Chapter 12
Louise sat in her living room, her fingers moving slowly across her forehead. Why! After all this time, after she thought it was all finished....now this had to happen.
She was afraid, afraid of the threat to her career, and of the treachery of her own body. Things had been so peaceful; lonely, yes, but peaceful. Peace had become the touchstone of her life, and now that peace had been tampered with.
She was tempted to have a drink but she knew it would only make her headache worse. She had migraines now. Age, she thought, a shuddering sigh coursing through her. The part of her that was a woman had been wasted. It was a thought she never allowed herself, except on nights when she vas very tired, too tired to sleep. Then, regret would attack relentlessly, and she could not do a thing about it.
She lay back with her eyes closed. She may have dosed off; she could not tell. For a moment, the doorbell seemed to be ringing in a dream. Then she sat up with a jerk and realized that there was someone at her front door.
She stood up quickly and saw the shadow of a form through the curtains. It was a woman. Louise shrank back, wishing she could run and hide but the doctor in her was too strong! She had never refused to answer a knock or a ring-she could not.
She opened the door and saw Vivian gazing at her with a pleading, wide-eyed expression on her face. They looked at each other for a few seconds without speaking, then Louise's shoulders lowered in a gesture of reluctant assent.
"All right," she sighed. "Come in."
She preceded Vivian in to the living room and motioned to a chair, remaining standing herself, leaning back against the mantle and hugging her arms together as though she were shivering in the cold.
Vivian sat down. "I had to come. I knew you didn't want me to, but I had to." Her voice grew panicky. "I've never forgotten you, Louise. You can't have forgotten me, I know it!"
"No, I haven't forgotten. I haven't forgotten anything about the whole mess."
"Mess? Is that what it means to you?"
"Yes, I'm afraid it does. It's all a symbol of near-disaster to me, and you're part of the symbol, Vivian. It could have wrecked me."
"But it didn't!" Vivian cried. "You're a doctor now. You got what you wanted."
"True, but I still have nightmares about people opening bedroom doors. Then I dream that I'm falling, down, down, into some kind of black pit. I wake up in a cold sweat. You're part of that scene, Vivian. Whether it's fair of me or not is beside the point. The fact remains that you're all tied up with the thing that scared me to death. You're tied up with failure in my mind, with the wreck of my career. With waste and shame and despair and with exposure."
Vivian was nonplussed. She shifted uncomfortably. "Well, I didn't realize I had such farreaching influence. After all, I just came by to say hello."
Louise's eyes glinted with wry amusement. "Did you? We said hello this afternoon."
Vivian's mouth tightened. "Do you want me to leave?" she asked abruptly.
The word yes! screamed silently through Louise's brain but she could not bring herself to utter it. She shifted her steady glance. Something about standing there, looking at Vivian, reminded her of gazing into a fire. It was dangerous and destructive, but it was beautiful, too, and fascinating in a primitive way.
This time, it was Vivian's turn to smile sardonically as she noted the older woman's hesitation. The moment had passed; Louise could not tell her to get out now. She watched as Vivian leaned back in the chair.
"Well, let's bring each other up to date," Vivian began. "What happened to you after ... we left the university?"
Louise suddenly felt exhausted. She sank down into a chair. "I went to another med school in the Midwest. Then I made friends with another woman doctor in a little town in Iowa. She was getting old, and she took me on. When she retired, I took over her practice for her. I stayed there for many years but I didn't want to spend the rest of my life buried in the country. I decided to go into institutional medicine."
She made a gesture that seemed to say: so here I am. "And you?"
"Married, as you know. Two kids, both in college. I don't particularly care for either of them. Does that make me an abnormal mother?"
"I didn't specialize in psychiatry, I'm just an old-fashioned GP," Louise said curtly.
The pleading look returned to Vivian's eyes. "I hate him! I should never have married anybody."
She launched into a disjointed story of her marriage to Tim, her affairs. She did not mention Eve. Louise let her talk until at last, she tapered off with a ragged sigh.
"So now-what do you think of that?" she challenged.
"I think," Louise began, "that it's a self-destructive pattern, if you'll pardon my sounding like the psychiatrist I'm not. And it proves that my way of life was the wiser choice, doesn't it?"
"I can't answer that. I still don't know what your way of life has been, Louiee."
"At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I've been a celibate."
Vivian blinked in surprise. "All this time?"
"All this time."
"Does that include women and men both?"
"Both. I've never been one of these people who rationalizes lesbianism by saying that it's not really sex. If a woman wants to do anything of importance in this world, she has to steer clear of sex," Louse said, her voice ringing with passionate conviction. To her own ears, it suddenly sounded a little shrill, like a political fanatic-like Tim Lawler's editorials, for that matter.
"Oh, come on!" Vivian burst out.
"I mean it. Sex destroys. It almost destroyed me, and it has destroyed you. You never finished your work. What about your art?"
"I'm taking courses now-"
"But you're forty years old now."
Vivian sat back, stung. "Well, you're older than that," she said irrelevantly. It was almost a grumble.
"I'm forty-three," Louise sighed. The figures rose in her mind as though they had suddenly been put there with a branding iron. Without warning, her glance strayed to Vivian's long slender legs, neatly crossed and encased in sheer stockings. It was hard for her to believe that the chic woman opposite her had been the grubby little girl she had known so many years ago. She's much better-looking at forty than she was back then. As if to defend herself against her thoughts, she rushed into pontifical speech once more.
"I've had so many women come to me with all kinds of weird complaints, mental und physical both. But it's always the same diagnosis: they had no work that they loved. They simply lived all their lives as sexual beings. They have nervous breakdowns, they turn into shrews, drink, take pills, have affairs-anything to prove their worth or become the center of attention. You've done that, too, Vivian, but I haven't. And I don't want to!"
Vivian smiled knowingly. "Then why are you shouting?"
At that moment, with warning, Louise broke down. The accumulated years of loneliness tore off the mask and left her naked. Her face paled and grew pinched with emotional pain as she walked slowly towards the smiling woman. She moved woodenly, like a toy soldier someone had just wound up.
Vivian stood up, her face triumphant. "Would you like to specialize in gynecology?" she asked softly.
With a moan of release, Louise grabbed her and felt the immediate yielding fluidity of the soft body as it moulded itself to her. She was conscious of the alluring plumpness slightly parted female thighs take on when they are pressed close to another body.
Then, with a sensation akin to shock and, if the truth be told, primness, she felt her skirt being lifted as Vivian's hand crept up her legs and dug into the crotch of her pants. Somehow, running a hand up a woman's dress was decidedly masculine action. As the fingers pulled at her clothing she thought of the expression: getting into her pants.
In another second she did not think of anything at all because she became mindless.
They sank to the floor, their hands pulling at buttons and hooks, until they were naked. Vivian let her eyes trail over the pale flesh. "You don't change, do you?" she whispered.
"Neither do you."
Vivian fell over her, forcing her to the floor on her back. She cupped Louise's generous breasts that were still firm, firmer than her own. Her fingers tweaked the nipples, pinching them hard, until Louise cried out in pain and pleasure.
Vivian loomed over her, panting. "I can feel your nipples throbbing," she whispered, tightening her thumb and forefinger around the turgid points.
"Take them in your mouth, please ... oh!"
Louise's back arched as the hot, wet mouth descended. As the eager tongue rolled over the tips of her breasts she was wracked with shivers that spiraled down to her armpits and ribs. She worked her shoulder forward, forcing the breast deeper into the hungry mouth.
Vivian's smaller, shorter body lay on top of her, light in weight but dominant in its aggressive writhings. Their mounds touched; Louise felt the scrape of rough hair on her legs and stomach, then moaned as Vivian found the matching triangle and pressed forward. They twisted and rubbed against each other. Louise cried out in frustration.
"Here," Vivian gasped, "let's get them together right?" She reached down and separated Louise's cunt with one hand as the other reached out and grabbed a pillow from the sofa. She shoved it under Louise's hips. "Draw your knees up ... way up," she commanded. "Spread wide."
As Louise obeyed she looked down and saw Vivian now holding open her own oval of sex. She pressed it into the up-turned cleavage of femaleness. Pink flesh met pink flesh; exposed, laid open, wet with longing.
The touch was like an electrical shock. Louise's body arched and twisted under the slippery insistence of delight that Vivian urged upon her. It was obvious that Vivian's past experience had taught her something about female anatomy that Louise had not learned in medical school. She had never had sex with a woman in this manner; she had not thought it possible to join the female parts so adroitly.
"Darling, it feels so good," Vivian breathed. She had never felt such immediate ecstasy. It was the sort of feeling that sometimes came over her after having sex with a man, but only afterwards, after hard fucking and laborious manual manipulation. This was completely different. This was immediate and instinctive, this was fueled by a feeling far higher and more rarified than ordinary.
"I have never...." Louise gasped.
"Oh, Louise, I missed you so!" Vivian cried out. "I have thought of you every day of my life, and it has been so long."
"So long-" Louise echoed.
Their bodies, joined only externally, writhed and wriggled together, in perfect rhythm, in easy communion. It was as if they were doing a sort of a dance which both knew but had not known that they knew.
Their mouths met and held in a kiss. Louise was so sweet, so delicious, Vivian realized. So unlike a man, so unlike nasty-tasting Tim. She remembered the last time he had fucked her and she shuddered.
"What's wrong, darling?" Louise asked, pulling back her head in alarm.
"Nothing ... nothing to do with you. I just remembered something I don't like to think of."
"Kiss me and don't think ... for a while."
Every inch of her body where it was touched by Vivian's body was on fire, but it was a slow, sweet fire. Louise had never felt such closeness-such physical closeness-to another adult human being.
And Vivian knew that she was about to come. She was already coming, in fact, with an orgasm that rolled up her body and set her soul on fire.
"Vivian ... Vivian, I'm coming," she moaned. She looked up and saw the tumbled mass of chestnut hair half-shielding the red face and knew that her ecstasy was being shared. Their bodies went rigid, then began to shake as climax overwhelmed them.
They lay sprawled over each other on the floor. Louise ran her tongue over her dry lips. The sound was one of crackling paper to her. When she swallowed, it sounded like a small explosion. Those little noises after sex ... it seemed a million years ago that she had last heard them. They had an intimacy all their own, because they were so suggestive of what had just passed. The dry lips, made that way because of the mouth that was held open in smiling ecstasy. And that inevitable swallow, to ease the throat that had been choked with groans and sighs.
And now, the sine qua non of human closeness: her stomach growled, and they both heard it.
Louise was ready to smile, to say something, one of those humorous, affectionately bawdy things that lovers say to each other after pleasure, but Vivian spoke first.
What she said ruined the moment.
"I knew I could get you."
Louise looked into the glittering eyes: they were full of cockiness and assurance. It was like being with a man; the feeling that she had been captured, like some kind of animal or bird. It made her cease feeling human at all.
The joy went out of her. She rose and tossed the pillow back onto the sofa. Her eye followed it and she grimaced with distaste as she saw a wet spot on its cover. That would not have bothered her a moment ago. She felt isolated, totally alone, as though she had masturbated on that pillow and soiled it during a wild, helpless moment of solitary abuse.
"I'm on duty at the infirmary tonight," she said. "I must hurry."
Vivian shook out a stocking, then rolled it down to put it on. "When can I see you again?"
Louise blinked. Again, it was like being with a man. She had had a few dates in the past, on occasions that required an escort. Several times, the man had gotten interested in her. Each time, they had asked that same question: When can I see you again? It had always given Louise a sticky feeling, especially when it was accompanied by that lusty glitter that she now saw in Vivian's eyes.
"I don't know. I have to be careful. Everybody in these houses is married but me. I've attracted some attention already. You know how people are. When a woman's a doctor they figure she's half-man already. I....I'll have to see."
Why didn't she just tell Vivian that she did not want anything more to do with her? What was holding her back!
Vivian finished dressing and picked up her purse. "I'll call you," she said.
It was uncanny, Louise thought. I'll call you, baby....She watched Vivian go out the door, then, after a moment, when she was sure the car was well away from the house, she too left.
Eve was posing for a sculpture class. As she reclined, motionless, on the platform, her mind whirled with agonizing thoughts, disjointed and elusive, like bits of paper and leaves swirling in a strong wind.
On her way to the art department, she had seen Vivian drive through the campus, turning down the road that led to the faculty houses.
She knew what she was going there for. She hated the woman, Dr. Fowler, with a desperate hatred. Why must she take Vivian from her? To Eve, the doctor seemed powerful, like a goddess who could send thunderbolts into other people's lives.
She has so much, why must she take Vivian?
The words knelled dully through her mind. She has so much ... she has so much. What did that have to do with it, she wondered? It was Vivian that counted. But somehow, this thought seemed to be the crux of the issue.
Eve glanced about the classroom. It was a night class, and the lights were bright and hot above her. She felt vulnerable and exposed, not because she was nude, there in the middle of the room, but because she suddenly felt weak, insignificant.
She has so much....
Was that why Vivian wanted her, preferred her over me, she wondered? Suddenly it came to her that she did not have much to offer anyone except a beautiful body and a classically lovely face. She had never doubted her own omnipotence before, but now she found herself wondering what kind of companion she made. Did people like her? It never seemed very important before, because she had loved herself so much.
Was she interesting? That had never mattered before either, when she was occupied totally in absorbing self-interest.
Eve experienced a withering flash of insight. She had wanted Vivian because the woman was an extension of her own physical self. Model and artist, one and inseparable. Apart, they were helpless; together they could form a whole-a whole painting, a whole drawing, a whole sculpture.
Or a whole Eve....
She looked about at the class. She needed these people desperately; they gave her the only possible opportunity to form an identity. They formed heron paper, on canvas, in clay. She wondered how many hundreds of times, even thousands, her body and face had been reproduced. But it was always a two-dimensional reproduction. Where was the third dimension?
Where am I? Who am J? her mind cried. She became panicky though she remained perfectly still. For a moment, she thought the contrast of internal versus external would drive her mad.
The doctor had a third dimension. She had done something with herself, and she gave to other people. What have I ever given to anybody else? Sure, they draw me, they need me in a way, but if they didn't draw me they would draw something. If people wanted badly enough to draw, they would draw. Nothing could stop them.
She felt useless, filled with self-disgust.
"May we turn the model?" someone asked the instructor.
Eve stiffened. The model....Not Eve Banner, just the model. Again the question pummeled her brain: Who am I? Where am I? I can't find me!
The instructor nodded and moved the circular platform. It was used solely for sculpture. Every ten minutes or so it was turned, so that students who had been working on a frontal view could get another perspective. As Eve spun slowly about, the students moved the wet clay replicas of her, turning the small statues about to work on the part of Eve that now faced them.
They stood in a circle about her. She watched the terra cotta Eve Banners being moved about on the tall tables at which the students worked.
They picked her up and turned her around, shuffled her here and there, wherever and whatever they desired. She felt like two dozen puppets, motivated solely by someone else's will.
Something she had never bothered to think about now plagued her.
What would happen when she got old? Would she still be modeling? She could, of course. Age didn't matter; a figure to be drawn was a figure to be drawn; it did not have to be young and beautiful. But what would it be like to look back and think that she had spent a lifetime sitting still and doing nothing?
Her mind replied with last-ditch arguments. I can keep my figure ... you don't have to get fat and sloppy....I can watch my diet, eat health foods, exercise....
What could she do besides model? She had finished high school, which meant next to nothing nowadays. What little business education she had had she had long since forgotten. She was sure she couldn't type fast anymore. What else could she do? Work in a store?
Suddenly, she remembered lying in bed as a teenager and planning coldly and calmly to be a prostitute. Now, it filled her with dread; she began to tremble. How could she have been so calm about it back then? But it could happen ... she had been selling her naked body for a long time. How much of a difference would prostitution really be? Was the step such a small one in her case that she might very easily slip into it?
She remembered the basic law of gravity: things tend to go down, not up. "Pose change, please."
The turnstile began to move. Eve was not thinking of it. Suddenly it tilted violently to one side. Her mind engrossed, she did not catch herself in time. She heard the surprised gasps of the students, then the crash of the heavy circular table. She twisted about, her hand grabbing at air. A tearing wrench went through the small of her back, like a knife slashing across her muscles.
The instructor ran to her and moved to pull her to her feet, but she cried out.
"Don't! Don't move me! My back...."
She could not move. Each time she tried to raise herself, the pain pulled with excruciating intensity. Someone covered her with her robe.
"Get her to the infirmary," someone else said.
"Keep her flat. Find something to carry her on."
"A door, or a table, something hard."
They found a long, low coffee table in one of the painting classes. A still life was arranged on it. Hurriedly, they removed the vases of flowers and carried the table back to where Eve lay.
She grimaced in agony as they lifted her and placed her flat on it. She was immobile. It took five men, each with their hands under her body, to keep her horizontal while they eased her onto the makeshift litter.
"I don't want to go to the infirmary," she moaned. "She.:.."
"You've got to. You may have slipped a disc," said the teacher.
They made their way out the front door and down the darkened road to the infirmary. One of the men stumbled on a rock and nearly fell. The jolt made Eve cry out. It felt as if she were breaking in half with pain.
"Goddamn! Why don't they light these roads?" said one of the men.
Each step they took, out of rhythm and jogging, made the pain come again. She could not move her legs at all. The words, paralyzed from the waist down, sent terror through her. What would happen to her? Suppose she was crippled? What would she do then?
At last they came to the infirmary. One of the men kicked the door with his foot until it was opened. Eve looked up and saw Louise Fowler, dressed in a white coat and peering worriedly down at the burden.
"What's happened?" she asked.
"She had a fall, twisted her back. She can't move."
Louise led the way into the examining room. "Now," she ordered, 'lift the table up level with the cot and roll her off. Just turn her over, keeping her straight. Put her on her stomach."
Two of the men held the table while the others turned Eve onto the cot. It was like turning a page in a book. She lay on her stomach, hor robe under her, her body exposed.
Louise glanced at the five men. All of them wore beards, beads, and artists' smocks.
"Why is she unclothed?" she asked icily.
"She's the model in the art department. She fell off the platform while she was posing."
"Oh," Louise said. Then she looked more closely at the girl and recognized her. "I see. I'll keep her here. I'm on duty tonight."
They left, and Louise turned to Eve. "Hello there, I didn't notice who you were at first. Your name is ... Eve, isn't it?"
Eve was grateful not to be "the model" once again. She explained exactly what had happened as Louise questioned her. When she finished, the doctor nodded.
"It sounds like a muscle spasm. There's a way to find out. I'm going to prick you lightly with a pin in the area where the pain is. If the pinpricks feel numb there, and sharp on the unaffected areas, that means it's the muscle and not the bone."
Eve twitched as the pin jabbed along her upper back, but when it lowered to the coccyx area, the point could hardly be felt.
"That's good," Louise said with a relieved sigh. "No disc problems. I'm going to give you an injection of muscle relaxant."
She explained carefully exactly what the medicine was, how long it would take to make itself felt, and what Eve should expect to feel.
She smiled and patted the girl's shoulder. "It'll affect all of your skeletal muscles. You'll be weak as a kitten. Won't even be able to make a fist," she added lightly, patting again. "Now, you'll really be better off on your back. Here, let me turn you."
She flipped Eve over with expertise and surprising strength. They looked at each other for a moment and exchanged a warm smile.
Louise swabbed the bend of the elbow with alcohol, preparatory to giving the shot. "What gorgeous veins," she murmured. "Nice and prominent. You have to dig for some of them, you know?"
Eve laughed carefully, conscious of every movement. She had never been complimented on her veins before. Everything else, but never her veins. It was oddly refreshing and cheering.
The needle jabbed. As the shot ended, the pressure made Eve wince. "There," Louise soothed. "All over." She glanced at her watch.
"In about twenty minutes you ought to be as spineless as a jelly fish. In the meantime, would you like some coffee?"
"Yes, please."
"Me, too."
Louise brought the cups back and put her arm under Eve's head, lifting her up so that she could drink. "Atta girl," she said. She propped a back rest under the shoulders and handed her the cup, then took up her own.
Their eyes met over the rims of the cups. For the first time since she had been in the infirmary, Eve was conscious of being naked. She tugged fruitlessly at the folds of her trapped robe.
"Here," Louise said, spreading a sheet over her. Eve saw a faint blush appear on her cheeks. 'Tell me, if you don't mind," she began. "I've always been curious. Doesn't it bother you to pose nude? Do you feel ... embarrassed?"
Eve smiled. She had been asked that many times. Everyone was curious about it. "You get used to it," she said noncommittally. "You're probably used to looking at sights that would make most people faint, aren't you?"
"True enough," Louise nodded. The explanation seemed to satisfy her. She appeared to weigh the thought for a moment, then spoke again. "But somehow, you just don't seem like the type."
Eve's eyes widened. "I don't?" she murmured slowly.
Louise shrugged. "No."
"Why?" Eve pursued.
Louise's eyes narrowed with speculation. "Because you seem capable of more than that. You have an intelligent face. There's a certain ... oh, dumb animal stare in women who make their living by displaying themselves. You don't have it. You also have a lady-like air about you."
"I do?"
Again Louise shrugged. "Yes. Don't you know it?"
"I don't know ... whether I do or not," Eve replied in wonderment.
"Well ... look in the mirror," Louise said simply.