Other Men's Daughters (7 page)

The grown-up who becomes neurotic on account of ungratified libido behaves in his anxiety like a child; he fears when he is alone,
i.e
. when he is without a person of whose love he feels sure, who can calm his fears by means of the most childish measures.

He had found this in Freud. Was it for him? Freud blamed the condition on excessively tender parents who “accelerated sexual maturity and spoiled the child, making him unfit to renounce love temporarily, or to be satisfied with a smaller amount of love in later life.” His parents were, well, devoted, not, certainly not,
excessively
tender. What was
excessive?
Generous, sweet, courteous Mother. A little dreamy, a little distant, an intelligence that was not excessively nourished by Boston papers and Taylor Caldwell's novels. Love, Freud said, should awaken energies, not become their unique object. He was having a hard time concentrating, but his ideas seemed unusually interesting. As was his dream-life. It seldom had to do with Cynthia, though, surely, the dreams had Cynthian deposits. He dreamed he was the father of a psychotic daughter who, one day, couldn't see him; he watched himself fade away as she looked blindly his way. Waking, he found that the Love-Grip had relaxed; he had
no feeling
for Cynthia, no sense of her. In her place was a girl-sized rectangle. Blank. Nothing. Fantastic relief. It was over. Yet, what about her? What would she do? He tried to put her back in the rectangle. She appeared, but what was she? Nice-enough, pretty-enough, smart-enough, but nothing special, and childish, or anyway, too young, inappropriate. Relief. Tremendous relief. He was fully awake.

His thought was, “What am I going to do with her?” She was coming to Cambridge for the weekend. Perhaps she'd found the same blanked rectangle in her bed. “Oh no,” he said out loud, and Sarah muttered on the other side of the bed. “What a see-saw.” Later, walking past the Revolutionary War cannon in the Common, he felt the rectangular blank once more. The love song had stopped.

Yet.

Dr. Merriwether had not been around the unentanglers of biological mystery for nothing. The ethologist's Law of Heterogeneous Summation (simple quantity—not quality—of stimuli accounts for behavior) applied. Given the long abstinence and present opportunity, no single dream of blankness could dispel Cynthia.

Merriwether's assistant, Cy McTier, almost sang about the “beautiful reflex mechanism” of the mantises. “The female eats any insect she can catch. The male moves toward her, love in his beak. She eats him, head first.” McTier was tiny, fiercely good-humored, an endless go-getter. “When she devours the sub-oesophageal ganglion, it no longer inhibits the copulatory center in the last abdominal ganglion. So our headless male can begin fucking. Eighty percent of the time, he makes it just before he's devoured.”

Perfume glands on the moth's wings, music from the stridulating files of grasshopper legs, magnets in the budgerigar's painted feathers, tactile excitement as the orchid's nub mimics the bee. True or false, real or unreal, insect, mammal or physiologist, heterogeneous stimuli bring the genetic transmitter into heat.

Beside the unfriendly body of his formerly dear spouse, Dr. Merriwether lies awake. Mind, recently astonished at its release from grotesque servitude, now
sees
Cynthia making love to Whoever, sees her undressing, facing the boy's body, climbing, wrestling, sees the hand in her cleft, feels her melt—the fluids, the breath, the motion, the cries—and here, in the sheets, mattress buttons against his bare legs—why was there no new mattress?—Merriwether's penis swells, Cynthia is with him, he is Whoever, up, down, the river's going to flood, oh, Lordie, he makes it out of bed, down the hall, up the creaky stairs, into the guest room, down upon the bed.

five

Clocks.

The orange face on City Hall, the ghost pallor of those on Independence Hall. At night the clock faces of Philadelphia moon above the town. Time's cages.

Hand in hand, fingers in fingers, Cynthia and Merriwether walk down Chestnut Street to the Delaware. He is in belted suede, she in leopard. Animals within animals, lovers within animals, walking after
La Bohème
at the Academy of Music; old cornball songs of tuberculosis and back rent, Mimi and Rodolfo. Cynthia's first opera, Merriwether's old favorite, aphrodisiacal stridulation in the old city of the Republic. They walk down to the restored Georgian world of Society Hill, rows of cockeyed houses with red shutters, green, white, blue, by St. Peter's, by the thin skyscrapers of I. M. Pei, the messy old city flung behind them. “This town's a morgue. Eleven, eleven-thirty, you can't buy a cup of coffee.” Their cabbie, Merriwether's age, but twenty years his senior, patronizing these odd but unquestionable lovers, letting them out at the Benjamin Franklin after their chowder and lobster at Bookbinder's.

“I lost my watch the day you called me,” said Cynthia. “I always keep it in a jewel box Grannie gave me. Or on my wrist. You called you were coming, and I can't remember where it is.”

“I'll get you one.”

“It's just strange. It's not like me. Maybe it's to say, ‘Time'”—euphemism for age—“‘doesn't matter for love.'”

Merriwether had given a seminar at Penn on Pauling's protein clocks and other biological rhythms, circadian, hebdomadarian, mensual, annual. He'd arranged it through his old student, George Nyswunder, a professor there, and flown down Thursday night. Cynthia had taxied to the airport and they'd met at the Eastern Airlines counter.

They were fixing up the airport. You came off the plane to a backdoor, climbed backstairs by sandbags, went along corridors of iron intestines until you hit the ticket counters. Across from Eastern was a girl in a huge-brimmed flop hat which shadowed half her face.

Cynthia.

Panic. What was he doing here meeting a strange girl?

Something similar showed in her face. He too was desummered. He wore a dark fedora, a topcoat, he carried a briefcase. Another salesman getting off a plane.

To cover the panic of non-recognition, they rushed to each other, touched cheek with cheek, then, feeling the warmth, getting the other's signals, the stimuli, felt familiarity drift back into them.

“Darling.”

“Cynthia.”

Not quite believed in, but crutches which supported them till they walked on their own. In the taxi, they embraced like teenagers.

He hadn't been to Philadelphia since a boyhood trip with the Latin School to see the Liberty Bell. “Excuse me, sir, you've sold me a cracked one,” eight years old, handing the quarter souvenir to the vendor—his only memory of the trip. So he wanted to see the way the city looked. “What river's that?” She didn't know.

“Skookul,” said the cabbie.

Cynthia was an urban, older version of her summer self, plucked, perfumed—
Je Reviens
(the odorous wingtips)—warm in a leopard fur, carrying a many-pocketed leather bag. (His own was ersatz.)

The hotel had an enormous, gloomy lobby full of Temple of Karnak pillars, rubber plants, Naugahyde couches; it was rimmed with luminous cigar stores, haberdashers, coffee shops; Muzak drugged it. At the desk, a knowing clerk awaited them. It is Modern Times. No identity cards, no atmosphere of “tryst,” just the familiar shack-up of any two ordinaries coming together from any earth spot; arranged by phone, assembled by plane. No village tension to modern love. They registered for the first time as Mr. and Mrs.; he signed his own name and gave the right city.

An old bear coming out of the strawberry patch, muzzle bloody with juice, trailing vines. Grizzled, glittering Merriwether, eyes bright with novelty, leaked awkwardness. The ease of modern love was not ease for him. No sense of “interlude,” no relaxation. Of the ninety thousand American males signing in at ninety thousand registers over the country, could more than a dozen have been as awkwardly illicit?

In the next half hour, Cynthia got her first orgasm. (So this was what the cheering was about.) In Cambridge, she'd come close, but twice, their first night and on her weekend, she'd had her period. It was painful for Merriwether—“the endometrium's shedding its lining.” There was also the shedding of what she called his “hang-ups.” Now in this “T” of a room, their bed in the cross bar, the window full of room lights spattered down the adjacent wall, in a pellmell plunge of relief, they made it; quite satisfactorily, then kleenexed up, washed, pajamaed, talked, ordered wine and turkey sandwiches from telephone Button 7—and received the silvered dishes and Greek waiter like hotel kings. Splendid American stuff.

At the seminar, Cynthia sat against the wall. She'd been presented to George Nyswunder with Merriwether's new boldness. “My friend, Cynthia Ryder.”

Nyswunder had known a Merriwether whose highest spirits were reserved for scientific argument and tennis court triumphs; Cynthia Ryder was a large surprise.

“Are you a physiologist?”

Nyswunder was a more social man than many in the academy, but, used to academic catechism, his social intercourse was heavily interrogative. A lusty little man, he was still pink-cheeked, wide-eyed. Loyal, a scrapper, he was timid about himself. His strength came from following leading physiological lights. Merriwether was his first, but since, he had fastened himself to one of physiology's giants, Pulvermacher; he'd wasted years editing the man's lesser papers. Nyswunder did have a nose for “quality”; Cynthia fit his bill, and Merriwether took on a glow because of her. How did Merriwether bring it off? Nyswunder himself had a thousand erotic reveries, but was a quick self-censor; booze reinforced suppression.

“Just a physiologist's specimen,” said Cynthia. Which won Nyswunder.

In the rim of class seats beyond the seminar table, Cynthia watched Merriwether in a role new to her. He felt her reassessment, saw himself as he thought she saw him. Why did he have her come? He did not manage the discussion with his usual ease. A serious, handsome graduate student countered an assertion with a report Merriwether hadn't read in a recent
JEP
. There was a bad moment. For Cynthia, he redeemed himself with authentic curiosity: “That does upset the cart. Can you tell me about it?” It was the student's glory moment. After Merriwether got the gist of the article, he saw—without looking—Cynthia's eyes on the student's Tartar mustache. He gaped, dry-mouthed, he lost connection. The Tartar's exposition dragged. Nyswunder interrupted. “Thanks, Jimmy, let's let Professor Merriwether finish off. Those results only speak to a special case anyway.”

This grace revived Merriwether. He discovered a tunnel, crawled through, and, happy day, there was a flood of new light. On the spot, he suggested a chemical chain which had the students gasping. And, by God, they applauded.

Cynthia blushed. She loved him more in defeat than triumph; but triumph was also sweet. She had suffered years of authoritative maleness; to see it come back after discomfort was something she hadn't seen in her unbent father.

Nyswunder took them off to lunch in a fish place near the University. He was excited by Merriwether's final burst. “Pulvermacher's going to be knocked out, Bob. He's found the pituitary releases the antidiuretic hormone when the molar concentration is raised.”

“Isn't that Verney's work?”

“Yes, of course, but Harry's done the analysis.”

“Will you get it for me?” Merriwether was flushed himself. He was on to something; Philadelphia looked like an exceptionally lucky trip for him.

“I couldn't follow most of it,” said Cynthia.

Nyswunder apologized, blushed, smiled, a child in the face of this girl, twenty years his junior. Still, she was a kind of stepmother, his guru's companion; he would go brush his teeth if she suggested it.

Lunch talk ducked intimacy; mostly there was reminiscence by old pupil and teacher. Cynthia stewed in her chowder, said she didn't feel well, she'd taxi to the hotel.

“Excuse us, darling,” said Merriwether. Nyswunder too apologized. “This is bad. Forgive us. It's my fault.”

Pardons streamed. Nyswunder's hand was grasped by Merriwether with conspiratorial gratitude. The pupil had helped his old teacher with his new girl. (Nyswunder was now a part of their lives.)

They returned to the room, feathers smoothed, and made love. Not for years has Merriwether made love in the afternoon, or more than once in a day. He kissed her shoulders; pushed the hair away, kissed her neck. Self-reinforcing system: hormones produced by the act for which they're needed. “Think love.” (Short of heart-attacks, dry-mouth, cankersores, and general weariness, love created love-making power.)

Cynthia's body was still innocent as a volleyball, belly, hips, gold curls of pubic triangle, breasts. The oddest, finest thing, a laugh which somehow went from lips, cheeks, eyes into the body; so playful after
Sturm und Drang
.

Lying beside sleeping Cynthia, Merriwether imagined Nyswunder's routine. Lab-class-bar-home-to-Joan. Where were the Nyswunders on the spectrum of coupleness? Was theirs a marriage which supplied the delights of old home week? Like the Schneiders? God knows George was not one of those pioneers struck with the miracle that every skirt hid the paradisiacal lips. Not like the geneticist, SharpeCairns. That aristocratic hoodlum looked like a human hassock, but was a sexual Magellan. He and Merriwether would be swamped in argument, when boom, silence, pause, Sharpe-Cairns had smelled something, and, sure enough, walking across the room, a woman going to the bathroom. “Take a look at that ass. It's Japanese.” Fair little face concentrated like a pistol. Breath altered, cornea widened. No inscrutability. It would be minutes before he could recover enough to talk; he never recovered all the way. From now until he “scored”—it was from his Oxford lips that Merriwether learned this uncharming participle—he could not function above mechanics. His mind was on that bepanted rear-end and its tender verso. What was marriage to such hunger? The difference between unscheduled gorges in the street and three meals a day. “Time for lunch, George. Time for dinner.”