The Sphinx (9 page)

Gene’s shoulder
was. still bound up in crepe bandage, but his bite wound had almost completely
healed and the bruises on his ribs had gradually faded. When Maggie had seen
him on Monday, she had tried to persuade him to visit the doctor, but he
remembered his promise to Mrs. Semple; and insisted he was fit.

“After all,” he
had told her, “cavemen got bitten by wild beasts, and they didn’t have a
friendly neighborhood MD to visit.”

“Cavemen used
to die a lot,” Maggie had said sharply, and walked out of the office.

This was Gene’s
first date with Lorie. He had called her on Wednesday evening and asked her to
come, and even though she had seemed hesitant at first, she was happy and
excited now, and he couldn’t resist glancing across the car and reveling in the
sheer sexual beauty that she radiated.

Whatever
hang-ups she had about marriage and her mother, that wasn’t going to stop them
from having a great time at Walter’s party, and then maybe some more intimate
amusements to follow. She was a girl in a million, and if he hadn’t been trying
to play things a little cooler since his ill-fated raid on the Semple estate,
he would have told her so.

They drove
through sunlight, shadow, and whirling leaves. Walter’s weekend place was right
out in the country, and at this time of the year it was a refreshing and
exhilarating drive.

“You know
something?’ said Lorie. “I’m so nervous!”

“What are you
nervous about?”

“Us! You and
me. I’m so, excited, I don’t want any of this to end.”

He grinned.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to.”

But Lorie shook
her head. “One day, it will have.to. Whatever happens, however things go.”

Gene stuck a
cigarette in his mouth and pushed in the car’s cigar lighter. “You shouldn’t be
such a pessimist,” he told her. “Try living in the present for a change,
instead of the future.”

She looked at
him. The radio was playing “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?”

“We have to be
warned about the future, Gene, or perhaps we won’t get out of the present
alive.”

He lit his
cigarette. “You sound like your mother.”

“Yes,” she
said. “I’m my mother’s child.”

It took them an
hour to reach Walter Farlowe’s house. It was a split-level white-painted
vacation home that had been designed for him by Edward Ocean, the young and
irretrievably tacky architect. There was a pool, which was now scattered with
floating leaves, and a wide patio that overlooked a deep valley of misty
treetops and blue haze. Most of the guests were already there, and the sloping
driveway was crowded with red Mercedes and silver Sevilles. A brick barbecue was
sending up smoke signals that told of charred chops and curled-up steaks, and
Walter Farlowe himself, in a chef’s hat and yellow suspenders, was sweating and
grinning and trying to serve everything out on. soggy paper plates.

Gene parked his
New Yorker, and they walked down the open-plan steps at the side of the house
to the patio. With a feeling of great satisfaction, he saw heads turn and heard
one or two low, appreciative whistles, which meant that Lorie in her safari
suit was creating just the stir he’d hoped for.

They walked
across the patio, and as they approached the barbecue, Walter Farlowe came out
and greeted them.

“Gene! Glad you
could make it! Sorry I can’t shake hands–too greasy.”

“This is
Lorie,” said Gene. “A new, but very dear, friend of mine.”

Walter tipped
his chef’s hat. ‘Tm pleased to know you, Lorie. How do you like your steak?”

Lorie glanced
at Gene, and then back at Walter.

“Well,” she
said huskily, “I like it pretty underdone.”

Walter grinned.
“How underdone is ‘pretty underdone?’ “

Lorie licked
her lips. “A couple of seconds on each side.”

“A couple of
seconds!” laughed Walter. “Now that’s practically raw!”

“Yes,” said
Lorie. “That’s the way I like it.”

They were
finishing off their orders for food to Walter when a curly-haired girl in a
silky yellow-and-green trouser suit came up and linked her arm through Gene’s.

“Gene
Keiller–of all people!”

“Hallo, Effie.
How’s the advertising business?”

“Terrific. Is
this your new friend?” 70

“It certainly
is. Lorie, this Is Effie, an old buddy of mine from way back in Florida. Effie,
this is Lorie Semple.”

The two women
smiled at each other with mutual suspicion.

“Gene, you must
meet Peter Graves,” said Effie. “He’s my latest shrink, and he’s absolutely and
completely the sanest man in the whole world. He’s right over here! Lorie, why
don’t you come with me and meet some of the ladies. Nancy Bakowsky is here,
would you believe? You know, the lady from Woman’s Home Journal!”

Lorie gave Gene
a quick wink over her shoulder as Effie whisked her away to talk to the ladies.

It was a
conversational convention at thrashes like this that the men stuck with the men
and the women stuck with the women, and any man who tried to horn in on the
ladies’ circle was considered a wolf, while any lady who hung around the men’s
circle was regarded as a potential whore. For that reason, the men rubbed
elbows and swapped medium-dirty stag stories, while the women crowded together
and talked about feminism and who was dallying with whom.

Gene, carrying
a fresh vodka tonic, found Peter Graves’ sitting by the edge of the pool alone.
He was a young bald man with a thoughtful face and rimless spectacles. He
dressed in the kind of Aertex sweatshirt and navy-blue jersey-knit pants that
made you think he might be an athlete, or at least a devotee of jogging. You
could have mistaken him for a hairless Dustin Hoffmann.

“Hi,” said
Gene. “Mind if I join you? Effie’s been singing your praises, and I wouldn’t
like to miss the sanest man in the world.”

Peter looked a
little bewildered. “Is that what she said? That proves she needs treatment.”

Gene sat down
on a plastic sun-chair and took a sip of his drink.

“What kind of
analysis are you into?” he asked. “These days it’s all TA and do-it-yourself,
as far as I can see.”

Peter nodded.
“Well, I’m pretty transactional, but I’m trying to relate it to the patterns of
real social encounters, if you see what I mean.”

“Not entirely.”

Peter tugged at
his nose thoughtfully. “Let me put it this way. I’m trying to introduce greater
reality into TA, because in my opinion it’s been failing to face up to what
life is all about.”

“Oh,” said
Gene. He reached in his pocket for his cigarettes, and lit one up. The smoke
drifted across the pool. “Tell me, do you believe that people can get obsessive
about not doing things they really want to do?”

“Like what?”
asked Peter.

“Like my
girlfriend there, Lorie. You see her–the one in the safari suit? She said she
liked me from the-moment she first met me, yet she’s been giving me warnings
the whole time about how I mustn’t get serious, and she even made me swear not
to marry her.”

“That’s not
unusual. She’s probably anxious about the possibility of being tied down.”

Gene shook his
head.. “It’s more than that. She keeps trying to give me the impression that
there’s something spooky going on in her life. She won’t tell me exactly what
it is, and I can’t even guess what she’s trying to get at. But she’s always
giving me forbidding threats about the dire consequences of forming any kind of
relationship with her.”

Peter sniffed.
“Do you want me to talk to her?”

“You mean,
analyze her?”

“No, just talk.
It sounds like an interesting syndrome. Why don’t you let me go over and chat
for a few minutes? I can’t say I’d hate it. She’s a beautiful girl.”

Gene looked
across the pool to where Lorie was being introduced to Nancy Bakowsky. “Okay,” he
said, noncommittally. “If you don’t mind being eaten alive by half the
Democratic ladies in town.”

Gene waited
while Peter Graves padded over to the ladies’ circle on grubby running shoes
and spoke for a while in Lorie’s ear. There seemed to be some very intense
discussion going on between them, but Gene was distracted by Walter Farlowe,
who brought him a plateful of steak and salad, and a plastic knife and fork to
eat it with. He broke the fork on the first attempt, and spent the next ten
minutes searching for a new one.

When he got
back to the pool, Peter Graves was waiting for him, sipping a 7-Up and looking
thoughtful. “Well?” Gene said.

Peter gave an
uncertain smile.

“Did you talk?
Did you get any inkling?”

Peter looked
unhappy. “Well, in a manner of speaking, yes. But I’m not too sure if I
discovered too much.”

Gene chewed a
mouthful of burned steak. “Are you trying to tell me that you couldn’t figure
her out?”

“Well, no,”
said Peter hesitantly. “But the truth is, she seems to believe that she’s
locked into some kind of predestined fate. You know? And she’s worried that if
you get involved with her, you’re going to get yourself involved in that
predestined fate too.”

“What do you
mean, predestined fate?”

“Exactly that,”
explained Peter. “She thinks that, for one reason or another, her life has to
follow a particular traditional pattern. She told me that And when I asked her
about yon, and the way she felt, she said that she was worried you were going
to wind up as a kind of victim of whatever this pattern may be.”

Gene put down
his plate and lit another cigarette. He decided he’d had enough of Walter
Farlowe’s cooking. “Did she give you. any indication of what this pattern was?”
he asked.

Peter Graves
shrugged. “She knows, but she’s not telling.”

.”Are you sure
of that?”

“Absolutely.
I’ve seen it before. There’s some part of her personality that she is
consciously sublimating to the point where it’s almost impossible for any
analyst to reach. That lady of yours has a mental brick wall around her real
personality that’s almost impenetrable.”

Gene blew out
smoke. “Almost impenetrable?”

Peter nodded.
“The only way to get through it, the only way to discover what she’s hiding and
why she’s hiding it, is to trigger off the predestined fate she keeps talking
about.”

“I don’t get
that,” said Gene, frowning.

“Well, you said
she’d told you to swear not to marry her, right? That was an effort on her part
to avoid this predestined fate, But if you were to ask her to marry you, and
you did get married, then I guess that would be a trigger for the traditional
pattern, and she would have to go through the whole rigmarole, and expose that
part of her personality that she’s been trying to hide.”

“That sounds
pretty hypothetical,” Gene said.

Peter swallowed
some 7-Up, and suppressed a burp. “Not at all. What a lot of people don’t seem
to realize these days is that basic psychiatry is like practical mechanics. Your
Lorie is a completely predictable and straightforward example of anxiety.
Because of some past situation in her life, she believes that if she takes a
particular course of action, something awful is going to happen, and therefore
she avoids that course at all costs. To get her out of the anxiety, she needs
someone to show her that it’s not necessarily going to be that way.”

“You mean, I
ought to ask her to marry me?” Peter scratched the back of his neck. “That
would be the ideal solution, yes. But obviously you mustn’t do it unless you
mean it.”

Gene said
nothing. He looked across the still, reflecting pool to where Lorie stood,
laughing politely with the other women, and she was so tempting in her safari
suit, with her gleaming gold hair and her slanted green eyes, that he wondered
how any man could possibly resist her. He wanted her, almost desperately, and
he was beginning to wonder if asking her to marry him wasn’t the only way.

That evening,
as a smoldering crimson sun sank behind the hills in a grayish haze, they left
Walter Farlowe’s place and drove back to Washington. Gene had drunk three too
many vodka tonics, and wasn’t driving very straight, but Lorie was too high and
happy to notice. Their date had opened her out like a Japanese paper flower in
water, and she was chattering about all the people she was going to meet and
all the things she was going to do.

“Did you have a
good time?” asked Gene. He knew she had, but he just wanted to hear her say it.

“Oh, Gene, it
was fantastic. You know, I’ve kept myself bottled up for so many years, and
I’ve never wanted to get out and talk to people but now that I have, I love it
I could go to a party every night.”

“Your father
was pretty sociable, wasn’t he, from what I’ve heard?”

She nodded. “He
was the best host in Washington. Mother has an album about him upstairs, and
it’s full of newspaper cuttings about his dances and his parties.”

Gene lit a
cigarette. “That was pretty sad, what happened to him.”

“Yes,” she said
quietly. “I miss him.”

“Does your
mother ever think about remarriage?”

Lorie brushed
back her hair with her hand. “Oh, no.”

“You seem very
certain of that.”

“It’s the way
our people are. It’s traditional that a woman has only one man in her lifetime,
and I don’t think that Mother could ever consider anyone else. She believes too
much in the old customs.”

“It seems a
pity. She’s an attractive woman. If I wasn’t going out with you, I could almost
fancy her myself.”

“Now then,”
laughed Lorie. “You’ll make me jealous.”

He shook his
head. “You have nothing to be jealous about, ever. You have everything going
for you that any girl ever could. You’re truly a beautiful person, you know
that?”

She looked
away. Her tawny hair shone in the last reddish light of the sinking sun.

“You mustn’t
get too serious,” she said.