Дэймон Найт: Orbit 3

Then she turned to him and said: “Tell me what to do, Mr. Ralph. I don’t know what to do for you.”

“For us, child,” he said. “What we do—whatever we do from now on, is for us. Together.”

“I like you saying that. Tell me what I should do.”

“You don’t have to do anything except be loved and love back in whatever way you feel. Anything you feel and do is right because you’re my wife and I’m your husband.”

“Would it be wrong for me to want you to hold me— here?” she asked. Eyes cast down, she touched her breasts. “I feel as if I’m bursting, I’m so full of love for my Mr. Ralph. I never thought—back then, that—”

He had to stop her talking and kissed her.

For a ring he had made a circlet of grass. When it broke apart or fell to pieces he made her another. In a way, he thought sometimes, it was like renewing the vows.

Once, years later, when he was looking for a pencil he found in the back of her drawer a collection of hundreds of wisps or strands of dried grass. She had saved each of the worn-out rings, obviously. She had kept them in a cheaply-manufactured container of plastic masquerading as leather which said in gaudy lettering “My Jewel Box.” These were her gems, her only treasure.

He sometimes asked Siss, suddenly, intently: “Are you my friend?” And she would reply: “Yes, I am. Didn’t you think so?” And he would be ashamed, but also gratified, and his heart would swell because she had said more than just Yes.

A woman is a race apart, a friend had told him once. “But,” Rolfe added to himself, “this is ridiculous.” He and Siss could not have been more unlike mentally.

Well, of course. That could have been true even if he’d had the whole world to choose from. Suppose she had been a selfish, empty-headed teenager; how long could he have stood someone like that? Or she could have been a crone, a hag; work-worn, fat, diseased, crippled. You’re a pretty lucky guy, Martin Rolfe; Mr. Ralph, sir!

Sexually they were complementary, for instance. But was that enough? Except for little bits of time, no. But those are very important little bits of time, aren’t they, Marty? Precious, even. Each a potential conception, a possible person.

But aside from that, no; it was not enough.

But because her entire existence was one of trying to please him, she learned eventually to make acceptable verbal responses and their mating became more satisfactory to him. His stomach ached less frequently.

By trial and error and by diligence, as she learned any task, she learned to speak to him in bed with an approximation of high intelligence, murmuring words of sympathy, approval, surprise, delight, playfulness, even shock at appropriate times. She learned to modulate her laughter, once coarse and raucous. She learned that a few words, sincerely but carefully expressed, did more for their mutual happiness than a babble, or an ungrammatical gush.

Her physical responses, as of a slave to a beloved master, had always been gratifying to him, except for her one unbreakable habit—her tendency to say “Oh, praise God!” whenever she achieved orgasm, or whenever she thought he had.

Once she had asked him to tell her about his life.

“What about it?” he had asked.

“All about it,” she’d said.

“That would be a lot to tell.”

“As much as you want to, then, Mr. Ralph.”

Without a word of introduction he would start: “I was sixteen when I first kissed a girl. Awfully old . . .”

He’d always thought it shameful that he’d been unkissed so long and had never confessed it before. It was years later before Siss got up the courage to say: “Mr. Ralph, you told me once you didn’t get a kiss till you were sixteen and that’s too bad, but do you know how old I was?”

And he had said No, he didn’t and she’d said:

“Twenty-eight, Mr. Ralph: that’s how old. So don’t you feel so bad.”

And he’d asked her, though he was practically certain: “You mean I was the first one ever to kiss you?”

“The first man, except my father, yes, sir, Mr. Ralph. And do you know what? I’m awfully glad it was you that was the first, and that now nobody else ever will. I’m glad of that.”

And so he had to postpone his confession. He had been on the point of telling Siss about his previous marriage—how he had chosen his wife from those available for matrimony among the fairly large number of women he had known.

What a fantastically wide choice he had had! The irony of now, with no choice at all, made him marvel to think that he could have picked from among millions, had he known doom was to come and that he and his mate, if she too were saved, would be parents to the entire human race. With what care he would have searched, what exacting tests he would have applied, to screen the mass of womanhood for a fitting mate for the last man!

But because he had expected all life to continue he had chosen from an extremely small sample. Nevertheless he had chosen well.

Later he would tell Siss; not now. He would not hurt her at this time with talk about what, by hindsight, had been a perfect marriage; nor did he feel like hurting himself by contrasting a happy past marriage to an intelligent woman with what he had now.

Now he would tell Siss about another time in his adult past, a sad interlude during which he and his perfect wife had separated and he was living alone.

How foolish to have had that quarrel with his dead perfect wife, he thought. How senseless to have lost all the time that they might have had together.

Yet he had achieved a certain peace in his solitude. And their marriage had been stronger when he returned to her.

“I’m going to tell you about a time I was living all alone in a little trailer in the woods,” he told Siss.

He had been a free-lance editor in those days, doctoring doddering magazines, doing articles for his editor friends, and reading for a publishing house, and so was able to avoid the frenzied daily commute. He used the mails and phone and got into the city a couple of times a month.

He enjoyed an occasional dinner or cocktail party in his exurb; but he valued his privacy enough to decline many invitations and to withdraw to his trailer.

Rolfe himself never entertained. His truck-back trailer home was unsuited for anything but the shortest of visits. He’d have the mailman in for a drink of Bourbon on Christmas Eve, or chat with the man who came around to collect for the volunteer ambulance corps, or play ten-second-move chess with the route man who delivered the only food Rolfe ate at home—eggs, and the butter he fried them in.

The truck-back home normally sat in the middle of Rolfe’s eighteen acres—far enough out of town so that there were woods to surround him and a dammed-up stream in which to swim, but close enough for an electric power line to be run in.

If Rolfe’s choice of this way to live during his separation was an eccentricity, then he was eccentric. One other thing about him was a little odd. He had nailed a sign to a tree at the beginning of the track which led off the county road to his place. It said:

PRIVATE ROAD

MINED

The police came around after he put up the sign, which he’d burned into the end of an egg crate with an electric pen. The policemen, a lieutenant and a sergeant, left their car at the county road and walked carefully along the edge of Rolfe’s track to the pickup truck in the clearing near the dammed-up stream. A pheasant moved without haste into some undergrowth as they came up to the door over the tailgate.

Rolfe invited them in, making room for them to sit down by lifting a manuscript off the one easy chair and motioning the sergeant to the camp chair in front of the typewriter on the bracket that folded down from the wall. Rolfe sat on the single bunk along the driver’s side, having first got cokes out of the tiny refrigerator. He knew better than to offer liquor to policemen on duty. They chatted for a while before the lieutenant said: “About your sign, Mr. Rolfe; we’ve had some complaints.”