The Gorgon Festival (5 page)

When Ester entered at eleven for her good night kiss and to model her new mini-nightgown, he was no closer to a symbol or metaphor than before but he was grateful that the gown was pink chiffon and not police blue.

As she swirled before him, the extreme thrust of her mammae threw the gown into billowing disarray which created ripples in the fabric that gave a liquefaction to her thighs, wholly visible on the pirouettes. She resembled a painting by Degas made animate in a style more graphic than that he had discovered in Rubens. On her final pirouette, she bowed, turned, and ran trippingly from the study with a final flirt to her bottom.

That little twist did it.

Squealing, Ward leaped after her. In vain she fled into the bedroom and sprang to the safety of her bed, but with a bound he caught her. In a swirling froth of pink chiffon, the Great God Pan was alive and rutting in the Ward bedroom, and strangely, Ester did not resent his animality. Before she walked in shreds to her dressing room, she said accusingly, “You’ve been taking lessons.”

Seated beside the pile of pink fluff, taking off his shoes, Ward berated himself for his ungentleness. He got up and went to his dressing room to undress and prepare for bed, knowing his energy was depleted for the night. Anyway, he comforted himself, it could have been worse; something besides her nightgown could have caught in his zipper.

Slipping into his silk pajama tops with the Nehru collar, Ward heard the vacuum cleaner whine. Contrite and bottomless, he rushed to lend a hand, but the last pink thread was vanishing from the counterpane. Ester, clad in a conventional nightgown, hooked up the attachment and turned to roll the cleaner back to the broom closet.

“I’m sorry, dear,” he said, coming to take the handle.

“Sorry!” she whirled on him. “I’m proud that you fell in love with me. You’ve got more surprises than a box of Crackerjacks.”

Her arms were moving around his neck in an invitation to an encore which he unmistakably accepted even as he considered her expression “fell in love.”

It was a quaint term based on Newtonian gravitation which had been modified, though not invalidated as a concept, by Einstein’s world lines. Ester’s nearness was both a curve and an attraction, a gravitational world line interlocked with his own. By extension, if space were curved and the universe finite, as the General Theory seemed to indicate, then infinity was a unity encompassed by a master world line enclosing circles in circles.

“By golly, Ester. Here I’ve been fooling around with the parts and never studied the whole.”

“This is rather unusual,” she said, “but, if you insist, you may go into the study.”

Ester was unaware of a breakdown in communication until Ward’s whiteness vanished in the darkness and his footsteps dwindled down the hall. Perplexed, she felt that her husband, rushing to his study in Priapean urgency, might be yielding to some strange compulsion, possibly academic, to make love to his desk. On tiptoe she followed him; she wanted to see how he pulled this off.

Then she heard his voice, pitched high with excitement, speaking into his recorder: “In the mathematics of affinities, the universe is assumed to be a closed system. Thus, the symbol for infinity is considered the symbol for the master affinity, the universal world line, or the total environment. Thence, it is self-evident…”

Quietly Ester returned to bed and turned out the light, knowing all was well with her husband.

Ward’s Saturday night and Sunday, too, was not proof of rejuvenation, but the fact that he was out of bed by six, Monday morning, and at work in his laboratory before seven indicated youthful energy. Once at his desk he worked as a man possessed and by ten had established a formula to account for last night’s satyriasis:

With his new system of emotio-mathematics he could establish formulae rapidly because he was choosing the symbols. In the formula above, S represents an organic force field, male or female, generated by hormones in a state of dynamic balance with C, or centripetal force. Therefore P represents the proximity factor.

His animalism had been the product of the rapidly collapsing force field, C
⁽²⁾
.

On the first Monday, Ester slept till noon and arose to fire the maid. She prepared dinner Monday evening, and he got in four solid hours of work in his study before yielding to Ester’s P factor. Thereafter Ester couldn’t sleep because of the energy generated in her force field by his collapsing world lines, and she did housework between 1 and 5 a.m. On the other hand, Ward’s dissipated S induced languor and he slept.

Tuesday morning, Ruth called him at work and invited him up for a noon snack of chocolate and macaroons. She wanted his opinion on her survey of the social problems of immortality.

“Ruth, I haven’t time. At the moment, I’m converting Aristotle’s
Poetics
into the linear equations of esthetics.”

“But I need your opinion. I’m so immersed in these problems I haven’t been out of my library since early Sunday morning. My Scarlet Churchill was supposed to bloom Monday, and I haven’t seen yesterday’s roses.”

Ward thought he recalled a pop song called “Yesterday’s Roses,” and he said, “I’m no social thinker.”

“Not all the problems are social. For instance, would there be a traumatic shock when one watches his generation grow old and die? And what would be your reaction to Ester, forty years from now, when she’s grown old and halt and you’ve still got rhythm?”

Now Ward was positive her largesse would include more than chocolate and macaroons. If he came down from the hill, drowsy and incapable on Tuesday, of all days, Ester would know why and be devastated. Ester had faith in his fidelity as he had trust in her loyalty, and his first responsibility was to his wife. Ruth had entered upon a relationship knowing he was a married man, knowing that his contractual loyalty was to Ester, etc., etc. Firmly but gently Ward reaffirmed the married man’s priorities.

“Ester’s a variation from the norm,” he said. “Age cannot wither nor usage stale her infinite variety.”

In the sudden silence, Ward realized his implied comparison, deliberately invidious, had hurt a sensitive mind unschooled in the clichés of adultery.

“Alex,” there was a catch in her voice, “you’ve never said anything like that to me.”

Neither had he said it to Ester: Shakespeare had said it about Cleopatra. Hurt in her voice aroused his compassion, and in her ignorance of Shakespeare an opportunity to console her without exerting mental effort.

“You didn’t want me to talk, Saturday night,” he reminded her, “but Ester’s going on another shopping tour tomorrow and I know a small café where there’s candle light and vodka. If I can take you there, I’ll breathe to you such lines would smite the general ear with envy, for yours is the stuff that schoolboys’ dreams are made of.

“When in the columns of the San Francisco Chronicle I read descriptions of the jet-set belles, I know the gilded concubines of Greeks cannot outshine the loveliness you master now…”

For seventeen minutes, while he solved for the esthetics factor on the paper before him, he plucked from memory appropriate lines from Shakespeare to beguile her and closed on a line of pop music whose connotations he knew she would catch. “I’ll come and get you in a taxi, honey.”

Obviously he had healed her hurt, for she exploded with gusto, “I’ll be ready ’bout a quarter past eight.”

Nevertheless, Ruth’s request prompted him to think of the ecological effects of immortality, and his first equation had frightening implications. Within five generations the planet would be choked with human beings. Nothing short of nuclear holocaust could overcome even the short-term effects of practical immortality.

On Wednesday morning, he called Ruth and expressed his fear of the maternal instinct. Fortunately he caught her in a libidinal low, for she was curt.

“Tend to your theories, Alex, and don’t let it bother you. I’ve solved that problem. In the first place, there’s no maternal instinct. Motherhood is an acquired trait. And there’s such a thing as biological controls. Remember Doctor Knipling and the screw-worm flies of Curaçao.”

Knipling, he recalled, eradicated screw-worm flies, a cattle pest, on Curaçao by introducing sterile, irradiated males into the species. The human problem was the female as long as motherhood existed in a near-symbiotic relationship with sentimentality, forgetfulness, drunkenness, carelessness, and licentiousness.

In the matter of maternity as instinctual versus learned behavior, he would get a grass-roots opinion from Ester.

Carrick called him at two, and the department head sounded disgruntled.

“I dropped by your house at noon to say hello to Ester, but she didn’t answer.”

“Ester fired the maid,” Ward explained. “Housework keeps her busy until four or five in the morning, so she sleeps in.”

“I didn’t know things were so bad, but, with your larger grant, you can put her back on the payroll along with my boys.”

“Then you’ve decided on the larger grant?”

“It’s still under advisement, but it’s getting less so. Give Ester my regrets.”

Ward left the laboratory an hour early to spruce up for his date with Ruth. Arriving home, he was surprised. On the dining room table were candlesticks, clean linen, and a wine bucket containing a bottle of Thunderbird ’68.

From the kitchen, Ester called, “Is that you, dear?”

“Yes, darling. I thought you were going to town for a second fitting.”

“I decided that dark blue was too depressing… Go and get ready, dear, for dinner.”

He turned to go upstairs, wondering what to do about Ruth, when the phone rang. He answered it, but it was Joe Cabroni sounding more disgruntled than Carrick.

“Get me Ester.”

“Sure, Joe. Hang on.”

He buzzed Ester on the kitchen extension and heard her pick up the phone.

“Where in the hell have you been?” Cabroni asked. “I’ve been waiting at this bar since four-thirty.”

“Oh, Joe. I completely forgot our appointment in the rush of preparing dinner for Alex…”

Ward hung up.

When he returned downstairs, Ester was ready to start serving, but she was worried. “Joe’s unhappy. I promised to have a drink with him before my fitting. Now, he’s up there, getting stewed on vodka, and he promised he’d keep calling here until I join him.”

Wine soothed her. The soup was delicious, and she was serving the salad when the phone rang.

“You answer it, Alex. Tell him I had a nervous breakdown.”

A plea in her eyes overcame his trepidation, and he arose and went to the phone. “Doctor Alexander Ward speaking.”

For a moment he could hear heavy, angry breathing and then the phone clicked.

“He hung up on me.”

It was an unsettling episode, but he composed himself over salad. After all, Joe Cabroni was not Normandy Beach, and Ward had survived stronger antagonisms. To allay the tension, he asked, “Darling, if you could keep forever young, with no body changes, would you like to be a mother?”

“If I could stay as I am, forever, I would grow boys spaced five years apart to keep a fresh crop to entertain me after you’ve gone.”

“That would be incest,” Ward pointed out.

“Of course, but what is incest if it isn’t mother love gone hog wild? And grandmothers can be fun, too.”

The phone rang again and Ward answered promptly. “Ward, here. What the hell you want?”

Again the heavy breathing, less angry but far more irregular, and the click.

“This is sheer harassment, a police technique to keep you on edge, and he’s drunk,” Ward said, returning to the table. “Where were we? Oh, yes. You were having sons by your sons’ sons… After a thousand years of inbreeding, genetically, you would be practicing self-stimulation.”

“Oh, no, Alex. I’d have someone to talk to.”

Guttering candles sparkled in her eyes as she envisioned eons of ecstasy. Ward realized he was not getting a grass-roots opinion, but one of her ideas was thought-provoking. Without mortality as a basis for morality, there might be a direct ratio between lewdness and longevity.

Over dessert the phone rang again, and Ester’s eyes flared in outrage. She lunged at the telephone, picked it up, and said into the mouthpiece, “Listen, you. I’m having dinner with my husband whom I love and who loves me. You can quit harassing us and you can forget that date, you vodka-swilling pig. If you call this number again I’m going to swear out a peace warrant. My husband explained your technique and I know all about you…”

Suddenly Ester held the phone in her hand and looked at it in bewilderment. “The bastard hung up on me.”

Ward glanced at his wrist. It was precisely 8:15.

By now, Cabroni had passed out and the call had come from Ruth. If she judged him by the implications of Ester’s remarks, he had violated the first canon in the ethics of adultery, he had told all to his wife and laid the blame for his lechery on his mistress.

Early the next morning, Ward telephoned Ruth, giving the signal—ring, hang up, and ring again. She didn’t answer. By ten he was engrossed in a mathematical definition of electricity, but he remembered to call again. At lunch he ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and called her twice. She was still sulking, so he gave up. He would wait and let her call him as she chose to throw off her peevishness.

After lunch he became thoroughly engrossed in a definition of organic electromagnetism, plotting from Riemannian geometry in kinematic time and equation which amalgamated space-time, gravitation, electromagnetism and organic chemistry. Ward was aware that he was defining the
corpus Dei
, but all was secondary to the sheer fun of theoretical mathematics.

By five he had completed substantiating the rejuvenation phenomenon, but ecological doubts still nagged. He wondered if the maternal drive was a function of E
₁
(Ego enhancement) or of S
₁₆
(Love). The sub-sixteen defined love as a variable of sex attraction in an area somewhat more specific than hallucinations and self-delusions. S
₁₆
had, at least, the reality of a rainbow.