Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (35 page)

She turned quickly, withdrawing her hand abruptly, but I couldn’t tell if she had felt anything, or suspected my agitation. Janet was oblivious.

“But you and Rusty and Laura have all met,” she said. “I keep forgetting how great kids are at insinuating themselves into any scene.”

“Where’s Caesar?” Laura finally got to ask.

I had another shock with the name. My nightmare, my waking nightmare. Or had I heard her calling to the dog?

“I never take him with me unless he’s been invited,” Christine said. “You never know where you’ll run into a dog-hater, or a pet cat, or another dog that’s a bit jealous.”

They talked about the dog we had had until late in the spring, a red setter that had been born all heart and no brain. He had been killed out on the county road. Again I was distantly aware of what they were saying, almost as if I were half asleep in a different room, with voices droning on and on beyond the walls. I was simply waiting for a chance to leave without being too rude.

The kids wandered away after a little while, and Janet and Christine talked easily. I began to listen when she mentioned Pete’s name.

“Pete and Grace had been my husband’s friends for a long time. Pete studied under him, and Grace and I were in classes together. So they invited me to stay in their house this year. She shrugged. “I take it that Pete didn’t write to you and warn you that I’d be moving in. He said he would, but I guess I didn’t really think he’d get around to it.”

Karl Rudeman. Karl Rudeman. It was one of those vaguely familiar names that you feel you must know and can’t associate with anything.

Janet had made a pitcher of gin and bitter lemon, and I refilled our glasses while I tried to find a tag to go with the name. Christine murmured thanks, then said, “It isn’t fair that I should know so much about you both—from Pete—and that you know nothing about me. Karl was a psychologist at Harvard. He worked with Leary for several years, then they separated, violently, over the drugs. He died last May.”

I felt like a fool then, and from the look on her face, I assumed that Janet did too. Karl Rudeman had won the Nobel for his work in physiological psychology, in the field of visual perception. There was something else nagging me about the name, some elusive memory that went with it, but it refused to come.

Christine stayed for another half hour, refused Janet’s invitation to have dinner with us, and then went back home. Back through the woods, the way she had come.

“She’s nice,” Janet said. “I like her.”

“You warn her about Glaser?”

“She’s not interested. And it does take two. Anyway she said that Pete gave her the rundown on everyone on the lane. You heard her.”

“Yeah,” I lied. I hadn’t heard much of anything anyone had said. “He must have been thirty years older than she is.”

“I suppose. I always wonder how it is with a couple like that. I mean, was he losing interest? Or just one time a month? Did it bother her?” Since Janet and I always wondered about everyone’s sex life, that wasn’t a strange line for our talk to have taken, but I felt uncomfortable about it, felt as if this time we were peeking in keyholes.

“Well, since you seem so sure she wouldn’t be interested in Bill Glaser, maybe she’s as asexual as she looked in that outfit.”

“Hah!” That’s all, just one Hah! And I agreed. We let it drop then.

We had planned a movie for that night. “Get some hamburgers out for the kids and I’ll take you around to Cunningham’s for dinner,” I said to Janet as she started in with the tray. She looked pleased.

We always had stuffed crab at Cunningham’s, and Asti Spumante. It’s a way of life. Our first date cost me almost a week’s pay, and that’s what we did, so I don’t suggest it too often, just a couple of times a year when things have suddenly clicked, or when we’ve had a fight and made up to find everything a little better than it used to be. I don’t know why I suggested it that night, but she liked the idea, and she got dressed up in her new green dress that she had been saving for a party.

When I made love to her late that night, she burst into tears, and I stroked her hair until she fell asleep. I remembered the first time she had done that, how frightened I’d been, and her convulsive clutching when I had tried to get up to bring her a drink of water or something. She hadn’t been able to talk, she just sobbed and held me, and slowly I had come to realize that I had a very sexy wife whose response was so total that it overwhelmed her, and me. She sighed when I eased my numb arm out from under her. Pins-and-needles circulation began again and I rubbed my wrist trying to hurry it along.

Christine Warnecke Rudeman, I thought suddenly. Christine Warnecke. Of course. The photographer. There had been a display of her pictures at the library a year or two ago. She had an uncanny way of looking at things, as if she were at some point that you couldn’t imagine, getting an angle that no one ever had seen before. I couldn’t remember the details of the show, or any of the individual pieces, only the general impression of great art, or even greater fakery. I could almost visualize the item I had read about the death of her husband, but it kept sliding out of focus. Something about his death, though. Something never explained.

Tuesday I went home for lunch. I often did, the lab was less than a mile from the house; sometimes I took Lenny with me, but that day he was too busy with a printed circuit that he had to finish by six and he nodded without speaking when I asked if he wanted a sandwich. The air felt crisp and cool after the hot smell of solder as I walked home.

I was thinking of the computer cutting tool that we were finishing up, wondering if Mike had mastered the Morse code yet, anticipating the look on his face when I installed the ham set. I was not thinking of Christine, had, in fact, forgotten about her, until I got even with the house and suddenly there she was, carrying a tripod out toward a small toolhouse at the rear of the lot.

I turned in the Donlevy drive. If it had been Ruth Klinger, or Grace Donlevy, or any of the other women who lived there, I would have offered a hand. But as soon as I got near her, I knew I’d made a mistake. It hit me again, not so violently, but still enough to shake me up. I know this woman, came the thought.

“Hi, Eddie.” She put the tripod down and looked hot and slightly out of breath. “I always forget how heavy it can get. I had it made heavy purposely, so it could stay in place for months at a time, and then I forget.”

I picked it up and it was heavy, but worse, awkward. The legs didn’t lock closed, and no matter how I shifted it, one of them kept opening. “Where to?” I asked.

“Inside the toolshed. I left the door open.”

I positioned it for her and she was as fussy as Lenny got over his circuits, or as I got over wiring one of the suits. It pleased me that she was that fussy about its position at an open window. I watched her mount a camera on the tripod and again she made adjustments that were too fine for me to see that anything was changed. Finally she was satisfied. All there was in front of the lens was a maple tree. “Want to take a look?” she asked.

The tree, framed by sky. I must have looked blank.

“I have a timer,” she said. “A time-lapse study of the tree from now until spring, I hope. If nothing goes wrong.”

“Oh.” My disappointment must have shown.

“I won’t show them side by side,” she said, almost too quickly. “Sort of superimposed, so that you’ll see the tree through time…” She looked away suddenly and wiped her hands on her jeans. “Well, thanks again.”

“What in hell do you mean, through time?”

“Oh… Sometime when you and Janet are free I’ll show you some of the sort of thing I mean.” She looked up, apologetically, and shrugged as she had that first time I met her. It was a strange gesture from one so small. It seemed that almost everything was too much for her, that when she felt cornered she might always simply shrug off everything with that abrupt movement.

“Well, I have to get,” I said then, and turned toward the drive. “Do you have anything else to lug out here, before I leave?”

“No. The timer and film. But that’s nothing. Thanks again.” She took a step away, stopped and said, with that same shy apologetic tone, “I wish I could explain what I want to do, in words. But I can’t.”

I hurried away from her, to my own house, but I didn’t want anything to eat after all. I paced the living room, into the kitchen, where the coffee I had poured was now cold, back to the living room, out to the terrace. I told myself asinine things like: I love Janet. We have a good life, good sex, good kids. I have a good business that I am completely involved in. I’m too young for the male climacteric. She isn’t even pretty.

And I kept pacing until I was an hour later than I’d planned on. I still hadn’t eaten, and couldn’t, and I forgot to make the sandwich for Lenny and take it back to him.

I avoided Christine. I put in long hours at the lab, and stayed in the basement workshop almost every evening, and turned down invitations to join the girls for coffee, or talk. They were together a lot. Janet was charmed by her, and a strong friendship grew between them rapidly. Janet commented on it thoughtfully one night. “I’ve never had many woman friends at all. I can’t stand most women after a few minutes. Talking about kids sends me right up the wall, and you know how I am about PTA and clubs and that sort of thing. But she’s different. She’s a person first, then a woman, and as a person she’s one of the most interesting I’ve ever run into. And she has so much empathy and understanding. She’s very shy, too. You never have to worry about her camping on your doorstep or anything like that.”

She’d been there almost two months when Pete’s letter finally arrived telling us about her. Janet read it aloud to me while I shaved.

“She’s a good kid and probably will need a friend or two by the time she gets out of that madhouse in Connecticut. Rudeman was a genius, but not quite human. Cold, calculating, never did a thing by accident in his life. He wound her up every morning and gave her instructions for the day. God knows why she married him, why they stayed together, but they did. In his own way I think Rudeman was very much in love with her. He said once that if he could understand this one woman he’d understand the entire universe. May he rest in peace, he never made it. So be good to her.

“Grace sends love. She’s been redoing our apartment…”

I stopped listening. The letter went on for three pages and left as many questions as it had answered. More in fact, since we already had found out the basic information he had supplied. I decided to go to the library and look up Rudeman and his death and get rid of that nagging feeling that had never gone away.

“Eddie, for heaven’s sake!” Janet was staring at me, flushed, and angry.

“What? Sorry, honey. My mind was wandering.”

“I noticed. What in the world is bothering you? You hear me maybe half the time, though I doubt it.”

“I said I’m sorry, Janet. God damn it!” I blotted a nick and turned to look at her, but she was gone.

She snapped at Rusty and Laura, and ignored me when I asked if there was any more mail. Rusty looked at me with a what’s-eating-her expression.

I tried to bring up the subject again that night, and got nowhere. “Nothing,” she said. “Just forget it.”

“Sure. That suits me fine.” I didn’t know what I was supposed to forget. I tried to remember if it was time for her period, but I never knew until it hit, so I just left her in the kitchen and went downstairs to the workroom and messed around for an hour. When I went back up, she was in bed, pretending to be asleep. Usually I’d keep at it until we had it out in the open, whatever it was, and we’d both explain our sides, maybe not convincing each other, but at least demonstrating that each thought he had a position to maintain. That time I simply left the bedroom and wandered about in the living room, picked up a book to read, put it down again. I found Pete’s letter and saw that we’d been invited to visit them over Christmas. I seemed to remember that Janet had gone on about that, but I couldn’t recall her words. Finally I pulled on a jacket and walked out to the terrace. I looked toward the Donlevy house, Christine’s house now. Enough leaves had fallen by then so I could see the lights.

It’s your fault, I thought at her. Why don’t you beat it? Go somewhere else. Go home. Anywhere else. Just get out.

I was falling. Suddenly there was nothing beneath my feet, nothing at all, and I was falling straight down in a featureless grey vacuum. I groped wildly for something to hold on to, and I remembered the last time it had happened, and that it had happened to Laura. Falling straight down, now starting to tumble, my stomach lurching, nausea welling up inside me. Everything was gone, the house, terrace, the lights… I thought hard of the lights that had been the last thing I had seen. Eyes open or closed, the field of vision didn’t change, nothing was there. “Janet!” I tried to call, and had no way of knowing if I had been able to make the sound or not. I couldn’t hear myself. A second sweep of nausea rose in me, and this time I tasted the bitterness. I knew that I would start crying. I couldn’t help it; nausea, fear, the uncontrollable tumbling, unable to call anyone. Fury then displaced the helplessness that had overcome me, and I yelled, again without being able to hear anything, “You did this, didn’t you, you bitch!”

Donlevy’s study was warm, the colors were dull gold, russet, deep, dark green. There was a fire in the fireplace. The room was out of focus somehow, not exactly as I remembered it, the furniture too large and awkward-looking, the shelves built to the ceiling were too high, the titles on the topmost shelf a blur because of the strange angle from which I saw them. Before me was Donlevy’s desk, cleaner than I’d ever seen it, bare with gleaming wood, a stand with pens, and several sheets of paper. No stacks of reports, journals, overflowing ashtrays… I looked at the papers curiously, a letter, in a neat legible handwriting. Two pages were turned face down, and the third was barely begun.

“…nothing to do with you in any way. When I have finished going through the papers, then I’ll box up those that you have a right to and mail them to you. It will take many weeks, however, so unti…” The last word ended with a streak of ink that slashed downward and across the page, and ran off onto the desktop.