“Well …”
“We’ve hit a snag in the interpersonal area and both Max and I feel you could iron it out.”
“The fact is …” What does Moira’s cheek say, my cheek wonders.
“Here-we-are,” says Stryker in a routine rush, glancing at Lillian. All the quiet pride of a scientist demonstrating his best trick.
The Love team springs into action, each to his station.
Lillian turns to show her famous cruciform rash. She embraces herself. Her pale loins bloom. Stryker presses buttons with a routine skill, a practiced climactic.
“Beautiful!” murmurs Helga.
“Pathognomonic!” cries Father Kev Kevin.
Moira bends to her note-taking, scribbles furiously as Stryker dictates.
Helga speaks by microphone to Lillian.
“Turn around slowly, dear.”
She addresses the unseen students, perched in their roost above us.
“You will notice please the cruciform morbilliform eruption extending bilaterally from the sacral area—”
Moira breaks her pencil and goes to sharpen it. The others are busy with Lillian and I see my chance. I follow her into a small closet-sized room, which houses a computer and a cot littered with dusty scientific journals. A metal label on the door reads Observer Stimulation Overflow Area. Standard equipment in all Love clinics. Known more familiarly to the students as the “chicken room,” it is provided to accommodate those observers who are stimulated despite themselves by the behavior they observe. For although, as Stryker explained, the observer hopes to retain his scientific objectivity, it must be remembered that after all the observers belong to the same species as the observed and are subject to the same “environmental stimuli.” Hither to the closet, alone or in pairs or severally, observers may discreetly repair, each to relieve himself or herself according to his needs. “It iss the same as a doctor having hiss own toilet, nicht?” Helga told me somewhat vulgarly. “Nicht,” I said but did not argue. I have other fish to fry.
While moral considerations are not supposed to enter into scientific investigation, “observer stimulation overflow” is nevertheless discouraged. It is Stryker’s quiet boast, moreover, that whatever may happen in Palo Alto or Berkeley or Copenhagen, scientific objectivity has been scrupulously preserved in the Paradise Love Clinic. No observer has ever used the chicken room. The closet houses not lovers but dusty journals and a computer.
Moira, in fact, tells me she feels safer in Love than when she worked as secretary to the chief psychologist.
“Can I see you after work today?” I whisper and take her hand. It is cold. Che gelida manina. Thy tiny hand is frozen.
“Can’t today!” she whispers back. “But I can’t wait till the Fourth! Where are we going?” Her lovely gold eyes look at me over her steno pad like a Moslem woman’s.
I frown. An ugly pang pierces my heart. Why can’t she see me today? Does she have a date with Buddy? Here’s the misery of love: I don’t really want to see her today, was not prepared to, have other plans, yet despite myself hear myself insist on it.
“But—”
She shushes me, seals my lips with her finger, and, glancing through the open door at Lillian who is unwiring herself, brushes her lips with her fingers, brushes mine.
“You better go.”
“Yes.” Ah.
Returning to the observation room, I sink into a chair and dreamily watch Lillian dress. Here’s my trouble with Moira. She’s a romanticist and I’m not. She lives for what she considers rare perfect moments. What I long to share with her are ordinary summer evenings, cicadas in the sycamores.
She whispers behind me. “Where are we going this time? To Dry Tortugas again? Chicken Itza? Tombstone?”
I shrug and smile. She likes to visit ghost towns and jungle ruins, so I’ll show her the one in our back yard, the ruined Howard Johnson motel. She’ll savor the closeness of it. One weekend we flew to Silver City, Arizona, and stood in the deserted saloon and watched tumbleweeds blow past the door. “Can’t you just hear the old rinky-dink piano?” she cried and hugged me tight “Yeah,” I said, taking delight in the very commonplaceness of her romanticism. “How about a glass of red-eye, Moira?” “Oh yes! Yes indeed!”
Lillian dresses quickly, pins on her Lois Lane hat, using the viewing mirror as her vanity, shoulders her bag, trudges out
In comes the next subject. No, subjects. A couple. I recognize one, a medical student who is doubtlessly making money as a volunteer. He is J.T. Thigpen, a slightly built, acned youth who wears a blue shirt with cuffs turned up one turn. He carries a stack of inky books in the crook of his wrist. His partner, whom the chart identifies only as Gloria, is a largish blonde, a lab worker, to judge from her stained smock, with wiry bronze hair that springs out from her head. Volunteers in Love get paid fifty dollars a crack, which beats giving blood.
“These kids are our pioneers,” Stryker tells me, speaking softly now for some reason. “And a case in point. Something has gone wrong. Yet they were our first and best interaction subjects. Our problem, of course, with using two subjects was one of visualization. Colley, who is a wizard, solved that for us with his Lucite devices. We can see around curves, you see, between bodies. So we figured if Colley could help us out in mechanics, you could help us out with interpersonal breakdowns. How about it?”
“Well …”
Gloria and J.T. are undressing. J.T. takes off his shirt, revealing an old-fashioned undershirt with shoulder straps. He’s a country boy from hereabouts. The spots of acne strewn across his shoulders turn livid in the fluorescent light. Removing his wristwatch with expansion band, he hesitates for a moment, then hangs it on the crank handle of the hospital bed.
Gloria wears a half-slip, which comes just short of her plump white knees, and a half-brassiere whose upper cusps are missing.
“Okay, keeds!” cries Helga, clapping her hands into the microphone. “Mach schnell! Let’s get the show on the road!”
“We have found,” Stryker explains to me, “that you can inspire false modesty and that by the same token a brisk no-nonsense approach works wonders. Helga is great at it!”
I clear my throat and stretch up my heavy-lidded eyes. My nose is a snout.
“I’ve got to be going.”
J.T. and Gloria, half-undressed, are standing around like strangers at a bus stop. J.T. sends his fingers browsing over his acned shoulder. Gloria stands foursquare, arms angled out past her hips as if she were carrying milkpails.
Father Kev Kevin clears the orgasm circuit. He won’t look at me.
“I’ve got to be going, Stryker.”
“Wait. How can you spot the hangup if you don’t watch them?”
“Yeah. Well, later. Thank you very much, all of you. Hm. I’m already late—” I look at my watch and start for the door.
“Wait! Ted ’n Tanya are next. They’re our best. Or were. Don’t you want to—”
“No.”
“What about the job?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“We’re funded, man! The money is here!”
“Very good.”
Leaving, I catch a final glimpse of J.T. Thigpen, bare-chested and goose-pimpled, gazing around the porcelain walls with the ruminant rapt expression of a naked draftee.
“Mach schnell! Keeds—” cries Helga, clapping her hands.
Whew! Escape! Escape, but just in time to run squarely into Buddy Brown, my enemy, in the corridor.
He smiles and nods and grips my arms as if we shared a lover’s secret. What secret? Who is he waiting for?
I brush past and do not wait to find out. Am I afraid to find out?