Дэймон Найт: Orbit 3

“You shouldn’t swear, Mr. Ralph,” she’d said. “But thanks anyhow.”

“And you shouldn’t talk. You’re welcome. Look, we’re going to play a game. We’re going to a fancy night club. We’re going to make believe you’re a mute—that you can’t talk. No matter what, you must not say a word. Not a word.”

“All right, Mr. Ralph.”

“Starting right now, damn it! I’m sorry. I mean starting right now. All you can do is nod or smile. You can touch me if you want to. But you can’t talk at all. That’s part of t he game. Do you understand?”

She started to say yes, then caught herself and nodded.

The silent nod from this beautifully gowned woman immediately made her ten times more attractive. Pleased with himself and with her, he gave her his arm and bowed her into the front seat of the Bentley he had searched out for their evening.

The night club had once been a major one, with a resident big-name band. Changing fashion had turned it into a discotheque, so that it had a juke box. He fed it a handful of coins to pay his way into a night of illusion. But the fables were bare and therefore wrong. He found a linen closet and set them with tableclothes and silverware, glasses, candlesticks.

The illusion grew. He found a switch that set in motion a set of colored lights which played on multi-faceted colored globes which hung from the ceiling. Another switch set them spinning slowly.

“What do you do in your spare time?’ he asked her, knowing she wouldn’t reply but wanting to see how she would react.

She shrugged, smiled a little and shook her head in what he tried to imagine was an attitude that said she had so little spare time that it was negligible.

She was carrying out her part of the bargain. She did it extremely well. She listened without a word to his conversation, looking into his eyes as he pretended they were two among hundreds of elegant diners. He reconstructed talk from pre-holocaust nights out. He pretended she was a girl he had once been engaged to and told her extravagant things. She looked back at him and smiled, as if mockingly, as the old girl would have done. He pretended it was a later time, with the engagement in ruins and him solacing himself with the wife of his best friend, with the best friend’s knowledge and consent, and the girl across from him gave him silent looks of profound sympathy. He pretended he had hired a call girl and spoke foully to her. She smiled bravely, her lips quivering, saying nothing.

Angered by the illusion which he had created and which mocked him, he drank too much and continued to abuse her—for herself, now; for doing as he had asked, for remaining silent.

The juke box was playing “Begin the Beguine” and ghostly dancers danced inside the circle of tables, under the soft colored lights. He saw them and cursed them for their nonexistence. He got up, knocking his chair over backwards, and shouted at her.

“Speak!” he said. “I release you from your muteness.”

She shook her head, no longer smiling.

“Speak! you misbegotten halfwit! You monstrous bird-brained imposter! You scullery maid in a Schiaparelli gown. Speak, you—mental case.”

But still she said nothing; merely looked at him with those deep eyes that seemed to understand and forgive.

Only at the very end of their evening out, when he had drunk himself into a stupor and stared across the room over her right shoulder, as if transfixed by his misery, did she speak. And then she said only:

“We better go home, Mr. Ralph, honey.”

Then with a strength greater than his she half carried him there to the car and drove him home and put him to bed. It was a good thing he’d taught her to drive.

He woke up contrite, half remembering that he’d behaved unforgivably.

But she forgave him, as perhaps no one else ever would have, using these words:

“I forgive you, Mr. Ralph. You knewd not what you dood.”

He was delighted. “Do not what I would,” he said. “Had I but dood what I could, who knew what would have been dood?”

“I don’t think that’s very nice, Mr. Ralph. I said I forgive you. You’re supposed to say thank you and say you’re sorry, even if you’re not sorry.”

He was still laughing at her, even after the realization that he had a hangover.

“Okay. I’m sorry even if I’m not sorry and it’s very good of you to forgive me for my insufferable behavior, even if nobody asked you to.”

“Thank you for saying that, Mr. Ralph. Now I’ll fix you a hangover remedy.”

“Where did you learn to concoct a hangover remedy, for God’s sake?”

“I was a working girl once for a poor man who got intoxicated and his wife. I learned it there.”

She gave him no magic potion but an ordinary tomatoey thing laced with pepper and Worcestershire sauce. He drank it down but stubbornly declined to feel better for a full hour. By then he had persuaded Siss he needed a cold beer and she’d brought him one—disapproving but proud of her ingenuity in having produced it, since they kept no store of alcoholic beverages. She must have made an ingenious search to find a cold beer; he was suddenly proud of her.

But, remembering his performance of the night before, he hated himself.

From the holding of hands to the kiss is not so far a thing as from the not holding of hands to the holding.

One thinks of the innocence of holding hands (children do it; men shake hands) but it is a vast journey from a platonic handclasp, over which there is no lingering, to the clasp which is so intense and telegraphic (accompanied, as it may be, by ardent gazing) that it would be a great surprise if the kiss to which it soon led were rebuffed.

And a kiss may lead anywhere. This he knew. He wondered how much she knew, or felt or surmised.

Dared he take her hand to help her across a stream or a rocky place? So far he had taken her arm, holding her firmly just above the elbow as if she were an elderly woman and he a large Boy Scout. He had no wish yet for anything more intimate.

It was a hesitant, tentative beginning to their romance.

“Do you mind my touching you?” he asked. Lately he had found that it gave him pleasure to touch her hair or trace the outline of her ear, or run his finger along her breastbone. Nothing carnal.

“No; I enjoy it.”

And so they married. He arranged a ceremony, not only for her sense of propriety but to satisfy his demand for a kind of stability amid chaos.

He made it as elaborate as possible. He found a big flat rock to be the altar. He picked flowers and garlanded them into a headpiece for her. Let her head be covered, though her body was not.

She surprised him with a piece of writing. Crudely written in pencil on a sheet from a lined pad, it said:

“To my Mr. Ralph—

“This is our day to mary to-gether. My day and your day. I feel real good about it even if nobody else cant come. I’ll try and make you a good wife with all my heart.

“I know you do the same thing for me because you are kind and good dear Mr. Ralph.

“Your freind and wife

“Cecelia Beamer”

It was the first time he knew what Siss was the nickname for.

Never before a sentimental man, Martin took his wife, Cecelia Beamer Rolfe, in his arms and kissed her with tenderness and affection.

He put her wedding-letter, as he thought of it, away in his desk, where it would be safe.

He wanted to consummate the marriage outdoors. It was a perfect June day, the sun warm, the grass soft, a breeze gentle. Lord knew they could not have asked for greater privacy than that of their own planet. But he felt Siss would have been, if not shocked, embarrassed unless four walls surrounded them.

Therefore he took her indoors, where she removed her flowery hat and put it in water, in a bowl.