Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

It was our wedding night. I had undressed quickly in my bathroom and was lying, wearing only a pair of black briefs, on one of the two king-sized beds, my hands behind my head. I was pretty inexperienced sexually myself, and Anna was a virgin.

So much for the Fergusson pill and the “liberation of the body”—I was as scared of sex as they had been in the Middle Ages. So was Anna. We had talked about it.

But she had not said anything to prepare me for what happened next. We had gotten off the plane still wearing the dressup clothes from the wedding. She came abruptly out of her bathroom now, with her white blouse still on and with some kind of godawful sexless rubber girdle on her bottom. She walked over to the bed in her matter-of-fact way, planted her feet like a shortstop, turned her back to me and said, “I can’t get this thing off.” I was sort of spellbound by all this. It was Anna’s way of behaving all right, but I had expected something different for a wedding night. I sat up in bed, reached over and unhooked a little steel hook at the top of the thing. It felt to my fingertips like Rubbermaid.

“That’s better,” she said and then proceeded to loop her thumbs under the waistband of that damned rubbery white garment, pull it down an inch and then, abruptly, let it go with a loud pop . She breathed an audible sigh of relief. She took it off an inch at a time that way. Pop, pop, pop , I can still hear it.

I had not expected Anna to act like a courtesan. But, Jesus, she seemed to be trying to tell me something awful with this.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “what’s going on?”

Her voice was taut. “I just couldn’t get the thing off ,” she said.

“Why did you wear it in the first place?” She didn’t need a girdle. Her ass was fine.

Then she began to cry.

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. That must have been the first of a million times I was to say that. I’m sorry, honey. Christ! I should have read the handwriting on the wall right then and bolted back to New York. Let my lawyers handle the annulment. But, as usual, I thought it over and figured I was in the wrong. If only I could trust my feelings with women the way I do with money! I’d be as fulfilled as a fat Japanese Buddha floating on a lotus leaf.

“The lady at the store told me I needed something to wear under the suit, and I bought it. I wanted to look right for you.”

I shook my head. She turned to look at me, standing there with a white Synlon blouse on and that big dumb rubber thing lying on the floor like a discarded chastity belt. Chastity belt is right. I’ve learned since that there are nuns everywhere.

“Well, she should have sold you a pair of scissors to get it off with.” I was trying to be amusing. But it wasn’t funny. Goddamn it, it was terrible . I felt like a son of a bitch for being angry. I had loved her for her plainness, hadn’t I? What did I expect? Poor girl—how could she know how to be graceful on her bridal night?

Anna looked devastated. “I’m sorry, Ben,” she said. “I guess I don’t know how to be a bride.”

“Honey,” I said, “it’s okay. Just throw that thing away and get yourself naked and come back. If you feel self-conscious naked, wear something. Just something that isn’t made of rubber.”

She smiled. “Okay,” she said, and went back into her bathroom.

She came back after a while wearing a white gown. She had put on perfume. She lay in bed by me and we talked and both of us got to feeling better, but something in me was apprehensive. We didn’t make love until the morning, after breakfast. She bled a little on the sheets. When I walked out of the shower afterward I saw that she had the sheets off the bed and was in her bathroom grimly rinsing the blood out. My stomach sank. But I said nothing to her. What the hell , I thought. She’ll change. But she didn’t.

After two hours or so of eating pears in the living room, I went into a bathroom and threw up. Then I went to the phone and called Arthur Freed, one of my lawyers, got him out of bed, and told him I wanted to get a divorce and I was willing to pay substantial alimony.

I still felt sick and my mouth was full of a sour-sweetish taste from all the pears. But something in my heart felt lighter. I had been putting off that divorce for fifteen years.

I’d been seeing Isabel from time to time, ever since I’d backed a revival of a play she had a small part in. I waited until sunup and called her and asked her to have breakfast with me. She agreed, sleepily. By nine that morning I was in her apartment and we got into her loft bed together, while her two big, loutish pussycats watched me fumble, moan and fail. I had become impotent. Son of a bitch!

In a cover article a few years ago, Newsweek called me “a scrappy child of the times” and went on to speak of those “times” as being “the orphan offspring of the twentieth century.” In its half-assed way Newsweek was right. My father buried his life in the past; I live very much in my own century. I was born in 2012, when population in the industrial societies was plummeting. It’s a wonder I was born at all. The last gas station in America closed when I was four. Faster-than-light travel was perfected when I was seven, and when I was in high school the frenetic search through the stars for uranium was on, with hundreds of ships like the Isabel scanning the Milky Way for what the Tribune called “the galactic Klondike.” Fuel for that venture reduced the world’s supply of enriched uranium by half. God knows how much was thrown into the stratosphere during the Arab Wars, blowing up those half-empty oil wells and the spanking new concrete universities that dotted the sands of the Persian Gulf.

If my century is the “orphan” of the twentieth, it is the 1990s that conceived my times. More precisely, the year of conception was 1997, when Fergusson invented his pill.

Fergusson was a cranky old celibate whose contraceptive had all the necessary characteristics: it was cheap, easy and safe, and you didn’t have to remember to take it more than once. It was also nonsexist; a man or a woman could get sterile with the same pill. The first Fergusson kits came out several years before my birth, and it is to my everlasting astonishment that neither my mother nor my father took one of the reds and prevented me and this account of them from coming into being. A kit was a small plastic bottle with two pills—one red and one green. If you swallowed the red you were sterile and you remained that way until you took the antidote—the green pill. You were sterile for a weekend in Mexico City or for your lifetime, as you chose. A Fergusson kit cost almost nothing to manufacture; they sold for the price of a Pepsi-Cola—two dollars. The World Health Organization gave them out free in Latin America and India. The Roman Catholic Church nearly strangled on its apoplexy; the Pope crinkled his wise old Japanese eyes in pain. The press and pulpit were full of talk about God-given procreation and the warmth of families. People nodded agreement sagely and took the pill. Minority groups shouted “chemical genocide” and maternity wards closed down. Bantu tribesmen gave their young reds as part of traditional puberty rites. No igloo in the Arctic was without them. And everywhere the greens were left over. They seldom got taken. “Collective suicide” Osservatore Romano called it. A few dutiful Irish had broods of sulking babies; the rest of mankind breathed a sigh of relief. The price tag had finally been removed from copulation. The next generation was half the size of the previous one.

Myra was born from my deliberate taking of a green on a Friday night. At the first sign of Anna’s pregnancy, I popped a red.