damned drug, there should be plenty of time. Reassured, she parted the robe and began to masturbate furiously. Just a door away, she thought wildly, that’s the closest I’ve been to really cheating since I wrecked my first marriage.
The bathroom door opened and he emerged, dripping wet, the shower still roaring behind him.
They both froze in shock. She could see each individual water droplet on his body with total clarity, could see her tiny reflection in half a hundred of them, dancing with reflected TV light. His hair was still mostly dry. His erection was rampant. There was a mole just below his left ribs. She knew she would never forget the sight of him as long as she lived. “Was there something you wanted?” she heard herself say.
It took him two tries to get his voice working. “I won’t lie to you, Ruby. I was looking for your laundry hamper.”
Her weirdness quotient had been exceeded long since. “My laundry hamper.”
“I was jerking off in the shower, and suddenly I wanted something that smelled like you. I’ve wanted you for a long time, Ruby—you know that.”
His penis twitched with his pulse. It had a different curve than Paul’s. She spread her legs wide, and framed her vagina with her fingers. “Do you think this will smell enough like me, Sam?”
He came to her at once.
In the midst of it all, she momentarily regained enough rationality to be stunned at how good it was. One of the things that had helped her overcome the infrequent temptations of the last twenty years had been the awareness that on a purely physical level, no brief encounter with a stranger could ever be as satisfying as what she got from a husband who had devoted himself to a study of her body, of her likes and dislikes and her unique personal erogenous zones. Why, the logic went, risk all that for a seven-second spasm that was bound to be inferior? As Paul liked to say, familiarity breeds content.
She had failed, she now saw, to allow for the possibility of telepathy. Or rather, for the possibility that telepathy might come to pass between two people who had not spent years working on it. Sam seemed to sense her desires almost before she did, or else miraculously had precisely dovetailing desires of his own. Nor was he catering to her; there was a delicious selfishness in the way he plundered her.
She reveled in the newness of him, glorified in the discovery of hair where she was not accustomed to finding any, of bones and muscles knit together in unfamiliar ways, of an unmistakeably differently shaped penis, a mouth that tasted different. She had always known that variety was sweet, but in the more than two decades since she had foresworn it she had not thought she missed it. Now it enraptured her. And there was an extra fillip to her joy, for she had only had two other Caucasians in her life, and one of those a woman, and the straight hair snarled in her fingers now was a sweet mystery. For the first time in her life she came with her legs up in the air, and clawed deep tracks in his back without knowing it.
When she could see and hear and think again, she realized that he was still in her, still hard, still thrusting. All at once she was horrified at herself and what she had done. It was in her mind to expel him and roll away, to stop short at least of that one final symbolic infidelity, the acceptance of someone else’s sperm. She wanted to do so very much. But she could not do it to Sam—poor, dear Sam, who had not asked to be involved in her problems, and had gone too far to stop now. She saw that she must, for her honor, do her very best to bring him off, and then send him home and never never never be alone with him again.
Which gave it all a sort of bittersweet poignance that, after a short time, was startlingly erotic—she felt herself being caught up again in the passion she was dutifully trying to fake. His knowing hands caressed her flanks, came up to knead her breasts against his chest, slid up her throat to her hair. Her breath came in noisy gulps, and she knew she was getting close again. His hands left her hair then and curled over both her ears, a split second after he murmured “Give me your tongue,” and automatically she did and as he sucked it hard between his lips and came like gangbusters her eyes opened wide as they could go and looked into his from a distance of a few centimeters. His eyes were sparkling. She clutched at the top of his head and felt where the scalp flap had been resutured, and as his hands came away from her ears and went down to push her legs out straight beneath him she heard him whisper in her open mouth, “Happy Anniversary darling—Sam said to give you his best,” and her heart—there is no other way to say it—came.
RUBBER SOUL
But I don’t believe in this stuff, he thought, enjoying himself hugely. I said I didn’t, weren’t you listening?
He sensed amusement in those around him—Mum, Dad, Stuart, Brian, Mal, and the rest—but not in response to his attempt at irony. It was more like the amusement of a group of elders at a young man about to lose his virginity, amusement at his too-well-understood bravado. It was too benevolent to anger him, but it did succeed in irritating him. He determined to do this thing as well as it had ever been done.
Dead easy, he punned. New and scary and wonderful, that’s what I’m good at. Let’s go!
Then the source of the bright green light came that one increment nearer, and he was transfixed.
Oh!
Time stopped, and he began to understand.
And was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and yanked backwards. Foot of the line for you, my lad! He howled his protest, but the light began to recede; he felt himself moving backwards through the tunnel, slowly at first but with constant acceleration. He clutched at Dad and Mum, but for the second time they slipped through his fingers and were gone. The walls of the tunnel roared past him, the light grew faint, and then all at once he was in interstella
r space, and the light was lost among a million billion other pinpoints. A planet was below him, rushing up fast, a familiar blue-green world.
Bloody hell, he thought. Not again!
Clouds whipped up past him. He was decelerating, somehow without stress. Landscape came up at him, an immense sprawling farm. He was aimed like a bomb at a large three-story house, but he was decelerating so sharply now that he was not afraid. Sure enough, he reached the roof at the speed of a falling leaf—and sank gracefully through the roof, and the attic, finding himself at rest just below the ceiling of a third-floor room.
Given its rural setting, the room could hardly have been more incongruous. It looked like a very good Intensive Care Unit, with a single client. Two doctors garbed in traditional white gathered around the figure on the bed, adjusting wires and tubes, monitoring terminal readouts, moving with controlled haste.
The room was high-ceilinged; he floated about six feet above the body on the bed. He had always been nearsighted. He squinted down, and recognition came with a shock.
Christ! You’re joking! I done that bit.
He began to sink downward. He tried to resist, could not. The shaven skull came closer, enveloped him. He gave up and invested the motor centers, intending to use this unwanted body to kick and punch and scream. Too late he saw the trap: the body was full of morphine. He had time to laugh with genuine appreciation at this last joke on him, and then consciousness faded.
After a measureless time he woke. Nothing hurt; he felt wonderful and lethargic. Nonetheless he knew from experience that he was no longer drugged, at least not heavily. Someone was standing over him, an old man he thought he knew.
By Any Other Name Page 25
