Melancholy Elephants

by Spider Robinson

  She wore an odd expression, as if there were something extraordinary or dismaying about what he had said. “Oh,” she said finally in a small voice. “Again I apologize.”

  “De nada, Miss Wingate.”

  “Anne.”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul, why do I get the impression that none of this is new to you?”

  He poured himself another cup. “New to me?”

  “You’re too competent, too skilled at coping with troublesome drunken women. I’m not the first, am I?”

  He laughed aloud, surprising himself. “Anne, you are not the twenty-first. I’ve been Mr Rose’s personal secretary for about ten years, and I would say that one of you manages to get past me every six or seven months, on the average.” He frowned. “Too many.” And thought, but you looked intelligent and stable.

  “And you say he knows about love.” She put down her cup, got up and paced. She came to his powered cookstool: the proper height for counter and cabinet work; a pedal for each wheel, heel for reverse, toe for forward. She sat on it and heel-and-toed it into rotating. It was a whole-body fidget, annoying to watch.

  “Anne, love rides his back like a goblin. It lives in his belly like a cancer. He wears it like a spacesuit in a hostile environment. It wears him like a brake drum wears shoes. I can’t tell whether he generates love or the other way around.” His voice was rising; he was irritated by her continued rotation on the stool. “I think everybody knows that. Everybody who can read.”

  She stopped the stool suddenly, with her back to him. “Was there ever anything that ‘everybody knew’ that turned out to be so?”

  His irritation increased. “I worry about anyone under eighteen who isn’t a cynic—and anyone over eighteen who is. There are thousands of things that everybody knows that are true. Falling off a cliff will hurt you. It gets dark at night. Snow is cold. Philip Rose knows about love. Damn it, you’ve read his books.”

  “Yes, I’ve read his fucking books!” she yelled at his refrigerator.

  Something told him that now was the time to shut up. He sat where he was, elbows on the table, pinching his lower lip between his thumbs, and looked at her back. It was some time before she spoke, but he did not mind the wait.

  “When I was eight years old,” she said at last, “my Aunt Claire gave me one of his juveniles. Latchkey Kid. It smacked me between the eyes.”

  He nodded uselessly.

  “I’d always been loved. So thoroughly, so completely, so automatically that both I and the people who loved me took it for granted. The book made me understand what it felt like not to be loved. That would have been enough for most writers. But Rose went further. He made me love Cindy, even though she wasn’t very likeable, and he made me see how even she could find love, even in a world like hers. He wasn’t famous then, he only had a dozen or so books out.

  “The next one I tried was Tommy’s Secret. I don’t suppose I could quote you more than a chapter or so at a time without referring to the text. For my tenth birthday I asked for a hardcover set of everything he had ever written. My father was scandalized—it wasn’t expensive enough—so I let him buy me two sets. That way I had one copy to preserve, immaculate, and one I could mark up and underline and dog-ear. Soon I found I needed a third set. Some writers you want to keep, special and private, for yourself and a few close friends. Rose I gave away to anyone who didn’t duck fast enough.

  “There is a story he wrote, ‘A Cup of Loneliness,’ that is the only reason I didn’t kill myself when I was sixteen.”

  Unseen, Paul nodded again.

  “By then I was old enough to realize how much I owed Aunt Claire. Unfortunately I realized it at her funeral. After a while I decided that I was repaying her by giving Philip Rose to other people. I mailed copies of his books to every critic and reviewer I could find. In college I got three credits of independent study for a critical analysis of Rose’s lifework to date that must have taken me forty-eight hours to put on paper. My professor got it published. I began to realize just how much weight my father’s name carried, and I used it, to see that Philip Rose’s career prospered. Eventually I had persuaded enough influential people to ‘discover’ him that public awareness of him started to grow.

  “Part of that was selfish. He was obscure, next to nothing was known about him as a person in any references I could find. I wanted to know about him, about his life, about where he had been and what he had done and whether or not he had enough love in his own life.”

  Paul nodded a third time and lit one of her cigarettes.

  “He didn’t accept visitors and didn’t give interviews and didn’t return biographical questionnaires from Who’s Who in Books and didn’t put more than he could help in his ‘About the Author’ blurbs. All I knew was that it said in the back of Broken Wings that he was married, and then the PR for the next one, A Country We Are Privileged to Visit, mentioned that he lived alone in this city. It never occurred to me to actually approach him myself, any more than it would occur to most people to look up the President.” (Curry happened to know that the President had been Anne Wingate’s godfather.) “But I threw reporters and scholars at him until I realized I was wasting his time and mine. If People magazine can’t get past you to him, no one can. I suppose I could have just put a good agency onto researching him, but the idea of setting detectives on Philip Rose is grotesque.

  “I decided that I would make him famous, and sooner or later he would simply have to open up. Not that I claim to be responsible for his fame—even I’m not that arrogant. He was already certain to be a legend in his own lifetime—but I speeded up the process. And it didn’t work worth a damn. Not since Salinger has a writer been so famous, so loved, and so little known. You cover him well. I still don’t know what went wrong with his marriage—or even what her name was.

  “Finally I decided there was only one way to thank the man who had taught me everything I know about love. It’s because of him that I studied lovemaking, so that I could give my lovers a gift that was something more than commonplace. It’s because of him that I’m still involved in politics. It’s because of him that I don’t hate my father. It’s because of him that I don’t hate myself.”

  Paul interrupted for the first time. “You don’t hate yourself, Anne, because he taught you how to forgive.”

  She banged her fist against the stool’s flank. “How can I forgive him for what he did?”

  He kept his own voice soft and low. “Don’t you mean, How can I forgive him for what he didn’t do?”

  “Damn it, he didn’t have to do anything. Just lay back and let me do the doing—”

  “And that wouldn’t be doing something? You say you’ve studied lovemaking: is there any such thing as a passive partner? Aside from necrophilia and rubber dolls? You wanted him to do you the favor of accepting pleasure from you. You’re young and very beautiful: perhaps you’ve never met a man who wouldn’t count that a privilege. You made your offer, and he declined politely—I’ll bet my life it was politely—and so you decided to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. And learned the sad truth: that there is no offer a man cannot refuse if he must.”

  “Why ‘must’? There was no obligation of any kind, expressed or implied—if he’s half the telepath his books make him seem, he must have known that. All I wanted to do was say thanks.”

  “You did thank him. And then before he could say ‘you’re welcome,’ you tried to ram your thanks down his throat, or down yours, or whatever, and made him throw you out. There’s an old John Lennon song, ‘Norwegian Wood.’ I’ve always felt that he changed the title to avoid censorship. I think the song is about the nicest compliment a man can receive from a woman. Isn’t it good?: knowing she would. But that message can be conveyed from twenty feet away, by body language. Only children need it confirmed by effort and sweat, that’s what Lennon was trying to say. Damn it, Anne, haven’t you ever been turned down?”

  “Not like that!”

  “You gave Mr
Rose exactly two choices: be raped or be rude. I wasn’t there, but I know. Otherwise he would not have been rude.”

  “But—”

  “Anne, I’ve been through this before, and I must say they usually take it better than you. But once every couple of years or so we get one so young and so blind with need that he has to be rude to turn her off. It always upsets him.”

  “Damn you,” she yelled.

  “Anne, the first step to forgiving yourself is facing up to what you’ve done wrong. Or did you think that your own upset was only hurt pride and frustration?”

  “And how do you handle the dumb young insistent ones?” she asked bitterly, and spun the stool around to face him. He saw tear tracks. “Take the Master’s sloppy seconds?”

  “I lie to them, generally,” he said evenly. “I talk to them until I get an idea of which excuse they’re willing to be sold, and then I sell it to them. If it seems necessary, I figure out what sort of bribe or threat it will take to keep their mouths shut, and provide that. As for myself, I prefer bed partners who know as much about love as they do about lovemaking.”

  She flinched, but said nothing. She was studying his face.

  “You say you’ve read all his books,” he went on. “Do you recall reading in any of them a definition of ‘love’? As opposed to lust or affection or need or any of a dozen other cousins?”

  “No, I don’t think he’s ever defined it, in so many words.”

  “You’re right. But there is a single, concise definition that runs through every thing he ever wrote. He never wrote it down because it had already been done, by another writer, about whom Mr Rose feels much the same way you feel about him.”

  “The old man in free fall? The science fiction writer?”

  “That’s right. You have done your homework. He defined love as ‘that condition in which the welfare and happiness of another are essential to your own.’”

  She thought that over. “Make your point.”

  “Is that what you claim motivated you?”

  Her eyes closed. Her expression smoothed over. She was looking deep inside for the answer. After twenty seconds she half opened her eyes. “Yes, partly,” she said slowly. “More than half. I wanted to be personally sure he was happy and well—to make him happy myself, to be there and know that it was so.”

  “By giving him something he doesn’t want.”

  “Damn it, he needs it—he must!”

  “Ah, the old standby of the teenage male: ‘Continence is unhealthy.’ Anne, in your experience, do priests and monks tend to die young?”

  “But why would he want to be celibate?”

  “Did it ever occur to you that he might not have any choice? Let me tell you a story that is none of your—”

  She shook her head. “Now you’re doing what you said a moment ago—lying, giving me a plausible excuse. Some story about a war wound, or a tragic accident, or a wasting disease. Save it, please. Philip Rose’s work could not have been produced by any kind of a eunuch. Furthermore, I know better. He had to be very rude to get rid of me. I got close enough to be sure that all his equipment was in place and functioning.” She smiled bitterly. “I don’t care much for puns, but I assure you: Philip rose.”

  So did his eyebrows. “My respect for you has jumped another notch. I’m impressed. And, frankly intrigued. And mildly annoyed at the low respect in which you seem to hold me. I have not lied to you yet, and I wasn’t going to start. The story I was—”

  “Why not?”

  “Do you want to hear this story or not?”

  His volume made her start. She must have spent a lot of time on the road; the small involuntary movements of her feet, brake, clutch, accelerator, made the chair pivot back and forth spasmodically, so that as her head nodded yes, her body said no.

  Neither of them could help giggling at that; it broke some of the tension, leaving both with half smiles. She waited in silence, determined not to interrupt again, while he chose his words.

  This took him longer than it should have. He found that he was staring at her eyelashes. They were so long and perfectly formed that he had assumed them false. Now he saw that they were real. He tore his gaze from them, fixed it on his own hands, whereupon he discovered that they were fidgeting, caressing each other. He forced them to be still—and his foot started tapping on the floor.

  “You are certainly under twenty-five,” he said, “so you cannot have been born earlier than 1970. Which does not,” he added, “mean that you’re ignorant of prior times. I know you are something of a historian. But you’re not likely to have an intuitive feel for an era you haven’t lived through.”

  He saw the ever-so-slight tightening of those muscles used to keep the mouth shut. Her mouth was as distracting as her eyes.

  “Philip Rose,” he went on doggedly, “was born in 1934. He didn’t marry until he was twenty-five—that made it 1959. Marriage then was something different from marriage today. Which actually may not be all that relevant—Mr Rose has never been a slave to convention. He has always, I think, made his own rules.

  “Maybe that’s the point I’m trying to make. If you are the kind of man who makes his own rules, in 1959, you keep the rules you make for yourself. That’s the dilemma that Situational Ethics blundered into—if you can change them situationally, they’re not rules; if you can’t they’re a straitjacket. What I mean is, Mr Rose might change his own personal rules—but once he’s made a promise, he’ll keep it. No matter how much he might—or might not—regret making it.

  “So in 1959 he married Regina Walton. There were several unconventional things about the marriage, and one very conventional thing.

  “The first unconventional thing was the age difference. She was nearly ten years older than he, already well established in her field. The second unconventional thing—for the time—was that she kept her own last name. At his urging. A Rose by any other name, and so forth. The final unconventional thing was that they wrote their own wedding vows—and that was the thing that hurt.

  “Can you see that? How that would make a difference to him? The conventional marriage ceremony of that time was an utterly standardized legal contract with ritual trappings. Everyone took the same vows, with minor variation, and as you took them you knew they could be dissolved in thirty days in Reno. If you must mouth a certain formula in order to cohabit legally, then, if you should ever change your mind, you can rationalize that it wasn’t a ‘real’ promise. But the two of them wrote their own vows, thinking them through very carefully first—so they left themselves no loopholes at all.

  “Which is a shame, because of the one conventional part I mentioned. Their contract is quite specific: lifetime sexual fidelity is spelled out. Old fashioned death-do-us-part monogamy.

  “Conventional for the time: even though divorce was common then, term marriage was emphatically not. Oh, people got married knowing that ‘forever’ might translate, ‘until we change our minds’—but they didn’t get married at all unless they at least hoped for forever.

  “But Philip and Regina meant it. They were practical romantics: they did not want a deal they could quit when the going got tough. They left themselves no escape clauses.”

  Involuntarily, she interrupted for the first time. “Foolish.”

  “Shut your stupid mouth,” he said quietly. “It is not for you to criticize them.”

  She bit her lip.

  “I read just the other week, the average term marriage runs three years, and the average ‘lifetime’ marriage now last about nine or ten years. The Rose-Walton union has lasted forty years so far.”

  He might just as well have kicked her in the belly. Her breath left her explosively, her hands and feet flew up from their resting places, snapped back. She drew air convulsively in through both nose and mouth, slumped down again in her chair and cried, “No!” She jumped up and began pacing around the room, turning to face him as she paced. “No. It’s not possible! I would have heard, something—and there was no tra
ce of a woman’s hand in that apartment, I’m certain of that, damn it, the first thing I thought of was someone else.” As she convinced herself, she began to get mad at him. “You lying son of a—”

  “You don’t listen very well,” he said, enough edge on his voice to get through to her. “I said they were practical romantics. I said they thought it through. Her profession sometimes made long trips necessary, and his work-habits made him a homebody. They agreed to be faithful forever—but they did not promise to live together always.”

  She stopped pacing. She blinked those marvelous eyelashes so rapidly that he fancied he could feel the breeze. Then she shut her eyes and frowned.

  “For more than twenty-five years,” he continued, “all went well and more than well and better than that. I don’t know why they never had children—I never will unless he chooses to tell me—but they don’t seem to have suffered from the lack of children. They were never apart for more than three or four months at a time, and when they were together they were more together than most people ever get to be. He says that they supplied each other’s missing parts, that between them they made up one good and sane human being. You said yourself he’s a telepath. Anyone may have a taste of telepathy, but it takes a really good marriage to develop it to anything like his level.”

  He paused, and was silent in thought for a time, and she waited patiently.

  “Then the hammer fell on them.

  “Her field was immunology, and she was one of its leaders. It was a natural interest for her—she was loaded with serious allergies herself, the kind that have to be wrestled with permanently and can kill you if you get careless. When the European Space Station went up, it was a natural for her. What better place could there be to do medical research than a totally and permanently sterile environment? So she bullied and squeezed her way into a tour as the ESS’s first resident physician. She and her husband thought it would be a pleasant vacation from her own allergies. I assume you know what happened to most of the first-year ESS personnel.”