Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  From the look of the sky, they would have snow for their return trip. If you could get an unobstructed enough view north, you could see the clouds gathering behind the Jemez Mountains. But it was still clear and windless in Santa Fe. The sidewalks were crowded, and people seemed to be taking advantage of the nice weather. Jenny browsed in front of the shop windows until she was absolutely sure that no one who knew her was anywhere within sight, and then she cut across the street, went down two more blocks, and stepped into the lobby of the La Ventana Hotel.

  There wasn’t much there to tempt you to linger—just a couple of tired looking blue gray sofas resting on a tan carpet, a few low tables covered over with that morning’s newspaper, and the front desk. It wasn’t even the sort of place where you could buy a pack of cigarettes.

  Jenny couldn’t have said whether the clerk noticed her or not, so resolutely were her eyes fixed on the staircase. If he had he wouldn’t have bothered to make any inquiries of her—it wasn’t that sort of a place either.

  The door to Room 227 was painted over with so many coats of white that the moldings around the edges were almost completely filled in. Jenny noticed every detail—the dirty smudges above the knob, even the brush marks—as she stood there, trembling with dread. Finally she summoned up the courage to knock, twice, hardly loud enough to hear herself. She waited, wondering whether to knock again, wondering whether to leave, hoping and fearing that no one would answer.

  But someone did answer. After what felt like an eternity, and was probably no more than eight or ten seconds, the door swung open and revealed a man standing in his shirt sleeves, one hand thrust into the pocket of a pair of baggy brown trousers. He was only a little over average height, but, poised there in the doorway, he seemed to fill the room behind him. The door seemed to open onto him and nothing else.

  His face was wide and strong and very tanned, but it was possible to see already a certain slight puffiness around the angles of his jaw, presaging that he would run more and more to fat as he approached middle age. But that was still all in the future—he was young yet. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-nine or thirty and was handsome in an obvious way. And whenever he smiled, and his brown eyes crinkled a little around the corners, he revealed that he knew it. He was smiling now.

  “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come,” he said, in an accent that turned his “w”s into soft, liquid “v”s. But it wasn’t the accent that kept you from entirely believing him. “I’m glad to see you.”

  He stepped aside, and Jenny Springer walked across the threshold into the room, and the door closed.

  . . . . .

  The room’s only window faced west and threw a thin bar of hard yellow light across the carpet, which was tan, just like the one down on the lobby floor, and dotted here and there with cigarette burns. The light cut the bed in half lengthwise, as if to divide one side from the other, but no such precaution was necessary now. Jenny Springer was in the bed alone. The sheet was pulled up to cover her breasts, but no one was looking at her—the man who had spent the afternoon lying beside her was up now, standing in front of the bureau with his back to her, tying his necktie in the mirror.

  She reached over to the night table and picked up the wristwatch her parents had given her as a high school graduation present. It was twenty-five minutes after three.

  “Erich—Erich, I have to leave pretty soon.”

  He turned around to look at her, and smiled. He was only reacting to the fact that she had spoken; probably he hadn’t even been listening. Probably he didn’t give a damn whether she stayed or went.

  “What will you tell your husband?” he asked, his voice smooth and musical—almost feminine—and his accent correct but obviously European. He smiled again, as if the question were part of a little joke he was having on Hal Springer, whom, as far as Jenny knew, he had never met.

  When she didn’t answer, Erich Lautner turned back to his mirror. She watched him for a long time, as he finished with his tie and began the careful business of combing his hair. He was like an artist, putting the finishing touches on a masterpiece, she thought, and then flushed with shame the next instant. What an idea to have! Was that what it was like to be an adulteress, not to think well of anyone? Apparently.

  She had been to bed with Erich twice before, often enough for him to feel he had established a kind of claim on her. So now she was trapped, both by her marriage and by this affair with Erich. God, how could she have been so stupidly blind? Now all she wanted was to be left in peace, and even that was no longer possible. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  She slipped her feet over the edge of the bed and began feeling for her shoes. If she hurried, there would be just time enough for a shower. Oh the blessed luxury of it, with plenty of hot water and soap—she knew she would feel better after a shower. Erich never even glanced at her as she made her way into the bathroom.

  Five minutes later, when she came back out, she found him fully dressed and sitting on one of the room’s two chairs, waiting for her.

  “When will I see you again?”

  It wasn’t the question she wanted to hear. She thought of what it would be like that night when she got home, she thought of Hal, grunting under a barbell in his khaki underwear. He would probably want to make love to her, which he did as if according to a recipe, as if she were simply something to be handled, to be turned this way and that, which would give her no pleasure at all—she might as well be a block of wood.

  And Erich, who thought he was so much the technician of lovemaking, wasn’t much better. What he forgot was that it was hard to feel pleasure—to feel anything—where there was no love. She despised herself all the more because she couldn’t manage even a little spark of guilty sensuality. She wasn’t meant for adventures in hotel rooms.

  When she was seventeen there had been a boy. . . She had never told anyone; it was her secret. He had been a cousin of a friend, someone there for a month one summer. He had been her only other experience—they had done it twice, on the back seat of a car he had borrowed from his uncle, and each time she had been overwhelmed with shame. She had been glad when he went home again. She had promised herself she would never do anything like that again, and she never had. Not until Erich.

  But there had been pleasure on that back seat, an aching, desperate kind of pleasure. Everything after had been a crushing disappointment, but at least she knew that it was in her to feel passion.

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly, turning her eyes a little away from the full force of Erich’s smile. Why did he always have to smile like that, as if he thought he could read her mind? “It’s so hard to get away. I don’t know how you do it—I thought everyone was supposed to work on Saturday.”

  And it was true. Hal was working today. All the men at Los Alamos worked six days a week. Sometimes right through Sunday. But Erich always seemed to be able to get away.

  “I can come and go as I please. I am a theorist—they pay me to think, and I can do that anywhere. Besides, a bachelor. . . I have a right to come into town once in a while to get my shoes resoled. When will I see you again?”

  “Look, Erich, this is no good. This is. . .”

  “Is it your husband that worries you?” He closed his eyes, and an expression of weary boredom came over him—even his shoulders seemed to sag imperceptibly. “I think we have little enough to fear from him. Or perhaps you have decided that you love him. Is that it, Jenny? Have his embraces suddenly become so very dear to you?”

  She hated him when he was like this. Erich was good-looking and clever—he was the most intelligent man she had ever known—but he could be so arrogant, so sure he could have his own way in everything.

  That was part of the charm for him. She suddenly saw it. If she hadn’t happened to be married to one of the base security officers, he probably wouldn’t have enjoyed his little affair with her half so much. Stolen meetings in sleazy little rented bedrooms were all very well in their way, but what really made it f
or him was the fact that he was putting one over on a man who walked around the grounds at Los Alamos with a .45 automatic hanging from his belt. She wished sometimes that Hal would find out, just to see how Erich Lautner, Doctor of Philosophy, would handle that.

  Her clothes were draped over the back of the other chair. She turned her back a little to him, trying not to be too obvious about it because she didn’t care to be teased about her few remaining scruples of modesty, and took off her towel. She didn’t speak as she stepped into her panties—she really didn’t know what to say.

  When she was dressed, and was zipping up the suit skirt, she could face him calmly enough again.

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with Hal,” she said. “But we can’t go on like this.”

  “Are you suggesting I should marry you?”

  She shook her head. No, she wasn’t suggesting that—and neither was he. It was just more of his sly mockery.

  “No—I don’t want you to marry me. When the war is over, I don’t know what I’ll do about Hal, but I don’t imagine that will last. No, you don’t have to marry me, Erich.”

  . . . . .

  It did begin to snow on the way home. As the car wound its way up the mountain road, and the flatland fell away to leave them naked and exposed against the rising ground, the wind stiffened toward them and hard flakes struck against the glass with a sound that was audible even over the growl of the engine. They were all glad to get back inside the confines of the base housing complex, and when they dropped Jenny off in front of her bungalow she ran for the front door as if for dear life. The snow pelted the backs of her bare legs like sharp little stones.

  Even after she was inside, after she had hung up her coat and turned on the electric heater in the bedroom, she still stood with her arms clasped around her shoulders, she was still quaking—it was as if an icy hand had reached up inside her to lay its fingers against her heart.

  She wasn’t cold—she was afraid.

  It would have been different if she had had the courage simply to throw the whole thing away—the marriage, Hal, Erich, everything—and go back to her parents’ house in New Jersey. But she didn’t. She knew she didn’t, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was a weakness, a species of cowardice, but she didn’t want to be the little tramp of a soldier’s wife who had made a fool of herself with some smoothie of a European scientist and got dragged through the divorce courts. Hal wouldn’t be nice about a thing like that—it wasn’t his fault, but he just wouldn’t have it in him—and she was afraid of what her parents would think. She was afraid of admitting that kind of failure to anyone.

  And Erich was the type who would probably like to brag about his conquests, who certainly would brag if she ever wounded his masculine vanity by somehow slipping away from him. As long as she was his mistress, and he had the secret satisfaction of having a military policeman’s wife at his beck and call, he would be silent, but if he lost that. . .

  “Why shouldn’t we go on as before?” he had asked, smiling his crafty, contemptuous smile. “You don’t love your husband—why should you deny a little measure of affection to a poor fugitive from the Nazis?”

  12

  On the second story of the base security office, where the floors were unfinished plywood and the walls had been painted a mustard yellow, Hal Springer sat with his feet up on his desk, staring resentfully at a letter one of the project scientists had written to his wife back in Massachusetts. The goddamned thing was in cipher.

  They did stuff like that all the time, just to be annoying. It was sort of a game with them—make the work just as difficult as you can for the snoops, let the snoops know every day of their lives just how pointless it is trying to keep a leash on such a bunch of bright boys. Springer knew perfectly well that if he went over to this one’s office and demanded an explanation the little snot-nose would probably just sigh dramatically, reach inside his desk, and pull out a code key, and that would be that. He was a mathematician named Stanley and his wife was an assistant professor of statistics at Radcliffe—it said so right on the envelope—so presumably she would have been able to figure out the letter without a key. But Springer wasn’t going to play their little game. He wasn’t going to give anybody a chance to make a fool out of him. He just wasn’t going to forward the letter.

  He balled the thing up and threw it in his wastepaper basket, wondering why the whole world seemed to conspire against him. In the five months since he had come out from the East, he had learned to hate the project scientists worse than he ever could have hated the enemy. He couldn’t understand why they all wore civilian clothes, why they hadn’t all just been drafted and put under direct military authority so they wouldn’t be able to fuck around like that without landing in the brig where they belonged.

  And he couldn’t understand what they were all supposed to be doing up here in the first place. Everybody just called it the Project and tiptoed around like guests at a funeral, but nobody—at least nobody he had talked to—had the faintest idea what it was about. Nobody. He was a security officer, so they told him, but what was he supposed to be protecting? What was the big deal?

  God, he should never have joined the Army. They might have let him off if he’d told them about his old hernia operation. He should have stayed with the cops in Newark, busting drunks and whores and handing out parking tickets along Wilson Avenue. Nobody needed him to be a night watchman out in the sticks.

  And he would have stayed back in Newark if it hadn’t been for Jenny: it was all because of her; she just had to be so gung ho about the stupid war. All she could ever seem to talk about was how she had joined the Red Cross and who had enlisted and what was happening in the Pacific. What should she care? Jenny had never even seen the Pacific.

  But he had gone and joined up, just because he knew she wouldn’t even look at a man she thought wasn’t serving his country—and hadn’t he been serving his country by running in the cruds who pissed on the bus station walls?—and now everything had gone wrong. He was a good soldier and a good husband, but the people he was assigned to guard did everything they could to make him look stupid and his wife didn’t seem to care about him.

  The night before he had made love to her. He was a proper man; he had waited until she had come to bed and turned out the light on her night table, and then, while she lay there in the darkness with her back turned to him, he had reached out and put his hand on her arm, just below the shoulder. He hadn’t forced her, and she had come to him willingly enough, but she did nothing. She was just there, lying beneath him; he couldn’t even hear her breathing.

  It was always like that. It seemed to be something that she simply accepted, like meat rationing. She wouldn’t even allow him the consolation of being resented.

  The Army had been unaccountably lavish in its use of windows for the security office, and from where he was sitting Springer had an almost panoramic view of the entire mesa. He knew that if he got up and walked the fifteen or so feet to the front of the building he would be able to see part of the roof of his bungalow, hiding behind a three-story bachelor apartment building in the next block. When they first came to Los Alamos, he used to do that a couple of times every day. It had given him a special kind of feeling to look down there and know that Jenny was at home, doing whatever it was that women did in their husbands’ houses. It had been love and the pride of ownership and a certain feeling of triumph, that he had won out at last. Now he could barely stand to go near that side of the room.

  It wasn’t supposed to come out this way; marriage was supposed to settle everything. He had always believed that if he could just get Jenny to marry him—it didn’t matter how—that everything else would work out. She would love him then. She would have to love him.

  Marriage, he had always believed, was the happy ending, not the start of some new contest. Life was supposed to return to normal, but Jenny just seemed to refuse to understand that. It was like there was something wrong with her.

 
And now some smart-ass little cocksucker of a college boy wanted to send his wife love letters in cipher. Jesus.

  “Doesn’t it make you feel like a peeping Tom?” she had asked him once, a couple of weeks after they first arrived, when he had started to work in Mail Screening. She had been standing in front of the sink in the kitchen, her back turned to him, scrubbing potatoes for dinner.

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “I don’t know,” she had answered, her voice perfectly conversational and easy—they had gotten along better in those days. “I just wondered how you felt about it.”

  “I don’t feel any way about it at all. What’ve feelings got to do with it? It’s just the job I was assigned—somebody’s got to keep the eggs from telling everybody on earth what they’re up to over there.”

  But Jenny hadn’t understood. She was as smart as anybody he had ever known, man or woman; she probably would have gone on to college and become a teacher if her old man had had the money—it was what she said she had wanted. But she hadn’t figured out that the eggs were just a bunch of rotten, spoiled little brats who had to be watched every second or they would commit treason and call it “kidding around.”

  For Jenny it was very simple: it just wasn’t nice to open other people’s mail. She didn’t seem to understand that they weren’t back in New Jersey anymore, that there was a war going on. He had pointed that out to her once.

  “Are we at war with the eggs?” she had asked. “I thought it was the Japanese and the Germans.”

  You couldn’t explain anything to a woman.

  There was still a stack of manila envelopes on his “in” tray—the work came like that, bundles of letters tied up in manila envelopes; you had to watch what they received as well as what they sent out. Springer took the top one, unfastened the clasp, and let the contents spill out over the surface of the desk. The sight of it all made him feel faintly sick. God, life in the Army.

  “I feel funny in this uniform,” he had told her, only half joking. “It’s the wrong color.”