The Meddlers (19 page)

And with last night’s television program added to the massive newspaper comment, she could imagine just how much badgering she would get if her involvement with the project became known. The thought of suffering the sort of onslaught George was suffering made her shrink. No, she couldn’t possibly tell Norma, of all people, Norma who was about as discreet as a public address system.

“Truly, you’re worrying unnecessarily,” she said now and looked at Norma with as limpidly honest a gaze as she could manage. “I’ve just got a sleep problem.”

“Well, it’s against my better judgment, but I’ll do it. Soneryl—nothing heftier than that. And not much of it. Try to stop using them as soon as you possibly can.”

She turned in her chair and looked at Miriam, now sitting on the edge of the couch, and smiled at her a little tentatively.

“But, look, Miriam, will you let me talk to you about something now I’ve got you here? No matter what effect your performances with hormones may be having on you, you must admit you did respond rather, well,
violently
, when I asked you how you felt about my pregnancy. And I’m really very fond of you, as fond of you as you’ll let me be. And I’d like to see you happy.”

“I’m perfectly happy,” Miriam said, trying not to sound repressive. All she wanted was to get that prescription into her hands and go. But she hadn’t got it yet.

“Oh, I daresay you think you are, but you could be so much happier. I said before, you’re a woman. And I never yet met a
woman, no matter how bright, no matter how ambitious, who didn’t need some sort of emotional involvement. I know it sounds corny, but love is important to women—”

“Oh, Norma, for heaven’s sake! Don’t start on that! You used to go on and on about it and it made me irritable then. You seemed to think the most interesting thing about a lecturer wasn’t what he had to teach us, but what he looked like. And I told you then,
you
may have this starry-eyed thing about love and marriage, but that doesn’t mean every other woman has—”

“Oh, I know, I know. I was a bit sloppy in the old days, but then, that’s part of adolescence. Perhaps I did go to extremes, falling in and out of love like a yo-yo.” She laughed reminiscently. “And it was fun. But you went to the other extreme, denying any need at all for emotional involvement. And—look, Miriam, you’re a biologist, right?”

“Yes, and my work is all I want to—”

“Let me finish. If you won’t accept my word for it, try and work it out for yourself, in your own way. You’re a biologist, so I’ll put it to you in biological terms. One of the strongest drives of any organism is to reproduce, right? Salmon go leaping up rivers against incredible odds just to deposit their spawn at the right place. Dogs cover great distances to track down bitches in heat—there’s a great range of intense animal behavior that derives directly from this urgent need to mate. Right?”

“So?”

“So people are animals too, in a biological sense. We have just as intense a drive to reproduce ourselves. No matter how much individual intellectual processes attempt to control this basic drive, no matter how important other aspects of living become, the drive is there. Am I still right?”

“Well, I suppose—”

“Oh, of course I am! I’m pointing out facts here, not surmise. All right. The drive is there. Now, let’s look at the difference in the drive between men and women, OK? Men have only one biological function, in a reproductive sense. They simply want—and want pretty urgently—to impregnate a female. And they can do it without being emotionally involved with the female in question. But
women are different. As I see it, women not only have the same intense biological need to reproduce, it’s greater than men’s, in some ways. And because her part in reproduction takes so long—more than a year, when you add on the feeding period—there is a biological mechanism that—”

“Norma, I just don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“Wait a minute, will you? And listen. I’m speaking your language now, not my own. And I may be only a tuppenny-ha’penny GP, but I did have a basic scientific training before I went to medical school, so I know what I’m talking about. What was I saying? Oh, I know. The biological mechanism. It makes a woman need to
love
a man. She has to love him to assure herself she can produce a good infant, and love him to ensure she and her infant will be protected when they need to be. And if you can’t see that, you’re committing the great scientific sin. Refusing to accept a piece of evidence because it doesn’t happen to fit into your own theorizing. I mean it. Love is important to women, vital to them. You’re a woman. If you don’t allow your biology to fulfill itself, you can’t be completely happy. You need some sort of emotional involvement. Q.E.D.”

Miriam sat and stared at the round smooth face for a long moment. Then she said slowly, “You’re saying that the woman who does not have babies is running directly counter to her own deepest biological drives. That childlessness indicates an unfulfilled and therefore unhealthy and distressed individual?”

“Yes.”

“But there are millions of childless women. Are they all so unhappy?”

“Lots of them are. Of course, it’s possible for them to redirect their drives. Nuns do that, I suppose, and some nurses and school-teachers.”

“And people like me!” Miriam felt an odd surge of triumph, as though she had succeeded in making a victory over the thinking processes of an intellect far superior to her own; which was absurd because however pleasant a person Norma was she was far from being one of the world’s great brains. “I’m perfectly well able to
redirect my drives, which I must accept exist in a purely biological sense, into the work I do.”

“But in the name of all that’s holy, Miriam, why
should
you? You can do both! There is no earthly reason why you shouldn’t have all the satisfaction of a complete sex life as well as an intellectual one! And when you have that, oh boy, have you got something! You mayn’t think very highly of the work I do, because you’ve always been able to run rings round me, mentally speaking. But it’s right for me. I’m a good doctor—a bloody good doctor—and I’m doing immensely worthwhile work in my own way, even if I’m not doing much about shoving forward the frontiers of knowledge and all that. It takes up an enormous amount of energy, physically, intellectually, emotionally, but I still have a husband I love, and kids I love, and I’m going to have more after this one—four or five, who knows? And all the time I’ll still be a doctor with a mind I use. I’ll be using and enjoying my body, and my mind, and—don’t you see what I’m trying to tell you? You could do the same! It may be true what you told me, that the state you’re in now is due directly to the hormones you’ve been pumping into yourself. But I take leave to doubt whether that’s the whole story. I think the way you’ve responded to this hormone thing indicates an… an underlying problem. I think you’re heading full tilt for a frank mental illness—clinical depression, maybe a tension state of some sort—because you’re not giving yourself a chance. I know you had a crippling childhood in many ways—”

“Crippling? What on earth do you mean?”

“What I say. You had a really awful time, didn’t you? A mother who died when you were a tiny kid, and then brought up by a man who was so turned in on himself he couldn’t possibly give a girl the sort of love she needed—”

“Oh, Norma, that’s parlor psychology of the most sickly sort! I will not accept this unsubstantiated theorizing about the effects of young experience on adult behavior! It sounds seductively appealing, I grant you, and it’s a very useful escape route. Mrs. X shows obsessional behavior? Ah, that’s because she was put on a pot at the age of two. Mrs. Y shows obsessional behavior? Ah, that’s because
she
wasn’t
put on a pot at the age of two. Up to now, you’ve made some sort of sense. But when you start on this Freudian stuff, I lose patience. Show me facts to prove the effects of environmental experiences, and I’ll listen, but this—look, let me put a point to you. You’re suggesting that because my father was an… an unloving undemonstrative man I’ve learned the same responses by being exposed to him?”

“Exactly.”

“But isn’t it just as possible that I am genetically lacking this response? That he carried in his genes a personality trait that created emotionally unresponsive behavior in him, and passed the genes on to me? If that were so, your whole theory falls down. I don’t have this great urgent need for love and whatever battened down under hatches built by my life with my father. I just don’t have it, period.”

“Oh, Lord, you sound like that Briant man on television last night. The sickest thing I ever heard—”

“Sick? What’s sick about it? He’s trying to bring some order, some factual sense into this whole confused area of human behavior and its motivating drives. How can that be sick? It’s a lot less sick than the fantasies your woolly-minded psychoanalytical school spins. That’s all they are. Fantasies—unprovable and largely inapplicable.”

“You look better. Getting annoyed with me has put some color back in your face. You looked like a piece of bad cheese when you came in here. And you can say what you like. The strength of your responses to my suggestions makes it clear that I’ve touched on something in your psyche that’s very real to you—”

“Oh, Norma, for God’s sake! Are you quite inaccessible to plain logic? I came here to see you because I had a symptom that… that is due entirely to my disturbed hormone balance—”

“So you say—”

“—
entirely
to my disturbed hormone balance, and you start on the fabrication of an involved story about my infant experiences. And you’re weaving it on an almost nonexistent thread.” She stopped and then said slowly, “Look, let me put something to
you
. You’ve been following the news about this Briant project?”

“Who hasn’t? You’d have to be blind, deaf and buried in idiocy not to.”

“All right. Now, this, er, this woman who was used to produce the baby.”

Norma grimaced. “Honestly, Miriam, doesn’t
that
make you feel—oh, I don’t know—repelled? Even someone as dedicated to science as you are must see—”

“Forget the value judgments. They’re irrelevent. Now, according to the newspaper reports, the woman, er, has had no contact at all with the natural father of the infant. No physical contact, let alone any emotional contact. But she has fulfilled her biological function, she’s had a baby. And I would suggest that she should be, well, more satisfied with herself than she was before, if your theory stands up. But suppose she isn’t? Suppose, for hypothesis’ sake, that in fact she has been made… in some way unhappy by her experience. She, er, she’s an intellectual type, emotionally unresponsive, according to the papers.”

Should she risk it? Would Norma jump to one of her conclusions and this time with deadly accuracy? But having gone this far…

“Much the same sort of person as I am myself,” she went on deliberately. “If she has been, well, distressed by having this baby, wouldn’t it mean that in fact she was genetically designed, as it were,
not
to need to a marked degree the satisfaction of this basic drive to reproduce? In which case, your whole theory about my need to have some sort of emotional involvement with someone falls flat on its face. Because if one woman is genetically structured in this way, so could I be.”

“I’ll bet my bottom dollar she
is
distressed by her experience, and I’d dearly like to know how she’s feeling right now. There’s been nothing much about her in the papers, has there? They’re certainly keeping her well hidden.”

“Why are you so sure she’s distressed? I was only hypothesizing for the purposes of this, er, argument.”

“But she must be!” Norma said, showing a sudden spark of irritation. “Didn’t you listen to what I tried to explain? It isn’t
reproduction
that drives women. It’s a need to love a man! The reproduction
bit comes later, depends for its success in terms of feminine satisfaction on the existence of a viable and enjoyable man-woman relationship! This woman who produced this baby has run directly counter to her own deepest needs, don’t you see? She’s never loved, never made love! How can she feel anything but distress because of having had that baby? Especially when you remember the poor devil had it taken away from her at birth.”

The telephone rang sharply, and Norma made a face and turned around to her desk to pick it up.

“Dr. Gould. What? Oh, Mrs. Giannotti, what’s the trouble? Oh. Has he a temperature?”

Miriam stared at the broad white expanse of Norma’s back, her mind whirling, trying to think clearly through the sound of Norma’s voice chattering about aspirin and bed rest and when she could visit the patient.

Was that the trouble? Could there be some really logical sense in what Norma had said? After all, she had had a baby, two babies. She should know.

Was this why it had kept happening, this awful pubertal behavior that had so bedeviled and bewildered her these past days and most of all nights? Had producing the baby mobilized in her a whole mass of primitive drives and desires that because of the hormonal changes of the pregnancy were no longer amenable to intellectual control?

She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to arrange her thoughts methodically. If the way she was feeling now, the undoubted stress she was suffering, was due to the existence of these drives—or rather, their sudden clamoring demands for satisfaction—would patiently waiting for her hormone balance to be restored to normal solve her problem? No, it would not. Would it? Once she faced up to the fact that she had them—and Norma’s explanation of their existence held water, it couldn’t be denied—they were there. They couldn’t just be damped down again.

All right, she told herself. I have a drive toward satisfaction of a sexual need, a drive that has been in part created by producing the baby. I have to face the fact that this is so. This is why I’ve been feeling so miserable. Because I’ve been trying to satisfy it—

Trying to satisfy it in a way that fills me with revulsion. Face it, face it. You’ve suffered most of this distress because of the way you’ve been forced against your conscious will to cope with this need.