INTERVENTION (23 page)

She awoke with her head on my chest. I was stroking her hair.

"I've never—never—" She was unable to continue.

"Was it good?"

"I wanted you very much, Roger. Now I know why. Does—does the extrasensory thing account for it?"

"That, and my being something of a frog prince."

She laughed giddily and began moving her body in gentle rhythm, without urgency. "You amazing man. I actually felt as though we were floating—doing it in midair."

I was coming alive again slowly. "I had to wait so long. And then, when I finally found you, I wasn't sure I could ... the way I had dreamed it. But it happened. At last."

She lifted her head and regarded me with astonished eyes. My mental sight caressed every plane of her face. Before she could ask the question I closed her lips with mine.

"You couldn't be!" she whispered when she finally broke free.

It was my turn to laugh. "I warned you I had been dormant, waiting patiently on my lily pad for a complaisant princess. A veritable virgin frog."

"I don't believe you. Is it some religious thing, then? No normal man—"

My coercion silenced her. I opened my mind and showed her the truth. To my amazement, she began to weep.

"My poor, darling Roger. Oh, my dear. And if we hadn't found each other—?"

"I don't know. As you saw, my first experience with love ended rather badly. I was mistaken about the depth of her feeling because she was unable to open her mind to me. I couldn't risk that again. Do you understand?"

"And you're sure about me." It was a statement.

"You went to the heart of the matter when you started to tell me that I wasn't normal. Of course I'm not. Luckily for me, neither are you. That's why you're going to marry me." I was grinning at her in the moonlight and my fingers traced tickling pathways up and down the luscious curve of her spine.

She said, "Oh, no!"

"You won't marry me?"

"Of course I will, fool." She clung to me. "I meant—perhaps we shouldn't do it again quite so soon. You destroyed me. Do you realize that?"

I gave a sinister chuckle. "The prince is not to be denied. He has princely prerogatives—et un boute-joie princier!"

"But I don't know whether I can
live
through it a second time tonight!" Even as she made false protest, she was encouraging my renaissance. "If they find my poor little dead body in here tomorrow, you'll be the prime suspect. Think of your embarrassment when the prosecutor demands that you produce the weapon in court! Think of the vulgar sensationalism, the requests for autographs—aah!"

Shush.

Oh my darling oh Roger.

Have no fear. If you're really concerned, this time we'll do it on the bed.

***

Elaine rented a house in Bretton Woods and transferred the one-woman editorial office of her little magazine to its front bedroom. We made good use of the other one all throughout that enchanted summer and planned to marry in November, when her divorce action would be finalized. In those years the Catholic Church was ambivalent in its recognition of such marriages, and sexual liaisons such as ours were considered to be sinful; but I was ready to defy a regiment of archangels for Elaine's sake, and the guilt that must accompany the violation of one's principles was banished to the deepest part of my unconscious. Only those of you, reading this, who are yourselves operant metapsychics can understand the inevitability of our sexual merging, our excitement at the increasingly profound bonding that we experienced—the soul-mating that lovers have sought and celebrated throughout all the ages. Even though Elaine never attained full operancy in relation to other minds, she did become fully consonant with me. We spoke to each other without words, knew each other's moods and needs through telepathic interchange, shared sensations, even reinforced each other's ecstatic submersion. You lovers in the Unity would no doubt think our efforts pitifully naive and maladroit; but we thought ourselves in wonderland. Elaine's previous partners, most especially her insensitive husband, had failed to arouse her; her inhibitions had restrained her from any attempt at remedy. But when she was with me there was no need for any crass éclaircissement. I
knew
her from the very beginning. It was the most amazing part of our love, and it also precipitated the ending because I was not wise enough to know the hazards of entering another's most private place while utterly disarmed.

The four short months with Elaine were the happiest time of my life. Without her I would become a hollow thing—a mere spectator when I was not a puppet. Looking back, I can see that our separation helped bring the great scheme to fruition; but whether the Lylmik engineered it deliberately or whether they simply took advantage of our little tragedy must remain an unanswered question. The Ghost surely knows, but it is silent, just as heaven was silent when I prayed for the strength of character that might have carried me beyond fury and pride to the forgiveness that would be so easy to give now, nearly 140 years too late...

But let me tell the story quickly. First, the happy memories:

Champagne picnics and love on an old Hudson's Bay blanket in the deep woods beside Devil's Elbow Brook.

A moonlit tennis game played in the middle of the night on a court at the White Mountain Hotel—and all the staff knowing about Elaine and me, and not daring to say a word because she was Somebody.

Pub-crawling with her in lowest Montréal on a Canadian holiday weekend, and defending her honor in a riot of psychokinetically smashed glassware when she was insulted by canaille even more drunk than we were.

Going down to Boston together, staying at the Ritz-Carlton, sitting on the grass for open-air Pops concerts, messing around the market, and never but
never
eating baked beans.

Taking jaunts to the Donovan family's summer home at Rye where she tried to teach me to sail, then browsing for antiques among the tourist-trappy little coast villages until it was time to finish the day with a clambake or lobster-broil and love on the beach.

Sitting petrified beside her as she drove her red Porsche like a demon through the Maine woods, playing tag with highballing log trucks going eighty-six miles an hour.

Lovemaking on a stormy afternoon in my ancient Volkswagen stalled in the middle of a Vermont covered bridge.

Lovemaking in a meadow above her house at Concord, while monarch butterflies reeled around us, driven berserk by the aetheric vibes.

Love in a misty forest cascade during an August heat wave.

Love in my hotel office at noon behind locked doors.

Love on a twilit picnic table, interrupted by voyeur bears.

Mad psychokinetic love in thirty-three postural variations.

Love after a quarrel.

Hilarious love.

Marathon love.

Tired, comfortable love.

And toward the end, a desperate love that did hold fear and doubt at bay for a little while...

There are memories of another type altogether, which I must deal with more briskly:

One of the most disquieting was my realization that she would never be able to overcome the mental blockages causing her latency. She could converse telepathically with me, and Denis could "hear" her as well as probe her memories; but she was never functionally operant with others except when she was experiencing extraordinary psychic stress. Elaine's mind thus seemed to belong to me almost by default, and I felt the first stirrings of real guilt: we were
not
one mind but two, and to pretend otherwise was to court disaster.

She was able to keep very few things secret from me. This gave me numerous opportunities to learn how to mask from her my own reactions of shock or chagrin—as, for instance, when I found out just how wealthy she really was. She cheerfully made plans for my gainful employment in Donovan Enterprises "after you give up your tedious little job at the hotel." She had all kinds of ideas on how I might capitalize on my metapsychic talents (and how Denis could go far if we only liberated him from the clutches of the Jesuits). She wanted to expand
Visitant
magazine into a rallying vehicle for as-yet-undiscovered superminds. When I balked at these and similar enthusiasms she was hurt, resentful, and unrepentently calculating.

Elaine's loyalty was ardent. Nevertheless she was unable to disguise her disappointment when I was less than a success at a meeting with her brother the eminent Congressman, her other brother the wheeler-dealer land developer, and her sister the Back Bay socialite do-gooder. Elaine plainly regretted my lower-class origins, my lack of appreciation for the cosmological bullshit espoused by her Aetherian clique, and my persistently old-fashioned religious faith—which wasn't at all like the trendy version of Catholicism made socially acceptable by the Kennedy clan.

I introduced Elaine to the Remillards at a disastrous Fourth of July barbecue in Berlin thrown by Cousin Gerard. Poor Elaine! Her clothes were too chic, her manners too high-bred, and the covered dish she contributed to the rustic buffet too haute cuisine. She compounded the debacle by speaking elegant Parisian French to old One' Louie and the other Canuck elders, and by admitting that her family were Irish Protestants. The only Remillards who weren't scandalized were little Denis and my brother Don. Don was, if anything, too damned friendly toward her. She assured me that there was no telepathic communication between the two of them; but I recalled his coercive exploits of yesteryear and couldn't help feeling doubt at the same time that I cursed myself for being a jealous fool.

Later that summer, when we would briefly visit Don and Sunny to pick up or drop off Denis, whom we often took on outings, Elaine was distant or even covertly antagonistic toward my brother. At the same time she claimed to pity him and pressed me to "see that he got help" in combating his alcoholism. I knew that any effort on my part would be worse than useless and refused to interfere—which provoked one of our few serious quarrels. Another took place in early September, when I took Denis back to Brebeuf Academy and revealed his metapsychic abilities to Father Jared Ellsworth, as the Ghost had instructed me to do. Elaine was irrationally convinced that the Jesuits would "exploit" Denis in some nameless way. I assured her that Ellsworth had reacted with sympathy and equanimity to the revelation (he had even deduced some of the boy's mental talents already); but Elaine persisted in her fretting over Denis, and her attitude toward him was so oddly colored and tortuous that I was unable to make sense of it until long after the end.

The end. God, how I remember it.

It was late in October on a day when the New Hampshire hills were purple and scarlet with the autumn climacteric. We had gone on a season-end pilgrimage to the Great Stone Face, just she and I, and finished up at a secluded country inn near Franconia. It was one of those terminally quaint establishments that still draw Galactic tourists to New England, featuring squeaky floors, crooked walls, and a pleasant clutter of colonial American artifacts, many of which were for sale at ridiculous prices. The food and drink were splendid and the proprietors discreet. After our meal we retired to a gabled bedroom suite and nestled side by side on a sofa with lumpy cushions, watching sparks from a birchwood fire fly up the chimney while rain tapped gently on the roof.

We had been talking about our wedding plans and sipping a rare Aszu Tokay that the host reserved for well-heeled cognoscenti. It was to be a simple civil ceremony down in Concord, with one of her distinguished Donovan uncles officiating. Later we would have a small supper "for the wedding party only," which effectively meant no Remillards except me. I listened to her with only half an ear, drowsy from the wine.

And then Elaine told me she was pregnant.

I recall a thunderous sound. It may have come from the storm outside the inn, or it may have been purely mental, my psychic screens crashing into place. I remember a fixed-frame vision of my hand, frozen in the act of reaching for the decanter. I can still hear Elaine's voice prattling on about how she was so glad it had happened, how she had always wanted children while her ex-husband had not, how our child was certain to be a paragon of "astromental" achievement, perhaps even more brilliant than Denis.

Incapable of speech or even a rational thought, I sat gripped by a grand refusal. It could not be. She had not said it. I think I prayed like a child, entreating God to cancel this thing, to save my love and my life. I would repeat the same futile supplications later through the bleak winter months as I tried in vain to conquer myself and return to her; but always love would be obliterated as it was at that hellish moment, wiped out by a blast of volcanic rage and fatally wounded pride.

Of course I knew who the father was.

I finally turned my face to her, and I know I was without expression, my howling despair inaudible beyond the closet of my skull. Elaine cowered back against the cushions, shrinking from the exhalation of pain and menace.

"Roger, what is it?"

Her mind was, as always, completely open to me. And now that her thoughts concentrated on the certainty of the life growing within her, I could perceive a complex skein of memories woven about the embryonic node. The confirmation would be there.

I knew I should leave those memories of hers untouched. It was the only forlorn hope left to me. I must not look into the secret place but seal it forever, pretend that the child's father was someone else. Anyone else.

The secret places. All rational beings have them and guard them—not only for their own sakes but for those of others. Who but God would love us if all the secret places of our minds lay exposed? I knew how to conceal my own heart of darkness; it is one of the first things an operant metapsychic learns, whether he is bootstrap or preceptor-trained. Only a few poor souls remain vulnerable always, trapped in the shadow-country between latency and conscious control of their high mental powers. Elaine was one. Open. Without secrets.

"Roger," she pleaded. "Answer me. For God's sake, darling, what's the matter?"

Don't look. She loves you, not him. To look would be a sin—against her and against yourself. You aren't a truth-seeker, you're a fool. Don't look. Don't look.