He thought of Kay. Kay alone in her redwood bower, Kay with bucking hips and tossing hair and glistening droplets of sweat between her breasts, Kay hissing and shivering in Nate’s simulated embrace. Murray tried to reach across to her through the Group loop, tried to find and isolate the discrete thread of self that was Kay, tried to chisel away the ten extraneous identities and transform this coupling into an encounter between himself and her. It was a plain violation of the spirit of Group; it was also impossible to achieve, since she had refused him permission to establish a special inner link between them that evening, and so at the moment she was accessible to him only as one facet of the enhanced and expanded Serena. At best he could grope toward Kay through Serena and touch the tip of her soul, but the contact was cloudy and uncertain. Instantly on to what he was trying to do, she petulantly pushed him away, at the same time submerging herself more fully in Serena’s consciousness. Rejected, reeling, he slid off into confusion, sending jarring crosscurrents through the whole Group. Nate loosed a shower of irritation despite his heroic attempt to remain unperturbed, and pumped his way to climax well ahead of schedule, hauling everyone breathlessly along with him. As the orgasmic frenzy broke loose Murray tried to re-enter the full linkage, but he found himself unhinged, disaffiliated, and mechanically emptied himself without any tremor of pleasure. Then it was over. He lay back, perspiring, feeling soiled, jangled, unsatisfied. After a few moments he uncoupled his equipment and went out for a cold shower.
Kay called half an hour later.
“You crazy bastard,” she said. “What were you trying to do?”
He promised not to do it again. She forgave him. He brooded for two days, keeping out of Group. He missed sharing Conrad and JoJo, Klaus and Lois. The third day the Group chart marked him and Kay as that night’s performers. He didn’t want to let them all share her. It was stronger than ever, this nasty atavistic possessiveness. He didn’t have to, of course. Nobody was forced to do Group. He could beg off and continue to sulk, and Dirk or Van or somebody would substitute for him tonight. But Kay wouldn’t necessarily pass up her turn. She almost certainly wouldn’t. He didn’t like the options. If he made it with Kay as per Group schedule, he’d be offering her to all the others. If he stepped aside, she’d do it with someone else. Might as well be the one to take her to bed in that case. Faced with an ugly choice, he decided to stick to the original schedule.
He popped up to her place eight hours early. He found her sprawled on a carpet of redwood needles in a sun-dappled grove, playing with a stack of music cubes. Mozart tinkled in the fragrant air. “Let’s go away somewhere tomorrow,” he said. “You and me.”
“You’re still into you-and-me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Where do you want to go?”
He shrugged. “Hawaii. Afghanistan. Poland. Zambia. It doesn’t matter. Just to be with you.”
“What about Group?”
“They can spare us for a while.”
She rolled over, lazily snaffled Mozart into silence, started a cube of Bach. “I’ll go,” she said. The Goldberg Variations transcribed for glockenspiel. “But only if we take our Group equipment along.”
“It means that much to you?”
“Doesn’t it to you?”
“I cherish Group,” he said. “But it’s not all there is to life. I can live without it for a while. I don’t need it, Kay. What I need is you.”
“That’s obscene, Murray.”
“No. It isn’t obscene.”
“It’s boring, at any rate.”
“I’m sorry you think so,” he told her.
“Do you want to drop out of Group?”
I want us both to drop out of Group, he thought, and I want you to live with me. I can’t bear to share you any longer, Kay. But he wasn’t prepared to move to that level of confrontation. He said, “I want to stay in Group if it’s possible, but I’m also interested in extending and developing some one-on-one with you.”
“You’ve already made that excessively clear.”
“I love you.”
“You’ve said that before too.”
“What do you want, Kay?”
She laughed, rolled over, drew her knees up until they touched her breasts, parted her thighs, opened herself to a stray shaft of sunlight. “I want to enjoy myself,” she said.
He started setting up his equipment an hour before sunset. Because he was performing, the calibrations were more delicate than on an ordinary night. Not only did he have to broadcast a full range of control ratios to Central to aid the others in their tuning, he had to achieve a flawless balance of input and output with Kay. He went about his complex tasks morosely, not at all excited by the thought that he and Kay would shortly be making love. It cooled his ardor to know that Nate, Dirk, Van, Finn, Bruce, and Klaus would be having her too. Why did he begrudge it to them so? He didn’t know. Such exclusivism, coming out of nowhere, shocked and disgusted him. Yet it wholly controlled him. Maybe I need help, he thought.
Group time, now. Soft sweet ionized fumes drifting through the chamber of Eros. Kay was warm, receptive, passionate. Her eyes sparkled as she reached for him. They had made love five hundred times and she showed no sign of diminished interest. He knew he turned her on. He hoped he turned her on more than anyone else. He caressed her in all his clever ways, and she purred and wriggled and glowed. Her nipples stood tall: no faking that. Yet something was wrong. Not with her, with him. He was aloof, remote. He seemed to be watching the proceedings from a point somewhere outside himself, as though he were just a Group onlooker tonight, badly tuned in, not even as much a part of things as Klaus, Bruce, Finn, Van, Dirk. The awareness that he had an audience affected him for the first time. His technique, which depended more on finesse and grace than on fire and force, became a trap, locking him into a series of passionless arabesques and pirouettes. He was distracted, though he never had been before, by the minute telemetry tapes glued to the side of Kay’s neck and the underside of her thigh. He found himself addressing silent messages to the other men. Here, Nate, how do you like that? Grab some haunch, Dirk. Up the old zaboo, Bruce. Uh. Uh. Ah. Oh.
Kay didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss. She came three times in the first fifteen minutes. He doubted that he’d ever come at all. He plugged on, in and out, in and out, moving like a mindless piston. A sort of revenge on Group, he realized. You want to share Kay with me, okay, fellows, but this is all you’re going to get. This. Oh. Oh. Oh. Now at last he felt the familiar climactic tickle, stepped down to a tenth of its normal intensity. He hardly noticed it when he came.
Kay said afterward, “What about that trip? Are we still going to go away somewhere tomorrow?”
“Let’s forget it for the time being,” he said.
He popped to Istanbul alone and spent a day in the covered bazaar buying cheap but intricate trinkets for every woman in Group. At nightfall he popped down to McMurdo Sound, where the merry Antarctic summer was at its height, and spent six hours on the polar ski slopes, coming away with wind-bronzed skin and aching muscles. In the lodge later he met an angular auburn-haired woman from Portugal and took her to bed. She was very good, in a heartless, mechanically proficient way. Doubtless she thought the same of him. She asked him whether he might be interested in joining her Group, which operated out of Lisbon and Ibiza. “I already have an affiliation,” he said. He popped to Addis Ababa after breakfast, checked into the Hilton, slept for a day and a half, and went on to St. Croix for a night of reef-bobbing. When he popped back to California the next day he called Kay at once to learn the news.
“We’ve been discussing rearranging some of the Group couplings,” she said. “Next week, what about you and Lanelle, me and Dirk?”
“Does that mean you’re dropping me?”
“No, not at all, silly. But I do think we need variety.”
“Group was designed to provide us with all the variety we’d ever want.”
“You know what I mean. Besides, you??
?re developing an unhealthy fixation on me as isolated love-object.”
“Why are you rejecting me?”
“I’m not. I’m trying to help you, Murray.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Love me in a healthier way, then.”
That night it was the turn of Maria and Van. The next, Nikki and Finn. After them, Bruce and Mindy. He tuned in for all three, trying to erode his grief in nightly frenzies of lustful fulfillment. By the third night he was very tired and no less grief-smitten. He took the next night off. Then the schedule came up with the first Murray-Lanelle pairing.
He popped to Hawaii and set up his rig in her sprawling beachfront lanai on Molokai. He had bedded her before, of course. Everyone in Group had bedded everyone else during the preliminary months of compatibility testing. But then they all had settled into more or less regular pair-bonding, and he hadn’t approached her since. In the past year the only Group woman he had slept with was Kay. By choice.
“I’ve always liked you,” Lanelle said. She was tall, heavy-breasted, wide-shouldered, with warm brown eyes, yellow hair, skin the color of fine honey. “You’re just a little crazy, but I don’t mind that. And I love screwing Scorpios.”
“I’m a Capricorn.”
“Them too,” she said. “I love screwing just about every sign. Except Virgos. I can’t stand Virgos. Remember, we were supposed to have a Virgo in Group, at the start. I blackballed him.”
They swam and surfed for a couple of hours before doing the calibrating. The water was warm but a brisk breeze blew from the east, coming like a gust of bad news out of California. Lanelle nuzzled him playfully and then not so playfully in the water. She had always been an aggressive woman, a swaggerer, a strutter. Her appetites were enormous. Her eyes glistened with desire. “Come on,” she said finally, tugging at him. They ran to the house and he began to adjust the equipment. It was still early. He thought of Kay and his soul drooped. What am I doing here, he wondered? He lined up the Group apparatus with nervous hands, making many errors. Lanelle stood behind him, rubbing her breasts against his bare back. He had to ask her to stop. Eventually everything was ready and she hauled him to the spongy floor with her, covering his body with hers. Lanelle always liked to be the one on top. Her tongue probed his mouth and her hands clutched his hips and she pressed herself against him, but although her body was warm and smooth and alive, he felt no onset of excitement, not a shred. She put her mouth to him but it was hopeless. He remained limp, dead, unable to function. With everyone tuned in and waiting. “What is it?” she whispered. “What should I do, love?” He closed his eyes and indulged in a fantasy of Kay coupling with Dirk, pure masochism, and it aroused him as far as a sort of half-erect condition, and he slithered into her like a prurient eel. She rocked her way to ecstasy above him. This is garbage, he thought. I’m falling apart. Kay. Kay. Kay.
Then Kay had her night with Dirk. At first Murray thought he would simply skip it. There was no reason, after all, why he had to subject himself to something like that if he expected it to give him pain. It had never been painful for him in the past when Kay did it with other men, inside Group or not, but since the onset of his jealousies everything was different. In theory the Group couples were interchangeable, one pair serving as proxies for all the rest each night, but theory and practice coincided less and less in Murray’s mind these days. Nobody would be surprised or upset if he happened not to want to participate tonight. All during the day, though, he found himself obsessively fantasizing Kay and Dirk, every motion, every sound, the two of them facing each other, smiling, embracing, sinking down onto her bed, entwining, his hands sliding over her slender body, his mouth on her mouth, his chest crushing her small breasts, Dirk entering her, riding her, plunging, driving, coming, Kay coming, then Kay and Dirk arising, going for a cooling swim, returning to the bedroom, facing each other, smiling, beginning again. By late afternoon it had taken place so many times in his fevered imagination that he saw no risk in experiencing the reality of it; at least he could have Kay, if only at one remove, by doing Group tonight. And it might help him to shake off his obsessiveness. But it was worse than he imagined it could be. The sight of Dirk, all bulging muscles and tapering hips, terrified him; Dirk was ready for making love long before the foreplay started, and Murray somehow came to fear that he, not Kay, was going to be the target of that long rigid spear of his. Then Dirk began to caress Kay. With each insinuating touch of his hand it seemed that some vital segment of Murray’s relationship with Kay was being obliterated. He was forced to watch Kay through Dirk’s eyes, her flushed face, her quivering nostrils, her moist, slack lips, and it killed him. As Dirk drove deep into her Murray coiled into a miserable fetal ball, one hand clutching his loins, the other clapped across his lips, thumb in his mouth. He couldn’t stand it at all. To think that every one of them was having Kay at once. Not only Dirk. Nate, Van, Conrad, Finn, Bruce, Klaus, the whole male Group complement, all of them tuning in tonight for this novel Dirk-Kay pairing. Kay giving herself to all of them gladly, willingly, enthusiastically. He had to escape, now, instantly, even though to drop out of Group communion at this point would unbalance everyone’s tuning and set up chaotic eddy currents that might induce nausea or worse in the others. He didn’t care. He had to save himself. He screamed and uncoupled his rig.
He waited two days and went to see her. She was at her exercises, floating like a cloud through a dazzling arrangement of metal rings and loops that dangled at constantly varying heights from the ceiling of her solarium. He stood below her, craning his neck. “It isn’t any good,” he said. “I want us both to withdraw from Group, Kay.”
“That was predictable.”
“It’s killing me. I love you so much I can’t bear to share you.”
“So loving me means owning me?”
“Let’s just drop out for a while. Let’s explore the ramifications of one-on-one. A month, two months, six months, Kay. Just until I get this craziness out of my system. Then we can go back in.”
“So you admit it’s craziness.”
“I never denied it.” His neck was getting stiff. “Won’t you please come down from those rings while we’re talking?”
“I can hear you perfectly well from here, Murray.”
“Will you drop out of Group and go away with me for a while?”
“No.”
“Will you even consider it?”
“No.”
“Do you realize that you’re addicted to Group?” he asked.
“I don’t think that’s an accurate evaluation of the situation. But do you realize that you’re dangerously fixated on me?”
“I realize it.”
“What do you propose to do about it?”
“What I’m doing now,” he said. “Coming to you, asking you to do a one-on-one with me.”
“Stop it.”
“One-on-one was good enough for the human race for thousands of years.”
“It was a prison,” she said. “It was a trap. We’re out of the trap at last. You won’t get me back in.”
He wanted to pull her down from her rings and shake her. “I love you, Kay!”
“You take a funny way of showing it. Trying to limit the range of my experience. Trying to hide me away in a vault somewhere. It won’t work.”
“Definitely no?”
“Definitely no.”
She accelerated her pace, flinging herself recklessly from loop to loop. Her glistening nude form tantalized and infuriated him. He shrugged and turned away, shoulders slumping, head drooping. This was precisely how he had expected her to respond. No surprises. Very well. Very well. He crossed from the solarium into the bedroom and lifted her Group rig from its container. Slowly, methodically, he ripped it apart, bending the frame until it split, cracking the fragile leads, uprooting handfuls of connectors, crumpling the control panel. The instrument was already a ruin by the time Kay came in. “What are you doing?” she cried. He splintered the lovely gleaming calibrat
ion dials under his heel and kicked the wreckage of the rig toward her. It would take months before a replacement rig could be properly attuned and synchronized. “I had no choice,” he told her sadly.
They would have to punish him. That was inevitable. But how? He waited at home, and before long they came to him, all of them, Nate, Van, Dirk, Conrad, Finn, Bruce, Klaus, Kay, Serena, Maria, JoJo, Lanelle, Nikki, Mindy, Lois, popping in from many quarters of the world, some of them dressed in evening clothes, some of them naked or nearly so, some of them unkempt and sleepy, all of them angry in a cold, tight way. He tried to stare them down. Dirk said, “You must be terribly sick, Murray. We feel sorry for you.”
“We really want to help you,” said Lanelle.
“We’re here to give you therapy,” Finn told him.
Murray laughed. “Therapy. I bet. What kind of therapy?”
“To rid you of your exclusivism,” Dirk said. “To burn all the trash out of your mind.”