Silent Partner

beer in the left, a plate of chicken wings, egg rolls, and partially gnawed rib bones in the right.

“I was over by the roses,” said Daschoff, “trying to figure out how they get them to flower like that. Probably fertilize them with old dollar bills.” He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head toward the mansion. “Nice little cottage.”

“Cozy.”

He eyed the conductor. “That’s Narahara, the wunderkind. God knows what he cost.”

He lifted the mug to his mouth and drank. A fringe of foam coated the bottom half of his mustache.

“Budweiser,” he said. “I expected something more exotic. But at least it’s full strength.”

We sat down at an empty table. Larry crossed his legs with effort and took another, deeper swallow of beer. The movement inflated his chest and strained the buttons of his jacket. He unbuttoned it and sat back. A beeper was clipped to his belt.

Larry is almost as wide as he is tall and he waddles; the reasonable assumption is obesity. But in swim trunks he’s as firm as a frozen side of beef- a curious mixture of hypertrophied muscle marbled with suet, the only guy under six feet to have played defensive tackle for the University of Arizona. One time, back in grad school, I watched him bench-press twice his weight at the university gym without breathing hard, then top it off with one-handed push-ups.

He ran blunt fingers through steel-wool hair, wiped his mustache, and watched as Kruse charmed his way through the crowd. The new department head’s route took him closer to our table- near enough to observe the mechanics of small talk but too far to hear what was being said. It was like watching a mime show. Something entitled Party Games.

“Your mentor’s in fine form,” I said.

Larry swallowed more beer and held out his hands. “I told you I was dead busted, D. Would have worked for the devil himself- a bargain-basement Faust.”

“No need to explain, doctor.”

“Why not? It still bugs me, being a party to bullshit.” More beer. “Entire semester a waste. Kruse and I had virtually nothing to do with each other- I doubt if we spoke ten sentences the entire time. I didn’t like him because I thought he was shallow and a phony. And he resented me ’cause I was male- all his other assistants were women.”

“Then why’d he hire you?”

“Because his research subjects were males and they were unlikely to relax watching dirty movies with a bunch of women around taking notes. Not likely to answer the kinds of questions he was asking, either- how often they jerked off, their most frequent masturbation fantasies. Did they do it in public toilets? How often and who they fucked, how long it took them to come. What was their deep-seated primal attitude toward liver in a can.”

“Frontiers of human sexuality,” I said.

He shook his head. “Sad thing is, it could have been valuable. Look at all the clinical data Masters and Johnson came up with. But Kruse wasn’t serious about collecting data. It was as if he was going through the motions.”

“Didn’t the granting agency care?”

“No agency. These were private suckers- rich porn freaks. He promised to make them respectable, put the academic imprimatur on their hobby.”

I turned and looked at Kruse. The blonde in the black dress was teetering on spiked heels.

“Who’s the woman with him?”

“Mrs. K. You don’t remember? Suzanne?”

I shook my head.

“Suzy Straddle? The talk of the department?”

“I must have slept through it.”

“You must have been comatose, D. She was a campus celebrity. Former porn actress, got her nickname for being… limber. Kruse met her at some Hollywood party while doing ‘research.’ She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. He left his second wife for her… or maybe it was the third- who keeps track? Got her enrolled in the university as an English major. I think she lasted three weeks. Ring a bell yet?”

I shook my head. “When was this?”

“’74.”

“In ’74 I was up in San Francisco- at Langley Porter.”

“Oh, yeah, you double-shifted- internship and dissertation same year. Well, D., your precociousness may have dumped you in the job market one year sooner than the rest of us, but you missed out on Suzy. She was really supposed to be something. I actually worked with her- for a week. Kruse assigned her to the study, doing secretarial work. She couldn’t type, screwed up the files. Sweet kid, actually. But somewhat basic.”

The honoree and spouse had come closer. Suzanne Kruse tagged along after her husband as if bolted to a track. She looked fragile, with bony shoulders, a tight-corded neck bisected by a diamond choker, nearly flat chest, hollow cheeks, and sharply pointed chin. Her arms were shapely but sinewy, bony hands ending in long, spindly fingers. Her nails were long and red-lacquered. They clutched her husband’s sleeve, digging into the tweed.

“Must be true love,” I said. “He stuck with her all these years.”

“Don’t bet that it’s wholesome monogamy. Kruse’s got a rep as a major-league pussy hound and Suzy’s known to be tolerant.” He cleared his throat. “Submissive.”

“Literally?”

He nodded. “Remember those parties Kruse used to throw at his place in Mandeville Canyon the first year he joined the faculty? Oh, yeah, you were in Frisco.” He stopped, ate an egg roll and ruminated. “Wait, I think they were still going on in ’75. You were back by ’75, right?”

“Graduated,” I said. “Working at the hospital. I met him once. We didn’t like each other. He wouldn’t have invited me.”

“No one was invited, Alex. These were open houses. In every sense of the word.”

He chucked me under the chin. “You probably wouldn’t have gone, anyway, because you were a good boy, so serious. Actually, I never got further than the door, myself. Brenda took one look at them coating the floor with Wesson oil and hauled my ass out of there. But people who went said they were plus-four orgies, if you could stand fucking other shrinks. Oh! Calcutta! meets B. F. Skinner- what a scary idea, huh? And Suzy Straddle was one of the main attractions- tied up, harnessed, muzzled, and flogged.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Campus gossip. Everyone knew- it was no secret. Back then, no one thought it was all that weird. Pre-microbe days- sexual freedom, liberating the id, expanding the boundaries of consciousness, et cetera. Even the radical libbers in our class thought Kruse was on the cutting edge of something meaningful. Or maybe it just got their rocks off being dominant. Either way, it was philosophically acceptable to flog Suzy because she was fulfilling some need of her own.”

“Kruse do the flogging?”

“Everyone did. It was a real gang scene- she was an equal-opportunity floggee. There, look at her, how she’s holding on to him for dear life. Doesn’t she seem submissive? Probably a passive-dependent personality, perfect symbiotic fit for a power junkie like Kruse.”

To me she looked scared. Adhering to her husband, but staying in the background. I watched her step forward and smile when spoken to, then retreat. Tossing her long hair, checking her nails. Her smile was as flat as a decal, her dark eyes unnaturally bright.

She moved so that the sun hit the diamond choker and threw off sparks. I thought of a dog collar.