Orbit 3 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  From his notebooks:

  Collecting old-fashioned windup phonographs against the day when no elec. Also old-fashioned 78 records. Got to keep so many things I can’t reproduce.

  Music. Good; Siss likes. She enjoys Tchaikowsky, Wagner and Beethoven (what wildness must stir within her poor head sometimes!) She’ll sit still for Bach. I can’t complain.

  We’re both crazy about Cole Porter, she for the music, I for the words, those great words, so much more ironic now than he had ever meant them to be.

  “It’s All Right With Me,” for instance.

  * * * *

  We’ve found a place. We—Is that the first time I’ve used the word?

  It’s far enough away from the city to be really country; beyond the stink and the reminders of dead glory; yet close enough so I can get in for supplies if I need them. I’ve stored up enough good gassed-up cars so that travel is no problem, but I think I’ll try to stay here as much as I can. I used to be a fair woodsman. Let’s see how much I remember.

  It’s peaceful here. My stomach-ache is better, all of a sudden.

  * * * *

  He insisted on thinking of her as a person who had come into his custody and for whom he was responsible. For a long time all he felt toward her was pity; no desire. And for that reason he also pitied himself.

  Because she was what she was, it would be unthinkable for her to touch him in any but the most innocent of ways, as she would one of her animal friends.

  And when she called him anything but Mr. Ralph, using a word like honey, he was not flattered because he had heard her apply it also to a squirrel, a bluejay and a field mouse.

  “Mr. Ralph, can I ask you a favor? Would you mind if you took me for a ride?”

  It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to go anywhere; apparently her enjoyment lay in sharing the front seat with him; he noticed that she sat very close to him, in almost the exact center of the seat and did not, as he had speculated she might, sit at the far right, next to the window.

  For her ride she chose an ornate costume which included a hat, a silk scarf, dark glasses, jacket, blouse and skirt, stockings and half-heel shoes.

  She picked the costume at what she called the Monkey Ward store while he shopped down the block for a fairly clean convertible with sound tires and a fair amount of gas in the tank.

  They rode out past the quarry. Long ago he had stored away the fact that Quarry Road was the highway probably least littered with debris.

  There was one bad place where he had to get off into a field to skirt what looked as if it had been a 50-car chain-reaction smashup. Otherwise, it was good driving all the way to the lake.

  He parked near the old boat-launching site and automatically scanned the watery horizon for any sign of sail or smoke. He had never entirely abandoned hopes of finding other people.

  He had brought from the liquor store (catty-corner from Monkey Ward’s) a fifth of a high-priced Scotch and as they sat looking out over the lake he carefully opened it, preserving the tinfoil for her.

  Then he ceremoniously offered her a drink. She declined, as he knew she would, saying:

  “Not now, thanks. Maybe some other time.” Apparently a piece of etiquette she’d learned was that it was bad manners to refuse anything outright—especially something to eat or drink.

  Rolfe said: “I’ll have one, though, if you don’t mind.” And she replied, in what must have been a half-remembered witticism, “Take two, they’re small.”

  He took two in succession, neither small.

  The lake was serene, the sun was warm but not hot, a breeze blew from the east and the bugs were infrequent.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that there’s nobody else?” he asked her. “Don’t you get lonesome?”

  But she said: “I’m always lonesome. I was. Now I’m less lonesome than I was. Thanks to you, Mr. Ralph.”

  Now what could he say to that? So he sat there, touched but scowling out at the horizon, and then he reached for the very old Scotch (the world had still lived when it was bottled) and took a very big swallow. Only later did he think to offer her one.

  “Some other time, maybe,” she said. “Not right now.”

  There came a day when her last brassiere lost its hooks and she obtained his dispensation to stop wearing it. And another when her blouses lost their buttons and refused to stay closed by the mere tucking of their tails into her skirts, and he told her it didn’t matter in the least; until finally her last rags fell from her.

  She said to him: “You’re my Mr. Ralph, honey, and it’s not wrong to be this way with you, is it, Mr. Ralph?”

  This touched him so that he took her naked, innocent body in his arms and kissed the top of her clean, sweet head and he said:

  “You’re my big little girl and you couldn’t do anything wrong if you tried.”

  And only then, for the first time, he felt a desire for this waif—this innocent in whom the seeds of the whole human race were locked.

  She gave him a quick daring kiss on the cheek and ran off, saying: “It’s time I started supper now. My gosh, we have to get you fed.”

  * * * *

  He remembered with shame a pathetic scene early in their life together. They had gone to Monkey Ward’s and dressed from the skin out in brand-new evening clothes. He’d had to help her cancel some tasteless combinations but at last she stood before him like an angel. Or, as he’d said: “Damned if you don’t look like a Madison Avenue model.”

  “You shouldn’t swear, Mr. Ralph,” she’d said. “But thanks anyhow.”

  “And you shouldn’t talk. You’re welcome. Look, we’re going to play a game. We’re going to a fancy night club. We’re going to make believe you’re a mute—that you can’t talk. No matter what, you must not say a word. Not a word.”

  “All right, Mr. Ralph.”

  “Starting right now, damn it! I’m sorry. I mean starting right now. All you can do is nod or smile. You can touch me if you want to. But you can’t talk at all. That’s part of the game. Do you understand?”

  She started to say yes, then caught herself and nodded.

  The silent nod from this beautifully gowned woman immediately made her ten times more attractive. Pleased with himself and with her, he gave her his arm and bowed her into the front seat of the Bentley he had searched out for their evening.

  The night club had once been a major one, with a resident big-name band. Changing fashion had turned it into a discotheque, so that it had a juke box. He fed it a handful of coins to pay his way into a night of illusion. But the tables were bare and therefore wrong. He found a linen closet and set them with tableclothes and silverware, glasses, candlesticks.

  The illusion grew. He found a switch that set in motion a set of colored lights which played on multi-faceted colored globes which hung from the ceiling. Another switch set them spinning slowly.

  “What do you do in your spare time?’ he asked her, knowing she wouldn’t reply but wanting to see how she would react.

  She shrugged, smiled a little and shook her head in what he tried to imagine was an attitude that said she had so little spare time that it was negligible.

  She was carrying out her part of the bargain. She did it extremely well. She listened without a word to his conversation, looking into his eyes as he pretended they were two among hundreds of elegant diners. He reconstructed talk from pre-holocaust nights out. He pretended she was a girl he had once been engaged to and told her extravagant things. She looked back at him and smiled, as if mockingly, as the old girl would have done. He pretended it was a later time, with the engagement in ruins and him solacing himself with the wife of his best friend, with the best friend’s knowledge and consent, and the girl across from him gave him silent looks of profound sympathy. He pretended he had hired a call girl and spoke foully to her. She smiled bravely, her lips quivering, saying nothing.

  Angered by the illusion which he had created and which mocked him, he drank too much
and continued to abuse her—for herself, now; for doing as he had asked, for remaining silent.

  The juke box was playing “Begin the Beguine” and ghostly dancers danced inside the circle of tables, under the soft colored lights. He saw them and cursed them for their nonexistence. He got up, knocking his chair over backwards, and shouted at her.

  “Speak!” he said. “I release you from your muteness.”

  She shook her head, no longer smiling.

  “Speak! you misbegotten halfwit! You monstrous bird-brained imposter! You scullery maid in a Schiaparelli gown. Speak, you—mental case.”

  But still she said nothing; merely looked at him with those deep eyes that seemed to understand and forgive.

  Only at the very end of their evening out, when he had drunk himself into a stupor and stared across the room over her right shoulder, as if transfixed by his misery, did she speak. And then she said only:

  “We better go home, Mr. Ralph, honey.”

  Then with a strength greater than his she half carried him there to the car and drove him home and put him to bed. It was a good thing he’d taught her to drive.

  He woke up contrite, half remembering that he’d behaved unforgivably.

  But she forgave him, as perhaps no one else ever would have, using these words:

  “I forgive you, Mr. Ralph. You knewd not what you dood.”

  He was delighted. “Do not what I would,” he said. “Had I but dood what I could, who knew what would have been dood?”

  “I don’t think that’s very nice, Mr. Ralph. I said I forgive you. You’re supposed to say thank you and say you’re sorry, even if you’re not sorry.”

  He was still laughing at her, even after the realization that he had a hangover.

  “Okay. I’m sorry even if I’m not sorry and it’s very good of you to forgive me for my insufferable behavior, even if nobody asked you to.”

  “Thank you for saying that, Mr. Ralph. Now I’ll fix you a hangover remedy.”

  “Where did you learn to concoct a hangover remedy, for God’s sake?”

  “I was a working girl once for a poor man who got intoxicated and his wife. I learned it there.”

  She gave him no magic potion but an ordinary tomatoey thing laced with pepper and Worcestershire sauce. He drank it down but stubbornly declined to feel better for a full hour. By then he had persuaded Siss he needed a cold beer and she’d brought him one—disapproving but proud of her ingenuity in having produced it, since they kept no store of alcoholic beverages. She must have made an ingenious search to find a cold beer; he was suddenly proud of her.

  But, remembering his performance of the night before, he hated himself.

  * * * *

  From the holding of hands to the kiss is not so far a thing as from the not holding of hands to the holding.

  One thinks of the innocence of holding hands (children do it; men shake hands) but it is a vast journey from a platonic handclasp, over which there is no lingering, to the clasp which is so intense and telegraphic (accompanied, as it may be, by ardent gazing) that it would be a great surprise if the kiss to which it soon led were rebuffed.

  And a kiss may lead anywhere. This he knew. He wondered how much she knew, or felt or surmised.

  Dared he take her hand to help her across a stream or a rocky place? So far he had taken her arm, holding her firmly just above the elbow as if she were an elderly woman and he a large Boy Scout. He had no wish yet for anything more intimate.

  * * * *

  It was a hesitant, tentative beginning to their romance.

  “Do you mind my touching you?” he asked. Lately he had found that it gave him pleasure to touch her hair or trace the outline of her ear, or run his finger along her breastbone. Nothing carnal.

  “No; I enjoy it.”

  * * * *

  And so they married. He arranged a ceremony, not only for her sense of propriety but to satisfy his demand for a kind of stability amid chaos.

  He made it as elaborate as possible. He found a big flat rock to be the altar. He picked flowers and garlanded them into a headpiece for her. Let her head be covered, though her body was not.

  She surprised him with a piece of writing. Crudely written in pencil on a sheet from a lined pad, it said:

  “To my Mr. Ralph—

  “This is our day to mary to-gether. My day and your day. I feel real good about it even if nobody else cant come. I’ll try and make you a good wife with all my heart.

  “I know you do the same thing for me because you are kind and good dear Mr. Ralph.

  “Your freind and wife

  “Cecelia Beamer”

  It was the first time he knew what Siss was the nickname for.

  Never before a sentimental man, Martin took his wife, Cecelia Beamer Rolfe, in his arms and kissed her with tenderness and affection.

  He put her wedding-letter, as he thought of it, away in his desk, where it would be safe.

  He wanted to consummate the marriage outdoors. It was a perfect June day, the sun warm, the grass soft, a breeze gentle. Lord knew they could not have asked for greater privacy than that of their own planet. But he felt Siss would have been, if not shocked, embarrassed unless four walls surrounded them.

  Therefore he took her indoors, where she removed her flowery hat and put it in water, in a bowl.

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

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

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

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

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

  He had to stop her talking and kissed her.

  * * * *

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

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

  * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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