M Y W I F E E M I LY
A Novel
MAURICE ROWDON


Every morning the San Francisco Chronicle has a
picture of the president somewhere. He says things
are going to be all right and they're getting better.
This is good to hear and I need to hear it because
other people say they couldn't be worse.
Sometimes he
seems to say we should drop nuclear bombs because they
aren't as bad as all that, and sometimes he seems to
say we shouldn't.
It differs according to the people
he's talking to, but where exactly is the truth?
isn't that I'm worried about whether a nuclear bomb will
be dropped but that even the possibility casts a shadow
on my doings. I have to calculate that any action of
mine may not have an effect lasting a year, ten years,
much less a lifetime as my animal self (I'm a veterinary
surgeon), bent on racial survival, demands that it
should.
Therefore I am at one and the same time fright-
ened of the president and thankful for him. I am
frightened he might do it and I am happy and grateful
that he doesn't, and above all I'm relieved that he
tells me, almost every morning in the pages of the
San Francisco Chronicle, that things are all right,
that the world is a safer place now than it was.
All this brings me to Emily, who shone like
Vivien Leigh in'Gone with the Wind'when I met her in
a café. The sun was shining as usual and a smart
reminding breeze (reminding because it carries a
certain chill) came up from the Pacific.
I walked in
and there was a friend of mine and she (the friend)
said 'This is Emily' and we all sat down to coffee.


Emily was for me all I meant by Connecticut and
white-painted houses behind rising lawns and front
doors you could leave open all day and friendly sheriffs
and kids playing Huckleberry Finn by the river in the
dappled shade of wych elm and commencement days and
black gowns on lawns and strawberries and cream and
light frilled flower-printed dresses and chipmunks in
the walls and a Broadway show in the evening and Long
Island weekends and courtesy and black ties.
She stood my height, and we communicated with our
eyes, and I could see children, animals and a wooden
wide-decked house at the edge of a eucalyptus grove
and years of happiness stretching to a natural death
(or maybe a presidential decision, which would at least
be quick).
Certain forces were obviously working in Emily
to make me think of her in terms of Daughters of the
American Revolution and Pennsylvanian colonial towns
with burg on the end of their names, rather than in
terms of her inmost San Diego nature.
And I. must have had certain forces in me which made
her think of me (as she told me later) in terms of
Marines standing tall.
The café where I met Emily was on a wooded hill
above Sausalito.
It had a corrugated iron roof and
plastic green curtains to keep the sun off and old
wooden wheels on the lawn in front.
People went there
for the quality of the icecream and the fact that it
was all broken down.
The upshot of this meeting high above a mooring


station for yachts, in a green-tinted café wafted
by the musty scent of eucalyptus trees, was that we
met again at a gala dance in Mill Valley. It was
two o'clock in the morning and I was still dancing
with Emily. Her hair got in my face and it was like
the first time I kissed a girl in a field and I put my
nose in her hair and felt what a horse must feel like
(veterinary surgeon again) when he puts his nose in
his feedbag after a hard day, that warm hay smell.
Emily invited me to her home which was in
Emeryville not far from the ocean, a crowded bungalow
with a strip of lawn in front and a warehouse with a
hooter behind it, and also a dye factory which emitted
a noxious blue smoke from time to time. Happily it
wasn't her only house.
She spent most of her time in
Petaluma, in sloping country that had once been flourish-
ing chicken land, only the price of eggs had gone down,
and now all you see is a grazing horse or two. The
scent from the woods is delicious of an evening when
the air cools, and truthfully those nearby trees seem
to open boxes of nasal delights.
She had a three-storey
wooden house nestling among the trees at the edge of
the woods, and at night, she told me, the animals out
there were all but deafening.
She'd even seen beaver,
which I thought had gone out before the gold rush.
She had a fur book, beautiful color plates showing every
kind of fur you can imagine, from stoat to skunk, this
book was such a beautiful job, it cost over a hundred
dollars a few years back, this was at a time when the
publishing trade was featuring highly expensive books


of this nature for people like Emily.
Together, her hay-fresh hair close to mine, we
pored over these furs, and over the photos at the end
of the book which showed eminent hunters standing
smiling with shotguns in their hands.
These evenings at Emily's remote Petaluma place
were enchanting for a kind of artistic undertone which
very much belonged to her personality.
She had pictures
made of 'cracked steel' on her walls.
Cracked steel
is steel broken at fantastically high temperatures so
that it forms bubbles, contusions, chasms. They weren't
framed square or oblong like other pictures, which I
thought most interesting. For instance, one steel
picture was a vast jagged mass with points so sharp
that, as Emily said, 'lean against that and you come
away in shreds'.
It was just propped against the wall,
triangular, stretching from floor to ceiling among the
stuffed birds. No pets were allowed in the room because
of that spiked cracked-steel picture, they might run
against it, Emily said, and she didn't want the respon-
sibility.
One day she said would you like to see me naked.
This was de rigueur among my friends at this time.
Most people said 'What about a hot tub?' but, typically,
Emily went straight to the reason for the hot tub craze.
I suppose pipe-smoking therapists would say there was a
sexual element (to compensate for it being so small,
I'm refering to the therapist's) but in fact if there
was any sexual interest between me and Emily in the hot
tub it never manifested.
We sat there like babes.
Only afterwards in my bed sixty miles away did I realise
that I'd been watching the most lusciously Junoesque
body I had ever seen, the most generous hips and thighs
and lips, the most handsomely swollen breasts I had
ever overlooked to touch!
It was an extraordinary doubletake.
She had the
same feeling about me. Next day we threw ourselves


onto each other. It had been the longest flirtation
either of us had been through.
It had lasted four
days, seven hours.
It beat other flirtations hundreds
of percents.
In no time we were married. It seemed
right after the long self-denial we had inexplicably
imposed on ourselves.
Between us we now had eight
houses and several large holdings.
These included a fine house we bought in Santa
Rosa, where we lived nearly all the time.
Emily and I ran as usual (I mean as we had
usually done as singles) in the annual May cross-
city marathon in San Francisco, the whole seven and a
half miles of it, mostly uphill, and readers who know
San Francisco from the boob series will know what I
mean by uphill. This marathon is an abuse of the body,
as both of us discovered when we returned to our de luxe
apartment in the Richmond district among wealthy won ton
entrepreneurs. We'd had something of an altercation
before setting out as I insisted that Emily wear a
tighter bra as she has enormous tits inherited from her
mother. She wouldn't hear of it and of course she had
an uncomfortable seven-and-a-half mile journey. I
got ahead of her and finished at least a mile in front.
This irritated her and when we got back she began
flinging insults at me.
'You crotch-bug, you small-ass, five-foot-two
simian!'
It was an amazing tirade.
'And another thing,' she screamed, 'take your
fucking running shoes off, you're supposed to be a


therapist, you should know about not trailing shit
all over your own carpet, especially as I do my yoga
on it!' (she never did yoga).
Her tits were a problem to her, as was her large
nose, in fact the two became associated with each other,
in both our minds, and if a reference was made to one
her mind included the other involuntarily. Needless
to say, both her tits and her nose were just the right
size.
I ought to say here that I'm not a therapist and
I'm not short. As I said, I'm a veterinary surgeon.
But in our sexual fantasies I was a therapist, and short
in the ass, as she always said. I was also b lack-haired,
balding, with a paunch.
Also in these fantasies I took
no exercise.
In real life I have auburn hair, stand
middle height with rather muscular shoulders and chest,
and I do a lot of exercise, I go to all the marathons I
hear about, including cycling ones. It gives me a sense
of belonging somewhere for a few hours.
The sexual depravity between Emily and me was
awesome. We had 172 fantasies.
Here I would like
to say something about Emily's vagina.
There is nothing
worse, I often told her, than a formless vagina.
She
could turn hers into anyone's. At one time I would
be convinced that she had a short, slim, nubile vagina,
at another (perhaps only a few minutes later) that of a
mother of three who had been riding the marital phallus
for years.
She would squint at me in a certain way across the
dinner table in Chinatown and I would understand---With


a quickening of blood between my legs---that this
was a reference to fantasy No 48. She would quickly
slip her tongue out as I turned to her in a cinema
foyer and I would suddenly be helplessly adrift in
fantasy No 56. Or she would seek my hand during a
film, laying two fingers in the palm of my hand, and
that would be 32. Our repertoire covered a vast
territory (gleaned, in large part, from my entirely
imaginary therapeutic work). I found Emily quite
frightening in this respect.
She could have me helpless
in a split second and none of my friends knew why I was
so docile.
This is why I looked at her so little, not
because of her tits or her nose as she thought.
Emily and I stood the same height, we played some
good tennis together, we appraoched sex in the same
athletic way. But we didn't enjoy it. We fitted
each other like a glove. I mean, genitally.
Penetration
gave us a satisfaction we'd neither of us gotten from
others.
But still we didn't enjoy it---because
everything else was missing. So we opted for penetration
at all costs, at all times, in the hope (I suppose) that
it would activate interest in other areas. We did it
without preliminaries, in the most unlikely places--
the more unlikely, the greater the thrill (we hoped).
We did it in people's bedrooms when we were supposed to
be taking off our coats etc. We made contact behind
screens, sculptures.
The fact that it had to be
momentary and couldn't lead to anything made it more
delectable.
It became an almost involuntary act, like
taking a cigarette.
One hardly consulted one's spouse
about that.
Of course we knew that something had to be done.
And that was how the 172 fantasies came about. We
turned ourselves into other people, so that not a
moment of sincerity should occur between us. It did
the trick.


I'm not at all ashamed to say that I married
Emily largely because she was involved in the most
remarkable genetic experiment of this century.
To get the facts straight at the outset, Emily
was a biochemist by training and had a large stake,
career-wise, in medical biology.
News of this experiment never reached the scientific
journals, let alone the media. I won't try to describe
the technical side, which involves equations and
chemical formulae so complicated that they would alienate
the reader's interest at once.
I shall say little more than that this most
significant biological experiment of our time involved
only two rats---at least at the time when Emily first
worked on the project.
These rats were not only many thousands of miles
from each other but many thousands of miles from them-
selves.
Let me explain.
The two organisms were male and
female. Emily had charge of the male head, which was
sited in a Sonoma County lab (I don't want to be more
specific).
She was in constant electronic communication
with this lab.
That is, she could see from monitors
which she kept in all her homes the minute-by-minute
chemical changes that went on in the male head, and
whether these corresponded with the needs of the
experiment or not (as for treatment---I mean medical
treatment---of any symptoms, this was handled automatic-
ally by computer feedback).
The male head had been modified somewhat.
Both


ears and the tongue had been removed, together with
part of the neurotransmission function affecting the
olfactory, optic and oral outlets.
But apart from this the brain and its stem were
left intact.
The modifications were made in order
to simplify the sensory stimuli to which the head was
subjected at all times.
This was where Emily came in.
While no fewer
than eight scientific disciplines were involved in the
monitoring of the head, she alone was responsible for
the head's emotional life, both from the point of view
of chemically induced emotions, and emotions that were
the result of autonomic processes to be expected in
the ordinary course of a rat's life.
At this point I ought to say that the prime mover
in the experiment, its eminence grise, as the French
say, was the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Clemens
Martinez-Holstein. He'd got the prize about six
years back for his work in high energy sub-nuclear
interactions, like Europe's LEP (large electron-
positron collider).
Since then he'd been living in the Berkeley hills
with his family, devoting himself to his vast library
(he had no fewer than 73 biographies of the British
king George 11, so Emily told me) and whatever experiments
reached his ear and took his fancy.
Clemens lived serenely with his devoted wife,
giving modest dinner parties for a few select professors
from time to time. I was once an honored guest.
This was just after I married Emily. I shall never
forget it. Another physicist, the renowned Arthur
Schendt, arrived with his charming violinist wife Lucy
who tours the world while he studies away at his Santa
Cruz research center.
Discussion went on until after
ten o'clock (Berkeley dinners tend to start around six)
and covered such a variety of subjects that I left the
house walking on clouds.


'Wow!' I kept saying to Emily in the car.
Needless to say, most of our Nobel Peace Prize
winners have to cope with a plethora of daily press
enquiries.
Sons, wives and daughters are warned not
to say a word on the master's behalf but to make a
written copy of the reporter's question, then submit
it to dad in his study.
I happen to know that Clemens gets on the average
three calls a week from various parts of the world.
Naturally, the press is a source of a good many wry
jokes at his Elysian dinner parties.
To see this
gentleman talking quietly at the head of the table
while his wife ministers to guests with what I can
only call protean versatility ('what would you like,
white wine, red, beer?') is a sight to behold, and that
this great man condescends to play a game of poker after
the coffee is a mark of his balance and humanity.
Again and again I pay inner tribute to those
Scandinavian gentlemen responsible for the awarding of
the Prize for their artful delvings and pryings into
labs and workrooms the world over so as to winkle out
the truthfully rich men of our time---rich in mind and
resolve.
But back to the experiment. The basic thing to
know is that a sustained electrical impulse will keep
any part of the body alive even though it has been
severed from the main trunk, provided of course that
a blood link has been maintained.


It was Clemens who skittishly devised the name
ROOV 1V---at an informal gathering on his lawn one
Thanksgiving, so Emily told me.
The initials refer to Rat Organs on Vacation,
and the number 1V to the fact that the experiment is
now in its fourth stage. At least three more stages
are contemplated.
In the case of ROOV 1V rat-parts were packaged
separately, kept alive by electrical impulse, and blood
link, and sent to various parts of the world not


only still alive but in computer-link with the other
parts of the same rat.
The parts severed were the legs, heart, kidneys,
liver, limbs and reproductive system, while the
digestive tract remained, with the head, at 'head-
quarters' in Sonoma County.
The female head was stationed in a genetics center
at Carcassone, in France (Europe).
Unlike the male
head, it had been kept intact, so that its responses
to the male sexual stimuli (that is, to the stimuli
of the male head's thoughts, chemically induced and
computer-linked with the female head) would be those
of a normal female animal.
Of course, herein lay the astonishing success of
the experiment---the fact that the two heads remained
in sympathetic connection with each other despite the
geographical displacement.
This was achieved by
common nourishment (administered at precisely the
same times), common stimuli and common blood supply,
and of course deprival of nearly all local stimuli,
especially in the case of the male head. That is,
a mutual magnetic attraction was set up across a
space of over eight thousand miles, operated by
computer programs and satellite communication.
The spinal columns of both organisms, the male
tongue and the two livers went to the famous James
Macbride, late of Bradford university in England,
famous for his rodent work over the past thirty or
forty years and especially for the 'rat-war' involving
a thousand rats in two armies equipped with radial
or electronically charged claws which created the
equivalent of radioactive burns on the 'enemy'.
The most important element in the ROOV experiment,
the reproductive systems of both male and female, were
kept at a genetic center in Sidney, Australia, which
has some of the most advanced equipment available for
artificial insemination and cloning.


Now when I tell the reader that progeny in the
form of six healthy rats was produced by the female
womb after prolonged stimulation of the male head in
Sonoma County, he will readily accede to my point that
ROOV 1V is indeed the experiment of our time.
And when I say that control of this most important
aspect of the experiment, the stimulation, was in
Emily's hands, the reader will have no problem under-
standing my respect for this remarkable young woman
with the wild blonde hair.
I actually believe that ROOV 1V couldn't have
happened without her. She daily administered to the
male head terror, anguish, tenderness, longing, horror,
bewilderment, anger, suicidal urges so desperate that
the tongueless and earless face would contort in a
thousand helpless wrinkles.
At first her choice of 'moods' was haphazard, she
once told me. Her stimuli were crude over-doses,
producing immediate dramatic and observable results
but without rationale.
When Emily programmed a stimulus
on her computer-system, the actual injection or electrical
charge (say, into the liver or the thymus) took place
thousands of miles away simultaneously, and within
considerably less than a second it showed up on the face
of the experimental animal.
Macbride's job in London was to safeguard the
liver from drastic toxic effects, monitor the change
in tissue so that this could be compared with Emily's
'emoticnal' monitoring system, and keep contact with
Sidney where the male genitals were so that any phallic


erection induced by thoughts in the experimental
male head would touch off the right response in the
female head and induce vaginal receptivity.
At the start of the experiment Emily's idea had
been to prolong any state of pain, horror etc in the
male head as long as possible. Her idea was to
stretch the 'negative' emotion to where sexual union
would suddenly become the only alternative to suicide
or madness (flies will mate in the last throes of
arsenic poisoning). For, hitherto, erotic thought-
pictures had been doggedly absent from the head.
But again and again she only produced a state
of utter prostration, equivalent to the last stages
of life---so much that when she suddenly administered
a 'positive' stimulus (a powerful aphrodisiac, for
instance) the organism was too weak to use this energy
for recuperation, and the sexual effect was lost.
So she was obliged to reduce the negative stimuli.
Of course this endangered the strength of the hoped-
for sexual impulse! For it had to be strong, almost
vindictive---in order to influence the electronic
system connecting it with the female head (and indeed
with its own reproductive system).
But the results of administering smaller doses
and subtler combinations were, to say the least,impressive.
No fewer than 16 times in as many days remote-controlled
coitus almost took place. And on the seventeenth day
it happened.
Emily is a Sprade-Taylor and of course this made
her a good 'catch' for the ROOV experiment. Her


family was high on the Democratic party's list of
campaign-funders and fund-raisers.
Martinez-Holstein
rightly figured that a word from her might improve the
federal funding for ROOV.
This
in spite of her present low standing in
the family. A few years before I met her she had
sued her father for molesting her sexually when she
was a child.
She asked $1.8 million and got an out-
of-court settlement for $1.3 million.
Her attorney
threatened to argue that she was sexually frigid as
a result of her father's attentions (which she told
me she had enjoyed 'wildly'), to which her father
had said to his attorney, 'Damn right!
I was trying
to knock the horseshit out of her!'.
He was all
ready to enter a long scandalous case but the family
stopped him.
Or rather Sprade-Taylor Holdings stopped
him, on the grounds that it would be bad for business
and Emily would inherit around $1.5 million anyway.
So the settlement was made and he cut her out of his
will, which lost her $0.2 million on the inheritance
but a) meant she didn't have to wait for her father's
death, b)the money she got wasn't in trust but ready
to spend.
She was 14 or 15 at the time of the molestation.
She told me her breasts were well-formed at that time
and she passed for 18.
Her father had married her
mother when he was eighteen, and her mother had given
birth to her the following year, so when Emily was 14
he was a handsome and irresistible (her own words) 32.
She said he would smack her lightly on the butt,
'chuck' her under her tits and sit her on what he
wryly called his 'knee'.
'It was a riot!' she screamed.
'Everybody knew
about it. At house parties the guests would say,
there they go again, Sam and Emily are just made for
each other!'
'Still,' I said (because I knew she wanted me to


say it), 'child molestation is child molestation.'
'You're damn right!' she bellowed, following it
with one of her laughs that scared the cats next door.
I told her my father had given me a clip round
the head when I told him to go climb a wall one time,
and the blow sent me flying down the back stairs and
I was out for an hour.
'What? What?' She rushed to the phone and called
her lawyer Tim Spilman and his car was turning into
our driveway within twenty minutes.
'Tell him what you told me!' she said.
I told him the story. How my father had been
a strong man and had knocked me down the stairs, which
had been concrete.
'Where was this?'
'In Houston, Texas.'
'Is the building still there?'
'I think they pulled it down to make a freeway.'
'I'll find out,' he said, making a note.
I thought it was all ridiculous but he said we
might be able to sue the realtor whose building it had
been. He couldn't sue my dad because the poor man was
dead. And anyway he'd never had 2 cents to rub together.
'It's a long shot,' Tim said, departing with an
arm-full of documents, 'but I'll do my best. Happen-
ing as it did over thirty years ago makes it mutton
instead of frisky lamb.
But if I can prove mental
disabilities which have only just surfaced we might
pull off a couple or three million.'
I paid several visits to a clinic of his choosing
but they couldn't find me anything but sane, which
provoked Emily to say (not entirely in good humor),
'They didn't damn-well look hard enough.'
But she was secretly impressed that three analysts
had declared me unusually high in IQ and so stable as
to make them suspect schizophrenia and search (unavail-
ingly) for the 'other' personality which the stable


one was hiding.
I was desperately anxious to take part in the
ROOV experiment. It was all I could do during a
veterinary operation, when my mind wandered, not to
make vivisections of the kind that had made ROOV 1V
a scientific wonder, only this time the experimental
animal would be someone's adored cat or dog!
In fact I suggested to Emily that from my point
of view ROOV had one serious flaw---namely, the choice
of rats as the experimental organisms. I argued that
a cat or dog, or at least a Rhesus monkey, would have
been far more suitable in that the facial expressions---
of horror, anguish or whatever---would have been so
much easier to decipher in a creature nearer, in both
size and temperament, to man.
She saw the point at once.
She said, 'It's great to hear you talk that way,
honey!'
She grabbed my hand.
'I had a chat with
Martinez-Holstein at the faculty meeting a couple of
nights ago.
Know what he said?
He said, this project
is a design for outer space!'
'Outer space?' I echoed.
'Just what I said,' she said.
'We can implement
our decisions by computer-link and record the results
from Mars or Jupiter or wherever we site the organisms!'
'Site the organisms?'
'You still don't see!' she said with a laugh which
sent the cats next door bolting down the street with
flattened ears. 'We can create organic life on these
planets irrespective of conditions there---below-zero


temperatures, zero gravity, zero oxygen.
Don't you
see we'll have to have larger organisms for that?
We can have the respiratory and reproductive organs
here and the rest on other planets.'
We felt so spaced out by this conversation that
we held hands all night. I think we talked till dawn
came round.
Euphoric tremors kept us staring into the
dark, almost scared.
Yes, it was scarey being involved
in an experiment of such dimensions! But isn't any
really new idea, any revolution, scarey? Can anyone
claim that enlarging human awareness is a safe and
comfortable transaction?
She said to me one evening, after we'd had
contact on the back seat of the Portsch (No 27),
'I feel I don't know enough about emotional reaction,
period.'
She sat there thinking.
Then she said, 'I want you to go down that manhole
across the street.'
'Pacific Bell have a manhole over there, right
by the church.'
'I want you to go down it.'
'What the fuck would I want to do that for?' I
screamed (having learned to raise my voice---and language---
with Emily).
'To plant a loudspeaker.'
'To plant a what?'


Our house lay behind a sloping lawn, with an
unimpeded view of the whitewashed Dominican church,
Mary Magdalen, behind a line of young spruces.
A couple of weeks later I spotted a black guy
going down the manhole and nipped across the street
at once.
I said, 'Hi', gazing down into the darkness.
'Hi!' came a voice.
His teeth and eyes lit
up the darkness merrily.
'How ya doin'?'
'Fine. You OK?'
'Gotta problem down here.
Aside from that,
everything's cool man.'
And he bent to work again.
'Pretty day we're having,' I said.
'Sure is! You havin' a day off?'
Yeah!
I'm a veterinary surgeon.'
'Well listen to that! An animal lover, great!'
'That's right,' I said.
'Is this a regular visit
of yours?' I asked him.
'I do a routine check Wednesdays.
Phone wires is
mighty complicated!'
So Emily had a week to complete the amplifier.
She was constructing this at her lab.
It was the size
of a pea.
This was her plan. I would engage the
phone engineer in conversation on his next visit.
I would express interest in Santa Rosa's telephonic
system and he would invite me down the manhole.
Once
down there all I had to do was plant the amplifier on
the manhole wall, having warmed it in my hand so that
its adhesive surface would hold it fast to the concrete.
The following Wednesday I waited for him.
He said, 'Jump right down.'
I planted the amplifier in the first three minutes,
while he bent down to show me Santa Rosa's telephonic
landscape.
He kept me down there another ten minutes.
I pleaded jogger-lust and at last ran off. When I


returned he was gone and the sidewalk looked as
clean as a whistle.
The amplifier in the manhole was tuned to Emily's
hifi. All she had to do was to wait for a passer-by
and depress a button, and watch the emotional reaction
on the opposite side of the street.
By this time the reader will want to know what all
this was about. I must say it staggered me, but I
went through with it, absurd as it seemed. Emily's
idea was to scare the daylights out of passers-by by
amplifying certain noises under the sidewalk.
She
wanted to watch their reactions.
She wanted to be
able to predict certain reactions from certain stimuli.
And I have to hand it to her---it was a success, mad as
it seemed at the time.
She found a radio station in Michigan which sold
sound-effects tapes, and she chose a set of their ghastly
screams. It was these she put into the amplifier.
Coming up from a manhole on a serene Californian
morning, it could knock the hell out of anyone unprepared
for it. One such golden morning when I had a day off
it started.
We sat together at the window and watched.
There were few passers-by.
But enough for our
purposes.
After an hour we had observed every possible
variation of the fight-or-flight response---curiosity,
panic, resentment, paranoia, disbelief, fury. And she
seemed able to modulate the response by the sound she
put out (also by the timing and intensity).
Our
unfortunate neighbours went through a whole theatre of
responses.
One victim (Emily prefered to call them participants),
a woman in her early middle age, already---before the
sound was on---demonstrated nervous disability.
Her
walk was unsteady, her head shook slightly from side
to side.
'Perfect,' Emily said.
'Why perfect?' I asked.


'I need the abnormal facial landscape. Don't
you see? ROOV exnims' ('exnims' is lab slang for
experimental animals) 'aren't exactly normal either!
And this one!'
She nodded toward the woman.
you dig the walk?'
Just as the woman put her right foot on the
manhole Emily pressed the button.
One of the ghastliest
screams I've ever heard echoed down the street.
The woman faltered, gasped, stepped back, almost
lost her balance. She managed to recall enough presence


of mind to look behind her, then, finding no one,
she began trembling so violently that we both thought
she was going to have a fit.
Her mouth open, her
eyes wide, her cheeks oddly swollen, she went absolutely
stiff.
Emily observed this with what I can only describe
as ardor, her long hair falling to her shoulders in
delicious, snake-like cascades.
Suddenly she pressed
a second button. A variant of the first scream emerged---
a moan so long, forlorn, that the daffy lady this time
crashed to the ground.
She lay on her back and began
uttering short, stark, mechanical screams of her own.
While her eyes stared wide at the sky and her legs
went through violent spasms, she screamed with every
breath as if being tortured.
'We'd better call the hospital,' I said.
'Cool it!' Emily yelled.
I realised she was recording the woman's screams.
Then she let me call an ambulance. I rushed across
the street to assist the lady but she thought I'd come
to murder her.
People started collecting. Finally,
after about an hour (they'd been directed to Santa Ana
instead of Santa Rosa by a drunk despatcher), the
ambulance crew appeared and gave her an injection that
put her out.
'How did it happen?' they asked with the minimal
interest.
I shrugged.
'She just had a fit.
Started scream-
'I never heard such screams in all me damn life!'
a neighbor with two teeth yelled from across the street.
In the next few weeks Emily learned an awful lot
about emotional reaction.
But quite soon of course
the neighbors began asking each other where the ghastly
screams were coming from.
We thought it best to close the experiment before
the tiny amplifier was discovered.
And she'd got what


she wanted.
Her observations showed her how and
when, and in what sequence, she should apply her stimuli
at the Sonoma County lab. The result was that phallic
erection took place in Sidney, Australia the following
week, and 17 days later, as I said above, coitus and
triumphant conception took place.
I waited for her to feel bad about this street-
experiment. All her highs were followed by terrible
lows. It came after the usual two to three day interval.
She puckered her brow and bit her lip and looked like
a big helpless child.
When I attempted contact she
pleaded menstruation, though normally she welcomed
penetration at that time.
Luckily Susan Riven called round.
After marrying Emily I purchased a handsome
medical complex on the outskirts of Santa Rosa,
among spruce and eucalyptus trees. I took the 'Pet
Hospital' sign down and replaced it with 'Cat and Dog
Clinic'. It had two consulting rooms and a large
well-equipped surgery, with an Italian-style kitchen
and two bathrooms, and a shaded patio at the back
where I could take snack lunches.
I put out enquiries for a business partner, and
Susan Riven showed up among about five applicants.
We drew up contracts and she bought me out of half
the property (I meant to invest the purchase-money in an
enlargement of the surgery, should our partnership go
Susan had black hair flecked with gray and wore
her clothes very tight and . (without going overboard


into teenage sexiness, for she was a mature mother
of three) provocatively. A smart dark suit with
a white poplin blouse and a full silk bow at the neck
would be formal wear on any other woman. By clever
tailoring she managed with this kind of outfit to
suggest a ripe body under severe constraint, so that
the sense of constraint intensified the ripeness and
vice versa in an upward spiral that sometimes made me
giddy.
At work she took her jacket off and slipped a
white surgical smock on, but even this she managed
to wear with a certain loose forgetfulness like a
dressing gown, except that it was perfectly formal too.
By concealment Susan revealed more than most other
women do in the nude. Her almost-primness, her manner
of seeming to eschew intimacy of any kind, suggested
intimacy of the most clandestine nature.
She got into the habit of visiting us, and she
and Emily got quite friendly.
On the day when contrition
about the street-experiment hit Emily I heard their
voices in the kitchen as I was passing.
I was just
off for the evening jog. I could hear from Emily's
voice, its falling intonation, that she was telling
Susan the whole story, and being (if I could judge
from Susan's silence) only half-believed. I decided
against the jog and joined them over a Johannesburg
Riesling from one of Emily's Napa Valley vineyards.
Susan made a slight stiffening when I came in.
It announced, by forbidding contact, the urgent importance
of contact, so I made as much brazen contact with my
eyes as I could. My gaze dwelled on her belly, her
legs, her neck, avoiding her breasts as too obvious.
I tried to give Emily's disjointed and college-girl
account of the experiment some degree of dignity. After
all, Susan's husband ran a big corporation (inso far as
any one man runs a corporation), and we couldn't have


Emily seeming the vulnerable little girl she was.
I said that ROOV 1V was the most significant
experiment for human evolution there had ever been.
It was natural therefore that Emily should be carried
away by it from time to time. And then, despite the
distress of the victim (who was still in hospital),
Emily had made many useful observations about emotional
response which had crowned the experiment with its first
success.
Susan nodded vaguely. My impression was that she
didn't get the story anyway and thought that by showing
silent sympathy she would help draw the conversation to
a close and bring another bottle on to the table. As
I was of the same mind (there was no limper lump than
Emily in one of her 'states') I went to the cellar and
brought up a better year than Emily had provided (the
standard of the wine always indicated her valuation of
the guest---Susan was clearly vintage but not grand cru).
As I uncorked the bottle Susan gave me a glance so
brief yet pregnant that I nearly dropped everything.
The atmosphere warmed considerably.
But not enough
to revive Emily.
The only thing that really helped Emily when she
was in this state was her membership of the local QFBDA
(Quick Fix Blood Donor Association).
She would arrange
to go round to the Kappa Epsilon hospital on Mount Shivar,
to give blood.
They knew her, had her medical track
record, as they did all other members of the QFBDA,
and her visit took up no more than an hour of their time.
I often remarked that it was her modern version of blood-
letting.
Certainly she returned from the hospital
looking serene. And after a short nap she was herself
again. By the evening her sexual interests---a sure
barometer of her health---had begun to awaken once more.
She always said that giving blood was like the guilt
passing out of her body.


'And it's good to help somebody, right?' she
would scream, disturbing the next-door cats again.
But this could only happen after she had squeezed
the juices of moral self-recrimination to the last drop.
'Do you realise what I made that woman suffer?'
she asked me in the lounge when Susan had gone.
She raised her voice above Haitinck's interpretation
of Schubert's 'the Great' which I'd just put on.
'Jesus Christ, man,' she went on, 'I invaded that
woman's privacy, I abused her rights, I maybe took ten
years off her life---!'
'OK, OK,' I said.
'OK, he says. She ended in hospital, man! Did you
know I went to see that woman yesterday?'
(Of course I
knew). 'Ma'am, I said, I saw them take you away and I just
thought I'd drop by and see how you were, and oh fine she
says, except they don't believe me, but I'm telling you
somebody was screaming so bad from under the ground,
some murder or torture was going on for sure! And they
don't believe me, they have three shrinks hovering round
me all day!'
I was just about to say something comforting when
she burst out with, 'That was my contribution to an
innocent woman's life!
She'll maybe end up in a half-
way house or worse, she'll be made to feel a nut whereas
all she had before was a nervous tic!
Don't you see
what's troubling me, man? what keeps me awake at nights?'
(she slept so soundly you could have had a party in the
bedroom).
I switched the hifi off and beckoned her to the
water-sofa.
'Let's have a talk about it,' I said, putting a
a dozen pillows under her.
My job was to present the objective point of view.
I'd had a heavy day with two Dobermann bitch hysterectomies
and a lot of irritating phone consultations, one of which


had culminated in me putting the phone down on the
caller, a foolish if pleasureable snit-show on my part.
Still, I launched into one of my quiet monologues
which always had her wide-eyed in a matter of moments.
I abjured her to remember her calling, to recapitulate
for herself some of the breakthroughs already achieved
by ROOV 1V, and to remember that truth and evolution do
claim victims and that there never was a bold new idea
that didn't incur suffering for innocent people.
was regrettable but sometimes facts had to be gathered
quickly and efficiently, for time was short---time always
had been short in the halls of science where a breakthrough
today was obsolete by tomorrow.
Yes, we were in a hurry! We wanted to get there!
For thousands of years the world had hung about dreaming
of getting there, but with us the buck had stopped, we
were actually on the job and Emily was privileged to
be one of the chief actors in the drama.
'Think of that drama first and last,' I told her,
realising with annoyance that. it was too late to go
jogging, 'think of the fact that the whole world is
waiting for this drama to unfold, that the future of
humankind depends on people like you and that without
you we return to the old dull ignorant existence people
used to have!
You know,' I said, squeezing her to me,
'you may call your feeling for that hospitalised woman
empathy, but I call it squeamishness, and in this work,
Emily, you can't afford squeamishness.'
She was already asleep. There would be no contact
tonight, and probably none tomorrow.
But then, on the
third day, I would enter the kitchen and see a changed
woman before me, her bra removed, her blouson zipped
low, as if by accident.


The following week, on Monday, she got a call
from the office to say she was to fly next day to New
York, meet up with other ROOV personnel and then fly
on to Amsterdam, where there was to be a conference
with the Australian geneticists (they were the key
characters in the drama at this stage).
The fact was that the six rats born of ROOV were
showing signs of depleted immune systems.
There had
been two deaths in as many days, due to hypoxia.
The surviving exnims were certainly not fit for vivisection.
It was a top-secret event in Amsterdam---but I knew
what the secret was.
The new rat-sections were to have
been space-capsuled, with only the heads on the earth
(probably at Stanford University). A quick change of
plan was necessary.
Naturally Emily was excited---she would have charge
of the new heads, or one of them, and there was talk of
offering her a lecturing semester at Sidney (this was
spilled in a quiet phonecall from Arthur Schendt, the
physicist, who while he had no part in the experiment
knew all the gossip).
Emily was worried that for a week or more I would
be without sex contact.
'Maybe Susan!' she said. 'Do you like her?'
And she called her (I sat smiling to myself).
When we were settled on the water-couch that evening
I said, 'Listen, you mustn't be open with Susan.'
'Why not for god's sake?'
'To get from one point to another Susan never
takes the straight line,' I told her.
In bed that night we were about to enter fantasy
No 17 (strangers on a crowded train, nighttime, standing
in the corridor etc etc) when Emily stopped and asked me


what the hell I was going to do for the next week if
Susan didn't pay me the visits she'd half promised.
I said, Leave it to me.'
She lay biting her lip and said, 'You mean you've
already made it with her huh?'
'Right!' I said proudly.
And I began telling her how it had happened.
Emily had been so busy with her exnims and the
birth of experimental progeny that she just hadn't
noticed changes in Susan and me (though maybe there
hadn't been any changes to notice).
'It started at our first dinner together,' I said.
'At Peccadillos on Market in San Francisco. To celebrate
our business partnership.
It was the way she sat there,
glanced up at the waiter, never crossed her legs or leaned
or used her elbows. And her glances---so quick and
elusive.
Our talk was very formal, Emily---but the more
formal it was the more provocative it became.
'Afterwards, sipping coffee a block away from my
office, all alone, I got in a real excited state. I
figured it was the way she seemed to deny any possibility
of contact between us that made contact with her an
immediate must for me!
'This happened,' I went on, 'the day after we all
drank Johannisberg Riesling in the kit tchen. Contact
took place behind a half-open door, suddenly, with three
pet-owners in the office.
She didn't disrobe in the
slightest.
'We got into the habit of choosing times when the
waiting room was full.'
'Or contact would take place at my desk after office-
hours.
When contact was over formality at once returned.
We straightened our clothes and returned to business.'
'My god!' Emily breathed.
'What a number!'
'I believe she maintains the same modesty (if this
is the right word) with her husband.
Indeed, from one


or two hints she's given me it appears that even in
bed his approach has to be clandestine.
The bedroom
door has to remain open so that one of the children
might pass. Excitement rises when there are visitors
in the house. Mostly her marital contacts, it seems,
are outside the bedroom, whenever a moment's privacy
can be snatched.'
Emily, trembling with excitement, gripped my hand
and asked me, 'And the climax?'
'Like she's trying to hold it back but it runs
away with her,' I said.
'Like breaking the law,
outraging decency and the laws of propriety. You see,'
I went on, 'she underpins her pleasure with the rigidity
of her domestic life.
She must always return home at
the same time---never a date, a weekend away. And yet
he knows exactly when she's been undergoing a contact.'
'How?' Emily screamed.
'The same way I do!'
'From her extra guardedness and formality. And
then of course once he's achieved penetration himself
he can feel it physically---again as I do.'
'But can you be sure of that? I mean, if she
never talks how do you know the husband penetrates?'
I said, 'With Susan it doesn't matter what the
subject of conversation is, she always has a subtext.
She might say---this is just an example---how demanding
her husband's work is---it's a little breathless phrase--
quite trivial, you understand, but it gives you the
picture---the sudden penetration just when she's calling
the kids in for lunch---a quick elicit hand as she bends
to make the kids' bed.'
'My god,' Emily screeched, 'what you're saying is
she has just one number! But oh my god what a number!


She squeezes the juices of just one number!'
'We have 172,' I said. 'Shall we squeeze one
So we did.
We had just achieved penetration when a ring
came on the waiting-room bell. That morning I'd
seen Emily to the airport.
After a hard day Susan
and I had closed up and it seemed the most natural
thing to do to make contact. We did so standing up,
fully clothed, then comes the ring on the bell.
I opened the door and a female stood there with a
basketful of cat.
'Is it an emergency?' I asked.
I stepped aside to let her in. I was still half
in erection and could see that Susan was equally aroused.
I took the limp cat out of the basket.
There then followed a conversation between the
three of us which from the standpoint of the client
was a professional discussion about feline symptoms
but which for Susan and me was an unbearably provocative
erotic dialogue, with its 'she's a little hot', 'just
open her legs a little' and 'it doesn't feel at all
congested' etc etc.
When the woman left, her cat already sleeping
peacefully, I found that Susan was receptive as before,
indeed more so, I knew of Casanova's advice, not to
climax in the standing position, and after a time I led
her into my office.
There she sat on me, still buttoned
everywhere, her lips closed---for we never kissed direct


on the lips.
I was allowed access to her breasts
only as a final, snatched treat, and then not always.
I say we 'never' kissed direct on the lips but in the
first shudders of climax, when all caution was thrown
to the winds, her resistance melted for an instant and
I could breach her defences.
I believe my climaxes with Susan were more copious
than with any previous woman. Her gasps as I gave way
to my prolonged ejaculations were alarmed, outraged,
and this facilitated both her and my discharge. This
is not to demean what I was doing with Emily.
But the
reader has to remember that Emily and I were in constant
contact, and secondly that our pleasure depended strictly
on a scenario and therefore cerebral control, and this
inevitably restricted the climax too.
Removing all evidence of any contact between us
after it had taken place was part of the ritual Susan
and I observed, and even this had its erotic function.
We shifted away from each other with hushed, eye-averted
movements, hastening for kleenex, towel etc. Only
the rustle of paper, the zipping of jackets, pants,
skirts, was heard.
Frequently this was enough to stir
new excitement, so that we found ourselves in renewed
contact, less cautious than before but, because of that
(thrilling contradictions!) more repressive too, with
gasps of disapproval or movements threatening immediate
withdrawal, which of course only quickened the pleasure.
I remember on one occasion, after repeated contact,
she had to phone home to explain her delay on professional
grounds, and she did it still in maximum penetration.
I was astonished at the control in her voice, as I was
too by the quickening of excitement in the penetrative
area while she talked.
I was still far from experiencing pleasure (as
opposed to a perfunctory sense of genital release) with
Emily.
After contact with her I felt only irritation
and a certain resentment. My mind was at once set on


activity---a swing in the hammock, a dip in the
pool---preferably far from sight or sound of Emily.
This was no rejection of her. I knew we would be in
contact again soon, that we would be chatting within
moments, busily preparing coffee etc. I'm only
describing the first fleeting post-coital emotions.
They were ones of withdrawal and acute distaste.
I noticed also that if she and I had too frequent
contact over a period of days we would both experience
outbursts of rage, always with good apparent reason,
though the outbursts never happened when we were moderate
in our penetrality.
It was by now a regular and expected
feature of our marriage, this rage, so much so that we
set aside a room for our scraps. Since during a rage
I would sweep the entire aftermath of a meal off the
kitchen table, smashing plates, cups, glasses---and since
these came from the Sprayd-Tayler household and included
Wedgewood and Sèvres---we thought we should call a halt
and I hit on the somewhat self-deceiving idea of organising
the room next to the kitchen as what we came to call the
'Two' room (Tension Workout).
There we placed furniture
we set no value on, we filled the cupboards with theatrical
crockery that cost a song, and we put pictures on the wall
that we prefered to see smashed than hanging.
Emily was amazonian when she went in that room.
I've never seen such ferocity in human eyes, or witnessed
such wholehearted destruction.
But the sense of release was terrific.
And in this
way we didn't hit, bruise, bite or scratch one another as
we had been doing.
One time I got in such a state I locked her in the
Two room.
She was banging on the door and screaming
abuse at me. Meanwhile I dragged a crate of cheap red
wine from under the kitchen table and began uncorking
furiously.
'Let me out you motherfucking vagabond!' she screamed.


'I'll let you out!' I shrieked back.
'In my
good time!'
She nearly pushed the door down---kicked it, ran
against it with all her might.
When I had all the bottles uncorked I replaced them
in the crate and carried the lot to the Two room door.
I unlocked it and ran straight to the table armed with
the crate while her fists pummeled my back.
I managed
to throw her off and get a couple of theatrical tumblers
out of the cupboard.
'I want you to drink, you drooling cow!' I hissed
at her.
I poured out two full glasses with quivering hands
so that the wine slopped all over the table as she pushed
and pulled at my naked flesh (for by now we had torn
every shred of clothing off each other's bodies).
Then I turned to her and thrust one of the tumblers
in her hand---'Here!' I screamed, 'drink to me! Marinate
your stinking guts in this!'
And I suddenly tipped her tumbler so that its contents
went full in her face.
She gasped and spluttered. I
threw the contents of my glass in her face too. I took
out bottle after bottle and emptied them over her head,
her tits, poured them over her hips so that the red liquid
trickled down her legs as if coming from inside her, and
she on her side, once she saw the name of the game, began
grabbing bottles too until I was just as drenched as she
was.
We were slipping on the floor, there were pools of
it. But when she grabbed a bottle and instead of pour-
ing the liquid out took it by the neck to hit me over the
head with it I thought it was time to stop. I got hold
of her wrists and held them down until she dropped the
bottle and it. smashed on the floor.
'OK, OK,' I panted.
'Pixie, pixie!'
We had long ago agreed that this word would end all
fights, at whatever cost to pride.


She lowered her head and whispered, 'Pixie.'
We went upstairs and took showers.
Then we had
a quiet supper on the back porch, gazing at the apple
trees and the humming birds that hung and sucked at the
jasmine blossom. An owl hooted liquidly from a redwood
tree.
And when it was quite dark and the neighbourhood
hushed (the reader will never believe it) we returned
to the Two room and began fighting again. Once more
the clothes were torn off. The rest of the wine was
poured.
And so it went on. The more fighting we did, the
more we wanted to do.
The more anger released, the more
anger manifested.
In fact we had to be careful that
this didn't supersede and finally drive out our nightly
contacts.
But in a strange way it was similar to the
contacts, almost more satisfying.
After those two fights we took another shower and
retired to bed.
Just before I got between the sheets
she said quietly, 'Just one moment'.
And she gave me
the hardest smack in the face I've ever received. I
did nothing.
Only got between the sheets.
Then when
the lights were out I quickly, without warning, achieved
penetration from behind and without the slightest reference
to her pleasures, Without kiss or manual preparation (so
important to her, especially the latter), I went about
my business.
Almost at once I came to climax.
This
was the deepest insult, from Emily's point of view,
that a man could inflict on her. By the way, 'pixie'
meant, apart. from pax, mutual or shared climax, and she
would often murmur it while we were climaxing. That was
its power in ending our fights. Its utterance produced
an immediate reversal of our aggression.
The concept
of mutuality in orgasm was most important for Emily.
She might cry for an hour afterwards, if she 'missed
the plane', as she called it:by far the deepest humiliation
she knew.
Better than a smack in the face, I thought.


Two remarkable things happened while Emily was
away. First, my office was allocated unexpected
night-surgery duties which in the normal course of
events would have come round a month or two later.
I and seven other veterinary doctors in the Santa
Rosa area maintained a rosta by means of which one of
us was available to the public every night of the week.
I had been on graveyard duties only twice in the past
six months so that when two of the other clinics became
short-staffed due to illness, and the 24-hour service
at San Rafael was unexpectedly closed after an earth-
tremor cracked one of the walls, the first call was
on me.
Now here's the second remarkable thing. The rosta
secretary rang me and asked could both partners be on
graveyard duties in case one was required for emergencies
(in the lack of the San Rafael establishment) and one for
handling the calls coming into the office while/if
the other was operating on an animal.
I already had a couch in my office.
Susan
didn't. It was a matter of moving one in.
Emily left the Tuesday morning.
News of our
night-commitment came Wednesday afternoon.
Susan's
couch was moved in at seven o'clock that evening--
her husband and a neighbor brought it round while I was
with a client.
There were two coffee shops and an eatery nearby
on the plaza and we had our own kitchen facilities for
any cooking we might want to do. I brought six vintage
Beaunes from the house and a couple of bottles of champagne
in case there was something to celebrate.


It seemed natural that we should have our meals
together. Or rather, on the precedent of the first
evening (when I impulsively opened a bottle of Dom
Perignan) it turned out that way. Her husband called
from time to time, and she talked to each of the children
just before bedtime.
The astute reader will already have suspected what
I am about to narrate---the fact that contact between
Susan and me, now that we were to all intents and
purposes living together, seemed if not out of the
question, at least mighty difficult, given the fact that
clandestinity was no longer necessary or even possible.
Any overt penetration would have argued a relationship,
an affair, and we both wished to avoid the semblance of
either (on behalf not of the laws of propriety but
those of pleasure).
We had a problem---how to continue contacts without
disrupting the clandestinity.
With classic feminine
genius Susan managed it. From the outset she establish-
ed an even greater formality than before.
She said,
'This is a good chance to go over the accounts.'
She
repeated it to her husband in a breathless way, 'We're
going to do the accounts---it's a heaven-sent opportunity.'
And do them we did.
We worked without a break the
first evening from eight till ten. That was when I
brought out the Dom Perignan---'to celebrate our partner-
ship' (the financial outlook for the company was
considerably brighter than we'd thought).
We ate
sandwiches in the kitchen.
At half-past ten we returned
to work.
Not until midnight did Susan look up from
the calculator. We were surrounded by piles of invoices
and receipts.
'Perhaps you'd better look at this,' she said,
tearing off the last foot or so of the roll on which
the monthly balance had been calculated.
I drew a chair to her side and looked over her


shoulder.
She began pointing out certain discrepancies
from an earlier calculation we'd made. As she leaned
forward on one elbow I found my hand travelling under
that leaning arm toward her knee. We went on talking
figures. My hand lifted her skirt a little, gradually,
while she went on whispering the figures. Carefully
the hand sought its target and received a surprisingly
warm reception despite no outward change in Susan's
demeanor. To add excitement her husband phoned at that
moment and she was obliged to hide her gasps as best
she could while conversing with him.
The question arises here, did I feel differently
with Susan after a climax than I did with Emily?
Certainly I felt no distaste, much less resentment.
And the reason was perfectly clear to me---that Susan
and I weren't all that close and therefore negative
emotions of intimacy were not provoked.
All I felt was a sterile sense of repletion (quite
normal after orgasm). It was much like depression.
The office looked bare, pleasureless.
The future
mamentarily collapsed.
That was why her quick return
to formality after a climax was welcome to me. We
had nothing to say to each other: sex-contact was our
only form of communication,
But this very fact---that
we were in all else complete strangers---was what made
the contact exciting, renewable.
She and Emily had
plenty to rap about between them. Not she and I.
Hardly a word.
After the champagne, having discussed whether or
not, in view of our improved financial position, to
expand our business, we went to bed, she to her office
and I to mine.
I must say that as I undressed and waited for her
to leave the main bathroom I had a burning curiosity
to see her and if possible touch her without the clothing
that had hitherto intervened between us. I heard her
go to her office and not only close but lock the door.


I went and cleaned my teeth. Then I returned to my
office. I closed my door and switched out the light.
For an hour or more I lay there thinking up a formal
way of doing the most informal thing a man can do to a
woman. But no solution presented itself. Then I
fell asleep.
On the Thursday, that is the day after our
graveyard duties started, I was sitting at home
(Susan and I had arranged to give each other half the
day off during the graveyard period) when the physicist
Arthur Schendt and his violinist wife Lucy came by.
I was surprised at the visit because I'd met them
briefly at a ROOV 1V party where a champagne bottle
was broken over a cage containing the two ROOV heads
(before the despatch of one of them to Sidney). We had
hardly exchanged two words.
I sat them both down with coffee and he told me
that Clemens Martinez-Holstein had urged him to come
and see me during the absence of the ROOV 1V team.
'He called me from Amsterdam last night,' Schendt
told me.
It was the first I'd heard that Martinez-Holstein
had gone too.
'Oh yes,' Schendt said.
'No ROOV conference could
take place without him.'
'He wanted you to contact me?' I asked (the news
had really blown a hole in my seat).
'Yes,' he said.
'It's about the possible use of
domestic animals as exnims.'


A second hole in my seat!
I found myself trembling slightly, flushed. As
always I held my shoulders taut and square and pulled
in my abdomen, to hide this state.
'Like Clemens,' he went on, 'I've always felt that
rats were OK as animal resources because of ample
availability but surely domestic animals, being close
to the human being, are much better at providing
familiar responses.'
Almost my own words! I couldn't believe it!
He sat there puffing out cool shafts of light-
blue pipe smoke.
When he started uttering concern as to whether I,
a veterinary practitioner, could be seen to be particip-
ating in an experiment involving domestic animals---well,
it was almost too much for me. For in one sentence he
showed me that they were a) going to use me and b) going
to hide the fact that they were using me. It was in
exact detail the post-coital dream I'd been having for
six months past!
'Do you think the Humane Society would help there?'
he asked me.
'Well,' I said, 'the Humane Society's all for
animal experimentation if that's what you mean' (which
I knew he didn't).
'I see,' he said, tapping the tips of his fingers
together.
He was a very dark man, thickset, quite pale, with
a full, rather putty face.
He looked a trifle overfed.
Though still in his early forties he was too thick round
the middle, and my judgement was that he took no exercise.
He had sharp, dark-brown eyes.
'It's an absurd situation,' I went on. 'You can
use as many Rhesus monkeys as you like but you have to
be careful about cats and dogs. You get nutcases coming
into the labs and taking photos and trying to interfere


with the grants.'
'Exactly,' he said.
'I mean,' I said, 'Rhesus monkeys make just as
good pets as cats and dogs---for the spaceheads who
need pets.
I must say, of the creatures who come into
my office, the ones who need most attention are the
human ones.'
His wife Lucy smiled.
'Anyway,' I went on, 'I think I can arrange for
cat or dog exnims without the Humane Society being
involved, not officially that is.'
'Does the Society do that kind of thing?' he
asked.
'I don't know about the Society,' I said.
'I do
know about humans, and Society officers are humans.'
He seemed to like that remark.
I noticed his
wife's eyes gleaming, and she looked at me from under
her eyebrows, always a telling sign in a woman.
Apparently a ROOV V lab was being established to
deal with the next stage of the experiment, probably
at San José. I undertook to have three standard
poodles (as among the most intelligent dogs available)
and three German shepherds (as the most powerful and
courageous) delivered to the Sonoma County lab within
six weeks.
Schendt said he knew this would make Clemens real
happy. The public need know nothing about it (that is,
he said, the media). By the time ROOV V was completed
we could quickly switch to guinea pigs and publicize it
that way.
'It's a funny thing,' he said. 'The public seems
to think guinea pig is another name for experimental
animal and it actually likes being experimented on!'
We had a good laugh.
As they were going his wife Lucy turned to me and
said, 'I've just got a kitten. It's for our son who's


going to be ten next week.
Could you examine it and
maybe give it a shot?'
'Sure,' I said.
It had been a pleasant morning. I knew what joy
Emily would feel when I told her the news. From now on
I was as much part of the ROOV experiment as she was.
For Clemens wanted me to do the vivisection as well.
The third, and biggest, hole in my seat!
Schendt spilled
it just as he was getting into his car, very cool and
urbane---I wanted to hug him!
Next morning Lucy Schendt came to the office with
the kitten and we talked quietly while I did the
examination.
She hardly said a word but I had the
uncanny impression that she was telling me all about
herself.
It was the feeling that you suddenly have
a sister.
She stood leaning against my desk in a
custom-built track suit.
When I'd finished the
examination and done the shot she continued to stand
there. I invited her to sit down while the kitten
played around on the floor pissing everywhere.
I said, 'Don't worry, the floor gets swabbed every
There were clients everywhere.
I asked her what
it felt like facing a big audience for a solo and she
just shrugged.
I never saw a person so natural and
unforced in behavior.
I said, 'Why don't you have lunch with me?'
'OK,' she said.
'I'll take Snakebite back and
see you later---what time?'
I said, 'Why don't we meet in the carpark behind


the plaza at one o'clock?'
I planned to take her to a Mexican place outside
Concord.
I had the afternoon off, so we could hang
about if we wanted to.
Life seemed to have decided
to work smoothly on all fronts in Emily's absence!
It was a most contented lunch. We found ourselves
holding hands. I drove her back to my place and there
was no wimpy talk about how her relationship with her
husband wasn't working out etc. Whatever that relation-
ship was doing it didn't stop her falling in love with
me, or me falling in love with her. This is what
happened.
I took her to the bedroom and we were naked in a
second.
It was the first time I'd done that with a
woman. I'd always started fully or partially clothed.
Nakedness didn't turn me on. In fact I didn't like to
look at a naked woman. The very secretiveness of sex
was dispelled by nakedness---or rather I would say it
was wantonly dispelled.
But it was different with Lucy.
She was pleasantly
plump, soft, her skin alluringly dark, her breasts full
and maternal. It made me giddy, like seeing my own
mother. We fitted each other like a glove. I actually
looked at her. I found myself gazing at the vaginal
lips, the first time I'd ever dared to do it. We were
looking in each other's eyes during the climax.
I was
crazily in love---it was the first time I'd actually
looked at a woman, I was amazed, I spent the rest of the
day in space.
I could think of no one else.
With Susan I pleaded
a lower-back problem and hobbled about the office.
her taste was for unbroken formality there was little
she could say or do. She was stymied.
She kept talking
to her husband on the phone. She almost told him about
it---maybe she did. Meanwhile Lucy and I were together
half of each day.


Emily called me from Amsterdam but I didn't tell
her about Lucy. When she askedhow it was going with
Susan I said enthusiastically, 'She's too much!
She's
a riot!'
She laughed deafeningly and then said, 'Hey, I want
to tell you about Clemens.
He's coming on real heavy.
He took me to dinner last night, he's so traditional it's
outrageous!
He said, I'm falling in love with you,
may I call you Emily? Can you beat that? And he's
building up to THE moment!'
'I can't believe it!' I yelled: at her.
'Do you realise this means I get not only the Sidney
job but maybe visiting lectureships in London and Paris?
He's pushing my name everywhere! And here's something
else you won't believe, he keeps on saying how bad he
feels about his wife, because of him falling in love with
me, I mean it's outrageous, it's like being back in the
1800s, and he's an animal underneath! Huge!"
All this came as the best news possible. Maybe
Emily, despite her self-defensive amusement with the olde-
worlde Clemens, would hook up with him permanently. I
hoped so because, to my bafflement, I intended to marry
Lucy as soon as possible.
Lucy and I talked it over. At first the obstacles
seemed insuperable.
She had two kids, and her husband
seemed to be looking forward to another twenty years of
marital life with her.
There was my connection,
through Emily, with the ROOV experiment (I couldn't
afford to have Schendt turn against me).
But we saw that with a rational approach it might
all be arranged in time.
Then Lucy told me, very quietly (so like a woman),
that Arthur Schendt had for some time been in love with
a Cal student called Diane, a dazzler who wanted to
marry him at all costs. I could have danced with joy
(ofcourse Lucy had been saving it up for me).


Was there a real chance of olde worlde Clemens
wanting Emily for life?
The reader may have noticed that I make no
attempt to describe my naked hours with Lucy, though
I spent paragraphs describing clothed hours with Susan.
The reason is that with Lucy lovemaking passed like a
dream, I can no more recall the details than I can those
of my own birth.
One evening we VO wed to marry each other whatever
pain we might cause others, and she bit my finger (in
a Union Square bar in San Francisco), then hers, and
rubbed them together and said, 'Our bloods are now mixed
honey.'
Susan had begun looking at me strangely during the
night-shifts.
We still ate together, drank wine together,
revised the accounts and talked about company policy.
Once I found it impossible to contain myself. It was
the way she was sitting opposite me, demurely crossing
and uncrossing her legs. Because of Lucy I now felt
much less subservient to Susan's laws of outward propriety.
I went over to her and simply drew up her skirt, making
her gasp with astonishment.
In a moment I had uncupped
her bra and her luscious,breasts steod bare and swollen
in my grasp. I could gaze at them to my heart's content.
It was the realisation of at least two nights of dreaming
on my part---the first two nights of our graveyard duties.
I kissed her on the mouth, in a moment I pulled her to
her feet and achieved penetration.
All she had on were
her shoes.


I find myself about to describe those silent
hours with Lucy while blackbirds sang in the apple
trees---but a sense of modesty forbids me, a protective
reluctance to expose her to a stranger's scrutiny.
Even now, when she, or part of her, is at least eight
thousand miles away, I feel the same desire to shroud
our lovemaking in an aura of secrecy.
I could describe certain touches, gazes, and kisses
of such bewildering enjoyment that we almost fainted--
indeed, I believe we did faint, often, because I can
recall so little of what went on.
It was on our third day together that she came to
my house carrying her violin.
She said, 'I've got a recording at Palo Alto and,
you know something, on the way here I felt a desire to
practice here, with you, because that's what I shall be
doing when we're married!'
Now, though I hadn't experienced violin practice,
especially the intensely advanced and complicated
practice required for concert performance, I did realise
that even an hour, let alone years or decades, of violin
practice (of however expert an order) would drive me
well and truly up the wall.
But I shrugged this off as being churlish of me,
and a leftover from the Emily marriage.
Emily by the way had phoned the previous evening
to tell me that she and Clemens Martinez-Holstein had
made full contact.
Rather oddly, he had asked her to
put an overcoat on and had penetrated with it still
buttoned up.


Lucy began practicing in my workroom and I
couldn't stand it. I mean I couldn't stand a moment
of it. I walked in the garden but it pursued me
through the windows. I returned to the house and
closed myself up in the Two room but it pursued me
there through the walls. I strolled upstairs trying
to look casual and forced a smile as I entered my work-
room. I hadn't realised quite how deafening a violin
can be at close range. I stood there, fixing a distant
gaze of admiration on my face and hoping against hope
that she would stop.
Not a bit of it.
She saw me
and just went on. Perhaps she thought I was enjoying
it. Well, maybe Schendt enjoyed it. His head was in
particle waves and quantum leaps, and no doubt earthly
sounds, even maddening cat-like sounds, didn't get through
to him. But my ears are sensitive.
And while Emily
could sometimes be loud, she never reached this decibel
level.
I could see it was going to make domestic life quite
impossible.
Every cell in my body was an electric
battery.
I quietly left the room again and went to the front
porch. You could hear it whining and squealing between
the trees. What the cats next door thought of that I
don't know, but I wager
they prefered Emily's laughter.
There was nothing to do but leave. I jumped into
the Porsch and went downtown to Safeways. After an
hour I returned and to my everlasting joy she'd stopped.
She was in the lounge, on the phone to Schendt.
heard her say she'd finished the recording. That was
odd.
Then she said, 'It went off quite well, the
orchestra was really together.'
There were lots of
yesses and nos.
She said, 'I must say the brass was
a bit strong. And the beat!' A pause.
'Oh yes!
Very strong! He wields one of the firmest batons in
the music business.'
I realised, less with shock than a slow dawning


perplexity, that she was talking about me, about us,
about the thing no words could describe!
I walked into the lounge ostentatiously weighed
down with Safeways bags.
She put the phone down and
gave me a smile.
'I hope I didn't drive you out of the house with
my practicing,' she said.
'Not at all,' I said, on my way to the kitchen.
'It gave me a front-row seat at a great concert!"'
I couldn't resist her as she strolled into the
kitchen behind me and watched while I put the provisions
away. Later we had contact but all the time I heard
the violin.
It whined and it squealed in my ears
every time she moved or sighed or kissed me.
She wanted to discuss marriage plans again but I
said, 'Let's have coffee near my office, I'm due there
at three and it's half-past two already.'
In a dark corner of my local café I told her,
'I don't think I could live with your violin practice.'
She looked up, 'Oh?'
'Maybe you could get a studio some place. I think
we should keep our professional lives separate. I'll
promise not to bring sick cats in the house if you promise
not to bring your violin.'
She nodded and said nothing.
I knew it had touched a steel chord in her somewhere.
We kissed gently and parted.
I worked like a maniac from three until Susan came
at six. Then we closed up. I realised I felt relief
to see her. We ate the won ton soup and beef dish she'd
brought along. We drank wine. Then we returned to our
accounts.
Before she sat down, however, I put my arms
round her from behind and cupped her breasts in my hands.
I unbuttoned her blouse, still behind her, unclipped
her bra and then took every shred of clothing off her.
I drew her to my couch.
She had her eyes averted.
Her nakedness was the most naked nakedness I'd ever seen.


It really seemed illicit, therefore all the more
painfully exciting. It was Lucy, as I suggested before,
who'd given me the courage to break Susan's formality
down---or rather the skill to break it down without
destroying it. For where clothing had created formality,
nakedness now did So with even more exciting effect.
Still we didn't kiss, still I had to snatch my view of
her breasts, not because she resisted me but because,
knowing my intentions, she managed to turn away and with
a subtle movement that suggested both pleasure and with-
drawal thwart my mission.
Which only produced a cleverer
attack on my part, until finally I was. outrageously,
scandalously successful and we joined forces for the
grand finale.
I had a serious problem. My ejaculations were
increasingly small. After climax I felt an irritation
similar to what I felt after Emily.
Sometimes, after
a climax, I wouldavoid seeing a client for a time.
You have to glad-face people if you handle their pets.
Part of the job is making them feel their pets are
candidates for sainthood.
So you don't want to be
feeling nauseous or tetchy.
I got worried enough to consult my shrink, and we
had a session dealing with impotence and the primal
scene. He said I felt bad after a climax because I
was terrified to displace my father in the parental
bed. He pointed out that the son enters the parental
bed, symbolically, whenever he copulates, and he takes
his father's place. He penetrates the mother and this
entails guilt and remorse in precise proportion to the


fear he felt toward the father, and proportionately
to the extent to which he was rejected by his mother
on his first libidinous approaches to her.
He also said I should fry some eggs with unsyruped
dates as an aphrodisiac.
He said the Arabs had been
doing it for centuries 'and they screw the whole time'.
He said to up my ingestion of protein.
Also vitamin
B and megadoses of C, buffered to avoid the acid effect.
It did the trick.
On the other hand, while it
bettered my performance and I no longer felt depleted,
the post-climax irritation remained.
I realised I was
missing the tension workouts with Emily in the Two room.
Sometimes I would have to stifle a desire to hit people
in Safeways.
Schendt called me and started talking about the
ROOV project again. I realised he was telling me that
whatever relations I might be enjoying with Lucy, my
commitment to supply six dogs remained, and that I was
to do the vivisection as already hinted.
This was a great relief.
Every time Lucy and I
made love it felt like I was saying goodbye to the ROOV
project and missing my chance to compete with Emily for
precedence.
Emily and I were in competition about most things.
If she had a raise I arranged to take a similar amount
out of my own profits, to equalise our incomes. If
she knocked ten seconds off her two hundred meters record
I trained until I could do better (and she expected me
to). If she beat a girlfriend at tennis in two sets
I had to do the same with a man in three.
Schendt came to see me alone during office hours.
Without anything very direct being said, he gave me to
understand that he was willing for Lucy to sue for
divorce on condition that she didn't claim alimony
and kept his dazzling Cal student out of the court
proceedings.
'Could I suggest a settlement between us?' he


asked. 'Something we could keep out of court?'
'Sure,' I said.
'It's a waste of time and money
settling things in front of a judge.'
'I agree about that,' he said with a smile that
swelled his cheeks in a way that made it seem he'd had
three cholestorol-loaded breakfasts.
Lucy and I then had a meeting to discuss final
details.
Emily and I had been sensible enough, when
we'd gotten married, to draw up property contracts
for the eventuality of a divorce. I was to take
the Santa Rosa house and two Palo Alto properties while


Emily would take the holdings at San Diego, Lake
Tahoe and Los Altos. Her other properties in
Emeryville, San José, Santa Cruz and Napa Valley (the
wine concern) were to remain exclusively hers, like
two other properties in Maine and Houston, Texas.
Schendt's problem was much easier.
His contract
gave Lucy their house in the Berkeley hills while he
kept a more valuable San Francisco property in the
much-coveted Presidio area.
She and I agreed that
we should sell the Berkeley hills house and with a
50% contribution from me purchase about five acres in
the Danville area where we would build a house. I
would be entirely responsible for the construction,
decoration etc of the house, and a separate agreement
would give one-fifth of the finished property to Lucy
and the rest to me in the event of our divorce.
Lucy prefered Danville's hot, dry climate to the
damp and pollution of the Bay Area.
She said the
latter took her strings down a whole key sometimes.
I must say, those strings, up or down a key, were
decidedly bad news from my point of view, the one block
in our marital discussions.
'Are you going to practice at home?' I asked her.
'Of course,' she said.
'Then you'll have to build a soundproofed studio
on the Danville property.'
'You just don't respect my work,' she said.
'You're
fixated with love for animals but not for my work.
But
I make more money than either you or my husband!'
'That's beside the point,' I said (it irked me,
however).
'It's just another example of men putting down
women!' she said.
'I'm not putting you down!' I replied. 'In fact
I can't imagine anything better than coming to one of
your concerts because you'll be accompanied by an


orchestra and presumably the music will follow
some kind of design instead of being a formless
Of course I shouldn't have said that. It was
too much for her.
She jumped up, her otherwise
serene gaze flashing with fire.
She was out of the
house in a moment.
Happily Emily was due home the following day.
She did a dance on the tarmac when she saw me.
Her hair was wild as always---flowing and unruly
as she walked with long strides from the New York
plane.
'The mother-fucker!' she screamed at me almost
before she was through customs, 'he's got herpes!
I said my god you've got a fucking nerve! Now he
tells me!'
Other passengers were looking round with interest,
not that she would have minded discussing it. with them.
'But Emily,' I said, pushing her luggage cart
toward the carpark, 'didn't you ask him first? With
thirty million cases of herpes in this country didn't
you ask him? I always ask first!' (I never do).
'Oh come on, you don't ask the top boy in nuclear
physics if he's got herpes!'
'Listen Emily I'm not touching you until I know
you're clean, no way---!'
'OK, OK, I'll get a hospital check right away!"
In the car I said, 'Does this mean you're out of
the ROOV project by any chance---you've had a row with


'Are you crazy? I'm further in it than I was
even 24 hours ago!
There's nothing he won't do to
cool me off!
First he wants my respect back, then he
wants me back!'
'Great!' I said.
'Great! By the way Schendt
dropped by---'
'I know. I sent him. I told Clemens, call
Arthur Schendt and tell him to get his ass over to my
house' and talk about these dog-exnims my husband is
driving me nuts about.
I thought, I'll get some-
thing for being gyped!'
'So it was you!" I said.
I felt two ways about this.
It meant that however
successful my work in ROOV turned out to be, I would
still be under an immovable obligation to her.
'Did you discuss money?' she asked as we turned
off the freeway.
Because I found out in Amsterdam that
federal funds have been doubled---in fact that's why
the Amsterdam conference was called, because Clemens
and Macbride in London got the OK to move on to ROOV
v, vl and v1l.'
'So you'd better get those dogs delivered,' she
said as we drove into our driveway.
'Before somebody
changes his mind.'
When we were in the house I told her that Susan
and I still had two more nights on graveyard duties,
which had been extended.
All she did was laugh.
Then I said, 'I've got a couple of hours before
I'm due back at the office.' I looked at her closely
and asked her, 'What was all this about you being in
an overcoat when you made contact?'
'That's right!' Emily screamed.
She was bubbling


over to tell me.
'I couldn't believe it! He's
got a thing about overcoats. Every woman has to be
in an overcoat. He says he thinks it's because he
was born in Russia in January. But, man, it was
Amsterdam's annual heatwave! I said does your wife
have to do this? What are you talking about, he said,
you don't think I have sex with my wife, do you?
After all, he said, I love and respect her! That gave
me a lot to think about.
I thought hey wait a minute!
Where does Emily come in? Does he take me for a hooker?
But it sort of got me, know that?
It excited me !
We had to leave all the overcoats in Amsterdam. I ain't
taking back 2001bs of excess luggage in overcoats, I
'And buttoned up?' I asked, fascinated.
'Right!
Right!
I couldn't believe it!
said but how is this done physically man and he said
don't worry about that, I've been doing it for as long
as you've been born.'
Well, this conversation naturally excited us,
particularly as Clemens's number resembled so many of
our own. We went upstairs and did No 57. We chose it
spontaneously.
For me there was an added reason. No 57


(the sudden fully clothed encounter of two strangers)
was similar not only to Clemens's scenario but to
Susan Riven's too. I remarked on this to Emily, which
raised not only our excitement but our sense of having
had a common experience in the last few days.
made us feel close.
I must say, if I'd had worries about my potency
before, they were dispelled now. I got to the office
at one minute to three like a marathon runner.
I said to Emily before I left, 'I'll tell you one
good thing about fantasies.'
'What's that?' she said.
'They don't have herpes!'
She laughed louder than Lucy's violin.
When I walked into my office Susan was on the
phone with Emily. They were rapping like sisters.
The subject was Amsterdam and canals and how it rained
the first two days but cleared up and she saw the
pictures she wanted to see.
I heard Susan say, 'I think I looked after him
OK. To the best of my ability!'
It tickled my desires, barely recovered as they
were from Emily's depradations.
But there were more urgent things on the agenda.
I called my Humane Society contact, or rather the
friend whom I took to have a cooperative Humane Society
contact, and in circumspect language which he understood
at once asked him to speed up the delivery of the dogs.
He promised them within five days. I leaned back in


my swivel chair feeling satisfied.
It was good to have Emily home again. The last
few days had been alienating, strange, and I was glad
to forget them.
Clients started arriving thick and strong, and I
did two minor operations. I wasn't through until
seven, by which time Susan had arrived back for the night
shift. I felt pleasantly exhausted.
I found myself
greeting her like a longlost friend.
We'd no sooner
closed the office than Emily called.
She said Clemens was still 'coming over heavy', in
fact from a pay-phone in a Santa Rosa bar. He was
urging her to come to the bar---'in an overcoat' (it
was climbing 85 degrees).
She was flustered, that is
really enjoying it.
'My only concern is the herpes,' I said.
'I told him he'd have to wear rubber and he said
he'd wear tarpaulin if I wanted him to. He's a fanatic.
He wants us to take a room at the St Francis.
For two
nights! Didn't you say you were on graveyard duty for
two more nights?'
'That's right,' I said.
'So maybe I ought to at least go and see what he
wants.'
'As a double check, you mean?'
But she didn't hear this.
'Where's the Brief
Encounter bar?' she asked.
'Take a right on Abbot, left on Twain, right on
Market and you'll see it on the left, opposite 17th.'
'Well,' she said, 'I'd better get dressed.'
'In an overcoat,' I said.
I was decidedly worried.
When men of Clemens's
age startedlosing their heads they brought not only
themselves down but everyone they were closely associated
with.
That now included me. And I had my neck stuck
out with these dogs. Of course it might be that he'd
been playing this sort of game for all his sixty-three


years. But if federal funding and the public image
depended on him the danger remained.
Secondly, again on the assumption that he had lost
his head, he might start turning Emily's too, and she
might sue for divorce at just the wrong time. After
all, my connection with ROOV depended on her, not on
Lucy, so what the hell was I doing marrying Lucy?
Also I needed Emily.
She could keep a leveller head
than I.
Unless she was in one of her victim-syndromes,
which hit her as de pression does others.
But I mustn't seem to oppose a divorce if she really
wanted it.
In that case I should play the injured
party to whom she must make amends (remember that as
Clemens's wife she would have twice the clout in ROOV).
He also might feel guilty toward me, being ye olde
worlde, and I could play on that too.
Then wasn't divorce an ideal outcome? My head was
in a whirl.
I was in no mood for contacts with Susan. I felt
that my home, suddenly reinhabitated an hour ago, was
now doubly empty, because I might not be living there
as Emily's husband much longer.
I've often heard my shrink say that fear and sex
are impossible bedfellows. I was certainly as limp
as a rag, and though my mind wished me to take action
my genital area seemed to feel otherwise.
I made an excuse that I needed fresh laundry for
the night and drove back home. The bedroom looked like
after two burglaries.
Every drawer was open.
She
must have tried every overcoat in the house, spring,
fall and winter. A desire to please so intense surely
argued passionate interest on her side?
I hurried downstairs and ate as many fried eggs
and dates as I could, then raced back to the office.
Susan had dinner ready and I picked at it without saying
I'd eaten. I drank more wine than usual to stimulate
an appetite but it only bogged down in the dates.


I suddenly realised: if he wanted her in
overcoats he would never want her for life! If he
wanted her in overcoats he didn't want her in his bed.
Remember that while Emily and I had a range of
172 fantasies, which we were revising all the time,
he had just this one. That is, instead of fitting
his woman into numberless roles, as I did, he fitted
her into overcoats.
It could hardly last.
I decided to verify my hunch.
After our meal I
again excused myself, saying I had a spot of phoning
to do, and went to my office.
There I dialled Clemens's
number, knowing he wasn't there. One of his sons
answered first.
Then his wife came.
I said, 'I'm Emily Sprayd-Taylor's husband' (the
name opened doors like a remote-control garage-door
button).
'Oh,' she said, as cool as a Rockefeller.
away for a couple of days.'
'I thought he'd just got back from Amsterdam,
I said crudely.
'He is back from Amsterdam but, you know, he's an
awfully busy man. If the press isn't after him it's
the university or one of the Washington committees.
I always tell him his journeys abroad bring him twice
as much work at home, it piles up in his absence.'
'You mean,' I said, playing for charm, 'it isn't
all roses being a Nobel Prize winner?'
'That's right! I just wish they'd give him a
little leisure sometimes!
Mind you, Mr Sprayd-Taylor'
(zaecided to let that one go) 'I don't complain. I
get a lot of flattering attention which I really don't
deserve. And we have a good life on the whole. We've
never missed a vacation together. We're off to the
Bahamas next week. We have a little house outside
Blue Haven.
From there we're going to a physics
conference in Helsinki which will take up two days.
Then we shall spend a couple of months in London,


reviving old friendships you know. - My husband once
held a visiting professorship at King's College.'
I let her rattle on without listening, for my
mind was at ease. I knew all I wanted to know. I
was just dying to see Emily's face when she got a card
from the Bahamas. And another from Helsinki. Then
London.
My hunch had been devastatingly correct. A man
with only one fantasy had to be a pervert. And a
pervert in his position had to have a wife who wiped
up after him.
That had been my hunch.
I left my office meaning to join Susan in the
kitchen.
She'd gone to bed. I went to her door and
listened.
Not a sound.
I pushed the door open.
No one was there. I waited in the kitchen.
Half
an hour passed. Then I heard her car. She came in
and said, 'I had to slip back home for something.'
It was pretty obvious to me what it was. She
was flushed and her hair was slightly tussled. Useful
that her husband was back from Nebraska.
'Let's do some accounts before we go to bed,' I
said.
She looked bewildered by this statement.
In a
moment we were in contact. My excitement was almost
frantic.
Especially when I became aware of her recent
visit home---I mean the gushing evidence of that visit.
I was at home the following day getting some
order into the bedroom when I was stunned by a phonecall
from Mrs Martinez-Holstein.
'Could I speak to your wife?' she asked.


'She's not at home right now,' I said.
'Maybe
you should try the lab.'
'I did,' she said.
'Were you trying to tell me
something yesterday when you called me?'
'Tell you something?'
'My husband phoned me from San Francisco just now
to say he's going to Sidney, Australia, with your wife.
He said it was to do with the ROOV project but when I
called Arthur Schendt about it he didn't seem to know
what I was talking about.
I wonder if you do.'
'Well, I'm sure if your husband said there's work
to be done in Sidney involving my wife, it's correct.
Is there any reason on your side to doubt his word?'
'Only the fact. that nobody else on the project
seems to know about it, and you don't seem quite as
familiar with your wife's movements as a young husband
might. When you called me last night was she at home?'
'I was on night duty at the office. I assumed
she was.'
'Do you assume she is now? Did you find evidence
on your return home this morning that she'd slept in
her bed?'
'Well, no, but then she's often on night duty too.'
'Like hell she is! With my old man!'
And she slammed the phone down.
I could see not only my home and marriage going for
scrap but---once Mrs Martinez-Holstein got her feelings
aired---the entire ROOV project as well. The fact is
that however independent a scientist may feel of public
opinion he can get sudden and unpleasant surprises for
the simple but much overlooked reason that federal
funds have to be justified politically, and a scandal
is what every politician big or small goes in daily,
even momently, terror of.
I called the St Francis but there was no one by
the name of Martinez-Holstein or Sprayd-Taylor.
called Arthur Schendt and told him that Clemens's wife


had phoned me.
'What's the woman worried about?' I asked him.
'As a matter of fact,' he said in a particularly
dry way, 'I think she might be worried on account of
her husband going to Sidney with your wife when he's
due in a matter of days in the Bahamas with his own.'
'You mean his own wife.'
'I mean his own wife.'
I could see nobody was even trying to prevent a
scandal.
Somehow I had to reach the only person in
all this who I considered to be level-headed.
Namely
the cause of it all, my own wife.
It was by now twelve noon and I only had three
hours before I was due to take the office over from
Susan. I drove onto the freeway and made for the
Berkeley hills, in search of the Martinez-Holstein
house.
I was amazed at how peaceful the streets
looked up there, considering the number of lethal
physicists and chemists living on them. Quiet,
terraced houses sat among trees, with a fine view of
the Bay far below. I wondered how many of the Nobel
Prize winners living in the vicinity were putting
overcoats on in the heat wave.
But with Nancy Martinez-Holstein in one chair
and you in another and a coffee table with cookies
and the best chinaware in between, the last thing you
thought about was sex---anybody's, not just Nancy's.
I thought I would go to the point.
'Emily went away with all her overcoats,' I said
quietly.
This was Nancy's reply, her head lowered.
She
stayed like that for a considerable time. Then she
looked up.
'I thought Rosenfeld had got rid of that,' she
said.
'Rosenfeld?'


'I'm surprised you don't know his name, he's
the most prominent Freudian analyst in the Bay Area.
George was with him for five years. I threw out every
overcoat we had after we moved to California. I only
wear sweaters and zip jackets.'
'Never mind what I mean.
Suffice it to say he
has a thing about overcoats and that's why your wife's
wardrobe has no overcoats in it at this time.'
'You probably don't see, being a faithful and
unsuspecting husband,' she said.
'We all thought it
was a thing of the past.
In the old days he used to
find secretaries, types who thought it amusing to dress
up in overcoats.'
She gave me a piercing look from
under her eyebrows.
'You mustn't believe there's
anything prurient in what he does. He simply likes
to see young women dressed in overcoats.'
'He tried it with me.
But I soon showed him he
was barking up the wrong tree.'
She then, to my astonishment, mimed a spitting
motion at the floor.
'All we can do is wait,' I said.
'Wait?' I thought she was going to throw the
coffee pot at me. 'My son's already at the St Francis!
Wait my fanny! Let me tell you this, young man.
Your marriage is in danger, and I think you'd better
know it. I think your wife had better know it too.
Because he always makes marriage proposals, which I
then have to drag him out of.
But this is the first
time he's paired up with a respectable housewife and
a famous name!'
'Are you afraid of a scandal?' I asked her.
'I'm afraid of nothing except your wife.'
She rose. This was the sign for me to leave.


'She may think the name Martinez-Holstein
better than yours, or even than her own!' she added.
Then: 'Good morning.'
You old cow, I thought on my way to the car.
I've half a mind to push Emily into marriage just to
spite your face.
I drove back to the office in fairly good spirits,
for I was devising a cute little plan.
Suppose I flew
to London to see Macbride, the genetic brain behind
ROOV, and apprise him of Martinez-Holstein's flight
to Sidney, his proposed divorce and the likely revelation
of his overcoat fantasy?
Surely Macbride would take immediate steps to
protect his project---and me---by contacting the right
echelons in Washington?
I didn't think I would carry this out but it served
to buoy me up for an afternoon horribly bereft of news
from Emily.
I buried myself in my work and found an odd
satisfaction in standing side by side with Susan at the
operating table---a difficult hysterectomy required us
both.
When we threw our gored smocks into the laundry
basket we breathed a common sigh of relief and slipped
into the kitchen for a cup of coffee such as only Susan
makes.
We closed up at seven with the last night of our
graveyard duty before us. I thought I might phone
Macbride instead of going there but when I settled
down at my desk to do it the words wouldn't come, it


felt ridiculous.
Susan was in her office cleaning up her files
and I found myself walking in there and sitting down.
To my surprise I began telling her what had happened.
I said nothing about my interest in the ROOV project
but just intimated that Clemens Martinez-Holstein was
the eminence grise behind it all, and that all of Emily's
ambitions were caught up in it.
'So what are you worried about?' Susan asked me.
I couldn't believe how cool she was. It lightened
the load at once.
'If she gets on with this man,' Susan said, 'why
shouldn't she pair up with him? It seems natural
enough to me. He can bring her a lot of good.
She's
the kind of woman who lives in her work and a marriage
of this kind will give her the chance to really dedicate
herself.'
'And what kind of woman are you?' I asked her.
'What do you mean?'
'Do you want to live in your work?'
'Sure I do,' she said.
'My husband's very
supportive about that.'
He was in computers, she said, making close on
three or four times what she made. He was buying real
estate in Nevada, had opened three exclusive restaurants
in Contra Costa county as a sideline.
I was fascinated by the matter-of-fact way she had
of talking about things.
She barred the speculative
in all discussion. In this way the only problems were
surface ones---whether to get to Safeways before lunch
or after, whether to invest in an enlarged surgery etc.
There was something comforting in this. All of a
sudden the Emily question seemed not simply emotional
and unreal but self-solving.
A call came from the rosta-supervisor who said he'd
arranged for another station to take over duties for


that night, we could go home and needn't expect
graveyard duties for at least three months.
I said to Susan, 'Why don't you come home with
She didn't give me an answer, simply packed her
night-things and put them in her car. In the carpark
she said, 'I'll follow you, OK?'
There were no loose strands with Susan. I drove
along feeling neat, resolved. I meant to squeeze for
myself such a cosy place in the ROOV project---squeeze
it from two sore consciences---that I too might be flying
round the world soon---Sidney, London, Cape Town.
The
night sky looked crisp and orderly.
The tyres hummed
on the tarmac.
Susan was behind me.
When I turned onto the driveway I saw that the house
was ablaze with light.
I jumped out quickly as Susan braked behind me.
I ran into the house.
Emily was there, upstairs,
packing.
There were suitcases everywhere.
I almost collided
with Clemens. He was standing outside the bedroom.
He came forward to meet me with a smile, his eyes like
dark grapes, as innocent and joyous as a child's.
His
appearance was unusual.
He had long black hair touched
with grey and white almost down to his shoulders. He
looked like a leftover from the Sixties, and his costume
confirmed the impression.
He had narrow black leather
pants on and a sweeping white cloth jacket that swung
loose and well-cut round his haunches, and one of the
most elegant black-and-burgundy striped shirts I've ever
seen. He was agile, fairly straight in the back, and at
first glance I would have given him little more than half
his reputed years. Compared with him his wife Nancy
was an abbotess excommunicated for witchcraft.
'I hear you had a nice chat with my wife,' he said
as if peering into my thoughts.
'That's right,' I said.


'Oh there he is!' I heard Emily cry from inside
the bedroom after she heard my voice.
Susan was standing behind me and I had time to
introduce her to Clemens before being hugged by a
radiant Emily.
'Come downstairs,' she said.
I followed her down.
Susan remained on the
landing with Clemens and the absurd thought crossed
my mind that if left to themselves they might make
immediate contact, since an overcoat fantasy is but
one step from a formality fantasy.
So I called out
to her, 'Why don't you come too Susan?'
'Oh sure!' Susan said, following us.
'I'll go on with the good work here,' Clemens
called out, presumably refering to the packing.
'So,' I said to Emily,: 'you decided?'
'Decided what?'
'Well, I mean throwing in your lot with Clemens?'
'We're going to Sidney but that's still professional,'
she said ambiguously.
She looked at Susan.
'How are
you honey?'
Then she turned back to me (Emily was
mistress, in moments of emergency, of a striking
theatrical style) and said, 'I've been working hard for
you. We were down in LA most of yesterday and I saw
the ROOV surgeons. I told them about you and they
said they had complete confidence that if V and Vl get
off the ground you could do the job.
Does Susan know
about this?'
I said with alarm, 'Of course she doesn't.
You
know ROOV's confidential!'
'I think you should tell her.'
'Why? I mean, fine, I can tell her but---!'
'Anyway,' Emily went on, 'that's for you to decide.
We're going to Sidney to clinch a few of the details on
V and Vl. The organs are going to be launched from
an Australian site, by the way.'


Susan was watching us intently.
I had a heady
feeling that I would tell her about ROOV. Also I
knew better than to cross Emily's advice, especially
when it was thrown out as casually as that.
Emily returned upstairs and we heard drawers being
opened and suitcases being closed. The house fairly
buzzed with Emily's presence. I looked at Susan and
found myself wanting immediate contact.
I believe she
felt the same.
Was this passage of erotic current between us
Emily's doing? I couldn't winkle this peculiar thought
out of my mind.
When they came downstairs again they were dressed
and ready for a long journey.
Clemens strolled over to me, detached, easygoing
and said, 'When Emily and I are back you must come and
sample my wife's cooking.
She makes the best souffles
in the Bay Area.'
Emily was talking to Susan.
I heard Susan say, 'He's in Nebraska,
Looking for
real estate. He'll be there at least a week.'
I turned.
'Jerry?' I asked (this was her husband).
'When did he leave?'
'A couple of days ago.'
I gazed at her in wonderment.
She was just about
as dead opposite to Emily as you could get---contained
where Emily was explosive, tight where Emily was loose,
reserved where Emily was a bull in a chinashop.
wasn't that she hadn't thought to tell me about Jerry,


much less that she'd been withholding the information.
It just hadn't served any purpose to tell me. The only
reason she did mention it was because Emily asked her
where her husband was (did Emily really ask that question
Apart from the fact that it meant we could be
together at nights in my huge bed if we wished, Susan's
information released in me an oddly determined desire
to---I can only say ravish her, plunder her, ruffle the
carefully ordered hairdo.
Even upset her life. For
ever. Yes!
Emily and Clemens were on their way to the door.
I helped with the bags.
Every time they looked at
each other the world seemed to sing.
I was as sure
she'd found the man of her life as I was that rats have
tails.
Yet they were behaving like two delegates at an
embryology congress.
Was that part of their overcoat
number?
After they drove off I found myself saying to
Susan, 'What say we go celebrate?'
What exactly we had to celebrate I didn't know and
she didn't ask. We left her car in the driveway and
I took her to a smart French place in Santa Fé. It was
a long drive but with the help of a Brahms quintet it
went quickly.
Susan and I had no great need to address
each other.
She had a stillness which I began to
perceive was maybe wild, eventful and varied just like
Emily's ebullience.
I also found myself telling her during the first
course (an Italian dish of smoked ham and melon, so why
the French names and dynamite prices?) about my role
in the ROOV experiment.
It was reckless, I thought---
but an inner self more authentic than the thinking one
urged me to describe the imminent delivery to the Sonoma
County lab of six dogs from Mike Borovitz.
She absorbed everything without a twitch of the


eyes, which simply gazed at me, great deep dark-brown
pools of---what? Tranquillity, thought, concern?
She said quietly, 'The experiment should be renamed.'
'Why?' I asked witlessly.
'It now concerns dogs. So it should be DOOV.'
'That's right,' I said with a laugh.
'You're
damn right!'
She didn't laugh and I wondered if she was serious.
She went on, 'Emily said we should work together.'
'But we already do.'
'Exactly. I couldn't see what she was driving at.
Now I do.'
I leaned forward.
'You mean you'd be prepared to
be co-surgeon?"
She nodded.
The fourth hole in my seat!
I was excited, thrilled. I wanted contact.
'Come back to the office,' I said, my voice
trembling, 'and I'll show you the designs.'
These were important blueprints showing the sections
required for ROOV V. The Palo Alto lab had sent them
to me. It had been decided some time back that since
the tail of a dog is such an expressive and immediately
understandable part of the anatomy it should be retained
at a new station, perhaps in East Germany, and I wanted
to indicate to Susan some of the difficulties in keep-
ing the nerve structure of a tail alive in the new
conditions.
She was fascinated (I think).
We pored over the
colored sections until past two in the morning.
Then
we returned to my house.
I got her to the master
bedroom by inviting her to my workroom which was two
doors down from it.
There I made very quick and un-
expected entry and managed to ease and half-carry her
to the bedroom. When there we sank onto the vast bed
and within moments every shred of clothing was off her
body. She made shocked gasps, resisting each of my


bold movements by turning on her side, her back, her
belly, increasing my excitement to an unbearable pitch.
She didn't resist in such a way as to provoke rapacious-
ness or force in me: no, her resistance was a delectable
double statement, designed to protect her against too
great exposure on the one hand and too great a thrill
on the other.
The gasp was both shocked and narcotized.
Therein lay her electricity, or rather its two poles.
The next evening she had to stay at home because
her mother would be returning to New Mexico soon and
she couldn't leave her alone too often. Her husband
Jerry continued to look for properties in Nebraska.
I got my own house back to its former impeccable
neatness.
It was good not to have Emily yelling from
every corner and room,
On the other hand the silence
was distressing. No phone calls.
Odd how a phone's
silence can reflect the silence inside.
I was getting happier and happier to see Susan in
the morning.
I felt childish elation at the sight of
her car parked in its usual place.
Now we'd settled back into our former routine our
contacts were even more thrilling (i.e. more snatched).
Sometimes I yearned to take her in my own bed and in
nakedness but I knew that the opportunity would come
round if I left matters to her.
To my surprise she brought her moustached mother
to the office.
She was a jolly Middle Westerner with a
hatchet jaw and the eyes of a scraggy hawk.
I could
see the way she'd brought Susan up. Rules had been
laid down. Not because they were good rules


or because Mom believed in them. Not at all. They
were simply the rules you went by, and apart from that
you could do or think what you liked.
And the rules
were only there so that you could have complete freedom
in every other respect.
I remember a guy at college who became quite an
expert on life behind the Iron Curtain.
He said
political suppression produces an intense personal life.
It's the only area in which you're free to act.
This was the case with Susan.
Emily, for all her freedom, never knew the kind
of sexual thrills Susan achieved.
Susan began calling me up in the evenings.
Always
about some matter of the accounts or the design of the
new wing. And whatever we said turned into another
language. Even while working with our minds we were
playing too.
It was really neat. We agreed---on the
evening before Jerry's return---to call in an architect
right away. That decision, over the phone, our speech
heavy with breath, was like a climax.
The following day Jerry called me, believe it or
not. The husband!
'Hi!' he said (a little roughly, I thought).
'How's Emily these days?'
'Fine!' I yelled back.
'Just fine! As a matter
of fact she'll have been in Sidney nearly two days
already.'
'Business trip, right?'
'Right!' I screamed.
'Seems to me,' he said, 'you and me have things to
talk about.
You know, you and Susan working so close---'
'Right!' I bellowed.
'Why don't you come around
tomorrow evening?'
'Just a business chat, right?' he said.
At the office next morning I told Susan, 'Your
husband's coming over this evening. Any idea what he
wants?'


She smiled.
A smile on Susan's face was an
event, not because it happened seldom but because
it was a good-luck, all's-clear-ahead sign. I trusted
this because I knew she never arrived at any verdict
by thinking (any more than Emily did). She simply
registered the verdict with her face, as Emily did
with her mouth.
Susan showed it in a flash of teeth,
as Emily vocalized it in a yell. In both cases it
bore an unchallengeable authority.
We had a heavy day and couldn't spare time for a
sit-down lunch.
She made coffee. I did three minor
operations, got bitten by a labrador. As the day
proceeded I found myself getting nervous. I imagined
Jerry to be one of those 300"1b Wasps who get rich at
25 because they have deep voices.
I left the office late because of a hysterical
client.
She thought her cat was going to die (which
it deserved to) and I had to reassure her for nearly
an hour that Michael was in a healing crisis, not the
last crisis. I sped home and found him waiting in his
car. He was one of those lanky, long-striding men
like the late Hank Fonda, and wouldn't, clearly, hurt
a fly unless it threatened to reduce his dividends.
And by the way he smiled at me and nearly wrung my hand
off, I wasn't going to do that.
'Come inside,' I said, 'I have some Dom Perignan
on ice.'
As he followed behind me he said, 'Nice outfit
you have here.'
Then: 'Seems to me Susan's pretty
attached to you.'
He certainly didn't beat round bushes.
'That's right,' I said, opting for idiot enthusiasm.
'Thing is,' he said, dropping into my water-couch
like a dolphin at play, 'you two are working together
real tight, and maybe your personal lives should be
integrated too.'


'Integrated?'
'You have a thriving business between the two
of you, you're expanding, there's nothing like two
people who are partners in everything.'
I knew exactly what he meant
of course.
He didn't even bother to reply, gazing at
me steadily (I was still hovering on my way to the
kitchen to fetch the champagne).
I said, 'Attachment doesn't constitute marriage.'
'That's a hundredweight of bull,' he said succinctly.
'You've got more of a marriage there than most men have.'
'But you're always on the road!' I said.
'Just what I'm saying! You and she have more of
a marriage there than I've got---and that Emily's got.'
'Is this the business chat?' I asked.
'I'm coming to that,' he said.
'OK, I'll get the champagne.'
I prepared the bucket.
Some smoked salmon canapés
were ready in the fridge. As I wheeled it all into the
lounge I saw he'd taken a bunch of documents out of his
pocket. I thought at first they were divorce proceed-
ings but when we were settled with a drink he began
explaining.
'I've consulted Susan,' he said, 'and she says it
depends on you. Now this is what I propose. I'll
give her the house, and maybe a slice of a hotel in
Florida, but I need something from you.'
'What's that?' I said.
'Emily and Martinez-Holstein are involved in an
experiment which I happen to know about quite independ-
ently of anyone in this area. As a matter of fact a
close friend of mine has a hand in the federal funding
for this project, we grew up together.
And now I hear
you're involved in the ROOV project too.'
'That's right.'
'And Emily seemed anxious before she left that you


bring in Susan on the surgical side.'
'That's right.'
'And now we're talking of dogs as exnims.!
'That's right' (I decided to throw discretion to
the winds).
He said, 'I want you to initiate a new computer-
system for the project.'
'Yessir.
I flatter myself that one of the companies
I'm involved in is producing the finest electronic
equipment for this kind of purpose in the world.
our system is adopted at every ROOV station in the world
I think the federal funding apparatus will view the
project even more favorably than before.
OK, they
recently doubled the funding on ROOV 1V but they're
stroking their chins about these plans for V, vl and
V1l. I can say definitely but strictly off the record
that the key people there see the adoption of our ware
as essential to progress on v, Vl and V1l.'
He left me stunned---chiefly by the power I'd
suddenly been endowed with (the documents Jerry Riven
put on the table, by the way, were lengthy descriptions
of the software).
As if scenting something in the air Emily called
from Sidney at about midnight.
'Clemens and I married yesterday,' she said.
'What?' I screeched.
'That's bigamy! You'll
ruin the whole project.
Don't you realise that the
State Department can't be seen to be financing bigamists?'
She laughed.
'It was a Maori ceremony,' she said.
'They married us spiritually.'
'Oh that!' I said with relief.
I went on: 'I've
been thinking about the computer systems on the ROOV
project and it seems to me we could do better Emily.'
'That's Clemens's province and I'm sure he'd
know if it was inadequate.
Anyway keep your nose in
the surgical section.'


'But I've got much more elaborate programs in
mind,' I said.
'It's too much for me to handle at this end!'
she said.
'Listen, why don't you go to Arthur Schendt?
He can twist Clemens's arm on most things. Also we'll
be travelling for our honeymoon, so we won't have an
address for a fortnight.'
She rang off.
My first thought was that contacting Arthur
Schendt was a great idea. I might even put him
together with Susan's husband and they could talk
software together.
Lying on the water-couch I called him and got
Lucy and saw it wasn't such a good idea after all.
'How are you?' I asked her.
'I'm playing in LA tomorrow. Why don't you come?
I'm staying at the Walton.'
'Well', I found myself saying, 'I might do just
She gave me more details and I rang off without
making a firm promise.
Perhaps, I thought drowsily,
I could more beneficially get Lucy to influence her own
husband than try to do the job myself.
When I got to the office Susan was standing in the
kitchen.
'Did Jerry tell you what he wants from me? The
computer deal?' I asked her.
'He did, yes. It sounds OK to me.'
'We're partners already.'


'Did this suggestion come from you?' I asked her.
'What suggestion?'
'That we team up completely, you and me?'
'He came to see me without consulting you?'
'That's right,' she said.
'And he only told you afterwards?"
'And when he told you it seemed the right idea to
'Doesn't it seem the right idea to you?' she said.
She was standing right in front of me, erect, with
those dark still pools of eyes dwelling on me, peculiarly
innocent; and this moved me. She really hadn't played
a part in Jerry's plan (until I met Susan I didn't believe
a person without guile existed).
I suddenly realised I had to marry her because she
would otherwise belong to someone else and wouldn't be
able to protect herself.
I felt I had to protect her
with my guile (which was surely enough for two).
'I just don't like the idea of our marrying because
somebody else said so,' I told her.
'Least of all your
husband.'
'He knows what's good for me.'
'I don't doubt it,' I said.
'But when people
marry they have to love each other.'
'That's what I mean. He knows about these things.'
'He knows we love each other?'
Still she stood there---while those pools lighted
me with their non-commital darkness.
All morning I had the question in my mind, did I
love her? I realised this wasn't a real curiosity as
to my feelings: I wanted to know if Jerry was right.
As to feelings, I didn't know, but maybe he saw some-
thing. And Emily too---yes!
She too had pushed us
together.
Strange, to act in a scenario made by others.


I resolved to find out the answer by leaving.
I needed, in any case, a change of scene. I called
Susan in the next office and asked her, 'Mind if I take
the afternoon off tomorrow?'
'To think it out?'
'You won't think,' she said.
'You didn't give me an answer.'
'Oh sure!'
Next day I left the office at noon and was on a
plane to LA by two o'clock, feeling perplexed that
somehow jurisdiction over my life had been ceded to
others, and they---even more perplexing---they possibly
knew better than I did what was good for me.
On arrival I called Lucy and asked her to book
me a room in her hotel.
By the time I got there
through the rush-hour traffic she'd already gone to
rehearsal. I had a decent snack and returned to my
room to sleep (I ate fried eggs and asked for dates
but they didn't have any).
Later I called Susan.
'Everything OK?'
'Emily called.
She couldn't find you at home.
She says Martinez-Holstein is spending most of his nights
'Oh my god.'
'She's disillusioned, she says.
They didn't go
on the spiritual honeymoon. She wants you to phone
her. She says she's tired of buying overcoats. Even
a mink didn't interest him.'


'Did she remember to keep it buttoned up? - I asked
facetiously.
'I suppose so.'
'Did you know about the overcoat business then?'
'Oh sure,' she said.
'Do you have any fantasies?' I asked her.
'Me? Of course not. You know that.'
I was fiddling with the phone cord, biting my lip.
'Anything wrong?' she asked when I didn't speak.
'I just can't go back to being married to Emily!'
I said.
'I'm used to other things now.'
'Well, then,' she said quietly, you've got your
answer already, haven't you?'
I went to the concert and was so spaced out I
missed all but a few bars, though I heard enough to
realise that Lucy was in the top class.
I made a faux pas at the reception afterwards by
saying I was a sucker for anything by Brahms when she'd
actually played Schumann.
She kept close to me as the
champagne went round, making it clear that she'd be
returning to the hotel with me, not with the first
violin who drooled over her lustfully.
During the concert (to which I would normally
have given my full attention) I'd been occupied by the
worry that Emily might not be contemplating divorce
after all.
And if she wasn't I couldn't marry Susan.
Which I wanted to do. Desperately perhaps. All this
made Jerry Riven the wisest man on earth.
I was
determined to push his computers with Schendt.
Also
I resolved to phone Emily that night to sound her out.


-as soon as I could decently get out of Lucy's arms.
By the time my mind had stopped running round in
circles the orchestra was off the platform and everybody
was leaving (I thought it was the interval). I must
have sat through the interval in the belief that an
orchestra was still playing. I only hoped Lucy didn't
want any comments on her performance.
Luckily she had other things on her mind. We
broke away from the reception and jumped into a cab.
She took me to her room, actually a suite. Without
a word we undressed and for the next three hours I
lost consciousness. It was the same state as before--
melting into a perfect natal glove, so fitting in all
respects that any sense of boundary disappeared. We
lay there unable to distinguish whose limbs were whose.
Cunilinguus (which I had never attempted with Susan,
I was saving it for a spectacular scene I had in mind,
but more of that later) featured greatly in my contacts
with Lucy.
It was like sipping divine juices and the
moment it began my mind shut down and I was once more
floating in the amniotic sac.
She dozed off and like a mouse trying to push a
boulder I heaved my exhausted body out of the bed.
I'd warned her that I'd got to phone Emily, so she knew
I was going (I believe that if I hadn't gone at that
moment we would have drifted back to the old intimacy
and married, violin or no violin).
I staggered along the corridor, my eyes half closed.
I collapsed on my bed and almost fell asleep. I tore
myself from sleep, douched my face in cold water, ordered
some coffee from the thankfully allnight kitchen and
finally I was ready.
She picked the phone up after one ring, a sure sign
of being on edge.
'Yeah?' she yelled (she must have thought it was the
itinerant Clemens).


I was very quiet with her. I said, look, it
may seem black now, but he'll come back, and remember,
once you're married you'll have his name and then he,
and incidentally you, can do what the hell you like.
After all, you may live to thank him for his nightly
excursions---you may want to do the same!
'I suppose you're right,' she said.
'It's just
damned unfortunate that it's winter here. I overlooked
that one! Everybody's in overcoats.
It drives him
frantic!'
'Why don't you get him to somewhere like Cape
Town?' I said.
'They're in bikinis there.'
'And bikinis are a big turnoff for him!' she said.
'But he's such a crafty old bastard he sees round all
the corners.'
Impossible,' I said.
'Not even Einstein could
see round your corners.'
'Oh well,' she said.
'I'll try. And how are
you? Arthur Schendt told Clemens you really hit it off
with Lucy.'
'He did?' I said biliously.
'It's more of a
friendship.'
She laughed.
I'd no sooner put the phone down and started
unbuttoning my shirt when it rang again.
It was Emily.
'Listen,' she said, her voice soft and breathy
this time, 'do you remember No 15?'
'No 15?' I asked her.
'What are you talking about
Emily?'
'Listen', she whispered, 'I haven't had a thing
for three whole days and I'm frantic!'
'Emily! You should have told me right away!'
'I thought it'd pass off but it didn't. I got
No.15 on my mind.
Could you oblige me honey?'
'Sure I could!
Shall I tell you just how it
happened?'


Her voice took me right back. I found myself
excited too.
'I've got my vibrator right here!' she whispered.
'Well,' I said, also breathing differently now
(I could hear this in my own earpiece), 'I'm sitting
working on a veterinary paper, right?'
'Right! Right!'
'It's a paper on the removal of the spleen in rats
and its implications for the lifespan of domestic
animals.'
'Right!
Right!'
'Now I'm sitting at my desk and the window's right
in front of me---'
'And it's open!'
'I can see the lawn and the shrubbery with the peonies
and the tall rhodedendrons and the wisteria trained over
the vine pagoda---'
'And you're standing there.'
'It looks like you're hoeing.
'I am! I am! I'm hoeing.'
She was breathing
strongly now and I could hear a lively electric buzz in
the background (she eschewed silent ones, saying that
the buzz was a 'good controbasso').
'You have gardening gloves on---'
'And a long skirt.'
'That's right---I need it against the prickly weeds
and the poison oak.'
'There isn't any poison oak in our garden but you're
cautious in this respect.'
'That's right!'


'So you're wearing a long thick skirt.'
'That's right!'
'You've been neglecting that part of the garden
for some months--- I
'So there's a lot of weeding to do.'
'There is!'
'And some of the weeds have grown tough roots and
you have to bend down to grip them with a strong gloved
'I do, I do, I do!
It's no good trying to get at
them with the fucking hoe, I have to use my hands, bend
down and use my hands!'
'I'm just starting a paragraph about the reduced
function of the thymus gland and underproduction of T-
cells when---'
'When you start bending more---remember you've got
your back to me---'
'Your long skirt rises slightly at the bottom when
you bend down---'
'To get hold of the weeds!'
'That's right.
And this reminds me of No 62.'
'Oh yes!' she said.
'And I can't stand it any more. You bend and
'And the sight of you bending---bending and bending---
'It's too much for mell'm no longer interested in
the removal of rodent spleens! And the window in front
of me is open---you bend and bend---I'm frantic---I can't
contain it any more---I can feel my heart beat down in


my crotch---I try to hold myself in but I can't---!"
'I jump out of the window---'
'I jump out of the window and race across the
'You can't hear me because I'm running on grass!'
'And I'm bending!'
'Yes, you're bending! And I'm running across the
lawn. I run and run and when I get to the shrubbery
I pull up your skirt from the back and I---I---I---!
'I force an entry!'
'And suddenly I see the sherrif's wife is standing
right by you---'
'She was talking to you all the time, I didn't see
- She was hidden by the shrubbery---'
She dropped by for coffee!' Emily said.
'That's right!
She dropped by and she came in by
the garden entrance and I didn't see her and she said
don't stop your gardening, I can talk to you while
you're on the job---!'
'That's right, she did!'
'She said while you're weeding there honey we can
talk but I couldn't see her from my window because she
was hidden by the shrubbery---'
'And there she is, standing right by me, her mouth
is open, she can't say a word, she's so shocked, and I
can't say a word and you can't say a word---'
'And she goes on standing there, she can't take


her eyes off us---and I can't stop what I'm doing---'
'No, please don't!'
'I have to go on doing what I'm doing---and you're
almost falling over---!'
'You have to hold on to a redwood sapling to keep
your balance, you have to plant your feet more firmly
in the ground, you have to widen---!'
'And she's watching us, she can't take her eyes
off us and I can't stop doing what I'm doing---!'
'You don't have to!'
'And then it seems like she's egging us on! Yes!
And you start rolling with the movement-- --
'Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards---I"
'Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards!'
'And now I'm lifting you off your feet, and she's
watching harder and harder, and she starts shouting go,
go, gol---I've thrown the skirt over your back and she's
breathing heavily and shouting faster, faster, keep at
it, go faster, go, go, go!
You're getting there,
There was suddenly an awful lot of noise at the
other end. And then it was quiet.
It was a long,
long pause.
And finally she said in a whisper, 'Thanks honey.
Talk to you tomorrow.'
And she rang off.
I arranged for a morning call and fell asleep at
once, still in my clothes.