Authors: Irving Wallace
He nodded, protesting no more, his face so ashen that she wanted to hold it in her hands and kiss him and beg his forgiveness, but she did not.
At last, he shrugged, and started for the door.
“Where are you going, Sam?”
“To search,” he said.
After he had left, she wondered if he had gone to search for Mary—or for Sam Karpowicz, Liberal.
* * *
In the twenty minutes before three o’clock in the afternoon, when she would have her last appointment of the day, Rachel DeJong sat in the vacant hut that she used for her office, beside the pile of pandanus mats that served her as psychoanalytical couch, and transcribed her clinical notes on Marama, the woodcutter, and Teupa, the dissatisfied wife. This task completed, she considered the impending arrival of her third patient.
Putting aside the looseleaf notebook confined to professional aspects of her visit to the Sirens, Rachel took up the oblong ledger in which she irregularly confided the personal aspects of her life. Moreturi had been entirely transferred from the first notebook to the second, because his relationship to her (and her thoughts about him) were not for publication.
Opening her diary, Rachel found her last entry, six days old. It was terse, cryptic, and would mean nothing on earth to anyone besides herself. It read:
“First day festival. After daily two sessions, attended swimming meet. Thrilling. One of our team, Marc H., was entry. Performed well until end when performed badly, but in keeping with his personality pattern. In evening went to outdoor dance, in which both Harriet and Lisa participated. Afterwards, late, agreed to accompany a native friend, Moreturi, by canoe to nearby atoll. Romantic like Carmel seashore. We went for swim. I almost drowned. Afterwards rested on sand. Memorable evening.”
She examined the passage. What might another, say Joe Morgen, make of it? Nothing, she decided with satisfaction. Not even a Champollion would be able to decipher it. The true history of people was written only in their heads, and went safely, privately, underground with their mortal remains. Everything on paper was only one-tenth of truth. But then, remembering her reading, the cleverness of her predecessors, she was less certain. How little Sigmund Freud needed of Leonardo da Vinci’s life, from what was left on paper, to interpret the truth of that life. And Marie Bonaparte, how little she required to know of Poe to dissect his addled psyche. Still, her own passage committed to paper was bland, offhand, unrevealing, except, perhaps, for the riddle of “Memorable evening.” Someone might ask—why memorable? But an evening, especially one in a foreign climate, could be memorable because of the scenery or a mood. Who in the world would ever learn that it had been memorable to its author because it had been the occasion of the first orgasm in her life?
With pleasurable fearlessness, Rachel put her pen to the ledger and began to write:
“Speaking of this native friend, I have seen him but once since our visit to the neighboring atoll. Since I had dismissed him from analysis (see Clinical Notes), I had no reason to receive him at work. Several times, however, he extended social invitations, offering to show me other parts of the main island, and, in fact, the third atoll. These verbal invitations came by messenger, but I had to decline. There has been very little time, what with my patients, my studies of the Social Aid Hut, my investigations of the Hierarchy as an institution of mental help, and my observation of all the festival activity.
“My one consequent encounter with Moreturi occurred early this morning, when I went to call upon his mother, who heads the Hierarchy (see Clinical Notes). He was waiting for me before her door and requested a formal analytical interview. He said my previous work with him had apparently borne some fruit, given him some sort of new insight into himself, and he was bursting to tell me of what I had helped him to accomplish. Naturally, as a psychoanalyst, I found this irresistible, and so I promised him one final session at three o’clock in the afternoon. I cannot imagine what it is he has to reveal to me.”
Her watch told her that he would be here in seven minutes. She capped her pen, closed her ledger, and laid both aside. She extracted the hand mirror from her purse, observed herself in it, and then combed her hair and ran a light border of lipstick across her mouth.
She was, she was pleased to see, a young woman, after all. Why had she attempted to be more? What had directed her into becoming a young woman psychoanalyst? Briefly, she concentrated on answering these questions more honestly than she had answered them in her own analysis. In the university, she guessed, she had not wanted to join teeming life. If you went into life as a plain woman, no more, you were defenseless and subjected to too much pain. Your female feelings were buffeted and bruised. You were sometimes laughed at or scorned or humiliated, even emotionally dirtied, and you could not fight back. Of course, as plain woman, you sometimes knew pleasure, even ecstasy, were admired, desired, wanted, but Rachel had set those advantages aside. The dangers of going into life as woman unadorned were too many.
And so, perhaps, as an insurance, a means of self-protection against being humbled or neglected or committed, she had taken on the armor of career. By earning her M.D., becoming a psycho-analvst, she was no longer exposed to the quandaries of being merely mortal. In a way, she was above people, a synthetic goddess sitting on a throne apart from the appalling mainstream of life. The sick and the ailing come to her, the emotional beggars and cripples, and she was their deliverer. There was, too, the other aspect of it. From her high position, behind the magic one-way glass, she lived a hundred lives, enjoyed and suffered a thousand experiences vicariously. Yet, she was above and safe from this erratic life. She could touch it, but it could not touch her. And always, to salve any ache about her noncommitment to life, there was the flag of good purpose that she flew: you led the lame and the blind, you helped, and earned a merit badge from the Creator.
Rachel DeJong returned her compact to her purse. Fine, she thought, so it worked, except when she grew older and wanted it not to work. Joe Morgen could not reach her in her high position, and she no longer had the limbs to come down from it. Marriage meant giving up, for better or worse, that fearful flesh and emotion that she had kept to herself. The question had always been: could she step down, be at eye-level with everyone like her, be jostled in the crowd or bed, be one more member of the people, a woman plain, not a woman psychoanalyst?
But she had stepped down! Six nights ago, on the hospitable sands of a foreign and isolated beach, she had waived the role of voyeur and remote bystander. She had surrendered the part of Deliverer for Deliverance. She had opened herself to an animal man, of another skin and two breeds, and questionable literacy and sensitivity. There had been no immunity. She had been taken as a plain woman, nothing more, and she had given satisfactorily, and she had proved to a man and to herself that she was capable in the role of female.
Yet, even as she glowed with self-congratulation, she was not positive that the major step had been made. There had been too many extenuating circumstances. Moreturi had provoked her into accompanying him by a ridicule and challenge that could only come from a primitive mind. She had responded to his invitation to visit the atoll, to swim in the semi-nude, because she had been drunk. Not her own free will, but an accident in the water had divested her of garments and resistance. She had not deliberately joined Moreturi in love. She had submitted to his love because she had been too helpless to resist him. In fact, as best she could recall, during the act she had sobered sufficiently to try to resist him. She had resisted him. It was his overpowering masculinity, the christening water washing over them, that had aroused her. Her response had been physical, not mental. There had been no free choice in the act. Therefore, little had been solved. She recognized that she had been afraid to see Moreturi again, curious as her body was (not she, but her body), not out of mortification, but purely because she was still not convinced that she could perform as an ordinary woman. If she was still unsure about herself, she was still unsure about herself and Joe. She would return to California as she had left it—a woman psychoanalyst, with her inner conflicts still unresolved behind her stoical calm.
During the last of her introspection, there was a slight disturbance, and she realized someone was rapping at the door.
Suddenly, she had misgivings about permitting him this final session. It would be an embarrassment for her. And for him. What did he have to say that could be so important? Well, there was nowhere to which she could retreat. Forcibly, she lofted herself to her high position behind the magic one-way glass, and prepared to live another’s life, keeping her own in safe seclusion.
“The door’s open!” she called out.
Moreturi came into the room, closed the door behind him, and his demeanor was respectful and friendly. None of the familiar self-assurance was evident, as he came toward her, tendering a half-smile.
“It is kind of you to see me once more,” he said.
She indicated the layers of matting beside her, “You said I had helped you, and women are nothing if not curious.”
“Should I lie down as before?”
“By all means.” She watched with fascination the shiftings and displacement of his muscles beneath his tan skin. He stretched himself to a comfortable position on the matting, adjusting the cord that held his white supporter.
For Rachel, the situation in this room, the patient reclining on the couch, the therapist seated on the floor next to him, made their nocturnal encounter unreal. She had been on her back in the dark, and he had been above her on his knees, naked and passionate, and she had allowed him to remove her wet nylon panties, and later, half in the water, she had done crazy things, said crazy things, and now they were six days away from that and a million feelings apart, and she wondered if he was remembering it also.
“Do you want me to talk?” he was asking.
God yes, talk, she wanted to shout. She said, “Please tell me whatever you have on your mind.”
He turned his head toward her. “I am in love, at last, Rachel,” he said.
The pulses in her wrists jumped, and her throat constricted.
He continued speaking directly at her. “I know you have always regarded me like a man-child, but now I know I have more depth. There is a deepness in me since the festival began. Should I tell you?”
“If—if you feel—”
“I will tell you. You are the only one I can tell this to, because of our intimacy. When I invited the one i speak of to go with me, in the canoe, across the channel, it was only a lark. I confess it. My feelings were not deeper. She resisted me a long time, turned me aside, and I wanted to show her she was as human as me. Also, one enjoys a woman who resists—”
Rachel’s cheeks were crimson with humiliation. She had the impulse to slap him.
“—but after the swim, when she gave herself to me, something happened. It had never been like that before between myself and a woman. It was not only below that I felt love, but here, too.” He touched his heart. “For once, I was loved as I loved another. This woman who appeared so cold was heated. I was never happier.”
She wanted to leave her high throne, kneel over him, kiss him for his sweetness. She wanted to envelop this good person with her gratefulness.
“Rachel, I have thought of what you have said to me and done for me,” he went on. “I now see my problem is solved. I will pledge eternal faithfulness, except for the one week of the year that is our custom, and I will be a true husband—”
Rachel’s joy turned to alarm. Blindly, she reached out and took his hand. “No, Moreturi, not another word. You are one of the kindest men I have ever met. I’m terribly moved. But a single night, one affair, is no basis for an enduring relationship. Besides, we are worlds apart and it simply would not work. You’ve done more for me than I’ve done for you, believe me, but I could never—”
“You?” he said. He sat up with astonishment. “I do not speak of you. I speak of Atetou.”
“Atetou?” she gasped.
“My wife. I took her to the atoll last night, and we are changed. There will be no divorce.” He peered at her, and saw that she was unable either to close her mouth or speak. “Forgive me if—” he began.
“Atetou!” she repeated shrilly, and she wrapped her arms around herself, and rocked not with mortification but delight. “Oh, my God!”
She began to giggle, and then to laugh, the laughter erupting from her chest and throat. “Oh, Moreturi, this is too delicious!”
She was chortling like a mad fool. She shook with mirth, her entire body convulsed.
She found him beside her, one arm around her, patting her, trying to calm her, but she shook her head, wanting to reassure him that she needed no consolation, that this was rich and wonderful, as tears of merriment rolled down her cheeks.
“Oh, me,” she choked. “Oh, Moreturi, this is too much—”
She groped for her purse behind her and pulled out a Kleenex and wiped her eyes, as her laughter subsided to a tittering.
“What is it, Rachel?”
“It’s funny, that’s what. Old sobersides me, so serious, so pleased and worried when you were talking, positive you were speaking about us—that you were serious about me—”
He looked down into her stained face. “I was serious about you,” he said. “I am practical, also. I know it cannot be. You have too much mana at home, you are too wise for a fool like me—”
“Oh, stop it, Moreturi, I’m just a woman like Atetou or any-other,” she said with relief. Then, with more control, she added, “If you knew there could be nothing between us, why did you take me to that beach, and—and make love to me?”
“For fun,” he said simply.
“For fun?” she repeated, and her mouth formed the two words with a kind of new knowledge.
“Is there another reason to make love? To have children, it is the afterthought, not the first and main one. Fun is the important thing in life. It does not make us worse, it always makes us better.”