Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

Janet was painting window shades for Laura’s room. She had copied the design from some material that she was using for a bedspread and drapes. She had baked two pies, and a cake, and a loaf of whole-wheat bread. The house was clean and smelled good and we were busy. And happy. It always sounds hokey to say that you’re a happy man. Why aren’t you tearing out your hair over the foreign mess, or the tax problem, or some damn thing? But I was a happy man. We had a good thing, and knew it. Janet always baked on Saturday, froze the stuff and got it out during the week, so the kids hardly even knew that she was a working mother. They were happy kids.

Then Christine came along. That’s the only way to put it. That afternoon she came up through the woods, dressed in brown jeans, with a sloppy plaid shirt that came down below her hips and was not terribly clean. Laura ran down to meet her, and she was almost as big as Christine.

“Hi,” Janet said, coming out to the terrace. “Mrs. Rudeman, this is Eddie. And Rusty.”

“Please, call me Christine,” she said, and held out her hand.

But I knew her. It was like seeing your first lover again after years, the same shock low in the belly, the same tightening up of muscles, the fear that what’s left of the affair will show, and there is always something left over. Hate, love, lust. Something. Virtually instantaneous with the shock of recognition came the denial. I had never seen her before in my life, except that one morning on the way to work, and certainly I hadn’t felt any familiarity then. It would have been impossible to have known her without remembering, if only because of her size. You remember those who aren’t in the range of normality. She was possibly five feet tall, and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. It was impossible to tell what kind of a figure she had, but what was visible seemed perfectly normal, just scaled down, except her eyes, and they looked extraordinarily large in so tiny a face. Her eyes were very dark, black or so close to it as to make no difference, and her hair, as Janet had said, was beautiful, or could have been with just a little attention. It was glossy, lustrous black, thick and to her shoulders. But she shouldn’t have worn it tied back with a ribbon as she had it then. Her face was too round, her eyebrows too straight. It gave her a childlike appearance.

All of that and more passed through my mind as she crossed the terrace smiling, with her hand outstretched. And I didn’t want to touch her hand. I knew that Janet was speaking, but I didn’t hear what she said. In the same distant way I knew that Laura and Rusty were there, Laura waiting impatiently for the introductions to be over so she could say something or other. I braced myself for the touch, and when our fingers met, I knew there had been no way I could have prepared myself for the electricity of that quick bringing together of flesh to flesh. For God’s sake, I wanted to say, turn around and say something to Rusty, don’t just stand there staring at me. Act normal. You’ve never seen me before in your life and you know it.

She turned quickly, withdrawing her hand abruptly, but I couldn’t tell if she had felt anything, or suspected my agitation. Janet was oblivious of any currents.

“But you and Rusty and Laura have all met,” she said. “I keep forgetting how great kids are at insinuating themselves into any scene.”

“Where’s Caesar?” Laura finally got to ask.

I had another shock with the name. My nightmare, my waking nightmare. Or had I heard her calling to the dog?

“I never take him with me unless he’s been invited,” Christine said. “You never know where you’ll run into a dog-hater, or a pet cat, or another dog that’s a bit jealous.”

They talked about the dog we had had until late in the spring, a red setter that had been born all heart and no brain. He had been killed out on the county road. Again I was distantly aware of what they were saying, almost as if I were half asleep in a different room, with voices droning on and on beyond the walls. I was simply waiting for a chance to leave without being too rude.

The kids wandered away after a little while, and Janet and Christine talked easily. I began to listen when she mentioned Pete’s name.

“Pete and Grace had been my husband’s friends for a long time. Pete studied under him, and Grace and I were in classes together. So they invited me to stay in their house this year. Karl suggested Pete for the exchange program three years ago. He didn’t believe there was a coherent American school of philosophy, and he thought that it would be good for Pete to study under the Cambridge system of Logical Positivism.” She shrugged. “I take it that Pete didn’t write to you and warn you that I’d be moving in. He said he would, but I guess I didn’t really think he’d get around to it.”

Karl Rudeman. Karl Rudeman. It was one of those vaguely familiar names that you feel you must know and can’t associate with anything.

Janet had made a pitcher of gin and bitter lemon, and I refilled our glasses while I tried to find a tag to go with the name. Christine murmured thanks, then said, “It isn’t fair that I should know so much about you both—from Pete—and that you know nothing about me. Karl was a psychologist at Harvard. He worked with Leary for several years, then they separated, violently, over the drugs. He died last May.”

I felt like a fool then, and from the look on her face, I assumed that Janet did too. Karl Rudeman had won the Nobel for his work in physiological psychology, in the field of visual perception. There was something else nagging me about the name, some elusive memory that went with it, but it refused to come.

Christine stayed for another half hour, refused Janet’s invitation to have dinner with us, and then went back home. Back through the woods, the way she had come.

“She’s nice,” Janet said. “I like her.”

“You warn her about Glaser?”

“She’s not interested. And it does take two. Anyway she said that Pete gave her the rundown on everyone on the lane. You heard her.”

“Yeah,” I lied. I hadn’t heard much of anything anyone had said. “He must have been thirty years older than she is.”

“I suppose. I always wonder how it is with a couple like that. I mean, was he losing interest? Or just one time a month? Did it bother her?” Since Janet and I always wondered about everyone’s sex life, that wasn’t a strange line for our talk to have taken, but I felt uncomfortable about it, felt as if this time we were peeking in bedroom-door keyholes.

“Well, since you seem so sure she wouldn’t be interested in Bill Glaser, maybe she’s as asexual as she looked in that outfit.”

“Hah!” That’s all, just one Hah! And I agreed. We let it drop then.

We had planned a movie for that night. “Get some hamburgers out for the kids and I’ll take you around to Cunningham’s for dinner,” I said to Janet as she started in with the tray. She looked pleased.

We always had stuffed crab at Cunningham’s, and Asti Spumante. It’s a way of life. Our first date cost me almost a week’s pay, and that’s what we did, so I don’t suggest it too often, just a couple of times a year when things have suddenly clicked, or when we’ve had a fight and made up to find everything a little better than it used to be. I don’t know why I suggested it that night, but she liked the idea, and she got dressed up in her new green dress that she had been saving for a party.

When I made love to her late that night, she burst into tears, and I stroked her hair until she fell asleep. I remembered the first time she had done that, how frightened I’d been, and her convulsive clutching when I had tried to get up to bring her a drink of water or something. She hadn’t been able to talk, she just sobbed and held me, and slowly I had come to realize that I had a very sexy wife whose response was so total that it overwhelmed her, and me. She sighed when I eased my numb arm out from under her. Pins-and-needles circulation began again and I rubbed my wrist trying to hurry it along.