It wasn’t his interest in Sister Clotilda that was bothering him, he was pretty sure of that. Although he liked the little tingle of mild wickedness, he was not in any sense willing to flout the laws of his Church and his God. Maybe, he thought, he might hire a good lawyer and fight, but not break a law. He considered his pursuit of Sister Clotilda daring enough, and what came of that would depend on what her order allowed when and if he ever got around to asking her to apply for a dispensation. He had no interest in the wilder splinter groups like the clerical communes or the revived Catharists.
“Roger Torraway?” she guessed.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “There’s something about tampering with his senses that bothers me. His perceptions of the world.”
Sister Clotilda squeezed his hand. As a psychiatric social worker, she was cleared to know what was happening at the project, and she knew Don Kayman. “The senses are liars, Donnie. That’s Scripture.”
“Oh, sure. But does Brad have any right to say how Roger’s senses lie?”
Clotilda lit a cigarette and let him think it out. It wasn’t until they were near the shopping mall that she said, “Next turnoff, isn’t it?”
“Right,” he said, taking the wheel and turning the car back to manual. He slid into a parking space, still preoccupied with Roger Torraway. There was the immediate problem of Roger’s wife. That was trouble enough. But beyond that there was the bigger problem: How could Roger deal with the greatest of personal questions — what is Right, and what is Wrong? — if the information he had to base a decision on was filtered through Brad’s mediation circuits?
The sign over the shop window said PRETTY FANCIES. It was a small shop by the standard of the mall, which had a Two Guys with a quarter of a million feet of floor space and a supermarket almost as big. But it was big enough to be expensive. With rent, utilities, insurance, payroll for three salespeople, two of them part-time, and a generous managerial salary for Dorrie, it meant a net loss every month of nearly two thousand dollars. Roger paid it gladly, although some of our accountancy functions had pointed out to him that it would have been cheaper to give Dorrie the two thousand a month as an allowance.
Dorrie was stacking chinaware on a counter marked “Clearance Sale — Half Price.” She nodded to the visitors politely enough. “Hello, Don. Nice to see you, Sister Clotilda. Want to buy some red teacups cheap?”
“They look nice,” said Clotilda.
“Oh, they are. But don’t buy them for the nunnery. The FDA just ordered them off the market. The glaze is supposed to be poison — provided you drink at least forty cups of tea out of one of them every day of your life for twenty years.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. But — you’re selling them?”
“The order isn’t effective for thirty days,” Dorrie explained, and flashed a grin. “I guess I shouldn’t have told that to a priest and a nun, right? But honestly, we’ve been selling this glaze for years and I never heard of anyone dying.”
“Would you like to have a cup of coffee with us?” Kayman asked. “In other cups, of course.”
Dorrie sighed, straightened a cup into line and said, “No, we might as well just talk. Come on back to my office.” She led the way, and said over her shoulder, “I know why you’re here, anyway.”
“Oh?” said Kayman.
“You want me to go visit Roger. Right?”
Kayman sat down in a wide armchair, facing her desk. “Why don’t you, Dorrie?”
“Cripes, Don, what’s the use? He’s out cold. He wouldn’t know whether I was there or not.”
“He’s heavily sedated, yes. But he has periods of consciousness.”
“Did he ask for me?”
“He asked after you. What do you want him to do, beg?”
Dorrie shrugged, fiddling with a ceramic chess piece. “Did you ever think of minding your own business, Don?” she asked.
He did not take offense. “That’s what I’m doing. Roger’s our one indispensable man right now. Do you know what’s happening to him? He’s been on the table twenty-eight times already. Thirteen days! He doesn’t have any eyes any more. Or lungs, heart, ears, nose — he doesn’t even have any skin, it’s all gone, a few square inches at a time, replaced with synthetics. Flaying alive — men have become saints for that, and now we’ve got a man who can’t even have his own wife—”
“Oh, shit, Don!” Dorrie flared. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Roger asked me not to come and see him after the surgery started. He thought I wouldn’t be able to — He just didn’t want me to see him like that!”
“My impression of you,” the priest said thinly, “is that you’re made of pretty durable stuff, Dorrie. Would you be able to stand it?”
Dorrie grimaced. For a moment her pretty face did not look pretty at all. “It isn’t a question of what I can stand,” she said. “Don, look. Do you know what it’s like being married to a man like Roger?”
“Why, pretty fine, I would guess,” said Kayman, startled. “He’s a good man!”
“He is, yes. I know that at least as well as you do, Don Kayman. And he’s head over heels in love with me.”
There was a pause. “I don’t think I understand what you’re saying,” Sister Clotilda ventured. “Are you displeased by that?”
Dorrie looked at the nun consideringly. “Displeased. That’s one way to put it.” She set down the chess piece and leaned across the desk. “That’s every girl’s dream, right? To find a genuine hero, handsome and smart and famous and pretty nearly rich — and have him so crazily in love with her that he can’t see anything wrong. That’s why I married Roger. I couldn’t believe I was that lucky.” Her voice went up a half tone in pitch. “I don’t think you know what it’s like to have someone head over heels in love with you. What’s the good of a man who’s upside down? Sometimes when we’re in bed together I’m trying to get to sleep and I can hear him being awake next to me, not moving, not getting up to go to the bathroom, just so fucking considerate… Do you know that when we’re traveling together Roger never goes to the bathroom until he thinks I’m asleep, or when I’m somewhere else? He shaves the minute he gets up — he doesn’t want me to see him with his hair messed up. He shaves his armpits, uses deodorants three times a day. He — he treats me like I was the Virgin Mary, Don! He’s fatuous. And it’s been that way for nine years.”
She looked beseechingly at the priest and the nun, who were silent, a little ill-at-ease. “And then,” Dorrie said, “you come along and tell me I ought to go see him when they’re turning him into something ghastly and ludicrous. You and everybody else. Kathleen Doughty dropped in last night. She had a skin full; she’d been drinking and brooding and she decided to come over and tell me, out of her bourbon wisdom, that I was making Roger unhappy. Well, she’s right. You’re all right. I’m making him unhappy. Where you’re wrong is thinking that my going to see him would make him happy… Oh, hell.”
The phone rang. Dorrie picked it up, then glanced at Kayman and Sister Clotilda. The expression on her face, which had been almost pleading, condensed into something like the porcelain figures on the table beside her desk. “Excuse me,” she said, folding up the soft plastic petals around the mouthpiece that converted it into a hushphone and turning away from them in her chair. She talked inaudibly for a moment, then hung up and turned back to them.
Kayman said, “You’ve given me something to think about, Dorrie. But still—”
She smiled a porcelain smile. “But still you want to tell me how to run my life. Well, you can’t. You’ve said your piece, both of you. I thank you for coming. I’ll thank you, now, to go. There’s nothing more to be said.”