Other Men's Daughters Page 5

  “Hash?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t get it. Why?”

  “Because it’d be nice.”

  “Oh. You mean hashish. Cannabis.”

  “Won’t you take it with me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Actually, he was astonished. He’d first thought Cynthia was talking about corned-beef hash. When he caught on, he felt as he’d felt when she’d danced for him, “out of it”; and then, depressed. Did the girl think their relationship needed this kind of bolstering? Couldn’t she enjoy herself without it? “Yet it’s their sign,” he told himself (their assigning her to “The Young”). Was part of his feeling for her the joy of learning about a new species? Terrible idea. Had laboratory life so deformed him that even intimacy was heuristic? Though love and learning were old associates. (Maxim Schneider told him Sappho’s love poems came at her pupils’ graduations.) But he wanted Cynthia, not her bulletins.

  At least not her hash.

  “Don’t bring it. If we need it, there’s even less sense to all this than we know there is.”

  “I just thought it might relax us.”

  “I’m paranoiac about exposure here, Cynthia. You’re a minor, this is my town. Your hash might, well, settle mine.”

  “All right. I won’t.”

  “It’s so easy for someone like me to subvert his pleasures. I’m such a proper, cautious type. You’ll soon see what a swamp you’re letting yourself into.”

  “I love you. I won’t bring it. I’ll just bring this little book I have for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nineteen Ways to Sodomize a Minor.”

  The next day, Cynthia called him at the university to say she couldn’t come that weekend; her father was coming to see her between legal meetings in Philadelphia.

  “Can’t you tell him you’re going out of town? I fixed Tom Fischer’s apartment for you.” He’d put sheets on the bed and orange juice in the freezer.

  “I just can’t. You don’t know him. He’d be deeply offended.”

  “I guess I’m not deeply offended.”

  It was worse than that. A week before, she’d canceled the trip because a photographer had invited her to a party in New York where she might meet people who could use her as a model. “I’d get all this money, then things would be easy for me. I could visit you whenever I wanted without dunning you or Daddy for money.” Merriwether felt trapped by her whims. He was disappointed, jealous, anxious, enraged. “Let’s just call it off,” he’d told her. “Have a fine time in New York. We’ll be in touch some day,” and he’d hung up and left the office to avoid a return call.

  The rest of that day was awful. There were no classes to distract him, no committee meetings, he couldn’t work in the lab. He went home early and played one-on-one with George in the backyard, and that night went with Sarah to a movie, one of the few times in the year she’d been willing to go out with him anywhere. The movie was an unlucky choice, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In it, a teenaged girl, after listening to her mad teacher’s spiel about “middle-aged Dante” falling in love with “child Beatrice” (“they were both nine years old,” said Sarah, edifying two rows of patrons), becomes the mistress of the teacher’s own lover. Merriwether flushed. Here he was, exhibited in the cage of the film, listening to the audience laugh at the young girl telling her lover—five years younger than he—that he was over the hill. Was the situation so comic? Over and over, the same situations, the same warnings, the same conclusions.

  He had to force himself not to telephone Cynthia. Instead, he wrote her a letter denouncing her frivolity, denouncing himself for being “taken in” by what he’d mistaken as a “deeper seriousness,” for being so foolish to think any twenty-year-old girl could be anything more than briefly diverted by “an old laboratory grub.”

  “I shouldn’t mail it.” But he put on the stamp and walked to the mailbox. Yet he knew he would tear it up, knew it, almost knew, almost, and then, before he could let himself think, he’d opened the blue lid and tossed in the letter.

  Why not? It was forcefully written; it would effectively bar the door.

  Friday, Sarah drove Priscilla back to Oberlin. He planned to stay home with George and Esmé, then couldn’t. Cynthia would be in Someone’s Bed, he could not wait that out at home. Hanson, an epidemiologist, was lecturing on the degenerative disease, kuru. He’d go to it.

  First, he took George and Esmé to dinner at the Wirthaus. They had a spat about who spilled the 7-Up, he was firm with them, and at home told them to stay apart, he had to go to a lecture. “Take any messages, sweetheart,” he told Esmé. “Be sure you write them down. Don’t forget. Put the messages on the bed-table.”

  “I always do, Dad.” Esmé was very responsible, he kissed her, she stroked his cheek. “You didn’t shave too well today.”

  “I’m only going out for a bit, darling. But don’t worry if I’m not back at nine-thirty. Though maybe you ought to go to bed in our room, in case the phone rings.”

  Which puzzled but also delighted her.

  “And please, children, be very good with each other. Don’t let anyone in unless you know them. But don’t use the chain, or I won’t be able to get back in.” He always repeated instructions when these two were left without a sitter. It was a recent arrangement, they enjoyed the independence and the run of the house.

  The lecture was first-rate. Hanson was a youngish man from the Rockefeller Institute. He’d gone to New Guinea and encountered the Foré, a neolithic people of remarkable metabolism. Their potassium-sodium balance was incredible; lactating women suffered potassium poisoning, the urine output was as little as 200 ccs, yet there was no uremia. The Foré were cannibals, they had no numbers over ten, had no conception of themselves as a tribe or group, couldn’t swim, had no boats or bridges, knew nothing of the world beyond a hill and thirty or forty other people. As for kuru, it was a virogenic, pre-senile dementia without inflammation and with a median incubation period of ten to fifteen years. After a year’s work, Hanson realized it was a variation of the Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease: it derived from the Foré’s cannibalism. (As a mark of endearment and respect, the Foré cooked, ate and ornamented themselves with the flesh of dead relatives; their “how do you do” was “I eat your buttocks.”)

  After the lecture, Merriwether joined Hanson and Fred Matthias, the department chairman, at Matthias’s house on Kirkland Place. Mrs. Matthias had furnished this jewel of Cambridge Georgian like an office. Matthias was a genial emptiness. Merriwether thought that his wife, a smart neurotic woman, had set this Naugahyde stage to advertise the vacancy.

  Hanson was hawk-faced, intense, knowledgeable about everything connected with his work, ethnography, epidemiology, genetics, medical history, even the politics and economy of the area. He had not only taught the Foré about kuru but about steel, swimming, boat-building, salt, arithmetic, and the great world outside their hills. “I felt Promethean.”

  Merriwether walked home through the Yard. What human variety there was. Was it only last night he’d been damning human sameness?

  Back home, it was George not Esmé, asleep on the bed. The reading light was on, his son’s little arm was over his eyes. On the telephone table was a note in George’s unsteady script. “Sinthea called. Two times. She will call tomorow.”

  Relief foamed in him. His darling George. The taker of this message. Please God, may it not harm him.

  The weekend went well. He told Sarah he had to stay in the lab with his rats. “I can’t tell when they’re going to pop off.” He and Cynthia stayed in Fischer’s room, watched television, played chess and read Anna Karenina to each other. Saturday night, they went to Boston, getting on the train at Central Square, sitting a few seats apart in case they met anyone he knew. A trial for both of them. Merriwether, in his tie and tweed jacket, Cynthia in her black stockings, mini-skirt and boy’s sweater smiling nervously, foolishly over three seats. He moved next to her. “It’s too silly.�
� Yet he was so nervous in the restaurant, she said, “Let’s just go home.” They didn’t feel at ease until they were back in Fischer’s bed.

  The next week Cynthia wrote him a letter in the love code of Kitty and Levin. “Bd,” it went

  i d of l f y

  w y 1) l w m or 2) m m

  C o

  In the laboratory he worked it out to “Bobbie dear” or “darling” “I’m dying of love for you. Will you 1) live with me or 2) marry me.” He had to get “C o” explained on the phone.

  “‘Check one,’” she said.

  As for “dying of love,” it was hyperbolic, but he understood the feeling in it. Love-need was a crab-grip in the intestines. But if the grip was Cynthia, why did he scarcely think of her? At times, his sense of her was more her name than anything else. Not quite the name, but the idea of Cynthia within it. It made no physiological sense. The Love-Grip. Why not the Love Goddess? What did missing her mean? Costive tension? He missed her. He wanted her in bed. Ankle bones, hips, her—yes—all of it, moving, on, in, above, below. “I love you.” Up in his study, head on his typewriter case. “I love you.” The dark window beaded with drizzle. Books, note cards, goose-neck lamp, pictures of Albie, Pris, Esmé, George, of Sarah—he looked away. Cynthia. Que je vous adore.

  The grown-up who becomes neurotic on account of ungratified libido behaves in his anxiety like a child; he fears when he is alone, i.e. when he is without a person of whose love he feels sure, who can calm his fears by means of the most childish measures.

  He had found this in Freud. Was it for him? Freud blamed the condition on excessively tender parents who “accelerated sexual maturity and spoiled the child, making him unfit to renounce love temporarily, or to be satisfied with a smaller amount of love in later life.” His parents were, well, devoted, not, certainly not, excessively tender. What was excessive? Generous, sweet, courteous Mother. A little dreamy, a little distant, an intelligence that was not excessively nourished by Boston papers and Taylor Caldwell’s novels. Love, Freud said, should awaken energies, not become their unique object. He was having a hard time concentrating, but his ideas seemed unusually interesting. As was his dream-life. It seldom had to do with Cynthia, though, surely, the dreams had Cynthian deposits. He dreamed he was the father of a psychotic daughter who, one day, couldn’t see him; he watched himself fade away as she looked blindly his way. Waking, he found that the Love-Grip had relaxed; he had no feeling for Cynthia, no sense of her. In her place was a girl-sized rectangle. Blank. Nothing. Fantastic relief. It was over. Yet, what about her? What would she do? He tried to put her back in the rectangle. She appeared, but what was she? Nice-enough, pretty-enough, smart-enough, but nothing special, and childish, or anyway, too young, inappropriate. Relief. Tremendous relief. He was fully awake.

  His thought was, “What am I going to do with her?” She was coming to Cambridge for the weekend. Perhaps she’d found the same blanked rectangle in her bed. “Oh no,” he said out loud, and Sarah muttered on the other side of the bed. “What a see-saw.” Later, walking past the Revolutionary War cannon in the Common, he felt the rectangular blank once more. The love song had stopped.

  Yet.

  Dr. Merriwether had not been around the unentanglers of biological mystery for nothing. The ethologist’s Law of Heterogeneous Summation (simple quantity—not quality—of stimuli accounts for behavior) applied. Given the long abstinence and present opportunity, no single dream of blankness could dispel Cynthia.

  Merriwether’s assistant, Cy McTier, almost sang about the “beautiful reflex mechanism” of the mantises. “The female eats any insect she can catch. The male moves toward her, love in his beak. She eats him, head first.” McTier was tiny, fiercely good-humored, an endless go-getter. “When she devours the sub-oesophageal ganglion, it no longer inhibits the copulatory center in the last abdominal ganglion. So our headless male can begin fucking. Eighty percent of the time, he makes it just before he’s devoured.”

  Perfume glands on the moth’s wings, music from the stridulating files of grasshopper legs, magnets in the budgerigar’s painted feathers, tactile excitement as the orchid’s nub mimics the bee. True or false, real or unreal, insect, mammal or physiologist, heterogeneous stimuli bring the genetic transmitter into heat.

  Beside the unfriendly body of his formerly dear spouse, Dr. Merriwether lies awake. Mind, recently astonished at its release from grotesque servitude, now sees Cynthia making love to Whoever, sees her undressing, facing the boy’s body, climbing, wrestling, sees the hand in her cleft, feels her melt—the fluids, the breath, the motion, the cries—and here, in the sheets, mattress buttons against his bare legs—why was there no new mattress?—Merriwether’s penis swells, Cynthia is with him, he is Whoever, up, down, the river’s going to flood, oh, Lordie, he makes it out of bed, down the hall, up the creaky stairs, into the guest room, down upon the bed.

  five

  Clocks.

  The orange face on City Hall, the ghost pallor of those on Independence Hall. At night the clock faces of Philadelphia moon above the town. Time’s cages.

  Hand in hand, fingers in fingers, Cynthia and Merriwether walk down Chestnut Street to the Delaware. He is in belted suede, she in leopard. Animals within animals, lovers within animals, walking after La Bohème at the Academy of Music; old cornball songs of tuberculosis and back rent, Mimi and Rodolfo. Cynthia’s first opera, Merriwether’s old favorite, aphrodisiacal stridulation in the old city of the Republic. They walk down to the restored Georgian world of Society Hill, rows of cockeyed houses with red shutters, green, white, blue, by St. Peter’s, by the thin skyscrapers of I. M. Pei, the messy old city flung behind them. “This town’s a morgue. Eleven, eleven-thirty, you can’t buy a cup of coffee.” Their cabbie, Merriwether’s age, but twenty years his senior, patronizing these odd but unquestionable lovers, letting them out at the Benjamin Franklin after their chowder and lobster at Bookbinder’s.

  “I lost my watch the day you called me,” said Cynthia. “I always keep it in a jewel box Grannie gave me. Or on my wrist. You called you were coming, and I can’t remember where it is.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  “It’s just strange. It’s not like me. Maybe it’s to say, ‘Time’”—euphemism for age—“‘doesn’t matter for love.’”

  Merriwether had given a seminar at Penn on Pauling’s protein clocks and other biological rhythms, circadian, hebdomadarian, mensual, annual. He’d arranged it through his old student, George Nyswunder, a professor there, and flown down Thursday night. Cynthia had taxied to the airport and they’d met at the Eastern Airlines counter.

  They were fixing up the airport. You came off the plane to a backdoor, climbed backstairs by sandbags, went along corridors of iron intestines until you hit the ticket counters. Across from Eastern was a girl in a huge-brimmed flop hat which shadowed half her face.

  Cynthia.

  Panic. What was he doing here meeting a strange girl?

  Something similar showed in her face. He too was desummered. He wore a dark fedora, a topcoat, he carried a briefcase. Another salesman getting off a plane.

  To cover the panic of non-recognition, they rushed to each other, touched cheek with cheek, then, feeling the warmth, getting the other’s signals, the stimuli, felt familiarity drift back into them.

  “Darling.”

  “Cynthia.”

  Not quite believed in, but crutches which supported them till they walked on their own. In the taxi, they embraced like teenagers.

  He hadn’t been to Philadelphia since a boyhood trip with the Latin School to see the Liberty Bell. “Excuse me, sir, you’ve sold me a cracked one,” eight years old, handing the quarter souvenir to the vendor—his only memory of the trip. So he wanted to see the way the city looked. “What river’s that?” She didn’t know.

  “Skookul,” said the cabbie.

  Cynthia was an urban, older version of her summer self, plucked, perfumed—Je Reviens (the odorous wingtips)—warm in a leopard
fur, carrying a many-pocketed leather bag. (His own was ersatz.)

  The hotel had an enormous, gloomy lobby full of Temple of Karnak pillars, rubber plants, Naugahyde couches; it was rimmed with luminous cigar stores, haberdashers, coffee shops; Muzak drugged it. At the desk, a knowing clerk awaited them. It is Modern Times. No identity cards, no atmosphere of “tryst,” just the familiar shack-up of any two ordinaries coming together from any earth spot; arranged by phone, assembled by plane. No village tension to modern love. They registered for the first time as Mr. and Mrs.; he signed his own name and gave the right city.

  An old bear coming out of the strawberry patch, muzzle bloody with juice, trailing vines. Grizzled, glittering Merriwether, eyes bright with novelty, leaked awkwardness. The ease of modern love was not ease for him. No sense of “interlude,” no relaxation. Of the ninety thousand American males signing in at ninety thousand registers over the country, could more than a dozen have been as awkwardly illicit?

  In the next half hour, Cynthia got her first orgasm. (So this was what the cheering was about.) In Cambridge, she’d come close, but twice, their first night and on her weekend, she’d had her period. It was painful for Merriwether—“the endometrium’s shedding its lining.” There was also the shedding of what she called his “hang-ups.” Now in this “T” of a room, their bed in the cross bar, the window full of room lights spattered down the adjacent wall, in a pellmell plunge of relief, they made it; quite satisfactorily, then kleenexed up, washed, pajamaed, talked, ordered wine and turkey sandwiches from telephone Button 7—and received the silvered dishes and Greek waiter like hotel kings. Splendid American stuff.

  At the seminar, Cynthia sat against the wall. She’d been presented to George Nyswunder with Merriwether’s new boldness. “My friend, Cynthia Ryder.”

  Nyswunder had known a Merriwether whose highest spirits were reserved for scientific argument and tennis court triumphs; Cynthia Ryder was a large surprise.