(1961) The Chapman Report

by Irving Wallace

  and the indecency of it, she opened her eyes and forced her mind to check and repress this unseemly reaction.

  She tried objectively to see herself, to see this act of sexual intercourse. Always, before, she had thought Constance Ghatterley’s melting beneath the ardor of the mustached gamekeeper an absurdity of fiction. How could any one man release a woman from bondage to her inhibited past? And by means such as this?

  And yet, now, clinging to her lover, the old doubt seemed less certain. Objectivity seemed to slide away. Because now, now, his love was so full inside her, parting and rending her flesh from its old inertia, heating her skin so recently cold, arousing her limbs with his consummating desire, lifting her passivity to the turmoil and rage of rapture and lust.

  For a frantic moment, as in the old, old way, she tried to keep her identity, her aloof identity, to prevent losing it to the other individuality, prevent absorption into the other flesh. Desperately, she tried to curb the rising excitement and replace it with the habit of safe fondness and esteem. Ridicule this unnatural thing, she told herself, this unoyster thing, mock this ancient coupling, mock the awkwardness of the position, with limbs so ludicrous, mock the act itself, this unaesthetic muscular exhaling and inhaling, see the constricted breathless face above divested of all nobility and friendship-fight it, fight it, reach for the smooth used weapons of retreat and resistance, find them, grip them, fight it, fight it.

  But grope as she would, there were no weapons, and she was helpless and alone with this wild engagement, and she was weak, weak, and all at once she did not care, and was almost happy. For now, more and more, conscious thought and control slipped away from her. Against her broken will, hating what was happening and loving it, she found her enemy body an ally with the one above.

  Gradually, and at last, it was easier not to think than to think. It was easier to feel, and to allow her wandering mind finally to betray her and join her inflamed torso and surrender to the one above. Yet, in defeat there was a special victory, for the conqueror offered her more than she had ever known love to possess, not timid tenderness alone, not mere security, not simply art, but savage, joyous sensuality.

  And suddenly the remote identity was gone and she wished only to be blended into the oneness of him. That instant, fused by passion, she let go of something held so many years-let go her separateness-and joined him without reservation. Crying out, she

  gave herself totally, gasping words she had never spoken aloud, demanding that he take her, take her, remove her from this unendurable rack of pained pleasure.

  Momentarily emerging from the animal agony of suspension, one human fear flashed through her head, and with it her heart seemed to stop. What if there would not be another time like this, and another and another? How could she live a day without this? Without her beloved? What if he had awakened her for this wondrous night only, and then left her a corpse, shattered for an eternity of years? Oh, couldn’t he see? She had come alive. She had crossed the barrier. She was his own. She had loved him before this night, but it had not been her entire life, but now she could not live without him.

  She opened her eyes, meaning to ask him, but found that she had no voice except in her womb, and so with that, wildly, shamelessly, proudly, she told him her need. And he answered in her womb, and then with his lips whispering against her eyelids and parted mouth.

  The past had dissolved, and there was left the present she could trust, and so she abandoned herself fully to carnal love. Thus impaled, champion over pride and fear, she clawed his shoulders, urging him closer, closer, closer, begging for release, caring for nothing but to be emptied of herself and all that had coursed into her loins and had risen dammed to the bursting point.

  “Don’t stop,” she heard herself cry out, “don’t stop-don’t-“

  Pitched to a frenzy by her chant, his love-giving became a ferocity matched by her own primitive love-taking.

  Distantly, she heard him. “Kathleen-“

  And herself. “Yes-oh, yes-“

  Oh, Paul, she groaned.

  And Paul-Paul-Paul—

  Oh, Paul.

  … thank God, Paul forever, forever.

  When she awakened in the night, a vessel so wondrously drained, so peaceful with self and all the world, she was neither startled nor surprised to find her mate asleep beside her. She caressed his consumed naked body with her eyes, and gently she rubbed her neck on his arm heavy with slumber, and blissfully she luxuriated in the gift of an immortality of living years ahead.

  Moonlight had invaded the room, and touched them both, and

  heightened the sense of eternity. Quietly, Kathleen slipped off the bed and padded in nudity through the moonlight, like a goddess that had made her offering and received the ultimate blessing.

  At the window, she parted the drapes slightly arid lifted her gaze to the serene blue sky, observing how the multitude of stars, in crystal clarity, blinked their approval and paraded in celebration. Silently, she thanked them for miraculous life, as once she had on a Christmas Eve in childhood.

  She thought, Old earth, I love you, love you.

  When she returned to the bed, he was waiting. She went into his arms, joyful for their all-pervading intimacy.

  She wanted to tell him about this, and against his chest she spoke, and he kissed her sweetly, and then he spoke. They talked bit by bit like this, softly, surely, occasionally, of what had been and what would be and what they were, and, after a while, they slept again… .

  JUNE had given way to July, and summer to autumn, and with the coming of Christmas, the days in The Briars were short and the nights festive. Winter brought its intermittent rains and winds, and soon it was spring. Now the first yellow warbler came to The Briars, and then the busy finches and the needle-billed hummingbirds beating their wings over cups of gold on the vine, and the Monterey pines wore their green hoods more brightly and the magnolia trees opened their puffs of white, and the dusty gray sightseeing buses appeared in great number again, and in this new and burgeoning springtime, Kathleen Radford gave the bon voyage luncheon for Teresa Hamish. Dr. Jonas had the car pool this mild morning, and Kathleen

  waited at home until he had picked Paul up for the short ride to the clinic before she changed into her best maternity dress. Later, at noon, in the auditorium of the Association, she personally greeted with a smile each of the arriving forty guests. Grace Waterton displayed a post card from Naomi Van Duesen in Michigan. Naomi was leaving the sanitarium soon, to move into the bungalow at Reardon that Horace had bought. Ursula Palmer excitedly announced the opening of her husband’s third branch firm, and proudly passed around a brochure that she had written. Mary McManus, seeming older than when she lived in The Briars, appeared with photographs of her infant son, and was grateful to one and all that they had not forgotten her, though she now had a house in the valley. Bertha Kalish had put on weight, and spoke of Sam Goldsmith’s children as if they were her own, and when someone asked when there would be a wedding, she blushed deeply.

  Once assembled, the women, most of them anyway, began eagerly to discuss the recently published book, A Sex History of the American Married Female.

  Dr. Chapman’s six-hundred-page report had been made public five weeks before, and within two weeks it had replaced James Scoville’s A Man Called Boy at the top of the nation’s nonfiction bestseller lists. On this spring day, coast to coast, Dr. Chapman’s volume led the nonfiction lists of the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Time magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, and Retail Bookseller. In five weeks, it had sold 170,000 copies, and the bookshop in The Village Green had placed its third reorder. Dr. Chapman’s photograph was everywhere, and this morning a Broadway columnist had printed the rumor that Dr. Chapman was forsaking Reardon College for an academy of his own to be financed by the Zollman Foundation, and the Zollman board members had said that they had no comment but that an announcement relative to Dr. Chapman would be shortly forthcoming.

  In the small group of wom
en clustered about Teresa Harnish, all listened sympathetically to Ursula Palmer’s complaint about Dr. Chapman. Ursula had just finished reading Dr. Chapman’s book, and she was objecting now to the graph that reported specifically on twenty-seven high-income suburban communities, each listed by name, and The Briars among them.

  “You’ll find it in the appendix,” Ursula was saying. “He states baldly that in communities like this, and he means ours, too, over twenty-nine per cent of the married women up to thirty-two years

  old are having, or have had, extramarital relationships, and thirty-eight per cent-mind you, thirty-eight per cent-have committed infidelity by the age of forty-five. Now, what do you think of that?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” said Teresa Harnish, “That dreadful book should be classified as fiction, not nonfiction, that’s what I think.”

  And almost everyone in the group solemnly agreed.