Chapter 3
Sitting alone again in the quasi-medical bordello room, Bill began to feel progressively more uneasy. It was one thing to take off his clothes for an examination-if that's what it could be called-by a woman who professed to be a registered nurse, but quite another to wait naked for the arrival of an unknown marriage counselor. Bill had a dim vision of a tweedy, pipesmoking, horn-rimmed individual with graying hair. Did he normally find his patients or clients or whatever in this state?
He thought of getting up and going to the door and asking Julia Palmer for the return of his clothes, but that prospect was almost equally unsettling. Suppose there were new clients in the reception room? He had to content himself with the thought that she must have taken his clothes for a reason, even though the reason might be that she was crazy.
He tried to sort out what he'd learned thus far, and he had to acknowledge that he hadn't learned much. He had succeeded in half-convincing himself that he hadn't stumbled into a high-class version of a massage parlor. If that were the case, Ms. Palmer would surely have mentioned money before this. He was struck by the disconcerting thought that his money was in his wallet, and his wallet was in his pants. Perhaps he would never see her again.
Bored and nervous, he got up and made an inspection tour of the room. He stopped first at the gadget that had first caught his eye, the apparatus that looked like a prop from a science fiction film. It consisted of a large rectangular box sitting on a narrow table. Two straight chairs faced the table from either side. On one side of the box was an array of dials that made no sense to him. On the other side, two metal cylinders the size and shape of tomato-paste cans were attached to the box by wires. The box had a line cord that was plugged into a wall outlet. "Ah, Mr. Wilson! Good afternoon!" Bill was jolted by the woman's voice, but that surprise was nothing, compared to the one he got when he turned and looked at her. She was sweeping into the room in a long gown, making a theatrical entrance, hand extended, teeth gleaming in a thousand-watt Hollywood dazzle. Everything about it, the entrance, the smile, would have been laughably phony, if it weren't for the fact that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in his life. He gaped.
She was tall and slim, with honey-golden skin and hair like spun sunshine. Her eyes were an unnerving shade of green, like sunlight striking into the depths of ancient icebergs. Her round, rimless glasses made them seem unnaturally large and penetrating.
Her pale green gown seemed terribly formal for a business office, if that's what this could be called, but it was almost drastically simple, vaguely of ancient Grecian design. It bared her tan arms and was cut all the way to the navel in front, revealing most of her big, shapely breasts. As she got closer, he saw that it was almost completely transparent:
He took her extended hand uneasily and let her dazzle him a bit more with her smile. Then she said, "What seems to be the trouble?"
"I don't have any clothes, for one thing," he said.
"Don't let that bother you," she said, dismissing the subject. "I meant to say, why are you here? But do sit down. I see you've been examining our F-meter."
"Your what?"
"Our F-meter. It's central to our program of adjustment, an invention of mine. It's the only accurate measurement of human sexual response. But forgive me. My name is Wanda Fleurette."
"Ms.?"
"Don't mind Julia," she laughed. "Just call me Wanda. If you're interested in my qualifications, I hold a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago, and I've done advanced work in Switzerland. But titles and honorifics are just ways of obstructing communication between two people, and communication is all that matters. May I call you Bill?"
"Sure," said Bill, slightly shaken by the intensity of her manner. It wasn't the manic intensity of Julia Palmer, but it was equally effective: when Wanda spoke to him, it seemed that nothing and no one on earth mattered to her as much as he did. He supposed it was a gimmick she'd learned, but that knowledge didn't destroy its effectiveness.
"Seven and a half inches," she murmured aloud. She was leafing through the form that Ms. Palmer had filled out. Before Bill could react, she looked up at him and said: "Why have you come here, Bill?"
"Well. See, my wife. We've been married a little more than a year-"
"Why did you marry her?" Wanda interrupted.
"I was in love with her," he declared forcefully. "I still am."
"I see," Wanda said, with the tone of one whose darkest suspicion had been confirmed.
"And anyway, she just doesn't seem to take any pleasure in sex. She never wants to-experiment, or anything."
"What sort of experiments do you have in mind?"
"I don't know. I mean, for her there's only one time and place to make love, and that's in bed at bedtime with the lights out, as infrequently as possible. For instance, on our honeymoon, I wanted to take a shower with her, and she wouldn't let me. She acted as if I was suggesting something depraved and unnatural."
"Hm," Wanda said, frowning. "How old is she?"
"Twenty-two. She's younger than I am. Fourteen years younger. You'd think she'd have an entirely different attitude-I mean, the sexual revolution and all that. When I met her, she seemed liberated, intelligent, unconventional. And she is, in a lot of ways. But she's got this thing about sex. She isn't frigid. She likes it, once it gets started. But she'll use any excuse to keep it from getting started."
Wanda studied the questionnaire a moment, then said: "Maybe she thinks your cock is too big. Did she ever complain about that?"
"My what?" asked Bill, genuinely believing that he'd misunderstood her.
"Your cock. Surely you've heard the word?"
"Yes, but...."
"Don't talk about your wife's sexual hang-ups, if the sound of a simple English word distresses you. Maybe you should go see Dr. Joyce Brothers, or write a letter to Dear Abby, instead of wasting my time with your puritanical quirks. Well? Is your cock too big for her?"
Bill felt that he'd been unfairly used. Hearing ladies use unlady-like language was no novelty to him, and he didn't care about it one way or another. He simply hadn't expected the word from her in this setting and situation, and he'd misunderstood. But he was too startled by her vehemence to defend himself, so he merely said, "No, that doesn't bother her. At least she never complained about it. But sex is something she doesn't like to talk about, either."
"Where did you find her, anyway?"
Bill didn't like her tone nor her choice of words. They implied that Amy was some kind of freak. It was difficult for him to get angry with a beautiful woman on first meeting, but he found himself prepared to make an exception in Wanda's case. But he forced himself to stay calm. His curiosity was stronger than his anger. It would have been unthinkable to go this far without finding out what these people thought they were doing.
"I picked her up, sort of. She was sitting in Washington Square Park, reading a science fiction novel that I'd read, and we started talking about it."
"It? You mean, you started talking about fucking each other?"
"My God, no! We started talking about the book that we'd both read."
Wanda looked disappointed, but she said: "You see, it's hard to keep track of what people are talking about if they don't use plain English. Getting used to the idea of saying what you mean will be one of the first steps toward adjustment."
Bill smiled ruefully. Maybe there was something in what she said. In Amy-language, a cock was a "thing," tits were "things," a cunt was "there."
"What are the other steps?" he asked.
"You'll come to them as you go along."
"Now, wait a minute. I won't come to them unless I decide to sign up for whatever it is you're selling. And I don't intend to sign up until I find out what it is. So far, nobody's been willing to tell me. You're listed in the phone book under marriage counselors, but it's pretty obvious that something more than that is going on around here. I think I've been pretty patient up until now, but it's about time I got an explanation."
Wanda leaned back in her chair and produced a cigarette. Bill reached for his lighter and was embarrassingly reminded that he still had no clothes on. She studied him for a while as she smoked. Her gaze was not unfriendly. In other circumstances, he might have thought there was a sexy invitation in her deep green eyes. He tried to take his mind off that possibility. It was difficult. He noticed that the dark round badges of her nipples were visible beneath the flimsy green material of her gown. He felt his prick beginning to swell again.
"Human beings," Wanda said, "have lost touch with their animal nature."
Bill found himself struggling not to laugh. Her statement was hard to reconcile with the fact that his prick was getting harder by the minute.
"We've tried to convince ourselves that we aren't animals, that we're some kind of gods," she continued, "perfect, plastic deities who don't go in for such nasty activities as screwing or shitting or bleeding or dying. This attitude is wrong and dangerous. It's forced us out of touch with the cycles and rhythms of the universe. It's forced us out of touch with ourselves. The only way remaining open to us to achieve unity with Nature is by fucking. In an age when so many misguided people subscribe to the belief that we aren't animals, it becomes a religious obligation to fuck, with as much passion and intensity and frequency as we can muster. Desires must be gratified. Repression is sickness and death."
Ms. Palmer might look like a fanatic, but Wanda certainly sounded like one. He was so preoccupied with the unnerving conviction and intensity of her delivery that it took a moment for the meaning and the implications of her words to sink in. But before he could question her, she was off again:
"The world is an unpleasant place, Bill. It might be compared to a burning building that we're all trapped in. We can't escape. Some of us are going to be reached by the flames sooner than others, but we're all going to die. The best and noblest thing we can do in this situation is to reach out to as many of the other victims as we can and touch them, with love and understanding, with the only real means of communication we have available to us, namely, with our cocks and our cunts.
"But we've wandered so far astray from our animal nature that we've forgotten how to use our bodies. We've bound them up with chains customs and laws and religious restrictions and tribal taboos. What I do, Bill, is break those chains. I put you back in touch with yourself. I can do the same for your wife. If you want to define that as marriage counseling, I suppose you could."
"Well," Bill said slowly, and this time he couldn't restrain a nervous laugh. "Well. I guess I see what you're driving at. Maybe I even agree with you, up to a point. But I just can't see Amy ... I mean, you don't know her. To put it bluntly, she'd think you were a nut."
Wanda didn't take offense. She laughed. "I didn't start teaching my philosophy yesterday, Bill. I've made hundreds of-well, converts, if that word doesn't make you uncomfortable. Men often come very rapidly to a superficial acceptance of my ideas. They see my vision as a convenient excuse for getting a piece of ass, but it doesn't touch them profoundly. Women, although slower to accept, are often the most thoroughly converted-especially the sort of unfulfilled, repressed woman that you've described. Many people think I'm a nut. I've been persecuted unmercifully, driven from one place to another, hounded with petty legalities-well, that's unimportant. Just take my word for it: Amy sounds like a very likely candidate."
Bill found all that a little hard to swallow, except perhaps the part about being hounded by the law. For one thing, all this experience would have had to be crammed into a span no longer than twenty-eight years-and that was his absolute outside estimate of her age. Without the glasses, without the artfully understated makeup, she could have passed for a girl ten years younger than that.
"You still haven't told me what all this involves. I mean-well, what does it cost?"
"There are different levels of adjustment," she said, echoing the rigamarole that Ms. Palmer had given him.
"Yeah, but how much?"
"It depends on what you want out of life, Bill. And, of course, it depends on what you get out of my therapy. There would be nO point in continuing, if you found it unhelpful, or distasteful. The first level of adjustment would cost you a hundred dollars, and it generally takes no more than five sessions. Successfully completed, it entitles you to the designation of Class A Seeker. After that, for a similar fee and a similar investment of time, you become a Pre-Adjusted Seeker."
Bill considered. Her rates were far cheaper than a psychiatrist-or a massage parlor. Unless she had a vast following, it was hard to see how such rates could earn her this suite of offices.
"And then what?" he asked.
"Well, ultimately, if you follow the process of adjustment all the way to the end, you become what we call a Perfect. It can take from two to five years, although some people have achieved it much more quickly. And some, of course, can never achieve it, but they'd be weeded out early in the process. And before I can even sign you on for the first course of adjustment, you have to pass your qualifying test on the F-meter," she said, patting the instrument that sat on the table between them.
"Well, what does that cost? Becoming a Perfect, I mean."
She laughed. "By that time, you wouldn't be worried about money. You would be totally adjusted to your own sexuality. You'd have complete control over it-or it would over you-but it's silly to talk in those terms, you see, because you would be one indivisible unity. As a matter-of-fact, we'd be paying you by then. Your principal interest would be in converting others, and you'd be an employee of Life Adjustment Sciences, Inc. But it's a little early to start thinking about all that."
Bill thought. He could pull out whenever he chose. If it proved to be a fraud, he'd be out only a hundred dollars-or two hundred, assuming he could recruit Amy. It seemed worth it to satisfy his curiosity.
"All right," he said. "Bring on the F-meter."