The Quiet Pools

CHAPTER 15 —AAA— “… this unwelcome intruder…”

There was almost nothing Christopher McCutcheon liked about coming to see Eric Meyfarth, R.T.

Christopher hated the ritual of signing Loi’s complaint and being called by Meyfarth for confirmation. He hated scheduling the appointment and leaving work in midday. He hated the walled canyons of downtown Houston, the warren-towers of plex and chrome.

He hated the office manager’s earnest cheeriness, and the tight mouths and guarded eyes of the other clients waiting with him in the twenty-sixth-floor lounge. No, not clients—patients. Patients that belonged in a back-street clinic, seeking treatment for some embarrassing disease, deathly afraid of being asked why they were there. That was how they behaved—no help to Christopher, fighting against the same feeling. Up went the walls, driving Christopher back behind his own.

The little man in the pinstripe cap and white bristle-brush moustache, raccoon eyes furtively glancing around the room, retreating to the window when Christopher spoke to him. The woman in the short white skirt and the glittery cascade of string earrings, paging hopefully through a glamour magazine in search of one more secret. The child-faced woman in the blue flower-print dress, her toddler on a tether, a faraway look in her eyes until she was brought back to her boredom by the tug of her charge.

Never give them your eyes. There must a school which teaches that as a survival skill, Christopher thought. When by chance eyes met there was no contact. They stood mask-to-mask for the instant of surprise, before turning politely away. It was as though they held to their masks more tightly for knowing that beyond the door, they would be expected to let them fall.

So Christopher waited, unhappy and uncomfortable, for the part he hated the most.

Not that he had any personal enmity for Meyfarth. Referred by their former arty in Oakland, Christopher and Loi had come to see Meyfarth for baselining in the first weeks after arriving in Houston. They had come back a second time a few months later to introduce Jessie.

Neither session had been particularly demanding, and Christopher had come away with qualified good feelings. He would have preferred they sign with a woman, but the bearded and round-bellied relationship technologist had a calming presence and, it seemed, a genuine heart.

But then, Christopher had expected to see him only for periodic checkups and the odd arbitration, not with a major family crisis blowing. That pushed ugly memories to the fore, memories of the long, angry sessions when his marriage to Donald and Kristen was collapsing. Whether it was their arty’s incompetence or his own intransigence, all he learned from that episode was that he resisted being dissected, and resented being made to feel a failure.

And there was no way that he would be able to escape either experience in the sessions to come.

With the unerring accuracy of a master archer, Meyfarth went straight for that discomfort in the first five minutes.

“How do you feel about being here?” he asked, twirling a pencil. “I always wonder when it’s someone from an open family. All that legalistic leverage is absent.”

“I’m not too happy about it,” Christopher confessed.

“Not too happy because—”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“Like going to a proctologist?” Meyfarth asked with a smile.

“Somebody’s always wrong. I just don’t like it.”

“How do you feel about refusing Jessie a baby?”

“I’m sorry I had to hurt her feelings.”

“Should she have expected you to say no?”

“Well, yes—if she’d thought about it. If she’d thought about me.”

“What about the argument last Tuesday? How do you feel about that?”

Frowning, Christopher allowed, “I’m not too proud of it.”

“Why?”

“I lost my temper.”

“Anything else?”

“It wasn’t that big a deal.”

“How do you feel about me being party to all your family secrets?”

“I like you all right.”

Meyfarth sat back. “I can’t work with forty percent answers, Christopher. And you can’t learn anything from them, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you haven’t given me a soul-deep honest answer yet. ‘Well—.’ ‘Not too happy.’ ‘Not too proud.’ ‘A little uncomfortable.’ ‘Something like that.’ ‘I’m sorry I hurt her feelings.’ ”

“Those are honest answers.”

“Half-truths are lies, Christopher. It’s far more serious when you tell them to yourself than when you tell them to me. But I’m far more useful to you when I know the truth. Shall we try it again?” he asked rhetorically. “You don’t want to be here.”

Surprised, it took Christopher a moment to get the word out. “No.”

“But you think you have to be, to satisfy Loi.”

Grudgingly, “Yes.”

“You don’t know me, you don’t know if you trust me, and you think I’m going to be on Loi and Jessie’s side, anyway.”

A rueful smile. “Yes to all three.”

“If you’re pushed to the wall, you’ve decided to compromise on having a baby with Jessie. But you’ll be damned if you’re going to be talked into letting John Fields into the family. That’s where you’ve drawn the line in the dirt.”

Christopher stared. It was like having his thoughts read. It was like being naked. “Yeah,” he said, almost a whisper.

Meyfarth nodded, satisfied. “That’s better. Now we can start to work. Do you want your family to survive?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Christopher said. “That’s really why I’m here.”

“Are you prepared to risk discovering yourself?”

“What’s the risk in that?”

“Easily said when you think you already know who you are and what you want,” Meyfarth said. “But this won’t be easy. Extended families are so damned complicated. Six vectors with three, twelve with four, not even counting second-order pairings. And noncontract families are even more complicated, because you don’t have all the crutches. Do you know, what you three are doing is actually closer to the original conception than most of my clients?”

“How so?”

“I’ve read Stan Dale’s original treatises. I think he’d have been horrified to have people locked together by contracts rather than by love, and even more horrified to have his name hung on the result. But that’s what happens when a bureaucracy crosses paths with a philosophy.” Meyfarth shrugged. “Ancient history. I’d like to see you succeed, Christopher. I really would. If you can do it without my help, more power to you. If you’d like my help, I’m ready to do what I can.”

Christopher sighed, a pale breath. “This isn’t going to be much fun.”

A polite smile. “You never know,” Meyfarth said. And he waited.

“I don’t know why, but it’s a hard thing to say,” Christopher said.

“I know.”

Christopher frowned, looked up at one corner of the ceiling, then back at Meyfarth. “I’d like your help.”

“Okay,” said Meyfarth, sitting forward. “Then let that be the reason that you’re here. Not Loi or Jessie or John Fields or the baby. This is about Christopher McCutcheon. This is for Christopher McCutcheon.”

Christopher found himself with nothing to say.

“Does that feel better than the reason you walked in here with?” Meyfarth prompted.

“Yeah,” Christopher said, breaking into a smile. “That feels all right.”

Christopher could no more stop himself from referencing the hyper than he could stop himself from breathing. Not only did he not need Meyfarth’s explication of “ancient history,” but he probably could have taught a short course in it himself from what he had read in the last week.

The basic facts were simple. The profession of relationship technologist had grown up alongside the contract Dale family, which in turn had been given its life’s breath by the turn-of-the-millennium AIDS epidemic.

Behind that skeleton was a fascinating and convoluted story. At the end of the twentieth century, every generation in memory had bowed to the nature of the beast and given tacit, usually hypocritical, consent to indiscretions of the flesh—men driven by old programs, women freed by new technologies. But consent was summarily withdrawn by HTLV-III and its mutant heirs, ruling final, no appeal.

With the wages of sin death, monogamy fast regained its fading respect—and collected a bandwagon’s worth of champions. The new fidelity advocacy was an odd alliance comprised, at the most fundamental level, of those women whose security was threatened by male philandering and those men whose control was threatened by female sexual emancipation. Whether they wore cleric’s garb, a doctor’s coat, or the prim dress of a moral reformer, they embraced AIDS almost gleefully as the means to a final victory.

This was true to some degree in every Western nation, but particularly true in the United States, which at the time was already skating down the slope toward social repression. Testing for the damning virus followed the trail blazed by testing for drugs. The lid came down on prostitution, the rad-lib argument that it was a victimless crime rendered laughable.

Pornography, which might otherwise have flourished, fell under ever more restrictive laws, with the Trojan horse of a campaign against homoerotic and analerotic material leading the way to sweeping condemnation of all explicit expression. Hardening hearts victimized the afflicted a second time, shutting them out of medical care, jobs, and even the communities they had long called home.

But even in the United States, the victory did not last long. Like a dammed river in flood season, the accumulating sexual energy penetrated every crevice and eroded every point of weakness, seeking its own level.

To start with, the well-networked Womyn’s community, its lesbian leanings anathema to both species of monogamist, was barely touched by the plague. It became ever more visible as a political constituency and ever more attractive as a sexual safe haven; it exercised its economic might by building Aurora Sanctuary, the smallest of the satlands.

Separatist hard-liners resented the influx of the “fashionably femme,” but their presence made for a more credible voice and the leverage to win two-woman couples the right to contract “marriages” in five states.

Technology offered an even more important outlet. While the public media were drying up, the private media were heating up. Personal computers and Sky LANs, video camcorders and digital cameras, even faxphones and the lowly copier put more than enough resources into the hands of individuals to allow a revolution in home-grown co-op erotica.

What’s more, those who took fantasy one step further found that phone dates and compusex meant that safe sex did not have to mean no sex at all; that there could be intimacy without intercourse. By the time scanning image telephones gave way to hi-band stereo com tanks, a whole new culture and etiquette had grown up around what unfriendly observers ridiculed as “secondhand sex” and “technology abetting pathology.” Defenders cheerfully called it “masturdating” and went right on.

But the frontal assault on the new monogamy came not from without, but within.

The three key elements were in place almost from the outset, but it took a decade and a half for the synergy between them to jell. The brave notion that people are not by nature either sexually or emotionally monogamous was already in circulation, quietly promulgated by a new school of human-growth therapists such as the Dales and pioneer researchers like the Constantines. (Books by both were in the hyper, though Christopher passed on reading them.)

On the parenting front, with two-child two-earner families increasingly the norm and one-parent families still all too plentiful, there was a continuing crisis in child care. Millions were wrestling with the unhappy alternatives of toddler warehouses and the unrewarding solitude—for child and parent alike—of home.

And—the final straw—home was more likely than not to be rented space. The bloated national debt and a minor worldwide recession had blessed credit sellers with rates high enough to squeeze even the middle class out of owning a decent house. (Here Christopher ignored another lengthy side-thread, this time on the “leveraged prosperity” of the Conservative Revolution.)

All three problems had a single solution, and thousands of families found it on their own. A third person or second couple meant an extra income, extra hands, siblings for the solo child, sexual variety with security. For those who could solve the jealousy riddle, the “big houses” were stronger economic units, stronger emotional units—stronger families.

But it was not until a California woman named Jennifer Allison and her two husbands offered their relationship up for dissection that the question of group marriage entered the national dialog. With the assistance of the Bush Foundation for Freedom, the Allisons sued for the right to a contract marriage under their state’s “lezzie law.” The issues were the same—custodial rights, spousal rights, taxes and insurance, wills and inheritances—and the arguments on both sides had a familiar ring.

Even so, the story was a media sensation, and Allison, Allison Allison v. The State of California went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court before finally being resolved 6-5 in favor of the plaintiffs. The case turned on the narrow issue of what, for federal purposes, was a family and what was merely a household, with the Court’s opinion introducing a genteel euphemistic coinage for the Allisons’ arrangement: extended monogamy.

The ruling was less controversial than it might have been thanks to the influence of Sharon Ferraro’s extraordinary novel While Life Is Still in Us, Let’s Love All We Can, which had appeared earlier that year. A fictionalized first-person account of the trials and triumphs of Ferraro’s own extended marriage, the book became a best-seller on three continents. Its title became a cultural catchphrase, a rallying cry for millions hungry for a taste of the riches of the heart.

In the wake of the Allison ruling, Congress rushed to regulate what the Court had blessed. Predictably, the central issues were muddied by irrelevancies: precontact AIDS testing; a schedule of renewals (with more testing) ranging from a one-year “compatibility” renewal running out to a fifteen-year “life” renewal; a counseling and mediation requirement.

The last was the work of the American Psychological Association’s heavyweight lobbyists. For more than a decade, the APA membership had been in a professional quandary, with the meaning of the old labels “counselor” and “therapist” being debased and diffused by the likes of color therapy and spirit counseling on the one hand, and by AI query-psych engines with names like Sigmund, Eliza, and Dr. Chip on the other.

Developing the model curriculum and certification for “relationship technology” was the first step toward redefining the APA’s mission and elevating their credibility. A clever campaign against the do-it-yourself psychware, pushing the idea that “people need people,” was the second. Persuading the authors of the national Family Integrity Act to mention relationship technology in the section requiring family counseling was the clincher. Every Dale family—and, in time, a fair fraction of what were now called “pair” families—would have its “Uncle Arty.”

Behind the high-tech label and its folksy derivation, though, was old-fashioned goal-oriented therapist-assisted self-examination. Be it transactional analysis or power dynamics, reality therapy or Klersen System, it still came down to inviting a stranger to tinker with your emotional machinery. And there was nothing in the hyper that could make Christopher any happier about that prospect.

Meyfarth allowed Christopher to tell his version of the baby-making blowup and the John Fields fiasco. The arty listened patiently and sympathetically, asking only a few questions to clarify minor points.

“I’m sure they told you I’m being selfish,” Christopher concluded. “Is it selfish to want to be happy? Am I obligated to say yes when I don’t want to? Why is it me that should have to adjust?”

“I’d like to come back to those issues a bit farther down the road.”

Christopher eyed Meyfarth suspiciously. “I thought that was what we were here to talk about.”

“And ultimately we will—when you’re ready to answer your own questions.”

“I already have answers. The problem is that no one accepts them.”

“Including yourself,” Meyfarth said, “or that fact would not trouble you.”

“What troubles me is that if I follow my conscience I’ll kill the family,” said Christopher. “They’ve put me in a position where I can’t win. And they can’t lose. Either they’ll turn me into the man they want or they’ll turn me out and find another.”

“Something like that has already happened to you once, hasn’t it?” asked Meyfarth.

“No,” Christopher said. “I left that one myself.”

“I see. Perhaps this is a good time for me to hear about your marriage. You were living in San Francisco then?”

“I don’t see what my marriage has to do with what I’m here to work on.”

“The common element is you,” Meyfarth said simply.

“But it’s old news,” said Christopher.

“Do you really think that a relationship that serious which ended that unhappily had no effect on how you approached your next bonding?”

Christopher looked away. “I know what effects it had.”

“You were really quite young,” Meyfarth said. “How did you come to marry Donald and Kristen?”

The question took Christopher away from Meyfarth, two years and two thousand kilometers away. “Donald was my friend,” he said. “We were both working for DIANNA in San Francisco, in the updates group. I was a year out of school. Kristen—I met Kristen at a musicbox down in Santa Cruz. She was a singer, though I didn’t know that when I met her. Terrific energy.”

“What did she look like?”

A little smile. “Tall. Very tall. A graceful gazelle. Chestnut-brown hair, what people call laughing eyes. I’d phone her now and again, and things would get pretty warm. And sometimes she’d come up for an evening, a few friends over to make some music. One time Donald was one of them.”

“So that’s how they met.”

“No. They already knew each other—they met taking a tour of San Simeon, the old Hearst mansion, of all places. They’d been dating for a few months and hadn’t realized that they both knew me. We started doing things together, the three of us, and the one-on-ones kept getting warmer. She wanted us both, but she was old-fashioned—contract first, play later. So we ended up getting married and moving into a house in Santa Cruz.”

“Was there love, too, or just sex?”

“I thought I loved her,” Christopher said. “I don’t know how to judge whether I really did. Three years later I was gone. What does that say?”

“Nothing,” Meyfarth said. “Nothing by itself. Were you three happy?”

“Kristen was. Donald was. Most of the time I wasn’t.”

“Why?”

He hesitated. “Do you know what it’s like to watch someone else make love to your wife?”

“What was that like?”

Christopher covered his mouth with steepled hands as he thought. “He was my best friend, and I ended up hating him.”

“Because you had to share Kristen?”

“It wasn’t bad at first,” he said, looking up and coming back from his faraway place. “It was all new and very crazy. We knew we were safe, and we could do anything. There were whole weekends when all we did was fuck. We invented new ways to put two into one. Or at least we thought we did.”

“Was there ever any sexual contact between you and Donald?”

“No,” Christopher said. “Nothing more than a kiss.”

“Isn’t that difficult to manage with three in a bed? It seems to me that the incidental contact, the energy, would eventually lead to—”

“I didn’t want that. I made sure he knew it. I’m not a bigot. It just didn’t appeal to me.”

Meyfarth shook his head. “Try again.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s a forty percent answer. Peel back one more layer. You were friends sharing a woman, pleasuring a woman—”

“Exactly. We were focused on Kristen. She was the center of attention. It was like a challenge to see how high we could send her. We were partners.”

“At the beginning.”

Christopher slumped back in his chair. “Yeah. At the beginning.”

“And it never changed so you or Donald was the focus, the other two the partners.”

“No. Not really.”

Meyfarth frowned. “It’s a bit astonishing to me that your love-making had but one pattern. You’re in bed together, the three of you. Everyone shifts positions, and there’s his cock at your mouth, or yours at his. You realize that’s his hand on your buttocks, not hers—”

“I wasn’t going to let him do that to me,” Christopher said coldly.

“Do what?”

“He started trying to take over. He started trying to make Kristen look to him first. If I’d let him have that, too, I’d have lost everything he hadn’t already taken.”

“And so—”

“We’d started out even. I didn’t care for the way things changed. She liked both of us together. But she liked him alone best. How was I supposed to feel?” he demanded. “Why are we talking about this? What does this have to do with me now?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“If there is anything, yes, goddammit. If not, then let’s move on.”

“I heard the answers in what you said. I’m wondering why you didn’t.”

Christopher balked at the implied criticism. “Maybe you’re going to have to rub my nose in it.”

“All right,” Meyfarth said calmly. “I will. You drew a sharp line between yourself and Donald in your marriage and pointed everything toward Kristen.”

“Yes.”

“And you expected Loi and Jessica to do the same.”

“I—” Christopher stopped in mid-denial, looking surprised. “Maybe I did.”

“You wanted Kristen’s position. You wanted to be the focus.”

“At least sometimes, yes. Is there anything wrong with that?”

Meyfarth ignored the question. “You thought you chose both Loi and Jessica. You thought they were going to give you that.”

“Yes.”

“That being the only man would make you the focus.”

“Ah—”

“But the truth is that Loi did the choosing. She’s the one at the center. She’s where you wanted to be. And you’re only just realizing it.”

Christopher stared at Meyfarth. His expression was half wild-eyed indignation, half wide-eyed revelation. His mouth worked and his eyes grew bright with moisture.

“God,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Yes. I never saw it. I never saw it. She’s just like Donald. Like Donald all over again.”