Walter Tevis - Mockingbird

And she whispered, “Jesus, Paul. You’re crying. In front of me.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t…”

“Do you feel bad?”

I wiped at my cheek with my hand, and it brushed against hers. I held still, with the, back of my hand against her cheek, and then I felt her hand turning mine, ever so gently, until my palm was holding her cheek. I felt a wave of a new feeling, a soft, sweet feeling like that of a powerful drug, enter me. I looked at her face, at her wide and curious eyes, now somewhat sad. “No,” I said. “No. I don’t feel bad at all. I feel… something. I don’t know.” I was still crying. “It’s a very good thing, what I feel.”

Her face was very close to mine. She seemed to understand what I was saying, and she nodded her head. “Shall we finish saying the letters?”

I smiled. Then I said, “J.” And I took my hand from her cheek and placed it on her back. “‘J’ is the next letter.”

She smiled.

We did not get to the difficult part of the alphabet. The “W, X, Y and Z.”

Mary Lou has moved in with me! For two nights now we have slept together in my bed. By unfastening the desk part of it and setting it against the wall, she was able to make room for herself.

It was difficult for me to sleep with another person in the bed with me. I had heard of men and women sharing beds, but never to sleep in. But that was the way she wanted to do it, so I have done it.

I am self-conscious about her body, afraid to touch her or press against her. But I awoke this morning to find myself holding her in my arms. She was snoring lightly. I smelled her hair and kissed her lightly on the back of the neck and then just lay there, holding her sleeping body for a long, long time, until she woke.

She laughed when she woke and found me holding her and snuggled against me warmly. I became self-conscious again. But then we started talking and I forgot my self-consciousness. She talked about learning to read. She said she had dreamt she was reading—had dreamt that she had already read thousands and thousands of books and now knew everything there was to know about life.

“What is there to know about life?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said. “They keep us so ignorant.”

I wasn’t certain I understood that—or who “they” were—so I said nothing.

“Let’s have breakfast,” she said. And I called the servo and we ate soybars and pig bacon. I felt very good, even though I had slept little.

During breakfast she leaned over the desk and kissed me. Just like that! I liked it.

After breakfast I decided to work on a film, and Mary Lou watched it with me. It was called The Stock Broker and its star was Buster Keaton. Buster Keaton is a very intense man who has many unusual difficulties in his films. They would be funny if they were not so sad.

Mary Lou was fascinated. She had never seen any films of any kind before and was only familiar with holographic TV, which she did not like.

Early in the first reel, when Buster Keaton was painting a house and kept painting the face of a man who would put his head out the window, Mary Lou said, “Paul, Buster Keaton looks exactly like you. He’s so… serious !”

And she was right.

After the film we spent the day studying reading. She learns amazingly fast and asks interesting questions. I have had many students in the university where I teach, but none like her. And my reading is improving too.

Everything about her is delightful.

It is evening now, and Mary Lou is watching me write this at the desk propped against the wall. I explained to her about writing and she was excited and said that she must learn to do that too so that she could write down the memory of her life. “And write down other things I think of. So I can read them,” she said.

That was interesting. Maybe that is the true reason that I write this—since I write so much more than Spofforth ever meant for me to record—I write it so I can read it. Reading it does something strange and exciting in my mind.

Perhaps one reason Mary Lou is bolder than I is that she lived in a Worker Dormitory before she ran away and I, of course, am a graduate of a Thinker Dormitory. Yet she is so fiercely intelligent! Why would she have been trained to be a Worker and not a Thinker? Perhaps the choices are made on some basis other than intelligence.

I must remember to get more paper, so that Mary Lou can learn to write and can begin to print out the memory of her life.

She has lived with me nine days now, against all principles of Individualism and Privacy. I feel guilty at times, compromising my Interior Development by the whims of another person, but I don’t think about the immorality of that very often. In fact, these have been the happiest nine days of my life.

And she already reads nearly as well as I do! Amazing! And she has begun to write the memory of her life.

We are together constantly. It seems at times like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford—except they were too well-trained to have sex.

There is no sex at all in the old films, although many of the people live together in the most intimate and immoral ways. Porno, of the kind normally taught in Classics courses, was apparently undiscovered, like TV, at the time these silent films were made.

We make love as often as I am able. Sometimes it just happens while we are reading together, with her repeating the sentences after me. Once it took us almost all afternoon to finish a little book called Making Paper Kites because we kept stopping.

Neither of us smokes pot or takes pills. I am often very nervous and excited and feel that I cannot sit still. Sometimes we take short walks when that happens. And, although a part of me seems to cry out against the intensity of the way I am living and working and making love, I know that it is better this way than any other way that I have ever been.

Once, on a walk, we became excited and I suggested we go to a quick-sex bar at Times Square. So we did, and I used my NYU credit card to get the best cubicle they had. There were the usual big porno holographs in the lobby, and two robot doxies with naked breasts and black boots offered to assist us in an orgy, but Mary Lou, thank goodness, told them to bug off. And I turned down the offer of sex-up pills that the bartender made. We went to the cubicle alone, turned off the lights, and made love on the padded floor. But it was not really any good that way.

That was the way my lovemaking had always been before, and the way it is supposed to be. “Quick sex protects,” as my Interpersonal Relations teacher used to say. But I wanted to be at my own place with Mary Lou, making love in my own bed and talking afterward. Except for the sex, I wanted to be like Mother and Father in one of the ancient films. I wanted to buy her flowers and to dance with her.

When we had finished Mary Lou said, “Let’s get out of this sex factory,” and then, as we were leaving, “I think that place is what Simon meant by a ‘Chicago whorehouse.’”

And I did buy her flowers, at a vending machine. White carnations, like Gloria Swanson wore in Queen of Them All .

And before we went to bed that night I asked her to dance. I pinned a flower to her Synlon dress and I played the background music from a TV program, and we danced together. She had never heard of two people dancing together before, but any serious student of films knows about dancing. I had seen it many times. We were awkward and we stepped on each other’s feet several times, but it was fun.

But when we went to bed something, I don’t know what, frightened me. I held her close until she fell asleep. Then I lay awake for a long time, thinking. Something about the quick-sex place had frightened me, I think.