Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

(“I know.”)

He added aloud, “Besides, I doubt if I could give her all she needs. She wants to give herself all the time, to everybody. Even her Happiness meetings and her snakes and the marks aren’t enough for Pat. She wants to offer herself on an altar to everybody in the world, always—and make them happy. This New Revelation… I grok that it is a lot of other things to other people. But that is what it is to Pat.”

“Yes, Mike. Dear Mike.”

“Time to leave. Pick the dress you want to wear and get your purse. I’ll dispose of the rest of the trash.”

Jill thought somewhat sadly that she would like, sometimes, to take along just one or two things. But Mike always moved on with just the clothes on his back—and seemed to grok that she preferred it that way, too. “I’ll wear that pretty blue one.”

It floated out to her, poised itself over her, wriggled down onto her as she held up her hands; the zipper closed. Shoes to suit it walked toward her, waited while she stepped into them. “I’m ready, Mike.”

Mike had caught the wistful flavor of her thought, but not the concept; it was too alien to Martian ideas. “Jill? Do you want to stop and get married?”

She thought about it. “We couldn’t, today, Mike. It’s Sunday. We couldn’t get a license.”

“Tomorrow, then. I will remember. I grok that you would like it.”

She thought about it. “No, Mike.”

“Why not, Jill?”

“Two reasons. One, we couldn’t be any closer through it, because we already share water. That’s logic, both in English and in Martian. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“And two, a reason valid just in English. I wouldn’t have Dorcas and Anne and Miriam—and Patty—think that I was trying to crowd them out and one of them might think so.”

“No, Jill, none of them would think so.”

“Well, I won’t chance it, because I don’t need it. Because you married me in a hospital room ages and ages ago. Just because you were the way you are. Before I even guessed it.” She hesitated. “But there is something you might do for me.”

“What, Jill?”

“Well, you might call me pet names occasionally! The way I do you.”

“Yes, Jill. What pet names?”

“Oh!” She kissed him quickly. “Mike, you’re the sweetest, most lovable man I’ve ever met—and the most infuriating creature on two planets! Don’t bother with pet names. Just call me ‘little brother’ occasionally…it makes me go all quivery inside.”

“Yes, Little Brother.”

“Oh, my! Now get decent fast and let’s get out of here—before I take you back to bed. Come on. Meet me at the desk; I’ll be paying the bill.” She left very suddenly.

They went to the town’s station flat and caught the first Greyhound going anywhere. A week or two later they stopped at home, shared water for a couple of days, left again without saying good-by—or, rather, Mike did not; saying good-by was one human custom Mike stubbornly resisted and never used with his own. He used it formally with strangers under circumstances in which Jill required him to.

Shortly they were in Las Vegas, stopping in an unfashionable hotel near but not on the Strip. Mike tried all the games in all the casinos while Jill filled in the time as a show girl-gambling bored her. Since she couldn’t sing or dance and had no act, standing or parading slowly in a tall improbable hat, a smile, and a scrap of tinsel was the job best suited to her in the Babylon of the West. She preferred to work if Mike was busy and, somehow, Mike could always get her the job she picked out. Since the casinos never closed, Mike was busy almost all their time in Las Vegas.

Mike was careful not to win too much in any one casino, keeping to limits Jill set for him. After he had milked each one for a few thousand he carefully put it all back, never letting himself be the big-money player at any game, whether winning or losing. Then he took a job as a croupier, studying people, trying to grok why they gambled. He grokked unclearly a drive in many of the gamblers that seemed to be intensely sexual in nature—but he seemed to grok wrongness in this. He kept the job quite a while, letting always the little ball roll without interference.

Jill was amused to discover that the customers in the palatial theater restaurant where she worked were just marks… marks with more money but still marks. She discovered something about herself, too; she enjoyed displaying herself, as long as she was safe from hands that she did not want to grab her. With her steadily increasing Martian honesty she examined this newly uncovered facet in herself. In the past, while she had known that she enjoyed being admired, she had sincerely believed that she wanted it only from a select few and usually only from one—she had been irked at the discovery, now long past, that the sight of her physical being really didn’t mean anything to Mike even though he had been and remained as aggressively and tenderly devoted to her physically as a woman could dream of—if he wasn’t preoccupied.

And he was even generous about that, she reminded herself. If she wished, he would always let her call him out of his deepest withdrawal trances, shift gears without complaint and be smiling and eager and loving.

Nevertheless, there it was—one of his strangenesses, like his inability to laugh. Jill decided, after her initiation as a show girl, that she enjoyed being visually admired because that was the one thing Mike did not give her.

But her own perfecting self-honesty and steadily growing empathy did not allow that theory to stand. The male half of the audience always had that to-be-expected high percentage who were too old, too fat, too bald, and in general too far gone along the sad road of entropy to be likely to be attractive to a female of Jill’s youth, beauty, and fastidiousness—she had always been scornful of “lecherous old wolves”—although not of old men per se, she reminded herself in her own defense; Jubal could look at her, even use crude language in deliberate indecencies, and not give her the slightest feeling that he was anxious to get her alone and grope her. She was so serenely sure of Jubal’s love for her and its truly spiritual nature that she told herself that she could easily share a bed with him, go right to sleep—and be sure that be would also, with only the goodnight peck she always gave him.

But now she found that these unattractive males did not set her teeth on edge. When she felt their admiring stares or even their outright lust—and she found that she did feel it, could even identify the source—she did not resent it; it warmed her and made her feel smugly pleased.

“Exhibitionism” had been to her simply a word used in abnormal psychology—a neurotic weakness she had held in contempt. Now, in digging out her own and looking at it, she decided that either this form of narcissism was normal, or she was abnormal and had not known it. But she didn’t feel abnormal; she felt healthy and happy—healthier than she had ever been. She had been always of better than average health-nurses need to be—but she hadn’t had a sniffle nor even an upset stomach in she couldn’t remember when… why, she thought wonderingly, not even cramps.

Okay, she was healthy—and if a healthy woman liked to be looked at—and not as a side of beef!—then it follows as the night from day that healthy men should like to look at them, else there was just no darn sense to it! At which point she finally understood, intellectually, Duke and his pictures… and begged his pardon in her mind.

She discussed it with Mike, tried to explain her changed viewpoint—not easy, since Mike could not understand why Jill had ever minded being looked at, at any time, by anyone. Not wishing to be touched he understood; Mike avoided shaking hands if he could do so without offense, he wanted to touch and be touched only by water brothers (Jill wasn’t sure just how far this included male water brothers in Mike’s mind; she had explained homosexuality to him, after he had read about it and failed to grok it—and had given him practical rules for avoiding even the appearance thereof and how to keep such passes from being made at him, since she assumed correctly that Mike, pretty as he was, would attract such passes. He had followed her advice and had set about making his face more masculine, instead of the androgynous beauty he had first had. Nevertheless Jill was not sure that Mike would refuse such an invitation from, say, Duke—but fortunately Mike’s male water brothers were all decidedly masculine men, just as his others were very female women. Jill hoped that it would stay that way; she suspected that Mike would grok a “wrongness” in the poor in-betweeners anyhow—they would never be offered water.)