Case and the Dreamer (39 page)

Then we went back to the waterbed, and it was good, it was better than anything or anybody before. But it wasn’t the best part.

The best part is that I will never, never be afraid of dying.

That, now—that’s better than seasoned grease.

She cried out:
“I thought I loved him!”
She had cried and cried ever since she told him, ever since she had
had
to tell him about what had happened; she had cried through all of his anguished demands as to exactly what had happened, cried while she answered him truthfully, instant by instant of that evening and night, the innocent acceptance to cocktails, the acceptance of the ride home, then, then, then, what happened in the car.

Most of the night, half a day then, the questions, questions shouted, questions sobbed; the “Who was it?” questions, and their chain: “You don’t know? How could you not know?”; the “How could you?” questions, with their “While I—,” “When I—”; and the “At this of all times” chains: “While I sweat there in that rotten warehouse until two in the morning to get us a little extra, to get
you
a little extra,” and “When I trusted you, have always trusted you,” and “At this of all times, when we have to live apart, sleep apart.…”

A love, a wedding, a honeymoon that went on and on for almost a year now; the exciting new job with a civilian firm in a foreign land, building a military base; and the lonely weeks when he went first; and the joy when her application was approved and she, too, could come; and the appalling news that until the housing area was completed they would have to live in bachelor quarters, she in her barracks, he in his, under the stiff-necked regulations of a base commander who went by the book (no cohabitation except in married quarters, and Marine guards under strict orders to enforce)—and “at this of all times,” the one time when the commandant permitted a military/civilian celebration off the base, the one time when they had both been invited and he insisted she go while he rolled up some overtime in the warehouse, the one time she—she—it had happened, and with a stranger. Who was he? She didn’t really know.
Where was he? Gone, flown away that night on whatever function he had with the company. Or the military. She didn’t even know that.

So it came down at last to the apparently endless chain of demands—“Why? Why? Why did you do it?”—and there was no answer, none, none, for a day and a night and some hours to boot, until last she cried out: “I thought I loved him!”

The slow door of the ladies room closed itself on the click-buzz-hum of the big office. Ariadne Guelph passed through the inside door to find her friend May Stern crouched on the settee, hands between knees, slump-shouldered, a portrait of misery. “May, honey—whatever is the matter?”

The younger girl looked up slowly. “Ari. Oh. Ari.”

Ariadne sat beside her, put an arm around her. “I heard old Bristle-chin telling someone over the phone that he can’t get any work out of you today, or any sense either. What is it, Maisie? That’s not like you.”

“In there …” May waved a hand toward the inner room and its row of booths.

“I’ll see.” She rose and looked inside, returned. “There’s no one in there.… Tell me, dear.”

May took Ariadne’s hands and looked up at her with wistful eyes. “Ariadne, last night I—well, I …”

“Let me guess. It was some guy.”

Silently she nodded.

“And you made it with him.”

Another nod. A quivering lip.

“Gosh, honey, it happens all the time. Who was it?”

The weeping began. “Th—that’s just it. I don’t
know!
”

“You were raped!”

“I wish I had been,” and she laughed weakly through the tears. “Oh, that’s crazy, of course not. What I mean … I wanted to, I wanted … him, I just didn’t care. And I don’t know why. And I don’t know
him
.”

“I think,” said Ariadne firmly, “that this is just one of those things
that can happen. No harm done, and you can forget it.”

Little May more or less did, too, until she missed her next period.

Lynn was very happily married. At first she and Jon talked sometimes about having a child—dream stuff, “maybe someday” stuff, but it was never really an issue. And as time went by she became increasingly convinced that it was just something which would never happen. And the pills and all that were such a nuisance; she quite forgot them some of the time, then all of the time.

Then she had her inexplicable adventure—she who was the least adventurous of women. She and a friend went into a bar—for the friend’s thirst, not her own; she just didn’t go to bars—and the friend gulped and left because of an appointment, and Lynn, who never gulped, stayed to finish her sipping. And then
he
was there, standing by the little table, sitting across from her, saying things she could no longer remember in a soft, deep voice … oh, yes, she remembered one thing: “I do not want an affair, I want an experience,” and a walk to, to wherever it was, not far, a warm, clean space for the bed … the walk could not be recalled because of the thick cloud of wanting in which she drifted. It happened, and she was outside again walking with him, walking without him, and finally home, quite alone, totally bewildered, captured between the truth and disbelief.

By the time Jon got home she had decided not to tell him, and there really was no need to. Lynn was a very composed lady.

Evelyn was not a very composed lady, and she did tell Kevin when he got home; she had to, distraught as she was with astonished self-hatred. Kevin immediately beat the hell out of her. He beat her so badly that she called the police, and when they arrived he stood over her with a new insanity shining in his eyes so brightly that she did as he told her to do; and she said to the police that she had been raped, that Kevin had come home to find her in his battered condition. The moment she was alone at the police station she told the sympathetic women of the rape crisis unit what had really happened. So Kevin was arrested and jailed, and Evelyn went for frantic hours to everyone she could reach to gather enough money to bail him out.
Shaken and well cooled, he went home with her and lay all night crying in her soothing arms.

A military base hospital is so very male-oriented that the presence of a woman with an obstetric difficulty seems somehow inappropriate, but no one can say why.

After her affair (no, it was not an affair, it was an experience), her husband would not touch her. When she underwent a pregnancy test, which he had stonily demanded, and it came out positive, he touched her even less; he touched her no more with his eyes, his voice.

And when, exactly at the time her next menses were due, she miscarried, he was flooded with joy, and became his old garrulous, affable self; but it was over for her, all over. He sat there in the hospital room with flowers in his hand, showering relieved gladness on a piece of stone, which would not come to life even when he said he forgave her.

Dr. Gerald Macomb McCambridge, head of the heavily funded and prestigious Genetic Research Laboratories, dialed a number and spoke: “Hi, Wacky.” Nostalgic baby-talk: the name was Whickter, which became “Whiskey,” then “Wicky,” and finally “Wicky-wacky,” which Professor Dr. Alonzo Frederick Whickter heartily detested; he gave it back: “Oh, hi, Macmac.”

“I can look down this wire,” said McCambridge without preliminary, “and see past your left shoulder and through that door into your filing cabinet a folder describing a prepartum female who, having committed whatever it takes to become pregnant, has passed one period and spontaneously aborted on the next.”

“You’ve been peeking,” said Whickter.

“I
am
peeking,” said McCambridge. “I now read further down the file. The same ladies subsequently test sterile, due to a very slight malformation, or alteration, of the outer membrane of the ovum, rendering it impenetrable.”

“How the hell did you know? I have twenty-two like that.”

“I have forty-five,” said McCambridge, “and I suspect that out
there on my secretary’s desk are a fair clutch more. But I’m not finished reading over this wire and through that door into your files.” He cleared his throat. “Not a few of these patients are, or need to be, in psychiatric hands to pursue the conviction that they do not know who impregnated them nor how it was accomplished.”

“Mac,” said Whickter with no trace of banter left in his voice, “what the hell is it—an epidemic?”

McCambridge let silence fill the line.

Whickter drew a shuddering breath. “My God. I think you just said it was.”

“You said it.”

“How far has it gone?”

McCambridge shrugged, sure that the other man could sense the gesture. “As a general rule, what percentage of cases of any specific disorder show up in my labs or your practice? If you suddenly get five cases of toxic shock syndrome, how many can you estimate are in the general population?”

“I factor with a big number,” conceded Whickter. “Of course—”

“Of course what?”

“I’d have to know the epicenters. Five cases in a neighborhood, a city, a seaboard—”

“What do you get from your files?”

“Minneapolis … South Bend … (two in South Bend, I think) … Louisville. Quite a cluster in Louisville.… It’s gone pretty far. Too far.”

“London,” said McCambridge “Metz, Casablanca, Capetown, Buenos Aires, Nairobi, and something in Hong Kong that looks very much like it.”

“Oh, my God,” Whickter said again, and this interested McCambridge very much; he had heard this expression from Alonzo Whickter perhaps twice since their college days. “You must have had your League of Nations on the prowl.”

“Right,” said McCambridge. His “League of Nations” was a very special group of graduate students, each as distinct a specimen of the various human subspecies as McCambridge had been able to find. Each kept close contact with his or her racial origins; for his
special projects, McCambridge wanted as little dilution as possible.

“Then,” said Whickter, “you already knew it was an epidemic.”

“Let’s say I was wondering if it could be.”

“Mac, what shall we do? Call in the press, alert people?”

“The press,” said McCambridge, having traveled this course before, “will not need any calling in. When the media become aware of it, they’ll come. And right here is where they’ll come to. Calling in the press before you have a diagnosis, and especially before you can point at a treatment, is pushing a quite unnecessary panic button. Tell me: have any of your patients suffered permanently, aside from emotional trauma?”

“Not really. Not so far.”

“All right. Now here is something you, as dean of a school of gynecology and obstetrics, can do, something I’d rather not stir up from this source. I need data on unaffected carriers.”

“Like Typhoid Mary.”

“Not like Typhoid Mary. Like men. Go from the hypothesis that if the man had contact with a woman who has had this—what?—plague, and then has contact with another woman, what chance has a second woman got to contact the disease?”

“I think I can get you some data.”

“I think you can. And if you can find out at what stage the male picks up the bug—that is, if the contact occurs during a pregnancy or after the miscarriage, spontaneous aborting, whatever you call it—that would be valuable.”

“I’ll try.”

McCambridge said very quietly. “It’s kind of urgent, Alonzo.”

“I’ll do it.”

“I know you will. Goodnight.”

All night long Dr. McCambridge’s teletype chuckled as it recorded reports. Bahia. Provincetown. Manila. Addis Ababa. Tel Aviv. Edmonton …

“May, honey! Are you all right? You took a day off.”

“Am I all right? I’m more than all right! I lost it!”

“You lost what?”

“Shh. Gossip I don’t need.… You know, what you came in to talk to me about. That time. In the ladies’.”

“Oh, my goodness. Don’t tell me you were—”

“I was, but I’m not. Not anymore. And I didn’t have to go to a—to the doctor, either. It just, well, it’s gone, that’s all.”

“You never told me! I never dreamed—”

“I didn’t want to worry you. And something else: I’ve met the most marvelous man.… Tell you at lunch.”

Lynn composedly told Jon that she was expecting, and he was overjoyed, so much so that it was easy for her to conclude that what he didn’t know could hurt him very much. They had a marvelous, romantic month during which he handed her into and out of the car, helped her up steps, carried every package even though it might hold no more than a comb, until she discovered one rather messy morning that they had nothing to expect. At this news Jon expressed sadness, but it was a rather modified sadness. It seemed to have under it a stratum of something else, something not the least sad. This was revealed when he consoled the deprived would-be mother with, “After all, we really have a full life together. In a way, another, ah, person, would dilute it, hm?” He smiled then, and took a breath which considerably expanded his broad chest. “I’ve got to say, though, that it did something for me to learn that I could do it after all. Not that I was really worried or anything. And the fact that you couldn’t carry it doesn’t change that at all.”

“Oh,” she said composedly.

Dr. McCambridge had hoped to be approached first by one of the large newsmagazines, with good writing and a sizable and energetic research staff; or at least a major city newspaper, part of a chain that would cover the country—foreign press, please copy. These were, however, scooped by a supermarket tabloid that specialized in gross gossip, flying saucers, arthritis pain, and the intimate conduct of stars and high bureaucrats. Dr. McCambridge paused for a moment to consider whether or not to grant the appointment, and then sighed and, from somewhere in the depths of his worldly wisdom, recognized
that the impact of these tabloids was upward by way of the underbelly and not downward to the brain; that is to say, they crossed the breakfast table and the bar more readily than did more respectable periodicals. It had to come out sooner or later; it
must
come out, and perhaps it were better done through “I read somewhere that—” or “They’re saying that—” than by accurately quoting a trusted source.