Orbit 9

by Edited by Damon Knight

  I got in the tub and soaked for fifteen minutes, then put on pajamas and robe and went down to the basement to check out the program for Mike’s computer. I didn’t hear Janet come in, but when I went up at twelve thirty, she was in the living room waiting for me.

  “I’m really concerned for her,” she said. “I don’t think she ought to be alone. And I don’t think she’s crazy, either.”

  “Okay. Tell.” I headed for the kitchen and she followed. Janet had made coffee and it smelled good. I poured a cup and sat down. “I don’t know if I can or not,” she said. “Christine has a gift of vision that I’m sure no one ever had before. She can see, or sense, the process of growth and change in things.” I knew that I was supposed to register skepticism at that point, and I looked up at her with what I hoped was a prove-it expression. She became defensive. “Well, she can. She’s trying to duplicate it with the camera, but she’s very frustrated and disappointed in the results she’s been able to get so far. She’s got a new technique for developing time-lapse photographs. Whether or not it’s what she is after, it’s really remarkable. She prints a picture on a transparency, and shoots her next one through it, I think. When she prints that on another transparency, it gives the effect of being in layers, with each layer discernible, if you look hard enough. But she claims that for it to be successful, you should be able to see each stage, with all the others a blur, each one coming into focus with the change in attention you give to it. And that’s how she sees.”

  I finished the coffee and got up to pour a second cup, without commenting. Standing at the stove, with my back to her, I said, “I’m willing to believe that she’s some kind of a genius. But, this other thing, the fainting, screams, whatever happened tonight. She needs a doctor.”

  “Yes. I know. I talked her into seeing Dr. Lessing. Lessing will be good to her.” She made a short laughing sound, a snort of quickly killed mirth. “And he’ll tell her to pick up a man somewhere and take him to bed. He thinks that widows and widowers shouldn’t try to break the sex habit cold turkey.” Again the tone of her voice suggested amusement when she added, “Knowing that she’s coming to him through us, he’ll probably recommend that she cultivate Lenny’s company, two birds with one stone.”

  My hand was painfully tight on the cup handle. I remembered one night with Janet, saying, “Jesus, I wish I could be you just for once, just to see what happens to you when you cry like that, when you pass out, why that little smile finally comes through…”

  I knew my voice was too harsh then. I couldn’t help it. I said, “I think she’s a spook. I don’t like being around her. I get the same feeling that I got when I was a kid around a great-uncle who had gone off the deep end. I was scared shitless of him, and I get the same feeling in the pit of my stomach when I’m near her.”

  “Eddie!” Janet moved toward me, but didn’t make it all the way. She returned to her chair instead and sat down, and when she spoke again, her voice was resigned. Way back in Year One, we’d had an understanding that if ever either of us disliked someone, his feelings were to be respected without argument. It needed no rationalization: people liked or disliked other people without reason sometimes. And by throwing in a non-existent uncle I had made doubly sure that she wouldn’t argue with me. Finis. “Well,” Janet said, “she certainly isn’t pushy. If you don’t want to be around her, you won’t find her in your path.”

  “Yeah. And maybe later, after I get out from under all this other stuff, maybe I’ll feel different. Maybe I’m just afraid right now of entanglement, because I’m too pressed for time as it is.”

  “Sure,” Janet said. I liked her a lot right then, for the way she was willing to let me drop Christine, whom she had grown very fond of, and was intrigued by. She was disappointed that she had been cut off at the water, that she wouldn’t be able now to talk about Christine, speculate about her. God knows, I didn’t want to think about her any more than I had to from then on.

  The next few days blurred together. I knew that things got done, simply because they didn’t need doing later, but the memory of seeing to them, of getting them done, was gone. The geriatric patient came out of his cast on Saturday practically as good as new. He was walking again the same day they removed it, with crutches, but for balance, and to give him reassurance. His leg and hip muscles were fine. Lenny and I laughed and pounded each other over the back, and hugged each other, and split a bottle of Scotch, starting at one in the morning and staying with it until it was gone. He had to walk me home because neither of us could find a car key. Lenny spent the night, what was left of it. On Sunday I slept off a hangover and Lenny, Janet, the kids, and Christine all went for a long ride in the country and came back with baskets of apples, cider, black walnuts, and butternuts. And Janet said that Christine had invited all of us over for a celebration supper later on.

  “I didn’t say we’d come,” Janet said. “I can call and say you still are hungover. I sort of hinted that you might be.”

  “Honey, forget it. How’s Lenny? You should have seen him last night. He laughed!”

  “And today he smiled a couple of times,” she said, grinning. “He’s over at Christine’s house now, helping with firewood, or something.”

  “Tell her that we’ll be over,” I said.

  The kids grumbled a little, but we got Mrs. Durrell in to sit and we went over to Christine’s. Lenny was in the living room mixing something red and steaming in a large bowl. “Oh, God,” I prayed aloud, “please, not one of his concoctions.” But it was, and it was very good. Hot cider, applejack, brandy, and a dry red wine. With cinnamon sticks in individual cups.

  Steaks, salad, baked potatoes, spicy hot apple pie. “If I knew you was coming,” Christine had murmured, serving us, but she hadn’t belabored the point, and it was a happy party. She proposed a toast after pouring brandy for us. “To the good men of the earth. Eddie and Lenny, and others like them wherever they are.”

  I knew that I flushed, and Lenny looked embarrassed and frowned, but Janet said, “Hear, hear,” and the girls touched the glasses to their lips. In a few moments we were back to the gaiety that was interrupted by the toast that lingered in my head for the rest of the evening.

  Lenny was more talkative than I’d seen him in years. He even mentioned that he had been a physicist, something that not more than a dozen people knew. The girls were both looking pretty after a day in the cold air; their cheeks were flushed, and they looked happy. Janet’s bright blue-green eyes sparkled and she laughed easily and often. Christine laughed too, more quietly, and never at anything she said herself. She still was shy, but at ease with us. And it seemed that her shyness and Lenny’s introspective quiet were well matched, as if there had been a meeting of the selves there that few others ever got to know. I caught Lenny’s contemplative gaze on her once, and when she noticed also, she seemed to consider his question gravely, then she turned away, and the flush on her cheeks was a bit deeper. The air had changed somehow, had become more charged, and Janet’s touch on my hand to ask for a cigarette was a caress. I looked at her, acknowledging the invitation. Our hands lingered over the cigarette in the non-verbal communication that made living with her so nice.

  I was very glad we had that evening together. Janet and I left at about twelve. Lenny was sitting in a deep chair before the fire when we said goodnight, and he made no motion to get up and leave then too. In our car Janet sighed and put her head on my shoulder.

  Images flashed before my eyes: Christine’s buttocks as she moved away from me; the tight skin across Janet’s ribs when she raised her arms over her head; Christine’s tiny, tiny waist, dressed as she had been that night, in a tailored shirt and black skirt, tightly belted with a wide leather belt; the pink nipples that puckered and stiffened at a touch; and darker nipples that I had never seen, but knew had to be like that, dark and large. And how black would her pubic hair be, and how hungry would she be after so long a time? Her head back, listening to a record, her eyes narrowed in concentration,
her mouth open slightly. And the thought kept coming back: What would it be like to be her? What did Janet feel? What would she feel when Lenny entered her body? How different was it for a woman who was sexually responsive? She wouldn’t even know, if I waited until she was thoroughly aroused. Sex had been in the air in the living room, we’d all felt it. After such a long period of deprivation, she’d crumble at Lenny’s first touch. She’d never know, I repeated to myself.

  When we got out of the car I said to Janet, “Get rid of Mrs. Durrell as fast as you can. Okay?” She pressed her body against mine and laughed a low, throaty laugh.

  I was in a fever of anxiety then, trying to keep from going out into her too soon. Not yet. Not yet. Not until I had Janet in bed, not until I thought that she and Lenny had had time to be at ease with each other again after being left alone. Maybe even in bed. My excitement was contagious. Janet was in bed as soon as she could decently get rid of the sitter, and when my hand roamed down her body, she shivered. Very deliberately I played with her and when I was certain that she wouldn’t notice a shift in my attention, I went out to the other one, and found her alone. My disappointment was so great that momentarily I forgot about Janet, until her sudden scream made me realize that I had hurt her. She muffled her face against my chest and gasped, and whether from pleasure or pain I couldn’t tell, she didn’t pull away.

  She was fighting eroticism as hard as she could. Drawing up thoughts of plans, of work not yet finished, of the notebooks that were so much harder to decipher than she had suspected they would be, the time-lapse photos that were coming along. Trying to push out of her mind the ache that kept coming back deep in her belly, the awful awareness of her stimulation from too much wine, the nearness of Lenny and his maleness. She was hardly aware of the intrusion this time, and when I directed her thoughts toward the sensual and sexual, there was no way she could resist. I cursed her for allowing Lenny to leave, I threatened her, I forced her to unfold when she doubled up like a foetus, hugging herself into a tight ball. For an hour, more than an hour, I made love to Janet and tormented that other girl, and forced her to do those things that I had to experience for myself. And when Janet moaned and cried out, I knew the cause, and knew when to stop and when to continue, and when she finally went limp, I knew the total, final surrender that she knew. And I stared at the mirror image of the girl: large dark nipples, beautifully formed breasts, erect and rounded, deep navel, black shiny hair. And mad eyes, haunted, panic-stricken eyes in a face as white as milk, with two red spots on her cheeks. Her breath was coming in quick gasps. My control was too tight. Nothing that she thought was coming through to me, only what she felt with her body that had become so sensitive that when she lay back on the bed, she shuddered at the touch of the sheet on her back. I relaxed control without leaving and there was a chaotic blur of memories, of nights in Karl’s arms, of giving up totally to him, being the complete houri that he demanded of her.

  “Bitch!” I thought at her. “Slut.” I went on and on, calling her names, despising her for letting me do it to her, for being so manipulable, for letting me do this to myself. And I brought her to orgasm again, this time not letting her stop, or ease up, but on and on, until suddenly she arched her back and screamed, and I knew. I don’t know if she screamed alone, or if I screamed with her. She blacked out, and I was falling, spinning around and around, plummeting downward. I yanked away from her. Janet stirred lazily against me, not awake, hardly even aware of me. I didn’t move, but stared at the ceiling and waited for the blood to stop pounding in my head, and for my heart to stop the wild fibrillation that her final convulsion had started.

  Janet was bright-eyed and pink the next morning, but when she saw the full ashtrays in the living room and kitchen, she looked at me closely. “You couldn’t sleep?”

  “Too much to think of,” I said, cursing the coffee pot for its slowness. “And just four days to do it.”

  “Oh, honey.” She was always regretful when I was awake while she slept. She felt it was selfish of her.

  I could hardly bring myself to look at Lenny, but he took my moods in stride, and he made himself inconspicuous. The machine was gleaming and beautiful, ready to crate up and put in the station wagon. We wouldn’t trust it to anyone but one of us, and I would drive to Chicago on Friday, install it myself Saturday morning, hours before the doors of the exposition opened at four in the afternoon. Lenny, like Janet, took my jittery state to be nerves from the coming show. It was like having a show at the Metropolitan, or a recital at Carnegie Hall, or a Broadway opening. And I wasn’t even able to concentrate on it for a period of two consecutive minutes. I went round and round with the problem I had forced on myself by not leaving Christine Warnecke Rudeman strictly alone, and I couldn’t find a solution. I couldn’t speak out now, not after last night. I couldn’t advise her to seek help, or in any way suggest that I knew anything about her that she hadn’t told us. And although the thoughts of the night before were a torture, I couldn’t stop going over it all again and again, and feeling again the echo of the unbearable excitement and pleasures I had known. When Lenny left for lunch, I didn’t even look up. And when he returned, I was still at the bench, pretending to be going over the installation plan we had agreed on for our space at the exposition. Lenny didn’t go back to his own desk, or his work in progress on the bench. He dragged a stool across from me and sat down.

  “Why don’t you like Chris?” he asked bluntly.

  “I like her fine,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No. You won’t look at her, and you don’t want her to look directly at you. I noticed last night. You find a place to sit where you’re not in her line of sight. When she turns to speak to you, or in your direction, you get busy lighting a cigarette, or shift your position. Not consciously, Eddie. I’m not saying you do anything like that on purpose, but I was noticing.” He leaned forward with both great hands flat on the bench. “Why, Eddie?”

  I shrugged and caught myself reaching for my pack of cigarettes. “I don’t know. I didn’t realize I was doing any of those things. I haven’t tried to put anything into words. I’m just not comfortable with her. Why? Are you interested?”

  “Yes,” he said. “She thinks she’s going crazy. She is certain that you sense it and that’s why you’re uncomfortable around her. Your actions reinforce her feelings, giving you cause to be even more uncomfortable, and it goes on from there.”

  “I can keep the hell away from her. Is that what you’re driving at?”

  “I think so.”

  “Lenny,” I said when he remained quiet, and seemed lost in his speculations, “is she? Going crazy again? You know she was once?”

  “No. I doubt it. She is different, and difference is treated like mental illness. That’s what I know. No more. From demonic possession to witchcraft to mental illness. We do make progress.” His hands, that had been flat and unmoving on the benchtop, bunched up into fists.

  “Okay, Lenny,” I said. “I believe you. And I won’t see her any more for the next couple of weeks, whatever happens. And, Lenny, if I’d known—I mean, I didn’t realize that anything of my attitude was coming through. I didn’t really think about it one way or the other. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her… or you.”

  He looked at me gravely and nodded. “I know that,” he said. He stood up and his face softened a bit. “It’s always people like you, the rationalists, that are most afraid of any kind of mental disorders, even benign ones. It shows.”

  I shook my head. “A contradiction in terms, isn’t that? Mental disorders and benign?”

  “Not necessarily.” Then he moved his stool back down the bench and went back to work. And I stared at the sketches before me for a long time before they came back into focus. The rest of the afternoon I fought against going back to her and punishing her for complaining about me. I thought of the ways I could inflict punishment on her, and knew that the real ace that I would keep for an emergency was her fear of heights. I visualized strolling a
long the lip of the Grand Canyon with her, or taking her up the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, or forcing her up the face of a cliff. And I kept a rigid control of my own thoughts so that I didn’t go out to her at all. I didn’t give in all week, but I had her nightmares.

  On Wednesday Janet suggested that I should let Lenny go to Chicago and I snapped at her and called her a fool. On Thursday Lenny made the same suggestion, and I stalked from the lab and drove off in a white fury. When Janet came home I accused them of getting together and talking about me.

  “Eddie, you know better than that. But look at you. You aren’t sleeping well, and you’ve been as nervous as a cat. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Just leave me alone, okay? Tired, that’s all. Just plain tired. And tired of cross-examinations and dark hints and suspicions.”