They kissed and undressed. Her body was lean, athletic, with small high breasts, a flat belly, a dark appendectomy scar. He drew her toward the bed. It seemed strange, almost perverse, to be doing things in this antiquated fleshly way, no snake, no ocean, no meeting of minds. He was afraid for a moment that in the excitement of their coupling they would lose control of their mental barriers and let their inner selves come flooding out, fierce, intense, a contact too powerful to handle at such short range. But there was no loss of control. He kept the power locked behind the walls of his skull; she did the same; there were only the tiniest leakages of current. But there was no excitement, either, in their lovemaking.
He ran his hands over her breasts and trapped her nipples between his fingers, and gently parted her thighs with his knee, and pressed himself against her as though he had not been with a woman in a year, but the excitement seemed to be all in his head, not in his nerve endings. Even when she ran her lips down his chest and belly and teased him for a moment and then took him fiercely and suddenly in her mouth, it was the idea that they were finally doing this, rather than what they were actually doing, that resonated with him. They sighed a little and moaned a little and finally he slipped into her, admiring the tightness of her and the rhythms of her hips and all that, but nevertheless it was as though this had happened between them a thousand times before: he moved, she moved, they did all the standard things and traveled along to the standard result. Not enough was real between them, that was the trouble. He knew her better than he had ever known anyone, and yet in some ways he knew her not at all, and that was what had spoiled things. That, and holding so much in check. He wished he could look into her mind now. But that was forbidden, and probably unwise, too; he guessed that she was annoyed with him for having insisted on this foolish and foredoomed meeting, that she held him responsible for having spoiled things between them, and he did not want to see those thoughts in her mind.
When it was over they whispered to each other and stroked each other and gave each other little nibbling kisses, and he pretended it had been marvelous, but his real impulse was to pull away and light a cigarette and stare out the window at the snow, and he wasn’t even a smoker. It was simply the way he felt. It bad been only a mechanical thing, only a hotel-room screw, not remotely anything like snake and ocean: a joining of flesh of the sort that a pair of rabbits might have accomplished, or a pair of apes, without content, without fire, without joy. He and she knew an ever so much better way of doing it.
He took care to hide his disappointment.
“I’m so glad I came here, Chris,” she said, smiling, kissing him, taking care to hide her disappointment, too, he guessed. He knew that if he entered her mind he would find it bleak and ashen. But of course he could not do that. “I wish I could stay the night,” she said. “My plane’s at nine. We could have dinner downstairs, though.”
“Is it a terrible strain, keeping the power back?”
“It isn’t easy.”
“No. It isn’t.”
“I’m so glad we did this, Chris.”
“Are you?”
“Yes. Yes. Of course.”
They had an early dinner. The snow had stopped by the time he saw her to her cab. So: you fly up to Denver for a couple of hours of lust and steak, you fly back home, and that’s that. He had a brandy is the lounge and went to his room. For a long while he lay staring at the ceiling, sure that she would come to him with the ocean, and make amends for the unsatisfactory thing they had done that afternoon. She did not. He wondered if he ought to send her the snake as she dozed on her plane, and did not want to. He felt timid about any sort of contact with her now. It had all been a terrible mistake, he knew. Not because of that emanation from the dirty depths of the psyche that she had so feared, but only because it had been so anticlimactic, so meaningless. He waited for a sending from her, some bright little flash out of Arizona. She must surely be home now. Nothing came. He went on waiting, not daring to reach toward her, and finally he fell asleep.
Jan said nothing to him about the Denver trip. He was moody and strange, but she let him be. When the silence out of Phoenix continued into the next day and the next he grew even more grim, and skulked about wrapped in black isolation. Gradually it occurred to him that he was not going to hear from Laurel again, that they had broken something in that hotel room in Denver and that it was irreparable, and, oddly, the knowledge of that gave him some ease: if he did not expect to hear from her, he did not have to lament her silence. A week, two, three, and nothing. So it was over. That hollow little grunting hour had ruined it.
Somehow he picked up the rhythms of his life: work, home, wife, kids, friends, tennis, dinner. He did an extensive analysis of southwestern electric utilities that brought him a commendation from on high, and he felt only a mild twinge of anguish while doing his discussion of the prospects for Arizona Public Service as reflected in the municipal growth of the city of Phoenix. He missed the little tickle in his mind immensely, but he was encapsulating it, containing it, and after a fashion he was healing.
One day a month and a half later he found himself idly scanning the mindnoise band again, as he had not done for a long while, just to see who else was out there. He picked up the loony babble out of Fort Lauderdale and the epicene static from Manitoba, and then he encountered someone new, a bright dear signal as intense as Laurel’s, and for a dazzled instant a sudden fantasy of a new relationship blossomed in him, but then he heard the nonsense syllables, the slow, firm, strong-willed stream of gibberish. There were no replacements for Laurel.
In Chicago, where he had been sent to do a survey of natural-gas companies, he began talking to a youngish woman at the Art Institute, and by easy stages some chatter about Monet and Sisley turned into a dinner invitation and a night in his hotel room. That was all right. Certainly it was simpler and easier and less depressing than Denver. But it was a bore, it was empty and foolish, and he regretted it deeply by breakfast time, even while he was taking down her number and promising to call the next time he was in the Midwest. Maitland saw the post-Laurel pattern of his life closing about him now: the Christmas bonus, the trip to Hawaii with Jan, braces for the kids, the new house five years from now, the occasional quickie romance in far-off hotel rooms. That was all right. That was the original bargain he had made, long ago, entering adult life: not much ecstasy, not much grief.
On the long flight home that day he thought without rancor or distress about his year and a half with Laurel, and told himself that the important thing was not that it had ended but that it had happened at all. He felt peaceful and accepting, and was almost tempted to reach out toward Laurel and thank her for her love, and wish her well. But he was afraid—afraid that if he touched her mind in any way she would pull away, timid, fearful of contact in the wake of that inexplicably sundering day in Denver. She was close by now, he knew, for the captain had just told them that they were passing over the Grand Canyon. Maitland did not lean to the window, as everyone else was doing, to look down. He sat back, eyes closed, tired, calm.
And felt warmth, heard the lapping of surf, saw in the center of his mind the vast ocean in which Laurel had so many times engulfed him. Really? Was it happening? He let himself slide into it. A little flustered, he hid himself behind a facade of newspapers, the Tribune, the Wall Street Journal. His face grew flushed. His breathing became rougher. Ah. Ah. It was happening, yes, she had reached to him, she had made the gesture at last. Tears of gratitude and relief came to him, and he let her sweep him off to a sharp and pounding fulfillment five miles above Arizona.