The Sphinx (13 page)

He stared at
her. Some cigarette smoke went down the wrong way, and he coughed.

“I beg your
pardon,” he said. I could have sworn you said I could never see you naked.”

She nodded.

He bent his
head thoughtfully for a moment, and then he leaned over and crushed his
cigarette out in a small porcelain ashtray. He shucked off the gray coat of his
morning suit, and walked across to Lorie in his formal white shirt and gray
pants.

“Take off that
dress,” he said, in a soft voice.

Lorie lifted
her proud head. “Gene, I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Do you have a
reason?” he asked her.

She nodded
dumbly.

“What is the
reason.”

She shook her
head.

“You’re not
going to tell me?”

She shook her
head again.

“In that case,”
he said, “I’m going to tear the god-damned thing right off you, shred by
shred.”

“Gene–it’s my
wedding dress!”

He turned
around and banged his fist on the top of the mahogany dresser so that the
perfume bottles Tattled and a hairbrush dropped on to the floor.

“Lorie, I know
it’s your goddamn wedding dress! Do you think that I want to tear it? Why the hell
can’t you take it off? Why don’t you Just fate some pride in yourself and show
your husband your goddamn body?”

“Because I
can’t, and I can’t tell you why! I’m different, Gene, you don’t understand!”

Gene rubbed the
back of his neck in anger and frustration. He took a few deep breaths to try
and control himself. “Lorie, I know you’re different,” he said in a steady and
leadenly patient voice. “I married you because you’re different. You’re unlike
every other girl I ever knew. You’re stunningly attractive, you have a
desirable body, and you turn everyone’s heads when you Walk into a room. Don’t
you understand that it was because you’re different that I wanted you?”

She was crying
now. Tears ran down her cheeks, and she made no attempt to hide them.

“Gene,” she
said miserably, “you don’t know how different.”

Without another
word, she reached behind her and began to unbutton her wedding dress. He didn’t
help her, and she cried all the time she was doing it. At last it was undone,
and she stepped out of it and laid it on the bed.

Underneath, she
was wearing white stockings, white suspenders, a short slip and a bra. Her big
breasts were firm and shapely, and he could see the pink half-moons of her
nipples rising over the white lace of her bra cup.

Gene stood
there, aroused and transfixed,, but he made no move to undress her, and he
didn’t say a single word. This was something she had to do for herself. She
might never have undressed in front of a man, before, but now she was going to
have to learn.

She turned her
back on him, raised the slip over her head, and then reached behind her to
release the bra. He saw her bare breasts swing slightly as she took it off. She
-wasn’t wearing any panties, and her curved and rounded bottom was suntanned
the color of freshly poured coffee.

“There,” said
Gene hoarsely. “Was that so bad?”

She slowly
turned around. He was just on the point of walking toward her, his hand
half-raised, but what he saw made him stop as suddenly as if he’d been doused
in icy-cold water. A terrible feeling of dread and uncertainty swamped over
him, and all he could do was stand where he was and stare.

She had
beautiful breasts. They were the loveliest breasts he had ever seen, and they
were high and tense with youthfulness and crowned with wide, pink nipples. What
was different about Lorie, though, was that directly under those breasts she
had what looked like the beginnings of another pair of breasts! They were much
smaller, like an adolescent girl’s, their two pink nipples, were also visible.
And, under that pair she had what appeared to be two more nipples, faintly
visible, but distinctly breast-like and pink.

Between her
thighs grew abundant curls of tawny pubic hair. It formed a fleece that grew
right up past her navel, and even grew a few inches down her thighs.

Lorie stood
there looking at him her arms wide apart so that he could see everything of her
there was to see. She had stopped crying now and she was silent and watchful
and proud.

“You see,” she
said. “I’m different.”

Gene picked up
his morning coat and groped in the pocket for his cigarettes. He swallowed
nervously, and found that he was sweating and shaking with shock.

“W-w-what is
it?” he stammered, lighting up his True. “Is it... some kind of...”

Lorie stalked
across the room and stood at the window. “Does it upset you, the fact that I’m
Mice this?” she asked.

He turned away.
“I don’t know,” he breathed uncertainly. “I just didn’t imagine that... ”

She camp across
and touched his shoulder. He-couldn’t bear to look at her, in case he found
himself Staring at those small, unformed breasts under her maul breasts, and at
that curious and unsettling growth of pubic hair.

“Yes,” she
said. “It does upset you, doesn’t it? I thought it would. That’s why I didn’t
want to show you. At least, if you’d never seen it, you never would have
known.”

“You really
expected me to marry you, and spend the rest of my. life with you, without us
ever making love?” asked Gene. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but he
couldn’t believe what he was seeing, either, and he felt that his
Me
had abruptly and inexplicably taken an extraordinary
turn, into some maniacal existence that was like a late night horror show on television.

“It could have
worked,” said Lorie. “You said yourself that playing the field was part of
everyday life in Washington. I could have been your chaste and thoughtful
escort, and you could have gone out with any girl who took your fancy. I do
love you, Gene. You must understand that I really do love you.”‘

Gene sat down.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “It’s like a goddamned nightmare.”

Lorie squatted
down beside him and stroked his arm soothingly. He smoked for a while, and then
said, “Haven’t you or your mother ever thought about plastic surgery? I mean, a
good plastic surgeon could–”

“Gene,”
interrupted Lorie, “it’s nothing to do with plastic surgery. It’s the way we
are.”

“The way who
is?”

“My mother, me,
and our ancestors. This is what being Ubasti means.

“It means
having six breasts?”

Lori stood up,
and went to sit on the end of the bed. She sat in her white stockings and
suspenders with her thighs wide apart, and even though he still felt curious
tingles of horror in his spine and the back of his hands, he was also aroused
by the sight of her.

“American
doctors call these ‘supplementary breasts,’“ said Lorie, cupping her second
pair of breasts in her hands. “They’re very well chronicled in. medical books,
and lots of women have more than the usual number of nipples.”

Gene dabbed at
his sweaty forehead with his handkerchief. He didn’t comment on what she’d
said, but let her continue.

“For us Ubasti,
though,” she said, “these breasts are not supplementary, but usual. And it is
only because the use of the normal number of six breasts were not properly used
by women in the past that they gradually decreased in size, and shrunk, and
eventually were bred out of existence altogether. Gene, can you imagine the beauty
of a woman with six breasts as big as these?”

Gene looked at
her, and shook his head.

“Lorie,” he
said, “it has to be surgery. You can’t spend the rest of your life going around
with six nipples. What about walking in a bikini? And what’s going to happen
when they take you to the hospital to have our babies? What’s the doctor going
to say? ‘Oh, I suggest you breast-feed, Mrs. Keiller. You’ve got enough of
them.’“

Lorie,
unnervingly for Gene, was caressing her own lower nipple. “Can’t you see it
from my point of view?”

“What about my
point of view?” demanded Gene. 107

“You spring It
on me after we’re married that you’re a physical freak, and then you tell me
that you don’t want to have it corrected!”

She pouted.
“You’re making me sound completely selfish.”

“Well, it’s
true!” he yelled. “You are completely selfish! I married you on the vague
understanding that, under those clothes of yours, you were a beautiful woman!
Now I find out that you’re overloaded with more breasts than a Dalmatian bitch,
and I’m supposed to forget that I’m married to you and play the field? Lorie,
what the hell’s going through your mind?”

She didn’t
answer him at all. Instead, she turned and gently said, “At least you won’t
want to sleep with me now, will you?”

He stopped
yelling and stared at her. He got up from his chak, walked across to the bed
where she was sitting, and scrutinized her pretty, tempting, confusing, and
infuriating face.

“I get the
feeling you’re actually pleased” he told her. “You are, aren’t you? You’re
actually pleased.”

“Gene,” she
said, “I’ve tried to protect you from this from the very start. I’ve done
everything I can.”

“You’ve tried
to protect me from what?”

She looked at
him with a sad, soft expression. “From yourself, Gene. I tried to warn you so
many times but you wouldn’t be warned. Whatever I did to put off, you were
determined to come blundering into my life without a thought -for what I was or
anything else. Up until the time you met Mother, I think I could have saved
you. But she’s too strong for me, Gene. She’s my mother, and she’s a Ubasti,
too. I have to do what she wishes.”

“I don’t
understand a word of this,” Gene said.

Lorie brushed
back her hair. “Go and look at that picture next to the dresser,” she said.
“That’s right, that one.”

Uncertainly,
reluctantly, Gene went over and examined the small, framed etching. It was
probably mid-Victorian, judging by the melodrama of what was going on, and the
style. It showed a small graceful creature with horns tied up to a stake in the
ground. Not far away, huge and powerful and tossing its mane, crouched a lion,
ready to pounce on the tiny animal and devour it.

Underneath the etching, an elegantly written caption read,
“Smith’s gazelle.”

T
hey spent a restless night under the gloomy canopy of the
four-poster bed. Lorie wore an ankle-length nightdress of pale peach-colored
silk, and through the disturbed hours of the early morning, tossing and sighing
and trying to relax on wrinkled sheets, Gene made no attempt to touch or hold
her.

His feelings
were in a scorching turmoil. He knew, somewhere in the middle of that emotional
broth, that he still loved Lorie, and that to lose her now would be tragically
painful. Now and then he looked across at her as she lay with her eyes closed
on the wide, lace-trimmed pillow, and she was just as tempting and tantalizing
as she’d always been. But then he thought about her breasts, and the thick hair
between her thighs, and he felt his gorge rise in almost total revulsion.

What he
couldn’t understand was that she was content with her body the way it was. It
didn’t seem unnatural or ugly to her at all. If anything, she seemed to
consider that women with only two breasts were somehow distasteful and
inadequate. Gene’s mind couldn’t get around this acceptance of her own
freakishness, any more than a coyote could get its jaws around a whole sheep.
Or a Smith’s gazelle.

He had been
brought up to appreciate American girls on a strictly Playboy level. Fresh
bouncing hair, wide wholesome smiles, sparkling eyes, and curvy suntanned
bodies. In Florida, most of the girls he had dated were like that, with the
sole exception of a wan academic young lady he had once taken, out of pity
alone, to a John Cage concert. By the time the concert was over the only person
he had felt sorry for was himself. To Gene, the ideal of the pretty girl was an
indisputable part of the American philosophy of happy living, and it was
impossible for him to comprehend anyone who didn’t subscribe to it. That didn’t
mean that he was going to close his mind to Lorie, though. He wasn’t that much
of a mental stereotype. But it did mean that once he had sorted out her
perverse attitude to physical oddity, he was going to do everything he could to
get her around to the best plastic surgeon he could afford.

As dawn began
to solidify the shadowy images of the night, Lorie stirred, turned over, and
reached out to touch his hand. He didn’t recoil, although his pulse-rate
speeded up, and he found himself waiting tensely for whatever she was going to
do.

“Gene,” she
whispered. “Are you awake?” .

He grunted. “I
don’t think I’ve slept”

There was a
pause, and a rustle of sheets. Tm sorry, Gene, this was all my fault. I should
have told you the truth before.”-

He coughed. “Well,
yes, maybe you should. But it’s still not too late, you know. If you want me to
go see a doctor I know... I mean, I’ve heard he’s an expert on hormones... and
really I think it’s the best thing to do.”

“If you like,
we could just call it quits’. You could get a divorce in Reno, couldn’t you?
You could say I’d been unfaithful if you wanted to. I’m not after you money.”

Gene propped
himself up on one elbow. “Lorie,” he said, “I don’t get It. Why would you
father walk around with that kind of physical disability than have a short,
simple operation and get it over with? You’re a beautiful girl, and you could
be the most fantastic-looking thing on two legs.”

She didn’t
answer.

“Maybe it’ll
set us back a few thousand dollars,” he continued. “But what’s that compared to
having a perfect body? I thought every girl wanted to look as gorgeous as
possible. I just don’t understand you.”

She turned her
head away. “Gene,” she whispered, “it’s me. This is what I’m like. I’m Ubasti.”