(1961) The Chapman Report (31 page)

Paul laid out his pajamas and began to undress.

Horace put down the book. “Paul, I appreciate the way you covered for me today.”

“Merely an investment. Expect you to do the same for me, when the time comes, and the way I feel, it will.”

“I shouldn’t have got so drunk.”

“We’ve been gypsying around too long.”

“How was it today?”

“Oh, the usual.” He tied the cord of his pajama pants and pulled on the tops. “I can’t imagine what would surprise me any more. Though, I must admit, it’s never prosaic. The last one I had today was really a dilly-an out and out nympho.”

“You mean actually?”

“No question. I never saw her, but Benita said she was a doll. It was really a session. I was son}’ as hell for her. Fifty partners before she was married and once a week after, besides her husband, until he caught her at it.”

He clamped the clothes hanger on his trousers and hung them up.

“You mean her husband caught her with another man?” Horace asked.

“In the back yard, of all places, with some boy. The husband walked out on her cold-can’t say I blame him, except that she’s so obviously ill and needs help. She came to California and kept right on with it, even worse, though she’s trying to get herself in hand now, but she won’t.”

Horace had been listening intently. Suddenly, he asked, “What was her name?”

Paul, who had started for the bathroom, halted. “Name? I don’t think I-wait, yes-Shields-Naomi Shields.” He wondered at the strange convulsed look on Horace’s face. “Do you know the lady?”

“That was no lady,” said Horace quietly, “that was my wife.”

ALTHOUGH they had slept no more than four hours, Paul and Horace, by unspoken agreement, had risen at daybreak to avoid the others. After dressing for their third day of interviews, they had waited briefly outside the dining room of the Villa Neapolis until the doors were opened at seven-thirty. During the next half hour, except for several transient couples hastily eating their breakfasts in order to get on the road before the heavy traffic, they were alone.

By eight o’clock, they had left the dining room without seeing Dr. Chapman, Cass, or Benita, and, relieved, they had made their way to the garage. The sun simmered in the cloudless sky like an oversized egg yolk frying. The moist grass on either side of the path was warming and would soon be dry, and Paul decided that it would be as hot as it had been on Monday. He lowered the canvas top on the Ford convertible, secured it, and then settled behind the wheel next to Horace.

He eased the car backward out of the stall, and finally, gear in low and foot teasing the brake, he guided the vehicle slowly down the steep private road that led to Sunset Boulevard.

At the stop sign, he glanced at Horace. “We’re a bit early. Like to take a short drive first?” “Whatever you say.”

Paul wheeled the Ford east on Sunset Boulevard, and then proceeded at thirty-five miles an hour, slowing once as they approached the university campus (the ROTC boys were drilling smartly on the green), and accelerating again as he headed in the general direction of Beverly Hills. The speed of the open car generated a breeze, where there had been none, and the air brushed them as gently as a woman’s hand. At the Bel-Air gate, on impulse, Paul turned sharply left. “Have you ever been in here?” he asked. “I don’t think so,” said Horace.

“You’d remember if you had. It’s exactly like a drive in the suburbs behind Honolulu.” They were on Bellagio Road, a smoothly rising, curving, asphalt roller coaster. The thick ivy and bushes bursting through the wire fences, the miles of blue and red bougainvillea and red and purple fuchsia, hid all signs of habitation. The Monterey pine trees and sycamores guarding the road were aged and massive, and gave an impression of estate and belonging, such as the self-conscious, imported date palms of Beverly Hills had never been able to imply. Paul remembered his parents and thought of how they would have looked at these trees and then talked of the Old Country. The occasional mail boxes, usually wooden and quaint, were topped by names finely wrought in iron, several of the names celebrated. In a way, the mail boxes spoiled it, for they reminded the intruder that there was human life here, not wild life, and that the sensation of forest primeval was false.

Paul turned from the windshield to Horace, meaning to comment on the landscape, but he saw that Horace was completely oblivious to the surroundings. Horace sat slumped low, as if in a trance, arms crossed loosely on his chest, eyes staring blankly at the dashboard.

Paul had no choice but to recall the black morning that had begun after midnight. After Paul’s disclosure of the interview with Naomi, Horace had remained on the bed, his face numbed as if by stroke, smoking incessantly, while he related the story of his marriage.

There was, that year before Dr. Chapman, a convention of gynecologists in Madison (Horace remembered), and Horace went up from Reardon to read a paper. The convention tried to accommodate guests in every way, and among the available conveniences offered was a secretarial pool. The girl assigned to Horace announced herself as Naomi Shields. Until he met Naomi, Horace had recognized the female as only a biological necessity, an exercise quite apart from important workaday routine. He had always been certain that he was fated to live and die a bachelor.

Naomi was something that he had never imagined a woman could be: lively, interested, beautiful, responsive. Also, and this soon proved a decisive factor, she was a young woman widely desired and sought after. The fact that she had eyes for Horace alone, gave him a special status among his colleagues, and a prideful satisfaction that he had never before felt. He began to endow Naomi with a value that superseded love. (“Of course, I speak from hindsight,” he had conceded to Paul.) From the first, Naomi was prepared to give herself wholly to Horace, wholly

and unconditionally, and it took every resource of Horace’s Catholic upbringing to restrain him from taking advantage of the love-struck girl. As it was, they were engaged merely five months (“Hardly enough to know each other,” he had told Paul) before he brought her down to Reardon and made her Naomi Van Duesen.

From the earliest days, he enjoyed the idea of marriage. It gave him membership in a popular social group that he had not realized existed, and for the first time in his life he possessed a feeling of belonging to something more cosmopolitan, more enjoyable, more fulfilling than the faculty staff of Reardon College. The countless accessories of the nuptial state were what pleased the most: the pineapple duckling prepared at home, the frayed shirt collars turned at last, the collaborative shopping for refrigerator and blue parakeet, the addressing of Christmas cards, the continuing envy of male friends, the casino and scrabble and double acrostics together, the brassiere behind the bathroom door and the stockings drying over the tub and the toothpaste uncapped, the dividing of the Sunday paper, the buttons magically reappearing on pajamas and shirts.

But there was a price for these pleasures, these sanctioned intimacies, and it came due too often on the double bed.

His sexual needs, Horace had frankly admitted to Paul, were always less than average, as far as he could guess in those less literate pre-Chapman days. In the beginning, Naomi’s tireless appetite thrilled him, made him swell with masculinity. But after a few months, there was no settling down, and her ceaseless passion became not a pleasure but a duty that mocked him. Almost every night, she expected him, and what had been love soon became labor of love. The shadow of the dread double bed darkened each born day. Only the emergence of Dr. Chapman saved him. Dr. Chapman became a rescue as effective as any ever staged by the cavalry or Marines. When Dr. Chapman took him on as a spare-time aide and demanded night work, Horace co-operated in the secret project with a fervor that Chapman mistook for scientific enthusiasm. As a result, there was friction with Naomi, but soon enough she was made to understand that twice weekly would have to be their norm. Eventually, her agitation decreased, and toward the end, it disappeared altogether. Not until the terrible denouement in the back yard and the scene afterward, did Horace realize to what degree she had reorganized her life, and at what cost she had made the adjustment.

He severed the rotten thing from his life in one clean stroke. The house was vacated; the furniture sold. Every memento, every gift, every photograph save one (a softly diffused portrait of her in profile, taken in the second year of their marriage), was liquidated. Even the single last link of communication, the alimony payment, Horace reduced to the impersonal. On the third day of ever}’ month, an attorney in Reardon, Wisconsin, mailed the check to an attorney in Burbank, California.

During the busy, arduous months of the bachelor survey, Horace managed to dedicate himself to the work and succeeded fairly well in erasing Naomi from his mind. But with the undertaking of the married female survey, this often became more difficult-for, too frequently, a voice behind the screen reminded him of her voice, and more and more often the reply to his extramarital-activities question sounded intentionally sadistic as it came from behind the screen.

Horace dreaded The Briars from the moment the trip had been arranged. He had not minded being in Los Angeles during the male survey, but a sampling of married females made the proximity to Naomi unbearable. Perhaps, as he thought all along, he feared that he would see her again; or perhaps he feared that he would not. He could not define the true reason for his apprehension, but it painfully existed all the same. And then, Monday night, he had seen her. He had gone to the movie in Westwood and found a place three seats in from the center aisle. About twenty minutes into the main feature, a young woman came up the aisle, and she was Naomi. She did not see him and continued toward the lobby, but he saw her, and was deeply shaken, and later got extremely drunk.

In discussing Naomi’s interview with Paul, Horace had been disturbed by the inevitability (at least in his own mind) of Naomi’s presence among the two hundred volunteers. It was, he thought, as if some bad fate had attached itself to him and would not let him go. Paul, however, had regarded her appearance as less unusual. After all, more than three thousand women had been interviewed. The percentages were against it, as Paul had predicted earlier on the train, yet it was not so surprising that one of them might prove to be someone a member of the team

would know, especially since she dwelled in the small community being sampled. Paul reminded Horace of the earlier incident in Indianapolis when he himself realized that he was questioning a married woman whom he had dated several times in school. Those things happened; they just happened. They were not allowed to happen too often in art, banished as straining credulity, but in real life they happened all too often. No, it was not the coincidence of it that had bothered Paul, but, as he told Horace, the odd fact that Naomi would offer herself to a survey of which her husband was a part. Surely she knew. Horace thought not. In the latter period of their marriage, she had not known for whom he was working spare time, since Dr. Chapman’s second survey had not yet been officially announced. As to reading about his new profession afterward, that too was unlikely. Even when she read books, and those only early in their marriage, she had never had the patience for newspapers or magazines. It was hardly likely that she had changed. And if, occasionally, she glanced at a newspaper-well, Paul knew very well that the stories usually went on and on about Dr. Chapman but rarely mentioned even the names of the members of the team. Furthermore, it was unlikely that Naomi had ever revealed her married name to anyone in The Briars, so the other women would have no way of relating the Van Duesen on the Chapman team to her. No, as far as Horace could see, that part of it made sense.

Thus they had gone on talking until three in the morning, Horace doing most of the talking and Paul trying to placate and reassure him.

Remembering all of this now, in the early sun, as he drove the Ford through Bel-Air, Paul tried to discover in what way the memory of it still troubled him. His natural sorrow for a good friend, of course. But that was too simple. There was something more selfish. It was, he supposed, that all of this related directly to his bachelor state. It was possibly one more brick on the wall slowly rising that kept him from a woman, any woman, he might marry. On each brick, there was a digit, and one day this digit barrier would be too high and formidable to surmount. Naomi had been but a reflection of hundreds of other women whose intimate lives he had probed-the nameless numerals-telling him in the language of science that all there was to love and marriage was x number of means of petting, x number of positions, x number of orgasms. And perhaps, honestly, this was all that there was to it. If so, it made of

marriage a bleak resort. Rather than that, he would prefer monastic isolation. Or was there more? What of the good, solid unions he had known, and the romantic fancies he had so long held? What of tenderness and things in common and procreation? Get thee behind me, Victor Jonas.

Paul swung his convertible to the extreme right of the narrow road, to allow an oncoming delivery truck to pass, and then he looked at Horace again. He felt a swell of compassion for his battered friend.

“Feeling any better, Horace?”

Horace removed his stare from the glove compartment and blinked at Paul. “I’ll be all right. … It was damn kind of you to let me bend your ear the way I did last night.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You know what I was just sitting here thinking? I was thinking why I really got so plastered Monday night.”

“Well, you saw her-“

“Yes, but it wasn’t just seeing her. What happened was I saw her for an instant-it was the first time since that night-and that instant I knew I loved her as much as ever. It just grabbed me by the gut. It was awful, because I’m a reserved person, and there was no control in this. There she was, a dirty thing, and I loved her. After she was gone, I didn’t care about what I did or said. I just wanted to see her. I didn’t tell you this last night-I was ashamed-but I jumped out of my seat and went up the aisle after her like a crazy goon. She wasn’t in the lobby or outside, and I went up and down the block, and other blocks, searching for her. I didn’t find her. I decided to look her up in the telephone book and go see her. She was in the telephone book, all right. Then I was scared-there was a whole stranger I didn’t know much about, the one on the grass with that kid-and I decided I’d better have a drink first. There were no bars around that part of Westwood. I asked someone in the street, and he said it was because of the university. Did you know that? So I drove to another section near some place called Pico and found a place and got stiff. I was in no condition to see her, and I was lucky even to get back to the motel. But I can’t get it out of my mind, how I behaved. I thought she was done and dead, and I had it tucked away in an old compartment, forgotten, and then the resurrection, and what’s left of me is in little pieces. I must be out of my mind. How can you love a whore?”