5
Ecstasy is perhaps too large a word to use in connection with sex, or even lovemaking, but that night was the most perfect that Farber could remember, sweet and hot and fine; they were alternately tender and fierce, exuberant and pleasantly melancholy—and at last they sank down peacefully together into soft black sleep, like twins settling into an ocean of dust and downy feathers.
When Farber awoke, it was that cold and bitter hour just before dawn, and Liraun was gently disentangling herself from him preparatory to leaving. Feeling her softness and warmth slipping away over his skin, feeling the chill empty air rush in to fill the void, so that he was suddenly naked where before he had been handsomely clothed in flesh, Farber opened his eyes. He watched her face, luminous as a moon in the darkness, rise up over him, pull away from him, seeming to fall away from him like a spaceship falling from an orbiting satellite toward the bronzy disk of its home planet, like a tiny phosphorescent fish swimming away and down into the living darkness of the sea. Something complex and painful rose up in him, tightening his throat and burning behind his eyes. Without volition, his voice began to speak—the words ringing oddly in the silent room—and he heard it asking Liraun to stay, to stay with him, to live with him, to never leave—
Liraun’s face went blank, as though something had flown from it, shooting away as the pheasants had shot up into the damp German night. She did not, would not, answer him. While he beseeched her to tell him what was wrong, she put her clothes on, moving stiffly and mechanically, her usually agile fingers fumbling with the fastenings. Her face was cold and empty as wax. She would not look at him. When she had finished dressing, she paced aimlessly around the apartment, darting first one way and then the other, like a caged animal. Farber was on his feet now, trying to touch her, hold her, but she brushed by him as if he didn’t exist. She stood quiveringly still for a moment, her eyes glassy and blind.
Then she ran from the room.
The door slammed with finality behind her.
Farber was left to stand alone in the darkness, listening to the cryptic tickings and buzzings of household appliances, and slowly, through the bewilderment and pain, came the frozenly rueful realization that he still did not know how to find her again.
###
That evening, Liraun did not come to visit him. He sat up waiting for her half the night, dozing in his chair, starting up expectantly at every sound, going over that final scene again and again in a futile attempt to figure out what had happened, reliving some of their past moments together with an almost hypnotically intense recall.
Liraun didn’t show up the next night, either.
On the third evening, Farber stormed out of his apartment, furious and hurt, went to the Co-op Mess, and had an unreasonable number of drinks. He also had an intense, tearful reconciliation with Kathy, and within two hours they were back in her apartment, and in her bed. Kathy spent the rest of the night inventing exotic ways of making love, in order to seal the bond. Farber worked at it firmly, and managed to come consecutively more times than he ever had in his life, but it was no good: he kept thinking about Liraun, he kept picturing her, he kept wanting it to be her instead. In spite of his boozy resolve, he found that he could only relate to Kathy absentmindedly; he kept fantasizing that she was Liraun, and it was this that sparked most of his desire, not Kathy herself.
Early the next evening, Liraun appeared at Farber’s apartment, seeming almost literally to materialize from the darkness beyond his door. She didn’t say a word about her absence, or his the previous night, or the fight they’d had, if that’s what it had been. She never mentioned any of it again. Neither did Farber. He relaxed gratefully into the familiar strangeness of her company, suffused with a feeling of having come home again. Kathy rang the bell about ten, and kept ringing incessantly until Farber was obliged to shout for her to go away. Liraun said nothing about that, either.
They didn’t again discuss the prospect of living together, but a few nights later, unasked, she showed up with a backpack of possessions and moved in. It only took her about fifteen minutes to get settled. As Farber watched her moving around his apartment, putting away her things, he was overcome by a feeling of amazement that was almost awe. He really knew nothing about her at all, nothing about her life. And yet, here she was—moving in with him. This alien, living in his house, day in and day out. It was incredible and wonderful. Already—as she put supper on to boil, unasked, and sat tranquilly playing the tikan—he could feel her neat, quiet, calming presence spreading throughout the apartment, seeping into his body like radiant heat, thawing his hopes, loosening his fears.
After this, Farber stopped trying to avoid further emotional involvement with Liraun, although if you had mentioned the word love to him at any one point he would have denied it quickly and emphatically. In fact, though, he was coming to depend on her presence more and more, especially now that he was a virtual outcast in the Terran community, shunned by everyone. She was a prop; she held him up, she kept him going. She was a tranquilizing drug to assuage the loneliness and isolation of exile on an alien earth. She helped him forget that he could stare at the stars here forever, and never once see a configuration he could recognize from a thousand boyhood nights spent dreaming on a hill in the Frankische Alb near Treuchlingen. He was drawn powerfully by her enigmatic and bottomless nature. Her mind and spirit were still masked from him, as by a thousand thicknesses of distorting semitransparent gauze, and physical intimacy was only a means to strip away the first of these layers. Also, Farber, who had been used to the aggressive, self-assertive women of Earth, was delighted by Liraun’s apparent submissiveness, although like most men of his generation he seriously believed himself to be “liberated.” Nevertheless, he quickly became comfortably accustomed to having her defer to his will, cook his supper, serve him in a hundred little ways.
The next month was probably the happiest Farber had yet experienced in his bland young life. Certainly it was the period during which he produced his best work. During the weeks he lived with Liraun he created several stills which would later attract a moderate amount of attention on Earth, among them Woman at Rest, Alàntene Night, Riverman, and the fairly well-known Esplanade—Looking East to the Sea. He was as content as he had ever been. He had the pleasure of work that he enjoyed, the satisfaction of that work done well, a reasonable prospect of future success—and Liraun. And, as people are always ready to disregard the most painfully learned lessons the moment they think the wind has changed, he even began to regain some of his old cockiness. Naturally, it could not last.
###
Authors and scholars have argued for years about why Farber became determined to marry Liraun. In actuality, Farber himself was never sure. It was not so much a conscious decision, but rather something that—he realized, in retrospect—he had become committed to at some point along the line. Exactly when that point, that moment of commitment, had been reached, he himself did not know. But there were six specific things that took him toward it, six long steps into deep water.
Perhaps the first step occurred when he realized that Liraun was unhappy.
Or if not unhappy exactly—for they still took much delight in each other—then troubled, at least, and divided of soul. Even in her gayest moments, there had always been an edge of melancholy to her, but now it seemed to deepen and widen daily. He noticed it, responded to it with concern, but couldn’t find out why it was happening. As usual, she was intensely reluctant to talk about her feelings, and would either change the subject when Farber questioned her or become withdrawn if he pressed her to answer.
It wasn’t until they attended the monthly Co-op mixer—a flamboyant gesture of defiance on Farber’s part, from which he derived a good deal of bittersweet enjoyment—that he began to understand what was wrong. Prominent members of the Cian community were regularly invited to the mixer—still referred to as a “cocktail party,” although amphetamines and hallucinogens were served as readily as alcohol—and some of them actually came; they called the parties “Little Modes,” and seemed to regard them with tolerant, amused condescension, as one would an absurd play put on by kindergarten children.
Tonight the Cian were very cold toward Liraun, even colder than the Terrans were to Farber. They didn’t quite snub her openly, but there was a thinly veiled hostility behind everything they said and did that indicated their disapproval of her. Jacawen sur Abut was there, that chilly man—as Liaison, he almost had to be there, but it was clear that he hated attending; unlike the other Cian, who participated in the spirit of celebration with a whooping gusto that was not without a certain overtone of sarcasm, he watched the crowds of noisy partygoers with distaste, eyed the dancing with scorn (never, never trying the Terran dances himself, as some of the other Cian sometimes did, the grace and suppleness of their movements far outshining the dancing Terrans even when they amusingly bungled the steps, good-naturedly leading the laughter their attempts to master the Scorpion or the Dustdevil Three-Step inevitably evoked), and imbibed nothing, neither food nor drink nor drug. And, also unlike the other Cian, he alone was openly hostile to Liraun, his flinty eyes snapping with displeasure whenever he saw her, stalking abruptly from rooms if she entered them, refusing to speak to her or acknowledge her presence in any positive way.
Liraun was strained and silent throughout the party, and kept to herself as much as possible. Farber was chagrined: it had never occurred to him that their miscegenation might have caused Liraun to be ostracized by her people as he had been by his; he had realized that the Terrans would be distant with her, but had not stopped to think that by bringing her to the party he would be exposing her to the hostility and scorn of the Cian as well.
That night, for the first time since he’d known her, she was preoccupied and unresponsive during their lovemaking. At first he thought she was angry with him for taking her to the party, but then he realized that her distress was made up more of pain and humiliation than of anger. They lay quietly together in the darkness, her sweaty thigh still thrown over his legs, her head on his shoulder and three of her nipples—still hard—pressing into his side, feeling the sweat drying on their bodies, the body fluids and semen turning sticky in their pubic hair, watching the creamy shimmer of light the streetlamp outside the window cast across the ceiling and along the top of one wall. The silence was too heavy and too long there in the musk-smelling darkness, her body too inert a weight, and so to break the silence he said:
“What was it like for you when you were a child?”—not so much because he thought she would answer him, or even necessarily because he really wanted to know, but because these were the only words, the only conversational gambit, he could find in his tired, intoxicated head.
Surprisingly, she did answer him, raising up a little on an elbow to speak musingly, ironically, bitterly: “What was it like, to be a child? I remember mostly emptiness and wind, and that no one would play with me. Being alone. Walking on the Esplanade in the snow and the icy wind, looking at the shuttered houses. Knowing that every day, every minute that went by brought me that much closer to the day I would die.”
Farber stared at her, appalled. “It was really that bad for you?” he asked, but she merely shook her head, indicating not a negative reply but that she no longer wanted to talk about it. Instead she propped herself higher on her elbow, her thigh sliding over him as she moved, and stared down at him in a languid but intent way that finally reminded him—with an odd thrill of embarrassment—that she could see much better in the dark than he could. She touched his face with her fingertips, gently tracing the ridge of his eyebrows, his cheekbones, the line of his massive jaw. “So strange,” she said dreamily, “so strange. Like an animal, almost. Bestial. Like one of the scurrying little rockbabies who live in the western hills.” Farber, who had seen a rockbaby, realized that she was comparing him to the closest analog of an ape that Weinunnach possessed, and—after the initial half-amused flash of pique—it startled him to hear that she thought of him as apelike, because he had often thought how much like a cat she was; a cat, or an otter, perhaps, some sleek, graceful animal, self-possessed and beautiful. Bestial, yes. Like a beast. Like him. Feeling obscurely guilty, he reached up and touched her cheek, the silken, crackling cascade of her hair. She blazed up at his touch like tinder. They made love in a desperate hurry, Liraun forcing the pace, as though she feared the ceiling would fall in or the ground swallow them before they could finish.
Afterwards they rested in each other’s arms, the cat and the ape (neither was either, though both were aliens)—but Liraun slept fitfully, tossing and moaning as she worked her way through the turbulent country of her dreams, and Farber, who held her and stroked her throughout the night, slept not at all.