'But,' he said, 'it's my hobby. My lifetime hobby.'
'Like a kid pulling its pud,' Kathy said.
They – can't be replaced. I have the only copies of some of them. The one from the Jack Paar show—'
'So what? You know something, Eric? Do you know, really know, why you like watching men on tape?'
The Mole grunted; his heavy, fleshy, middle-aged face flinched as he listened.
'Because,' Kathy said, 'you're a fairy.'
'Ouch,' the Mole murmured, and blinked.
'You're a repressed homosexual. I sincerely doubt if you're aware of it on a conscious level, but it's there. Look at me; look. Here I am; a perfectly attractive woman, available to you any time you want me.'
The Mole said, aside, wryly, 'And at no cost.'
'And yet you're in here with these tapes and not in the bedroom screwbling with me. I hope – Eric, I hope to God I ruined one that—' She turned away from the door then. 'Good night. And have fun playing with yourself.' Her voice – actually and unbelievably – had become controlled, even placid.
From a crouched position he bolted toward her. Reached for her as she retreated smooth and white and naked down the hall, her back to him. He grabbed her, grabbed firm hold, sank his fingers into her soft arm. Spun her around. Blinking, startled, she faced him.
'I'm going to—' He broke off. I'm going to kill you, he had started to say. But already in the unstirred depths of his mind, slumbering beneath the frenzy of his hysterical antics, a cold and rational fraction of him whispered its ice-God voice: Don't say it. Because if you do, then she's got you. She'll never forget. As long as you live she'll make you suffer. This is a woman that one must not hurt because she knows techniques; she knows how to hurt back. A thousandfold. Yes, this is her wisdom, this knowing how to do this. Above all other things.
'Let – go – of – me.' Her eyes blazed smokily.
He released her.
After a pause, while she rubbed her arm, Kathy said, 'I want that collection of tapes out of this apartment by tomorrow night. Otherwise we're finished, Eric.'
'Okay,' he said, nodding.
'And then,' Kathy said, 'I'll tell you what else I want. I want you to start looking for a higher paying job. At another company. So I won't run into you every time I turn around. And then... we'll see. Possibly we can stay together. On a new basis, one fairer to me. One in which you make some attempt to pay attention to my needs in addition to your own.' Astonishingly, she sounded perfectly rational and in control of herself. Remarkable.
'You got rid of the tapes?' the Mole asked him.
He nodded.
'And you spent the next few years directing your efforts toward controlling your hatred for your wife.'
Again he nodded.
'And the hatred for her,' Mole said, 'became hatred for yourself. Because you couldn't stand being afraid of one small woman. But a very powerful person – notice I said "person" not "woman."'
'Those low blows,' Eric said. 'Like her erasing my tape—'
'The low blow,' the Mole interrupted, 'was not her erasing the tape. It was her refusing to tell you which one she had erased. And her making it so clear that she enjoyed the situation. If she had been sorry – but a woman, a person, like that; they never become sorry. Never.' He was silent for a time. 'And you can't leave her.'
'We're fused,' Eric said. The damage is done.' The mutually inflicted pain delivered at night without the possibility of anyone intervening, overhearing and coming to help. Help, Eric thought. We both need help. Because this will go on, get worse, corrode us further and further until at last, mercifully—
But that might take decades.
So Eric could understand Gino Molinari's yearning for death. He, like the Mole, could envision it as a release – the only dependable release that existed ... or appeared to exist, given the ignorance, habit patterns, and foolishness of the participants. Given the timeless human equation.
In fact he felt a considerable bond with Molinari.
'One of us,' the Mole said, with perception, 'suffering unbearably on the private level, hidden from the public, small and unimportant. The other suffering in the grand Roman public manner, like a speared and dying god. Strange. Completely opposite. The microcosm and the macro.'
Eric nodded.
'Anyhow,' the Mole said, releasing Eric's hand and slapping him on the shoulder, I'm making you feel bad. Sorry, Dr Sweetscent; let's drop the topic.' To his bodyguard he said, 'Open the door now. We're done.'
'Wait,' Eric said. But then he did not know how to go on, to say it.
The Mole did it for him. 'How would you like to be attached to my staff?' Molinari said abruptly, breaking the silence. 'It can be arranged; technically you'd be drafted into military service.' He added, 'You may take it for granted you'd be my personal physician.'
Trying to sound casual, Eric said, 'I'm interested.'
'You wouldn't be running into her all the time. This might be a beginning. A start toward prying the two of you apart.'
'True.' He nodded. Very true. And very attractive, when thought of that way. But the irony – this consisted of precisely that which Kathy had goaded him toward all these years. 'I'd have to talk it over with my wife,' he began, and then flushed. 'Virgil, anyhow,' he muttered. 'In any case. He'd have to approve.'
Regarding him with brooding severity, the Mole said in a slow, dark voice. There is one drawback. You would not see so much of Kathy; true. But by being with me you'd see a great deal of our—' He grimaced. The ally. How do you suppose you'd enjoy yourself surrounded by 'Starmen? You might find yourself having a few spasms of the gut late at night yourself ... and perhaps worse – other – psychosomatic disorders, some you may not anticipate, despite your profession.'
Eric said, 'It's bad enough for me late at night as it is. This way I might have some company.'
'Me?' Molinari said. 'I wouldn't be company, Sweetscent, for you or anybody else. I'm a creature that's flayed alive at night. I retire at ten o'clock and then I'm back up, usually by eleven; I—' He broke off, meditatively. 'No, night is not a good time for me; not at all.'
It could clearly be seen in the man's face.
FIVE
On the night of his return from Wash-35 Eric Sweetscent encountered his wife at their conapt across the border in San Diego. Kathy had arrived before him. The meeting, of course, was inevitable.
'Back from little red Mars,' she observed as she shut the living room door after him. 'Two days doing what? Shooting your agate into the ring and beating all the other boys and girls? Or exposing sun pictures of Tom Mix?' Kathy sat in the center of the couch, a drink in one hand, her hair swept back and tied, giving her the look of a teen-ager; she wore a plain black dress and her legs were long and smooth, strikingly tapered at the ankles. Her feet were bare and each toenail bore a shiny decal depicting – he bent to see – a scene in color of the Norman Conquest. The smallest nail on each foot glittered with a picture too obscene for him to contemplate; he went to hang his coat in the closet.
'We pulled out of the war,' he said.
'Did we? You and Phyllis Ackerman? Or you and somebody else?'