John brought out the steel bar, positioning himself behind little Albert’s head. Though we could all see what he was doing, and knew the noise would come, we held our collective breaths, and when the bar was struck with an ear-splitting clang, all but John jumped. Albert whimpered.
I was the closest to Albert, offering a bit of comfort with my presence, but never too much. Albert’s head swung toward me with bovine sluggishness, little hairless brow furrowed. I kept my own face neutral—the scientist’s mask, which I was beginning to wear more comfortably—and risked a glance at John. His chest inflated with satisfaction, and a smile tugged at the sides of his mouth. His dark eyebrows lifted in anticipation. Oh, how he wanted to move on, to do more, to log more stimulations and responses. But he restrained himself. Pacing was necessary. To hurry was to ruin things. Experiments took time.
But of course they did.
It hit me then: Pacing. Testing. Time. And the long-term trial that love (or sex, if they were equivalent) is—that all human interaction is, really. What terribly simple creatures we all are. Yes, John and I were involved in an experiment of some kind, neither of us wholly in charge, both of us prey to the same impulses.
Stimulus and response. Uncomplicated. He wanted it; I wanted it. There was no question that anyone was forcing me to do something I didn’t want to do. I was sure of that, now. He’d known I would have to be sure. Whether his waiting had been some kind of a trick, a function of his own insecurities, or just a habit formed in response to the women who had been happy to make the first moves, it had been the right thing to do. And more than right: tantalizing. A college boy would never have understood that. And now I understood, too: one did not need to suppress what should happen naturally. We were in the business of predicting and controlling behavior, but we were not in the business of controlling this.
“Are you taking notes, Rosalie?”
Not knowing how much I’d missed, I dashed off a couple words on a notepad tucked under my knee.
John had turned to Georgie, confirming some detail—Albert’s feeding schedule, a communication about the measles issue and his temperament since then, the working schedule of his wet-nurse mother. The words were white noise, background chatter. Little Albert sat, with his large head balanced over his slightly bent legs, looking slightly troubled and unsure, but stable. Things were proceeding just as they needed to proceed.
A technician removed the white rat and a hand passed me a basket of blocks. I held out one small orange block toward Albert and he took it and brought it to his mouth, comforting himself with the familiar object.
“Should we return him to the ward?” Georgie asked.
John answered, “Let him play with the blocks a little while more. Rosalie will watch him. You’ll bring Albert over to the nursery in ten minutes, won’t you Rosalie?”
“Yes, of course.”
Scottie, who had captured only frugal seconds of footage, left first, followed by Georgie. The rat was safely confined in a basket. The testing-room door was still open a crack, but I heard no voices outside. I absentmindedly handed Albert another two blocks.
I looked up at John, just as he was beginning to rise. “John, wait.”
“Yes?” He smiled—a quick, pleasant, professional smile—but he paused, studying me, registering something in my voice and my expression, the use of his first name.
I repeated again, more quietly: “John.”
His voice dropped a notch, softening into a playful, honeyed drawl. “Yes?”
I leaned to one side, behind oblivious Albert, and touched John’s shoulder, and then retreated, setting my hand on the mattress again. His grin widened. We balanced and braced ourselves, with hands therefore fully occupied, leaning into each other so incrementally, it reminded me of turning the focus knob of a microscope, careful not to make an adjustment too large—and then, closer yet, the slightest repositioning of chin, of neck. The most exquisite pause, well beyond the moment of feigned innocence, well beyond the moment of turning back.
And then: lips, mouth, taste of coffee and that hint of bourbon. My eyes were closed, not squeezed this time, in a paralyzed panic, but only closed so that I could shut out visual distractions and savor him. I could feel John’s lips pulling back for a barely repressed chuckle, grinning in response to my clumsy eagerness, one quick bumping of teeth until we found lips again. He was making me come to him, making me convince him that I wanted his lips, his tongue. No one could possibly smell and taste as good as he did. It was delicious—a slow and decisive probing that was nothing at all like the handful of rushed, awkward slobbers I’d dutifully exchanged with college boys. For several minutes, our labored breathing accompanied the sounds of Albert’s self-calming grunts and sighs.
My feet didn’t touch the floor again.
My lips felt bruised all the rest of the day.
Chapter 11
The plan was to test Albert again in one week. Like a boy waiting for summer camp to commence, John was torn between eager impatience and reluctance, wanting to hold on to that moment when the experiment he had envisioned was on track, proving his theory, and disinclined to admit anything that might conflict with the elegant pattern taking shape—and yet, because he was curious and driven, also wanting to know more as soon as possible.
But he was thinking about more than just Albert. I could tell by the notes that began to arrive and would keep arriving all late winter and spring. Among my favorites: Every cell I have is yours, individually and collectively.
Now that my own love life and job were equally underway, it was finally possible to reply with authentic happiness to Mary Cover’s last letter, as I had not been able to do over the Christmas holidays. Harold sounds like a gem. Columbia sounds perfect. What wonderful news!
As for my own news, I didn’t feel secure enough to share any illicit details. Dr. Watson keeps me extremely busy. I’m learning buckets and am convinced, as he is, that these experiments may be a solid foundation for the understanding and shaping of all human behavior.
A week after the first post-baseline trial, we repeated the experiment with Albert. Even without the ear-splitting hammering on the steel bar, Albert seemed to remember his earlier fear response. When we presented the rat, Albert’s hand withdrew. From the edge of the mattress, I wrote, “stimulus not without effect.” Albert did not cry during that first stimulation, but when we handed him his blocks, he was even more eager to play with them, soothing himself with a familiar pastime. Familiar tactile explorations, in general, were his most frequent ways of self-comforting. He didn’t seem to find much comfort from anything visual—least of all our faces, waiting to see him cry.
After a peaceful moment, we introduced the rat and the sound in combination again, twice, furry skitter and clang, furry skitter and clang. John with the hammer—Thor’s hammer, Curt liked to tease—raised at shoulder height, all his attention focused, ready to rain down thunder again.
When we presented the rat alone, Albert puckered up his face, whimpering. But only whimpering. Trying to shut out the world, that room, and all the sources of his unnameable distress.
Again, the quick-moving rat, and the steel bar, and the hammer.
Albert leaned back, pulling his knees and elbows closer to his body, shrinking as best as he was able, defenseless against what would come next, on the verge of losing control of his emotions. I made a note, looked up at John, holding the bar, ready to strike. We both nodded, ready.
The combination again—there, the crack widening, the last defenses falling. Albert let out a series of choking gasps until he managed to tuck his bottom lip under his top, drying tears leaving white tracks down his pink cheeks.
We presented the rat alone. It had barely started to skitter when Albert exploded into fresh, bountiful sobs. He threw himself forward, determined to crawl away. I grabbed his chubby ankles just in time to catch him from tipping off the edge of
the thin mattress. Smiles, all around the room, except from the newer nurse on duty, Rebecca, who watched us from a corner, baby blanket over one arm, stern. But we didn’t need her approval, and there would always be the sentimental type of person who did not see that a few tears or a bit of subject discomfort were a small price to pay for unlocking the secrets of human behavior.
End of two sessions. Seven pairings of stimulus-response.
If you’ve ever felt that sad, hopeless moment when the past seems to splash over and inundate the present, when history—public or private—seems doomed to repeat and endlessly reinfect itself, then surely you can imagine the thrilling opposite of that moment, when the future, a new future of reason and control and radical reshaping of humanity’s vestigial weaknesses, reaches back and extends a rescuing hand to the present. Never mind the apathetic finger of God reaching out, in that Michelangelo painting we’d all stared at in Art History class. This hand of reason had a firmer grip. It would pull us forward, if we grabbed back with enough determination, if we held on and didn’t let go.
That’s how it felt, then. That’s how it truly felt.
John looked over my shoulder and smiled with approval as I wrote, “Proof of the conditioned origin of fear response.”
The success of that second session surely merited a lunch out. I extended the invitation, to John’s grinning surprise, and offered to take us both in my Bearcat, which in dark midwinter I had started driving to work, to avoid the gloomy and chilling streetcar rides home after late nights at the lab.
John suggested a cheap sandwich place in a rundown neighborhood near the hospital, but I needed a safe place to park, and besides, this was a red-letter day. There was a new hotel downtown, the Baltimore Regent, with an elegant dining room. When I proposed we head there, John’s face tightened into an expression I couldn’t read.
“It’s a little pricey, isn’t it?”
“Not for lunch, surely.”
Still, he hesitated.
“But Dr. Watson,” I said, with mock formality, “you deserve to celebrate your success in style, don’t you?”
His face softened again, with what looked like pleasure and wonderment. “Our success, Rosalie. And you’re right.” He slapped the front of his trousers. “You’re absolutely right. No one changes the world on a tuna-fish diet.”
At the hotel, he made a big show of introducing himself and me to the maître d’ and to the manager who stopped by our table. He explained to anyone who would listen that we were having a business lunch, celebrating some good news.
Waiting for our veal cutlets, we reviewed the progress of my dart-and-target study. I had completed two parts so far. In one, I instructed dart players to practice daily for two months, then had them throw darts once per hour from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Their abilities did not change significantly as the day wore on, suggesting no changes in diurnal efficiency. In another part of the study, I had taken less-trained players and had them throw a dart every two minutes for twenty-four hours, the last four with the added variable of various drugs. (John, a natural guinea pig, dosed himself with strychnine, cocaine, and whiskey—not all at the same time—and reported no ill effects.) For the first four hours, shooting steadily improved, then became less efficient. At the end of the study—and yes, our merry little group of volunteers had progressed from giddy to tired—the group was shooting no better than in the beginning. There was no point in practicing something beyond a certain point, in other words.
“The logical next step . . .”
I had trailed off, but John didn’t notice. He was in his own world.
“He really did respond well, in that last session,” he said.
“Which subject?” I was still thinking about darts.
“Albert. A textbook demonstration.”
“Of something that hasn’t yet appeared in any textbook, but which soon will.”
He allowed himself a glimmer of unrestrained joy, but then his expression changed.
“If the next stages go as well. That’s what takes us to the next step. No more needing to make up fairy tales or force people to recline on couches, musing about their own unpredictable emotional reactions.”
“They won’t be unpredictable anymore.”
“Precisely.”
“It’s very exciting,” I said, authentically eager, and willingly releasing my need to talk about the darts, adult learning, my dissertation in process. Because he was right. He was always right. This was something the public would be eager to know—even more than how a room of giddy graduate students did at dart-throwing after staying up all night and drinking hard liquor.
“I need this, Rosalie,” he said. “We need this.”
He looked at me, for something: assurance, permission, further encouragement.
“Your reputation is assured, John.”
He managed a half smile.
“You just got a big raise. Surely, it’s enough?”
It wasn’t. Life was expensive. Life with a wife and mistress, even more so.
When I offered to pay for lunch, John responded with less surprise and offense than a good many men would, but still, he insisted upon sliding out the individual bills from his billfold with care. I wasn’t particularly sensitive, in those days, either to what things cost or how it might make a man feel, when he couldn’t afford to be a gentleman. There was some bit of negotiation with the waiter and manager at the end, settled just as I was returning from the powder room, but it was no trouble. He hadn’t brought quite enough money, but they were setting up a special account for him, seeing how much we’d enjoyed the meal and might return on a regular basis, to continue celebrating the many laboratory successes sure to come.
Passing in the hallway the following Tuesday, John said, “So we’re on, then, Saturday at Eutaw Place. Dinner for five. It’s an odd number but I trust you’ll make do.”
I had an armload of files, a lock of hair free from my hair ribbon, falling over one eye. “Would it be better if I brought my own date, to make it six?”
He reached out a finger and pushed the hair back, tucking it behind my ear. “You wouldn’t do that.”
“Maybe I would,” I said, egged on by his mischievous streak, wanting to equal him in self-assurance. But my attempt to be playful only made him put on a woebegone expression.
“You’re getting back at me for that day in the office—for me saying that you were too old for me.”
“What if I am?”
He moved closer, so that we were standing barely inches apart, so that he could speak softly, words rolling down the slope of his shoulder, into my ear. If someone passed, it would look like an almost normal conversation, our hands not touching, our bodies not quite facing each other.
“That was brutal for me, Rar,” he whispered, using my college nickname, which I’d finally divulged to him.
“Was it?” I believed him, but I wanted to hear him say it, to make up for those many weeks I had pined, alone and confused.
“Stop teasing me, now. It hurt me to say those words. But I had to make sure that this was something you wanted.”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“I want to make love to you.”
The way he could say it—so plainly, so nakedly and soberly, and not in the heat of passion or in some dark corner but standing here, in the most inappropriate public place, only made the words more stimulating.
“All right.”
My mouth was dry. The files in my arms were heavy. I shifted to rebalance them.
“I want to see you. All of you.”
I looked around—there was no one in the hall, but at any moment, someone could come around the corner, or open a door.
“I want to make love to you in the light,” he insisted.
I lowered my voice. “We’ll see about that. The light part.”
“No, da
rling, it’s important. Nudity is completely natural.”
Later, he would tell me about a friend of his who was starting a summer camp. Boys and girls. All naked on an island. Like little monkeys running around, completely unembarrassed. He would ask me what I thought, testing my attitudes, trying to root out any latent Victorianisms. I envisioned pine needles stuck to narrow, sweaty rumps, and mosquito bites in awkward places, and girls falling painfully while rock-hopping and boys grabbing after each other’s tiny penises. It sounded inconvenient, more than anything.
But what I told him now—the good student, the giving lover—was, “I’ll learn to be more comfortable.”
“That’s a girl.” He inhaled deeply and then said so softly I could barely make out the words, “You’ll never know how much I hate the weekends. If I could see you seven days a week—if we could live at the lab—I’d be a happier and more productive man, ten times over.”
He wanted to be with me at the North Pole, where the days were twenty-four hours long. If we could be together six days a week, he’d be twice as happy. But if we were together seven days, he’d be ten times as happy. I adored his ridiculous quantifications and schoolboy softheartedness.
“And you’d still make me fit in some lab work during all those sunlit hours,” I said now.
“Well, why wouldn’t I?”
“Tell me again,” I said, “What you would do with me at the North Pole, to pass those long Arctic days.”
In reply, he leaned down further, his lips ticklishly close to my ear, and said things I’d never heard him say—things I’d never heard any man say. He used long, Latin words I didn’t know existed for various maneuvers I had imagined a man and a woman technically might be able to do, if they were limber and unselfconscious, but wasn’t sure anyone really did do, outside of an ancient Indian text or modern red-light district. He broke down, step by step, a description of an erotic procedure I was sure wasn’t common, or legal. My cheeks were burning.
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