The Institute

3

We lay close for a long time in each other’s arms, mingling breath. Sometimes she kissed my throat but in an odd way, as though there was something special about it. In between, little by little, my mind came out of the fog. Thoughts began to run through it again. I remembered my sulk, the resentment toward her for blocking me off from her husband and his support of my institute. I wondered what had become of it. All I felt now was reverence, or something like it, for the lift she’d given me, up so high I thought I was in the clouds. I tried to think about it. Then I was inhaling the scent of her hair — so warm, clean, fragrant.

She opened her eyes and whispered: “Why did you do that to me?”

“Do what to you?”

“I would call it rape.”

“Then who am I to argue?”

“I did my best to stop you. You can’t say I didn’t. But no, you had to go on by main force, by brute force. You’re very strong, you know.”

“Yes, so I’ve been told.”

“Well? I asked you something.”

“Why I raped you—?”

“I wish you’d tell me.”

“My first answer to why is, why not? Why wouldn’t I rape you? The way your bottom twitched there in the living room as you looked at my pictures — first a step to the left, then another step, and for each and every step, a twitch.”

“You rape every twitchy bottom?”

“I never saw one before.”

“That’s not a very good answer.”

“You want a better one?”

“I wish you’d give me the real one.”

“You wanted me to, that’s why.”

She wilted and closed her eyes. After a long time, she whispered: “Yes — I wanted you to. I may as well admit it. I fought you off, did everything I knew. And yet I was praying, not that it wouldn’t happen, but that it would. Think of that, Lloyd; I actually prayed. I tried to get God on the side of that monstrous thing! I’ve never done that before! With anyone! Except as my vows permitted, except in marriage, I mean! Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you believe me?”

“I knew it without your telling me.”

“Lloyd, it’s the truth.”

“Speaking of God—”

“You believe in Him, don’t you?”

“Yes... You know who invented what we did?”

“What do you mean, invented!”

“He did.”

“That’s a strange idea.”

“Well? Who else? Who else could have? The greatest invention in the history of the world. Or maybe you know a better one?”

“Just the same, it was wrong.”

“Are you sure?”

“It was invented partly to test us.”

“How do you know it was?”

“That’s the terrible part. It seemed so right!”

“Can we get on, Hortense?”

“On? To what?”

“The nitty-gritty.”

“Which is?”

“I was hit by a truck. What were you hit by?”

“... a truck.”

With that, we stopped talking. We held each other close again, then pulled back and looked at each other. After awhile she whispered: “The biggest truck in the world, so big it frightens me. But because it was big, we must do what it says we must. We have to be true to it, Lloyd. We must know it was a truck, not just a motorbike.”

“What are you getting at?”

“It must never happen again.”

“I don’t get the connection.”

“If it was that big, it had to mean something. And if it did, we dare not besmirch it. If it was just desire, then it was cheap and meaningless. But you say you were hit by a truck, and I certainly was. So it was big. So it took us, without any warning. But now we are warned. We know what can happen. We’re no longer caught by surprise. So, all right, about what happened, life is like that. Perhaps God will forgive us. But it cannot — must not — ever happen again.”

I’m trying to remember what she said, but even now it blurs for me. One thing doesn’t necessarily lead to another. But at the time, I didn’t argue. I just said: “That’s how you want it?”

“It’s how it has to be.”

“O.K., then, so be it. Kiss me.”

She kissed me in a happy, carefree way, whispering: “That’s one thing about you, Lloyd, that I could feel from the moment I laid eyes on you. You’re decent.”

“Climb on.”

“On? Where?”

“My stomach.”

“Do you mean what I think you mean?”

“I have impulses.”

“But you just promised that it would not happen again.”

“I promised that you wouldn’t be raped, and you won’t be. So climb on. Girl on top can’t be raped. All she need do is slide off.”

“Dear God, please don’t let me.”

“Suppose He’s pulling for me?”

“Lloyd, please don’t make me!”

“I’m inviting you, that’s all. I can have it engraved, if you like, but it takes a little time and—”

“You’re tempting me!”

“Damn it, get on!”

“Oh!... Oh!... Ohhh!”

It lasted longer that time, but then we were quiet and she lay in my arms again. I said: “Suppose I told you that I loved you? Would you laugh at me?”

“I’d bat you one if you didn’t.”

“O.K., then, that’s settled.”

“Swak.”

“Could I have that again?”

“S-W-A-K. Sealed With A Kiss. You love me, and that makes me happy.”

“O.K., that covers me. How about you?”

“Lloyd, don’t make me say it.”

“Why me and not you?”

“I’m married. That’s why not me.”

“Let’s go into that.”

“Please. I don’t want to.”

“We have to.”

“Then all right, let’s. But there’s nothing to say. I’m married. If I was so stupid, so utterly without sense, as to forget it for that long and then forget it once again — I’m still married. That’s the beginning of it, and the end. There’s nothing more to say.”

“How tight?”

“What do you mean, ‘how tight’?”

“Does he do it to you or not?”

She moaned and broke into sobs. I popped her bottom and said: “Yes or no?”

At last she moaned: “No!”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. But it calls for explaining — kind of. Why doesn’t he? Did you have a fight? Is there another woman? Or what?”

“We didn’t have any fight and there’s no other woman that I know of. We weren’t in love at all. It didn’t figure in our prenuptial companionship, if that’s what it’s called. We met at a party my uncle gave — his big annual stinkaroo, his pay-back bash for the dinners he’d been invited to during the year. He was my father’s brother, and we weren’t rich, but he was. And my mother, who’s a Chapman from Chester, studied nursing when she was young and married just after getting her cap. But she looked after Uncle Allen, especially at his parties, so his blood pressure wouldn’t shoot up. But this time she came down with a case of shingles, and I had to take charge. I remembered names, got them all right — also steered things, especially the caterer’s end, which wasn’t done very well. Richard was there, admiring me — my computer mind, he called it, which he ascribed to social training I really didn’t have. I was brought up well enough, but keeping the names straight — which was what impressed him so — had nothing to do with it. My last year at Delaware, I was a teaching assistant — you know, the Simonette Legree who marks examination papers — and a favorite indoor sport she has to watch out for is where one student takes the course and another, the examination. So she acquires a considerable skill at telling which name goes with which face. As for the steering, which also impressed Richard, I ran the Rodney Dining Hall one year — and there, believe me, you’d better learn how to steer.”

“Where did the names and steering come in?”

“I told you — as social graces. Richard began to picture me as his hostess, up under the sky at his apartment in Wilmington.”

“Now I get it. Go on.”

“So I was excited. Who wouldn’t be? After all, he was Richard Garrett. He got a hostess and I got a big financier. But he didn’t get any wife and I didn’t get any husband. A marriage is made in bed, which, I think, can be heaven if two people love each other; but ours was a flop. I don’t know what the trouble was. He tried and I tried, and we both tried and tried and tried — telling ourselves that when we got used to each other, it would be all right. But it never was all right. We never were suited for marriage. All the trying in the world wouldn’t have been any help. I began having dreams, horrible dreams I’d rather not talk about. Then when I had a miscarriage, it all came to a head, and I knew I couldn’t go on. When I got home from the hospital, though, I found that he felt the same way. So we slept in separate rooms. It helped that while I was gone, our Swedish housekeeper, who had lived in, had gotten some kind of cable from Stockholm and had to go home. So no embarrassment was involved. I made the beds, and when Karen came in the morning, there was nothing for her to notice. At last we were happy. I loved entertaining his friends; and believe me, I do it well. He’s nice, perfectly wonderful, to my friends, except that he has this notion that we ought to move to Washington. What he really means is that I ought to move to Washington. Now, does that explain it better? Why I can’t get mixed up with your institute?”

“Yes, at last it makes sense.” But then I remembered. “Except for one thing,” I said. “Why did you do it at all? We agree, I think, that I am overwhelmingly irresistible and all that. But you were underwhelmed plenty until you came to that picture of me heaving a pass in a football game. Where did that come in? What did it have to do with football?”

“It’s a long story.”

“We have all day... all night.”

After awhile she said: “It was seeing your neck, your bare neck, your beautiful bare neck, in that picture... that left me...”

“Yes? Where?”

“Shook to the heels.”

“Give. Say it.”

“When I was in high school, I was invited for a visit to the home of a girl who lived in Maryland on a farm in the Greenspring Valley where her father raised racehorses. And one morning we hid out in the carriage house next to the stables, to see a stallion serve a mare. It was terribly exciting, more so than I’d have believed. He courted her like a schoolboy, prancing around in front of her, before finally going through with what he was there to do. Once, for a second or two, he was only a few feet from us — where we were peeping through the window — and for that long he arched his neck. We could have reached out and touched it. We could actually see the beat of his heart in the pulse of one of the blood vessels. Lloyd, it actually throbbed. Well, one day in Newark, when Delaware was playing Maryland, this Maryland boy threw a pass, and I could see his neck, which was bare. And it throbbed the way that stallion’s had. Lloyd, when I saw that picture just now, with the same bare neck showing, when I knew I was in the same room with that boy, with that neck, that beautiful neck, I had to sit down. But how did you know? How could you know how I felt?”

I told her about the sea nettle. “Strange,” she whispered. “You knew just by looking at me?”

“Let’s say I hoped. Don’t forget, I wanted you bad, from the moment I laid eyes on you.”

“They told me that your name was Palmer — Brisket Palmer. I memorized it.”

“Yes, and how that came about was: My football jersey itched. It was wool, and it felt like fleas. So I found a cotton shirt to wear underneath it, and that did it except for the neck. So my mother snipped it out with some buttonhole scissors. That left my neck bare. Every sportswriter decided the idea was to show off a thing of beauty. So one of them called me ‘the Brisket’ — and it stuck. Just the media being fair and impartial and scrupulous, as usual.”

“It was a thing of beauty, and still is. So firm, so round.”

“Sign of physical strength, which I have.”

“Did you know it has a mole, a tiny double mole, beside the Adam’s apple? It looks like a little hourglass.”

“I shave over it every morning.”

She kissed it, then went on: “Now I’ll really be depraved. You know what? If such a thing were possible, if it could happen again, I’d climb on board once more and—”

“Well, what’s impossible about it?”

“You mean it can be done? Three times in one afternoon?”

“To a studhorse, with something as good-looking as you, all things are possible. Up, pretty creature, and on!”

“Lloyd, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

It was the last carefree moment we had for some time.