Mr. Adam

CHAPTER 9

Dr. Thompson arrived in the morning. He didn’t come alone. He brought Marge, Maria Ostenheimer, and J.C. Pogey. “This is the visiting delegation,” he explained. “I hope you have room for us.”

I told him to look around, and pick their own bedrooms. We had them to spare. “All except you,” I told Marge. “You know where you sleep.”

“Yes, darling,” Marge said, docilely.

“Why are you being so nice to me? What are you up to?”

“Why, nothing, sweetheart. Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Certainly I’m glad to see you, but when you get sugary like this I know that you’re up to something, or you’ve done something bad.”

Maria said that was nonsense, and that, as she always knew, I was a nasty and suspicious man. J.C. Pogey went prowling around, and said that the Adam suite was a classic example of government waste. He had counted eight bedrooms, and six baths, and there were only three people living in it, if you included Jane, who sometimes spent the night.

“I’ll tell you how it is,” I explained. “If A.I. doesn’t work, we’re going to use it as a sort of high-class male brothel.” Marge said I ought to be ashamed, and that I had shocked Homer, and indeed this was true, for his face was the color of his hair.

I noticed that Tommy kept watching Homer, closely, not saying anything. But I wasn’t worried, because Homer appeared to be in good spirits, his seizures of the shakes seemed to have deserted him, and he was even talkative.

At eleven o’clock Tommy and I took Homer to the U.S. Public Health Service for his examination. There were nine or ten doctors, representing all the departments and agencies that had their hand on the erratic pulse of this important human. They inspected him for an hour, and then went into conference for a few minutes, and then they came out and Tommy told me, “He’s okay. We’re getting out an official report—that is, the Surgeon General will get it out—but the main thing is that you can use Homer Adam on a limited scale.”

“What do you mean, ‘limited scale’?” I asked.

“Well, so long as everything goes along evenly, we can use Adam for the impregnation of, say, two or three women a week. After he gains more weight and his metabolism perks up he can be used more frequently, providing that there are no glandular disturbances. Of course, if he were subjected to great emotional shock, or his general physical condition started to get worse instead of better, then we’d have to call it off. But for now, you can go ahead.”

I almost shouted. I’m afraid I ran to the telephone like a cub reporter with his first flash. I called Abel Pumphrey, and gave him the news, and then I called Danny Williams at the White House. Danny was a little cagey, and made me repeat everything Tommy had said, and then he asked me: “I suppose you feel your job’s over now?”

I said, “I have only one life to give for my country, and believe me, bud, I have given it!”

“Oh, no you haven’t,” he told me. “We’ll be satisfied when A.I. is S.O.P.”[1]

“That’s not fair, Danny,” I pleaded. “I only agreed to get Adam in condition for production. I’ve got my own life to lead.”

“I could give you a lecture,” Danny said, “on national responsibility. But I do not think it is necessary. You know damn good and well that your job hasn’t ended. What about your wife? Do you want her to be childless? For that matter, do you want to be childless? Do you want to pass out of this world without perpetuating the name of—” he hesitated—“Stephen Decatur Smith, the second.”

“Okay, Danny,” I surrendered. “But when things are S.O.P., I’m finished.”

“When it is all over,” Danny said, “the President will no doubt give you an award of the Legion of Merit.”

I remembered Colonel Phelps-Smythe. I started out to tell Danny what he could do with the Legion of Merit, pointed end first, but at that moment Tommy touched me on the shoulder, and said the car was there, and he and Homer were waiting.

So we went back to the party. Perhaps I had better explain. It wasn’t a party when we left, but it was a party when we got back. You cannot put a lot of people in a large number of rooms with an unlimited assortment of free liquor, and an excuse, and not have a party. The excuse was the beginning of A.I., and they had anticipated the verdict before we returned. As a matter of fact, when I look back on it, any other verdict seemed impossible. On that day, even if Homer Adam were drawing his last breath, gasping like a fish long out of water, still he would have been approved for A.I. I guess we were all pretty desperate.

Everybody treated Homer as if he had just made a winning touchdown, and he seemed to like it. You cannot exactly say that he stuck out his chest, but at least his habitual slump straightened, in the manner of all men who have been thumped and probed by the doctors, and told they will live. But he stayed around the telephone. Whenever our phone rang, Homer answered. Long before I’d arranged to have all our calls screened. That is, I’d left a selected list of people who could call and get straight through. Other calls were referred to N.R.P. Finally Homer answered the telephone and didn’t call me, or Jane, or J.C. Pogey, or anyone else to it. He simply seemed to curl around it. I edged toward him, but I didn’t hear much. Just yes, and no, and grunts.

When he had finished, I went downstairs to the switchboard. “There was just a call for Mr. Adam,” I said. “Where did it come from?”

“Oh, that one. From L.A.”

“Who authorized calls from L.A. up into 5-F?”

“Why, Mr. Smith,” the girl said, surprised. “Mr. Adam himself did! We don’t screen any calls from Miss Kathy Riddell.”

“How long has that been going on?”

“Why, ever since Miss Riddell was in Washington.”

I said “thank you,” and went back upstairs. There wasn’t much, or anything, that I could do about it. I didn’t want to start anything that would send Homer off on some unpredictable tangent. I simply wanted to maintain the status quo. Anyway, in a few days it wouldn’t matter, I thought. Homer would be so busy re-populating the earth that not even The Frame would interest him.

I don’t think J.C. Pogey was a good influence on Homer. That afternoon we were all sitting around, and Marge was acting as bartender, and Tommy Thompson was telling us about his experiments which he hoped would revive the male germ through medicine. It seems his first batch of seaweed lotion, or whatever it was, hadn’t been successful. Some fellows got sick, but no wives got pregnant. So he had revised the formula.

“Wouldn’t it be grand if it worked,” Homer said. “Imagine, I could—why I could do whatever I wanted. I’d be just like everybody else!”

“I don’t see anything good about it,” said J.C., “any more than I see any real sense in torturing Homer Adam, here, simply because he was the victim of an oversight. You—” he pointed a lean finger at Tommy—“exhaust yourself trying to combat destiny. Why don’t you take that girl—” he shifted his finger towards Maria—“out into the woods somewhere and forget all about the so-called human race. This little globe we live on has grown old, as I have, and God has simply decided to eliminate it. When Mississippi blew up God could just as easily have allowed the world to blossom as a nova. Instead, he is going to let it die like the last coal in the grate. Why fight it?”

Maria had been sitting on the arm of Tommy’s chair, one small hand on his massive shoulder. She waited for Tommy to speak, and when he did not, she said, quietly, “I think I can tell you why Tommy works, and why I work, Mr. Pogey. We are fighting for more than our lives. We are fighting to keep intact the thread that ties us to the hereafter. Man’s only link with immortality is through his children. That’s why we want the world to keep on having babies.”

J.C. Pogey shook his head in unhappy denial. “You’re taking the short view,” he said. “I take the long view. This particular sphere is only one of unnumbered millions stretching out across uncountable light years. Some of these spheres probably carry creatures which also fancy they have souls, and that they are linked with the Almighty. We would be very self-centered to think otherwise.”

“I’ll agree,” Maria argued, “that there must be some kind of life on other planets, perhaps in other constellations, but you can’t call it human.”

“Depends on what you term human,” said J.C. Pogey. “Now I can imagine a human being on some other globe. He might have four heads and eight arms. If we saw him we’d consider him a monstrosity, simply because he would be a bit unusual. But think how much better off he would be than we humans who have only one head and two arms. One brain might be a whiz at mathematics and a second at literature and another at philosophy and the fourth might just like to raise hell. Think of the fun he’d have.”

Marge said she thought J.C. was crazy, and that furthermore he made her feel frightened, but Homer was listening, fascinated. “If that’s true,” he said, “it wouldn’t be so bad if I—failed, would it?”

“Not at all,” J.C. said.

“Don’t listen to him, Homer,” Marge said. “He’s just a nasty sacrilegious old man.”

“On the contrary,” said J.C., “the only thing that makes me retain my sanity, and my belief in the Deity, is that this is a third-class world which God doesn’t take very seriously. It is like a rotten fruit that has hung too long upon the tree. God has simply become bored with running this world, and is closing it down.”

“Then you don’t think A.I. will work?” Homer asked, with the utter faith of a woman asking a question of a swami.

“Frankly, no,” J.C. replied. “I think you are just an accident, Homer, an oversight that will be remedied. You shouldn’t have been down in that shaft when Mississippi blew up.”

I could see that Homer was impressed. “Now look, J.C.,” I said. “Stop putting those silly ideas into Homer’s head. Just because you’re too old to have children yourself, you shouldn’t discourage everybody else in the world.”

J.C. snorted. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “Fate’s against it.”

“A.I. starts Monday,” I said. “On Monday everything begins again.”

A few hours later I began to think J.C. Pogey was right. Gableman and Klutz came to see us. I thought they were coming in to join the celebration, but they seemed distraught and worried. “Bring Mr. Gableman and Mr. Klutz a drink,” I told Marge. “And honey, change the brand. Every drink I’ve had this afternoon tastes funny.”

“Has it, dear?” Marge asked. “I’m sorry. Perhaps I’m mixing them wrong. I’ll do better.”

Gableman signaled me with a nod, and we went into a huddle in a corner. “Hell to pay,” he said. “The office is a madhouse.”

“What’s wrong?”

Klutz said, “Well, this thing took us rather suddenly—I mean putting Adam into production right away—and quite truthfully, we don’t seem to be prepared for it.”

“I don’t see why not,” I told him. “Everything is simple enough now. Homer is okay. I’ll just take him down to the lab Monday morning, and by Monday night some worthy female will be pregnant.”

“That’s just it,” Klutz said. “How do we pick the worthy female?”

“You don’t mean to tell me,” I said, “that with practically every woman in the United States wanting to become a mother—even women who never wanted to be mothers before—that you have trouble picking one!”

Klutz drew a pencil from his pocket, and paper. He seemed incapable of thought or speech unless they were accompanied by doodles. “It is far more complicated than that!” he said. “It is complicated beyond anything anyone imagined! It is a major matter of policy that should have been decided, long ago, by the Inter-Departmental Committee, on the highest level, mind you. For whomever we pick as the first A.I. mother, all the other women will raise a howl, and it is bound to have political repercussions!”

“That sounds insane,” I commented. I looked up, and saw Homer’s gaunt form behind me, swaying slightly. He was listening, and he did not seem amused.

“Oh, no,” said Gableman. “It is not insane at all. Consider the factors involved. In the first place—and this is really minor—there is the matter of geography. Every state wants priority on production, and the honor of furnishing the first A.I. mother.”

“That shouldn’t be hard,” I pointed out. “After all, while Homer’s capacity is to be limited for the time being, each section of the country can be represented in the first group of mothers selected.”

Gableman ran his long, unwashed hands through his long, oily hair. “As I said,” he persisted, “that is the simplest part. Then you get into race, religion, and social and economic position. The Negro question is particularly vexing. Do you know what the Southern Democrats in the Senate are doing? They’re planning to legislate N.R.P. out of existence unless we follow an All White policy. And the Negro press is screaming that we will be murdering the race unless we follow at least a policy of fifty-fifty.

“And take religion. There are some people who think that this is a fine opportunity to eliminate the Catholics, or the Jews, and naturally the Catholics and Jews are afraid of just this and they are demanding guarantees against extinction.”

I noticed that J.C. Pogey and Marge had joined our little group. Pogey’s face showed no emotion, but I knew he was laughing inside himself. “I think it is ridiculous,” I said. “The thing to do is get it started. Why, look at Marge here. She’s an average woman, and most of all she wants things to begin again, don’t you dear?”

“I wouldn’t mind having an Adam child, if that’s what you mean,” Marge said, smiling at Homer. “As a matter of fact, I’d like one very much.”

“Now that wouldn’t do at all, if I may say so,” Gableman said seriously. “Then people would charge the Administration with a sort of new-fangled nepotism.”

Klutz’s pencil continued to work. “And that isn’t by any means all,” he went on. “That is just the beginning. Suppose we pick a nice, average, Presbyterian, white, not rich not poor housewife, of good character. Well, all the unmarried women will say she’s already had her chance, and didn’t do anything about it, and that they, the unmarried women who never had a chance should have one now. Then, of course, the veterans’ wives have been asking for priority—and certainly this should be considered, with elections coming up next year—but so have the Wacs and the Waves. Who should have the priority, the wives or the service-women? Dear, dear, I should think that this is the most perplexing problem that N.R.P. has ever faced.” Klutz stared at us. Obviously, it was so monumental he could say no more.

Gableman took it up. “When the State Department heard that A.I. was authorized to begin Monday, it immediately protested to the President, because it had not been kept fully informed. The State Department is conducting the most delicate negotiations on how to share Adam. It is so delicate because of the two Mongolians.”

“May I say something?” Homer asked timidly.

Gableman didn’t hear him. “You see, the international situation is this way. The State Department doesn’t want to be accused of appeasing Russia, but if there actually are two Mongolians then we want to be big-hearted, and offer Russia a good slice of Adam. However, nobody knows whether there are two Mongolians or not, and until the State Department finds out, they do not want to be committed to a program. They have given us an order to do nothing hasty.”

“Pardon me a moment,” Homer interrupted. “I was just going to say—”

“Yes,” Klutz said. “I am afraid we have been caught flat-footed. I think we should have a group of experts draw up recommendations to present to the Planning Board, which in turn will work out a proposal which will be presented to the Inter-Departmental Commitee, which then can draw up a directive for the approval of the President.”

“Wait a moment!” Homer shouted. It was the first time I, or I suppose anyone else, had ever heard Homer Adam shout. It shocked us all into silence. Even Homer himself could not speak for a few seconds. But observing the surprising effect upon us all, apparently gave him courage, because he thrust out his chin as far as it would go and demanded: “Did it ever occur to you people that I might want to have something to say about this matter? It’s me that’s doing it, you know!”

Nobody said anything. “Why can’t I pick my own brides?” Homer demanded.

“Oh, but you cannot really call them brides,” Klutz protested. “It is doubtful whether you’ll ever see any of them at all.”

“The children,” Homer said, “are going to be my children, and I think I should have something to say about what the mothers look like.”

“Perhaps,” Gableman suggested smoothly, “Mr. Adam is thinking of one certain person?”

“And what if I am?” said Homer. He looked angry enough to fight. “You stand up there and talk about splitting me up and dealing me out as if I were a tax rebate. Perhaps, so long as I am to be given away, I can give away a little of myself.”

Marge shoved herself in front of me. “I think Homer is absolutely right,” she said. “I think for the first one he should choose whoever he wants.”

“You keep out of this!” I ordered her. “This is official business, and anyway I think you’ve got your mind set on being unfaithful to me.”

Klutz held up his hands. “Now, Mr. Adam,” he pleaded, “please be reasonable. The N.R.P.—and I am sure I am speaking for Mr. Pumphrey and the Planning Board—could not possibly allow you to allocate yourself. We would be accused of permitting you to set yourself up as a dictator—which indeed you would be. Why, if you picked the mothers, there wouldn’t be much use of the N.R.P. continuing at all, would there? It would be contrary to the national interest.”

Gableman rubbed his face, and his lower jaw worked as if in rhythm with deep thought. “Gentlemen, I think I can offer a solution,” he said. “Why not pick the first A.I. mothers by lot, just the way soldiers are picked by the draft?”

“That sounds like a very sound idea,” Klutz agreed. “The only thing is we’d have to register all the women who wanted to be mothers, which would consume much time. And in addition, if every single prospect for motherhood was allowed to register, the first choice might be one who would be extremely controversial, and then where would we be? I’m not sure N.R.P. could survive an unlucky choice.”

“Well, let’s put it in the lap of Congress,” Gableman said. “We’ll have each Senator and Congressman nominate two women—just like they nominate candidates for West Point—and then we’ll give them numbers, and the President can pick a number out of that goldfish bowl we always use for those things.”

“Say, that’s fine,” Klutz agreed. “I think that does it. But what about the international drawings, if we have any?”

“Oh, we’ll leave that to the UN,” said Gableman, “although the State Department won’t like it.”

“Well, thank goodness that’s settled,” said Klutz.

Homer, silent and white-faced, walked out of the room, down the hall, into his own bedroom, and shut the door. I didn’t feel good about the way we’d treated Homer, but obviously, for his own best interests, I felt he should not be allowed to participate in this phase of things.

Later that evening a Special Agent from the FBI came to 5-F. He brought, as a safe hand messenger, the dossier of The Frame which I’d requested the day she left for the Coast. You’d think newspapermen would quit being surprised. They discover that kindly old gentlemen rape, and sometimes chop up, little girls; and church deacons garnish their wives’ soup with arsenic over a period of years; and the impoverished old lady who has been on relief has three hundred thousand in cash stuffed in her mattress; and the lieutenant general who is a hero at home is a heel at the front. Newspapermen ought to quit being surprised, but they never do, and I was surprised at the dossier on The Frame. I had no more read the book of her life correctly than the man browsing through the library, who picks up a volume and reads an occasional sentence and paragraph here and there—skipping whole chapters—and lays it down in ten minutes.

I didn’t even know how long she had lived. I thought The Frame was 25 or 26. She was 31. I didn’t know she had been an honor student at her high school in Chicago, and later at the University of Chicago, although of course I knew her father was Professor Ruppe, the archeologist and scientist. She had taken her B.S. at Chicago, and then come to New York and danced.

In New York, too, she had a weird sort of double life, for even while she danced at that seedy uptown tourist trap she was taking a master’s degree at Columbia.

In 1940 she had gone to Hollywood. She had become engaged to Dr. Alfred Magruder, the atomic physicist from Berkeley. He had been killed in the Mississippi explosion.

For two of the war years The Frame had been employed, along with her fiancé and her father, on the Manhattan Project. After the war she returned to Hollywood, making occasional visits to Bohrville.

She was the author of a number of brilliant papers on nuclear fission. On the Manhattan Project she had served as secretary and assistant to the renowned Dr. Felix Pell. The dossier ended: “Loyalty and patriotism unquestioned.”

So that was The Frame! She seemed a most improbable person, and yet I knew the FBI would not be mistaken in any detail. Long after everyone else in the Adam suite had retired, I sat in the living room, staring into the shadowy vastness of Rock Creek Park, and trying to fit The Frame into the puzzle of Homer Adam. No matter how I arranged the pieces, she didn’t seem to fit—except in one way, and that way so sinister that I instantly wanted to throw it out of my mind, just as the mind rejects and quickly forgets a dream too horrible to remember.

Yet it kept coming back—the possibility that The Frame’s interest in Homer Adam was essentially directed at doing away with him, and in this way completing the death of mankind. I kept telling myself that, all in all, The Frame wasn’t a bad sort of a girl, and the phrase in the FBI report, “loyalty and patriotism unquestioned,” I revolved over and over, and yet the thought kept coming back to me.

It was altogether improbable. And yet was it any more improbable than Mississippi blowing up and wrecking me by an unseen, unfelt radiation without my even knowing it? Was it any more improbable than dropping a bit of material the size of an egg on a great city, and thereby reducing some hundreds of thousands of human beings to a few pinches of ashes?

It was not reasonable for The Frame to plot such a thing. And yet it is not reasonable for grown, mature men who go to church on Sundays, and are kind to their families, to spend the better part of their lives seriously plotting, in General Staff conferences, how to eliminate another nation, and most of its people, in the fewest number of days and hours.

I kept looking for a motive. She might be crazy, of course. She was probably a genius, and most of us believe that genius is a little crazy. Or perhaps, having lost her chance of happiness, she wished all others reduced to her level. This is a very peculiar, and often unnoticed, instinct of people. We saw it one day, in March, 1933, when the nation’s economic inequalities were suddenly leveled by the bank holiday. Since for a time nobody had anything, and all were alike in poverty, everyone was relieved and happy.

I felt that I had to know more about The Frame’s relations with Homer Adam, and right away. I went into his room. He had his face almost buried in the pillow, his long arms stretched around the crumpled pillow as if he had been crushing it. His feet extended, toes down, over the edge of the bed. He was asleep, and I shook him awake. “Hey?” he said. “What’s the trouble?”

“Wake up, Homer, I want to talk to you.”

“All right, Steve. Go ahead. Talk.”

“You’re not mad at me, are you?”

“No. Why?”

“I thought you would be sore because I didn’t stick up for you when you said you wanted to pick the first A.I. mother.”

“Oh, no, I’m not sore. I was just trying to do someone a favor.”

“I suppose you wanted to pick Kathy for the first A.I. mother. In a way, I don’t blame you. But I couldn’t conscientiously encourage your request. It would cause a great stir, and it wouldn’t be fair to Mary Ellen.”

Homer turned over and sat up, his hair wild. He blinked the remnants of sleep out of his eyes and said, “Oh, no. I wasn’t thinking of Kathy. I wasn’t thinking of Kathy at all.”

“Well, who were you thinking about?”

Homer seemed uncomfortable as if the bed were infested with red ants. “I’d rather not say.”

“Oh, come on, Homer, you can tell me!”

“No, I don’t think I’d better.”

“Why, that’s silly, Homer. If you are really set on picking some particular person, maybe I can fix it up. Perhaps it’s Mary Ellen. Perhaps you’d like to have another child yourself. Nobody could blame you for that.”

Homer didn’t look at me. He looked at his hands, and he looked at the door, and he looked everywhere but at me. “No, it was not Mary Ellen,” he said. He hesitated, and then blurted out, “If you have to know, Steve, it was Marge.”

“Marge!” I tried to pull myself together. I knew that I should be urbane about it, and perhaps nonchalant, and that by no means should I alarm Homer, but I knew I wasn’t succeeding.

“Please, Steve,” Homer pleaded. “Please don’t be angry. I was only trying to repay all your favors and your kindness. And I know that more than anything else Marge wants to have children, and she’s always been so nice to me, and she said that she would be delighted to have an Adam child. She’s hinted herself, several times today. She’s always said she’d be proud to have one.”

“Oh, she has, has she?”

“Yes. You see, Steve, that’s all I have to give.”

Well, I thought, I have to be broad-minded, and Homer is really being very decent and sincere, and there isn’t any reason to be jealous. “That is really very decent and generous of you, Homer,” I said. “I am touched. But I think that on behalf of the Smith family I must decline. As a matter of fact, as Gableman pointed out, people would call it nepotism, and charge graft and favoritism within the Administration. Why, it would be just like an official of the Department of the Interior deeding himself oil land owned by the government.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Homer. “But it seems to me that every time I want to do anything, myself, somebody blocks me. I ought to have some rights.”

“Homer,” I advised him, “I think you had just better dedicate yourself to unselfish service. You will be happier.” I remembered my original mission in waking him. “Homer,” I asked, “does Kathy want to have children?”

“No. I’m quite sure she doesn’t.”

“How sure?”

“Oh, I am absolutely sure. Absolutely. She said she wasn’t ready to have children yet.”

That answer fitted in with the theory I could not ignore. “Did Kathy ever suggest that you shouldn’t go through with A.I.?”

Homer considered a few moments before he spoke, his bony fingers picking at the mauve blanket. “Not exactly,” he said. “She said I was being used improperly, and she doesn’t have a very high regard for the N.R.P.”

“Did Kathy ever talk to you about nuclear fission, or anything like that?”

“Oh, no! All we’ve ever talked about was archeology—and us. If you don’t mind Steve, I’d rather not go into it any further. You know how it is—it’s very personal with me. I think at least that part of my life is private property.”

“I can’t help but agree with you,” I told him. His answers left me not far from where I was in the beginning. Forget it, I said to myself. Forget it. If The Frame wanted to destroy Homer, she’d had plenty of opportunity that night in the hotel. I promised myself I would forget it, and that, as Maria always insisted, I had a naturally suspicious mind, and yet I knew I would not forget.

“Honestly,” Homer said. “You’re not sore about my suggesting—about Marge?”

“Not a bit, Homer. Go on to sleep. Just dismiss it from your mind.”

“Thanks, Steve,” he said, and fell back on the pillow.

I went to my bedroom and turned on the light and Marge instantly raised her head and said, “Stephen, this is a fine time to be getting to bed. It is—” she looked at her watch—“nearly three o’clock. If that’s all you think of me you can just get into your own bed.”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I will!”

“Stephen, what on earth is the matter with you?”

“There are a number of kinds of infidelity,” I said, taking off my shoes and slamming them on the floor. “It isn’t necessary to be physically unfaithful. You can be unfaithful in spirit. One is as bad as the other.”

“Stephen, stop talking in riddles.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

She made a face at me. “All right, then, stay over there in your own bed.”

“You certainly have changed a lot,” I said, “since this morning. This morning you were silky sweet to me. Now, you don’t want me to touch you.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want you to touch me.”

“Yes you did. You told me to get into my own bed.”

She sat up, looking very pink and round and powdered and clean and smooth. “Stephen, you don’t know a damn thing about women!”

I turned out the light.