Pam gently placed her cup in its saucer on the side table. "How unexpectedly gallant. Rising to my defense when all this time you scoffed at my work."
"Not so," I protested. "I always respected it, even if I didn't understand it."
"Rapists!" Mrs. Maxson exclaimed, ignoring our byplay. "My daughter spent a year interviewing rapists in their cells. Can you imagine?"
"I categorized them by their behavior," Pam explained impassively. "The angry, the socially inept, the sadomasochistic."
"Sadists. So very sick," Mrs. Maxson chided.
"All of us have the capacity to inflict pain," Pam said quietly.
"Closet sadists?" I asked.
"We are all born psychopaths, born without repressions," she said. "Society teaches us the restraints of proper behavior and helps us develop a conscience."
I allowed Mrs. Maxson to pour me another cup of tea. "Some learn and some don't," I said.
Pam said sternly, "And if the restraints come off, if society encourages antisocial behavior, we are only too willing to comply."
Charlie Riggs sliced himself a piece of fig loaf and said, "The Nazis are proof enough of that, burghers manning the ovens."
"And on a lesser scale," Pam said, "the average man will inflict pain when it is acceptable to do so. In a college study thirty years ago, students were encouraged to give ever-increasing electric shocks to volunteers."
Charlie nodded. "The Milgram study."
The shocks were bogus," Pam continued, "but the students didn't know that, and they were only too happy to comply, even as the voltage increased and the volunteers writhed in apparent pain."
" Homo homini lupus " Charlie said sadly. "'Man is a fox to man.'"
We thought about that a moment, the shadows lengthening outside the gold-curtained windows. The mood of the afternoon tea had turned melancholy.
"Well, I don't know how we got off on that ghastly subject," Mrs. Maxson said after a moment. "Perverts and monsters. How I resent all of them, including their psychiatrists, for blaming women for their evil. With the Yorkshire Ripper, they blamed his wife. With the Hungerford killer, his mother. Your profession, Pamela, is so…so…"
"Misogynistic," Charlie offered.
"Exactly!"
"But then," Pam said, looking straight at dear old Mum, "it's difficult to overestimate the damage a mother can do."
Mrs. Maxson sighed and carefully replaced her cup and saucer on the silver tray. They must have been down this road before. She smoothed an imaginary crumb from the shimmering blue dress and shifted in her chair as if the tea were coming to a close. "Dr. Riggs, may I offer you a last slice of mincemeat cake with the brandy-butter sauce?"
Charlie patted his stomach and demurred, and Mrs. Maxson dispatched the pastry cart with a wave of the hand to her kitchen girl and told us we'd be having roast quail for dinner. I figured a five-mile run would be the prerequisite for that feast and would have made it, too, if a nap hadn't sounded so good. Mrs. Maxson showed me a room at the end of the second-floor corridor, and the four-poster practically invited me to drop in. The bed was high enough to store a steamer trunk underneath. Topside, it had a thick mattress, cool pink sheets, and high fluffy pillows.
I stripped down and drew the heavy curtains, blackening the room. The combination of jet lag, Thorazine, and two thousand calories of sweets took its toll. I was already asleep and dreaming of clear skies and steady winds when a sixth sense told me of a presence in the room. Unless I was dreaming.
I opened my eyes and, in the light of a candle, saw Pamela Maxson. She wore white panties and a white bra, and my waking sensation was that an erotic nurse was about to minister to her patient. She was fuller of hip and larger of breast than she appeared fully clothed, an enchanting swirl of womanly curves. She slid out of the panties and unfastened the bra. She shook her long auburn hair free over a bare shoulder and put the candle on the nightstand.
"I really don't own a bikini," she whispered, crawling into the cool bed and burying her head against my chest. "Red or otherwise."
There was the initial excitement of fresh silken skin and sweet womanly scents. There was the slight awkwardness of exploring new but familiar terrain. There was the customary kissing and touching and sighing and nuzzling, and there was finally the joining of bodies. Which, no matter the depth of feeling, the mutual care, comes down to the mutual thrusting of loins, the roar of engines in sync, the pure physical explosion of chemical energy. But even as my motor revved I thought the same was somehow out of kilter. There was, after all, no depth of feeling or mutual care. My pursuit of her had been halting and unsure, her response caustic and defensive. Then, the sudden change of moods; she became interested. In me or my neuroses, I didn't know which. But she was asking all the questions. She was filling in the blanks about me. That was fine. But who was this woman? I didn't know her at all. I didn't know the meaning of what we were doing, or why suddenly I needed to know, or why my spirits had plunged. It never used to be that way. Not in the days of the AFC Traveling All-Star Party Team. But damn, we change without knowing when or why.
So, after we unlatched, as my heartbeat slowed to its normal snail's pace, I had a short argument with the friend who sits on my shoulder, a smarter guy than me.
Lonely. That's what I feel. My arms wrapped around a beautiful woman who came to me, and I feel lonely…
What are you complaining about, Lassiter? You got yours, didn't you, fella?
Yes, but…
But what?
I want some caring with the caresses.
You're breaking my heart, big guy.
There's even some new words out there. Commitment. Love.
I'm gonna bring out the violins any minute now.
This didn't feel right. So meaningless.
Postcoital depression. Discuss it with your therapist. Hey, isn't that her…?
Somewhere, under the blanket of sleep, I heard a tapping against the windows and felt a chill in the room. There was the sense of movement, of clouds clearing, that perception below consciousness. Then invisible fingers flipped the switches and turned on the juice, warming up the brain.
I stretched an arm across the cool sheet and found myself alone.
"Looking for someone?"
"Found her," I said.
She stood at the foot of the bed, draped in a black velvet robe with gold piping. A candle flickered on the mantel. Outside, a summer storm pelted the windows with rain.
"I must be dreaming," I said.
"And not of me on a beach, I'll wager."
"Why do you say that?"
She sat on the bed.
"Now that you've had me, the repressed wish has been fulfilled. Time to move on to other wishes, other dreams."
She said it analytically, coldly, and I didn't like the way it sounded. "Is that a general comment on the male gender or should I take it personally?"
She was silent, so I said, "Or do you have some fear of abandonment?"
"You treated me as a transitional object," she said, "as a child would a teddy bear. To you, I'm something halfway between yourself and another person. Just a comforter for your infantile narcissism."
Oh. So that's what it was. It's so convenient to have a doctor in the house. Still, like most men, I prefer not to have my ego bashed just after sex. "Hold on, now. If I'm not mistaken, there was an appreciable amount of cooing and sighing coming from your side of the bed. Unless you were acting, things were pretty equal in the heat department."
"Is that it?" she demanded. "Were you measuring my galvanic skin response, the square inches of the blush on my chest? Is that all it is to you, the thermodynamics?"