Steel Beach (53 page)
Authors: John Varley
Well, why not? I just hadn’t seen the harm in giving Him a hand in the matter. I knew a little about rattlesnakes and I hadn’t seen a one that showed signs of listening to
anybody
. And that was my problem. I always seemed to de-fang the serpent of faith before it had a chance to canker.
Possibly this was good. But I
still
didn’t have anything else going.
Sourdough, shortly before his death, had given me a beautiful delft pitcher and basin set. I filled the basin, added some rosewater, a little Oil of Persia and a dab of What The French Maid Wore, then patted my face with a damp washcloth.
“Everything’s a struggle in here, isn’t it?” Cricket said. “I find myself wondering where the water came from.”
“Everything’s always been a struggle everywhere, my boy,” I replied, letting down the top of my chemise and washing my breasts and under my arms. “It’s just that different people have struggled for different things at different times.”
“Water comes out of a tap, that’s all I know.”
“Don’t pretend ignorance with me. Water comes from the rings of Saturn, is boosted in slow orbits in the form of big chunks of dirty ice until we catch it here and melt it. Or it comes out of the air when we re-process it, or the sewage when we filter it, then it’s piped to your home, then it comes out of the tap. In my case, for the pipe substitute a man who comes by once a week and fills my barrels.”
“All I have to do with it is turning the tap.”
I pointed to my tank sitting on the sink. “So do I,” I said. I patted myself dry and started rubbing cream on my skin. “I know you’re dying to ask, so I’ll tell you I bathe every third or fourth day at the hotel in town. All over; soap and everything. And if what you’ve seen horrifies you, wait till you need to relieve yourself.”
“You’re really into this, aren’t you. That’s what I can’t get over.”
“Why all this sudden concern about my standard of living?”
That one seemed to make him uncomfortable, so we were quiet for a while, until I had finished wiping off the cold cream. I couldn’t read his expression well in the dim light, looking at him in the mirror.
“If you were going to say the people who live in here are losers, save it, I’ve already heard that. And I don’t deny it.” I opened an oval lacquered box, took out a powder puff, and started applying the stuff until I sat in the center of a fragrant cloud. On the side of the box it said “Midnight in Paris.”
“That’s why you don’t belong here,” he said. “Hildy, you’ve still got worlds to conquer. You can’t bury yourself in here, playing at being a newspapergirl. There’s a real world out there.”
In here, too, I might have said, but didn’t. I turned to face him, then put the straps of my chemise back up over my shoulders. It was more of a long vest, really, made of yellow silk, snug at the waist. In addition to that I still had on my best silk stockings, held up by garters, and maybe a trifle here and a whimsy there. He crossed his legs.
“You once accused me of being not so good at people. You were right. I’d known you for years, and didn’t know you had a daughter, didn’t know a
lot
of things about you. Cricket, there’s things you don’t know about me. I’m not going to get into them, it’s my problem, not yours, but believe me when I tell you that if I hadn’t come here, I’d be dead by now.”
He looked dubious, but a little worried at the same time. He started to say something, but changed his mind. His arms were crossed now, too, one hand up and playing self-consciously with his mustache.
I reached behind me for the little purple vial of patchouli, dabbed a bit behind my ears, between my breasts, between my thighs. I got up and walked by him—quite close by him—to the bed, where I pulled the big comforter down to the foot, plumped up the pillows, and reclined with one foot trailing onto the floor, the other on the bed. The girl in the painting behind the bar at the Alamo is in an identical pose, though you would have to call her plump.
I said, “Cricket, I haven’t been in the big city for a while. Maybe I’ve forgotten how things are there. But in Texas, it’s considered impolite to keep a lady waiting.”
He got up, almost stumbled as he tried to get out of his shoes, then gave that up and came into my arms.
Kitten Parker, the male manifestation, was nude, supine, cruciform. I, the female manifestation, was also nude, and in lotus position: shoulders back, legs folded with the soles of my feet turned up on my thighs, hands loose and palm-upward in my lap. My knees stuck out to the sides and my weight barely made an impression on his body—that’s right, I was impaled, as the porno writers sometimes put it.
Those writers wouldn’t have been interested in this scene, however. We’d been there, unmoving, for going on five hours.
It was called sex therapy and Kitten Parker was the leading proponent of it. In fact, he invented it, or at least refined it from earlier versions. What it was, was a type of yoga, wherein I had been urged to find my “spiritual center.” So far my best guess as to its location was about five centimeters cervix-wards from the tip of his glans.
I found this frustrating. I’d been finding it frustrating for going on five hours. See, I was supposed to find my center because I was the yin, and because I was the novice.
His
center wasn’t material to the exercise,
he
knew where his center was though he hadn’t told me where yet; maybe that was lesson two. His contribution was to bring the thrust of his enlightenment, also known as his yang, or glans, into contact with my spiritual center, or rather I was apparently supposed to lower the center down, since deeper penetration was
clearly
out of the question. Maybe what I was feeling wasn’t my center at all, maybe it was just a vaginal suburb, but it had taken me going on two hours just to entertain the notion that maybe, possibly, that
might
be it, this little place inside me that seemed to want to be massaged, and I wasn’t about to go searching for it again.
So I thought about that might-be-center, willed it to move. It just stayed right there. I began to wonder if his yang was anywhere near as sore as my yin was getting. And if this whole thing would prove to be a yawn.
Actually, the only center I really cared about was the one every woman knows how to find without a road map from Kitten Parker: the center of sexual response, right up there in the cleft of the labia, the little-girl-in-the-boat, and that little girl had been sitting there, becalmed, hands on the oars, rowing her little single-minded heart out, swollen and excited, for going on… well, just over six hours now and the little slut was pouting and resenting the lack of attention and had been for… yes… and she didn’t like that one bit, no she didn’t, and she was just about to SCREEEEEAM!
CUT TO
INTERIOR—OFFICE OF THE PRIMALIST
Lots of ferns, lots of leather, violent paintings on the walls. The PRIMALIST faces her patient, HILDY, who, red-faced, watery-eyed, has had just about all the therapy a person can stand.
HILDY
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
PRIMALIST
That’s better, that’s much better. We’re starting to get through the layers of rage. Now reach even deeper.
HILDY
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
PRIMALIST
No, no, you’re back to the childhood peevishness again.
Deeper, deeper! From the soul!
HILDY
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
PRIMALIST
(slaps HILDY’s face)
You’re really not trying. You call that a scream?
Ooooooh
. Sounds like a cow. Again!
HILDY
YAAAH! YAAAH! YAAAAH! YAAAAAAA…
PRIMALIST
Don’t give me that lost-your-voice crap. You’re giving up! I won’t
let
you give up! I can
make
you face the primal source.
(slaps HILDY again)
Now, once more, with—
HILDY kicks the PRIMALIST in the belly, then knees her in the face. The PRIMALIST goes flying across the room and lands in the FERNS.
CUT TO
CLOSE SHOT—PRIMALIST
Who is bleeding from the nose and mouth and is momentarily out of breath.
PRIMALIST
That’s
much
better! We’re really getting somewhere now… hey! Where…
O.S. SOUND of footsteps: SOUND of a door opening. PRIMALIST looks concerned.
HILDY
(raggedly, receding)
AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaah… sh—
SOUND of door slamming.
FADE OUT
I passed out, right there on the thrust of Kitten’s enlightenment.
I was only gone a few seconds, during which I re-lived a particularly fruitless episode early in my Quest; sort of a comic within a comic. I really wish that Shouter, Screamin’ Sabina, had had
cojones
. My kick would have been right in the spiritual center.
“What it was,” I told Kitten as he helped me to my feet, “was the most powerful orgasm of my life.
Jesus
, Kitten, I think you’ve got something here. And this was only lesson
one
? Man, sign me
up
! I want to get into the advanced classes right away. I never would have
dreamed
it was
possible
to get off that way, much less such a… such an
earthquake
! Wow!”
I fluttered on like that for a while, probably sounding a lot like I had many, many years ago when I first discovered what that doohickey was
for
, when a sign from the outside world finally penetrated the golden haze of contentment. Kitten was frowning.
“You weren’t supposed to do that,” he said. “The point is enlightenment, not mere physical pleasures.”
“Goodbye,” I said.
At least Cricket didn’t seem to mind if I pursued mere physical pleasures. It didn’t take any five hours, either. The first of many came about five minutes after we began, him still fully dressed, pants around his knees. After that we settled down a bit and carried on far into the night.
It was my first sex since Kitten Parker. I hadn’t even
thought
about it in all that time.
I didn’t pass out during any of the orgasms, but it was special in another way. When we finally seemed to be through, I was still wearing most of what I’d gone to bed with, and there was a reason for that: Cricket liked it.
So many of our words come from a time when, by all reports, sex was even more screwed-up than it is today, unlikely as that seems. Call it a perversion? Seems very judgmental to me, but then they called masturbation self-abuse, and I don’t even like the flavor of the word masturbation. You can call it a fetish, a fixation. A “sexual preference,” how’s that for neutral? Bland is more like it. Call it what you wish, we all like different things. The Duke of Bosnia likes pain, preferably with the teeth. Fox liked tearing clothes off; Cricket liked to have me leave them on. He liked silk and satin and lace “unmentionables,” and he liked to watch me take a few of them off.
What made it special was that he hadn’t
known
he liked that. He hadn’t known much of anything. He was still a novice in this business of being a man. Helping him find it out about himself was a thrill for me, the kind you don’t get too often in this life. I could only recall three other instances and the last had been about seventy years ago. By the time you’re fifty or so you’re unlikely to discover a new preference in yourself, or anybody else.
“I was beginning to think I really was a single-sexer,” he said, when it seemed we were finally through. My head was tucked up beneath his arm, that hand stroking slowly over the curve of my hip, him leaning back, propped up on my best feather pillows, a cup of hot tea carefully cradled on his belly. I’d got up to brew the tea. He’d watched me the whole time. He took little sips now and then between his amazed sighs, and I’d trained him to give me sips when I ran a nail over the line of hair on his tummy.
“Something just
clicked
,” he said. I’d heard this line several times already, but the sound of his voice was soothing me. “It just
clicked
.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” I said.
“It just
clicked
. I told you I’d been with women before. It was
fun
. I had a great time. Orgasms, the whole bit. I
liked
being with women, just about as much as being with men. You know?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” I said.
“But I haven’t been having much luck with women since the Change. It just didn’t seem very special, you know? Not with guys, either, for that matter, not like it was when I was female. I was thinking about Changing back. This thing just wasn’t giving me much pleasure.” He flicked his exhausted new toy with his thumb. “You know?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” I said, and shifted a little to put my cheek against his chest. If I’d had any complaint it was that, when flipping through the Toys for Boys catalog, he’d ordered his from the extra-large column. I don’t know why first-time Changers do that—they’d just been girls, right? and they had to know that more is not better, that one size truly does fit all—but I’d seen it happen many times before. Some little relay clicks, and when it’s time to make the decision between hung and
hung!
, a great many opt for the large economy size. Strange are the ways of the human mind, doubly so when it comes to sex.
“But something just
clicked
. For the first time I looked at a female body and I didn’t just think ‘Gosh, isn’t she cute,’ or ‘She’d be fun to have sex with,’ or… or anything like that. It
clicked
, and I
wanted
you. I had to
have
you.” He shook his head. “Who can figure a thing like that?”
I thought, who indeed, but I said “Mmm-hmmm.” What I’d been thinking before that was I could have a discreet word with him later, or maybe have a friend plant the suggestion concerning excess yardage. It had been a minor complaint, no question, but there was also no question it would be even better with more normal equipment, next time.
I was already thinking about the next time.
No more digressions, no more cutaways to Hildy’s Quest.
None were any more enlightening than the handful I’ve detailed. In spite of that, I planned to keep on with my slog through the shabbier neighborhoods of religion, philosophy, and therapy. Why? Well, the answer might really
be
out there, somewhere. Just because you’ve been dealt a thousand hands of nothing much doesn’t mean the next deal won’t turn up the Royal Flush. And I saw no reason why the “answer,” if it existed, should be any less likely to be with the kooks than with the more respected, conventional snake-oil salesmen. Hell, I
knew
something about the established religions and philosophies, I’d been hearing about them for a hundred years and they’d never given me anything. That’s why I’d been going to the snake-handlers instead of the Flacks.
There was another reason. While I did pretty well during the week, what with the
Texian
and school to keep me busy, weekends were still pretty shaky. If I gave the impression that my Quest was being handled by a tough, cynical, self-assured woman of the world, I gave the wrong impression. Picture instead a ragged, wild-eyed, unkempt Seeker, jumping at every loud noise, always alert for feelings of self-destruction she wasn’t even sure she’d recognize. Picture a woman who had seen the bullet flying toward her face, had felt the rope pull tight around her neck, watched the blood flow over the bathroom floor. We’re talking desperation here, folks, and it moved in and sprawled all over the sofa every Friday evening, like the most unforgettable advertising jingle you ever heard.
Maybe it was the Quest itself making me nervous? I thought of that, stayed home one weekend. I didn’t sleep at all, I just kept singing that jingle.
The good news was my list of places to go, people to see, was a good five years long now, and I was adding new discoveries at almost the same rate I was crossing them off. As long as there was one more whacko to talk to, one more verse of Amazing Grace to sing in one more ramshackle tabernacle, I felt I could hang on.
So maybe God
was
looking after me. The chief danger seemed to be that he might bore me to death before I was finished.
Our passions spent, Cricket’s mouth finally having stopped telling me how everything had just
clicked
, we lay quietly in each other’s arms for a long time, neither of us very sleepy. He was still too wound up about the new world that had opened to him, while I was thinking thoughts I hadn’t thought in a very long time.
He put his hand on my chin and I looked up at him.
“You really like it here, don’t you?” he said.
I nuzzled into his chest. “I like it here very much.”
“No, I meant—”
“I know what you meant.” I kissed him on the neck, then sat up and faced him. “I’ve got a place here, Cricket. I’m doing things I like. The people in here may be losers, but I like them, and I like their children. They like me. There’s talk about running me for mayor of New Austin.”
“You’re kidding.”
I laughed. “There’s no way I’d take it. A politician is the last thing I’d want to be. But I’m touched they thought of me.”
“Well, I’ve got to admit the place seems to agree with you.” He patted my belly. “Looks like you’re putting on some weight.”
“Too much chili beans, Chinese food, and apple pie.” And way too much Kitten Parker. The bastard, telling me we weren’t supposed to get any pleasure out of it.
“I guess you’ve managed to surprise me,” he said. “I really thought you were in trouble. I still think maybe you are, but not the kind I thought.” You don’t know the half of it, babe, I thought. “This place seems to agree with you,” he went on. “I don’t know when I’ve seen you looking so happy, so… radiant.”
“How long ago did you get your Change?”
“About a month.”
“Some of that’s your cock talking, idiot. Things are still colored for you. It’s called lust.”
“Could be. But only part of it.” He glanced at his thumbnail. “Uh… listen, I hadn’t planned to stay out the night—”
“You can go home if you want to.” You swine.
“No, I was wondering if I could stay over? But I’ll have to call the sitter, I’m already late.”
“You have a human sitter?”
“Only the best for my little Buster.”
I kissed him and got up as he was making the call. I took off the rest of my clothes, hearing him whispering in the background. Then I stepped out onto the porch.
I hadn’t been sleeping a lot. Though the nights tend to be cold, I often walked them like that, nude, in the moonlight. Cricket was wrong if he thought I was happy—the best I could claim was to be happier here than anywhere else I could think of—and the nearest I came to happiness was on these nocturnal rambles. Sometimes I’d be out for hours, and come back shivering and pile under the quilts. In that snugness I was usually able to drift off.
Tonight I couldn’t stay gone long. I noted there was enough moonlight for Cricket to find his way to the outhouse, then hurried back inside.
He was already asleep. I went around dousing the lamps, then lit a candle and carried it to the bed. I sat down carefully, not wanting to wake him, and just looked at his sleeping face there in the candlelight for the longest time.
