Thunder and Roses

by Theodore Sturgeon

  She tiptoed over to the arch and looked in at Robin. He had hardly moved. She knew he was probably good for twelve hours’ sleep.

  She bent over him and gently pushed some of his rough hair away from his eyes. She had never seen eyes, before, which had such smooth lids.

  Robin smiled while he slept. She wished she knew why.

  Carefully she removed his shoes. She had to step very close to the couch to do it, and something crunched under her foot. It was a radio tube. She shook her head and sighed, and got a piece of cardboard—there was no dustpan—and a broom and swept up the pieces. Among them she found a stuffed canary and a fifty-dollar bill, both quite covered with “flug,” or dust whiskers. She wondered how many times Robin had sat on that couch, over that bill, eating beans out of the can and thinking about some glorious fantasy of his own.

  She sighed again and put on her coat. As she reached the door she paused, debating whether, if she left a note anywhere in this monumental clutter, he would find it. She wanted him to call her as soon as he awoke, so she could have an idea as to his prognosis. She knew well that in his condition, with his particular treatment, that the imbalances should be all adjusted within twelve hours. But still—

  Then why not wake him and remind him to call?

  She suddenly realized that she was afraid to—that she was glad he was asleep and … and harmless. She felt that she could name what it was she was afraid of if she tried. So she didn’t try.

  “Blast!” she said half aloud. She hated to be hesitant, ever, about anything.

  She would leave word with the landlady to wake him early in the morning, she decided abruptly.

  She felt like a crawling coward.

  She turned to the door, and Robin said brightly, “Goodbye, Peg darling. Thanks for everything. You’ve been swell. I’ll call you when I wake up.”

  “You young demon!” she ejaculated. “How long have you been awake?”

  “I haven’t been asleep,” he said, coming to the archway. He chuckled. “I’m sorry to say you are right about the canvas. I forgot about the disgusting thing’s being so conspicuous.”

  “Oh, that’s all … why did you pretend to be asleep?”

  “I felt something coming and didn’t want it to.”

  “I … don’t know what you mean; but why didn’t you let it come?”

  He looked at her somberly. Either it was something new, or she had never noticed the tinge of green in his eyes. “Because you wouldn’t have fought me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The lower half of his face grinned. “You like most of the things I do,” he said. “I like you to humor me in those things. Those things are”—he put his fingertips to his chest, then flung them outward—“like this—fun, from here out. I don’t want to be humored from here in.”

  Over his shoulder she saw the big canvas. From this distance it was even more specific. She shuddered.

  “Goodbye, Peg.”

  It was a dismissal. She nodded, and went out, closing the door softly behind her. Then she ran.

  Dr. Margaretta Wenzell was highly intelligent, and she was just as sensitive. Twice she appeared at Mel Warfield’s laboratory at the hour appointed for Robin’s succeeding treatments. Once Robin did not speak to her. The second time she went, Robin did not show up. On inquiry, she learned from the information desk at the medical center that Robin had been there, had asked if she were in Dr. Warfield’s office, and having been told that she was, had turned around and walked out. After that she did not go again. She called up Warfield and asked him to forward Robin’s case history and each progress report. Mel complied without asking questions; and if Dr. Wenzell spent more time poring over them than their importance justified, it was the only sign she gave that it mattered to her.

  It mattered—very much. Never had Peg, in consultation or out, turned a patient over to another doctor before. And yet, she was conscious of a certain relief. Somehow, she was deeply certain that Robin had not ceased to like her. Consciously, she refused to give any importance to his liking for her, but in spite of that she derived a kind of comfort from an arduously-reached conclusion that Robin had reasons of his own for avoiding her, and that they would come out in good time.

  She was astonished at the progress reports. She could deduce the probable changes in Robin from the esoteric language of the reaction-listings. Here a sharp drop in the 17-ketosteroids; there a note of the extraordinary effect on the whole metabolism, making it temporarily immune to the depressing effect of the adrenal cortices in colossal overdoses. An entry in the third week of the course caused Peg two sleepless nights of research; the pituitrin production was fluctuating wildly, with no apparent balancing reaction from any other gland—and no appreciable effect on the patient. A supplementary report arrived then, by special messenger, which eased her mind considerably. It showed a slight miscalculation in a biochemical analysis of Robin’s blood which almost accounted for the incredible activity of the pituitaries. It continued to worry her, although she knew that she could hardly pretend to criticize Mel Warfield’s vast experience in the practice of hormone therapy.

  But somehow, somewhere deep inside, she did question something else in Mel. Impersonality had to go very closely with the unpredictable psychosomatic and physiological changes that occurred during gland treatments; and in Robin’s case, Peg doubted vaguely that Mel was able to be as detached as might be wished. She tried not to think about it, and was bothered by the effort of trying. And every time she felt able to laugh it off, she would remember Mel’s odd statement in the laboratory that day—but then, he had taken such a quick and warm liking to the boy. Could he possibly resent him on her behalf? Again she felt that resurgence of fury at Mel and at herself; and again she wished that she could be left alone; she wanted to laugh at herself in the role of femme fatale, but laughter was out of order.

  The progress reports were by no means the only source of information about Robin, however. In the tenth day of his treatment, she noticed an item in the “Man About Town” column in the Daily Blazes.

  Patrons of the Goose’s Neck were treated to a startling sight this AM when Vincent (The Duke) Voisier came tearing into the place, literally bowling over a table-full of customers—and their table—in the process of hauling Vic Hill, songwriter extraordinary, out to the curb. The center of attention out there semed to be a tousled-headed character by the name of Robin English, who told this snooper mildly that Mr. Voisier was going to produce his show. At that moment The Duke and Hill came sailing out of the bistro, scooped up this Robin English and hurled him into a taxicab, leaving your reporter in a cloud of carbon monoxide and wild surmise. Now followers of this column know that Brother Voisier is usually as excitable as the occupant of Slab 3 at the City Morgue. My guess is missed if show business isn’t about to be shown some business. Voisier is a rich man because of his odd habit of taking no wild chances.…

  And then there was a letter from a book publisher tactfully asking for a character reference prior to giving one Robin English an advance on an anthology of poems. She answered immediately, giving Robin an A-1 rating, and only after sending it off did she realize that a few short weeks ago she would not have considered such a thing. Robin’s reliability was a strange and wonderful structure, and his record likewise.

  At long last, then, came his phone call.

  “Peg?”

  “Wh … oh, Robin! Robin, how are you?”

  “Sharp as a marshmallow, and disgustingly productive. Will you come over?”

  “Come over?” she asked stupidly. “Where?”

  “Robin’s Roost,” he chuckled. “My McGee hall closet and bath. Home.”

  “But Robin, I … you—”

  “Safe as a tomb,” he said solemnly.

  Something within her rose delightedly at the overtone of amusement in his voice.

  “I’m a big grown-up man now,” he said. “Restrained, mature, reliable and thoroughly unappetizing.
Come over and I won’t be anything but repulsive. Impersonal. Detached. No … say semidetached. Like a brownstone front. A serious mien. Well, if it’s before dinner I’ll have a chow mein.”

  “Stop!” she gasped. “Robin, you’re mad! You’re delirious!”

  “Delirious and repressing, like a certain soft drink. Four o’clock suit you?”

  It so happened that it did not. “All right, Robin,” she said helplessly, and hung up.

  She discovered that she had cleared her afternoon so efficiently that she had time to go home and change. Well, of course she had to change. That princess neckline was—not daring, of course, but—too demure. That was it; demure. She did not want to be demure. She wanted to be businesslike.

  So she changed to a navy sharkskin suit with a wide belt and a starched dicky at the throat, the severest thing in her wardrobe. It was incidental that it fitted like clasped hands, and took two inches off her second dimension and added them to her third. As incidental as Robin’s double-take when he saw it; she could almost sense his shifting gears.

  “Well!” said Robin as he stepped back from the door. “A mannequin, kin to the manna from heaven. Come in, Peg!”

  “Do you write your scripts out, Robin? You can’t generate those things on the spur of the moment!”

  “I can for moments like this,” he said gallantly, handing her inside.

  It was her turn for a double-take. The little apartment was scrupulously clean and neat. Books were in bookcases; it had taken the addition of three more bookcases to accomplish that. A set of shelves had been built in one corner, very cleverly designed to break up the boxlike proportions of the room, and in it were neatly stacked manuscripts and, up above, musical instruments. There was more livestock than ever, but it was in cages and a terrarium—she wondered where the white rats had been on her last visit. Imprisoned in the bathtub, no doubt. There was a huge and gentle pastel of a laughing satyr on the wall. She wondered where the big oil was.

  “I painted ol’ Splay-foot over it,” said Robin.

  “You include telepathy among your many talents?” she asked without turning.

  “I include a guilty conscience among my many neuroses,” he countered. “Sit down.”

  “I hear you’re getting a play produced,” she said conversationally, as he deftly set out a beautiful tray of exotic morsels—avocado mashed with garlic juice on little toast squares; stuffed olives sliced paper-thin on zwieback and chive cheese; stems of fennel stuffed with blue cheese; deviled eggs on rounds of pimento; and a strange and lovely dish of oriental cashews in blood-orange pulp.

  “It isn’t a play. It’s a musical.”

  “Oh? Whose book?”

  “Mine.”

  “Fine, Robin. I read that Vic Hill’s doing the lyrics.”

  “Well, yes. Voisier seemed to think mine were—Well, to tell you the truth, he called in Hill for the name. Got to have a name people know. However, they are my lyrics.”

  “Robin. Are you letting him—”

  “Ah—shush, Peg! No one’s doing anything to me!” He laughed. “Sorry. I can’t help laughing at the way you, looking like a Vassar p.g., ruffle up like a mother hen. The truth is that I’m getting plenty out of this. There just don’t seem to be enough names to go around on the billing. I wrote the silly little thing at one sitting, and filled in the music and staging just to round it off—sort of an overall synopsis. Next thing you know this Voisier is all over me like a tent, wanting me to direct it as well; and since there’s a sequence in there—sort of a duet between voice and drums in boogie-beat—that no one seems to be able to do right, he wants me to act that part too.” He spread his hands. “Voisier knows what he is doing. Only you can’t have one man’s name plastered all over the production. The public doesn’t take to that kind of thing. Voisier’s treating the whole deal like a business. Show business is still business.”

  “Oh—that’s better. And what about this anthology of poems?”

  “Oh, that. Stuff I had kicking around the house here.” His eyes traveled over the neat shelves and bookcases. “Remarkable what a lot of salable material I had, once I found it by cleaning up some.”

  “What else did you find?”

  “Some gadgets. A centrifugal pump I designed using the business end of a meat grinder for the impeller. A way to take three-dimensional portraits with a head clamp and a swivel chair and a 35 mm camera. A formula for a quick-drying artist’s oil pigment which can’t contract the paint. A way to drill holes through glass—holes a twenty-five thousandth of an inch or less in diameter—with some scraps of wire and a No. 6 dry cell. You know—odds and ends.”

  “You’ve marketed all these?”

  “Yes, or patented or copyrighted them.”

  “Oh Robin, I’m so glad! Are you getting results?”

  “Am I?” The old, lovely, wondering look came into his face. “Peg, people are crazy. They just give money away. I honestly don’t have to think about money any more. That is, I never did; but now I tell people my account number and ask them to send their check to it for deposit, and they keep piling it in, and I can’t cash enough checks to keep up with it. When are you going to ask me why I’ve been keeping away from you?”

  The abruptness of the question took Peg’s breath away. It was all she had been thinking about, and it was the reason she had accepted his invitation. She colored. “Frankly, I didn’t know how to lead up to it.”

  “You didn’t have to lead up to it,” he said, smiling gravely. “You know that, Peg.”

  “I suppose I know it. Well—why?”

  “You like the eatments?” He indicated the colorful dishes on the coffee table.

  “Delicious, and simply lovely to look at. But—”

  “It’s like that. This isn’t food for hungry people. Canapés like these are carefully designed to appeal to all five senses—if you delight in the crunch of good zwieback the way I do, and include hearing.”

  She stared at him. “I think I’m being likened to a … a smörgasbord!”

  He laughed. “The point I’m making is that a hungry man will go for this kind of food as happily as any other. The important thing to him is that it’s food. If he happens to like the particular titillations offered by such food as this, he will probably look back on his gobbling with some regret, later, when his appetite for food is satisfied and his psychic—artistic, if you like—hungers can be felt.” Robin grinned suddenly. “This is a wayward and wandering analogy, I know; but it does express why I kept away from you.”

  “It does?”

  “Yes, of course. Look, Peg, I can see what’s happening to me even if I am the patient. I wonder why so many doctors overlook that? You can play around with my metabolism and my psychology and ultimately affect such an abstract as my emotional maturity. But there’s one thing you can’t touch—and that is my own estimate of the things I have learned. My sense of values. You can change my approach to these things, but not the things themselves. One such thing is that I have a violent reaction against sordidness, no matter how well justified the sordidness may have been when I did the sordid thing, whatever it was. In the past, primarily the justification has been the important thing. Now—and by ‘now’ I mean since I started these treatments—the reaction is more important. So I avoid sordidness because I don’t want to live through the reaction afterward, and not so much because I dislike doing a sordid thing.”

  “That’s a symptom of maturity,” said Peg. “But what has it to do with me?”

  “I was hungry,” he said simply. “So hungry I couldn’t see straight. And suddenly so full of horse sense that I wouldn’t reach for the pretty canapés until I could fully appreciate them. And now—sit down, Peg!”

  “I … have to go,” she said in a throttled voice.

  “Oh, you’re wrong,” he said, not moving. He spoke very quietly. “You don’t have to go. You haven’t been listening to me. You’re defensive when I’ve laid no siege. I have just said that I’m incapable o
f doing anything in bad taste—that is, anything which will taste bad to me, now or later. And you are behaving as if I had said the opposite. You are thinking with your emotions instead of your intellect.”

  Slowly, she sank back into her chair. “You take a great deal for granted,” she said coldly.

  “That, in effect, is what the bread and cheese and pimentos and olives told me when I told them about these trays,” he said. “Oh, Peg, let’s not quarrel. You know that all I’ve just said is true. I could candy-coat all my phrases, talk for twice as long, and say half as much; and if I did you’d resent it later; you know you would.”

  “I rather resent it now.”

  “Not really.” He met her gaze, and held it until she began to smile.

  “Robin, you’re impossible!”

  “Not impossible. Just highly unlikely.”

  He sprang to pour coffee for her—and how did he know that she preferred coffee to tea? he had both—and he said, “Now we can talk about the other thing that’s bothering me. Mel.”

  “What about Mel?” she said sharply.

  He smiled at her tone. “I gather that it’s the other thing that’s been bothering you?”

  She almost swore at him.