Chapter 14

The medicine had begun to take effect. Eve felt boneless, as Louise had predicted. She tried to clench her fingers together but they were limp and useless. Louise, at her desk writing a report, looked up.

"Let's see how we're doing," she said, rising and coming over to the cot.

The sheet was spread over Eve's supine body. Louise pulled it up from the bottom, exposing the legs to the hips. Carefully, she tucked the white cloth between Eve's thighs, covering the private parts and leaving one leg exposed. This leg she grasped by the ankle and lifted it slowly, her eyes on Eve's face.

"Does that hurt your back?"

"A little ... but not much."

"Now the other one."

Eve watched as Louise re-covered the first leg, bunched the sheet over the genitals, and exposed the other leg for the test. It was a thoughtful kind of modesty, even for a male doctor to observe. With two women it was totally unnecessary. Yet Eve felt gratitude; it seemed the epitome of dignity and refinement, the subtlest of proprieties. Ironic, in her case, she thought. It was so odd to have someone else care so much about her modesty, when she had never cared about it herself. It was a topsy-turvy situation; like having someone else eat and sleep for her, a kind of spiritual lady-in-waiting. Sudden sadness overwhelmed her. Her mouth tightened into a thin line and her brows knitted together in confused thought.

"Hurt?" Louise said anxiously.

"No. No, it's much better."

The woman went to a metal cabinet. "I'm going to put you in a back brace. I want you to wear it for about a week. It's kind of like an old-fashioned corset."

At the word corset Eve stiffened. Tears came without warning, and automatically she tried to turn over and hide her face in the pillow, but the pain shot up at her abrupt, careless movement and she cried out.

"What is it?" Louise rushed to her. The brace was in her hand; it had laces and eyelets, and it did look like an old-fashioned stay.

"I don't want that thing!"

"I don't care whether you want it or not," Louise said calmly but adamantly. "You have to wear it. Eve-what's the matter!"

"I hate it! My mother wore...." She sobbed and choked, instinctively twisting away from the hand that held the hideous garment, as she had once twisted out of her mother's grasp. The pain immobilized her once more. She lay on her back, hands at her sides, perfectly straight, as she cried frenzied tears. Would she always have to be stiff and unmoving on the outside when she hurt so badly on the inside, she wondered? It seemed to have become a curse.

She saw Louise's face come close to hers as the Woman grasped her shoulders. Then, in a flash, she felt a sharp, quick lash of fingers on her cheek.

"Stop it. Stop it." The voice was even and calm but command was calcified in every syllable. Eve swallowed repeatedly and tapered off into a weak whimper.

"Here. Take this." Louise handed her a capsule and lifted her head so that she could drink the cup of water that she had fetched from a cooler.

"Now. That won't put you to sleep, it'll just calm you down. What is it, baby girl? Tell me all about it."

As Louise sat beside her on the cot, listening and nodding, Eve poured out the whole story once again, just as she had Vivian. As she finished, she understood something.

Lost one mother. Please return to Eve Banner. Reward..,.

But somehow it was different from the night she had told Vivian. That time, they had been in bed, naked. They had just made love. But now, Louise sat, starched and crisp, warm yet remote and in charge. Most of all, Louise had covered her nakedness. The only person who ever had-including myself.

"Tell me something," she said, gazing up at the woman.

"If I can," Louise answered.

"Vivian...."

Louise stiffened. "What about her?"

"You were lovers in school, weren't you? She told me you were."

"Yes, we were. And you?"

Eve nodded. She saw Louise's mouth clamp into an angry line.

"You don't have to be jealous," Eve said. "I won't take her away from you. It's you who're taking her away from me. She wants you, not me."

Louise shook her head. "That's not what I was thinking. What occurred to me was...." She hesitated, then went on." ... was that we both need Vivian like we need another thumb. You in particular. You're in no emotional condition to cope with her."

"You mean I've ... had a nervous breakdown?"

Amusement flickered in Louise's eyes. "In a way. I don't like the wording, however. Nervous breakdowns conjure up screaming women lying in fcur-posters, with the shutters drawn, and lots of tongue-clicking female relatives standing around blaming it on an early change of saying 'poor thing, she's just run down'. No, not that kind of nervous breakdown. That .suggests," Louise said intently, locking on Eve's eyes, "that there is an innate weakness and helplessness in women. You have not had anything like that."

Her voice and gaze were firm. It was as if she had said: If you die I'll kill you.

Eve felt a kind of strength seep into her. "What kind, then?"

"The kind that people often have, many times in their lives. People are constantly changing and maturing, dropping false fronts and protective colorations and shells of one kind and another.

There's an interim period when you've lost a defense, yet you've not had time to replace it with anything else. It's then that you have a kind of mini breakdown."

She paused, grinning. "That's why it's been so quiet in here tonight, with just the two of us. But the psychiatric service does a roaring business, especially in a college, and especially at this hour. The night has a thousand eyes; the day but one. People break more precedents than they do legs."

A thoughtful frown was on Eve's face. She smiled and nodded slowly. "You know, I admire you. A little while ago I hated you. I wish I could be more like you."

Louise opened her mouth, then closed it abruptly. "How about getting some sleep? You've had a rough day. I think I'll doze myself. I'm on duty till morning. If you want me, I'll be in the next room."

"Goodnight," Eve said.

Louise did not sleep. Instead, she lay looking up at the ceiling. I shouldn't make speeches, she thought wryly. Here lam changing and maturing, dropping false fronts and protective colorations and shells of one kind and another.

She had met many attractive women over the years, but she had never permitted herself to think of them. Now, though, the speculations came very easily and painlessly. She felt quite free.

She's twenty-six and I'm forty-three. Seventeen years....Is it too much? Will it work? I'm old enough to be her mother, but hell, she wants a mother, she needs one. And I need a child. There's nothing wrong with neuroses. Without them, there would be ho books to read and no music to listen to because there would be no unbearable grains of sand around which the oyster builds a pearl.

Louise had no patience with psychiatry. She recalled something she had read somewhere, about an English major who had written a short story, then told her professor: "Don't worry. I'm going to go back and put in the symbols."

As far as she was concerned, the best therapy consisted of common sense, grit, hard work that one enjoyed, and above all, a sense of humor. It all boiled down to reality, yet there were countless socially acceptable and even socially required ways of making oneself sick, all of them unrealistic.

Eve's worship and exploitation of the female form was one. Beautiful women were expected to be sex objects; it was not surprising that they so often followed through and became just that.

Belief in immortality was another sure-fire way to go crackers. The cornerstone of that particular self-deception was a denial of death. How many funerals took place at which the mourners insisted upon saying of the corpse: "He looks just like he's sleeping?" Did people sleep fully clothed, with carnations in their buttonholes? In thousand-dollar boxes?

Louise sighed in the darkness as she thought of Eve's story of her childhood. If all church property could be confiscated and donated to medical research, people might end up so healthy they'd live forever anyhow.

The name of the game, Louise thought, was to have neuroses while making sure that the neuroses don't have you.

She had been about to suggest to Eve that she get out of the posing racket, but then changed her mind. It has to come from her, be her own decision, not mine, she told herself. That was one technique of psychiatry that she approved of.

Why did it have to be Eve she wanted. It really made no sense. Maybe that was why she was so sure of it.

The problem was going to be Vivian. Of that she was positive. Hell hath no fury like a man who loses both women.