The Gorgon Festival

by John Boyd

  Within ten minutes, she skipped into the kitchen, toweled and robed. At first glance, it looked as if nothing had happened, until she bent before him, touched her toes with her fingertips, straightened quickly and swung from side to side, moving freely on all joints. Her face was so radiant with joy and freedom from pain that he spontaneously reached out and embraced her, holding her fragile, once-tortured frame with gentleness.

  “Ruth, when you came out of there, all radiant and unshadowed by distress, I knew that if I should live to be one hundred this was my finest hour.”

  “Pshaw, Alex,” she hugged him gently. “This was a joint effort. Your sugar phosphate would have been worthless without my absorbent. Now, let me get the chocolate started. This is just the beginning, Alex.”

  As a schoolboy studying geometry Ward had always tensed when reading in Euclid the phrase, “It is, therefore, self-evident…” Whatever followed was usually incomprehensible. Now he was becoming likewise leery of Ruth’s “This is only the beginning.” As she turned to the stove to prepare the chocolate, he sat down at the table feeling some trepidation.

  At the stove, she spoke in trivialities to dull the poignancy of the moment.

  “The way to make chocolate properly is to prepare a thick mixture, almost a wet fudge, of hot water, sugar, and chocolate and let it set awhile on a low flame before you add the warm milk. Mix the ingredients carefully, stirring all the time, back and forth, back and forth, with a swishing circular movement, smoothly, gently, never breaking the rhythm. You’ve got to have rhythm.”

  Out of respect and habit he paid attention, but Ward could not have cared less how to make hot chocolate. Besides, she seemed hung up on the phrase “back and forth,” which she kept repeating as she stirred.

  Finally, she adjusted the burner to very low and turned back to the table to join him. She took a sudden quick sip, looked over at him, and said, with obvious effort, “Alex, you know I’m on your side.”

  “My side?”

  “Your side. I’ve never intruded on your personal life, but Ester’s too much woman for you to handle, boy. She steps out on you.”

  Ruth was intruding, but he feigned polite surprise.

  “I suppose the husband’s always last to know.”

  “Never trust a woman under fifty. Ester’s a high-stepping strutter. Did you ever wonder why she doesn’t have children?”

  “She goes along with me,” he said. “I haven’t time for children and we both are concerned about the population explosion.”

  “That’s not your reason, either.”

  Suddenly he was interested. He had read about subconscious psychological motivations, but he had never tried to apply the theories to himself.

  “What’s my reason, Ruth?”

  “Psychologically you’re fixated on a breast level, and you don’t want to share her breasts with a child.”

  Ruth was wrong. He was quite willing to share Ester at any time other than every other Tuesday.

  “What’s Ester’s reason, if not ecological?”

  “Sex! Oh, there are other reasons, engineering problems, perhaps, but basically she can’t take time out from her hanky-panky.”

  “Engineering problems?”

  “If Ester had children, her breasts would fall. Then she’d need a block and tackle to get into her brassiere, unless she was willing to push those things around in a wheelbarrow.”

  “I follow your reasoning, Ruth, but I’m not quite clear how the reasoning got started.”

  “Your happiness, Alex. I told you I’m on your side.”

  “I’m happy. Sex is Ester’s problem.”

  “You can solve it for her.”

  “How?”

  “Get in there and take a sitz bath. No sense letting it go to waste.”

  “I have no arthritis. You volunteered as guinea pig, and I…”

  “I’m neither a guinea nor a pig, and you can check that with Ester when she gets back from San Francisco.”

  Intuition had pointed Ruth to Ester’s current lover, and Ward veered from the subject. “I haven’t observed you long enough to determine side effects.”

  “If you’re waiting for me to die, Alex, I can tell you now that death is not a side effect… You’re happy, but I want you to be happier. So get in there and take your sitz bath. It won’t hurt you. All it does is correct the random error process, which I’ll explain how after you’ve taken your bath.”

  He did as he was told, partly from habit and partly from curiosity about the theory of random error. He felt sheepish in the bathroom as he stripped and dipped into the tub. It was a waste of electricity, and sitting in used bath water made him feel squeamish.

  After five minutes, his squeamishness passed. Ruth had honored him by permitting him to use her bath water. If he had been a true friend, he would have watched over her as she bathed. She would have understood if he had felt a residual kickback from his childhood fantasizing. Even now he could feel impulses from his memory, so he focused his attention on another slight mystery.

  He had to ask her why she had called a cure for cancer “bush league.”

  After ten minutes, she called him. He got out, dried, and dressed. Back in the kitchen, he found the table set with a dish of his favorite home-baked macaroons placed in the center of the table, not six or seven, but at least a dozen.

  “Feel any different?” she asked.

  “Not particularly,” he answered honestly. “But I’m anxious to hear about this random error theory.”

  She seated him and brought the chocolate, sitting across from him.

  “Random error is an accumulation of defective DNA in non-dividing cells which impairs performance of the cell—the aging process. Your solution plus my absorbent plus an electric current adds enough missing rungs to our broken ladders to repair the damage from this process, almost instantaneously.”

  “How does this affect Ester?”

  “Alex, you theorist! Don’t you realize that bathtub in there is the Fountain of Youth? You now have the genitourinary tract of a sixteen-year-old boy.”

  His first thought was that she had gone dotty, but fear for himself and loyalty to her canceled the thought. In her desperation and pain, she had become vulnerable to nostrums and was practicing faith healing on herself.

  Then he thought of Ester’s problem, Ruth’s really, since it had never bothered Ester.

  “How will this help Ester?”

  “Biologically the ideal mate of a thirty-two-year-old woman is a sixteen-year-old boy. Ester’s three years over the hump, and you’re back in prime.”

  Ward munched a macaroon and thought.

  “Within any group,” he reminded Ruth, “there are individual variations, and I was a virgin until I was sixteen.”

  “Nonsense. You lacked inspiration earlier. You had outgrown your mother; and Ester, at that time, I suppose, was breastless.”

  All this emphasis on breasts upset him. A normal man didn’t love a woman for her bosom any more than he loved her for her earlobes. Ruth seemed to have the fixation, not he.

  “Ruth, I’d better head home. Ester always calls at midnight to see if I’m safe.”

  She glanced at her watch. “It’s only a little past nine. You can help with the dishes.”

  “Thanks for the macaroons and chocolate. They really hit the spot.”

  “Hit the spot, huh?” she said, rising to take the dishes. “I can tell by your innuendos you’re feeling peppier already. Grab a towel, boy, and lend a hand.”

  It was a delight to watch her clear the table with such ease after her halting movements before. Whether healed by faith or by the solution, she flowed and rippled with the grace which had attracted the cadets of Ethan Allen Military and Preparatory School. When he reached beneath the sink for the drying towel, the back of his hands brushed her thigh, and even his knuckles told him that she had good muscle tone. Despite her age, digging around in the garden had kept her muscles firm.

  He was standing bes
ide and slightly behind her and she was bending over the sink when she said, “Alex, I hate to think of you going home to that empty house. Don’t you ever feel lonely? Don’t you ever get blue?”

  Sadness in her voice triggered an impulsive show of affection. From behind her, his arms circled her waist and he kissed lightly the skin of her neck.

  “Not so long as I have the mother of my spirit. I hope Professor Gordon appreciated a wife so wise, compassionate, and judicious.”

  She held his arms against her with one hand and reached back to stroke his cheek with the other. Her hair held a faint scent of lavender.

  “He never tried to get me elected to a judge’s bench, if that’s what you mean.”

  He chided himself for using abstract terms. Despite her logical mind, Ruth was a woman, and any woman preferred a compliment to her hairdo over praise of her mentality.

  “When I was a boy, I thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Despite the age difference, if it had not been for my reverence for Professor Gordon I would have stood beneath your bower banging on my banjo until you consented to a bit of old New England bundling.”

  Her breath seemed to catch at his alliteration of “b.” “Watch your Oedipal feelings, Alex.”

  Beneath his right palm, her stomach muscles were hard and resilient. He patted them, affectionately. Her faith in her rejuvenation was drawing him into the orbit of her belief.

  “I have a theory why Professor Gordon died young,” he said.

  “I’m a pragmatist,” she said. “Demonstrate.”

  He moved closer.

  “Well, that’s not an invitation to a game of pinochle,” she said. “At my age it’s monstrous to have such thoughts, because you’re still the boy I met thirty-one years ago, my fresh-faced, smiling student; but even then you were teacher’s pet. We shouldn’t be standing here like this. If you’re going to misbehave, Alex, I’m going to send you to bed. No, Alex. Don’t kiss my lips. I forbid you. Come, young man, you’re going right to bed.”

  With his arm around her shoulder and her arm around his waist, the two old friends walked from the kitchen with a slow, ritual movement as if they approached some predestined altar before which friendship would be offered the supreme sacrifice. So rapt was Ward with the ripple of her thigh muscle against his that he forgot to turn out the light, and she forgot to remind him.

  “Thirty-one years, boy, is a mighty long time.”

  Before them, the long hall seemed endless, and he stepped up cadence as her remark lowered the weirs of his own long-pent and ill-recognized longing. In a spate of words, his dark secrets flooded out.

  “One of the boys in dormitory C, we called it masterbatorium C, drew your picture on the wall, and going to the John was called ‘going to see Ruth.’ Dear lady, you’ll never know how many lonely offerings were offered to you by the boys of Ethan Allen Military Prep. As first among your acolytes, I made Portnoy look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

  Finally, in the soft forty watts from the bedroom ceiling, she unveiled the inspiration which in the shadows seemed as lissome as a girl’s. Memories touched on memories at the sight, and as Ward divested himself of impediments his verbal gusher continued to blow.

  “Perhaps my subconscious reason for choosing Ester was to exorcise your litheness from my heart, for your maidenly swellings mock the pneumatic bunnies on the center-fold spreads.”

  In the dim light he spoke the truth, for she appeared boyish and appealing. He sat on the edge of the bed, leaning over her and gazing down at her ageless beauty.

  “You’re more than merely woman, Ruth. You’re sister and spouse, sweetheart and friend, brother and sister, son and daughter.”

  She smiled at his extravagance, “Thanks for omitting grandfather, but let’s not weigh this moment down with confessions. Thirty-one years are preliminaries enough.”

  Obediently he turned to her and noticed a peculiarity which brought again to his mind the trite image of baby’s bottom.

  “Ruth, you surely don’t pose in the nude for photographers.”

  “Pubic baldness, Alex. I’m seventy, but now, mine eyes have seen the glory la-di-da-di-da-di-da.”

  She hummed a few bars of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and when she swung into “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” he discovered he was not the only one with dark secrets. Doctor Ruth Gordon, champion of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach, was a secret lover of pop rhythms.

  “Drifting and dreaming, la-la-li-la… Soon, I’ll be sailing, la-ta-ta… Sock it to me, daddy, ta-ti-ti-ta. John Henry’s a steel-driving man, hup-hup…”

  Her practice was so distracting that he tried to break into her titles and humming with a remark, “By golly, Ruth, you’re the best seventy-year-old woman I ever knew.”

  “Hoped I might be the only, but you can’t have everything, la-ti-da… Waiting on the levee… Come on along, come on along, Alexander… La cucaracha, la-li-la-la-la… Tralala boom de ra!!! So long, It’s been good to know you…”

  One adjusted. In fact, her announcement of the title of the next melody helped alter his tempo, and on the third movement, which proved to be the coda, he was singing along with her.

  When finally he had to depart, bending above her to kiss her good night, he asked, “Ruth, why didn’t you let me kiss you in the kitchen?”

  “My jawbones are brittle, and I couldn’t risk my bridge.”

  “Your sacroiliac’s quite limber,” he commented.

  “My rhythm was a little off,” she said, “because of long widowhood.”

  “No. You’re everything we dreamed of in Dormitory C.”

  “Thanks, but run along, Alex. You’ve got a schedule to keep and I’ve got some heavy thinking to do. You’ve got the biggest moral decision that ever faced a man facing you, and I want to make the right choice. Get cracking on your theory tomorrow, and I’ll work on social implications.”

  Inadvertently, he was humming the Brahms lullaby as he closed the bedroom door behind him and walked down the hall to the exit. Ruth had always been an influence on his life.

  He remembered his gear in the bathroom, but he knew it would be no problem for Ruth to put away now she had rid herself of arthritis. He would come back for it when he had more time.

  He closed the front door and went to his car, remembering his weak battery. Below him, Pinyon Verde Lane was illuminated and deserted of traffic. He cut the brake and rolled a block, coasting to get the car started, then switched on his lights and drove home, analyzing the evening.

  This event had been more than an illicit liaison. Possibly her arthritis had been hysterical, and not sugar phosphate but long friendship and mutual regard had been the catalyst which prompted his extended performance. Ruth’s action had been inspired by a psychic overload of affection built up from years of caressing only hamsters. Despite overtones of self-deception, the experiment had been fruitful, relieving Ruth of her imagined arthritis and demonstrating his own freedom from breast obsessions. And to his knowledge it was the first time sex had been used as a tool of pragmatism.

  Ward got home in time to take his call from Ester.

  He told her of the rose garden, of the flamboyance of the Scarlet Churchills, of the crunchiness of the macaroons, of the thrill of coasting downhill in the dark. It was a beautiful story, although he edited the triple denouement. Fervor touched his words, for when he closed, Ester said, “Honey, you sound like Tuesday night.”

  After they hung up, Ward was troubled by Ester’s reminder.

  Next Tuesday was his night, and after such a Saturday night he would have to cancel unless he started his homework early. Ruefully he went into his study and returned to bed with a folio of paintings, drowsily leafing through the lithographs.

  Suddenly his attention was drawn to a familiar nude by Rubens, “Venus Reclining.” Cupid flitted above the sleeping female with his bow drawn, and the artist had captured a tension in the bowstring Ward had never noticed before. It was the direction of the arrow, re
ally, which created the drama in the string. On the couch, Venus was only feigning sleep; he could tell from the expectant half-smile on her lips. She knew where Cupid was aiming his arrow, and the target was ready.

  “By golly,” Ward breathed, now fully awake, “Peter Paul Rubens was a pornographic painter.”

  Church bells awakened him in the morning. He rushed through breakfast to get to the lab quickly, then had to call a taxi because his car wouldn’t start.

  Ward chose laboratory over church on Sunday because he felt that working with protein molecules brought him closer to God than singing hymns off key. This Sunday’s work, to explain God’s ways to the Nobel Awards Committee, would be particularly sacred.

  Outside, a Sabbath quietness lay over the campus, the air was balmy, and a jacaranda tree bloomed beside his door. He felt communion with his microscope as he slid a slide of fragmented DNA under the focusing lens and gazed on the mulligan stew of life. He stroked the positive switch, watching the fragments come together, stop, come together, stop, like shy and inexperienced lovers.

  Remembering with pleasure Ruth’s idiosyncrasy of last night, he tapped out “La Cucaracha” on the key, making the elements dance toward a union. In rhythm, they circled to find each other, sugar to phosphate, cytosine to guanine, thymine to adenine. When the parts of the helix were almost in place, Ward held the third beat conventional for the rhumba.

  But the elements of the assembling molecule did not stop with the current.

  “Tarara BOOM de ray!”

  Guided only by inertia of rhythm, with the current on “off,” the elements leaped toward one another in a spontaneous, self-willed creation of DNA ladders.

  Ward was stunned. He shattered the nucleic molecules with a negative flow and re-ran the experiment. He had seen aright the first time. When the sides of the ladders were in close proximity, moving to a set rhythm, they leaped to interlock.

  Suddenly Ward knew what had happened on the slide, knew why, and knew there was no language by which his knowledge could be verified.

  The key was environment, and the rules were universal. Thymine and adenine loved each other with the passion of valence, and they coupled in a two-hydrogen bond of marriage to form the DNA, family for the cell, nation, which formed the body, civilization. All this was tender and true, but how did one convert sex appeal into a number and solve for sentiment in an equation? What was the prime factor, the ultimate unity, and what math could explain organic affinity?