Treasure Box

by Orson Scott Card

  "The friend who charges me three hundred bucks an hour."

  "The friend whose job is to know a lot more about how the world works than you do, and keep you from falling into heavy machinery."

  "Metaphorically speaking."

  "Sometimes people aren't what they seem."

  "I know that, Wayne."

  "No you don't, Quen. Because you are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too."

  "I've had partners who cheated me."

  "Who tried to cheat you. I draw up too good a contract for them to actually succeed."

  "They got away with the money."

  "Only because you let them. Only because you never let me sue or bring criminal charges."

  "It was only money."

  "No, after they embezzled it from you it was only money. When you had it, it was something more than money. It was fertile seed. It was the power of life. In your hands money makes things grow. In their hands it bought new cars and TV sets and some nice dinners out and then it had disappeared and nothing came of it."

  "My point is that I don't care enough about money to need a prenuptial agreement. If Madeleine turns out to be a fake or even if the marriage just turns sour or something, don't you think that will be much more devastating than losing a few million bucks in a lousy divorce settlement? If I lose the woman I love, who cares about the money?"

  "Quentin, you only say that because you've never lost either. Broken hearts heal. But when a fortune is gone, it stays gone forever."

  "I'm still employable."

  "No you're not, Quen. They're programming Pentiums and PowerPC chips and they're doing it in C. You don't know anything about that."

  "She's not going to divorce me and she's not after my money. Can we get to the business I came here for?"

  They got down to business and it didn't take long. On the day the marriage became valid, the new will would take effect, and Madeleine would become cobeneficiary of his insurance policies, along with his parents.

  Wayne rose from behind his desk. "I'm very happy for you, Quentin. True love is rare."

  Quentin stood up and shook his hand. "I hope I'm not being billed for that bit of counsel."

  Wayne laughed dryly. "Since you're not listening to me anyway, I'll go ahead and ask the really lousy question: Have you got her HIV test results?"

  Quentin took back his hand. "Wayne, you deal with my papers, not my sex life."

  "Forget the HIV test, then, but at least tell me you've been using protection."

  "Wayne, you're way over the line here."

  The lawyer offered no hint of apology, just regarded him, waiting for an answer.

  "But to ease your mind," Quentin finally said, "Mad and I haven't slept together."

  Wayne looked genuinely stunned. "Are you living in a time warp?"

  "The sixties never got to my house, and that means the nineties have nothing to scare me with."

  "You've never even tried to sleep with her?"

  "Wayne, you can shut up any time now." Quentin was still smiling, but it was getting thin.

  "She's probably wondering by now if you're gay."

  Quentin stopped in the doorway and said, "Wayne, you may think of yourself as a paid friend, but I think of you as my lawyer. Everything that happens with my business is your business. But what happens with my pants is between me and my dry cleaner."

  "Marriage is a contract, Quentin. And my business is to warn you when you're walking drunk along the edge of a cliff. Congrats on the wedding, though. I'm sure you'll be very happy."

  Quentin let the door make just the tiniest slam as he left.

  But Wayne had said what he said, and now Quentin couldn't get it out of his mind. These were the nineties, after all. He wasn't so disconnected from the world around him that he didn't know how things had changed since he was in high school and the guys he knew had to work themselves up just to hold hands with a girl, let alone kiss her. The whole sexual revolution and then herpes and AIDS, he knew about them. They simply hadn't touched his life because he was one of the good kids who didn't play around. What about Madeleine, though? Somebody like her, it was impossible to think that in the nineties she hadn't had plenty of guys make moves on her. Had she moved back? Somebody on NPR about five years before had said something about how when you slept with somebody, you were also sleeping with everybody they had ever slept with. How many guys had Madeleine slept with? Up till he talked with Wayne Read, he had assumed that Madeleine was a virgin just like he was. When he thought about it, he realized that he had pretty much assumed that all nice women were virgins.

  Wayne was right. He was in a time warp.

  This was absurd. Wasn't the double standard supposed to work the other way? A guy who was all worried about whether his fiancée was a virgin was supposed to be a hypocrite with plenty of notches on his own belt.

  And it wasn't just a question of past partners and sexually transmitted disease. Quentin was hopelessly naïve. There were magazine articles at every grocery checkstand talking about techniques for satisfying a woman every time, but Quentin hadn't read any of them. Was Mad expecting him to know all these techniques? Did they even work? Was it hard to learn them? How romantic would it be on their wedding night if he had to keep stopping to check with a manual?

  He had a couple of hours to kill before his flight. Instead of turning in his rental car he kept going down Bayshore and got off the freeway at the Hillsdale Mall, planning to pick up a book on how to be a good lover—he knew that no self-respecting American bookstore would be without a few of those. But to his chagrin Hillsdale was apparently the one mall in America without a single bookstore.

  He ended up at the airport newsstand, which had an issue of Cosmopolitan that offered to explain how a woman could satisfy a man; but that wasn't really the subject matter he was looking for. On the flight east he tried to watch the movie, gave up and tried to sleep, and finally ended up trying to imagine what it was that he remembered from high school locker room talk and from being at Berkeley in the early seventies and from movies and television shows. Touching breasts was a big deal, he knew that. But was it a big deal for the guy or for the girl or both?

  He was in a cold sweat, there in the airplane seat, just as if he had woken from that dream of being on a stage, expected to say lines in a play, only he didn't know what the play was and he'd never been to a single rehearsal. Sweating and trembling because he was going to have to take off his clothes and get into bed with a woman who had high expectations of him and he wasn't going to be able to deliver. He was going to botch everything. He remembered a couple of movies in which some teenage kid had his first chance at sex and got so excited he finished before the girl had even started, and this was apparently the most degrading, humiliating thing that could happen to a man. The woman's contempt would destroy him on the spot. At the time he had assumed this was all comic exaggeration and that such things either never happened at all or if they did, it was no big deal. But now he knew that it would happen to him and it would be a huge problem and she would despise him.

  It might have been OK when he was young, being sexually inert in a culture—his parents' culture—that valued chastity. But it was certainly doing him no favors now.

  And then there was the last thing Wayne had said. That Madeleine might be wondering if he was gay. He had kissed Mad a few times, and it had felt very good, and every one of those times he had a pretty good indication that he was oriented toward heterosexuality. But she wouldn't know about that. Would she? Do women look for that kind of thing? The man sitting next to him came back from the airplane lavatory and looked at how Quentin was gripping the arms of his seat. "Yeah, I used to be a white-knuckle flier, too." Quentin smiled wanly and looked away. He didn't bother explaining to a stranger that the plane crashing sounded like a pretty good idea, compared to his terror of having sex with the woman he was going to marry. Thirty-four years old.

  He had to resolve the question bef
ore the actual marriage. Not have sex with her—you don't jump off the cliff the first time you go rappelling. He just had to try something. Make a move.

  From Dulles Airport he drove down the toll road to the Reston Parkway and found a plentiful selection of books about sex in the self-help section of the Little Professor Bookstore just before it closed. He went home and was already reading, trying to imagine himself and Madeleine doing these things, when she called.

  "Weren't you going to phone me?" she asked.

  "I meant to," he said. "I'm just wiped out. I didn't think you wanted to talk to somebody as stupid as I am right now."

  "Does this mean you don't want me to come over?"

  That was how things went—she always came over to his apartment because she was moving around from place to place, camping on couches in friends' tiny apartments. Her phone was a cellular so the number was the same wherever she was staying. He had offered to put her up at a hotel but she laughed at him. "I don't want you spending money on something as stupid as that when I can stay with my friends for free. They all owe me, so don't worry about it." He never met any of the friends. Was she ashamed of him? Or of them? No matter—it was her he wanted, not her friends.

  So if they were to get together, it meant she would come to his place.

  "It's after ten," he said lamely.

  "I have two tubs of Ben and Jerry's chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream."

  "I have dishes and spoons."

  "Then we belong together. See you in a minute, Tin."

  Not even during exam weeks in college had he ever read so fervently and rapidly and intensely as he did during the twenty minutes he waited for her to arrive.

  By the time she got there he had already decided against most of the things the books suggested. Maybe people who had been married for ten years might be comfortable enough to do stuff like that with another person, but no way could he imagine trying it with Mad. All he wanted to do was see if he could, as the books suggested, give her any kind of pleasure during mild foreplay; and, of course, by so doing assure her that he was in fact straight, if inept.

  And maybe he was also hoping to see if she, in turn, was at all interested in him as a sexual partner. That would be, all in all, a great deal of very useful information for them to gain from what would be quite a minor event, taken in its proper perspective. Besides, skimming the books, however rapidly and urgently, had left him in a state of dazed arousal. Or, to use the more technical term, rampant horniness.

  They talked, they ate ice cream, they laughed, they sat down to watch the news and then maybe catch Letterman before she went home, and there on the couch with the weatherman occluding his fronts and alofting his lows, Quentin touched her cheek and turned her face toward him and kissed her and realized for the first time how chaste all their kisses had been, and so he tried the thing where you slide the tip of your tongue along your partner's lip during the kiss and—

  And that was the end of the kiss. She looked rather startled and laughed nervously and put her arms around him and hugged him with her face against his shoulder.

  Did he do it wrong? Even pimply teenagers used their tongues when they kissed, for heaven's sake—couldn't he manage even that much?

  No, no, it just startled her, that's all.

  He ran his hands up and down her back. She giggled.

  "What?"

  "That tickles. What are you doing?"

  "I'm trying to, uh, introduce a new level of physical closeness in our relationship."

  She looked at him like he was crazy.

  "Look, I'm just—I just thought it was maybe time we—"

  We what? The only image that could come to his mind was the most weird of the suggestions the sex manuals offered. That wasn't at all what he wanted to do, at least not today, but still there was that picture in his head and it pretty much drove out of his mind the words he had meant to say.

  But apparently she interpreted his silence in the worst possible way. She shuddered with revulsion and leapt up from the couch. "No!" she shouted. "Do you want to make me puke?"

  This reaction was way beyond anything his dread had conjured up.

  "All I did was—"

  "If you think I'm ever going to do anything so disgusting with you for love or money—"

  What did she think he meant? Since he had said nothing—did she mean she didn't want to have sex at all? "We're getting married," he said. "Married people generally touch each other without one of them puking. Most people assume that getting married means that somewhere along the line you—"

  "I hate you!" she screamed at him.

  He had never seen her like this, as she frantically picked up her purse and put on her flats—or rather, halfway put them on—and hobbled to the door as she finally settled her heels into her shoes. She slammed it on the way out, or at least an attempted slam, since the weather seal around the door kept it from making a satisfying noise. By the time Quentin could get to the door, she was already pulling away from the curb in her Escort.

  He tried to call her that night and all the next day but only got the voice mail on her cellular service. All the time, he kept trying to think what he had done wrong. What had she thought he meant to do? They were engaged, weren't they? It wasn't as if he meant to have sex with her that very night—he intended to wait till they were married. He had been raised that way. But couldn't he touch her? Or was he so bad at it that it physically revolted her?

  Or was it him at all? Maybe she was—what, frigid? Was there such a thing really? He thought that feminism had declared frigidity to be a myth that men made up to explain why women didn't want to have sex with sweating ignorant louts. Admittedly, he was ignorant and probably had been sweating. But—a lout? That was harsh. Had something happened in her childhood that made her interpret all sexual advances as something vile? By afternoon he had a couple more books, this time about sexual dysfunction, and read intently until he fell asleep by the still unringing phone, the fifth of his abject apologies and pleadings still unanswered on her voice mail.

  The next morning he awoke to the doorbell ringing. Insistently, ring, ring, ring. Groggily he tried answering the phone, which was not ringing, and then got up, slipped on a robe, and went to the door.

  It was Madeleine, carrying a bunch of daisies and looking as if she hadn't slept much the night before. "You must hate me," she said.

  "I thought you hated me," he said.

  "Can I come in?"

  "Yes, of course, come in."

  "You have to understand that I—I know I overreacted the other night. I thought you were—oh, who cares what I thought? I do want to marry you, you know, and of course marriage means physical intimacy and I just—I've never been with a man that way, you know, and so I—I'm just so sorry."

  "Mad, it's all right, you don't have anything to apologize for, I was insensitive I guess, I just—"

  "No, it was my fault, I—"

  "Didn't you get my messages?"

  "I listened to them over and over. I couldn't believe you still loved me after the way I acted. I just—I couldn't call you because I didn't know what to say, I—"

  "At least let me put these flowers in water. And your coat, is it that cold this morning?"

  He pulled a glass pitcher out of the cupboard and put in the daisies. He meant to fill it with water but first he turned around to speak to her and saw that she had unbuttoned the coat and under it she was wearing nothing.

  The coat was sliding off her shoulders but then she saw the look on his face. It must have seemed like a look of horror—not that she wasn't beautiful, her body was perfect, but from the way she acted two nights before this, it was too much, and besides, Quentin was terrified, he didn't know what to do. He dropped the pitcher onto the counter, just a couple of inches' drop so it didn't break, and the handle kept it from rolling off.

  Her face changed from a smile to embarrassment, consternation. She shrugged the coat back on and wrapped it around herself and sank down on
to the couch into a near fetal position and began to moan. "I've blown it again. I'm so stupid! I can't believe I—"

  "No, no, Mad, it's all right, I just—I mean it was sweet of you, but that isn't what I wanted the other night, I just—"

  "But that was supposed to be a real turn-on or whatever, that's what the article said—"

  He laughed out loud.

  "Don't laugh at me," she said miserably. "I'm sitting here naked in a coat with a polyester lining and polyester gives me a rash."

  "No, come here, come with me." He got her up from the couch, trying not to notice how the coat fell open and she couldn't really close it efficiently with him holding one of her hands. "Come here."

  He led her into his bedroom. "You have to see this," he said. He bent down and picked up the whole stack of sex manuals he had been studying. "Were you reading, perhaps, one of these?"

  She looked at the sides and it dawned on her what they meant. She laughed, too. "Oh, you're kidding. You, too? There's another person on this planet as naïve as me?"

  "Maybe most people are like us," said Quentin. "They're just ashamed to admit it."

  "No, nobody gets to their thirties as ignorant as we are. How did two freaks like us ever get lucky enough to find each other?"

  "Listen, Mad, let me tell you something. I'm glad to know you have such a beautiful body. Such a... terrific body. Such a..."

  "I get the idea."

  "But I don't need to see you like that again until we're married, OK? Pressure's off for now. We can sort of work up to this. Pretend we're teenagers or something. Put off the dreadful day."

  "That's fine. That's good," she said.

  "And when you remove the startlement factor, whatever it was you read—I have to tell you, it really wasn't a bad suggestion."

  "It was an article in Cosmo. A bunch of ways to please your man."

  "Bummer. If only I'd bought that issue when I saw it in the airport in San Francisco. I would have known my part of the script."

  "They don't give the man's part in Cosmo. They just sort of take it for granted that you already know your lines and stuff."