by Linda Wolfe
Ben was dismayed to see that Sidney hadn’t even opened it. Thinking of Neville, he remembered anew the armless fetus and the suckling baby with a knot of flesh for fingers. It was essential that, until his pill was cleared of suspicion, Sidney stop testing it. And it was essential that he inform the Deutsch Foundation of Neville’s theory. Fingering the envelope from Neville, he changed his mind about discussing Sidney’s irritating new disruptiveness in the office. There was no point in attacking him on all fronts. It would be best to concentrate his efforts on the more important one. As soon as Sidney was off the phone, he leaned forward and shoved the envelope from Neville on top of Sidney’s desk.
Sidney frowned, ripped it in half, and tossed it into his wastepaper basket.
Ben was appalled. He stood up, gesturing at the wastebasket with a jutting chin. “That’s going to be published, Sid.”
“Fat chance.” Sidney picked up his phone and started to dial another call.
“Listen, Sid,” he found himself pleading. “This is not something you can afford to kid around about. Neville’s going to get the damn thing published.”
“So what? No one’ll take him seriously.”
“I think a lot of people are going to take him seriously.”
“Let’s wait and see.”
“You can’t afford to just wait and see. It’s in your own best interests to report his findings, at least to the Deutsch people, before he does. If you don’t, they’re bound to be angry and who knows, they might withdraw their support from you altogether.”
Sidney had been calm, if unresponsive. But now suddenly he too stood, and, the phone receiver still in his hand, hurled his voice across the desk at Ben. “Don’t tell me what my own best interests are! I ought to know what my own best interests are!”
Ben felt a nervous cramp in the pit of his stomach, as if he had to move his bowels. When they were little, Sidney’s tantrums had always affected his stomach, adding to his fear of his brother’s explosiveness a terror of his own potential loss of control. “All right, all right, calm down,” he said ingratiatingly, trying to ignore the tremulousness in his gut. “Just promise me you’ll read what Neville has to say.” His deferential manner filled him with self-loathing, but he knew from long experience that it could soothe Sidney. “I know you’re busy, but try to make time for it,” he murmured.
His tactic worked. Sidney’s voice quieted and he grumbled, “Okay. I’ll read it. Maybe tomorrow.”
Ben retrieved the segmented article, each half still in half a manila envelope, from the wastebasket and put it back on Sidney’s desk. “Thanks,” he remarked enthusiastically. “That’s all I’m asking of you.”
In Bloomingdale’s maternity department, Emily sorted through the racks of tent-shaped dresses, fingering the spring silks and summer cottons. Preoccupied with her own needs and longings, she quickly forgot about the unpleasant incident in the Zaubers’ office. There were a myriad of pastel blue jumpers; she had never known pastel blue to have so many gradations. She wanted an unusual dress, a striking, colorful, dramatic dress. Even a sexy dress, she thought, smiling to herself at the notion.
It was odd the way her mind turned constantly to thoughts of sex these days, even though she considered her new capacious body dumpy and undesirable. She was forever aware of a pressure in her loins, a tension that made her ready to make love with Philip every night whereas always before he had had to pursue and persuade her if he desired her more than three or four times a week.
Dr. Zauber said her new interest in sex was caused by hormones, and she should be glad about it. But it made her anxious. Philip was marvelous about satisfying her increased demands for lovemaking, but she couldn’t help wondering whether he really enjoyed their times in bed. Was he just humoring her? Was he secretly yearning for some flat-bellied svelte creature? Would it really be possible for her to do as Dr. Zauber had suggested and, by fighting the cultural stereotype about pregnancy, cease to feel so unappealing.
Catching a glimpse of herself in a mirrored pillar, she doubted that mind could conquer her matter, and she couldn’t help scolding her body. Why couldn’t it have felt so desirous when it had looked desirable, and sexless now that it was bloated? Well, there was no help for it, she decided, at last selecting a few dresses from the rack. It was just another of the ways in which nature showed its cruelty, its fondness for practical jokes.
“Can I help you?” a young, redheaded salesclerk asked, coming up to Emily and gesturing at the clothes over her arm.
Emily relinquished them and followed the salesclerk into a dressing booth. Then she drew the curtains and once again removed Dorothy’s slacks and blouse. But all the dresses disappointed her. They looked dreadfully unflattering. Their skirts seemed to be made of acres of fabric. She tried on a dark-flowered print, the best of the lot, a second time. Slipping it over her head she struck a fashion model’s pose, one arm on her hip, one leg thrust angularly forward. “Come here, darling, I want you,” she pouted to her reflection, laughing at herself and swirling yards of fabric across her stomach. “Do you hear me, Philip darling?” she said, enjoying her game.
Suddenly she blushed with feverish embarrassment. The salesclerk had pulled aside the curtain to the dressing room and was saying, “How’re you doing?”
“Not so well,” Emily confessed, wondering how much of her playacting the salesclerk had seen. “I—I wanted something sexy,” she explained.
The salesclerk giggled. “You’re not the only one. A lot of women who come in here want bright colors and vivid patterns or even black lace and beige crochet.”
“Why don’t you sell it then?”
“It’s the manufacturers,” the salesclerk said. “They don’t make it for Maternity.”
Emily thought about cultural stereotypes and how hard they were to change. She would have to mention this to Dr. Zauber the next time she saw him. Already, although it was another full month before she would see him again, she was storing up material for their conversations. He was always so shy, and yet so interesting to talk with, so thoughtful. She smoothed out the folds of the dress she was wearing, wondering if he would like it and whether Philip would, and finally took it off and asked the salesclerk to write up the bill for it.
“Sometimes I think the manufacturers think pregnancy has nothing to do with sex,” the salesclerk murmured as she wrote.
Emily began to laugh, thinking of her nightly adventures with Philip. “If they only knew,” she said to the clerk.
The young woman seemed to understand what she was talking about. She winked one jade-green eye and her shoulders began to shake. “If they only knew,” she sputtered, her long red curls dancing. And then the two of them were giggling helplessly, noisy, convivial conspirators.
Emily was still smiling to herself when, on the way to the elevator, with her new dress wrapped and boxed, she saw a woman she thought she recognized standing at the negligee counter. The woman was tall and pale, with shiny blond hair, and Emily remembered having seen her at the Zaubers’ office several times. Her large leather handbag was placed carelessly open on the counter, and she was holding a white silk negligee up to the light.
She must be rich, Emily thought. She must be rolling in money. Anyone who bothered with pregnancy night-clothes had to be rolling in money. She herself had had to make do by borrowing a few gowns and a robe from her mother, who wore a size sixteen. Emily passed Claudia and eyed her jealously.
Claudia waited up for Sidney, resting on the chaise longue in the bedroom, wearing the new silk negligee she had bought, and wondering what kind of mood her husband would be in when he returned from the hospital. A bad one, she surmised, at least if the phone call she’d had from Cora right after she’d gotten home from work could be taken as any indication of what she might expect.
Cora had been indignant. She’d said Sidney had threatened to fire her. All because she’d spoken up for some woman who’d wanted his signature on her medical insurance form. Sidney’s moods
were getting her all mixed up, Cora had complained. They’d always been bad, ever since she’d first come to work for the Zaubers eight years before, but in the past month they were really getting impossible. She couldn’t talk to him, couldn’t reason with him. She had asked Claudia to use her influence with Sidney to make him relent, both about herself and about the woman’s form.
Claudia hadn’t been very encouraging. Once Sidney made up his mind about something, his opinion could only be altered by a change that came from deep within him, never by the reasoning of others. No one really had influence over Sidney, Claudia thought.
It was one of the things that she had once found so fascinating about him. She had been his patient before she had been his wife, referred to him by Mulenberg’s office. Sidney had spent a half hour with her before he examined her and asked her a host of questions about herself. She had been surprised. Mulenberg had never probed into her personal history. But Sidney had seemed intensely interested in minutiae and that, too, had seemed fascinating to her. Of course, answering his questions had been difficult for a woman as reserved as herself, but because he was a doctor, and because he seemed to need, not merely want, her answers, she had spoken up as forthrightly as she could.
He had asked her about her age at the time of first intercourse, and whether she had ever been pregnant, and whether she had pain during intercourse when she didn’t have the infection, and posed dozens of questions about the birth control pills she had newly persuaded Mulenberg to let her take. She had told him everything he wanted to know and even told him about her father, a lawyer and a poet and a drunk, who had died in an auto crash when she was fifteen, and about her mother, who had left him once, the winter Claudia was thirteen, returning too late to have prevented Ezra Harding’s series of Scotch-gaudy nights in bed with his tremulous daughter.
Claudia had spoken of it only once before, not to her mother and never while her father lived. She had told the story to Harry Mulenberg after she had been his patient for three years. She had gone to Mulenberg during her first Thanksgiving vacation from Radcliffe at the urging of a boyfriend who wanted her to get a diaphragm. She had never used the diaphragm but had broken up with the boyfriend instead. In those days sex had seemed ugly, a bother, only a means to an end to her. She had stopped seeing the young man who had given her Mulenberg’s name, and many another young man too, always after only a month or two of intimacy. But she went on seeing Mulenberg for Pap smears and breast examinations. And one day, about to graduate from college and jealous of the many friends she had who had formed more lasting relationships than she had been able to, she had blurted out her experience with her father to Mulenberg.
He had seemed the perfect person to whom to unburden herself. Kindly and casual, even flippant about sex, he made her feel that somehow he could lessen her fears of sexuality, put them into perspective.
She needed perspective. For years after the brief incestuous encounter with her father, she had been sure that in some way, although she had been the victim of lust, she had also been the instigator. She remembered well that at thirteen she had been involved in a fierce adolescent battle with her mother, and had used flirtation with her father, the more powerful parent, to win occasional victories over maternal rules and regulations. But when her father, drunk, had taken her to bed, she had felt degraded, rather than victorious. And despicable. As if she herself had planned the seduction. It was only after Harry Mulenberg, growing angry and red in the face as she told her tale, said, “Jesus Christ! You call that a father! What a son of a bitch,” that she felt the first stirrings of absolution from her guilt.
Afterward, her love life began to improve. By the time she first met Sidney, five years after her confession to Mulenberg, she had put the experience with her father behind her, had a half-dozen full-blown, long-lived romances and affairs, and learned to feel better about her body. But she never told any of the young men she slept with about the incest. When she told Sidney, she did so because he seemed to her merely an extension of Mulenberg, a professional persona and not an individual personality.
Sidney’s response to her story had been cool, clinically nonjudgmental. After examining her, he had given her a prescription for antibiotics and she had gone home and thought no more about him.
Four months later, he had called her at work and invited her to the theater. She had been distressed, recalling at once all she had revealed about herself, and had almost refused him. But it was Christmas week. And she had just broken up with the young Columbia law student she had been seeing for six months. And she was terribly lonely. She went out with Sidney and he didn’t refer to what she had said in the office but talked to her about the theater, medicine and her new job at the photography museum. When, several dates later, she herself brought up the uneasy matter of her revelations, he had said, “I never let my professional knowledge of someone affect my personal knowledge of them. You and I are starting out from scratch. You can tell me anything you want, or you can keep quiet about yourself altogether. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve forgotten everything you told me in the office.”
At the time, his words had seemed generous to her. She had confessed what troubled her most, and Sidney had not only accepted it and her along with it, but had been willing to go past the past, to wipe it all out of his memory. It made her feel free. She was twenty-five and he was almost forty.
Months later, by the time he asked her to marry him, she knew that it was an impossibility to shut out of the memory anything one has learned, and that Sidney had sensed something about her during their first encounter which had made him keen to draw her to him. Knowing this had made her feel less free. Indeed, there were times with Sidney when she felt trapped, imprisoned. But Sidney was already an eminent doctor and researcher, and she had always been drawn to power. Sidney intrigued her. He had a blustery egotism and self-assurance that made him totally unlike the people she had grown up with. He was brilliant, and knew it, and successful, and knew it, and as a result he was totally uncompromising. He rarely ingratiated himself with anyone, whereas being submissive and pleasing had been so ingrained in Claudia that she thought it a breach of manners to have a strong opinion.
Sidney’s manners were terrible. He was rude, self-centered, even explosive whenever he cared to be. His respect for other men in his field was nonexistent. She found herself admiring his disregard for everything she had been raised to consider socially essential. While she herself continued to be impeccably polite, she secretly reveled in Sidney’s rudeness.
When he proposed to her, her best friend and roommate Bootie Talcott warned her that men like Sidney were wonderful to visit, but disaster to live with. But Claudia ignored Bootie’s advice and accepted Sidney.
He’d rarely made love to her before they were married, but the few times he did she remembered vividly. He had never been tender, but he had been intense, and she had had with him the first orgasms she had ever had during intercourse. But his work was so demanding, so time-consuming, that often, even during their courtship, he claimed to be too tired for sex. Courtship was exhausting for everyone, he always said, but especially for doctors who, more than other men, needed the tranquility of a permanent liaison, the stability of marriage.
Lying yearningly in his arms, Claudia had decided he was right. And then on their honeymoon, she had had to beg him to make love to her. And only when she had begged and wheedled for several days, did he agree. She had found it insulting but it had excited him.
In the remaining days of their honeymoon—they had gone to Geneva where Sidney delivered a paper on birth control at an international conference—he continued to make sex a reward she had to strive to obtain. He insisted on sexual games that unnerved and dismayed her. He would make love to her only if she would first tell him her sexual fantasies, or read to him from pornographic novels, or masturbate him lengthily while he lay on the bed reading medical journals with which he had overstuffed their suitcases, or let him fondle her clitoris while she
sat spread-legged on the toilet.
She found most of his requests humiliating, not in and of themselves but because she had hoped that once they were finally living together and there were no longer the strains of late-night meetings, he would be excited by her body alone. Throughout her high school and college years her cool, distant, long-limbed beauty had provoked instant passion in a myriad of men and boys. But Sidney wanted her to work at arousing him. Or needed her to work at it.
She assumed it had something to do with his practice and an overexposure to women’s bodies and genitals. But although she was bitterly disappointed, she did his bidding, the very fact of his resistance making her keen to accommodate him. By holding himself back from her sexually, whether willfully or undesignedly, he made himself a prize which she had perpetually to win again through feats of compliance.
At home, in the Fifth Avenue co-op her mother gave them as a wedding gift, these feats were mostly in the bedroom. He liked her to beg him to make love to her, to stand before him naked and masturbating and pleading with him to enter her, or to beat her across the buttocks or the thighs and have her playact the part of a bad little girl, begging him for forgiveness for some invented wrong. But even in the rest of their apartment, she found herself humbling herself to him. In the kitchen he was fault-finding, demanding perfection in the offerings she made for their guests. And unless she made herself obsequious and deferred to his attitudes and opinions in the living room, he would refuse to have sex with her altogether.