Padilla shifted uneasily. “Different? Well, maybe a little different.”
“Could you tell me how?”
“Well, you know, how I think about things.”
“Yes?”
Padilla seemed to make up his mind. “Doctor, you know, I am a Filipino. Our country was conquered by your country a hundred years ago. First your country says after they drive the Spaniards away, they will give us our independence. Then they change their minds, no, the Philippines is our country now. Our national hero, Aguinaldo, you have heard of him?”
“No,” said McNulty. “I’m sorry.”
Padilla smiled. “He was the leader of the independence movement. He fought many battles. The U.S. government defeated him only by treachery.”
“I see,” McNulty said. “So you feel differently now about Americans?”
“Not about you, Doctor,” said Padilla politely. “I think you are a good man. But I know what Americans did to my country, and I think it is important for us to have pride.”
“And you started thinking this way after you got well?”
“Yes.” Padilla shrugged and smiled. “You want to know, why not before? I don’t know why. I think maybe I listened too long to people who say, keep in your place. Remember the Americans are the boss. I don’t know, but I believe the way I think now is better.”
Mrs. Morton Tring turned up with the friend, Alice Gortmacher, with whom she had been staying since she left her husband. Mrs. Tring was a handsome woman in her early fifties; Ms. Gortmacher was smaller, darker and more intense. “If you think," she said, “you’re going to get Susan to go back to that man, you’re very much mistaken.”
“No, no,” said McNulty, “that isn’t it at all. Believe me, Mrs. Tring—”
“Ms. Coleman,” she said; “I’m taking my maiden name back.”
“Ms. Coleman, then. I’m just interested to know if you experienced any change of feelings after you were ill. Did your outlook change, the way you look at things?”
“It certainly did,” put in Ms. Gortmacher. “She saw for the first time what a monster she was married to.”
“Is that right, Ms. Coleman?”
“Yes, well— It’s not exactly that, Alice. I mean, I knew what Mort was like, but suddenly it just seemed to me that I was staying with him for all the wrong reasons.”
“What sort of reasons?” McNulty asked.
“Well, you know, the usual things. The children. Mort’s career. What would people say, et cetera. And then, I suppose, I was afraid, too. What would happen if I divorced Mort and went off on my own? I still don’t know.”
"Yes, you do,” said Ms. Gortmacher, patting her hand. “Yes, you do.”
Ms. Coleman put her hand on her friend’s. “Alice is going to take me into her business,” she said. “She’s the dearest friend I ever had, and I don’t know what I’d do without her. But even if I didn’t have Alice, I’d do the same thing—I’d leave Mort.”
“Can you tell me what it was that changed your mind about that?”
She hesitated. “Well, this may sound silly, but I woke up one morning, a few days after I got well, and Mort was snoring, and I just asked myself, what am I doing here? And I looked at all the reasons, and they weren’t good enough. So I got up and got dressed, and called Alice, and just went.”
“Ms. Coleman,” said McNulty, “how many married women do you suppose there are who would feel the way you do, if they just thought it over?”
She glanced away for a moment. “Four out of five,” she said.
“More,” said Ms. Gortmacher firmly.
And, McNulty thought, she might well be right. He sympathized entirely, but what would happen to the world if the divorce rate climbed to ninety percent? If only couples who liked being together stayed together? Or if only those who knew themselves to be fitted for the practice of medicine ever became doctors?
32
Randall Geller and Yvonne Barlow, wearing dark glasses and sipping tall drinks, were lying side by side in lounge chairs near the pool, looking out across the bright ocean. Their bathing suits were almost dry. “What do you want to do next?” Barlow asked.
“Dunno. Go watch the geriatrics play shuffleboard?”
“Or sit here all day?”
“I can do with a lot of sitting here.” Geller hoisted his tall glass and drank.
“Not worried about boredom?”
“Hell, no. You know what I dreamed about last night?”
“No.”
“I dreamed I had the solution to the problem of sexuality.”
“That sounds boring.”
“It was very exciting. You know, why did bisexuality ever arise? You’ve got the Best Man theory, the Red Queen theory, the Tangled Banks theory, and none of them work. I had it all figured out, but I forgot it."
“Maybe it was just for fun,” Barlow said lazily.
“Well, why not? Pleasure is a survival factor—if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have it.”
“There’s a circular argument if I ever heard one. Do you think a spider gets a kick from building a web?”
“No opinion,” said Geller.
“Well, if you were going to design a machine to build webs, would you put pleasure into the circuit or not?”
“Oh, God.”
“No, you wouldn’t, because number one it wouldn’t be necessary, and number two you wouldn’t know how to do it, and number three if you did do it, it would be counterproductive. A spider that built webs for kicks might get bored and quit. Spiders just go ahead and build them.”
“Uh-huh. You remember the elevator operator in Brave New World?" Geller mimicked a voice trembling with ecstasy: “ ‘Up, up!’ ” Then misery and despair: “ ‘Down—down!’ ”
“So when was the last time you saw an elevator operator?”
“Um.”
They sat in peaceful silence; then Barlow said, “You ever know anybody who was rich?”
“No.”
“I did—a girl I went to school with. Her parents left her umpty million dollars.”
“What’s her address?”
“She wouldn’t look at you twice,” Barlow said. “Anyway, okay, she’s been married three times, she doesn’t have to do a thing she doesn’t want to do, and she’s really a failed human being. Can you imagine life as one long birthday party? She knows she blew it, and she doesn’t know what to do about that, and she’s very unhappy.”
“Tough,” said Geller. “That’s very tough.”
“Sure it is. Suppose you didn’t want to do anything except watch television and go to football games?”
“Paradise,” said Geller.
There was a buzz from Barlow’s beach bag. She reached over, extracted the phone. “Hello, Doctor.”
The phone quacked at her.
“Who else would be calling us? . . . We could, but we probably won’t. ... If you want to talk, why don’t you come up here? We’re at the Sports Deck pool. . . . Come up if you want to.” She put the phone away.
“Now why did you do that?” said Geller.
“Why not? Good for your boredom.”
McNulty showed up a few minutes later, interrupting a spirited argument. “Good old Doc,” said Geller. “Sit down, have a drink.”
“Not during working hours, thanks,” said McNulty, pulling over a web chair. “It’s nice up here, isn’t it? I can’t remember the last time— Well, anyway, I just wanted to tell you, I’ve been interviewing some of the other recovered patients, and there’s a pattern, all right. Marriages breaking up. People leaving their jobs. I keep thinking, maybe the parasite doesn’t know what it’s doing to us. If only we could talk to it.”