Orbit 9 Read online

  “Well,” was all I could think to say. Laura usually was the shy one, the last to make friends with people, the last to speak to company, the first to break away from a group of strangers.

  “She seems all right,” Janet said.

  “Let’s introduce ourselves tonight. Maybe she’s someone from around here, someone from school.” And I wondered where else Laura could have met her without our meeting her also.

  We didn’t meet her that day.

  I got tied up, and it was after eight when I got home, tired and disgusted by a series of mishaps again at the lab. Janet didn’t help by saying that maybe we had too many things going at once for just the two of us to keep track of. Knowing she was right didn’t make the comment any easier to take. Lenny and I were jealous of our shop and lab. We didn’t want to bring in an outsider, and secretly I knew that I didn’t want to be bothered with the kind of bookkeeping that would be involved.

  “You can’t have it both ways,” Janet said. Sometimes she didn’t know when to drop it. “Either you remain at the level you were at a couple of years ago, patenting little things every so often, and leave the big jobs to the companies that have the manpower, or else you let your staff grow along with your ideas.”

  I ate warmed-over roast beef without tasting it, and drank two gin-and-tonics. The television sound was bad and that annoyed me, even though it was three rooms away with the doors between closed.

  “Did you get started on Mike’s ham set yet?” Janet asked, clearing the table.

  “Christ!” I had forgotten. I took my coffee and headed for the basement. “I’ll get at it. I’ve got what I need. Don’t wait up. If I don’t do it tonight, I won’t get to it for days.” I had suits being tested at three different hospitals, Mike’s, one at a geriatric clinic where an eighty-year-old man was recovering from a broken hip, and one in a veterans’ hospital where a young man in a coma was guinea pig. I was certain the suit would be more effective than the daily massage that such patients usually received, when there was sufficient help to administer such massage to begin with. The suits were experimental and needed constant checking, the programs needed constant supervision for this first application. And it was my baby. So I worked that night on the slides for Mike Bronson, and it was nearly two when I returned to the kitchen, keyed up and tense from too much coffee and too many cigarettes.

  I wandered outside and walked for several minutes back through the woods, ending up at the bridge, staring at the Donlevy house where there was a light on in Pete Donlevy’s study. I wondered again about the little woman who had moved in, wondered if others had joined her, or if they would join her. It didn’t seem practical for one woman to rent such a big house. I was leaning against the same tree that Rusty had perched in watching the unloading of boxes. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, images were flitting through my mind, snaps, scraps of talk, bits and pieces of unfinished projects, disconnected words. I must have closed my eyes. It was dark under the giant oak and there was nothing to see anyway, except the light in Pete’s study, and that was only a small oblong of yellow.

  The meandering thoughts kept passing by my mind’s eye, but very clearly there was also Pete’s study. I was there, looking over the bookshelves, wishing I dared remove his books in order to put my own away neatly. Thinking of Laura and her nightmare. Wondering where Caesar was, had I left the basement light on, going to the door to whistle, imagining Janet asleep with her arm up over her head, if I slept like that my hands would go to sleep, whistling again for Caesar. Aware of the dog, although he was across the yard staring intently up a tree bole where a possum clung motionlessly. Everything a jumble, the bookshelves, the basement workshop, Janet, Caesar, driving down from Connecticut, pawing through drawers in the lab shop, looking for the sleeve controls, dots and dashes on slides…

  I whistled once more and stepped down the first of the three steps to the yard, and fell…

  Falling forever, ice cold, tumbling over and over, with the knowledge that the fall would never end, would never change, stretching out for something, anything to grasp, to stop the tumbling. Nothing. Then a scream, and opening my eyes, or finding my eyes open. The light was no longer on.

  Who screamed?

  Everything was quiet, the gentle sound of the water on rocks, a rustling of a small creature in the grasses at the edge of the brook, an owl far back on the hill. There was a September chill in the air suddenly and I was shivering as I hurried back to my house.

  I knew that I hadn’t fallen asleep. Even if I had dozed momentarily, I couldn’t have been so deeply asleep that I could have had a nightmare. Like Laura’s, I thought, and froze. Is that what she had dreamed? Falling forever? There had been no time. During the fall I knew that I had been doing it for an eternity, that I would continue to fall for all the time to come.

  Janet’s body was warm as she snuggled up to me, and I clung to her almost like a child, grateful for this long-limbed, practical woman.

  We met our new neighbor on Saturday. Janet made a point of going over to introduce herself and give her an invitation for a drink, or coffee. “She’s so small,” Janet said. “About thirty, or a little under. And handsome in a strange way. In spite of herself almost. You can see that she hasn’t bothered to do anything much about her appearance, I mean she has gorgeous hair, or could have, but she keeps it cut about shoulder length and lets it go at that. I bet she hasn’t set it in years. Same for her clothes. It’s as if she never glanced in a mirror, or a fashion magazine, or store window. Anyway, you’ll see for yourself. She’ll be over at about four.”

  There was always work that needed doing immediately in the yard, and on the house or the car, and generally I tried to keep Saturday open to get some of it done. That day I had already torn up the television, looking for the source of the fuzzy sound, and I had replaced a tube and a speaker condenser, but it still wasn’t the greatest. Rusty wanted us to be hooked up to the cable, and I was resisting. From stubbornness, I knew. I resented having to pay seventy-five dollars in order to bring in a picture that only three years ago had been clear and sharp. A new runway at the airport had changed all that. Their radar and the flight paths of rerouted planes distorted our reception. But I kept trying to fix it myself.

  Janet was painting window shades for Laura’s room. She had copied the design from some material that she was using for a bedspread and drapes. She had baked two pies, and a cake, and a loaf of whole-wheat bread. The house was clean and smelled good and we were busy. And happy. It always sounds hokey to say that you’re a happy man. Why aren’t you tearing out your hair over the foreign mess, or the tax problem, or some damn thing? But I was a happy man. We had a good thing, and knew it. Janet always baked on Saturday, froze the stuff and got it out during the week, so the kids hardly even knew that she was a working mother. They were happy kids.

  Then Christine came along. That’s the only way to put it. That afternoon she came up through the woods, dressed in brown jeans, with a sloppy plaid shirt that came down below her hips and was not terribly clean. Laura ran down to meet her, and she was almost as big as Christine.

  “Hi,” Janet said, coming out to the terrace. “Mrs. Rudeman, this is Eddie. And Rusty.”

  “Please, call me Christine,” she said, and held out her hand.

  But I knew her. It was like seeing your first lover again after years, the same shock low in the belly, the same tightening up of muscles, the fear that what’s left of the affair will show, and there is always something left over. Hate, love, lust. Something. Virtually instantaneous with the shock of recognition came the denial. I had never seen her before in my life, except that one morning on the way to work, and certainly I hadn’t felt any familiarity then. It would have been impossible to have known her without remembering, if only because of her size. You remember those who aren’t in the range of normality. She was possibly five feet tall, and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. It was impossible to tell what kind of a figure she had, b
ut what was visible seemed perfectly normal, just scaled down, except her eyes, and they looked extraordinarily large in so tiny a face. Her eyes were very dark, black or so close to it as to make no difference, and her hair, as Janet had said, was beautiful, or could have been with just a little attention. It was glossy, lustrous black, thick and to her shoulders. But she shouldn’t have worn it tied back with a ribbon as she had it then. Her face was too round, her eyebrows too straight. It gave her a childlike appearance.

  All of that and more passed through my mind as she crossed the terrace smiling, with her hand outstretched. And I didn’t want to touch her hand. I knew that Janet was speaking, but I didn’t hear what she said. In the same distant way I knew that Laura and Rusty were there, Laura waiting impatiently for the introductions to be over so she could say something or other. I braced myself for the touch, and when our fingers met, I knew there had been no way I could have prepared myself for the electricity of that quick bringing together of flesh to flesh. For God’s sake, I wanted to say, turn around and say something to Rusty, don’t just stand there staring at me. Act normal. You’ve never seen me before in your life and you know it.

  She turned quickly, withdrawing her hand abruptly, but I couldn’t tell if she had felt anything, or suspected my agitation. Janet was oblivious of any currents.

  “But you and Rusty and Laura have all met,” she said. “I keep forgetting how great kids are at insinuating themselves into any scene.”

  “Where’s Caesar?” Laura finally got to ask.

  I had another shock with the name. My nightmare, my waking nightmare. Or had I heard her calling to the dog?

  “I never take him with me unless he’s been invited,” Christine said. “You never know where you’ll run into a dog-hater, or a pet cat, or another dog that’s a bit jealous.”

  They talked about the dog we had had until late in the spring, a red setter that had been born all heart and no brain. He had been killed out on the county road. Again I was distantly aware of what they were saying, almost as if I were half asleep in a different room, with voices droning on and on beyond the walls. I was simply waiting for a chance to leave without being too rude.

  The kids wandered away after a little while, and Janet and Christine talked easily. I began to listen when she mentioned Pete’s name.

  “Pete and Grace had been my husband’s friends for a long time. Pete studied under him, and Grace and I were in classes together. So they invited me to stay in their house this year. Karl suggested Pete for the exchange program three years ago. He didn’t believe there was a coherent American school of philosophy, and he thought that it would be good for Pete to study under the Cambridge system of Logical Positivism.” She shrugged. “I take it that Pete didn’t write to you and warn you that I’d be moving in. He said he would, but I guess I didn’t really think he’d get around to it.”

  Karl Rudeman. Karl Rudeman. It was one of those vaguely familiar names that you feel you must know and can’t associate with anything.

  Janet had made a pitcher of gin and bitter lemon, and I refilled our glasses while I tried to find a tag to go with the name. Christine murmured thanks, then said, “It isn’t fair that I should know so much about you both—from Pete—and that you know nothing about me. Karl was a psychologist at Harvard. He worked with Leary for several years, then they separated, violently, over the drugs. He died last May.”

  I felt like a fool then, and from the look on her face, I assumed that Janet did too. Karl Rudeman had won the Nobel for his work in physiological psychology, in the field of visual perception. There was something else nagging me about the name, some elusive memory that went with it, but it refused to come.

  Christine stayed for another half hour, refused Janet’s invitation to have dinner with us, and then went back home. Back through the woods, the way she had come.

  “She’s nice,” Janet said. “I like her.”

  “You warn her about Glaser?”

  “She’s not interested. And it does take two. Anyway she said that Pete gave her the rundown on everyone on the lane. You heard her.”

  “Yeah,” I lied. I hadn’t heard much of anything anyone had said. “He must have been thirty years older than she is.”

  “I suppose. I always wonder how it is with a couple like that. I mean, was he losing interest? Or just one time a month? Did it bother her?” Since Janet and I always wondered about everyone’s sex life, that wasn’t a strange line for our talk to have taken, but I felt uncomfortable about it, felt as if this time we were peeking in bedroom-door keyholes.

  “Well, since you seem so sure she wouldn’t be interested in Bill Glaser, maybe she’s as asexual as she looked in that outfit.”

  “Hah!” That’s all, just one Hah! And I agreed. We let it drop then.

  We had planned a movie for that night. “Get some hamburgers out for the kids and I’ll take you around to Cunningham’s for dinner,” I said to Janet as she started in with the tray. She looked pleased.

  We always had stuffed crab at Cunningham’s, and Asti Spumante. It’s a way of life. Our first date cost me almost a week’s pay, and that’s what we did, so I don’t suggest it too often, just a couple of times a year when things have suddenly clicked, or when we’ve had a fight and made up to find everything a little better than it used to be. I don’t know why I suggested it that night, but she liked the idea, and she got dressed up in her new green dress that she had been saving for a party.

  When I made love to her late that night, she burst into tears, and I stroked her hair until she fell asleep. I remembered the first time she had done that, how frightened I’d been, and her convulsive clutching when I had tried to get up to bring her a drink of water or something. She hadn’t been able to talk, she just sobbed and held me, and slowly I had come to realize that I had a very sexy wife whose response was so total that it overwhelmed her, and me. She sighed when I eased my numb arm out from under her. Pins-and-needles circulation began again and I rubbed my wrist trying to hurry it along.

  Christine Warnecke Rudeman, I thought suddenly. Christine Warnecke. Of course. The photographer. There had been a display of her pictures at the library a year or two ago. She had an uncanny way of looking at things, as if she were at some point that you couldn’t imagine, getting an angle that no one ever had seen before. I couldn’t remember the details of the show, or any of the individual pieces, only the general impression of great art, or even greater fakery. I could almost visualize the item I had read about the death of her husband, but it kept sliding out of focus. Something about his death, though. Something never explained.

  Tuesday I went home for lunch. I often did, the lab was less than a mile from the house. Sometimes I took Lenny with me, but that day he was too busy with a printed circuit that he had to finish by six and he nodded without speaking when I asked if he wanted a sandwich. The air felt crisp and cool after the hot smell of solder as I walked home.

  I was thinking of the computer cutting tool that we were finishing up, wondering if Mike had mastered the Morse code yet, anticipating the look on his face when I installed the ham set. I was not thinking of Christine, had, in fact, forgotten about her, until I got even with the house and suddenly there she was, carrying a tripod out toward a small toolhouse at the rear of the lot.

  I turned in the Donlevy drive. If it had been Ruth Klinger, or Grace Donlevy, or any of the other women who lived there, I would have offered a hand. But as soon as I got near her, I knew I’d made a mistake. It hit me again, not so violently, but still enough to shake me up. I know this woman, came the thought.

  “Hi, Eddie.” She put the tripod down and looked hot and slightly out of breath. “I always forget how heavy it can get. I had it made heavy purposely, so it could stay in place for months at a time, and then I forget.”

  I picked it up and it was heavy, but worse, awkward. The legs didn’t lock closed, and no matter how I shifted it, one of them kept opening. “Where to?” I asked.

  “Inside t
he toolshed. I left the door open…”

  I positioned it for her and she was as fussy as Lenny got over his circuits, or as I got over wiring one of the suits. It pleased me that she was that fussy about its position at an open window. I watched her mount a camera on the tripod and again she made adjustments that were too fine for me to see that anything was changed. Finally she was satisfied. All there was in front of the lens was a maple tree. “Want to take a look?” she asked.

  The tree, framed by sky. I must have looked blank.

  “I have a timer,” she said. “A time-lapse study of the tree from now until spring, I hope. If nothing goes wrong.”

  “Oh.” My disappointment must have shown.

  “I won’t show them side by side,” she said, almost too quickly. “Sort of superimposed, so that you’ll see the tree through time…” She looked away suddenly and wiped her hands on her jeans. “Well, thanks again.”