Robert Silverberg: Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake

—Oh, love. Oh. Oh. Thank you.

—It wasn’t scary?

—Scare me like that as often as you want, Chris.

He smiled across the darkness of the miles. All was well. A fair exchange: symbol for symbol, metaphor for metaphor, delight for delight.

—Sleep well, Laurel.

—You too, love. Mmm.

This time Jan knew that something had happened while he was away. He saw it on her face, which meant that she saw it on his; but she voiced no suspicions, and when they made love the first night of his return it was as good as ever. Was it possible, he wondered, to be bigamous like this, to take part with Laurel in a literally superhuman oneness while remaining Jan’s devoted husband and companion? He would, at any rate, try. Laurel had shared his soul as no one ever had and Jan never could, but yet she was a phantom, faceless, remote, scarcely real; and Jan, cut off from him as most humans are from all others, nevertheless was his wife, his partner, his bedmate, the mother of his children. He would try.

So he brought the office gossip home to her as always and went out with her twice a week to the restaurants they loved and sat beside her at night watching cassettes of operas and movies and Shakespeare, and on weekends they did their weekend things, boating on the bay and tennis and picnics in the park and dinner with their friends, and everything was fine. Everything was very fine. And yet he managed to do the other thing, too, as often as he could: snake and ocean, ocean and snake. Just as he had successfully hidden from Jan the enigmatic secret mechanism within his mind that he did not dare reveal to anyone not of his sort, so, too, now did he hide the second marriage, rich and strange; that that mechanism had brought him.

His lovemaking with Laurel had to be furtive, of course, a thing of stolen moments. She could hardly draw him into that warm voluptuous ocean while he lay beside Jan. But there were the business trips—he was careful not to increase their frequency, which would have been suspicious, but she came to him every night while he was away—and there was the occasional Saturday afternoon when he lay drowsing in the sun of the garden and found that whispering transparent surf beckoning to him, and once she enlivened a lunchtime for him on a working day. He roused the snake within his soul as often as he dared and nearly always she accepted it, though there were times when she told him no, not now, the moment was wrong. They had elaborate signals to indicate a clear coast. And for the ordinary conversation of the day there were no limits; they popped into each other’s consciousness a thousand times a day, quick flickering interchanges, a joke, a bit of news, a job triumphantly accomplished, an image of beauty too potent to withhold. Crossing the bridge, entering his office, reaching for the telephone, unfolding a napkin—suddenly, there she was, often for the briefest flare of contact, a tag touch and gone. He loved that. He loved her. It was a marriage.

He snooped in Mountain Bell directories at the library and found her telephone number, which he hardly needed, and her address, which at least confirmed that she really did exist in tangible actual Phoenix. He manufactured a trip to Albuquerque to appraise the earnings prospects of a small electronics company and slipped off up the freeway to Santa Fe to visit the gallery that showed her pottery: eight or ten superb pieces, sleek, wondrously skilled. He bought one of the smaller ones. “You don’t have any information about the artist, do you?” he asked the proprietor, trying to be casual, heart pounding, hoping to be shown a photograph. The proprietor thought there might be a press release in the files, and rummaged for it. “She lives down Phoenix way,” she said. “Comes up here once or twice a year with her new work. I think it’s museum quality, don’t you?” But she could not find the press release. When Laurel flashed into his mind that night back in Albuquerque, he did not tell her he owned one of her vases or that he had been researching her. But he wondered desperately what she looked like. He played with the idea of visiting Phoenix and somehow getting to meet her without telling her who he was. So long as he kept his mind sheathed she would never know, he thought. But it seemed sneaky and treacherous; and it might he dangerous, too. She had told him often enough not to come to her city.

In the fourth month of their relationship he could no longer control his curiosity. She sent him a view of her studio. amazingly neat, the clay, the wheels, the kiln, the little bowls of pigment and glaze all fastidiously in their proper places.

—You left one thing out, Laurel.

—What’s that?

—The potter herself. You didn’t show me her.

—Oh, Chris.

—What’s the matter? Aren’t you ever curious about what I look like? We’ve been all over each other’s minds and bodies for months, and I still don’t have any idea what you look like. That’s absurd.

—It’s so much more abstract and pure this way.

—Wonderful. Abstract love! Save that for Swinburne. I want to see you.

—I have to confess. I want to see you, too.

—Here, then. Now.

He sent her, before she could demur, a mental snapshot of his face, trying not to retouch and enhance it. The nose a trifle too long, the cleft chin absurdly Hollywood, the dark hair thinning a bit at the part line. Not a perfect face, but good enough, pleasant, honest, nothing to apologize for, he thought. It brought silence.

—Well? Am I remotely what you expected?

—Exactly, Chris. Steady-looking, strong, decent—no surprise at all. I like your face. I’m very pleased.

—Your turn.

—You’ll promise not to be disappointed?

—Stop being silly.

—All right.

She flared in his mind, not just her face but all of her, long-legged, broad-shouldered, a woman of physical presence and strength, with straightforward open features, wide-set brown eyes, a good smile, blunt nose, conspicuous cheekbones. She was not far from the woman he had imagined, and one aspect, the dark thick straight hair falling past her shoulders, was amazingly as he had thought.

—You’re beautiful.

—No, not really. But I’m okay.

—Are you an Indian?

—I must have sent you a good picture, then. I’m half. My mother was Navaho.

—You learned your pottery from her?

—No, dopy. Navahos make rugs. Pueblos make pottery. I learned mine in New York, Greenwich Village. I studied with Hideki Shinoda.

—Doesn’t sound Pueblo.

—Isn’t. Little Japanese man with marvelous hands.

—I’m glad we did this, Laurel.

—So am I.

But seeing her in the eye of his mind, while gratifying one curiosity, had only intensified another. He wanted to meet her. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to hold her.

Snake. Ocean. They were practiced lovers now, a year of constant mental communion behind them. The novelty was gone, but not the excitement. Again and again he carried the porcelain bowl out to the sun-baked hills and poured the serpent into the grass and sent it gliding toward her eager body. Again and again she surrounded him with buoyant warm sea. Their skill at pleasuring one another struck them both as extraordinary. Of course, they soon began varying the imageries of delight, so that no monotony would taint their embraces. She came to him as a starfish, thousands of tiny suction-cup feet and a startling devouring mouth, and at another time as a moist voluptuous mass of warm smooth white clay, and as a whirlpool, and as a great coy lighthearted amoeba; and he manifested himself to her as a flash flood roaring down a red-rock canyon, and as a glistening vine coiling through a tropic night, and as a spaceship plunging in eternal free-fall between worlds. All of these were effective, for they needed only to touch one another with their minds to bring pleasure; and each new access of ingenuity brought an abstract pleasure of its own. But even so they tended often to revert to the original modes, snake and ocean, ocean and snake, the way one might return to a familiar and modest hotel where one spent a joyous weekend at the beginning of an affair, and somehow it was always best that way. They liked to tell each other that the kind of lovemaking they had invented and of which they were perhaps the sole practitioners in the history of humanity was infinitely superior to the old-fashioned type, which was so blatant, so obvious, so coarse, so messy. Even so, even as he said things like that, he knew he was lying. He wanted her skin against his skin, her breath on his breath.