The Three Sirens (41 page)

“Applicants were led in one by one, to sit with me while the Hierarchy remained in background. As each came in, Hutia merely announced a terse biographical summary of the person. For example a short man in his middle forties entered. Hutia said, ‘This is Marama, woodcutter, whose first spouse of twenty years died five years ago. Recently, he took, by mutual consent, a second wife considerably his junior, and now he requests a divorce.’ I was given a minute or two for interrogation of applicant.

“Of the six natives I met so briefly, there were four I could make judgments upon at once. The man Marama was good. Also, a thirtyish woman named Teupa. Two other women were less promising, and I rejected them. That left two, and I was undecided which I should take. One was a placid young man, probably not too imaginative, whom I might have handled with ease. The other young man was named Moreturi, and Hutia announced that he was the Chief’s son, which would make him her own son, too. This made Moreturi a personage, but I could not tell if the Hierarchy-wanted me to accept him or reject him.

“Moreturi proved of powerful stature, but I thought his manner and personality less than attractive. He smiled condescendingly the entire period I questioned him, and turned back my inquiries with teasing quips. Veiled hostility, I believe, toward the idea that a female could have magic and authority to solve his problem or advise him. Before we had finished, I had decided that he would be uncooperative and disruptive and that I had better select the more compliant man. After Moreturi rose, smirking, and left the room, I turned to the panel to tell them I would choose the other and not Moreturi. Somehow, it came out that I wanted Moreturi. It was as involuntary as the speech blunder I committed several months ago in Beverly Hills.

“Sitting here, I try to analyze why, once having made the mistake, I did not retract it before the Hierarchy and present them with the correct name. I suppose, unconsciously, I preferred the Chief’s son for a patient. I do not think it is because of his high station, which would give me prestige in the village. Nor do I believe it is because his position will enhance my paper. I think I was compelled to choose him because his insolence had challenged me to do so. Also, to prove to him that I am not merely an inferior female. It always irritates me when I run into the kind of man who thinks women are good for one thing and nothing else. (In fact, this may be a part of his problem.) At any rate—”

There was a heavy knocking. Startled, Rachel looked up and saw the cane door shudder under someone’s fist.

“Come in—come in,” she called out.

The door flung open, and Moreturi filled it, squinting down at her with a grin, inspecting her from his manly height. He nodded a slow greeting, stepped inside, closed the door softly, and waited, rocking on the balls of his bare feet.

“They say you chose me to come,” he drawled. “I am here.”

The unexpectedness of his appearance—somehow, she had thought that Marama or Teupa would be first—and the fact that he had come upon her just as she had been confiding his name to her notebook, both disconcerted and embarrassed her. It was as if she had been caught
flagrante delicto
. She could not restrain the redness on her cheeks.

“Yes,” she said, “I—I thought we should get started.”

Momentarily, she was dumb. All of the familiar routine and patter was impossible in this situation. No couch. No person who respected her. No person who desperately sought her help. No person like any person she had ever known, no neat tie and shirt and narrow-shouldered suit, but instead, Rousseau’s noble savage, un-appareled except for the conspicuous white bag between his legs. Her worried eyes lifted to meet his slanted mocking ones.

“What do you want me to do, Miss Doctor?” He had given her title a special emphasis, to show that his regard for her was still qualified by cynicism.

Quickly, she shut the diary, and shoved it into her purse. She patted her hair, and sat more erect on her heightened mattings, recovering some vestige of composure.

“Let me explain, Moreturi,” she said, attempting a schoolteacher approach. “In my country, when one is troubled, has a problem, and seeks psychiatric care, he comes to my office. I have a couch—like a cot, a bed—and the patient lies down, and I sit on a chair next to him or behind him … that—that is the way we do it.”

“What should I do now?” he asked stubbornly.

She indicated the thick strips of matting beside her. “Lie down here, please.”

He seemed to shrug, not with his shoulders, but with his eyes. As if to indulge a child, he carried his muscular body past her, knelt, and stretched out at full length on his back.

“Make yourself as comfortable as possible,” she said, not looking at him.

“It is not easy, Miss Doctor. Here we do not lie this way except to sleep or make love.”

She was too conscious of his presence, and she knew that she could not avoid it. Deliberately, she half-turned to face him, and then, having done so, she regretted it. She had meant to hold on his face, the taunt in it, but almost by uncontrolled reflex her eyes went to his sleek, block chest, and narrow hips, and intrusive codpiece.

Hastily, she averted her eyes, and studied the floor. “It is not necessary to lie down, but it is better,” she said. “It is more comfortable. This is a method of treatment we have to relieve you, to make you happier, better integrated, to free you of guilts and doubts, to help you correct poor judgments and—and impulses. You are called the analysand. I am your analyst. I cannot cure you. I can only advise you, help you cure yourself.” “What must I do, Miss Doctor?”

“You must talk, just talk and talk, whatever comes to your mind, good, bad, no matter what. We call this free association. You must not think of me. You must allow nothing to interrupt or hinder your flow of memories, feelings, ideas. Do not worry about being polite. Be as rude or frank as you wish. Speak out the very things you would usually not mention aloud, even to your wife or family or male friends. Speak of everything, no matter how trivial, how secretly important. And when you hesitate to repeat some idea, image, memory, know that I want to hear that, too, and want you to hear it aloud, for it may have significance.”

“I talk,” said Moreturi. “What do you do when I talk, Miss Doctor?”

“I listen,” she said, her eyes finding his face at last. “I listen, sometimes discussing certain points, commenting, advising, but most of the time merely being attentive to what you are saying.”

“That will help me?”

“It probably will. To what degree it can help in six weeks, I cannot say. But out of all of your confused, unrelated, mixed-up, seemingly meaningless thoughts there will eventually appear—first to me, later to you—a meaning. Things will add up, things will connect, things will fall in place. Central threads will become visible, and we can draw them out, and find their sources, and eventually, we will find out what is wrong.”

His supercilious demeanor had vanished. “Nothing is wrong,” he said.

“Why are you here?”

“Because I was told to be hospitable and—” He stopped abruptly.

“And what? What other reason, Moreturi?”

“You,” he said. “I am curious about an American woman.”

She suddenly felt uneasy and incompetent. “What is so curious about an American woman?”

“I look at all of you and I think—I think—” He halted. “Miss Doctor, did you mean I should speak everything in my mind?” She was sorry for her professional invitation, but she nodded her permission.

“I think, they are only half-women,” he said. “They have jobs like men. They speak words like men. They cover all parts of their beauty. They are not full women.”

“I see.”

“So I am curious.”

“Then you intend to examine me while I try to help you?” said Rachel.

“I intend to help you while you help me,” he corrected her nicely.

Good-by old Seventeenth Amendment, she thought. When in Rome, she thought. “Good,” she said. “Maybe we can help one another.”

“You do not believe it,” he said.

Be honest with them, Maud had cautioned, do not tell a lie. “I believe it,” she lied. “Perhaps you will help me. Right now, I’m concerned with you. If you are concerned with yourself, we can go on.”

“Go on,” he said, suddenly sullen.

“You say there is nothing wrong with you. You say you are here for other reasons. Very well; yet, you have appealed to the Hierarchy for assistance?”

“To divorce my wife.”

“Then there is a problem.”

“Not mine,” he said. “Her problem.”

“Well, let’s find out. Why do you want a divorce?”

He studied her suspiciously. “I have reasons.”

“Tell me your reasons. That is why I am here.”

He fell to brooding, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Rachel waited and waited. She surmised that almost a minute had passed before he turned his head toward her.

“You are a woman,” he said. “You will not understand man’s reasons.”

“You yourself told me that I am not like your women, I am a half-woman, more like a man. Regard me as a man, a man doctor.”

The absurdity of this appealed to him, and for the first time in a while, he smiled. The smile, she could see, was not born of the previous mockery but of genuine merriment. “It is impossible,” he said. “I take your garments off with my eyes and I see a woman.”

It was the second time his impertinence had made her blush, and this reaction left Rachel perplexed. Then she knew that it was not impertinence that got through to her, but rather a sexual arrogance that he possessed. “I’ll tell you what, Moreturi,” she said, “let’s go at this another way. Tell me a little about your marriage. What is your wife’s name? What is she like? When did you marry her?”

The specific questions reached him, and he responded directly. “My wife is Atetou. She is twenty-eight. I am thirty-one. She is not like most village girls. She is more serious. I am not that way. We have been married six years.”

“Why did you marry her?” Rachel wanted to know.

“Because she was different,” Moreturi said instantly.

“You married her because she was different, and now you want to divorce her because she is different?”

A shrewd expression crossed Moreturi’s countenance. “You mix the words up,” he said.

“But it’s true, what I said.”

“Yes, maybe true,” he conceded.

“Was Atetou your first love when you married her?”

“First?” Moreturi was astonished. “I was an old man when I married her. I had twenty girls before her.”

“That’s not an answer to my question. I did not inquire how many girls you’d had. I inquired if Atetou was your first love.”

“I did answer your question,” Moreturi insisted, combatively. “Atetou was not my first love because I had twenty girls before her and I loved them all. I do not make sex with a woman unless I love her with my whole inside and outside.”

He was earnest, she could see, and devoid of sexual arrogance now. “Yes, I understand,” she said.

“I love even the first one, who was fifteen years older than me.”

“How old were you with the first one?”

“Sixteen. It was after the manhood ceremony.”

“What kind of ceremony?”

“In the Sacred Hut. They took my—my—”

“Genital,” she said hastily.

“Yes. They took it and quick slit the top foreskin.”

“Like circumcision in America?”

“Tom Courtney told me no, you do it different, you take off the whole foreskin, we open only the upper part. Then it heals and there is a scab. Before the scab falls off, we are taken to the Social Aid place to find an older, experienced woman.” He smiled, relishing some memory. “I took a widow of thirty-one. Even though I was a boy, I was strong as a tree. She was stronger. I lost the scab quickly. I was fond of her. For a year after, in the Social Aid place, when I could have anyone, I would have her.”

The room was humid, and Rachel hoped that she was not obviously perspiring. “I see,” she said. Then, to say anything, “What do you use for contraceptives here?” He did not understand. She elaborated. “To retard—to stop conception of children?”

“The first one taught me to rub the prevention salve on the genital.”

“A salve?”

“To make feeble the male sperm. It retards the procreation more than not, though Tom says you have better means in America.”

“Very interesting. I’ll have to look into it.” She hesitated, and then said, “We started out discussing your wife—”

“Not my first love,” he said with a smile.

“That’s clear,” she said dryly. “And now you don’t like her because she is different.”

He rose on an elbow, and instinctively, she recoiled. “We have talked of love matters and so I can speak more frankly of Atetou,” he said. “She does not like to do the—the—I cannot think of Tom’s word—the word for embrace—”

“Intercourse? Coitus?”

“Yes, yes—she does not like it, and for me it is a joy all the time. I am not angry with Atetou. The High Spirit makes each person not the same, but it is not good they be put together. When I wish the joy of it, my wife does not. It is difficult. More and more, I must go to the Social Aid. More and more, my night dreams are filled with the women I have seen in the day. Too much, I wait every year for the festival.”

Rachel had a hundred questions now, but she locked them securely inside. Moreturi’s lustiness repelled her. She wanted no more of it dinned into her ears. Worse, for the first time, Atetou had become a living person in her mind, because Atetou had a face, and it was Rachel’s own. Her mind slipped back to the glacial Miss Mitchell on the couch in Beverly Hills. And then to others. And then back to Atetou. And finally to herself. The half-women.

She consulted her watch. “I have taken too much of your time, Moreturi—” She was conscious of him sitting up, the bulk of him. She swallowed. “I—I have a better picture of your immediate problem.”

“You do not blame me for needing the divorce?”

“Not at all. You are what you are. There is nothing wrong with your—your requirements.”

His features reflected the slightest admiration. “You are more than I thought. You are a woman.”

“Thank you.”