Overload

  Nim said firmly, “The hell with Jiminy! I’m here and I’m staying.”

  “I’m glad.” Karen smiled. “There’s some wine left. Shall we kill the bottle?”

  “Good idea.” Nim went into the kitchen, found glasses and the recorked Cabernet. Returning, he divided the remaining wine and held one of the glasses while Karen tipped.

  “I feel a wonderful glow,” she said. “The wine helped, but that isn’t all of it.”

  On impulse he leaned over, raised Karen’s face in his hand, and kissed her once more. She responded as ardently as the other times, except that the kiss was longer. At length, reluctantly, he moved back, though their faces remained close.

  “Nimrod.” It was a whisper.

  “Yes, Karen.”

  “I think I’m ready to go to bed.”

  He found his pulse beating faster. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Unplug my wheelchair first.”

  Nim went to the rear of the chair and did so. The power cord retracted into a housing as the battery on the chair took over.

  A sudden smile of mischief flashed across Karen’s face. “Follow me!”

  Using the electric wheelchair’s blow-sip tube control, and with a speed and dexterity which amazed him, Karen maneuvered herself from the living room, down a small hallway, and into a bedroom. There was a single bed, neatly turned down. Beside it a low-wattage light burned dimly. Karen swung her chair so it was at the foot of the bed, facing away.

  “There!” She looked at Nim expectantly.

  “All right. What next?”

  “You lift me out of the chair, then just pivot—the way you would if you were playing golf—and put me on the bed. When Josie does it we use a body sling that winds up like a crane. But you’re strong, Nimrod. You can lift me in your arms.”

  He did so, gently but surely, aware of the warm softness of her body, and afterward followed instructions which Karen gave him about her breathing apparatus. He switched on a small Bantam respirator already at the bedside; at once he could hear it cycling—a dial showed fifteen pounds of pressure; the rate was eighteen breaths a minute. He put a tube from the respirator into Karen’s mouth; as she began breathing the pressure went to thirty. Now she could dispense with the pneumo-belt she had been wearing beneath her clothes.

  “Later,” Karen said, “I’ll ask you to put a chest respirator on me. Not yet, though.”

  She was horizontal on the bed, her long hair spread over the pillow. The sight, Nim thought, would have excited Botticelli.

  He asked, “What do I do now?”

  “Next …” she said, and in the soft, dim light he saw a blush bloom again on her cheeks. “Next, Nimrod, you undress me.”

  Karen’s eyes were partly closed. Nim’s hands were shaking and he wondered if what he thought was happening could be true. Not long ago, he remembered, he had told himself that falling in love with Karen would involve love without sex—in contrast to sex without love which he had experienced so often before. Was he wrong? With Karen could there conceivably be love and sex? But if it happened, surely he would be despicable, taking brutish advantage of her helplessness. Could he? Should he? The ethical issues seemed a nightmare tangle of unanswered questions, a moral labyrinth.

  He had unbuttoned Karen’s blouse. Now he raised her shoulders while he eased it from her arms. She wore no brassiere. Her small breasts were superbly shaped, the tiny nipples slightly raised.

  “Touch me, Nimrod.” It was a soft command. Responding, he moved his hands lightly over her breasts, his fingertips caressing, then knelt and kissed them. At once he felt her nipples harden. Karen murmured, “Oh, that’s wonderful!”

  A moment later she told him, “The skirt unfastens on the left side.” Still gentle, he unbuttoned and removed it.

  When Karen was naked, doubts and anxiety still plagued him. But he moved his hands, slowly and with skillful sensuality, as he knew by now she wanted. Soft murmurings made her pleasure clear. After a while she whispered, “I want to tell you something.”

  He whispered back, “I’m listening.”

  “I’m not a virgin. There was a boy … it happened when I was fifteen, just before I …” She stopped, and he saw that tears were rolling down her cheeks.

  “Karen, don’t!”

  She shook her head. “I want to tell you. Because I want you to know there hasn’t been anyone else in all those years; no one, between then—and you.”

  He waited, letting the purport of what she had said sink in before he asked, “Are you telling me …?”

  “I want you, Nimrod. All the way. Now!”

  “Oh Christ!” Nim breathed the words, aware that his own desires—never difficult to unleash—were making themselves known in urgent terms. Then he threw the complex equations overboard and started taking off his clothes.

  Nim had wondered, like others he supposed, how it would be for an unimpaired man to make sexual love to a quadriplegic woman. Would someone like Karen be totally passive? Would the man make all the effort, obtaining no response? And in the end would there be pleasure for one, or both, or neither?

  He was discovering the answers, and all were unexpected.

  Karen was demanding, responsive, exciting, satisfying.

  Yes, in one sense she was passive. Her body, other than her head, was unable to move. Yet Nim could feel the effect of their lovemaking transmitting itself through her skin, vagina, breasts, and most of all her passionate cries and kisses. It was not, he thought in a flash of whimsy, at all like having sex with a mannequin, as some might suppose. Nor was the pleasure brief. It was prolonged, as if neither wanted it to end. He had a sense, over and over, of glorious eroticism, of floating and soaring, of joy and loving, until at last, as always, the ending came: Attainment of a summit; climax of a symphony; the zenith of a dream. And for them both. Could a quadriplegic woman have an orgasm? Emphatically, yes!

  And afterward … once more … a return to tenderness and kindly loving.

  Nim lay still, carefully considerate of Karen, blissful, spent. He wondered what she was thinking and if, in the aftermath, she had regrets.

  As if telepathy had delivered both questions, Karen stirred. She said drowsily but happily, “Nimrod, a mighty hunter of the Lord.” Then: “This day has been the best in all my life.”

  4

  Cynthia said, “I had a hard day and I could use a drink. There’s usually scotch around here. How about you?”

  Nim told her, “Count me in.” It was an hour since he had made love to Karen, who was now sleeping. He felt the need for a drink too.

  Karen’s older sister had come to the apartment twenty minutes ago, using her own key. Nim had finished dressing sometime earlier.

  She had introduced herself as Cynthia Woolworth. “Before you ask the question, no, my husband—unfortunately—is not connected with that wealthy family. I used to spend half my life answering that; now I get it out of the way at the beginning. Sloan was simpler.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll never mention it again.”

  Cynthia, he observed, was different from Karen, but also similar. Where Karen was blonde and slim, Cynthia was brunette, her figure full, though not excessively. Clearly, too, Cynthia’s personality was more forceful and outgoing, though perhaps, Nim thought, the misfortune which life had dealt Karen early, and their differences in life styles since, could account for that. What both had in common was a rare natural beauty—the same delicate symmetry of features, full lips, wide blue eyes, a flawless skin and—more developed in Cynthia—elegant, slim hands. It occurred to Nim that both Sloan girls had inherited their charms from their mother, Henrietta, in whom traces of an earlier loveliness still lingered. Nim remembered that Cynthia was three years older than Karen, which made, her forty-two, although she appeared younger.

  Cynthia located the scotch, then ice and soda, and mixed two drinks efficiently. The quick economy of her movements showed she was used to managing for herself. She had demonstrated that from
the time she arrived at the apartment, shook out her dripping raincoat and hung it in the bathroom, then following mutual introductions, instructed Nim, “All right, you sit down and relax—here, I brought the evening paper—and I’ll do what’s needed for my sister.”

  She had walked into Karen’s bedroom, closing the door so that Nim could hear a murmur of voices, but no more.

  When Cynthia came out fifteen minutes later, moving quietly, she announced that Karen was asleep.

  Now, seated facing Nim, Cynthia swirled the liquor and ice in her glass and informed him, “I know what happened here tonight. Karen told me.”

  Startled by the directness, all he could think of in response was, “I see.”

  Cynthia threw back her head and laughed. She pointed an accusing finger. “You’re scared! You’re wondering if I’ll be the avenging elder sister. Or if I’ll call the cops maybe, and holler ‘rape!’”

  He said stiffly, “I’m not sure I want, or need to discuss with you …”

  “Oh, come on!” Cynthia had continued to laugh; now suddenly she stopped. Her face became serious. “Look, Nimrod—if I can call you that—I’m sorry if I embarrassed you, and I can see I did. So now let me tell you something. Karen thinks you’re a kind, sweet, gentle, loving man, and the best thing that’s ever happened to her. And if you’re interested in an outside opinion, I feel the same way.”

  Nim stared at her. As he did, he realized that for the second time tonight he was seeing a woman cry.

  “Damn! I didn’t mean to do that.” With a tiny handkerchief Cynthia wiped her tears away. “But I guess I’m as happy and satisfied as Karen is herself.” She regarded Nim in frank approval. “Well, almost.”

  Nina’s tension of a moment earlier dissolved. Grinning, he acknowledged, “I can only say one thing. I’ll be damned!”

  “I can say more than that, and will,” Cynthia said. “How about another drink first?”

  Without waiting for an answer she scooped up Nim’s glass and replenished it, along with her own. Returning to her seat, she sipped the scotch before continuing, carefully choosing her words.

  “For your sake, Nimrod, as much as Karen’s, I want you to realize something. What happened between you and my sister tonight was wonderful and beautiful. You may not know this, or understand it, but some people treat quadriplegics the way they would a leper. I’ve seen it happen sometimes; Karen sees it more. That’s why, in my book, you come out as Mr. Nice Guy. You’ve never thought of her, or treated her, as anything but a woman … Oh, for God’s sake! … Here I am crying again.”

  Cynthia’s handkerchief was clearly inadequate. Nim handed her his own and she glanced at him gratefully. “It’s the little things you do … Karen told me that …”

  He said humbly, “It all started, you know—my coming to see Karen—accidentally.”

  “Most things do.”

  “And what went on between us tonight … well, I didn’t plan it. I didn’t even think …” Nim stopped. “It simply happened.”

  “I know that,” Cynthia said. “And while we’re about it, let me ask you something else. Did you—do you—have any guilt feelings?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Don’t! I read something once, when I was finding out how I could best help Karen, by a man named Milton Diamond. He’s a medical professor in Hawaii who made a study of sex and disabled people. I may not have the words exactly right, but the sense of what he wrote was: The disabled have enough problems without having conventional guilt-laden values forced on them … private sexual satisfaction takes precedence over public approval; therefore any guilt is wrong … and sexually, for disabled people, anything goes.” Cynthia added almost fiercely, “So don’t you have any guilts either. Wipe them out!”

  “I’m not sure,” Nim said, “if I can take any more surprises tonight. Just the same, I’m glad we talked.”

  “I am too. It’s a part of learning, and I had to learn about Karen, just as you have.” Cynthia continued sipping her scotch, then said meditatively, “Would you believe me if I told you that when Karen was eighteen and I was twenty-one I hated her?”

  “I’d find it hard to believe.”

  “Well, it’s true. I hated her because she got all the attention from our parents and their friends. Some days, at home, it was as if I didn’t exist. It was always, Karen this, and Karen that! What can we do for dear, poor Karen? Never, What can we do for healthy, normal Cynthia? It was my twenty-first birthday. I wanted a big party but my mother said it was ‘inappropriate’ because of Karen. So we had a little family tea—just my parents and me; Karen was in the hospital then—a lousy tea, and a shoddy, cheap little cake. As for my birthday presents, they were just tokens because guess where all the available money was going, every cent. I’m ashamed to say it, but that night I prayed for Karen to die.”

  In the silence which followed, even through drawn drapes, Nim could hear wind-driven rain against the window. He had understood what Cynthia had told him, and was moved. Yet, in a corner of his mind he thought: Glorious rain! To a utilities man, rain, sleet or snow meant stored-up hydroelectric power for the dry season ahead. He pulled back his thoughts and spoke to Cynthia.

  “So when did your feelings change?”

  “Not for years, and even then slowly. Before that I went through my own guilt period. I felt guilty because I was whole and Karen wasn’t. Guilty because I could do the things she couldn’t—play tennis, go to parties, neck with boys.” Cynthia sighed. “I wasn’t a good sister.”

  “But you are now.”

  “As much as I can be—after taking care of a husband, house and kids. It was after my first child was born that I began to understand and appreciate my little sister and we became close. Now the two of us are dear, loving friends, sharing ideas and confidences. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Karen. And there isn’t anything she doesn’t tell me.”

  Nim said drily, “I’d gathered that.”

  They talked on. Cynthia told him more about herself. She had married at twenty-two; one reason was to get away from home. Since then her husband had held a succession of jobs; his present one was as a shoe salesman. Nim surmised that the marriage was barely adequate, if that, and Cynthia and her husband stayed together for lack of an alternative and the sake of their three children. Before her marriage, Cynthia had taken singing lessons; now, four nights a week she sang in a second-rate nightclub to supplement her husband’s meager pay. Tonight was a non-singing night and Cynthia would stay with Karen, her husband taking care of their one child still at home. Cynthia had two more scotches while they talked; Nim declined. After a while her voice became slightly slurred.

  At length Nim stood up. “It’s late. I have to go.”

  “I’ll get your raincoat,” Cynthia said. “You’ll need it, even going to your car.” She added, “Or you can stay if you want. There’s a couch makes up into a bed.”

  “Thanks. I’d better not.”

  She helped him on with the coat and, at the apartment front door, kissed him fully on the lips. “That’s partly for Karen,” Cynthia said, “partly for me.”

  Driving home, he tried to push the thought away as being predatory and disloyal, but it persisted: So many attractive, desirable women in the world, and so many available and willing to share sexual pleasures. Experience, instinct, her own unmistakable signals told him: Cynthia was available too.

  5

  Among other things, Nim Goldman was a wine buff. He had a keen nose and palate and especially liked varietal wines from the Napa Valley, which were California’s finest and in good years rated with the premium wines of France. So he was glad to go to the Napa Valley with Eric Humphrey—even in late November—though he wondered why the chairman had invited him along.

  The occasion was to celebrate a homecoming. An honored, victorious, sentimental homecoming of one of California’s most distinguished sons.

  The Honorable Paul Sherman Yale.

  Until two weeks earlier he
had been a revered Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

  If ever a single individual merited the accolade “Mr. California,” unquestionably it was Paul Sherman Yale. All that a Californian might wish or strive to be had been exemplified in his distinguished career, now drawing to a close.

  Since his early twenties when—two years ahead of most contemporaries—he was graduated with honors from Stanford Law School, until his eightieth birthday, which he recently celebrated, Paul Yale had filled a succession of increasingly important public roles. As a young lawyer he established a statewide reputation as a champion of the poor and powerless. He sought, and won, a seat in the California Assembly and, after two terms there, moved up to become the youngest member ever elected to the state Senate. His legislative record in both houses was remarkable. He was the author of early legislation to protect minorities and outlaw sweatshops. He also sponsored laws which aided California farmers and fishermen.

  Moving on from the Senate, Paul Sherman Yale was elected the state’s Attorney General, in which office he declared war on organized crime and sent some of its big-name practitioners to jail. A logical next step was to Governor, a post he could have had for the asking. Instead he accepted President Truman’s invitation to fill a vacancy on the U. S. Supreme Court. His Senate confirmation hearings were brief, their outcome a foregone conclusion since—both then and later—no breath of scandal or corruption ever touched his name, and another sobriquet sometimes applied to him was “Mr. Integrity.”

  While serving on the highest court, he wrote many opinions which reflected his broad humanity, yet were praised by legal scholars as being “pure law.” Even his dissents were widely quoted, and some prompted legislative changes. Amidst it all, Mr. Justice Yale never forgot that he and his wife Beth were Californians and, at every opportunity, declared his continuing affection for his native state.

  When, in due season, he concluded that his work was done, he resigned quietly and the Yales left Washington, typically without fuss, returning—as Paul Yale expressed it to Newsweek—“westward and home.” He turned down the suggestion of a massive testimonial banquet in Sacramento, yet consented to a more modest welcome luncheon in his beloved birthplace, the Napa Valley, where the Yales planned to live.