We bundled the blanket back into its plastic pouch and cached it, and pulled on clothes, while rain began to fall in torrents. My jogging shoes were clearly goners. I didn’t bother to put on the bra, rolling it up on the run and sticking it inside my waistband. We floundered out of the trees in a furious commotion of wind and crackle-WHAM of lightning, and dashed in opposite directions for our parked cars. It took me fully fifteen minutes to reach mine, and twenty more to pedal home by roads several centimeters deep in rain, with the heater going full blast, and another half hour to take a hot shower and brew some tea. Then, wrapped in a bathrobe, I carried the tea tray and Jane Goodall’s classic study In the Shadow of Man into the living room, and reread for the dozenth time the passages on the social importance of physical contact among wild chimpanzees.
Over and over, as I sat there, I relived the instant of Sally’s instinctive quasi embrace in the storm, and each time it stopped my breath. What must Sally herself be feeling then? What terrifying conflict of needs? She must realize, just as I did, that a torrent had begun to build that would sweep her carefully constructed defenses away, that she could not stop it now, that she must flee or be changed by what would follow.
When I thought of change, it was as something about to happen to Sally, though change was moving just as inexorably down upon me. Three or four times in my life, I’ve experienced that sense of courting change, of choosing my life from moment to moment, the awareness of process and passage that exalted me that evening but never before or since with such intensity. I alone had brought us to this, slowly, over months of time, as the delicate canoe is portaged and paddled to where the white water begins. Day by day we had picked up speed; now the stream was hurtling us forward together; now, with all our skill and nerve and strength, we would ride the current—we would shoot through. There is a word for this vivid awareness: existential.
If I feared then, it was that Sally might hurl herself out of the canoe.
The next day but one was not a regular coaching day, but the pitch of nervous excitement made desk work impossible. I drove to the park in midafternoon to jog, and afterward decided, in preference to more disciplined routines, to practice my Traveling-from-Tree-to-Tree. My speed and style at this—that of a very elderly, very arthritic ape—was still not half bad (I thought) for a human female pushing forty, though proper brachiation still lay well beyond my powers. The run, as usual, had settled me down. The creek, still aboil with muddy runoff from the storm, was racketing along through a breezy, beautiful day. I chose an ash with a low fork, stuffed my clothes into my fanny pack, buckled it on, and started to climb.
I hadn’t expected to find Sally at the training tree, but saw her without surprise—seated below me, crosslegged on the grubby blanket—when, an hour later, I had made my way that far. She stood up slowly while I descended the familiar pattern of limbs and dropped from the bottommost one. Again without surprise I saw that she looked awful, shaky and sick, that assurance had deserted her—and understood then that whatever happened now would not surprise me, that I was ready and would be equal to it. While I stood before Sally, breathing hard, unfastening the buckle, the world arranged itself into a patterned whole.
Then, as I let the pack fall, Sally crouched low on the blanket, whimpering and twisting with distress. I knelt at once and gathered her into my arms, holding her firmly, all of her skin close against all of mine. She clutched at me, pressed her face into my neck. Baffled moaning sounds and sobs came out of her. She moved inside this embrace; still moaning, eyes squeezed shut, her blind face searched until she had taken the nipple and end of my left breast into her mouth. As she sucked and mouthed at this, with her whole face pushed into the breast, her body gradually unknotted, relaxed, curled about mine, so I could loosen my hold to stroke her with the hand not suporting her head. Soon, to relieve the strain of the position, I pressed the fanny pack—I could just reach it—into service as a pillow and lay down on my side, still cradling Sally’s head.
Time passed, or stopped. The nipple began to be sore.
At last, seemingly drained, she rolled away onto her back. Her face was smeared with mucus and tears; I worked my shirt out of the pack one-handed and dried it. At once she rolled back again, pushing herself against me with a long, groaning sigh. “The past couple of nights, God, I’ve had all sorts of dreams. Not bad dreams, not exactly, but—there was this old female in the troop, maybe her baby died, it must have done … I’d completely forgotten this. This must have been when they first found me. she found me, I think … I think I’d been alone in the forest without food long enough to be utterly petrified and apathetic with terror. But when she found me … I remember she held me against her chest and shoved the nipple in—maybe just to relieve her discomfort, or to replace her own child with a substitute, who knows. I think I would certainly have died except for that milk, there was such all-encompassing fear and misery. I don’t know how many weeks or months she let me nurse. She couldn’t have lived very long, though.”
Sally weighed my breast in her hand. “Last night I dreamed I was in some terrible place, so frightened I couldn’t move or open my eyes, and somebody … picked me up and held me, and then I was suckling milk from a sort of teat, and felt, oh, ever so much better, a great flood of relief. Then I opened my eyes and saw we were in the bush—I recognized the actual place—but it was you, the person holding me was you! You had a flat chest with big rubbery chimpanzee nipples”—lifting the tender breast on her palm—“and a sort of chimp face, but you were only skin all over, and I realized it was you.”
I put my hand firmly over hers, moved it down along her forearm. “How did you feel when you knew it was me?”
“Uncomfortable. Confused. Angry.” Then reluctantly: “Happy, too. I woke up, though, and then mostly felt just astonished to remember that that old wet nurse had saved my life and I’d not given her a single thought for twenty-five years.” She lay quiet under my caressing: neck, breasts, stomach, flank; her eyes closed again. “What’s queer is that I should remember now, but not when Carol first took charge of me, and not when I first read Tarzan, even though the Tarzan story’s nearly the same as mine. I don’t understand why now and not then.”
“Do you feel you need to? I mean, does it seem important to understand?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded exhausted. “I certainly don’t feel like even trying to sort it all out now.”
“Well. It’ll probably sort itself out soon enough, provided you don’t start avoiding whatever makes these disturbing memories come back.”
Sally opened her eyes and smiled thinly. “Start avoiding you, you mean. No. I shan’t, never fear.” She snuggled closer, widening and tilting herself; in my “therapist” frame of mind, I tried to resist this, but my hand—stroking on automatic for so long—slid downward at once on its own, and I ceased at the same instant to ignore a response I’d been blocking without realizing it for a good long while. I was still lying on my side, facing Sally; my top knee shifted without permission, and seconds later another afternoon had culminated in a POW that made my ears ring.
I was destined to know very well indeed the complicated space between Sally’s muscular thighs, far better than I would ever know the complicated space inside her head, but that first swift unforeseen climax had a power I still recall with astonishment. My sex life, though quite varied, had all been passed in the company of men. I’d never objected to homosexuality in any of its forms, on principle and by professional conviction, but before that day no occasion of proving this personally had happened to occur. As for Sally, her isolation had allowed for no sex life at all with humans male or female; and though the things we did together meant, if possible, even more to her than they did to me, she didn’t really view them in a sexual light. To Sally’s way of thinking, sex was a thing that happened more or less constantly during several days each month, and had to do with dark, shaggy, undeniable maleness forcing itself upon you—with brief, rough gusto—from behind. She
continued to miss this fear-laced excitement just as before. Our physical involvement, which was regularly reinforced, and which often ended as it had that afternoon, was a source of immeasurable pleasure and solace to her, but she viewed it as the natural end of a process that had more to do with social grooming than with sex.
But for me it was a revelation, and late in August, when the coarse, caterpillar-chewed foliage hung dispiritedly day after day in the torpid air, I went away for a week to remind myself of what ordinary sex was like with an ordinary man. Afterward I returned to Sally having arrived at a more accurate view of the contrast: not as pudendum versus penis, but as the mythic versus the mundane. Sleeping with my comfy old flame had been enjoyable as ever, but he was no wild thing living a split life and sharing the secret half with me alone.
“Are you in love with somebody?” Bill asked me on our last evening together. “Is that what’s up with you? It’s got to have something to do with your being in this incredible physical shape—wait! don’t tell me! you’ve conceived a fatal passion for a jock!” I laughed and promised to let him in on the secret when I could, and though his eyes were sharp with curiosity, he didn’t press the point. And for that, when the time came, Bill was one of half a dozen friends I finally did tell about Sally.
But even then, after it could no longer matter materially, I was unable to answer his question. Was I in love with Sally, or she with me? No. Or yes. For more than a year, I worked hard to link her with the human community, she to school me for a role in a childhood fantasy of irresistible (and doubtless neurotic) appeal. Each of us was surely fated to love what the other symbolized; how could we help it? But I’ve wondered since whether I was ever able to see Sally as anything but the Chimp Child, first and last. For each of us, you see, there was only one. In such a case, how can individual be told from type, how can the love be personal? And when not personal, what does “love” mean, anyway?
Whatever it was or meant, it absorbed us, and I was as happy that summer as ever in my life. As the season waned and the fall semester began, my skills and plans both moved forward obedient to my will. After workouts we would spread the blanket on its plastic ground sheet and ourselves across the blanket, giving our senses up to luxuriant pleasure, while the yellow leaves tapped down about us, all but inaudibly.
And afterward we’d talk. It was at this stage that bit by bit I was able to breach Sally’s quarantine by turning the talk to our work: her research, my theoretical interests, gifted or maddening students, departmental politics, university policy. Even then, when I encountered Sally on campus, her indifference toward me as toward everyone appeared unchanged; and at first these topics annoyed and bored her. But bit by bit I could see her begin to take an interest in the personalities we worked among, form judgments about them, distinguish among her students. To my intense delight, colorful chimp personalities began to swim up from her memory, with anecdotes to illustrate them, and she spoke often of Carol Cheswick, and—less frequently—of the team of psychologists at University College.
Cambridge provided no material of this sort, for by the time the church fellowship had sent her up, Cheswick was dead and Sally left to devise ways of coping on her own with the nosy public while protecting her privacy and the purposes it served. Antisocial behavior had proved an effective means to that end at Cambridge, as it was to do subsequently at our own university. She had concentrated fiercely on her studies. In subjects that required an intuitive understanding of people—literature, history, the social sciences—her schoolwork had always been lackluster; in mathematics and hard science, she had excelled from the first. At Cambridge she read biology. Microbiology genuinely fascinated her; now, thus late in her career, Sally was discovering the pleasures of explaining an ongoing experiment to a listener only just able to follow. In fact, she was discovering gossip and shop talk.
By the time cold temperatures and bare trees had forced me to join a fitness center and Sally to work out alone in a thermal skinsuit and thin pigskin gloves and moccasins, she was able to say: “I remember that old mother chimpanzee because she saved me out of a killing despair, and so did you. So did you, Jan. That day you discovered me crying in the beech, remember? I actually believed I was coping rather well then, but the truth is I was dying. I might really have died, I think—like a houseplant, slowly, of heat and dryness and depleted soil.” And to me as well, this seemed no more than the simple truth.
That winter, one measure of our progress was that I could sometimes coax Sally to my house. Had close friends of mine been living nearby, or friendly neighbors or relatives, this could not have been possible; as it was she would leave her pedalcar several blocks away and walk to the house by varying routes, and nearly always after dark. But once inside, with doors locked and curtains drawn, we could be easy, eat and read, light a fire to sit before, snuggle in bed together. In winter, outdoor sex was impractical and we could never feel entirely safe from observation in the denuded woods, whose riding trails wound through and through it. And Sally’s obsessive concealment of the fact that she had made a friend, and that her privacy could therefore be trespassed upon, seemed to weaken very little despite the radical changes she had passed through.
Truly, I found myself in no hurry to weaken it. I could not expect, nor did I wish, to have Sally to myself forever. Indeed my success would be measured by how much more fully she could learn to function in society—develop other friendships and activities and so on—eventually. It is true that I could not quite picture this, though I went on working toward it in perfect confidence that the day would come. Yet for the time being, like a mother who watches her child grow tall with mingled pride and sorrow, I kept our secret willingly and thought eventually would be here soon enough.
* * *
As spring drew closer, Sally began sleeping badly and to be troubled again by dreams. She grew oddly moody also. All through the winter she had dressed and slipped out to her car in the dark; now I would sometimes wake in the morning to find her still beside me. Several times her mutterings and thrashings disturbed me in the night, and then I would soothe and hold her till we both dozed off again. That a crisis was brewing looked certain, but though the dreams continued for weeks, she soon stopped telling me anything about them and said little else to reveal the nature of her distress. In fact, I believed I knew what the trouble was. The first dreams, those she had described, were all about Africa and England and seemed drenched in yearning for things unutterably dear, lost beyond recall. They seemed dreams of mourning—for her parents, her lost wild life in Tanzania, her teacher. Events of the past year, I thought, had rendered the old defenses useless. She could not escape this confrontation any longer.
I was very glad. Beyond the ordeal of grief lay every possibility for synthesizing the halves of her life into one coherent human whole. I believed that Cheswick’s death in Sally’s twenty-third year had threatened to touch off a mourning for all these losses at once, and that to avoid this she had metamorphosed into the Cambridge undergraduate of my scrapbook; intellectual, unsociable, dull. “You’re a survivor,” I had told her one night that winter, and she had replied, “Up to a point.” Now it seemed she felt strong enough at last to do the grieving and survive that, and break through to a more complete sort of health and strength.
Either that, or the year’s developments had weakened her ability to compensate, and she would now be swiftly destroyed by the forces held so long in check; but I thought not.
Weeks passed while Sally brooded and sulked; our partnership, so long a source of happy relief, had acquired ambiguities she found barely tolerable. Once she did avoid me for nine days despite her promise—only to turn up, in a state of feverish lust, for a session as unlike our lazy summertime trysts as possible. Afterward she was heavy and silent, then abruptly tearful. I bore with all this patiently enough, chiefly by trying to foresee what might happen next and what it might mean, and so was not much surprised when she said finally, “I’ve decided not to teach this summer
after all. I want to go to England for a month or so, after I’ve got the experiment written up.”
I nodded, thinking, Here it is. Huge green skunk cabbages were thick now in the low places on the floor of the April woods, and fly fisherfolk thick along and in the creek; once again we had the mild, bare, windy, hairy-looking forest to ourselves, and were perched together high in a white-topped sycamore hung with balls. “Sounds like a good plan, though I’ll miss you. Where to, exactly, or have you decided yet?”
“Well—London for a start, and Cambridge, and here and there. I might just pop in on my sister, not that there’s much point to that.” Sally’s sister Helen had married the vicar of a large church in Liverpool and produced four children. “But about missing me. You like England, you’re always telling me. Why not come along?”
“Really?” I hadn’t foreseen everything, it seemed. “Of course I’ll come, I’d love to. Or no, wait a minute”—squirming round on the smooth limb to watch her face—“have you thought this through? I mean, suppose the papers get wind of it? ‘Chimp Child Returns to Foster Country.’ Or even: ‘Chimp Child, Friend, Visit England.’ If we’re traveling together, people are bound to see us together—sure you want to risk it?”
“Oh well, so what,” said the Chimp Child, for all the world as if she hadn’t been creeping up to my house under cover of night all winter long. “I want to talk to the blokes at the university, Snyder and Brill and a couple of others—get them to show me the files on me.” She swung free of the branch and dangled by one hand to hug me with the opposite arm. “Sorry I’ve been such a bore lately. There’s something I’m suddenly madly curious about, I’ve had the most appalling dreams, night after night, for weeks.” She swung higher in the tree, climbing swiftly by her powerful arms alone, flashing across gaps as she worked her way to the high outermost branches and leapt outward and downward into another tree with the action I loved to see. “Right,” she called back across the gulf between us, “get to work then, you lazy swine. We’ll put on a show for Helen’s kids that’ll stop traffic all over the ruddy parish.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 75
