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


For in much wisdom is much grief
Ecclesiastes


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 Eebeing so small,
IAn refering to the therapist's) but in fact if there
was any sexual interest between me and Emily in the hot
surgeud
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, Ihadlasted four
dunsl
days, seven hours. It beat other flirtations hundreds
of percents.
In no time we were married. It seemed
lhav
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
Hay
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 apprapched sex in the same
athletic way. But we didn't enjoy it. We fitted EHLARGE
on TIS
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 moni tors
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. 'Wow!'
Needless to say, most of our Nobel 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 Sydney, 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
'emotidnal' 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?'
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. 'Do
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 Sydney, 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. CShe 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
awake at nights?'
fea
(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.
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 kitchen. 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


wod
his 3
polnic,
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 Sevres---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 prefer"ed 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'11 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.
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.
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.i 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 di scussed 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 yelledi at her.
'Do you realise this means I get not only the Sidney N
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.
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 Jose, 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-fifthof 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 iti 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, V1 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! I
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. It
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 depression 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'
(Idecided 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. I
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 an 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
TOP.66


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 11
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'11 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---Sydney, 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 v1 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 V1. 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 moufstached 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.'
'You mean---?' 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
projeçt 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
V11. 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---'
'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 me!l'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,
you're getting---!
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.


I woke uncannily fresh, to the beep of the phone.
'Eight-thirty sir.'
By a quarter to nine I'd taken a brisk hot-and-cold
shower and shaved. I called the office and spoke into
the message minder. I was held up, I said, and wouldn't
be in the office that day. Could Susan come for a meet-
ing there at nine this evening? There would be news
for both her and Jerry.
I had no idea what news it would be but it sounded
good.
I then booked my return flight for six that evening,
and went down to breakfast. Lucy was already there,
darkly radiant in a lilac track-suit which would never
see a track.
She had some nice pearls round her neck,
without earrings, and looked as serene as a Mendocino
beach.
I said, 'I'm staying till late afternoon.'
'Oh good. Tired of dogs and cats?'
'I'd like to talk to you.'
She looked surprised.
The coffee came and after a few sips we were
relatively human (why the word is used to denote empathy
I shall never understand).
'As a matter of fact,' I said, 'I think I was being
childish about your violin practice.
When I think of
your concert last night---and how all that practice at
home builds up into something so moving and complete---
I must have made you real angry the other day!'
'Your attitude's not unique,' she said, getting to
grips with two sunny-side-up eggs and some layers of
ham.
'Most people take exception to the catgut.


Arthur does too.'
'You mean he can't stand to hear you practice?'
'That's right.'
'Is that why he doesn't flinch at a divorce?'
'Could be.'
'Listen,' I said, 'it's Arthur I want to talk about.
There's a great plan afoot to adopt a new computer system,
with much more elaborate instantaneous-feedback programs
for the ROOV project.
Have you heard the latest about
Clemens and Emily?'
'No,' she said, showing interest for the first time.
'You know about his overcoat fantasy?'
'Who doesn't?'
'Well, he's cheating on her already, in Sydney.
'So what?'
Half a slice of ham went down.
'Do you realise that if it gets to Washington
these two people are using ROOV funds to waltz around
the world on spiritual honeymoons there's going to be
a scandal?'
'Are you sure they're using ROOV funds?'
I wasn't. But in my experience a bold guess was
better than no guess.
People hate uncertainty. A
false guess will often so insinuate itself into a situation,
if expressed with certainty, that it may in the end
prove correct.'
So I said, 'Of course I'm sure.'
'Did you have sex when you went to your room last
night?'
I stared at her. 'What are you talking about?'
'I came by your room and I heard you whispering,
you sounded very excited.'
'I'm an inveterate sleep-talker
when I sleep alone.'
She smiled.
'Inveterate something, anyway.'
'May I go on?'
'Why not talk to Arthur about all this?' she said
with impatience.
'It bores the shit out of me.'


'I want it as part of our marriage settlement,
I want you to persuade him to persuade Clemens to
adopt the new computer system for ROOV.'
She looked at me slowly. A slice of ham that a
moment before seemed
designed to enter her mouth
returned to the plate.
'What marriage settlement?' she asked.
'I thought
we'd agreed that the violin makes that impossible?'
'After your performance last night---both at the
concert hall and in bed---I just can't let that instrument
stand in my way. This is the bes t sex I've ever had,
and that violin solo was the best I ever heard.'
She gazed at her plate and the rejected ham was
once more lifted, once more thwarted of its destination.
'Are you serious?' she asked.
'Do I look serious?'
She gave this some thought and seemed undecided.
'I've left a message for Susan that I shall be here
for the rest of the day,' I said.
'Suppose we go back
on the same plane?'
She looked at the me with slightly narrowed
eyes.
We took a swim, then drank more coffee under a
sunshade. I showed her Jerry's blueprints of the
computer programs, which of course didn't mean a thing
to her. But she took them and stowed them away in a
music case.
We went upstairs and once more melted into each
other's---I was going to say arms but really it was
bodies.
Just a complete melting experience.
I had
difficulty connecting it even with sex. We caught
the six o'clock plane by the skin of our teeth.


Susan came to the office fifteen minutes late,
which was unusual for her.
She looked flustered and
the reason was clear.
Normally the thought that she'd just enjoyed contact
with her husband would have excited me. As it was, not
a murmur came from the genital area---no tingle of
cautious interest before the onset of lavish warmth,
no firm beating rhythm of the heartbeat in the totemic
organ itself, no incredible fast rise to full proud
enthronement.
Was my old complaint back again? I'd neglected
to eat fried eggs and dates before leaving LA. What
to think of a hotel that has no dates?
I gazed fixedly at her buttocks when she turned to
consult our files but it was hopeless.
I was genitally
as dormant as a winter field.
I thought of ringing my shrink again, or maybe,
this time, a doctor at the Haydock Smithers hospital
who'd been something of a buddy of mine at college
called Jock Terner, but it was late and maybe a good
night's rest would do the trick.
I knew this condition would continue for a day or
two, perhaps more.
During that time I would increase
my vitamin B intake, my megadoses of C, with plentiful
salads and all but raw beefsteaks. And then the organ
would come to life, not slowly but with that sudden
springing motion which never ceases to astonish me.
What worried me was that this present attack had
come so soon after the previous one.


'By the way,' I said, 'the plan to substitute your
husband's software for the present system seems to be
going well.'
She looked at me with what I thought was pride.
'Good!' she said.
'Have you talked to Emily lately?' I asked her.
'She's getting cold feet with Clemens.'
I couldn't quite meet her eyes. As I knew I
wouldn't be making contact with her there seeemed some-
thing dishonest about looking straight into her eyes.
An idea occured to me.
I said, 'Listen, I'm going to take the office over
for a couple of days. After all, you've had it very
heavy while I was in LA.'
'Why did you go to LA?'
'For Lucy Schendt's concert.
I got her to take
your husband's blueprints and she's giving them to
Arthur, you know they mean nothing to her at all but
she only has to hand them over with a certain look in
her eye and, you'll see, he'll be on the phone to Clemens
in a matter of hours.'
She said nothing to this.
Women are like that.
They don't believe in things until they happen.
this is how I feel too I accepted the silence.
'Maybe you could call Emily,' I went on. 'Tell
her Arthur Schendt's worried that she and Clemens are
using ROOV for overcoat jaunts all over the sub-equatorial
world.'
With these two brisk speeches I managed to hide
my sexual inertia.
On her side, horror of any direct
statement forbade discussion.
She said simply, 'Oh thanks,' to my offer of a two-
day vacation.
I told her, 'I'll be making the final proofs of the
ROOV sections, so I'll be working flat out, I shan't
even be taking phonecalls.'


She smiled.
'I'll be showing them to you on Friday' (in
three days).
I saw her to her car and we didn't even kiss. I
was aware---or rather I was abjectly hoping---that this
detachment between us was building a wonderful energy
for its spoliation---on Friday.
Besides soliciting my help in selling his computer
systems, Jerry Riven had lent me a bunch of the most
intriguing video games I'd ever seen. They were right
up my street, animal battles.
Cocks armed with sharp
spurs, bulls interlocking horns etc.
'I thought these might be in your field,' he said.
He was damn right.
I played them most of the
evening and they took my mind off my personal problem.
Next morning I called my shrink and he said,
'Can't you see it's a matter of having betrayed the
primal scene by sleeping with someone other than your
mother?'
'Who's my mother?'
Emily of course.'
'But I thought every woman I slept with was my
mother.'
'Exactly.
And even if you slept with your father
you'd still be sleeping with your mother.'
It was the sort of remark that made him the most
expensive shrink in northern California. I tried to
puzzle it out but couldn't.
And he wouldn't say any
more.


I worked on the ROOV sections and estimated they
would involve five operations separated by several hours.
The electronic apparatus would have to be on tap for
immediate takeover the moment I tied up the arteries
and was ready to cut.
The most complicated part would be the reproductive
system, especially in the bitches.
Also my mind paled
at the thought of the digestive section and the respiratory
section and the meticulous work they involved which the
slightest error could altogether ruin. I felt I needed
more surgeons but knew that Clemens wouldn't contemplate
extending the sensitive secrets of ROOV V and V1 even
further.
I thought it would be good to stage a rehearsal with
Susan, using a dog, and to this end I called Mike Borovitz
and ordered another male German shepherd.
We could either
jettison the sections or embalm them so that we could study
what went wrong, if we did go wrong.
Arthur Schendt phoned me and said, 'I've looked at
the computer material you gave Lucy and I've made a few
enquiries on my side.
All in all' (I took a deep breath)
'I feel this new software might well give ROOV a shot in
the arm, and that our storage of data, our emergency-
response system and our collation system for immediate-
research data will all be enhanced.'
Translated from Nobel prize language into English
(he even imitated Clemens's olde worlde accent) it seemed
like good news.
'Moreover,' he went on, 'I've talked to Clemens and
got his approval. I'm not in a position to contact the
federal end of the experiment but I expect Clemens to


do this by telephone the moment he leaves Sydney
for the bush.'
Before I could ask him what this meant he went
on, 'Lucy says you think Clemens and Emily are using
ROOV for gallivanting.
Not at all. They went to
Sydney to try to save the last two surviving ratlets.
I'm afraid they failed. And the reason I liked your
new programs was that the present ones were probably
what killed the exnims' (had Jerry Riven known this?).
'What are Clemens and Emily going into the bush
for?' I asked.
'Well,' he said, probably so as to get him away
from Sydney. There'll be fewer overcoats in the bush.
But I don't think Emily has much to worry about. He
always comes back to roost.'
'Which roost? His wife's?'
'You've got a point there,' he said. But he wouldn't
elaborate.
Of course I was brimming over with the good news
and wanted to call Jerry Riven at once. But something
stopped me. Susan was due back in the office the
following day and my fires, apparently responding to this
good news, were rekindling. It would be most opportune
to let her into the secret while approaching contact.
This contact was going to be special. I had plans
for it burgeoning in my mind.
Before I left for the office next morning Emily
called to say that although Clemens had agreed to go
into the bush he was still looking strange. The previous
evening he had invited her to put on her mink but it
had come to nothing.
He'd simply said 'It suits you
awfully well, you know' with a little twinkle.
'I'm going crazy all alone!' she screamed.
'Yes, Emily, but I haven't time for any numbers,
I'm just off to the office.'
'Fuck your numbers!' she said. 'And don't start
strutting round like a cock, I can cut you out of this
experiment at any time, and just remember that!'


'Just try it!' I shouted and slammed the phone
down.
Instead of cooling her off as I should have I
reacted, always the worst thing to do with Emily.
I was given to these short sharp anger waves,
which usually started long before they manifested,
and which for my money were connected with the
impotency problem. It had started that morning on
waking, an unpleasant stirring in the solar plexus,
an intense feathers feeling.
On these occasions the genital area is so dormant
that the phallus will all but disappear, approximating
to the size of a child's, so that its former ability to
swell to a posture of several inches seems hardly short
of miraculous.
But I felt good about putting the phone down on
Emily because whenever she threatened me like that it
meant she was feeling insecure. With her future
husband on the prowl for fresh overcoats and ROOV at
a very shaky stage due to the demise of the exnim
offspring, together with my almost insulting approval
of her divorce, she must have felt less than impregnable,
especially in a city where the name Sprayd-Taylor was
just another.
At noon Nancy Martinez-Holstein called.
She was
all steamed up. Could I come as soon as possible?
It was on the tip of my tongue to say irritably - And
what about you stepping over here?' but I curbed myself
and replied quietly, I'l1 be over.'
I slipped out at lunchtime and the moment I was on
the freeway with the hifi on and the San Francisco
lanes clear and sunlit before me I felt better.
hummed a snatch from Tristan and Isolde.


She was in her lair as usual, with the leaf-
blown terrace and redwood trees outside, and the view
of the Bay far below.
There was no coffee today.
'As you may or may not know,' she said, 'I'm an
active member of the Humane Society and my husband is
president of the Colonial Heights branch in Virginia.
Now Lucy Schendt happened to tell me yesterday that
you propose to use three German shepherds and three
standard poodles in the ROOV project.
Now apart from
the fact that Clemens and I have four dogs and an
uncountable number of cats---'
'I can smell them,' I said in: response to her nasty tone.
'Apart from that, we can't either of us be seen to
know about this and approve of it. Also I've spoken
to a number of people connected with the Humane Society
and they describe you as a knife-happy dog butcher!'
'Knife-happy my foot!' I said.
'I'm the gentlest
surgeon in the Bay Area.
Anyway what does Lucy Schendt
know about it?'
'Only what you told her yourself!' she said with
a flash of steel in her eyes.
I resolved to stop her idle rhetoric at once and
pulled my chair close. to hers.
'Listen ma'am,' I said.
'Lost cats and dogs are
either liquidated or left on the streets to pick up
killer diseases from the trash cans. This is why they
end in the experimentation labs! They're at least fed
there and in the warm, and everything is done to see
that they suffer as little as possible. To experiment
you cannot take account of feelings, Mrs Martinez-Holstein.
Give me one item in the long list of biomedical triumphs


in the last few years which hasn't. in some way
emanated from experimental data, and ask yourself
what would have happened to this data if the experimenter
had had any feelings! I know the ethical question is a
subtle one, Mrs Martinez-Holstein, I know that on the
face of it we all risk looking ridiculous when, having
injected a virus into an experimental dog so that its
limbs will atrophy and it will be robbed of its sight,
we then go home and with great solicitude pet and coddle
and brush another dog of the same breed!
But this is
what we do---'
'We? You the dog butcher have a pet?' she screamed.
'I happen not to have a pet.
Pets are a source of
fleas in California as you well know, Mrs Martinez-
Holstein, or perhaps you don't. Perhaps you enjoy
having them all over your house!'
'Use a flea-bomb once a week.'
'Quite ineffective, Mrs Martinez-Holstein, Also
fleas are disease carriers. But to return to our subject.
The ethical question is difficult. No doubt Clemens,
holidaying in the Australian bush with another man's
wife and happily provided with overcoats against the
'What a lucky thing we don't need overcoats in
northern California isn't it, Mrs Martinez-Holstein?
When you were living with your husband in London was
your wardrobe as bereft of overcoats as it is now?
Why, at that time you flaunted them, changed them a
dozen times a day!
Beaver, mink, duffle, cashmere,
tweed---don't the very names make you pine for the
colder climates now? What wouldn't you give for a
month of unseasonal snow, with icycles hanging from the
eucalyptus trees?
Imagine how it would feel---muffled
up, buttoned up---just as he likes it---so that with
She tried to speak, livid in the dewlaps, but I
held up my hand.


'Let a word of these dogs reach the press,' I
went on, 'and every newspaper in the nation will be
peppered with overcoat stories for a month! And
secondly, ma'am, every newsdesk will know that the
gentleman who first suggested using domestic animals
for the ROOV project was your husband. I'm simply
following his directions!'
I swept out of the room and was back in my car in
a moment.
I took a quick, satisfying lunch of roast chicken
and ricotta stuffing at a North Berkeley restaurant.
Then I returned to the office.
A message was waiting for me. Mrs Martinez-Holstein
had called.
She wished me to know that she fully under-
stood my position, and thanked me for supporting the
ROOV project so loyally.
In my heart I was planning war on Lucy, but then
I decided to treat it as a joke. It was so like her
to make trouble as a sexual ploy. For surely it was
that?
It was a busy afternoon and I didn't see Susan
until the last client left.
She was sitting in her
office reading a report, her door open.
'Well,' I said, 'I hope you had a good rest.'
She looked up.
'Oh yes, thanks.
Jerry was happy
to have me home for a change. We picniced on Mount
Tamalpais, then spent two nights at the Jericho Inn.'
She was tanned.
I was again aware of my
deficiency.
She seemed to contain in her orderly person,
in her dark, almost oily hair, in her lips (so clear and


wonderfully set) all the warm treasures I lacked.
I was desperately aware as I stood there that
Jerry's accumulated seed was inside her. I could
almost see the numberless contacts that had taken place
between them---at snatched moments on the road, at the
beach, the hotel room---I vicariously enjoyed the anguish
of risking the impermissible. But I couldn't feel any
excitement on my own account. How long would it last?
I avoided her eyes. The genital awakening I'd experienced
the previous day during Arthur Schendt's good-news call
had fizzled out.
I thought for a moment that a slight smile was
hovering on Susan's lips.
'You have some news?' she asked.
I was bewildered, couldn't think.
'The dissection designs,' she said. 'You promised---'
'Of course!
I'm an exhausted man,
Susan! You can look at the first draft tomorrow.
I've also been handling the negotiations over Jerry's
computer programs with Arthur Schendt.
More about that
later. Nancy Martinez-Holstein threatened to expose us
for using pets. Phew!'
She looked at me earnestly.
'You've been through
a lot.'
'Anyway you can tell Jerry it's OK. It's been
cleared with Clemens. He's going to take it up with
Washington.'
'I'll tell him.'
She touched my hand, though in
a 'safe' way, like a secretary.
'I think you ought to
get some sleep.'
'See you tomorrow,' I said.
When I got back home I went straight to the Two
room and smashed everything I could find. The floor
was covered in debris.
I was chiefly furious at having
failed in my plan to tell Susan the good news about the
computer programs while in contact---a formula I'd


-loo
been fantasising about for days. The more furious
I became the smaller my little totem seemed, until I
thought it would look fitting only on a three-year-old.
I found myself yearning (like a three-year-old)
for Emily's return.
I decided to call up my buddy at the Haydock Smithers
hospital.
'You need a change of woman,' he said.
'You think so?'
'I get into the same jam. Too much one scene no
good. As you know I've got a thing about hookers, so
it's easy for me, I just take off to San Francisco and
drive down Broadway.
As my shrink says, it's therapeutic
if costly. You know, Emily's a great girl and I'm sure
a sexual tinder-box, but you still need a change from
time to time.'
I thought about this. Had I been getting in a rut
with Susan and Lucy? The trouble was that once I scented
excitement in a woman I went after her to the exclusion
of all others, and I could now see that this singleminded-
ness or fidelity got me into trouble.
I lay on the water-divan feeling the vast emptiness
of my genital zone. I tried a couple of hard-porn videos
but the figures on the screen could just as well have been
chopping meat for all the interest I took in them. My
belly feathers had subsided.
But I had no appetite.
To make sure of my protein I ate two almost raw steaks
and fried some eggs with dates as a dessert.
It produced
no result except to make me vomit.
Another fact was that I needed an erection to sleep
properly.
Yes, if that area was dormant I was definitely
not. Of course the erective state is a feature of all
male sleep (to the astonishment of virgins, who think it's
all because of them), due to the concentration of blood
in that area.
When a man hasn't got an erection in a warm bed he
knows he's either sick or about to kick off. For me it


lol-
was in truth much like dying. The erective totem
was for me a constant friend---in crisis, fatigue or
solitude.
If you could rely on nothing else, you
could rely on him. At the end of a traumatic day,
there he lay. When you retired to bed he awaited
that gentle cupping motion of the right hand which was
a pure autonomic response: were the two---the organ and
the hand---genetically constructed with this mutual
fellowship in mind?
How harmoniously those two
extremities function together---the one responding to
the other in what must surely be nature's most ingenious
do-it-yourself kit.
Yet, for all this totemic proudness, my climaxes
were sadly disappointing. They were never more than
a genital release of a narrowly anatomical order.
Paradoxically, this lack of real enjoyment at the
highest moment prompted me to another climax as soon as
possible.
Because in a sense I never had a climax.
The emission would no sooner begin that I would want
to recall it, restrain and restrict its flow. You
might say it was this that guillotined my satisfaction.
Not at all.
Whenever I allowed it full rein (during
extreme physical fatigue for instance) there would be
a sense almost of pain, and perhaps of falling too,
falling into an endless giddy space.
I was often led to ask myself, do the women feel
th'e same? Is it the preliminaries, the foreplay,
the erotic anxiety, the sense of the impermissible
that, like me, they really enjoy, while the climax
induces giddy fatigue, emptiness, nausea, a horrible
repletion, hatred? Why would Emily need so many
contacts if that wasn't the case? Was she too 'chasing
the climax'?
I once read that wherever there isn't love the
climax is like this. And certainly I deeply disliked
any endearments during contact, any direct appreciation.


Emily was the same. Lucy began gasped endearments
early in our relationship but soon understood that
they turned me off. Perhaps the entire lack of any
possibility of endearment in my relationship with
Susan was what drew me to it again and again.
To be exact I've never been close to a human being,
and never intend to be.
When I got to the office next morning Susan was
on the phone rapping away. She signalled to me,
pointed to the mouthpiece and mouthed 'Emily!".
My heart did an excited leap. Was it Emily,
simply, I'd been lacking? Was our repertoire of fantasies
my one guarantee of continued and unvarying sexual
energy, because, in a word, no feelings were involved?
I walked into my own office, wishing to hide my
jubilation from Susan. As I did so she called out,
'Take it on your phone!'
I quickly shut the door and switched on my speaker-
phone so that I could sit there at my ease, and put my
hands anywhere I wished.
There was a screamed 'Hi!' at the other end and my
genital area performed what I can only describe as a
pirouette.
'Where are you?' I asked her, reclining further in
my armchair.
'I'm staying wi th Nancy.'
'You're back?' I asked with joy.
'Well sure I'm back! I had to get him out of that
fucking winter, right?'


'And you're staying with Nancy? That bearded
harridan?' (Scream of laughter).
'How can you
stand it?'
'Oh NanTcy's great,' she said.
'Between you and
me the real eminence grise behind every NPW is the wife.'
'The what behind every what?'
Another shriek of laughter.
'The policy maker
behind every Nobel Prize winner!
Is the wife! Got
'But what about the marriage?' I asked.
'Hers or mine?' she said.
'What's the weather report, are you marrying the
guy or not?'
'Well Nancy and I are having a real heart to heart
this evening, we'll be going over all the arrangements.'
'Arrangements for what?' I said.
'My marriage.'
'You're discussing it with her, the wife? Wouldn't
she prefer to arrange your murder?'
'Oh come on,' she said with a chuckle like the rattle
of chains.
'He's in Washington, so it's a good chance
for us to get together.'
'And what about you?' she went on.
'Things OK
with Lucy?'
'I'm after her blood,' I said.
'She talked to
Nancy about the ROOV V dogs and Nancy threatened me with
the Humane Society. Can you beat that? My future
'It's because she loves you. -
'Loves me?'
'Arthur Schendt's always complaining to Clemens that
you don't treat her right.'
'I'll try and improve it,' I said cynically.
When I put the phone down my genital problem
suddenly seemed childishly simple in origin.
It was
clear that Emily and I had an excellent marriage
because we'd remained virtual strangers. Our repertoire


lolt
of fantasies had never eroded through over-familiarity.
The same could be said of my relationship with Susan,
except that we had but one fantasy---so strong as to
be indefinitely sustainable. Our manner of working
in the office, our very business partnership, was conducted
as part of that fantasy.
Only in the case of Lucy was there no fantasy.
Only with her, therefore, was there danger of a cloying
element, or over-familiarity.
Little wonder she wanted
to take revenge on me, pull me down, for not responding
to her primal passes. To hurt but not too seriously,
to wound but not fatally---that was the way of primal
'love'. And I wanted out. I realised that now.
Contact with her had produced my sexual neutrality:
of that I no longer had any doubt.
Witness the fact that after a moment's conversation with
Emily on the phone my pants felt as full as a city.
As if to confound these thoughts Arthur Schendt
called up during an operation and asked to see me
'straight away after work at the Sunset Bar' in Santa
Rosa.
He was driving from the Oakland hills, so it was
clearly a serious matter.
When I saw him coming into the gloom of the bar
I knew he was in no mood for contradiction.
I won't bore the reader with an account of the most
boring hour I've ever passed. The subject was my
marriage settlement, which for him was desperately real
and for me was a fiction.
He'd talked with Emily and


they both felt I'd done Lucy wrong.
I said, 'I think you're dead right.'
I sat listening to his proposals and agreed to
everything (so little did I intend even to lay a finger
on her again).
From his point of view we settled that, as had
been arranged before, the Berkeley hills house should
go to her if she could have half my Santa Rosa property
etc etc.
On the other hand, I was to have no call on the
Berkeley home if Lucy and I divorced.
The property
would then revert entirely to her, and in exchange for
this---as part of the divorce settlement---I was to
receive a percentage of two years of her concert takings,
with a stipulated minimum which would operate whether
she actually performed or not.
I drove home with a lot of fury bottled up inside
me. I noticed that this made me yearn to be in an
illicit sexual situation.
But with the office closed
and Susan safely at home, with Emily locked in debate
with the hairy harridan Nancy, and with Lucy being the
opposite of elicit in all things, I was clearly out of
luck.
I drove on to my driveway intending to visit Room
Two when I saw Emily's Toyota. I nearly ran into the
house (but running wouldn't do as it was customary
between us not to show enthusiasm that might be
construed as passion').
She was upstairs resting.
She was lying on the
bed in a lightweight summer overcoat, despite the
temperature outside.
'Aren't you hot in that?' I asked.
'Oh,' she said with a smile, stretching her arms
out in the wooden way she had on any reunion between
us. 'I just crashed!'
I kissed her mechanically.
No embraces, no


touching of tongues, no---above all---sighed
protestations about how we'd been missing each other.
We both knew this would spoil our repertoire,
which relied for its efficacy on our fitting into our
roles as strangers.
She was looking a little blotchy.
Her hair was
still in fine form though---billowing out in blonde
handfulls.
My need was so urgent I achieved penetration in
a moment.
Her response in the primal area was so
generously manifest that it was all I could do to
withhold climax.
We then went into what we called our 'open'
fantasy, when we established a kind of business
conversation which gradually drew to a climax using
cool business terms as innuendo or suggestion. We
chose my marriage settlement with Lucy as our starting
point.
'Does it seem OK to you?' she gasped.
'You don't think it's too hard?'
'The settlement? The---settlement's pretty---
'Really?' she gasped.
'But Lucy's like that!
She favors the hard
approach.'
'She does?'
'That's right! We---agreed---to divide---this
house---equally---you have residence rights---!'
'Residence rights?'
'Residence---rights---for one---one---one year
The bed began its deep scarcely audible clang
(custom-built for just that).


'clarify---also---Palo Alto property,'
I went on.
'Couple---couple hundred---acres--
forest---and Napa---Napa---Napa Valley wine---wine---
oh my!'
'On winery!
"Lucy not---not----not beneficiary---beneficiary
1 Beyond! Beyond! -
Beyond?'
'Winery! Part
At that very moment of release a car drove on to
the gravel outside, its headlights flooding the bedroom
with a silver glow. We lay there panting. We heard
the porch door open below.
'Anybody at home?'
It was Clemens Martinez-Holstein.
Emily yelled (without withdrawing---indeed she made
a comfortable contrary motion), 'I'm up here honey!
We're going through an invenory of the furniture.
You'd better leave us to it!
I'll be home in a couple
of hours!'
'How are you Clemens?' I called out.


'I'm all a man can expect to be after a day on
He added, 'See you later then! Maybe
you'd like to drop by too?' (this to me).
'If I'm not too tired after these lists, sure!'
And the door downstairs closed again.
The intrusion had served, with miraculous timing,
to refuel our interest, and we recommenced our
'negotiations' almost at once.
This time I frequently altered position, and
seized a rare opportunity, despite her resistance,
to achieve cunilinguus.
Business negotiations from
this new angle were even more exciting.
These negotiations were considerably longer because,
having climaxed but recently, we were obliged to await
renewed seminal reserves.
This relative coolness gave
us the chance to prolong and complicate our bargaining.
The reader must understand that in discussing terms
we were by no means fantasising or playing roles, for a
change. On the contrary. After four hours of it
(which took us to midnight) we had determined almost
every item of our divorce settlement---thirty parts in
all, at least a dozen of these being subdivided into
five or more clauses each.
Our climaxes were, so to
speak, our signatures.
We were well-trained for this by our fantasy-
repertoire. Our negotiations resembled nos 83, 84
and 96 in which we made hard business deals with each
other which required the 'loser' to submit to humiliating
sexual 'spoliation'.
Emily took the bedside phone and blearily tapped


out the Martinez-Holstein number.
Nancy answered.
'Hi Nance,' Emily said.
'We finished the inventory
about twenty minutes ago and we're ready to crash.
Would you tell Clemens I'll see him tomorrow?'
We woke next morning in our clothes, half covered
with the goose-feather overlay. The redwood trees
outside were filtering the sunlight through and I watched
a large bluejay flap brilliantly like a snatch of ocean
across the window on its way, no doubt, to wreak havoc
in the orchard. We didn't have a shotgun, though there
were foxes around too. It wasn't good for a vet to be
seen shooting animals.
The local cats might get up a
petition.
As always, until half a cup of coffee was inside us
neither Emily nor I wished even to look at each other.
I slumped downstairs and prepared the table. I cooked
french fries, sausages, five or six sunny-side-ups,
tomatoes, baked beans. Then I called her. We ate
like soldiers, without a word.
As I went out of the door she said, 'We'd better
do that inventory again---can you make it this evening?'
I got the message, and tiny flames of excitement
licked my genital area.
'Sure,' I said.
I drove to the office in a decidedly mixed mood.
It was becoming clear to me that I was getting deeper
and deeper into a marriage with Lucy which only Arthur
Schendt intended to go through with, and which Emily,
by misunderstanding, supported. It was an imbalance
I obviously had to redress.
When I got to the office I called Lucy's work
number and put a message on the machine.
She didn't
call back.
So I called Schendt, meaning to try him with a
new line---that Lucy and I wanted time to think this
over. But in the course of the conversation I


weakened, sensing his unyielding disposition---
which in my case meant he would have me out of the
ROOV project the moment I turned his wife down.
And he was dying for his wife to get her hands on
some Sprayd-Taylor property (at least this was how I
saw it). I felt they had a private understanding.
Lucy with her tranquil cow-eyes was a born manipulator.
Look how she picked up concerts.
She reminded me of a
lithograph I once saw of a naked goddess sending
six streams of milk from her vagina into the mouths of
six waiting men.
These were concert agents and musical
directors. All on their knees.
(How I resented her
for those five harrowing days of impotence).
I also realised that there'd been no contacts
between me and Susan for at least a week, though we
passed within inches of each other many times a day,
and spent at least an hour of each day together in
the kitchen during breaks.
And I realised that my body (not so much my
conscious mind) was experiencing a sort of shame where
she was concerned. After all, I'd stood by and allowed
her husband to take sexual repossession of her. She
would come to the office each morning flushed, seemingly
unable to contain herself, like a woman whose desires
have been excited beyond all control, and who is
harrassed, distracted, flustered by them. A woman
likes to be in control where the feelings are concerned.
But there comes a---for her---dangerous time when
pleasure threatens her security.
Had I been able to contact her during those
fateful sterile days---snatch her back in the full
flood of her desires---all would have been well.
But Lucy (yes, my mind was made up on that point) had
prevented that. Now I was really out of step. I
felt I needed a boldness to touch Susan again which I
no longer had. Maybe I'd lost her as my future wife?


III
I sat in my office worrying.
Clients were getting thin on the ground---an
additional source of worry, in view of the investment
Susan and I were making for the enlarged surgery.
They say troubles come in regiments. I sat praying for
a cat-and-dog plague to strike the neighbourhood.
Of course it was vacation time and domestic pets
benefited from the better weather as the wimps who owned
them did.
As if to remove the last dregs of optimism from my
cup Lucy rang and started complaining that our divorces
weren't proceeding fast enough. I said, yes, it had
been on my mind too but there was a lot to settle.
I said, 'What the hell did you tell Nancy Martinez-
Holstein about the dogs for?'
'I think it's terrible, that's why,' she said.
'You shouldn't use pets.'
'What should I use---guinea pigs, rats, Rhesus
monkeys? Do you think only the animals you happen to
like have souls? And I notice you don't mind eating
'OK, OK,' she said.
'I guess I went too far.'
'This is science, Lucy,' I said.
'Why don't you
keep to art? Anyway,' I added, 'there are no problems
about the divorce- and marriage-settlements.'
'I see a very big problem,' she said crisply.
'What's that?'
'Jerry Riven told my husband that you were marrying
Susan, not me. That's the problem!'
And she slammed the phone down.
As a matter of fact that cleared the air for me.
I went straight to Susan and put my cards on the table.
'Did you hear about Lucy?' I asked her.
'Well she got the idea I wanted to marry her, I
mean we had a brief affair.
She got her husband to
make a divorce settlement and now your husband has wind


of it and thinks I'm pulling out of our marriage, I
mean the marriage between you and me.'
'Are you?'
'Am I what?" I asked to gain time.
'Are you pulling out of our marriage?'
She could see how sincere I was (it surprised even
As a matter of fact the thought of not marrying her
provoked something like panic in me!
'I've been sick worried about it for a week now,
I went on.
'I have Arthur Schendt and this woman
calling me at all hours and I hear myself saying yes,
OK, fine, we'll do it, just to get them off the line.
I mean, that fucking violin alone---I couldn't stand
half a minute of it!
She's OK in all other respects---
you know, it feels like being enclosed in a soft,
yielding envelope, my mind used to go blank, the way
she moves and---'.
I could see this description was stirring her, and
I meant it to.
'Anyway,' I said, 'with these two on my back I
wasn't able to think of marrying anybody---even having
sex!' (I hoped that covered my sterile period satisfact-
orily).
'Susan,' I said, 'aren't our property agreements
somewhere in your files?'
I glanced up at the shelves behind her, just out
of reach. You had to climb a little ladder to get at
them.
She jumped up and pulled the : yard-high ladder
to the required place. Then she stepped up. It was
the opportunity I'd been waiting for for weeks.
Here
was my coup de grace! Happily she was wearing a skirt.
I stepped forward to 'help' her as her right hand
travelled along the files just above her head.
Then
I placed myself between her and the shelves. At first


she thought I was just squeezing past her. But when
I was directly in front of her, my head roughly on the
level of her navel, I remained there, and began lifting
her skirt, while I gently lowered myself so that my
knees were resting on the ladder-platform.
I was suddenly engaged in cunilinguus.
The office
door was open, so there was the exciting possibility
that a client could walk by or even inadvertently enter.
I was almost concealed within her skirt.
I could hear
her gasping.
She was swaying and I thought she might
fall. She leaned against the bookshelves, obliged now
to display her riches more openly to me. She leaned
her whole weight on me.
She addressed herself wholly
to what I was doing while managing to appear not to
yield at all, maintaining her position so that anyone
entering would at first take her to be searching for a
file, alone.
Yet she was relishing my work fully,
even brazenly, under the relative immobility of her
situation.
At the climax she almost fell, and I had to support
her whole weight for a moment. We stayed there for a
little time, I concealed, she still apparently searching
for files.
A few seconds later she was stepping down from the
ladder, the wanted file in hand, as if nothing had
happened, and I took a seat in front of her desk.
'Here's the final agreement,' she said, handing it
to me. 'We ought to register it right away.'
'I agree,' I said.
'Right away.'
I do believe that business oscillates with the mood
of the person doing it. Promptly, as Susan and I were
taking coffee that afternoon, clients began pouring in.
It seemed every pet in the county had a snuffle, an itch
or an ache. Hot noses, suppurating ears, dull fur, the
runs---it was wonderful.
When we closed up at seven
o'clock we were pleasantly exhausted.


I hurried to the phone and called Emily at the
place I guessed her to be---our house.
'Ah you're there,' I said.
'I've just seen the
last client out so I'll be right by.'
Susan was standing in the corridor and I called
out to her, 'Emily and I are doing the inventory this
evening.'
'Oh yes---sure!' Susan said.
Despite my multiple contacts in recent days I
was still not back to my usual form.
While my
appetites had returned, my capacity for a reasonable
quota of emissions had not. And those that did take
place were by no means abundant.
My latest contact with Susan therefore fitted my
book perfectly because it gave her entire (indeed,
transfixed) satisfaction, while my participation was
purely oral.
Also I'd wanted to save my resources for Emily.
When I got home that evening I was astonished to
find my medical friend, Jock Terner from the Hayward
Smithers hospital, sitting at the kitchen table with
Emily (he'd never previously met her, as far as I
knew, and I'd certainly never given him my address).
There was a bottle of Johannisberg Riesling from
our Napa Valley stock on the table, half empty.
'Nice drop of urine you've got here,' he said to
me as I came in.
I sat down irritably.
'Well how are you Jock?' I asked him without interest.


'I'm OK,' he said.
'Emily's been telling me
about her Australian trip.
Sounds great. Surrounded
by Nobel Prize winners!'
I felt like pouring the 'urine' over his head.
I'd come into the house all set for some more protracted
'negotiations' with Emily. Then I find his sturdy
athletic body and thick neck and cropped blond head
in the way. To add salt to my annoyance, Emily
didn't seem to mind it at all.
In fact she was basking in it (I always knew when
she was aroused because her nipples swelled: two things
did it---boose and a man, and on this occasion she had
I'd deliberately not introduced Terner to Emily
(or any other woman I knew) because he prefered other
people's wives to his own. Like his fixation about
hookers, it was,a weakness stronger than he was.
'I've been telling Emily how worried I am about
you,' he had the audacity to say (what a fool I'd been
to open my heart to this death watch beetle of marital
happiness).
'Oh yes?' I mouthed.
I glanced at Emily in gingerly fashion.
Having
Jock Terner in your house was as lucky as the last
sacrament.
'How did you get my address?' I asked him as I
poured myself a glass of wine.
'Phonebook.'
'And what worries you about me?'
'I'm a doctor after all,' he said irrelevantly.
'Yes but a children's doctor,' I said. 'Do they
have such problems?'
'Children have worse sexual problems than adults--
naturally, because they get so little of it!'
'How's your wife?' I said pointedly.
'Back with her mother in Philadelphia for a month.'


'Nice city,' I said.
'I'm surprised you didn't
join her.'
'You wouldn't be if you knew my wife,' he said with
a wink at Emily which set her going. Her idiot laugh
went off like a fire-siren.
'Anyway,' Jock said, downing the last of his wine
and rising, 'I have to get back to the hospital.'
'Well,' I said with relief, 'hospitals are good
for something.'
'I hope so,' he said as I walked him to the door with
an invisible gun-barrel in his back.
'Especially as
your wife's coming in tomorrow morning for a checkup.'
'Is that right?' I asked Emily, swinging round on
her like a glass door.
'Do you realise that when this
man got his job the mortality rate among child
patients rose alarmingly?'
The idiot woman wailed with mirth again.
'He said he didn't like the look of it,' she told
'Of what?'
'My rash.'
'He loves rashes if they bring him patients over
six,' I said.
At the door I said, 'OK, Jock, don't call me, I'll
call you.'
'What the hell are you going to that hospital for?'
I asked her as his car drove away.
She was yelling at once.
'I'll go to whatever
fucking hospital I like!
He offered me expert service
free of charge!'
'Oh you'll get that!'
'Whatever I get I won't ask your permission first!'
she screamed, smashing her glass on the floor.
'Do the inventory yourself!' I yelled as I strode out
of the house.
I slept at the office.
Luckily I had my all-night
kit there from the graveyard week. I lay there thinking


about that little episode with Susan on the ladder.
That was a triumph a woman doesn't forget.
I was just entering delta sleep at about three
in the morning when Emily called. The phonebell went
through me like a redhot needle, while my mind grappled
with the question of my whereabouts.
'You've just got to come over,' she said quietly.
'It's the best time to talk.'
'But Emily I have a hard day ahead of me.'
'You'll feel more refreshed by opening your heart
than with two nights of sleep,' she said.
Emily always chose the hour of the wolf for heart-
to-hearts.
She was in the habit of saying that truth
comes on the wings of silence.
I managed to get out of bed somehow and brewed
myself a quick coffee.
I had to admit that the whispering breeze in the
eucalyptus trees, and the gentle touch of dampness in
the air (a balm after the sweltering day) made me almost
appreciate having been woken. But I didn't look forward
to our talk. I intended to let her do all of it (she
usually intended the same).
As I expected, she was on her third or fourth bottle
and showing not the slightest sign of that or fatigue.
Her hair was still like a thousand vibrant golden snakes.
I sat down at the kitchen table and she said,
'Honey, I've been noticing certain things about you of
late and your friend Jock confirmed tham.'
'What's he been blabbermouthing about?'
'Well, he said you were having trouble with the


sexual energy. I'd begun to notice it too,'
'You had?'
'That's right. Nothing you could really put your
finger on but nonetheless different from, say, a few
months back.'
'It's something I ought to talk to you about
anyway,' I said, already in the mercy position.
'I knew you weren't being open about something!'
she cooed.
'I went through a number of days absolutely limp,
Emily. I put it down to Lucy. Susan never has that
effect.
You see, I don't want to marry her.'
'Lucy. I want to marry Nancy.'
She gaped.
'You'll have to protect me against Arthur Schendt,
I said. 'He made the computer agreement with Jerry
Riven dependent on my keeping to the marriage settlement
with Lucy. Or so I think.
It'd be like him. You
see, Emily, I made a tactical error.
In order to push
that computer agreement I used Lucy to influence him.'
She nodded.
'Naturally that got you right back
in the marriage deal.'
'That's right,' I said.
'Does it have to be Susan?' she asked after some
thought.
'Well she's the one I want. And Jerry Riven---'
'What about him?'
'He's more important to us than Arthur Schendt,
I mean he has these strings in Washington.
'Right,' she murmured. 'Krow something? When
that computer deal went through the federal funds were
raised.'
'For ROOV?'
'Right! I tell you what,' she said.
'I'll get


Clemens to talk to Arthur Schendt.
You see, Arthur's
crazy to marry that pony-tailed student of his. Lucy's
married to her violin anyway, she won't miss you.'
'Well, it isn't as if I'm going to be her enemy,' -
I said defensively.
'Damn right!'
Dawn, like a grey dust immaterial as thought,
came as a suggestion at the window and gradually the
garden took on texture and color. I think we fell
asleep.
'Emily,' I said, waking. 'Do you really enjoy
'Well...' she began.
'No,' I said, 'don't answer yet.
I'll be more
precise. Do you enjoy your climaxes? Do you always
have a climax?'
The mascara round her eyes was running. For a
moment in her bright brown gaze there was something
grey.
'When I come,' she said quietly, 'it's a feeling
I can't describe. I feel it up here.'
She touched
her chest.
'It's comething hard, right there, behind.
Inside.
Hard. And black.'
I thought she'd fallen asleep again but she'd
only closed her eyes.
'It's like being taken by the throat too,' she went
on. 'It's a feeling that everything's finished.
It's depressive.
There's no future.
No point.
Then it passes off. I jump up and do something and
She thought for a moment, then said, 'It's
enjoyable too, in a way. Like peeing in company.
It's allied to peeing. But also I want to hold the
pee back,'
'It's the same with me---I want to keep it back---
but it's always too late.'
She filtered some coffee and sat sipping it, the
steam rising in her eyes with her breath. She cupped


her hands round the mug, leaned forward as she sipped,
rather like a child.
'Emily,' I said in the seductive silence.
'What do you like about sex? -
She sipped some more, gazing before her as the sun
in the window unmasked the electric light as sterile and
ineffectual.
She shrugged.
'I like thinking about it.'
'Just that?'
She nodded sleepily.
She let her mug of coffee
go and leaned back. Her eyes closed as if the eyelids
had been pulled down by strings.
I left her there. At the office I shaved and
showered, and drank more coffee.
When Susan walked
through the door I felt so happy I got hold of her and
lifted her off the ground, though being demonstrative
was against her rules. She gazed down at me in that
position, perplexed, with a slight smile, very intimate.
To my horror my earlier condition, which I thought
had righted itself, continued despite my having had no
contacts with Lucy.
Clearly Susan remembered my ladder-triumph of the
day before---expressed it in her walk, in the keen way
she glanced at me. I just couldn't respond at all.
My genital dormancy was awesome.
Had I brought the condition back by talking about
it with Emily?
Susan crossed the corridor and I gazed at her from
behind, watching the firm buttocks and the tight skirt,


urging myself to react.
But it did nothing. My
associative faculty seemed to have lost touch with
my genitals. I tried to think of Emily in certain
provocative positions. Again to no avail.
I remembered those cosily enveloped hours with
Lucy---I saw her ample breasts again, the hard
protrusive buds of her nipples in their halo of dark
skin. And to my astonishment I felt a rise of desire,
contrary to everything I thought I wished!
What was
happening to me? Was Lucy psychically working on me,
using forces that she and artistic types like her
found it easy to manipulate?
This astonishment was compounded with impotent
fury when Emily called me and said she'd 'settled
everything with Arthur Schendt.'
'What are you talking about?' I asked.
'He'll let you off the hook about Lucy,' she said.
I felt a giddy relief---but it was mixed with,
of all things, disappointment!
'I'm afraid I had to tell a white lie,' Emily went
'I told him about your recent sexual troubles.
I said you wouldn't maybe be able to fulfil the duties
of a husband.'
'I said I didn't know how important it was to Lucy,
and do you know what he said, he said it's her only
interest in the man, why else should she want to marry
him, it's her only interest anyway.'
'Oh my god!'
'What's wrong?'
'You tell a man I'm impotent and then ask me what's
wrong! I should ask what's wrong with you?'
'Listen honey,' she said with unexpected sweetness,
'you wanted Lucy out of your space, right or not right?'


'Right! But telling everybody I'm impotent---I'
'I didn't say that.
I said maybe it wasn't
permanent but in the meantime you couldn't as a husband
supply the goods. Anyway honey---!"'
'And stop calling me honey for christsakes!'
(She
only did it when she was up to something).
'My, my, you are cranky! May I say something?
Maybe you really are ill---I mean---'.
She hesitated.
'I noticed---when was it?---two nights ago! You know,
in the old days, you were almost too hard.
'Now?' I said, my teeth together.
'It's like it's all coming from your head---it's
like you're forcing---'
'Forcing it?'
'I think maybe you need a holiday.'
'Or a change of scene? Was that Dr Terner's
suggestion by any chance?'
'By the way,' she went on without answering, 'we
never did get to the inventory did we?'
'I'll let you know about that later!' I snapped,
putting the phone down.
I stalked into Susan's office and said, 'Why the
hell is there this delay getting our documents ready?'
She looked up calmly from a pile of prescriptions.
The sight of her sitting there in her own neat silence
was like a cooling hand on my brow.
'There's no delay,' she told me.
'The attorney
told us it might be a couple of days. You know that.'
I said to her, 'Would you come to my office for a
minute? I have a problem.'
She nodded and went on signing the prescriptions.
A dog barked from the kennels at the back (a hysterectomy
to be performed the following day).
After a few minutes she came. It was my intention
to go over some client debts with her. Our collector
had rung me about them the previous day. I slipped
my hand under her skirt, distractedly, as if unaware


of what I was doing but not only didn't it work---
an image of Lucy hovered in my mind!
I was on the
point of tears. I found myself, as I took my hand
away and spuriously drew her attention to the accounts
on my desk, cursing Emily as if she were responsible.
Suppose the story of my impotence spread to Jerry
Riven from Arthur Schendt---suppose he warned Susan
that I was sexually a flake?
I stayed another night at the office. I waited
for Emily to call and she did.
'I'm at Nancy's,' she said. 'I knew you wouldn't
be there for the inventory, so I didn't stay.'
'I'm not feeling too good,' I blurted out like an
idiot.
'I just wanted to put your mind at rest about Arthur
Schendt,' she went on.
'You know, he's been waiting in
the wings for an NP for at least three years---'.
'You're losing your memory too!
Nobel Prize!'
'The last thing he wants is for any boats to be
rocked in his vicinity. No trouble, especially with
WIFE. A word from Clemens on the NP grapevine that
he's wobbly and screwing his students and he'll never
get within smelling distance of an NP again.'
'So what?'
'So you don't have to worry that he'll talk to
Jerry Riven about you' (the witch!).
'That would be
tantamount to telling Jerry that you'd been planning
to marry Lucy, which wouldn't be good news on the Susan
front would it?'
'No it wouldn't,' I said, my teeth tight together
like. a vice.
As she intended, that little phonecall, far from
putting my mind at rest, had me trembling.
I called Susan from the office and got her husband.


I covered myself with a technical question about the
data processing in his system. I felt childishly
like insisting that Susan was my property and would
he please sleep somewhere else. He talked casually,
easily. Nothing seemed wrong.
As if to fill my cup of woe to overflowing Emily
called me again at midnight (she really was becoming my
persecutor) and said, 'Oh, I wanted to tell you about
that very strange friend of yours Jock Terner.'
'He examined my rash.'
'I was astonished at the audacity, he made me strip--
I had to do it because there were two nurses present.
He had me lay down on a surgical bed and he examined me
so closely I thought his eyes were going to pop out.'
'Then he took me for a coffee across the street and
said you just need a good purging.'
'Me or you?'
'Me. It sounded very suggestive.
He said he'd
like to meet some evening on Broadway in San Francisco,
he said I had to walk along like a hooker and he'd pick
me up in his car and we'd go to a sleazy hotel where all
the whores go, he said this is a big fantasy for him
and we could have a whale of a time, he said if you
haven't ever tried it Emily it contains all the known
thrills!'
Isn't he the whackiest space-head?'
I sat brimming with fury afterwards. I decided
to call him up. It was half past midnight and hopefully
he would be asleep. He was. It took him a whole
minute of lip-smacking and noisy breathing to realise
he wasn't being summoned by a dying patient. I cherished
every second.


'Ah,' he said and fell asleep again. But since
a medico's livelihood depends on convincing his gullible
patients that he's responsible even in the middle of the
night, his instincts pulled him awake again.
'What the hell do you want at this hour?' he said.
'I hear you're planning a good time with my wife,'
I said. 'On Broadway. In a sleazy hotel.'
'Oh for christsakes,' he said.
'Well are you?'
'Listen, I asked her to show me her rash and open
one blouse button and she smacks me round the face.'
'She what?'
'And I told the nurses before she came that she
was a Sprayd-Taylor. You were joking of course?'
'Of course.'
'At this hour? Are you drunk?'
'Well tell your fucking wife I don't like to be
made to look a monkey in my own hospital.'
When Susan came in the next morning she asked me,
'Why are you sleeping here?'
'How did you know I was?'
'Because I can smell your Men Only aftershave.'
'It's Emily,' I said. 'She's making my life
unbearable.'
'Well she---just won't leave me alone. When is
she going to marry ye olde Clemens, for christsakes?'


'Is that the real reason you're sleeping here?'
'No. I'm off her. Don't want to see her.'
She was standing there in a smart dark suit with
a white chintzy blouse underneath, just a couple of feet
in front of me, contained so neatly in herself as always,
her breasts discreetly hidden under the blouse's folds,
her waist tightly confined in a subtly pinstriped skirt.
What followed was one of the most provocative
events of my life. It proved that Susan understood,
observed all, while seemingly noticing nothing. What
she did was to close the gap between us and take hold
of me in the most intimate sense.
In a moment---even now
I can't say precisely how it happened---I was in penetration.
And she must have prepared for that---foreseen and
rehearsed it---for under her skirt I found no further
impediment.
Casanova may have argued against.emission while
standing but on this occasion no power on earth could
have prevented it. My need---so I learned in a fraction
of a second---was so great that for a moment my entire
body, not just my organ, seemed encapsulated within
her purse of pleasures.
The relief was as great in
her, I believe.
She gasped and rocked, her mouth open,
breathing hotly on my lips, as we drew to the most
simultaneous climax I had ever experienced.
So much for my 'wound'! With the right treatment,
at the hands of the right woman, it ceased to exist.
As I waited for her to finish in the main bathroom
that 'wound' seemed as historical and academic as the
shooting of Abraham Lincoln.
The event was repeated at lunchbreak.
This time
I took the initiative, though in all other respects it
was an identical experience, even in the matter of being
in the same place as before, in the corridor between our
offices (and still with free access, from the clothing
point of viewl.
Surprise seemed to be the order of the day, for


Emily called me in the early afternoon to ask me
to dinner at the Martinez-Holstein residence that very
evening.
'It's important for you,' she said.
'Clemens wants
to bring about a real reconciliation between you and the
Humane Society.'
'Jesus Christ!' I said. 'Am I in conflict with the
Humane Society?'
'Somebody tipped them off about the dog exnims.'
'Oh no! It's that bitch Lucy, I swear it!'
'That's why we have to pussyfoot round a bit,'
she said.
'Keep your cool. When are the dogs due to
arrive by the way?'
'In a fortnight, latest.'
'OK. Now Clemens also wants to clear up this
Lucy problem.'
'That's great but why does he want to do all this
for me?'
'He's doing it for me.'
I was intrigued.
It was my first invitation
to the Martinez-Holstein residence, at least as a wanted
guest, and this meant I was now 'officially' acknowledged
for my role in ROOV.
Also I was in the mood for a dinner party after my
recent inner trials.
A wave of gratitude toward Susan came over me.
After our two contacts that day she was as compact, cool
and erect as ever, not a hair out of place (not even if
you disheveled her did she look disheveled). With
Susan, however much you ruptured the proprieties, these
closed round her again at once like a protective woof.
She thus allowed the conventions total autonomy over her,
while subverting them more than anyone else I knew.
I told her I'd been invited to the Martinez-Holstein
house and she said, 'So have we.'
'Me and Jerry.'


'For this evening?'
I couldn't believe it.
At home I took a shower and fixed myself a corkscrew
(vodka to intoxicate, orange juice to vitaminise). I
left in a cloud of Men Only aftershave with a loose
cream jacket over black pants and an open-necked black
shirt, with shining sand-colored winklepicker shoes.
When I got there I found not only Clemens and Nancy
the Hatchet acting as hosts but Emily too. Arthur
Schendt and Lucy were already there.
When Jerry and Susan came a few minutes later the
lounge looked like the history of my life.
Strangely Lucy's presence didn't throw me. Her
animal eyes rested on me, I was glad to see, without
ethical overtones.
Clemens hovered over me in kindly fashion, dressed
in dark blue pants and a white Balkan shirt with cloth
bobble-buttons and lacing, from the Sixties. He went
from one guest to another chatting.
He smiled across
at Nancy the Hatchet, and occasionally touched Emily
on the shoulder as if to remind her of the fact that
they were sometimes intimate. His voice was urbane and
poised and I wanted to ask him 'Where are the overcoats
tonight dad?'. I swear he would have answered me with a
smiling twinkle of the eyes.
Yes, he was every inch a NPW!
I admired the way the evening was organised.
Nancy
never missed a beat---she was always there with more wine
or the fork you'd lost or a second helping you wanted
but were too shy to ask for.
Behind her vague smile and long, slow movements
there was sharp observation.
Considering we were six
guests it was amazing how effortlessly she managed.
The conversation touched on the ROOV project.
I was disquieted by two hints, one from Clemens and the


other from Schendt, that ROOV V and V1 might already
have been 'superseded'. I began to tremble---and to
suspect that I'd been invited simply to receive
the axe.
When Clemens took me aside at a certain point I
felt my moment had come.
He said, 'I know you'd like to smoke. Let me
take you to the library.'
We went down a corridor to a small room lined with
bookshelves. He closed the door and invited me to sit
down.
'I wanted a confidential word with you,' he said.
'The geneticists aren't ready with the machinery, so
you can't start your dissection until at least the
beginningof next month.'
'Why are the geneticists so remote from our end?'
I asked.
He shrugged.
'This is a visionary kind of
experiment.
They're hiding behind us, we're hiding
behind them. And so nobody quite takes responsibility.
Everybody fears a public outcry where there's animal
experimentation of this order.
There's an increasing
sympathy for rats in this world, believe it or not.
Ever since it got out that thousands of rat-brains were
pulped to produce endorphins. And as for cats and dogs
being introduced---well, I needn't tell you, a vet, the
possible consequences if it got out.
No one of any
reputation could be seen to be anywhere near it.'
put a gentle hand on my knee.
'Listen, all experiment
involves a risk of this nature. Do you think the public
would have let nuclear researches reach the level they
did if the papers had printed lay descriptions of the
experiments?
And the chemical warfare researches,
their toxic wastes poisoning people's gardens and wells
and rivers?
New knowledge has to be fought for, my
dear fellow, but discreetly, because the public hates
the new.'


As we went back to the other guests he said,
'You see, people fear the future. New ideas mean an
unpredictable future. Quite understandably they only
want the securities of the past.'
Mike Borovitz blew a hole in my seat by walking
into the lounge after dinner.
How my shady animal-
contact had met up with the Martinez-Holstein circle
I didn't know---and I instinctively felt I shouldn't
ask too many questions. But my chin certainly dropped
when I saw his sandy hair and long face with the rubber-
tube nose. He leaned over my chair from behind, coffee
cup in hand, and murmured, 'I'll be delivering Jamie
tomorrow, OK?'
'The German shepherd?' I asked.
He added, 'I'll deliver him to your
house if you don't mind, not the clinic.'
'Clemens thinks it's better.'
'Oh sure, sure!' I said.
This meant that I could begin cutting in a couple
of days. And Susan and I could do our 'rehearsal
cut'in our own time, unfased by the presence of the
anaesthetists, technicians etc.
I disliked Borovitz's presence in a circle I thought
exclusive and strolled on to the terrace.
I stood there
with my hands in my pockets blistering inwardly against
Lucy for having brought all this on us. How many cats and
dogs had she cured, patted consolingly,
operated on
at the vital moment? Why, I must have saved hundreds,
thousands of lives! To how many pet-owners had I not
brought relief and grateful joy! And this violin-
scraping asshole goes round sentimentalising about six
dogs which would die on the streets anyway.
It was said so quietly my heart did a jump---
right from anger into peace. Lucy was standing just
behind me.


'I really enjoyed our time in LA, didn't you?'
she said.
'Your playing and the reception afterwards and what
we did in your room are all of one lovely piece for me,
Lucy---I shall never forget it.'
And a warm memory of those two days did stir in
my mind as we stood there.
I took her hand and we
strolled down the slope between the redwood trees.
We held each other round the waist. The Berkeley
lights were strung out wide below us, with the still
Bay water beyond, and the highrises of San Francisco
shining on the far horizon against a deep red sky as
the sun took its last curtain of the day.
We sat down on the dry leaves and kissed.
The
night closed round us with its strangely inviting darkness,
like an envelope nobody else could penetrate. The
voices from the houses were muffled, indistinct, like
a musical accompaniment obliging us to sing the only
duet possible.
So we did. We rolled over and over in
the leaves, slipping gradually downhill.
Penetration
was as quick, smooth, easy, soft as slipping into dark
water in the dead of night, unseen.
Here again, for the third time that day, there was
no barrier to my entry within the skirt.
How strange
life was---two women had foreseen, mentally rehearsed
the very same event!
How soft that bed of leaves was, how excellently
it had all been stage managed from on high! We sank
deeper and deeper until it seemed that the hill itself
was being penetrated, that she had become the hill,
in its cavernous depths, its entwining convolutions of
roots.


When we got back to the lounge the guests had
gone. We heard voices upstairs.
'Oh god,' Lucy said, 'they're in the music room.
They'll want me to play. There's a Strad in the house.
And Nancy accompanies.'
She went off to the john while I plodded upstairs.
Nancy was playing a Schumann piece. As I put my head
round the door Emily jumped up and came over to me.
Something was amusing her.
She whispered, 'Let's go to my bedroom.'
She had one of the guest rooms---full of cheerful
printed cloth and fat cushions, with a low divan bed
by the window.
As soon as we were inside she said, 'That's one
crazy doctor you have!'
'The one who's got the thing about hookers!"
'Oh him! I wouldn't bother about him. God knows
how he ever qualified. His nickname's rigor mortis in
the hospital.
His prescriptions are feared like death
certificates.'
'OK, funny man,' she said with a chuckle.
'You
put him up to it, right?'
'To what?'
She made her fire-siren laugh, throwing her masses
of hair back.
'He stood at the front door---'
'Which front door?' I asked in alarm.
'This one! I invited him in and he went through a
long spiel about me walking along Broadway and he'd
pick me up between Columbus and Keary at 8.30 in the


evening, he was real excited!
It was all I could do
not to crack up right in front of him! You see, I
smacked his face for asking me to undress at the hospital,
you didn't know that, did you?'
'Right,' I said.
'Now if you picked me up on Broadway, that might
make a very interesting number, might it not?'
'Right!' I said, without conviction.
She kept chuckling. Then she locked the door.
Oh Jesus, I thought, here we go.
'I'd like to show you a new overcoat I bought,'
she said, walking to the wardrobe.
When she opened it I saw more overcoats than Macy's
even stock.
'No Emily,' I said firmly, walking to the door and
unlocking it.
'You're mixing your wires. It's the
other guy you do the overcoat number with!'
And I walked out. I was spellbound by my acting
prowess.
I actually heard her gasp behind me.
She came to
the door and said in a subdued voice, 'But several of
our numbers entail winter weather, don't they?'
But I'd already turned the corner into the music
room.
I had an ugly feeling as I sat in the office next
morning that I'd gone too far. If I lost Emily's
protection my other protectors would decamp too.
Suppose she urged Arthur - Schendt to tell Jerry Riven
about my impotency problem?
Then, if Susan pulled out,


that would be the end not only of our sexual partner-
ship but our business one too. I shuddered at the
thought of spending the rest of my life as a lone cat-
and-dog quack. And that empty house in the evenings
without Emily. The lone evening swim in the pool.
The lonelier drink at the edge of the pool in the dying
sun.
But I just couldn't face contact with Emily again.
And that put my career at risk. Apart from the fact
that the earth knows no fury like that of a woman scorned,
Emily's fury per se was enough to scorch a hole in your
pants.
Of course I was depressing myself. I'd drunk a
little too much wine the evening before.
But I still
had to face the fact that touching Emily was now, believe
it or not, repugnant to me. That chat in the dead of
night had done it. She should never have told me about
her climaxes.
Truth had come on the wings of silence
alright, but it had taken 172 numbers with it on departure.
At one time, even a week before, I would have run
a mile for a number with Emily. Just an oblique reference
from her about one of our numbers would make me jump to
attention in the genital area, unfailingly.
Not now.
I would have to think something up. I simply
couldn't afford that amazon as my enemy.
Susan on the other hand appealed to me more and more.
Every time she passed my open door I felt a little better.
I was beginning to miss her in the evenings too.
In two days time the building of our new wing would
begin, which would mean noise and dust and me sharing her
office (mine gave out on to the back patio where the
extension would be made). A new sign would go up
over the front lawn, in stone, on stilts---Domestic Pets
Clinic.
I got home late and found a fine German shepherd
wandering about on the front porch.
He came up to me


wagging his tail (not a frequent occurence where a vet
is concerned). There was a note pinned on the front
door---'I've left Jamie.
He knows who you are---Mike
Borovitz' (an odd remark, but no more odd than Mike him-
'Are you Jamie?' I asked the dog.
He wagged his tail even harder and made little
jumping movements toward the house.
'OK, Jamie,' I said, pushing open the door, 'make
yourself at home.'
He dashed in and went round sniffing as if this had
been his territory since birth.
He had attractive fur
with blond highlights, especially round the head.
It seemed a shame to separate him from his limbs, however
necessary. And I hoped that airhead Mike didn't think
I was going to carry six more canine guests at home.
He'd deliver them to the clinic or nowhere.
The dog dashed upstairs to the bedroom and started
howling with pleasure.
'What goes on?' I called out.
'You like it up
there?'
He came bounding down the stairs again, his eyes
shining and his tongue hanging out. He jumped up at me,
wagging his tail like mad.
Animals are supposed (by
animal intelligence dudes) to have intuition---they can
tell when storms and earthquakes are on the way and can
smell a nasty human motive a mile off. Well, all I
can say is that this animal, due for chopping up in a
couple of days, didn't seem to have his premonitive
faculties working at all.
Young Jamie (I gave him no more than two years)
was quite a companion that long evening. I made him
some food, adding leftover steak from my plate to some
lethal-looking dog mix from the clinic.
He wouldn't
touch it. I was amazed. He just walked away and
slumped down in front of me and fixed me with his eyes
in prolonged and silent criticism. I couldn't shake


his gaze off. Not until I rose with a sigh and
pulled out some hamburger steak from the fridge and
fried it up.did he relax. I knew that was what he
wanted just by the way he, was sitting there. When I
put the bowl in front of him he attacked it. like a lion,
threw it down his throat.
'Isn't that hard on your digestive organs?' I asked
him.
And he gave me a look as if to say, don't make me
laugh.
I put a porno video on but changed it almost at once
for Stokowski conducting the Beethoven Requiem. Jamie
sat there by my feet and every now and then, remembering
what his fate was to be, I put my hand down and stroked
his old ears, and I felt his quick, hot, rough tongue as
he, like me, returned to contemplate Leopold's maniacal
gesticulations and the open mouths of the Detroit Choral
Society.
My hope was that Emily didn't realise just how far
my antipathy for her had gone. But hiding anything from
her was like trying to escape a thousand watchful eyes.
She had them all the way down her back.
I decided to back-track, and called her up.
'What about this inventory?' I asked her.
'Oh I put that in my accountant's hands,' she said
drily.
'There are people who do that sort of thing for
a living.'
A silence followed.
'I'd in any case like to see you,' I said.
have things to discuss.'


'What things?'
This was uphill work.
I couldn't even hear her breathing, which meant
she'd gone beyond fury to the total-decimation phase.
Or was I mistaken?
She spoke my name very quietly.
'Yes?' I said.
'I'd like to do a goddess evening with you.'
'Didn't you know I'd joined this goddess group?
Oh, months ago!'
'I don't even know what a goddess group is,' I
said, feeling emphatically more comfortable.
'They're all over California, honey.
It's Mary
Preylie's Network.'
'Who's Mary Preylie?'
'She runs Goddesses-in-America.'
'I have to sit in the goddess position---and I need
an audience. I need a man---'
'You need a man?' I squealed, wanting to bite my
tongue out an instant after.
'Not for numbers. I'm off numbers.'
'You're off numbers?' I asked her, trying to
suppress my relief.
'Yes,' she said.
'I'm sorry. I'm afraid Clemens
took it out of me in that respect. I mean overcoats in
this heat.'
'I quite understand.'
'I want to pass on to something else.'
'What time would you like to come?'
'Oh, around seven.'
'Oh,' I said, 'I've got a dog called Jamie.
The
first delivery.'
'Great,' she said.
'I hope he cuts well.'
Around ten that same evening Susan called.


'I have the marriage settlement here,' she said.
'Registered.'
'Shall I bring them round?'
My heart did an excited leap.
'That's a great
idea. Bring them round Susan!'
I switched the television off and patted Jamie.
Amazing that though Susan and I were cooped up together
all day at the clinic I was as delighted as a child to
see her again.
She arrived in jeans and a sweater, but even in
this casual outfit she looked as uncasual as visiting
royalty.
What was it about her hands-off attitude that
invited urgent hands-on?
The dog jumped up at her too.
'It's like he's lived here all his life,' I told
her.
She nodded, giving Jamie non-commital but nonetheless
maternal, responsible pats. Everything she did had such
finality. No vague edges.
She laid the documents on the kitchen table and I
studied them.
I said, 'Can you stay the night?'
'Yes. Jerry's away.'
'What about the kids?'
'Mother's staying with us again.'
'You have a convenient mother.'
'Well, she really enjoys California.'
We went upstairs. I put out the light and lay
listening to her cleaning her teeth in the bathroom.
My excitement was so great I literally found it difficult
to contain myself.
She returned, silhouetted against
the window, in a night gown with frilled shoulder-sleeves,
cut in at the waist. It cupped her breasts so that they
seemed to spill over. And the moment she lay down at
my side the silent awed penetration that was in so many
ways an assault, however gently and smoothly achieved,


began.
Hands-off struggled deliciously against, and thus
further provoked, hands-on.
At dawn, with Susan slumbering at my side, I woke
thinking about the ROOV experiment---and especially of
those two references at the Martinez-Holstein dinner
party to ROOV V and Vl having been 'superseded'.
Also I'd noticed at that party how every reference
I made to my dog-exnims produced a discouraging silence.
And why had they invited Mike Borovitz, that Sonoma
County strawhead? What an asset for a serious scientific
experiment! I remembered how Mike had once started a
meatshop in Petaluma called New Age Meats and had a tape
playing to the customers while they made their purchases,
it was a woman's quiet voice saying that no pain had been
suffered by the animals, they'd been 'rendered unconscious
in home surroundings' and had died peacefully far from the
abbatoirs. I taxed him with it at the time---I said,
'Your fucking meat's the same as everybody else's!'
He said, 'What's that got to do with it? I influence
the mind. My customers eat their meat far more happily
than other people do. That's the important thing---
what goes on in the mind!'
And the shop did well too. In fact he opened two
more, one in Calistoga and the other in Mill Valley.
At breakfast I put it to Susan squarely: 'I'm
worried this project might go off the rails---or rather
that part of it that concerns you and me. Do you happen
to know what's going on?'
She looked at me vaguely and I explained about


ROOV V and V1 already having become obsolete.
She looked down, biting her lip, seeming to
withhold the very thing she was giving, as always.
'Jerry said the computer deal makes a difference,'
she told me.
'Better funds mean more ambitious projects.'
'Are V and V1 definitely off then?'
'I don't know that,' she answered.
'Should I call Jerry to find out exactly what he
knows?' I asked her.
'I think you should.
I've got his office number.'
When I called him from the clinic later that morning
he at first did his gruff international-businessperson
act, then he realised it was me and climbed down to a
Santa Rosa hot-tub self.
'You don't have to worry about our deal,' he said.
I broke in before he could go on. 'I realise that.
It's the exnim question that bothers me.'
'Oh I don't think they'll use your exnims . - he said.
'You mustn't quote me, and I haven't heard anything
for definite, but it's my overall impression that your
exnims have been superseded.'
'What the hell are they going to use---cows?'
'Are you that keen on the project, man? Do you
realise your clinic would be up for grabs and Susan out
of a job if it got out to the media what you propose
to do? I've been trying to get that over to Susan
for days but she keeps saying your heart's in it and
that kind of crap.'
There was a pause at the other end. He went on,
'I think the geneticists feel that while they're building
machinery to cope with your size of exnim they might as
well be even bolder---'
'Rhesus monkeys?' I asked.
'I can lay my hands
on them too!'
'Further even than that maybe.'


'Further? How do you mean?'
Again the pause. Then he said, 'I heard some
talk about casting round for human volunteers.'
I held my seat.
volunteers---? For christsakes man---!'
'Cool it,' he said.
'You don't imagine that men
like Martinez-Holstein and Schendt are going to take
one step forward without testing the ground, do you?'
'Anyway, I might have got it wrong,' he said.
'I think you certainly have!' I replied.
After the call I sat there for some time, pulled in
different directions by the wild horses of disbelief.
I went to Susan.
But she was deep in a consultation.
Even so she glanced up as if to say, 'Don't worry. It'll
all turn out OK.'
I was unfit for work. A saluki bitch almost bit my
finger off. A cat due for fixing arched its back. I
was just bending down to lift the tail of a young chow
to look at a leg wound when he farted right in my face.
'Clearly not my day,' I murmured to the gloating
owner.
When Emily arrived that evening I had the champagne
on ice and eggs-in-aspic which Susan had got from a
girlfriend who worked in a gourmet catering firm,
supported by my usual smoked salmon canapés and boiled
plovers' eggs. I made a nice color scheme with large
lettuce leaves and slices of egg-fruit, tomatoe, and
Greek olives and gherkins.
She breezed in on high heels, a transparent skirt


flowing behind her. Jamie gave her the same treat-
ment he'd given me, as if she'd been his mistress for
years. He made little squealing noises of pleasure.
They made a good picture together. So outdoors.
In her car were, of all things, boxes of rose
petals. I had to bring them in.
They were every shade---
tea-colored, purple, yellow, orange and bright scarlet.
There were wreaths of heavy-scented Hawaian pumeria.
The scent filled the lounge---wistful, lingering.
'What's it all for?' I asked her.
'I'll show you later,' she said, sitting down with
relish on one of the water-divans.
Emily loved her
food.
I opened the champagne and the cork flew to the
ceiling celebratively.
Jamie barked and thought it
was great fun. He got hold of the cork and started
playing with it, but was bored almost at once.
'He's real cute,' Emily said without the smallest
interest.
'He sleeps in our bedroom.
It's hard for me
sometimes---when I think of dissecting him.'
'Listen, honey,' she said, 'the exnims on ROOV
have the same lives as before, don't you realise that?
They may not move, and their limbs and organs may be
separated, but they still have a sense of life. What
is a sense of life anyway? You know what the French
say---'I think, therefore I am'. Well, all we do,
really, is think!
Clemens says, as long as the same
thoughts and emotions go through our heads, we live the
same however far we may be from our bodies. If we
think we're running, when we're not, it's just the same
as running from our point of view. If we think we're
eating then we are eating, even if our bodies aren't,
even if the digestive system is ten thousand miles away
from the head that's thinking. I mean, those rats in
ROOV think, therefore they are!'


'I hadn't seen it like that Emily,' I told her.
'You're damn right!'
I looked at her proudly. We touched glasses and
sipped the cool bubbly.
She tackled an egg-in-aspic
and made humming noises of appreciation as it passed
down. I always enjoyed watching her eat. It made food
doubly delicious. I felt my appetite quicken and I too
plunged in.
I made for the smoked salmon. With a
few drops of lemon it went down like velvet. And
when flushed with Dom Perignan it took a second bow,
so to speak.
'And how's the forthcoming marriage?' I asked her.
'Have you come to terms wit th Nancy?'
'Oh, that's all on ice at the moment.'
'The thing is Nancy's my best girlfriend at this
time and I don't wish to disturb her domestic life,
and Clemens agrees with me.' (I managed to hide my
nervousness).
'Anyway,' she said, 'you're a bit behind schedule.
I haven't been with Clemens for quite a time.'
'No?' I said, suddenly in a state of shock.
'Who
have you been with?'
'Didn't you know?' she said.
'Jerry Riven of
course! I thought everybody knew!'
'Jerry Riven?'
'Well of course.
That's why Susan and I were
always so close. I used to drive over to their place
all the time, don't you remember?'
'So---me being with Susan---you asking her to look
after me when you were in Amsterdam---that was a sort of
wife-swopping, right?'
She shrugged.
'Give it any name you want. But
don't forget he came to see you too---when I was in
Amsterdam.'
'And why did he come and see me, apart from the


computer deal?'
'Not apart from the computer deal.
That's why
I sent him.'
'You sent him?'
'Of course! I told him, put the computer deal in
my husband's hands, it'll give him some clout in ROOV.
So he did.'
'Well for christsakes!"
'We thought it'd be good for you and for Susan,
professionally.
We wanted to help your clinic.
But
then you got interested in Lucy.'
'I feel,' I said, 'I feel I don't run my own life!'
'Who does?' she said with a smile.
'Didn't Susan
tell you any of this?'
'Well of course not!'
'Not even that Jerry and I were madly in love?'
'She knew?'
'Well of course she knew!'
'It's no good saying of course because it was never
of course for me. She never said a word to me!'
'But for Jesus christsakes man ain't you got eyes
in your head?'
'With the best eyes in my head,' I said, 'how could
I see an affair between you and a man I'd never met?'
'Because I went to their house three times a week!
Can't you recognise a woman in love?'
'You were supposed to be in love with Clemens
Martinez-Holstein!'
'He only started coming on heavy in Amsterdam.
That was later!
I asked Jerry what to do and he said
hang on in there, it'll help you professionally.
'So now,' I murmured, unfit for further eating,
'you'll marry Jerry?'
'Not for sure. You know, he's always in Michigan
State or Houston or some place. And as Clemens said to
me yesterday, Riven isn't much of a surname. He meant
Jerry's dull, like a computer which isn't switched on.'


'But think of his influence in Washington,' I
said sneeringly.
'That's right. But now there's Jock to consider
'Jock who?'
'Jock Terner.' She popped an olive in her mouth.
'Your doctor friend. At least you know about him!'
'Well you arranged it all!'
'Arranged what Emily?'
'Arranged for him to call on me and invite me out.
I mean, it was obvious. You told him to do it. He
said so. He said you'd told him I'd be interested in
doing this number with him.'
Which number?'
'The hooker number!
When he said walk along
Broadway dressed up as a hooker and I'll pick you up
between Columbus and Geary I nearly freaked out! I
mean, it felt like I'd been waiting all my life for
this one number!'
'You did it?' I screamed.
'You actually did it?'
'Well of course I did!'
'Broadway, and the sleazy hotel?'
'He picked you up between Geary and Columbus,
and you dressed like a hooker?'
'Then why,' I asked weakly, 'why did you slap him
round the face when he told you to undress in the
hospital?
People do undress in hospitals!'"
'It was the way he said it. It was kind of
suggestive.'
'And asking you to dress up as a hooker wasn't
suggestive?' I spluttered.


'That was different.
It was a number. And
anyway he told me you wanted me to do it.'
'He told---' I couldn't find words.
She crammed some salmon in her mouth and said,
'Listen honey don't you see I only did it for that
reason---to add to our numbers?
Don't you remember
me saying at Clemens's party, wouldn't that hooker
number be great for you and me, and you just walked
out of the room!'
'But Emily,' I croaked, my voice a barely audible
rasp, 'shouldn't you decide between our numbers, Jerry
Riven, Clemens and, now, Jock Terner?'
'That's exactly what I have done,' she said.
'When Clemens said about Jerry Riven's name not being
good enough for me, my reply was, I like the name I got,
that's the one I prefer---!'
'The name---?' I asked, blanching at the thought
that she might possibly be refering to mine.
'Yours,' she said.
'The one I got. It seems
absurd to change. Doesn't it?'
This was all I'd been fearing for days. I looked
down, I looked up, I looked sideways---anywhere but in
her eyes.
'Emily,' I said, 'after all these arrangements?
The marriage settlements---two major settlements,
including foreseeable-divorce settlements for after
we're newly married---such a lot of work---first Lucy,
'But don't you think it's such an upheaval?' she
said softly.
'Changing houses, and bedrooms, and
habits!'
'Yes,' I said, biding my time so that I could think
out a convincing plan, 'you have a point there.'
got up.
'There are some little meat patties in the
I fetched them out as a diversion and they were the
triumph of the evening.
She wolfed about seven of them


in a row, feeding some to Jamie too.
Now that she had some bulk inside her I said,
'There's another thing. How certain are ROOV V and
'Certain? How can you ask that?'
'I mean, how sure can I be that dog exnims are
going to be used? I've heard some pretty funny
reports.
There's talk that dog exnims have been
superseded.'
She sighed.
'Isn't that the price one always
pays in this field? The pace is so fast that a project
finalised today is scrapped on the grounds of obsolescence
tomorrow.'
I gazed at her. 'Are those your words Emily?
I mean 'obsolescence' means something losing efficacy
after being applied.
We haven't applied the new
exnim experiments yet!'
'Well of course I've had a lot of discussion with
Clemens. You know, he's become a sort of mentor for
me, my guru you might say---'
'I'm happy you can say that Emily. He's an
altogether different class of man from Jock Terner.'
'Let's forget Jock Terner!' she said. Another
patty went down.
'You see, honey, we never know how
fast the genetic side of this experiment is going to go.
I mean, if we're trying to find out something about
intelligence---and I take that to be the scope of the
ROOV project---it's human intelligence we're basically
interested in.'
I slumped back in my seat.
'So,' I said softly, all the air leaving my body,
'Jerry Riven was right...'
'Is it possible, Emily, that the exnims for V and
Vl may be human volunteers?'
'Well,' she said thoughtfully, 'not exactly that.'


'If not exactly that, Emily, what is it exactly?
Is it Rhesus monkeys, exactly, or apes, exactly, or
any of the other primates exactly?'
'No,' she said.
I leaned forward.
'So why don't you tell me
what it is, exactly?'
'If I tell you anything, it's got to be confidential.
Now even Susan, right?'
'Right,' I said.
'Not even Susan.
Not even
Jamie.'
'Jamie?' she squealed.
'The dog.'
'OK, you have my promise, so what exactly are ROOV
V and V1 going to consist of?'
'There's talk of a suicide couple.'
'A suicide couple?'
'That's right. I mean---'
'You mean two people, a man and a woman, are going
to be the exnims. Two people who've had enough of
life and sign a document that they don't mind the
post-mortem use of their faculties?'
'It's a possibility, that's all I'm going to say!'
She looked all o'ercast with thought for a moment.
'Does that seem bad to you?'
'Bad? I don't know! I'm just shocked!'
'If they volunteered?' she asked in a tiny voice.
'You mean a couple has actually volunteered?'
She nodded.
'To whom did they volunteer?' I asked her.
'To Clemens.'
'Two friends?'
'He doesn't mind chopping up his friends?'
'Well,' she said, 'he wouldn't do the actual job
would he? Anyway,' she added, it kinda fell through.'


'But it's murder for christsakes!' I said in a
highpitched voice.
'That's why it had to be abandoned.
That's the
problem on everybody's mind right now!'
'What's the problem?' I asked.
'How to get round the law!'
She pursed her lips
and then burst out with, 'Dammit, all science has been
against the law from the beginning!
What about
Copernicus, Galilieo?'
I nodded. 'OK. I see that. Yes, I see that!'
'Wow! You try my patience sometimes!'
'I'm sorry,' I said.
'Now why don't you just try
and explain what's going on?'
'Listen, I know you've a good heart.
I know you
love animals and don't like to see them hurt. And as
for human beings---! But don't you see, honey, these
people aren't going to be killed at all! They're just
being given a different kind of life!'
'But they lose their power of choice,' I said,
unable to contain myself, despite my promise of silent
attention.
'You're taking their rights away from
them! That's equivalent to kidnap if not murder!'
'Listen, why don't you leave that on one side for
a moment, because it's something Clemens and Arthur
Schendt are going into in depth? OK?'
'OK,' I said unwillingly.
But I couldn't
hold myself back.
'You mean they're looking for human
exnims?'
'They're looking for the right legal approach.
'But if the legal aspects are made OK---if they
can get somebody to sign up as a ROOV exnim---will
there be a human exnim---I mean, will it be for real?'
'Listen,' she said compassionately, 'what are you
so excited about?'
'Don't you see Emily? That means my exnims won't
be used, that I have no role any more!
It means human
surgeons do the job, not me!'


She gazed down (was it contrition?).
'Seven dogs specially chosen!' I said.
'Look at
Jamie here! What a specimen!'
I was on the edge of
tears. 'And all this effort being thrown away!'
'I know,' she said, 'I know.'
'You're helpless, is that right, Emily? You can't
do anything for me?'
She shook her head.
'It just flew out of my hands all of a sudden,'
she went on. 'I suppose somebody said at the genetics
end, why not use the best exnims of all? They are
the best exnims!'
'I agree there,' I said.
'Listen, this is a very
great disappointment for me. Susan and I are building
a new wing at the clinic---I realise now that we've
been designing it with the ROOV experiments in mind.'
'Is the new wing going to benefit you and Susan
as vets too?'
'Oh sure.'
'So? Updated facilities attract the best customers.
You won't lose anything.'
Jamie came to my side and I patted him absentmindedly.
I wanted to tell him about my disappointment, seeing
that he wouldn't be chopped up after all. But of course
he wouldn't have shared the disappointment exactly.
Emily rose and sat down by me, put a hand on mine.
'Can I start the goddess thing now?'
'Oh sure,' I said with a brave smile.
'I've been
wondering what that's all about.'
'Could we clear the room? I need a space in the
middle.'
I pulled the coffee table, the armchairs and water-
divans to the sides.
Jamie thought this wonderful and jumped about,
playfully trying to bite my ankles.
'Shall I move the carpet?' I asked her.


'No. I need that to sit on.'
She started to undress.
'What are you doing?' I asked her.
'Why don't you sit down and just watch?'
Together with Jamie, who looked as puzzled as I
was, cocking his head to one side, I sat gazing at her.
She released her bra and her breasts made a soft
fall in their plenitude. To my horror I felt no reaction.
She took her panties off. I even felt some revulsion.
Breasts I'd once gazed at with 'the enthusiasm of
a son whose mother at last gratifies him sexually' (as
my shrink used to say) were now, if not precisely repellent
to me, at least suffocating in effect, as if they might
smother me.
Never before had I experienced such feelings with
a naked woman. Again my mind returned to that ill-fated
night when she'd told me about her climaxes.
She
shouldn't have done it, my mind clamored, she shouldn't
have done it!
It was---almost---like being intimate with a man
except that this man had boobs. There was a suggestion
of sweat, body-odor, tiny defects of skin.
I ached to get away as she, quite naked now, sat
on the carpet in the cross-legged position that you see
in yoga.
She said, 'Now would you bring the boxes and sprinkle
rose petals over me, and put the lei round my neck?'
I was sure she felt my revulsion as I moved round
her sprinkling the petals, and especially when I put the
two pumaria wreaths round her neck.
A peculiar relentless glint came into her eyes
which I was all too familiar with, as if she'd struck me
off her list. It provoked a sinking sensation in the
pit of my stomach.
Then she launched into a sort of lecture.
It was


really whacky.
She started talking about the
Goddesses-in-America Association and how she'd come
to join it.
'I met the founder,' she said in a phoney hushed
voice.
'Calcutta Sublime.'
'Calcutta what?' I asked her.
'Calcutta Sublime.'
'What's that?'
'She. The founder.'
'It's a name?'
'It's her name.'
'A real name?' I asked.
'Well of course real! I mean, it's hers. It's
far more real than the one she got in an empty church
ritual before she could speak.'
'Oh so it's a chosen name,' I said.
'Yes, but no less real for that.'
She really did look bonkers, sitting there naked
with such a prim expression. At the best of times,
clothed or unclothed, a prim expression wasn't for Emily.
'But no one can be called Calcutta Sublime,' I said.
'It's ridiculous.'
She reacted with a snarled, 'But maybe women
goddesses are ridiculous in your eyes anyway!'
I retired quickly and said, 'Not at all! I think
it's wonderful, I really do!'
'Good,' she said with a smile that made me feel she
would like to slice my head off and send it to Sydney.
She went on, Fifteen years ago, when she was plain
Muriel Fynger---'
'Muriel Fynger?' I cried, already regretting it.
'But that's unlikely tool
Nobody could be called
finger!'
'It's 'y' not 'i',' she saide
'I think her
father was German.
'Fynger' is quite likely as a
German name, isn't it?'


'What about her?'
'Exactly,' she said.
'Muriel, as she was then,
travelled to India where she found a wonderful guru
in Kashmir. I forget his name, it's on the tip of
Snachabanana?' ,
I asked facetiously.
I thought this foolhardy but (paradoxical is
Emily's other name) she screamed with laughter, her
breasts shaking, and yelled, 'OK, wisehead!'
I got up and sprinkled some more rose petals on
her and that seemed to be the right thing to do. I
straightened out the lei.
Then I returned to my seat
for the rest of the lecture.
'It was in Calcutta, where she met her guru, that
she changed her name---'
'You said Kashmir.'
'You said she found Snachabanana in Kashmir'
(another cascade of laughter, quickly controlled).
'Oh well, wherever it was. She spent ten years
with him and then she journeyed to Egypt. She came to
know all those gods you see there, like Rameses, and
she spent the night in the king's chamber, that's in
the pyramids, and she made sounds---'
'What sort of sounds?'
'Cooings and hummings.
She said the way they
vibrated between the walls means something. Every
chamber is different, and the measurements are according
to the kind of sound that had to be made. Something
like that. I mean, all this history is so male, so
logical, and she was into the life thing. Anyway,'
she said quickly as she saw another incisive question
popping up in my mind, 'she came back to Palo Alto and
started a retreat there.
She's turned one room into
an exact replica of the king's chamber and we all sit
there naked and feel the vibrations going through us.


We also dance and we feel the priestess growing in
'Priestess or goddess?' I asked.
'Well, sort of sacred,' she said.
'You let the
goddess in you take over. Do you know I made a humming
noise one time and all the other women got into it, and
Calcutta Sublime told us we'd all become channels of
the divine presence, and from then on we had to choose
the higher sex because we'd found our true selves, and
if all America joined hands, goddess with goddess,
there'd be no more wars or crime or child abuse or rape.'
'Higher sex you said?'
'It means being in touch with the cosmos when you
have sex, instead of just being with a man. That's
part of living in the higher consciousness.
Sublime
says that one of the most powerful energies known to
mankind is the sexual energy, it sends out warm vibrations
to every part of the universe whenever it's enacted in
the goddess-role, she says it's up to us to save the
earth this way. She says in ancient Egypt the serpent
was a symbol of sexuality, and when you see a bird holding
a serpent in its beak on an Egyptian column it means
sexuality under divine control. Don't you think that's
so revealing?'
'I do,' I said.
'I think it's so revealing.'
'Right!' she screamed, bringing Jamie from nap-land
to an alert position, ears cocked.
'Did you see the dog?' she went on. 'He's
recognising the goddess in me! Animals were very
important in ancient Egypt you know! Mystical powers
were attributed to them.'
I looked at Jamie's stunned face and said,'By god
you're right.'
'Calcutta Sublime said we should always be in a
command position when we do it.'
'Do what?'
'It,' she said quietly.
'The male should lie


down, and like Mother Kali---'
'Just keep quiet! Like Mother Kali I shall
dance round you and when you show me you're ready
I shall lower myself on you like in the temple carvings---'
She looked at me sharply.
'Put some music on and take
all your clothes off.'
'What?' I said.
'That's right!'
There was no escape, I could see that. But no way
could I stay and do what she wanted.
I really panicked
in those few seconds. I opted for acting.
'But don't you see Emily?' I said, quivering at the
thought of contact between us, 'don't you see this simply
can't be done? Do you realise what power you have,
just sitting there?
If you could see yourself at this
moment! The power radiates out of you like a blinding
shaft! And you expect me----expect me to---? Don't
you see you're beyond sex at this moment Emily? Why,
Emily,' I said rising like a ghost, 'I don't think I'd
dare touch you with my little finger in your present
state! It's like looking into a blinding light!'
I even put my hand over my eyes to shield them (how
ham can you get?).
Through my fingers I saw her gaping at me, her
eyes wide. I swear she was wondering if it had happened---
if I really was seeing an effulgent goddess.
'I can't stand the light!' I kept on saying.
the light!
The light!'
Finally I dashed out onto the porch and then straight
to my car, with Jamie close behind.
It was a crumby
exit but at least I was out of that room.
I swung the car round noisily and was on the freeway
with Jamie at my side in a matter of moments.
When I got to the office I called Susan.
'Come to the clinic,' I said.
'There's a crisis.'


Jamie went round smelling frantically at all the
places where cats and dogs had been, then he settled
down in Susan's office.
That demonstrated good taste
on his part, I thought.
She arrived in about ten minutes.
'I had to run away from Emily,' I told her.
'She's going crazy.'
'How come?'
'She thinks she's a goddess.'
Then I did with Susan what I should have done with
Emily (give or take a few details).
Susan went delightfully limp when she slept, and
rarely stirred all night. I admired this gift for
immediate repose, especially now, when I couldn't close
my eyes for worry.
I knew I'd blown it with Emily. I read one time
that when you were excommunicated in the old days it
was like being condemned to living death. You lost your
job, your family, your friends. And that's how I felt
about losing my connection with Emily. She was the
equivalent of five inquisitions.
How, the reader may ask, did I come to marry five
inquisitions?
Because of our numbers.
Our numbers
personified all Emily was (they mostly involved my
humiliation after all).
I knew I was not only out of the ROOV project but
worse. And I couldn't figure out what this 'worse'
was.
When Emily called me at the office next morning


and was all sweetness and coyness I knew I was right.
With Emily sugar served as a coating for something
lethal.
And when Jock Terner came to see me with a
commiserating look in his eye I knew the inquisitorial
sittings had begun.
I was just closing the clinic---Susan had gone
early because Jerry was returning from Portland and
she had to go to the airport.
Jock followed me into
the house and we settled down to a drink.
'Well,' I said, 'what's on your mind?'
'You,' he said.
'I believe the complaint you were telling me about
may be getting worse.'
'What complaint?'
'You know what I mean. Why else should you throw
Emily into my arms?'
'Me throw her into your arms?' I asked him.
'You know you wanted me and Emily to get together---
that she needed something you couldn't give her.'
'She was dying for it in that hotel room,' - he said.
'So much the better for you then,' I said, patting
Jamie who, being a loyal soul, was leaning hard against
my leg and staring at Jock with disapproval.
'Listen, man,' he went on, 'Emily and I aren't quite
decided yet but we've had a couple of evenings together
and it feels good, it feels right, know what I mean?
We've talked about marriage but we don't want to rush
into it.'
'Quite right,' I said.
'Now Emily feels a heavy responisbility toward
you---that's natural in a wife. And so do I.
wouldn't be my way to just go off and marry your wife
and leave you with a big empty house like this to sit in
and no women coming near you because, well, you're


temporarily out of service.'
'I'm not temporarily out of service.'
'OK, OK,' he said quietly.
'I promise
confidentiality. Emily told me about her goddess
ceremony last night and how you went out in a snit.
Now---' He held his hand up as I was going to
interrupt-- 'this particular distress of yours has
its origin in the mind and if you need somebody good---'
'I wish you'd keep out of my affairs,' I
said.
'Especially my mind.'
But I don't think your shrink's going
to help. I mean, he hasn't so far. You need chemical
assistance and I know the man to provide it. You've
got yourself into stress man, and you need a safe
tranquillizer. You need a period of rest and at the
end, why, you'll be dating women every day.'
'What the hell has Emily been saying?! I screamed.
'She's sick worried!'
he said. 'She was telling
me this morning---'
'You spoke this morning?'
'She was frantic!
She said, Jock, you've got to
help that man! After all you're a doctor!'
'That's a matter of opinion.'
'OK, OK, let's have our jokes but just the same,
my friend, you're in serious trouble and you'd better
face it.'
He got up slowly, to my relief.
'I've done my best,' he said.
'I've put my
point of view.'
'But there's nothing wrong with me!'
'Listen,' he said, stopping on his way, to the
door, 'a month back you were doing OK with Emily,
right? And suddenly it all goes wrong. You're not
interested in her any more and she knows it!'
Afterwards I called Susan.
She'd just gotten
back from the airport. I gave her a breakdown of


what had happened, concentrating on the theme that
my sexual interest in Emily had collapsed, and that
was why she was bent on revenge.
She didn't see that.
'It doesn't sound like
Emily,' she said to my astonishment.
'It does to me!' I said.
'Perhaps you're letting it weigh on your mind
unnecessarily.'
That was a calming thought. I said, 'Could be.'
When I saw her at the office next day she said,
'I want you to take something.'
She had some kind of vitamin-punched sedative on
her desk, in powder form, and dissolved some in water.
I drank it off obediently.
It made me feel good. But then anything from
Susan's hand would have boosted me, including a clout
round the head.
She followed me into my office and said, 'She can't
be all that bad. I think she's got your welfare at
heart.' She added, 'Why else should she rush round
to my house and give me this medicine for you to take?'
I swung round on her like aweather vane.
'What?' I screamed.
'What? She gave you this stuff?
I clutched my throat dramatically. I slumped into
a chair.
Yet I was feeling decidedly good.
I worked hard that day. I felt no resentment
against Emily.
I even called her up and said, 'You know Emily all
these stories you're spreading round are a little
exaggerated, don't you think? You know, I really
was convinced you were a goddess that evening.'
She was silent.
'Are you there?' I asked.
'I really was sincere that I couldn't touch you.


A golden light was streaming out of you. Afterwards
I asked my self why should'nt I touch even a goddess
if I wanted to. I wanted to Emily but I didn't dare.
I drove away with overpopulated pants when all I had
to do was---walk through that blinding light and take
the divine fruits! Easier said than done, I can
assure you!'
She said, 'What the fuck are you talking about?'
'Can't we do that ceremony again Emily?'
Was she convinced?
She seemed to waver.
Then my heart sank.
'I'll be at the house again this evening,' she
said quietly, and put the phone down.
She was already set up when I arrived, but in
the bedroom this time.
Two boxes of rose petals had been unloaded and
she'd lit candles and incense sticks. Jamie was
looking on as if it was a game just for him. His
tongue was hanging out, his eyes were sparkling.
I was trembling (was : it the medicine Susan
had given me?).
I watched her undress with
trepidation.
Off came the girdle and off, with a
smart snap, came the bra---and again that soft relapse
of the breasts into their God-given positions. Again
I felt no tremor of desire.
I saw I'd opted for an evening which would only
complete my undoing.
I put the lei round her neck with a secret desire
to throttle her. Her perfume, and a smell of healthy
sweat such as would have had me in swoons not a month


before wafted up from her armpits.
When she was seated with the rose petals all over
her she said, quietly, her eyes closed, 'Take your
clothes off and ask for the honor of a visitation.'
I ought to explain that part of her previous
lecture had been devoted to the phoney idea that once
upon a time men, being crude and heavy brutes, had gone
hunting all day while the women remained at home cooking
and weaving and doing all kinds of peaceful and even
divine things, like white magic. The men had worshipped
the women as a higher biological order and if they wanted
to have sex contact with them, or even speak to them,
they had to put a claim in for visitation rights'.
The claim was granted or not, according to how the woman
felt.
Well, I was now to undress and ask for visitation
rights.
But, so Emily had instructed me, I had to do
it with a 'biological sign', namely an erection. A
month before I might have built this up into an exciting
number but not so now. I undressed morosely, almost
flinging my clothes on the bed.
Then I lay down on
the floor as directed---in fact on a bed of rose petals
(if any of my readers hasn't slept on a bed of roses I
can assure them it's uncomfortable, because the petals
stick to your back).
She began dancing round me and I watched through
half-closed eyes as she took tripping steps, her tits
wobbling.
She made little jumps over me, stood astride
me waving her arms like a hypnotist, but I wasn't falling
into a trance.
She stood astride for a moment over my
head, wriggling to and fro, giving me an underview of
the most eloquent part of her anatomy.
I wished to
stammer absurd apologies.
Every moment I expected to
experience that sudden erotic interest that brings the
male organ snapping into the erect state as if on springs
but nothing happened.
She danced and danced.
watched her buttocks, her hips, her powerful legs, I


watched her aroused nipples. Nothing availed.
She stopped.
Slowly she put her clothes back on.
I remained on the floor, my eyes closed.
She walked to the door and I heard her murmur,
'And you say you're OK? My, my!'
Her car started up outside.
When it drove away
it left an awful silence behind it.
I cleared up the rose petals and pumaria. Jamie
was scratching himself downstairs so that his collar
tinkled. I called Susan but got Jerry and he said
gruffly, 'This isn't the right moment.'
I sat on a water-divan and eventually fell asleep.
I woke about five and drank some coffee. This made me
sleepy. Then I slept on the bed upstairs fitfully,
with abandonment-nightmares lining up to enter my brain.
I yearned to talk to Susan and drove to the office half
an hour earlier than usual.
She didn't come. All day
she didn't come. I called her but all I got was her
answer-machine. I had to handle all her clients. Just
as I was closing up she came.
'Jerry didn't want me to come,' she said. 'He's
gone to Portland again so it's OK now.'
'Didn't want you to come to your own office?'
'He's making trouble over the marriage settlement,'
she said.
I was real happy to see her again but I was too
weak to have contact.
I could see by her extra-formal
manner that she wanted it.
'Let's go to dinner,' I said.
'I want to get to


the bottom of all this.'
We drove to a dimly-lit Morrocan place in Lafayette
and, settled among cushions, watched a belly-dancer
shakiny in the middle of the room under a purple spotlight.
She was a Cal student, she told us when she came round
collecting tips, and doing her pre-med.
'Is Jerry seeing a lot of Emily?' I asked Susan.
'Quite a bit. They were at the house together last
night. She drove straight over from your place and told
us all about the goddess ceremonies.
She's been doing
them with all the men she knows, she says, and they all
respond, so why don't you?'
'She doesn't attract me any more.'
'She says you started complaining of impotence long
ago and you just don't want sex,period.'
'Have you seen signs of impotence?' I asked her.
11 As a matter of fact, yes.'
I nearly fell through. my seat.
'Little signs,' she went on. 'That's why I'm
worried too.
Jerry thinks you should seek medical
advice.'
'I've got a shrink dammit, he doesn't see anything
wrong!'
'Have you told him?'
'Of course I have.
I mean, I did. When I was
impotent.'
She looked at me doubtfully.
'What did he say?'
'Guilt. He always says that anyway.'
'Do you feel guilty?'"
'What about?'
'About doing it?'
'Of course I don't!'
'Emily says you told her you don't enjoy your
orgasms. -
'But neither does she!'


'She says it's because of your impotence---you
took all her pleasure away.'
'I'm not impotent!' I hissed at her.
She looked away,
maybe recalling the fact that
we hadn't made contact for two days.
'Does Jerry want you to pull out of our relation-
ship?' I asked her.
'And the business partnership?'
'That as well,' she said.
I was trembling so much I could hardly talk.
'And what do you feel?' I asked her.
'I don't know.'
'Listen,' I said, 'Emily's going overboard about
how I don't respond to her but she's going out with that
bilious medico Jock Terner.'
'So what?'
'I just think it means she's playing a game. With
your husband too. How hopeful is he of marrying Emily
'That's what he was saying,' she said.
'He says
maybe we should stay together. For the children.'
'And will you stay together?'
'I don't know.'
I tried to get her to spend the night with me but
she wouldn't. I felt so weak I could hardly walk her
to her car. It was as if Emily's stories about me were
coming true.
Later that evening I got a call from Clemens.
I let his voice hypnotise me with its quiet, urbane,


easy inflections.
'You must be awfully disappointed about the way
ROOV has panned out,' he said.
'I'd really appreciate
a chat with you about this. Are your evenings sometimes
'Oh yes,' I said.
'Why don't you come over tomorrow evening?' he
asked.
'Would that be possible?'
'Oh yes,' I said.
'We'll be alone. Nancy'll prepare something,
then she has to buzz off to the Humane Society festival
at Marin---did you know they were running a festival?'
'No I didn't.'
'It's part of the wildlife preservation campaign.'
He paused.
'I'm surprised you haven't booked yourself
a booth.
Most of the other vets in the area have. But
perhaps you forgot.'
'I just didn't know about it.'
Another pause.
Then he seemed to collect his wits and said, 'Very
well, then.
Tomorrow at six-thirty.'
That was Berkeley hills time for dinner (bedtime
nine or ten). I opened a tin of ravioli and poured
myself a glass of vodka.
I phoned Susan and said, 'Since Jerry's away why
don't you come over?'
She said, after what seemed to me a gasp of hesitation,
I shouldn't have made that call.
She slept at my
side and we hardly touched each other. She fell asleep
in my arms, still as always.
I felt two large tears roll down my cheek.
Because I knew now. I knew Emily was right.


The Martinez-Holstein house was as quiet as a
church. He came to the door in his loose Balkan blouse
and as I passed him he gave my arm a confidential squeeze.
The table had been prepared with a big bowl of
salad and pâte and little triangles of toast and
chocolate mousse and a nice spatlese just out of the
icebox.
We sat down at once, and he poured the wine.
We touched glasses.
He said, 'I get this direct from the vineyard.'
It was during the entrée (vol-au-vent with the best
bechamel I ever tasted) that he ventured onto ROOV.
He leaned back to do it (he always sat on a sort of
throne with stout lion's-head arms at the end of the
table).
'Of course we'd all like to be doing V and Vl in
vitro but that's impossible. In vivo it has to be.
And I'm afraid that the geneticists decided that while
the use of dog exnims would be a considerable advance
on 111 and 1V it wasn't enough, so it was better to
hold our resources for the real breakthrough.'
'I see,' I said (I didn't).
He got up and went across the dimly lit room to
a wall covered with bookshelves.
He took a volume
down and returned to the table.
Then he fixed a pair of pincenez onto his nose
(the first time I'd seen it done outside films).
'This book,' he said, 'is a transcript of the
proceeds at a CIBA Foundation symposium in London.
It contains a lecture by J.B.S. Haldane called 'Biological
possibilities for the human being in the next ten
thousand years'. In it he quotes words of his own


written in 1949. Here, read it for yourself.'
I read the following words:
'If King Charles 1's or King Louis XV1's head
had been stuck within a minute or so on a pump which
oxygenated blood to it, it would almost certainly have
come around, after half an hour or so, enough to open
its eyes and move its lips, and would probably have
recovered consciousness.'
Clemens's eyes were on me, mild, yet uncomfortably
concentrated.
He was leaning toward me, his elbows on
the table and his face---apart from that tranquil yet
uncanny concentration of the eyes---was without expression.
My impulse was to move further away but that might have
looked rude. I could almost feel his breath on my
cheeks. His eyes delved into me, though they were never
really piercing.
They maintained a soft, misty,
unwavering fixity as if I fascinated him.
Yes, I could read detached fascination in them,
all the more distressing for me as I felt that any
movement or speech on my part would only fuel his interest
further.
'Who---?' I began. Then I started again: 'I
don't know the background on these two kings, could you
fill me in?'
'I could indeed fill you in,' he said, his gaze
unchanging, his proximity marginally greater than before.
'Charles was king of England, Louis king of France.
They had one thing in common. They were both beheaded.'
'I see,' I said (my mouth was uncommonly dry and
these words emerged as a whisper).
'You have to realise, my friend,' he went on,
'that essentially ROOV is concerned with what, for want
of a better word, we must call immortality. And human
immortality is only possible as the end-effect of
intelligence.
Isn't that so? What is the computer
system we use in the ROOV experiment but the symbolisation
of accumulated human concepts? Now I'm sure you've


heard of a man in Michigan called Ettinger---Bob
Ettinger? You remember he caused quite a furore by
suggesting that corpses be frozen, and human organs
frozen, so that when a sound medico-biological technique
for prolonging life indefinitely had been found these
corpses could be thawed out and returned to life.
Theoretically there's nothing against this. Low
temperatures arrest growth in our organs as they do in
our vegetables when we put them in the fridge.
There
are a few snags, chief among them the damage that freezing
does. This can probably be eliminated. Are you
beginning to see the core significance of ROOV---that
one day a man may literally be separated from himself,
both in space and time, but nevertheless continue to
function? that he may one day be able to slip in and out
of life, or lose and then remake an organ, yet remain
a composite being? By the way, if you as an animal
lover are concerned about the rat-exnims already used
in ROOV, we're hopeful---if we can keep them alive
beyond their normal three-year lifespan---that we can
put them together again, so that they emerge from the
experiment the same as they went in except rejuvenated
and ready for a new life-cycle.'
A peculiar sensation arose in me---Iwas in a trance.
His face was inches from mine. I would have liked a sip
of wine but apart from the fact that he was obstructing
my path to it with his elbow I seemed incapable of
movement.
Worse by far than this, I felt a loss of even that
little energy I'd previously had in the erotic zone.
While he talked, my phallus all but disappeared.
was most eerie. The absurd conviction germinated in
my mind that he'd had something to do with my whole
impotence problem. Could he put the jinks on people?
'It must have occurred to you,' he went on, 'that
if we could have access to two of those frozen corpses,
ROOV V and Vl could proceed smoothly tomorrow. The


computer linkup requires a few adjustments but
otherwise we're ready to go.'
'So,' I said in a dusty whisper, 'what's the delay?'
'Well,' he said, moving even closer and lowering
his refined voice, 'we've been into the legal aspects
but---hem--- (yes, it was that sort of sound, a funny
little giggle, most uncanny), there's the difficulty
of getting signed waivers.'
'Waivers?'
'We have to have that. Not a lawcourt in the
nation would countenance anything less.'
'You mean,' I said, so weak now I could hardly
enunciate, 'frozen corpses have rights, is that it?'
'The moment they come alive again, they do.
Theoretically all we need is to replace the organ that
caused death, since, as I'm sure you know, most death
is caused by the failure of one organ in particular.
But when, in J.B.S. Haldane's words, the head has opened
its eyes and moved its lips, it has rights like any other
American citizen.'
'Of course,' I mouthed.
'Now if Charles 1 or Louis XV1 had signed something
before they lost their heads, they would have been ideal,
perfect exnims, don't you agree?'
'I agree,' I breathed, 'but wasn't this quite a few
years ago?'
'Well they don't chop people's heads off any more.'
'They electrocute them, inject them, gas them.
A man who's going to lose his life anyway is bound to
snatch at an opportunity of returning to life, even in
a different form, even in several different forms.
Isn't that so?'
'It certainly is,' I said.
'But again, a legal snag! Can you believe it?'
He shook his head.
'The Department of Justice won't hear
hear of it! Give a man who has possibly raped, murdered,


or assaulted numberless people the possibility of
starting all over again? Put a man through a lengthy
and expensive trial, sentence him to death, electrocute
him simply in order to bring him back to life again?
No! Useless to tell them that he would have his
bowels in Amsterdam and his sexual apparatus in Sydney.
They won't listen!
And one can understand them.
After all, their job is the law!'
'Exactly,' I said.
'We're brought back every time to our need for
volunteers,' he said, looking at me even more closely.
A great hush seemed to fall over the house.
'A suicide maybe,' he went on. 'There the law
might bend a little.
And, as for the suicidist, we
could promise him that all he found unbearable in his
present life would be rectified chemically during both
his ROOV and post-ROOV lives. All we would have to do
is change an organ, reconstitute the blood, balance
the chemical disposition in the neurotransmission
function.
I mean, take impotence!' he added suddenly.
I jumped a foot. 'Yes?'
'Take impotence,' he went on calmly.
'Can you
imagine anything more wretched? Can you wonder a man
would want to take his life? I would. Wouldn't you?'
I whispered, Well... Yes!'
'You would?' He leaned back with a sigh and
gazed before him with what seemed satisfaction.
'This
man would receive a guarantee that in his new state
there would be no impotence.
In effect he wouldn't
be commiting suicide at all, only opting for a better
life. The suicide would simply be the legal formality.'
'Exactly, said, almost sliding off my seat.
'Would you like some music?' he asked me quietly.
'Oh yes,' I said.
'I'd like some music.'
He rose and the moment he did so I drank the wine
in my glass in two gulps. I poured myself some more.


We parted a little later. He went away for a
few minutes and returned with a light overcoat on his
arm. As day temperatures were high in the eighties,
and the evenings still and sultry, I realised that the
overcoat could have only one meaning. He walked me
out to my car.
'I'm going to the city,' he said in his refined
way. 'I've a few things to attend to.'
And he gave me that same intimate, bloodcurdling
look as before.
There's one thing about a man who
talks quietly, urbanely and rationally.
He has to
be 100% sane. Otherwise, as in the case of Clemens
Martinez-Holstein, he begins to seem as crazy as a cat
in a storm.
I was happy when he got into his car and drove
off. I too drove out of the little patio in front
of his house. I didn't feel really safe until his
rearlights had disappeared from view.
It was good to see Jamie again. I was so tired
I went straight upstairs. He bounded after me.
I didn't even trouble to lock the porch door.
I managed to clean my teeth and get into the loose
shorts which are my only wear in bed. I was out
before a count even started.
I couldn't have been asleep more than an hour
when the dog started barking so frantically I jumped
into a sitting position before I was awake. A car
was outside.
My heart was pumping crazily and my throat was
thick. A trembling had seized my limbs. Jamie
had dashed downstairs and I heard someone coming up


slowly.
Jamie had stopped barking and by the sound was
wagging his tail and making votive leaps.
Then I heard Susan's voice. I subsided into the
lying position again.
'You scared the shit out of me,' I said.
'I was getting real worried.'
'Are you staying the night?' I asked her sleepily.
'I can't, Jerry's back and mom's gone home.'
She was standing framed in the dim light from the
corridor.
'So what you come for?' I asked her.
'I have to give you this injection.'
'What?' I was sitting up again at once. 'Oh no
you don't! Is that Emily's prescription?'
'Of course not!'
'You gave me Emily's prescription before and I
haven't felt the same since---I don't seem to have any
balls between my legs.'
'Well that's just why I want you to take this,'
she said with a hint of impatience.
At once I felt better about it. She was worried
about me, she wanted me.
'Jerry's doctor made it up,' she said.
'Hey wait a minute.
Jerry gave you this?'
I stared at her in the darkness.
'What's that you've got in your hand?' I asked her.
'It's the syringe,' she said.
'Intravenous?' I said.
'That's right.'
She came forward and sat on the side of the bed.
Yes, I do need help, I thought.
She opened her little medicine case, which she
used at the clinic.
She took out a tiny bottle of
spirits and dabbed the vein in the crook of my left
arm. Then she filled the syringe, carefully sent a


squirt of it in the air and then jabbed me e I lay
back and that's all I remember.
When I woke it was well after dawn. I lay there
blinking, feeling like a thousand fogs. I was certain
it was past eight---the time I went to the clinic. I
drew the phone to me lazily and tapped out the clinic
number. There was no reply. I called Susan. Jerry
answered and handed her over to me.
'Whatever you gave me last night was strong,' I
said.
'What's the time?'
'About ten.'
'You must rest a bit more. Everything's OK.
I closed the clinic for a vacation.'
'What the hell are you doing woman? You can't
do that on your own decision, you have a partner!'
'But you couldn't make it another day, don't you
realise that?
Clemens called me up about you. He
said you were behaving like a ghost. And that's what
I thought too!'
'It was Emily's injection,' I said.
'I mean
powders. Anyway, I have two operations today.'
'I did them for you.'
'But today hasn't happened yet!'
'Your operations were scheduled for yesterday.'
'That's not true, just look at the book Susan!'
'It is true. I gave you the injection two nights
ago, not last night.'
'What?' I squeaked.
'You mean I've been lying
here for---for---' I worked it out quickly--- 'around
30 hours?'
'Right. Now you know how much you needed the
'But what the hell was in that injection?


might have killed me. What kind of doctor does
your husband have---a horse doctor?'
'Just calm yourself. Don't you trust me?'
I subsided.
'OK,' I sighed.
'But I want you at the office
tomorrow, OK?'
I looked round the room.
'Where's Jamie?'
'Oh I let him out. The back door's open. I
thought he'll need to get out.'
'But he'll be starving.'
'No, I gave him a good day's supply. I left it
outside the back door.'
'You're a real nurse!'
As I put the phone down I felt sleep drift over me
again, a sweet misty shroud.
I sank back into the
pillows.
I awoke with Jamie barking downstairs. Another
car had driven up.
It was dark now. Was it the
evening of the morning I'd fallen asleep, or the following
one? The barking stopped, and I realised it must be
Susan. Again the light went on downstairs and footsteps
came up.
It was Emily. The terrors of my evening with
Clemens were suddenly revived as I heard her calling
me sweetly.
'I'm here,' I managed to say.
'I've brought the divorce documents,' she said.
She had a briefcase.
'But I've seen them already,' I said. 'They're
signed.'
'The attorney missed a document. He says you need
to sign a flagrante delectis clause.'
'What's that?'
She sat on the bed and produced the document in the
dimness.


'You see, honey,' she said, 'I feel you need
Susan and the sooner you marry her the better for both
of you.'
'You're dead right,' I said.
'Give me the pen.'
I signed at the bottom. It was too dark to see
what was written there.
I suppose I must have fallen asleep right after.
I woke in the middle of whatever night it was.
At first I could only recall Susan's visit, and the
jab in my arm. I wondered how many days had passed
since the clinic had been shut. I was surprised to
notice that I didn't care.
Then I remembered Emily. I recalled the document.
I'd signed something. Suddenly I panicked.
What had
I signed?
Was it a waiver for christsakes? A waiver that
could be---! I tried to sit up but couldn't.
They
were going to---! I was going to be the next---!
the next axnim for ROOV for christsakes!
Sweat was
pouring out of me.
I thought I remembered some words on the document.
They were 'in the event of my decease for whatever
reason.'
I touched my chin and found a mini-beard. I
raised myself painfully.
Getting out of bed was the
work of ten minutes. I tried three times before I
made it, falling back again and again.
I shuffled across the room like an old man. I
called Jamie and my voice was a croak.
He came bounding


up. He went crazy when he saw me standing. I
wanted to go downstairs and see about his food but I
couldn't make it. I opted for a shower and not a bath
because I might fall asleep in the bath. My eyes kept
crossing while I was shaving, and it took twice the
usual time. The bathroom clock said 3.45. I couldn't
believe it. The afternoon!
I dressed and cooked a hamburger for Jamie. He
didn't want it.
Outside the back door I found his
food bowl, and plenty of water.
Susan must have come
every day.
I drove to the office and found I couldn't steer
properly. My sight kept going wobbly. I was trembling
again. I returned home without going in the office.
When I got out of the car I nearly fell. My fingers
were jumping about.
I lowered myself onto a water-divan and felt I'd
been jogging twenty miles. I was panting like a bitch
in labor.
I drifted off to sleep again and was surprised to
find it only six o'clock when I woke.
I felt my chin
and found it cleanshaven, so it must be the same day.
I tried to dial Susan but couldn't hit the right
digits.
After about ten tries I succeeded.
'Listen,' I squeaked ineffectually, 'did Emily
have a hand in that injection? Is she trying to kill
me? I mean, she's going out with your husband, how do
I know they're not in cahoots with Clemens and want me
as the next exnim?' (my words were all slurred).
'The next what?'
'The human exnim!
They need a suicide.
Clemens
told me. I'm shit scared Susan.'
'I don't even know what you're talking about.'
'I was at dinner with Clemens and he told exactly
where the wind lies.'
'The wind?'


'They're going to use frozen corpses!'
'Frozen corpses?'
'Just because they can't get corpses to sign on
the dotted line, I mean unfrozen corpses,' I said.
'The corpses have to sign waivers first.'
'What's happened to your voice?' she said.
'Listen,
I'm going to get a doctor.'
'You better had.'
I put the phone down and felt like crying.
Jamie
was all I had.
He gave me a forlorn look.
It brought me new life.
I managed to raise myself off the divan and fetched a
bottle of bubbly. It wasn't on ice but to hell with
it, I could add some icecubes.
How I got the cork off
I shall never know. After about twenty tries it flew
at the ceiling and Jamie barked.
I poured it in a whisky tumbler and was just about
to put it back when I saw Jamie looking at me in an
affronted way.
I said, 'Wanna join me pal?'
I got his water bowl and filled it with champagne,
and put it down by the hearth.
'There you are, you German lush,' I said.
He lapped it like a lunatic.
He kept stopping and
smelling it, wondering if it was good and almost deciding
against, then he'd try it again and finally he settled in
and finished it.
He gave me one of those I-feel-good-but-oh-boy-do-
I-feel-bad looks.
I took a few generous gulps. I watched him collapse
into a sitting position.
Then he was out, right in the
middle of the carpet, his paws turned up.
I finished the bottle and got another. As soon
as the cork popped he jumped up like a man in a nightmare,
staring before him with bloodshot eyes.
Then he slumped
down and was out again.


I finished that bottle off too, then decided to
join Jamie on the floor. I felt my genitals had
shriveled to nothing.
I was in sudden panic fear
that they'd disappeared. Maybe I'd been operated on
in my sleep. I tore my pants open, pulled them down.
Everything was intact.
I slumped on the floor like
Jamie and put my arm round him. I felt cold, so I
moved closer.
He was as hot as a furnace. I fell
asleep at once.
The porch door burst open. I heard people.
I blinked awake.
The light was still on. I thought
I saw Emily and Mike Borovitz staring down at me.
I thought I was in bed. I heard Emily say 'My god!'
emphatically.
It might have been a bad dream.
I knew it wasn't a dream but it had the unsubstantiality
of a dream.
They switched the light off when they went. That
proved it wasn't a dream because when I opened my eyes
later it was all dark. I slowly became aware of my
situation. I was lying on the floor. I still had
my arm round Jamie who was still dead drunk.
He was
breathing heavily.
In the dim light I saw that my genitals were
exposed.
Then I remembered unzipping my pants before
falling asleep.
My nose was in Jamie's fur.
I was painfully stiff and moved slowly into the
sitting position. The knockout injection Susan had
given me seemed to be wearing off. I took a shower.


I started feeling real hungry and made some fried
eggs and dates. I was still staggering a bit.
I had to sit down every few minutes.
Also I was very
jumpy. Jamie only had to scratch himself and I jumped
as if a gunman had appeared.
I called up my shrink and told him the state I was
in and he said, 'Take it easy. I think you shouldn't
go to. work.
Maybe you need an organised rest.'
'What does that mean?'
'Oh a clinic some place. Forget everything and
let some nice buxom nurse be your mom for a few days.'
I was too afraid to leave the house.
I peeped
through the windows. I let Jamie out for a pee from
time to time but didn't go out with him.
That night I locked all the doors before going to
bed. I put the chain across in case Emily tried to
use her keys. I was afraid she might give me another
injection---the exnim one this time. Then have me
frozen.
I was undressing in the dark when the bedroom
became bright in the swinging headlights of a car and
Jamie started barking. I peeped out and saw an
unfamiliar car. I watched a man get out and walk to
the porch. I didn't recognise him. He rang the bell,
then knocked on the door with his knuckles but I didn't
move.
He called out my name.
It was my shrink.
I went downstairs and it was all I could do when
I opened the door to stop Jamie tearing him to pieces
(which probably says something about shrinks).
My shrink has pointed ears and maybe cloven hoofs.
His grey hair is close-cropped and the lips are thin,
the nose sharp, and he has rather wide glistening eyes
that settle onto things, particularly clients, and
remain there for too long. I was used to it.


"How ya doing Heinrich, come right in,' I said
weakly.
The first thing he said when he'd sat down was,
'What's this about you and the dog?'
'What do you mean Heinrich?'
'Your wife calls me up in a sweat, five years of
marriage, she says, and now this!'
He got up and started pacing round with his hands
in his pockets, which he always does when about to tear
down your defences.
'I mean,' he said, 'is it usual for you to lie on
the floor in the arms of a German shepherd with your
genitals showing?'
He swung round, fixed me with his
Viennese searchlights.
'Did you have sex?'
'Who with?'
'The dog.'
'Of course I didn't Heinrich, I was drunk!'
'And the exposed genitals?'
'I wanted to see if I could get any kind of rise
out of myself.'
'Get a what?' he asked.
'I wanted to see if there was any life in my balls.'
'And what was the result of your researches?'
'Not a thing.'
'Hence the use of the dog?'
'I drank a bottle of champagne and he drank a bottle
'You gave your dog a bottle of champagne?'
Dom Perignan.'
He blew through his lips and sat down again.
'I wouldn't have doneit normally,' I said, 'but I
was lonely. And I needed nursing. And there was only
the dog.'
'Nursing you see,' he said.
'Isn't Emily a
satisfying nurse? A dog is a substitute for that?'
'Not at all,' I said.
'But she got that injection


together didn't she?'
'Injection?'
'She got Jerry Riven to give this highly potent
sedative or whatever it was to his wife---'
'Excuse me,' he interruped.
'He gave a sedative
to his wife?'
'She gave it to me.
It was an intravenous
injection.
She jabbed my arm. Here, look.' I lifted
my sleeve.
'You can see it.
Susan's my partner.
She said my husband's doctor made this up.
She's a
biochemist remember?'
'Your business partner?'
'No, Emily. It was to make me commit suicide.'
'Commit suicide?'
'That injection knocked me out for three days.
I'm still groggy as hell.
And while I was out she
made me sign a document.'
'Ha!' he said.
'Now we have a document!'
'I think it was a waiver.'
'A waiver?' he asked, screwing his face up.
'I remember the words 'should I decide to commit
suicide' or something like that. What proves it is
that Clemens invited me to dinner earlier in the week
and we had a tête-à-tête and he said human exnims are
going to be used.'
'Human what?'
'They're going to be used instead of rats. They
wanted iced corpses but you can't get an iced corpse
to sign a waiver whatever which way you try.'
'Excuse me,' he said quietly, 'you said iced
corpses?'
'He said we can't use iced corpses because when
they come alive again they have the same damn rights
as anybody else.'
'I see.' He was giving me one of his long looks.
'When the corpses come alive again, yes?'


'That's right' (I was glad he was getting it at
last). 'So they were looking for suicides.'
'And your wife wished you to commit suicide?'
'You're damn right! And in that case I'd wake up
with my head in Palo Alto and my balls in Sydney!'
That's what they need the waiver for.'
'My god,' he said.
'Now you know it all Heinrich.'
'I certainly do,' he said, rising. 'No, don't
bother to come to the door.'
And he stepped straight out into the night.
That interview was a tranquillizer for me. I
slipped into bed and called goodnight to Jamie. I fell
asleep drinking an invisible toast to Freud.
I was in a sound slumber when Jamie started barking
again. I was getting used to intruders by now. But
there was a hell of a lot of noise this time. The
headlights of more than one vehicle were creating a
blinding light on the walls.
I heard the porch door open. I must have forgotten
to lock it after Heinrich.
Then somebody said 'Jamie!' and he suddenly went
quiet.
I lay there, my mouth open.
Mike Borovitz of all people appeared in the doorway,
silhouetted against the corridor lights.
'He's here,' he said to someone behind him.
There were two guys in white coats.
Emily was behind them.


'They won't hurt you honey!' she shouted at me.
The white-coated guys strode forward and seized
me in such a way I couldn't move.
'Don't touch me!' I screamed, trying to fight them
off. 'She wants me as an exnim!'
'Don't worry,' one of the white coats said, 'you'll
be OK.'
With an outburst of strength that surprised me
I managed to push them off and fling myself out of bed.
I was on my way to the door when they caught me from
behind.
'It was her injection!" I was yelling over and
over again.
But by this time I was on my way downstairs with
remarkable swiftness-- --and without my feet touching the
ground.
In the lounge I felt another injection go in,
and the fight went out of me. My last thought was,
why isn't my future wife here?'
I awoke in a clean bed facing a window.
Outside,
in the distance, were tufted brown hills of what I
thought was Contra Costa country, with Mount Diablo
to the right.
The room was small.
The sheets were
rose colored and smelled of lavender.
'Now how are you today?' a female said at my side.
I turned round and found a pleasant young face under
tinted hair.
'When did I get here?' I asked.
'Last night.'
'And what's the time?'
'About nine. Would you like some breakfast?'


'Yes,' I said.
'I think I could handle that.'
She was just about to disappear when I called her
back.
'Who's paying for all this?'
'I don't know, she said.
'I've only just come
'Perhaps you could inform yourself while they're
defreezing my breakfast.'
'Will do!' she said.
When she came back she said, 'The bill's going to
your wife.'
'That means me, right? They break into my house,
they pull me down the stairs---!"
'Why don't you cool off?' she said, taking my pulse.
'Your wife's coming for lunch. You can argue it with
'It was that fucking shrink of mine,' I said.
'If he's gone in with the ROOV people I'm finished.
But they're not going to get me to commit suicide---no
sir! no way!'
'Dead right,' she said. 'Now just eat your
breakfast and we'll run a bath for you.'
When I tried to use the phone I got the operator,
who told me my line wasn't connected. I called the
nurse again and asked her, 'What the fuck goes on? I
need to call my business partner.'
'You have to see the doctor first. I think you'll
have to improve your language,' she added with a giggle
as she went, 'I'm Presbyterian.'
One thing made me feel good. I'd been watching
the nurse's body with pleasure. As I finished my
breakfast and opened the Contra Costa Times I became
aware of an erection. And with that my courage started
coming back.
As it turned out I needed it---right away.


Emily was waiting for me when I returned from
the bathroom.
Her wild blonde hair had the appearance
of a vast halo against the window.
Her perfume filled
the room. She dropped her bomb at once.
'I have news for you,' she said.
'Arthur Schendt
and Lucy commited suicide.'
I almost fell down.
I looked at her closely to
see if she was laughing, maybe pulling my leg about my
own fears, but she was serious as hell. I sat on the
bed and just gasped for air.
'I don't believe you.'
She looked down.
She added, 'You know, she was always trying to do
it. I think her influence gradually worked on him.'
'I don't believe it.'
'Also he found out he'd missed the NP.'
Without looking at her I said, 'What's that?'
'The Nobel prize.
His whole life was geared to
that. You know a guy's name can come up several times,
then it's dropped.
Clemens told me. He said Arthur
knew the game was up when Hofhoch in Berlin got it.
Hofhoch's work was virtually a replica of Arthur's.
They had a long talk on the phone---Arthur and Clemens.
Arthur started getting very bitter, saying that the NP
was a reward for the over-rewarded, crap like that.'
'I just don't believe you Emily,' I said.
'I was shocked too.'
She put her hand on mine.
'I know,' she said.


I agreed with Emily I should hang on in the
nursing home till the end of the week. I wanted to
recover from the news. I asked for no visitors, even
Emily. I waited for Susan to call but she didn't.
I knew at least I was safe, now that the Schendts
had 'obliged'.
I thought of Lucy again and again,
lying quite still, gazing at me. I hardly spoke to
the day-nurse.
She seemed to wonder about this and
one time she squeezed my hand and said, 'Have you something
on your mind?'
'A couple of friends commited suicide.'
'Oh I'm sorry!'
I dreamed that Lucy was talking to me. And also,
waking in the middle of the night, I seemed to see her
in the room, sitting by the window as Emily had sat,
and telling me she'd done it for my sake, to make my
full participation in the ROOV program possible.
This
made no sense to me, and I put the image down to the
hallucination of grief. I found myself yearning for
her---just to see her, just to hear it wasn't true and
she was still alive and the story of her suicide was a
nightmare from which I'd woken.
I began to blame myself. I ought to have married
her, I told myself. An absurd triviality like violin
practice should not have prevented me. At the same
time, thinking these things, I felt disloyal to Susan.
A conflict started in my mind---between Lucy's breasts
as they appeared repeatedly before me, a pass-door to
bliss, and Susan's deep, dark, level gaze that told
me as repeatedly, - She wasn't for you, Lucy wasn't for


To compensate for the guilt this provoked I began
to blame Emily and Clemens, accusing them in my heart
of setting the suicide up, at least of having had a
hand in it somewhere.
I called Emily at the Martinez-Holstein residence,
guessing that she would be frightened to stay at the
Santa Rosa house
I accused her outright.
I said, 'Did Lucy and her husband sign a waiver?'
'Who got them to commit suicide---you? Clemens?'
Feeling that I now had a pair of balls between my
legs and that they weren't after all going to be trans-
ported to Sydney without me, I grilled her mercilessly.
Finally she screamed out, 'She killed herself because
of you! Arthur Schendt went to Susan's husband and said
what's this between Susan and her business partner and
Jerry Riven told him straight, they're virtually man and
wife, he said, and Schendt had to tell her, she went to
his desk and took out the gun, he stopped her doing it
but it triggered off his own grief about the Nobel physics
prize, and they agreed to do it the next day, they cut
their wrists.
Sleep with that!'
I slammed the phone down. My temperature went up.
I had to stay in the nursing home another three days.
At last Susan called me.
'I thought you were coming home days ago,' she said.
'I got so upset.'
'I want to reopen the clinic on Monday,' she said.
'Next Monday?'
'I'll be there,' I said.
'I'll be there!'
Emily called right after.
'I'm coming back home,' she said.
'What?' I almost screamed.
'Don't you want me?'


'Well of course I want you but aren't we both
negotiating marriages with other people?'
'I just feel we should be together so they don't
walk over us.'
She added, 'It strengthens our bargain-
ing power, gives us something to fall back on. What
do you say?'
'I say great!' I said. 'But who are you going to
marry finally?'
'It looks like Jock Terner.'
I smothered a gasp and said, 'OK.
Sounds a good plan
to me.'
'A good concerted plan,' she said.
I was as nervous as a kitten at the idea of facing
Emily at home. I called Susan and told her what was
happening.
She said, 'Jerry thinks it's a good idea too.'
'Yes. He says we can all negotiate better that
'Is Jerry in any negotiations at this time?' I
asked hesitantly.
'Of course! Emily spent about three hours with
him last night hammering things out!'
Emily certainly worked on a lot of fronts (and I'd
better learn to do the same).
'Do you have any idea why Emily wants to move back
with me?' I asked.
'Clemens didn't want her there any more,' Susan
said.
'He feels it's time to devote himself to his


wife and children.
He was very cut up about Lucy's
death because apparently he'd been seeing quite a bit
of her in recent weeks.
In fact they were thinking
of setting up house together.'
She said it in her mild and even way, knowing what
a mindblow - it was for me. My first reaction was that
of being swindled---Lucy hadn't commited suicide for
me after all!
Wasn't I worth commiting suicide for?
Did all the credits have to go to Clemens?
'How long,' I asked as casually as possible, 'has
this been going on between them?'
'Oh,' she said, matching my casual tone with what
I thought relish, 'for as long as he's known Arthur
Schendt, at least a couple of years.'
'A couple of years!' I said.
Then came the stunner.
'They were negotiating marriage right at the time
of the suicide,' she said.
'You know, she was the one
woman of his life he didn't need overcoats for. He
said that being with Lucy was like taking the uterine
journey backwards.'
Was she mocking me? I could hardly hold the phone.
'So,' I managed to whisper, 'you think she killed
herself out of disappointment? Maybe the negotiations
went wrong?'
'Could be,' she said blithely. 'He told her what
he told Emily---that he needed to be with his wife for
a bit, they were due for their annual vacation together.
That's why she gassed herslef---
'Gassed? I thought it was wrists!'
'Oh no. Arthur Schendt always favored gas. He
tried about three times with gas.'
'So really Clemens put the seal on it?'
My pride smarted. I started to blame Lucy. And
Susan knew exactly the effect she'd had.


And I admired her for it.
Feeling the return of phallic excitement, I
determined to have contact with Emily whether I wanted
it or not. It was no good trying to fight her. I'd
triedthat---and look where it got me. Happily my balls
were still in their wonted medical location but it had
been a close shave. Emily had shown her mettle and I
meant, for the time being, to play my cards diplomatic-
ally.
And eke what enjoyment I could. My shrink,
and plenty of fried eggs and dates, would be my support
system.
At the same time I was amazed at this cool decision
of mine. As my shrink always says, 'Unexpected change
is about the only constant you should expect in human
behavior.'
Emily was already home when I drove onto the driveway.
The front door was open, so were the windows upstairs.
Jamie came out and barked with joy and jumped up at me.
There was a shrieked 'Hi!' from upstairs that reminded
the cats next door that their respite was over.
Strange to relate, we kissed fondly but didn't make
contact. I found I did want it---and I could see she did
too---but we both opted silently to put an edge on the
desire by waiting.
She'd improvised lunch---mostly
salad with nuts and cheese and two baguettes fresh from
the bakery. These baguettes were so crisp that every
time we broke it in our hands Jamie came sniffing round.
'I took him for a walk,' she said.


I started in on ROOV almost at once. I wanted
to show that I still felt part of it (I didn't).
'I had dinner with Clemens just before all this
happened,' I told her, 'and he talked about the
possibility of human exnims, as you and I discussed before.'
She didn't know where to put her eyes. I enjoyed
this.
'You mean the cyrogenics idea?' she screamed (the
deeper the embarrassment the higher the decibels, with
Emily).
'You can't get people on ice to
sign waivers, you know that.
Clemens talked about
using suicides.
Waivers have to be signed before they
commit suicide.'
'Really?' she said, with big false owl-eyes.
'You
know, new ideas just sprout out of Clemens's ears!'
'Emily,' I said (I could have bitten off my tongue),
'when you came here that night when I was in bed did you
get me to sign a document?'
'Yes I did.'
'Was there a sentence in that document which said
should I decide to commit suicide?'
She stared at me. She came and sat by me. She
took my hand.
'Honey,' she said.
You can't go on talking this
way. Heinrich's really worried and so am I and we both
want you well.
That talk's going to start all the rumors
rolling again!'
'What rumors?'
'That you're not quite right in the head.'
'OK, OK,' she said consolingly.
'Yes I did get
you to sign a document but it was exactly what I said
it was, a new clause in our marriage settlement. I
felt you were better off with Susan than with me, also
Jerry Riven, whom I was going out with at the time,
wanted the whole thing cleared up. As for the phrase


'if I should commit suicice', you should really talk
to Heinrich about that.'
'OK, OK,' I said, 'but after the way Clemens
talked, and now Schendt's suicide...'
'Listen,' she said, 'you tried for cat and dog
exnims and in doing that you taught all of us in ROOV
some new tricks. In studying the cat and dog possibility
we discovered we could jump a whole series of stages and
make V and Vl what we'd previously envisioned for X and
X11 and X111!
You helped us skip about five stages,
all of them expensive---and by the way the expense
increases with each stage.
So maybe you saved the outfit
millions of dollars! So I don't think you should feel
you've failed honey---you haven't failed.
And you
shouldn't be disappointed.
You may be involved in ROOV
again---but in a far more important role.'
'Wow,' I said in a whisper.
'As Heinrich said to me the other day,' she went on,
'disappointment is a devastation, and it attacks first
and last the sexual energies.'
'He said that?'
She gazed at me a whole long time.
'You OK now?'
'Yes,' I said. 'I do care about ROOV Emily!'
'I know, I know. And we're all bearing that in
'I won't sleep tonight for excitement!" I said.
As a matter of fact we lay there holding hands
most of the night, awed by what ROOV would hopefully,
soon, become, for both of us. It made contact absurd,
trivial.


Marrying Emily was at one and the same time the
best and worst thing I ever did. I'm not sure if it
made me what I am now or unmade me as I once was.
Certainly I'm not my own person any more. But then
I've never really wanted to be. All my life I've
striven to sell myself, and I don't mean that in a
bad sense.
Looking at my life right now I can say
I've succeeded in doing that---and for a top price.
My fear that Susan and I had lost a lot of
customers through the sudden closure of the clinic was
banished by our answering service telling us that dozens
of people had rung up anxiously enquiring about our
return.
On the Staurday previous to me going back to work
Mike Borovitz dropped by and asked me would I like to
invest in his next New Age Meats venture? I said
'I'll think about it.'
He said he wanted to open a
shop on Solano Avenue in North Berkeley to catch the
enlightenment and ecology freaks.
He'd found another
cheap site in Oakland but would abandon it because a)
it was in a black district and b) it was close to
Mills college. He said, 'It'll be ten years before
blacks can afford to stop thinking about their own
survival and devote themselves to that of animals.
As for Mills college, students would eat animals alive
if they tasted better.'
The shop on Solano Avenue was perfect, he said.
'You get nothing but freaks there,' he added.
So I
told him to go ahead and see what kind of money we
would have to talk about.
So life was contrasting nicely with the helpless


horror that had gone before.
Emily was itching to know the truth about why
I was lying on the floor that time with Jamie.
'Are you into animals for christsakes?' she said.
'I wasn't even into women!' I said.
'I gave Jamie
a bottle of champagneand I drank another bottle myself.
Just before I fell asleep I made a physical enquiry into
whether my phallic area even existed any more and I
fell asleep without zipping up, that's all.'
That Sunday we did nos 16-24 until about four in
the morning.
Emily was in mint condition.
She said,
'overcoats, hooker-fixated medicos, overweight computer
dealers---I've had my belly full!'
Yes, this was the life. I arrived at the office
ten minutes earlier than necessary and everything looked
as bright as a new pin.
Susan came in and we just
feasted our eyes on each other.
The all-clear for our building operation had been
given by the contracting firm the previous week. The
demolition crew arrived that afternoon to break down the
rear wall of my office.
The noise and dust gladdened my heart.
It was like
a new beginning.
There was no chance of contacts with
Susan, though we both tried to 'accidentally' take a
few minutes off together, but the rush of clients was
too great and an emergency was brought in from the freeway
requiring immediate operation.
The contractors were as good as their promise.
The work was over in two weeks flat. A spacious gleaming
operation room, big enough to operate on a horse in,
was the result, and a widened driveway at the side of
the clinic so that emergency cases could be brought
straight round for operation.
Life settled back into its former routines.
Jerry
Riven was still anxious for Susan and I to marry, and so
I think was Emily, but she didn't want it to interfere
with the life she (Emily) and I shared, which was some-


thing of a contradiction.
She was thinking of our
numbers, which to my astonishment I was beginning to
enjoy again.
I urged her to settle her own affairs.
She had dropped Jock Terner, to my relief, and had taken
up with Jerry again, though not with what I judged to
be enthusiasm.
One evening about a month after the new surgery
was ready Emily invited me to dinner at a little French
place in Concord and when we were sipping our coffee
at the end she said, 'There's something I have to say.'
'There's a very big job waiting for you in ROOV.'
Excitement surged through me like a hot glow.
'But I don't know if you'll want to take the
responsibility,' she added.
'If you don't, we shall
all understand.'
'Tell me what it is!' I said.
'You asked me some time back when you were in your
delirious state if Arthur Schendt and Lucy had signed
waivers for the use of their bodies after death.
course that question came from a morbid state of mind
at the time, but it's surprising how unbalanced conditions
can intuitively hit on something like the truth.
it turns out, Arthur Schendt did, like a great number
of scientists, sign his body, and incidentally Lucy's
too, over to Stanford university. And the university
immediately contacted us.'
I was beginning to tremble.
'But what---? Where
do I come in?'
'Clemens saw to it---with a presence of mind typical
of that extraordinary man---I mean, overcoats apart he's
the only man I know who measures up to what I grew up
to believe a genius is---a fountain of new ideas and
these are confounding, even frightening-- --this man saw
to it that Arthur and Lucy were immediately put on a
life-support system. Luckily they were found within
minutes of commiting---'


'How did they do it?' I asked quickly.
'You told me wrists.'
'That's what I thought at the time,' she said
convincingly. 'But Arthur Schendt wanted to bequeath
clean bodies to the university, with the smallest damage
to the organs and neurotransmission, so Clemens told
The tips of my fingers seemed to be flying about.
She went on, 'If our hopes materialise, they can
both be brought back to life!'
'But---but---maybe they wouldn't like that!' I
said.
'Don't worry honey,' she said.
'The depressive
state leading 1 to suicide can be mended with a megadose
of endorphins. Easy!'
'My god,' I said.
She sighed.
'It's a heavy responsibility, I
'What is?' I asked, my fingers almost taking off.
'Would you be prepared to shoulder it? You see,
no surgeon can do it. Or will do it.
We can't even
think of approaching one. The experiment has to go
through in the conditions that have held from the
beginning.
Put it this way. The only way to save
poor Arthur and Lucy is to put them through the ROOV
experiment, and that can't be done in a hospital---or
by a surgeon.
It has to be the same genetic experiment
as what we did with the other exnims.'
'Listen', I said, wanting to leave the table,
escape a thousand miles.
'I couldn't---you don't
think I could---!'
'Who else is there to do it? And where else?
If it's all done at your clinic, which the federal
authorities already know about as one of the ROOV
locations, the job can be done now, and once it's done
nobody can undo it. But if it isn't done in those


strict terms Arthur and Lucy won't be with us again!
Honey, it isn't as if they'll feel anything! You
feel it! You feel the cruelty of the knife!
They're
dead honey! And this is going to bring them back to
life. You've got to do it!'
'But---' I could hardly get my breath, let alone
enunciate.
about hu-hu-human anatomy! I c-can't wield a scalpel!
I c-can't Emily!'
'Ssh!' she said, looking round. 'Don't you see
this is all emotional stuff---it's holding on! Let
go! We've talked to Susan and she's far more reasonable.'
'You've talked to Susan? And w-what did she say?'
'She said she'd think it over.
But you're not
even thinking it over!
Of course she has Jerry to
support her. But I mean to support you in the same
way! I'll be there at home waiting for you and
encouraging you and urging Clemens to start dropping
your name in NP circles---'
'My god,' I said again.
the human anatomy---and the---don't forget Lucy---it's
'Just cool off and I'll tell you a little more
about it,' she said.
And she did.
I drove to work next morning dazed and unhappy--
yet not at all sure I wasn't the happiest man on earth.
Of course that NP promise was absurd. I knew


it was just a carrot. I knew that the new ROOV
experiment could never become public. Even if it did
the geneticists would take the credit.
With luck my
name might be introduced in five, ten years.
Susan said nothing.
Our work continued as usual.
The thought of what was going to take place on the fourth
morning of September brought us even closer together,
and our contacts were as frequent as they could be with
a constant stream of clients and at least two operations
a day.
On the evening of September 3 Emily took me and
Susan to the Martinez-Goldstein residence for a quiet
but, in Clemens's words, 'celebration' dinner.
Nancy was there, the punctilious hostess as always.
It seemed Susan and I were the guests of honor.
Clemens
showed me a tattered five-year-old cable saying he was
a NPW, from Oslo, and then he showed me the document
itself.
He seemed to be telling me - and you, who knows,
It kindled fires of absurd pride in my heart,
I wanted a few words with Susan alone and asked the others
if I might walk with her in the garden a moment, as I
had a few things to say to her about the next day's
work.
When we were walking in the darkness hand in hand
I took her to a spot between two tall redwood trees.
'That evening we were all here together,for dinner,
you remember?---right here where we're standing Lucy and
I---we couldn't resist each other.
That's why we were
away from the party for about an hour. I don't know
if you noticed?'
'Yes I did,' she said.
'We could never resist each other.
Do you know
why I'm telling you this?'
'Because I don't want you to think that we're


doing anything kind of callous tomorrow.
I've seen
her body before.
I'm not really doing this for ROOV.
In a sense I am but I know they're using us Susan.
And you and I are letting our skills and our equipment
and office be used because we want Lucy and Arthur back
with us, isn't that right?' I repeated in the darkness,
standingon the very spot where Lucy and I had had contact,
'Isn't that right, Lucy?'
We walked a little further from the house.
'But I'm worried Susan!' I gripped her arm.
'Didn't you tell me when I was in the nursing home that
Clemens saw Lucy alone before she died?'
'Yes I did. He had her to dinner.'
'Alone? Are you sure?'
'Yes! Why, what's wrong?'
'He had me to dinner too! And I swear he was
trying to hypnotise me---get me to commit suicide---he
kept saying, what future does an impotent man have?-.
I was low in sexual energy then, Susan---and he knew---
from Emily!'
'I remember.'
'And he kept drilling into me with his eyes---!
He was almost sitting on top of me! He's hypnotic
Susan! He wanted to use me as an exnim! I know it!
So you see I wasn't so crazy when I talked to you on
the phone about iced corpses---you thought I was crazy---'
'Because Lucy and Arthur are on ice!
They're
probably thawing out now in preparation for tomorrow---'
'They're on life-support systems, not ice,' she
said.
'That's right! -
I smacked my forehead.
forgot!
So they were there in time.
You see how it
all fits? This Clemens must have known what was going
to happen.
He knew they were going to commit suicide!
So he was there on time with the life-support apparatus.


That means---! Do you see Susan? They
must have been alive!'
'They must still be alive.
And we're going to---
'They're dead! They commited suicide!'
'Clemens and the geneticists must have got there
before they were actually dead---don't you see? Other-
wise there'd be irreparable brain damage from gas!
But just to fall asleep---to be lightly gassed---that
constitutes no risk at all!
They're alive, Susan--
only asleep!
It's obvious! We can't have a head in
San José unless it's alive, unless it's aware and
thinking---as aware and thinking as the rat's head in
the Sonoma County lab!
Those rats were anaesthetized
but they were alive Susan!
And Lucy and Arthur are
alive.
They have to be to make the experiment possible!'
Susan was suddenly firm as I'd never seen her before.
She almost bared her teeth in the dark in her effort to
calm me.
'You mustn't think of it!' she said.
'Just do it!'
'But how can we? If they're alive! We could
wake them up now---instead we're---you know what our
assignment is? To murder them Susan!'
'It can't be true,' she said in great distress now,
as if the word 'murder' had taken all her firmness away.
'It can't be! Do you think a man with a Nobel prize
is going to risk that? Of course he isn't!
Because
he'd be booked for murder too---!'
'Damn right he would,' I said.
'Because he
persuaded her to commit suicide, like he nearly did me!'
'You can't be right!' She stamped her foot.
'You
can't be! They said they were going to take the
suicidal tendencies out of Arthur's brain by chemical
'They could do that now couldn't they? With the
bodies intact?'


'So what are we going to do?' she asked, fright-
ened, chilled in the humid evening air.
'I'm going to talk to Clemens about it. Do you
think I'm going to murder Arthur and Lucy? Or let you
do it?'
She shrugged, exhausted, and we strolled back to
the house.
Everyone was sitting round sipping coffee or
liqueurs. Emily was talking to Mike Borovitz. Jerry
Riven was in close chat with Nancy. I took Clemens
aside and we went to his library.
I told him more or less what I'd said to Nancy.
I was still unsteady.
He drew me to an armchair and sat close by.
'The brain damage wasn't irreparable,' he said.
'I confess that. But what do you think Stanford
university could have done had they harvested the organs?
Brought them back to life? Not at all! But we mean
to reconstruct the neurotransmission in both cases my
'Can't it be done without cutting them up?'
'Who will do it?' he asked emphatically.
'Only the
ROOV experiment can shelter tham now! Look at the facts.
First, we've no time to lose on niceties. We can't
retain two corpses---the coroner's verdict has already
been issued.'
'Who arranged it?'
'Dr Terner I believe.'
'Oh my god,' I said.
'My second point is that this is a perfectly
legitimate experiment as things stand officially.
Unofficially there's no way of saving Arthur and Lucy.
So we're forced to do it. We're morally obliged, as
their friends.
We have to bring them back to life
if we can manage it---and ROOV is the only way of doing
it! With the law on our side, that is. Everything
else would be meddling wi th corpses. Do you think for


one moment that we've time to persuade a huge
university to reconstruct these two brains, while
maintaining the bodies on a life-support system?
It takes academy weeks and months and sometimes years
to decide and then finance a new venture!
Come to
your senses sir! We have to save Arthur and Lucy
My mind was in a whirl. I nodded weakly.
'I suppose you're right,' I said.
The entire rear wall of the operating room could
now be opened, so that the vehicle containing the
Schendts would unload its contents without being seen
from the street or our waiting rooms. A cool musty
scent of eucalyptus drifted in. It was one of those
balmy ocean-influenced days. The breeze that stirred
the trees from time to time was as gentle as a kitten's
paw.
It had been reckoned that the operation would
take a minimum of eight hours, a maximum of ten. We
knew our assignments, Susan and I, having studied the
diagrams for a full month now.
She was trembling.
That gave me courage.
When we heard the crunch of the gravel under the
thick tyres, as the vehicle traveled slowly along the
side of the clinic, we looked at each other and tried
to smile.
As the vehicle turned into the patio and backed
slowly toward us, darkening the room, hiding the
eucalyptus trees and taking away the spicy scent of
that balmy morning, I suddenly remembered I hadn't fed


Jamie.
But Emily would cope, I was sure of that.
I'm writing this some years later.
Susan and
I are married, and we live at the Santa Rosa house.
Jamie is six now, and has sired a number of pedigree
puppies. Emily never married Jerry.
He fell in
love with the student who wanted to marry Arthur Schendt.
The operation was successful by the way, but it
took far longer than ten hours. We were still at it
at dawn the next morning.
Emily was waiting at the house with a magnificent
breakfast for both of us. She visits us from time to
time, and of course we're still closely involved in the
ROOV experiment, since she is in charge of the male head,
as before.
As a matter of fact Emily married Jock Terner.
It was a great wrench for me. I just couldn't respect
the man. Their first evening together, on Broadway
in San Francisco, literally hooked her. I do my best
to see her alone. And I make sure he never meets Susan.
ROOV Vl and V1l are proceeding smoothly by the way.
The neurotransmission in the heads has been rehabililitated.
It looks like all is ready for the great event.
Phallic
erection took place in Sydney, Australia, and there was
female receptivity.
That was precisely ten months and
three days ago. Four weeks after that electronically
induced coition took place.
The pregnancy has been smooth.
Next week---the
words will hardly write themselves, I feel so proud---
progeny will result.
Thus, Arthur and Lucy will eventually return to a
full and active life in a new role---that of parents.
It was Clemens who got me to write all this. He


said I must tell the world unofficially what it
wouldn't tolerate being told officially.
'Use a pseudonym,' he said. 'And disguise the
events. But not too much.'