“He’s a great person, all right,” I said absently, finishing the drink and holding the glass out for more. “Hey. What do you mean, he reminds you of me?”
“Can’t make up his mind, Broadhead. He’s got a stake that’s enough to put him on Full Medical, and he can’t make up his mind to spend it. If he spends it he can have his legs back and go out again. But then he’d be broke if he didn’t score. So he just stays on, a cripple.”
I put the glass down. I didn’t want any more to drink. “So long, Ituno,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
I spent most of the trip back writing letters to Klara that I didn’t know if I would ever mail. There wasn’t much else to do. Hester turned out to be surprisingly sexual, for a small plump lady of a certain age. But there’s a limit to how long that is entertaining, and with all the cargo we had jammed in the ship, there wasn’t room for much else. The days were all the same: sex, letter writing, sleeping . . . and worrying.
Worrying about why Shicky Bakin wanted to stay a cripple; which was a way of worrying, in a way I could face, about why I did.
Sigfrid says, “You sound tired, Rob.”
Well, that was understandable enough. I had gone off to Hawaii for the weekend. Some of my money was in tourism there, so was all tax deductible. It was a lovely couple of days on the Big Island, with a two-hour stockholders’ meeting in the morning, at afternoons with one of those beautiful Island girls on the beach sailing in glass-bottomed catamarans, watching the big mantas glide underneath, begging for crumbs. But coming back, you fight time zones all the way, and I was exhausted.
Only that is not the sort of thing that Sigfrid really wants to hear about. He doesn’t care if you’re physically exhausted. He doest care if you’ve got a broken leg; he only wants to know if you dream about screwing your mother.
I say that. I say, “I’m tired, all right, Sigfrid, but why don’t you stop making small talk? Get right into my Oedipal feelings about Ma.”
“Did you have any, Robby?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Do you want to talk about them, Robby?”
“Not particularly.”
He waits, and I wait, too. Sigfrid has been being cute again, and now his room is fixed up like a boy’s room from forty years ago. Crossed Ping-Pong paddles hologrammed on the wall. A fake window with a fake view of the Montana Rockies in a snowstorm. A hologrammed cassette shelf of boys’ stories on tape, Tom Sawyer and Lost Race of Mars and—I can’t read the rest of the titles. It is all very homey, but not in the least like my own room as a boy, which was tiny, narrow, and almost filled by the old sofa I slept on.
“Do you know what you want to talk about, Rob?” Sigfrid probes gently.
“You bet.” Then I reconsider. “Well, no. I’m not sure.” Actually I do know. Something had hit me on the way back from Hawaii, very hard. It’s a five-hour flight. Half the time I had spent drenched in tears. It was funny. There was this lovely hapi-haole girl flying east in the seat next to me, and I had decided right away to get to know her better. And the stewardess was the same one I’d had before, and she, I already knew better.
So there I was, sitting at the very back of the first-class section of the SST, taking drinks from the stewardess, chatting with my pretty hapi-haole. And—every time the girl was drowsing, or in the ladies’ room, and the stewardess was looking the other way—racked with silent, immense, tearful sobs.
And then one of them would look my way again and I would be smiling, alert, and on the make.
“Do you want to just say what you’re feeling at this second, Rob?”
“I would in a minute, Sigirid, if I knew what it was.”
“Don’t you know, really? Can’t you remember what was in your head while you weren’t talking, just now?”
“Sure I can!” I hesitate, then I say, “Oh, hell, Sigfrid, I guess I was just waiting to be coaxed. I had an insight the other day, and it hurt. Oh, wow, you wouldn’t believe how it hurt. I was crying like a baby.”
“What was the insight, Robby?”
“I’m trying to tell you. It was about—well, it was partly about my mother. But it was also about, well, you know, Dane Metchnikov. I had these . . . I had—”
“I think you’re trying to say something about the fantasies you had of having anal sex with Dane Metchnikov, Rob. Is that right?”
“Yeah. You remember good, Sigfrid. When I was crying, it was about my mother. Partly . . .”
“You told me that, Rob.”
“Right.” And I close up. Sigfrid waits. I wait, too. I suppose I want to be coaxed some more, and after a while Sigfrid obliges me.
“Let’s see if I can help you, Rob,” he says. “What do crying about your mother, and your fantasies about anal sex with Dane, have to do with each other?”
I feel something happening inside of me. It feels as though the soft, wet inside of my chest is starting to bubble into my throat. I can tell that when my voice comes out, it is going to be tremulous and desperately forlorn if I don’t control it. So I try to control it, although I know perfectly well that I have no secrets of this sort from Sigfrid; he can read his sensors and know what is going on inside me from the tremble of a triceps or the dampness of a palm.
But I make the effort anyway. In the tones of a biology instructor explaining a prepared frog I say: “See, Sigfrid, my mother loved me. I knew it. You know it. It was a logical demonstration; she had no choice. And Freud said once that no boy who is certain he was his mother’s favorite ever grows up to be neurotic. Only—”
“Please, Robbie, that isn’t quite right, and besides you’re intellectualizing. You know you really don’t want to put in all these preambles. You’re stalling, aren’t you?”
Other times I would tear the circuits out of his chips for that, but this time he has my mood gauged correctly. “All right. But I did know that my mother loved me. She couldn’t help it! I was her only son. My father was dead—don’t clear your throat, Sigfrid, I’m getting to it. It was a logical necessity that she loved me, and I understood it that way with no doubt at all in my mind, but she never said so. Never once.”
“You mean that never, in your whole life, did she say to you, ‘I love you, son?’”
“No!” I scream. Then I get control again. “Or not directly, no. I mean, once when I was like eighteen years old and going to sleep in the next room, I heard her to say to one of her friends—girlfriends, I mean—that she really thought I was a tremendous kid. She was proud of me. I don’t remember what I’d done, something, won a prize or got a job, but she right that minute was proud of me and loved me, and said so. . . . But not to me.”
“Please go on, Rob,” Sigfrid says after a moment.
“I am going on! Give me a minute. It hurts; I guess it’s what you call primal pain.”
“Please don’t diagnose yourself, Rob. Just say it. Let it come out.”
“Oh, shit.”
I reach for a cigarette and then stop the motion. That’s usually a good thing to do when things get tight with Sigfrid, because it will almost always distract him into an argument about whether I am trying to relieve tension instead of dealing with it; but this time I am too disgusted with myself, with Sigfrid, even with my mother. I want to get it over with. I say, “Look, Sigfrid, here’s how it was. I loved my mother a lot, and I know—knew! — she loved me. I knew she wasn’t very good at showing it.”
I suddenly realize I have a cigarette in my hands, and rolling it around without lighting it and, wondrous to say, Sigfrid hasn’t even commented on it. I plunge right on: “She didn’t say the words to me. Not only that. It’s funny, Sigfrid, but, you know I can’t remember her ever touching me. I mean, not really. She would kiss me good night, sometimes. On the top of the head. And I remember she told me stories. And she was always there when needed her. But—”
I have to stop for a moment, to get control of my voice again, so I inhale deeply and evenly through my nose, concentrating breath flow.