The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  “And—?”

  “Beautiful.”

  Orville had halted, bewildered. “Have you no more to say? Aren’t you surprised? Aren’t you shocked? Aren’t you stimulated?”

  Orville had waited. The members of the group had looked at one another and shrugged, until on their behalf, the first middle-aged woman had spoken.

  “It is ordinary,” she had said.

  “You mean it is familiar to all of you?” Orville had demanded.

  “Familiar,” she had said, and all the heads had bobbed.

  Nonplused, Orville had tried to go on. Unless he could extract some real reaction, he could not examine their stimulus-response pattern. “Does any one of you want to discuss this picture? What would you guess happened before this moment, during it, and can you imagine what will happen next?”

  The semicircle had consulted silently, with arched eyebrows and lifted shoulders, as if in agreement that their visitor was a lunatic. One had raised his hand. He was a thin young man of twenty. “I will discuss,” he had announced. “He wants the love, she wants the love, they make the love in the picture. Soon, he is happy, she is happy, they rest. Then they love again if they do not sleep. They are strong. They love many times, I think.”

  “Yes, yes,” Orville had said impatiently. “But isn’t there anything else you feel like saying? Does anything about this make you think of yourselves—or bother you—or make you hope—I mean—”

  “There is nothing to think,” the young man had said, stolidly. “It is too common. We all do. We all enjoy. Nothing more to say.”

  Orville had glanced inquiringly at the other five. Their heads curtsied in unison, agreeing with their neighbor.

  Crushed, Orville had held the impotent Pompeii fresco in his lap, staring down at it. The picture evoked an immediate response in him. For one thing, he had never employed the averse position with a female, and the possibility made him wonder. For another, he had never engaged in any position but one, and that with no more females than a few, which made him remorseful. For another, he had never enjoyed the pleasure so evident in the picture, which made him sad. For another, his mind went to Beverly Moore, which made him lonely.

  These thoughts, overlaid on the failure of his invincible P.P.R.I. to affect his six subjects, brought him to this moment of utter frustration.

  Grimly, he determined to persist, until his subjects capitulated. Tossing the Pompeii fresco aside, he yanked the next picture from the pile. It was the Jean Francois Millet called Lovers. It depicted in modern times exactly what the Pompeii fresco had depicted in ancient times. Orville had always regarded the Millet as a find because it startled his friends. Most knew Millet only for the traditional Angelus, and could not believe that the same artist had concerned himself with blatant sexuality. Orville passed the reproduction of the painting around. Once again, the stone faces were impassive, and once again, when asked for their reaction, they had nothing to say except that the performance was familiar.

  The third and fourth pictures were Rembrandt’s The Bed and Picasso’s Embrace, both realistically revealing men and women in familiar face to face copulation. To these, the reactions were those of utter boredom and the six subjects were mute. In desperation, Orville reached deep into his pile to extract the reproduction of Pascin’s The Girl Friends. The response to the fleshly painting of two nude French lesbians was immediate, loud, unanimous. The six natives laughed with undisguised delight. At once, Orville was hopeful.

  “What’s so funny?” Orville wanted to know.

  The thin young man of twenty spoke. “We laugh because we all say—what a waste of time!”

  “Is this not done here?”

  “Never.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “We feel nothing except the waste.”

  Orville pushed on, trying to provoke something more. He got nothing more. Pascin had drawn a blank.

  With mounting dejection, Orville passed out the sixteenth-century print by Giulio Romano. This represented an unclothed couple with the female in ascendancy. For the first time, the group showed interest. They huddled over the print, discussing it in Polynesian.

  Orville’s spirits lifted. “Is that familiar to you?”

  The middle-aged woman at the end nodded. “Familiar.”

  “Is it popular on the Sirens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Most interesting,” said Orville. “You see, it is practiced less in my homeland, among my people, than—”

  “Your people practice it often,” said the middle-aged woman. She had made a flat statement.

  “Not exactly,” said Orville. “According to statistics I have—”

  “Uata says your women wonderful this way.”

  “Who is Uata?”

  “The one who died.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Orville. “I’m sorry about him. But with all due respect, he would not have known how we—”

  The thin young man interrupted. “He knows. He has loved one of yours.”

  Orville hesitated. His ears had deceived him. The constant problem of communication. “How could Uata have known one of our people?”

  “You are here among us.”

  “You mean—one of us—our women?”

  “Of course.”

  Orville tried to contain himself. He must not over-react, lest he frighten them into conspiratorial silence. Careful, careful, he told himself. He must handle it casually.

  “Interesting, interesting,” he began. “You are being helpful. You can be more so. I’m curious to know the details of Uata and the member of our team—”

  In five minutes, he had every detail, every horrifying detail, and in six minutes, he had dismissed them, vaguely requesting a future meeting, when he would resume with the Thematic Apperception Test.

  After his hut was emptied, Orville remained shaken, actually-found himself trembling, at the perfidy, the unpatriotic and shameful behavior of their weakest link. There was only one thing to do, to reveal the scandal to Dr. Maud Hayden and have the offender drummed from the island.

  Bursting out of his dwelling, Orville went on a gallop past the residence of their Hester Prynne, past the residence of Marc Hayden, and, too distraught to knock, pushed his way unannounced into Maud Hayden’s office.

  She was at her desk, writing, and he was before her, face abashed and necktie awry.

  “Orville, what is it? You look terribly upset.”

  “I am, I am,” he said, trying to control his breathing. “Maud, I hate to be the one to bring this to you—it is too terrible—”

  Maud had laid her pen down. “Please, Orville, what is it?”

  “Through one of my tests, I just learned from the natives that one of your team, one of the women, has been—has been—has—” He could not bring the word out.

  “Fornicating?” said Maud gently. “Yes. I assume you are referring to Harriet Bleaska.”

  “You know?”

  “Of course, Orville. I’ve known all along. It’s my business to know. Anyway, these things get around very fast in this kind of confined society.”

  Orville advanced, crouching lower, until his posture was that of an outraged Quasimodo, searching Maud’s face. “You sound like you approve of this degrading—”

  “I don’t disapprove,” said Maud firmly. “I’m neither Harriet’s mother nor her guardian. And she is well past her twenty-first birthday.”

  “Maud, where’s your sense of propriety? This can work against all of us, lower us in their eyes. Besides—”

  “Quite the contrary, Orville. Harriet’s performance was so superior, in an area where sexual prowess is admired, that she is regarded as royalty, and so are we. She will receive more cooperation, and so will we. In short, Orville, in their eyes we are no longer a strange company of prudes.”

  Orville had straightened at this unexpected defense of a bawd, and he almost jigged with anger. “No, no, Maud, you’re all wrong—you’re too scientific—too objective—you ca
n’t see how this looks. For all our sakes, you’ve got to intervene, restrain this nurse from stooping so low—Send her back, that’s what you should do, send her back. Will you speak to her?”

  “No.”

  “You won’t?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then, all right,” he sputtered. “If you won’t, I will—for her own sake.”

  With outraged dignity, he pulled his tie knot down from where it had worked up onto his shoulder, and stalked out.

  Maud sighed audibly. She had thought the Reverend Davidson long dead of a self-inflicted razor wound on the beach of Pago Pago. She was mistaken. She wondered what Orville would do, if anything. She promised herself to keep her eye on him. One missionary, Adley used to say, can destroy in a single minute the work of ten anthropologists in ten years. Satisfied that Adley was on her side in this, she picked up her pen and resumed her notes.

  * * *

  Rachel DeJong had not known what to expect when her door opened, ten minutes before, to admit Atetou, wife of Moreturi, to her primitive consultation room.

  It was surprising that, in a village so small, where the female population circulated in a limited area, she had never set eyes upon Moreturi’s wife during a period when she had seen so much and met so many. She had not realized this when the appointment had been made. Only when she had awaited Atetou, and tried to remember something of her, did Rachel DeJong become aware of the omission. She pondered, then, as to whether the fact that she had not set eyes upon Moreturi’s wife had been an accident or a deliberate avoidance, either on Atetou’s part or on her own.

  Now, serving cold sweetened tea in tin cups that the Karpowiczes had brought along, Rachel was able to fix upon a certain knowledge or expectation that she had of Moreturi’s wife. While she had not met her before in person, she had met her daily in Moreturi’s highly colored free associations. She had expected—what? Certainly, an older woman and a woman less physically attractive. She had expected a shrew and a witch, a canker sore festering on Moreturi’s extrovert, lusty person. She had expected Xantippe. An old school memorization from Taming of the Shrew floated through her mind: “Be she as foul as was Florentius’ love,/ As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd/ As Socrates’ Xantippe, or a worse,/ She moves me not.”

  Yet, here, on first meeting, there was none of this evident, although Rachel suspected there must be some of it beneath. From their opening handshake, Atetou had been composed and an equal. She had come to this appointment with deep reluctance—Moreturi had made that clear—but her presence did not betray this. Rachel guessed that she could not be more than thirty: her diminutive features were smooth, too smooth; her neck was young; her small breasts were high and rigid. She had a disconcerting habit of looking past one, and you were not sure that she was really addressing you or listening to you. Her voice was hushed, so that it was necessary to lean forward to catch what she was saying, thus putting you to a strain and at a disadvantage.

  “Here you are,” said Rachel, setting the cold tea in front of her. “I hope you find it refreshing. Have you ever had tea before?”

  “Several times. On occasions when Captain Rasmussen brought it in.”

  Atetou took up the tin cup and drank impassively. Rachel settled on the matting across from her, and drank her own tea. Rachel felt the chill of her visitor’s hostility. Moreturi had confessed telling his wife of the details of his psychoanalysis. Atetou would naturally resent the meddling by an outsider, would put the outsider in a league with her husband against herself. Atetou was here merely to prove that she was not the misfit her husband claimed her to be to this outsider.

  If there was to be an honest exchange between them, Rachel knew the initiative must come from herself. Atetou would initiate nothing, and it was understandable. To make her speak up at all, Rachel would have to taunt her with Moreturi’s disapproval of his domestic state. Rachel deplored the tactic, but it would be necessary. There could be no hope of putting Atetou on the couch, so to speak, of casting her in the role of patient. Atetou would not permit it for a second. She was here as one lady to another, as a maligned neighbor prepared to straighten out one who had been misinformed. She was here for tea and careful talk.

  For Rachel, in the last days, Moreturi had proved easier as an analysand. Once the barrier between them had dropped, he had cooperated within his limitations. He treated the sessions as a lark. Stretched out on his back, hands behind his head, he chided his “Miss Doctor,” and spoke wildly and freely. He enjoyed discomfiting Rachel with his amorous experiences. He liked to report his dreams elaborately. He took pleasure in trying to shock. Rachel saw through him at once and steadily. He was not seriously interested in his unconscious motivations. .When his domestic crisis boiled over, there would always be the traditional Hierarchy to look after him. His sole interest, his game, Rachel perceived, was to reduce his analyst to female. He was not unintelligent, but he was not interested in intelligence. To investigate his own mind, to ride introspection into the unexplored jungle of his brain, lured him not at all. His concern, like that of his late friend Uata, was in physical sensation. The compleat hedonist: food, drink, sport, dance, copulation. For a free soul, a born bachelor, the responsibility of a wife was a burden. He did not necessarily want to divorce himself of Atetou, but rather of the unnatural prison of matrimony.

  Perhaps, Rachel had thought in this past week, Atetou is not so frigid as Moreturi had made out. Perhaps, in the eyes of one like Moreturi, any wife would be frigid. Unconsciously, Rachel supposed, she was always defending Atetou, because this was a defense of her sex. Men like Moreturi were a threat to the dependence women must have upon monogamy. At the same time, although Rachel did not examine this ambivalence in herself too deeply, she was secretly with Moreturi against his wife. Somehow, Atetou stood between Rachel and her patient. There was no direct line between analyst and analysand, because Atetou made it a triangle. Rachel squirmed under the restriction of guilt, whenever caught up in Moreturi’s crazy babble, and the guilt that held back further communication was the warden eye of Atetou.

  But Rachel knew that she was deceiving herself. Atetou did not stand between Moreturi and herself at all. The major inhibition was Rachel’s insistence upon continuing to communicate with Moreturi through psychoanalysis. With each day, it was proving more impossible. She would speak to him of a young female’s penis envy or a young male’s castration fear, and Moreturi would roar with laughter. She would speak to him of Oedipal guilts and displacement of unacceptable desires, and Moreturi would ridicule her until she was brought to the verge of tears.

  Gradually, Rachel was coming to this conclusion: a system of mental help, originated before the turn of the century in sophisticated Vienna by a brilliant Jew with a beard, did not work well, if it worked at all, in a civilization not oriented to the tensions of the West. It was arduous for Rachel to relate her knowledge of neurotics and psychopaths who developed out of a highly literate, clothed, repressed, material, competitive society to a relatively indolent, unpersevering, hedonistic, isolated semi-Polynesian society, where so many values were reversed. Yes, Rachel could see that if Freud, Jung, Adler had taken over the Hierarchy on The Three Sirens, they would have been driven by despair into analyzing one another.

  But then, Rachel saw, this was a second subterfuge. It was not Atetou and it was not Western psychoanalysis that were the obstacles between her and a success with Moreturi. It was, finally, herself. Her patient’s assurance, lack of inhibition, maleness, these frightened her, and shackled her. She would pursue no relevant point with him, pursue him down no path, because he was strong and she was weak, and she dared not let him know it. Superior knowledge was fine. It gave you control in an air-conditioned office in Beverly Hills. It gave you dominance over a person who was ill in the judgment of an orderly society. On the other hand, it gave you no strength in the primitive brush when it was your only armament. Coming upon a large animal, a free roaming animal that survived by instinct and appetit
e, you did not curb him by applying the wisdom of the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. What you did was to avoid close contact. You ran like hell.

  Now, here was the mate of the King of the Beasts before her. The mate represented one-half of a real problem that Rachel had undertaken to resolve. Something must be done. Rachel saw that her visitor had put down the cup and was waiting, the fingers of one hand fidgeting across the waistband of her grass skirt. Rachel finished her own cup, set it aside, and, with effort, assumed her professional mien.

  “I repeat again, Atetou, how pleased I am that you have come here,” said Rachel. “Do you understand anything of my work?”

  “My husband and mother-in-law have told me.”

  “Good. Then you appreciate I want to help you and your husband with your problem.”

  “I have no problem.”

  Rachel had predicted that she would be unyielding, and Rachel was not surprised. “Be that as it may, your husband appealed to the Hierarchy for a divorce on the grounds that you were having marital troubles. The matter was turned over to me. I am merely trying to serve in the place of the Hierarchy.”

  “I have no problem,” she repeated. “He has the problem. He made the appeal.”

  “That is true,” Rachel conceded, recalling that Moreturi had made a similar denial and accusation in his first visit. “Nevertheless, if one member of a marriage is unhappy, that would indicate the other member may be, too.” Then she added, “In certain cases, anyway.”

  “I did not say I was happy. I could be happy. The problem is his.”

  “Well, would you be willing to let things go on as they are between you two?”

  “I do not know…It is possible.”

  Rachel could not allow this to continue. She would have to bring Atetou into the open. “You know I have been seeing your husband daily, do you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know he speaks of his own life and his life with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know of what he speaks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Atetou, I have his side of it. To be fair to both of you, I want your side. When he tells me, day after day, you are not friendly, not sociable, not performing as a wife, I must believe that he should have a divorce—that is, if I listen only to him. But it would not be right to listen only to him. I must listen to you. Truth has two voices.”