Brett Halliday: Last Seen Hitchhiking

He went back for his beer. “I know you’re thirsty, but you can’t have any. One of the conditions is, you have to be sober.”

He hitched a stool closer to the table. After drinking he touched each of her nipples lightly. His fingertip was cold from the bottle.

“Meri, if it takes three days, you have to relax. Not that it matters a hell of a lot, because the machines don’t care, but you’re very… nicely put together, shall we say. I couldn’t tell in those cruddy clothes. And that’s important. I like to get the full Beauty and the Beast effect. The frog who’s going to turn into a prince if she fucks him, and then he double-crosses her and stays a frog. I like it that you wear a regular bathing suit and not a bikini. White stomachs are one of the things I dig.”

She said with difficulty, “A tank suit. I dive.”

He was delighted. “Tremendous. I don’t because I look so ridiculous and I get water in my ears. I’m one of the last remaining sidestroke swimmers. This is going to be — how they say” — he kissed his fingertips — “perfection. First, the briefing.”

He took a swallow of beer. “I saw you look at the diploma. The office belongs to a gynecologist who has made pots of money out of the female ailments and is now on a round-the-world cruise with his second wife. Isn’t that grand? Nothing to do but eat, read novels, and indulge in sexual intercourse. I broke in and found some duplicate keys. There’s a notice on the door. None of the doctor’s patients will be bothering us.”

She swallowed some of his used cigar smoke, and it caused her to gag slightly.

“Would you like the basin?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then I’ll plunge right in. Have you ever felt an inclination to take part in organized sex research?”

She drew a quick breath and took in more cigar smoke and coughed it out. She shook her head slightly.

“I see why not,” he said, “with a body like that. There was an announcement on the bulletin board — anybody interested, call such and such a number. I thought, what the hell, I might as well find out. They paid seven-fifty per episode. You must know the kind of thing I’m talking about. Ever since the people in St. Louis made themselves rich and famous with live sex in the laboratory, it’s been one of the hot research areas. You might be astounded by how much grant money you can get for the flimsiest proposal. I’m not putting it down! It’s really good and valuable. Because there’s no getting around the fact that sex is the single biggest cause of emotional disturbance. Unhappiness. Suicide. I wasn’t sure I could perform, you know, to specifications, but I let them persuade me to try, in the interest of science.” He laughed.

“Are you” — she hesitated, and brought out — “imagining this?”

“No,” he assured her, “it’s a real place. The Reproductive Physiology Clinic, and they’ve been open a year and a half. When you think about it, it’s not all that startling. These same guys were in dream research when that was the fad. They did some ground-breaking stuff about sexual dreams — which comes first, the dream or the erection — and it was easy to move from there into sex per se between wide-awake people. On the simplest level, all they try to do is observe and measure exactly what takes place in the human body during the response cycle. I was one of their most enthusiastic subjects. Very productive. Never missed an orgasm. You may have noticed that I’m a little repulsive?”

He was still smiling. When she said nothing, he went on, “I believe in being objective. Whenever I get a turndown outside the laboratory, I take off my clothes and look in a full-length mirror, and I understand why. To be perfectly honest, my batting average in ordinary situations is point zero zero zero. Who wants to have sex with a slob? Of course there are plenty of female slobs who might be willing, but I don’t demean myself.”

He drank, and sighed. “Now I can see that you’re beginning to wonder if I’m crazy. I won’t give you a definite answer on that. The shrink at school says I’ve been working too hard. I get these blinding headaches, and all I can do is collapse for a day. I used to steal Tampax from drugstores — heaven knows why.” His voice changed, and became more brisk. “Tell me how sex is with you. Satisfactory?”

She forced herself to say, “Most of the time.”

“And yet one of the astounding things I’ve discovered is that even nonslobs have trouble! I’ve talked to one really beautiful girl who’s never reached orgasm. When anybody calls her on the phone, she stutters and perspires.”

“Could you — untie me?”

“No, that’s the main part. Now I have to ask a personal question. Have you ever been raped?”

Her body tightened all over. “Is that what’s going to happen?”

“Well,” he said almost apologetically, “if I get an erection. And I hope I can, because I invested a lot of time and went to a lot of trouble getting you here. I’ve been driving the interstate steadily for two days. The only girls I’ve seen have been in pairs or threesomes, and I can only process them one at a time. I ought to wait till some of the hysteria dies down, but I only have the use of the office for one more week, and my data is far from complete.”

He patted one of the machines.

“The electroencephalograph,” he explained. “Measures changes in the electric potential of the brain, and that’s where you get some of your most interesting material. I’m getting a little ahead of myself. You didn’t answer my question. Just nod or shake your head if it’s too embarrassing to say. Have you ever been raped?”

She shook her head.

“You’d be surprised how often the answer is yes, and then how hard it is to establish what we’re talking about, exactly. Thanks to Masters and Johnson, we have very comprehensive physiological baselines on orthodox consensual sex. We finally know exactly what happens when the human female has orgasm — vasocongestive release, vaginal contractions at point-eight-second intervals, areolae detumescence, and all the rest. We’ve exploded dozens of myths. When I say we, I don’t include myself personally, because I’m damned if I know what they learned from the program I was in.”

He drank. “Be patient another minute. Sometimes when I talk about it, my friend here begins to stir. Not yet, though. O.K., we’ve accumulated a body of knowledge about the sexual process that didn’t exist a few decades ago. After all the centuries of superstition and ignorance, you can’t know too much about that shadowy area. I imagine, to generalize, that by now we must know nearly as much about the organs of generation as about, say, the stomach and lungs. But!”

He kicked back his stool and went to open another beer.

“The more I read in the literature,” he said, coming back, “the more I begin to wonder. Sex isn’t purely physiological. If I tickle your nasal membrane, the chances are that you’ll sneeze. But if I tickle you down here, and if you hate me, if you’re repelled by me, if you’re thinking of getting back on the interstate, you won’t come, will you? Of course not. The orgasm is a psychophysiological experience, of biologic-behavioral origin, taking place within a psychosocial context. I’m quoting the textbooks, naturally. Triggered somewhere in the cerebral cortex, and I can’t reach that with a tickler, right? One more personal question — in percentages, how often do you come?”

She breathed in and out slowly while he looked at her. He actually seemed to consider this conversation normal, as though they both had drinks in their hands.

“About half,” she said faintly.

“About half. Because all those other factors intervene. What if somebody else walks in? Does the pill really work? Do I like him? Did I pass the exam? Is that hair-spray I smell or something else? What would my father and mother say? And that little switch stays closed. The guy can be beautiful, the most accomplished technician in Florida, doing all the right things according to the paperbacks, and you won’t feel a twinge. And the sex researchers know that perfectly well. They cop out by saying that all they’re interested in is the physical aspects, and as far as the machines are concerned an orgasm is an orgasm, whether you get it with a stranger at a party or with a loving husband, the father of your children. I may not be saying this right. At present it’s only a working hypothesis. But the big question in my mind is, are all those statistical tables skewed because they record the sexual behavior of volunteers?”