The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 2

Why did I buy this ship in the first place, this small portable universe? Well, for one thing I had gone impotent. My once enthusiastic and catholic member had become shy, sullen, and would not serve me. Would not serve my lady friends either. There were quarrels, recriminations; I tried resorting to masturbation and, to my dismay, found that was out of the question too. My joint had taken leave of its senses and my senses had taken leave of my joint. It went on like that. I began to feel disgraced. I wanted to kill someone. My therapist said Mother; he was probably right, but Mother was already dead.

Isabel was my eventual port in this storm and kept me from going completely bonkers. She worked with me physically for a few days—and it was indeed work—and then abandoned that, sensibly saying,” It’s best to wait awhile, Ben.” I moved in with her, into her little studio apartment on East Fifty-first Street, and slept with her and her two big chunky cats in the little loft bed that she had built with her own pale, esthetic hands. Isabel was a good carpenter; she had worked on theater sets for years before developing the courage to try acting. God, what a tiny place that was! And you could never escape the street sounds from the windows: the shoutings of drunks and mad bombers and all-purpose crazies at two in the morning; the steam-powered garbage wagons at four, and the screeching wood vendors at seven-thirty. Wood was seven dollars a stick in midtown, and Isabel had a fireplace. It was the worst winter in forty years; on most mornings the water in the toilet would be frozen solid. I tried enormous bribes on the super for heat; he would give me his shy Yugoslav smile and pocket my hundreds, but the heating pipes remained silent. I tried, one frostbitten morning when the weight of three blankets was suffocating me, to bring Isabel to her senses and get her to sail to Yucatan with me for the winter. But she was adamant. She held the covers up to her chin and said, “You know I’m in a show, Ben.”

I could feel the little hairs in my nose as stiff as icicles. “Honey,” I said, “you’ve got six fucking lines in that show, and one of them is, ‘Hello.’” I couldn’t see outside because ice had formed on the windowpanes. And we had a fire in the grate; I had thrown some sticks on it at four in the morning, shaking so much from the cold that I’d almost missed. What would all the poor people downtown be doing, the ones who couldn’t afford wood and insulation and storm windows? The Red Cross gave out blankets, but there were never enough. I made a mental note to give a quarter million to the Red Cross. Or maybe a sheep ranch, so they could grow their own. It was seven in the morning and I could hear the wind howling around the corner from Third Avenue.

“Sweetheart,” Isabel said, “I’m not going to be your dependent. And I’m warm enough.” Isabel slept in long woolen underwear, hiding all that radiant skin of hers and those girlish breasts under scratchy BVDs. I slept wrapped around her warm body, dressed in a flannel nightgown and gym shorts.

We’d had that argument enough times before, so I gave it up. Isabel wasn’t about to take advantage of my wealth. That afternoon I hunted around and found a big old coal stove at a blackmarket shop on Seventh Avenue and got the name of a dealer. Burning anthracite for private heat was illegal, under the Nonrenewable Resources Act; it took hard-coal trains to move the food and other essentials around the country, and the enforcement was pretty tough. But I had connections and was willing to take the chance. After all, I was in the business: Belson Mines. I managed after three phone calls to get two dozen cabbage-sized lumps of anthracite and promise of another delivery in five days. Isabel and I were warm enough after that. My dealer, a skinny little fellow in a pea coat, tried to sell me some cocaine along with those black lumps, but in those days I had no interest in drugs. It took a voyage to the stars to get me hooked.

With coal in the grate, Isabel went back to sleeping naked, but it didn’t help my impotence. I remember waking up at 5 A.M. sometimes with a yearning in my groin, but if I woke Isabel—no easy task, since she slept and snored like a hibernating bear—it was no good. My scared member would retreat and I would be frustrated and feel like a fool to boot. And have Isabel furious with me for wakening her to another strikeout. “Ben,” she’d say, “if you want me take me. But quit waking me up for these experiments.” I blushed like a child and couldn’t get back to sleep. It was horrible. This was after that conversation in Jamaica with the geologist; I began to have daydreams of space travel. I will say this about myself: when I sublimate I sublimate grandly.

So I bought this ship and furnished it, made sure there were a few attractive women in the crew, and set forth to the stars with a limp penis.

“Doctor,” I said to Orbach, lying on the leather couch in his office, my big lumberjack shoes resting on the arm, my head against a fat leather pillow, “If I don’t get some orgasms soon…”

“I wish you wouldn’t pressure yourself so much,” he said. “There are other ways to use your energies.”

“I could lie, pillage and kill. I could run for President. I could travel through space.”

His voice was wry. “The last sounds the least destructive.” And that clinched it. The next day I told my lawyers to find a spaceship. The one I eventually got was Chinese; it was called Flower of Heavenly Repose. I had most of its old scientific gear junked, built a launching pad in the Keys, furnished the captain’s quarters with antiques, hired a crew, and took off for Fomalhaut. This took a year. It would have taken five if I hadn’t been wound up like a steel spring with celibacy. If I couldn’t push myself into a woman’s body by an act of will, will would push my body across the galaxy. I hated the spiritual algebra of it, but I understood the equation well enough; I had been robbing Peter to pay Paul for most of my life. That’s how you get rich in a world of dwindling resources, a world with its springs running down.

Somebody years before had told me about sleep body-building; you could avoid the boredom of getting into shape by doing it in a long chemical sleep. I hated exercise and the idea had charm, but I didn’t feel then that I could disappear from the world of the awake for two months without financial risks of the worst kind. When I learned that, despite the spacewarp tricks my ship was capable of, it would still take three dull months to get across the Milky Way, I decided to grab the opportunity and I had the Nautilus machines installed. I had been developing flabby pectorals and a pot. Firming up my body might firm up its sweetest part too. Hell, maybe in a two-month nap I might have a cascade of wet dreams and get some relief that way. But as it turned out, I didn’t; I spent most of my dream time with Father.

I have kept myself in transit ever since I left home at eighteen. I studied metallurgy at one college and Chinese at another, moving from hotel to hotel while I studied. My Aunt Myra in New York left me eighty thousand dollars when I was fourteen. I put it into forests at a good time, and by college I could afford a suite at any hotel I fancied and a secretary to type my term papers. I’ve never stayed in a plain hotel room; I always take suites. I think I fear being stuck in a single room like my father.

I realize as I write this—as I dictate it—that I am living now in a single room, as I did at Isabel’s. I am the sole resident of this moonwood shack, or cabin, the only piece of architecture on the planet Belson. There are no forget-me-nots on the walls, which are the matte silver of moonwood itself, that charming mineral. Still, the thought that I have become the inhabitant of one room and that my condition therefore resembles my father’s makes me uneasy. Like him, I spend hours at my desk, reading. Like him, I smoke cigars endlessly. Like him, I speak to no one.

I need to mine more moonwood and build on another room. I need a companion. I need Isabel.

I’ve lived here four months now, with my little morphine factory and my red computer and with the garden outside. There could hardly be a way of being more alone, except that the planet itself is my friend and lover. When I get morose I can water my garden or shoot up or do as I am doing this very moment: dictate these reflections into the red box that types them up and never makes a spelling error. My fractured life comes rising from a slot, in crisp Bodoni Bold on an endless sheet of Hammermill Bond; there’s enough of it now to paper this moonwood cabin, to give me a celestial womb lined with the print reflections of my life.

Since the ship left, there has been no sound but my own voice and the rare singing of the grass. Sometimes the planet shows me its rings. Her rings. His rings. They are seldom visible from here below, although I don’t know why. One night last month I was awakened by the grass singing and, mirabile dictu, had my first orgasm in years, lying there alone hearing that powerful wordless song and picturing Isabel and the warmth in her Scottish face. That one ejaculation undid a coil deep in my spirit and blew fresh air into my musty soul; I went for three days afterward without morphine. Isabel, I send you my love. I want to marry you if I ever come back to the Earth.

I’ve known Isabel for ten years and lived with her for five agonizing months, and only now am I coming to realize how much she means to me. Wouldn’t you know I’d put twenty-three light-years between us before I would see that? Maybe the distance is necessary to see beyond the fights we had. During our last month together my impotence turned me into a godawful nag; I worked on her case endlessly, nagging her about whatever came to mind, inwardly tearing myself apart with thoughts about all the potent lovers she must have had in her life. I would imagine stupid-looking young men who mounted Isabel’s slight body with the aplomb of jockeys. My stomach ached at such thoughts. Yet Isabel gave no justification for them. She was faithful to my forced celibacy while I lived with her, and there were no mementoes of other men around her place. I know because I looked.

I nagged her about her career. I told her she should try for bigger parts in plays, or quit the theater. I would complain about the time she spent shopping for clothes and about the way she seemed to fill that small apartment with shoes and dresses so there was no place for my corduroys and jeans and lumberjack shirts. And yet I knew during all this that I secretly approved, because Isabel looked splendid in her clothes.

I wasn’t always that way with her. I could be pleasant enough at times, and Isabel liked my sense of humor and my general disdain for the pretense of the business world. We were also both serious lovers of New York and of New York food. And Isabel knew, as women do, that I genuinely appreciated her good looks. There must have been something about me that she liked or I’d have been kicked out, if only for the messes I made on the floor with my cigar ashes. Isabel’s floor was painted white; she had done the job herself not long before I moved in. Six layers, and each one rubbed down with steel wool. I managed to spill a lot of ashes from my Gueveras on that floor and then grind them in later by pacing. Hostility, I suppose. One cold Monday after her play had closed, Isabel spent the day on her knees scrubbing the floor and then giving it another coat of paint. She did this in black panties and socks, bare-breasted, with a coal fire blazing in the grate. I tried to ignore her from behind my Wall Street Journals and my stock reports and prospectuses, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off that undulant ass and those lovely breasts that hung down and gently swung from side to side as she scrubbed with a Kiwi brush and then rubbed and then painted. But I kept my hands off her, knowing all too well I had no follow-through available. It was agonizing, and I felt guilty about having made the floor a mess in the first place. There was a big scratch in it where I had thrown and broken a coffee cup in one of my rages over not getting it up. She filled the scratch with plastic wood, sanded it and then painted over it. Bless her heart. And then that evening she bundled herself up and went off to the Morosco Theatre to try for a part in a revival of Hamlet. She came home to our paint-fumed apartment and announced she was going to be Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, that it was a terrific chance. Here was Isabel, forty-three years old, as happy as an ingenue with her first part. I should have married her on the spot and started having children. God what a healthy brood we could be making! But instead, I was dismayed by it all and began to think of leaving. We had lived together five months, without sexual intercourse. And I didn’t want to get that beautiful floor dirty again. I didn’t want to watch Isabel struggle to learn all that blank verse. I remembered Hamlet from college; it was a big part.

Eventually I got a suite at the Pierre. It was four rooms and a kitchen on the fourth floor for three thousand a day, plus tax and service. It was warm, since the management had good connections. I took up cooking in earnest.

My best success was pot roast. I got a real pleasure—maybe my only pleasure in those sexually bleak days—from peeling carrots and potatoes and onions, weeping through a dozen onions at a time, standing over my stainless-steel sink and blinking tearily out the window at the empty shell of the General Motors building. I browned the meat in safflower oil, the only oil Isabel would touch, after coating it with durum flour and drenching it in Java pepper. Java pepper was another of Isabel’s fetishes. I had to admit she was right too. And I wasn’t cooking all those roasts for her either. She never came up to that suite, with its big beige sofas and its oriental rugs; I never invited her.

Oh Isabel! What a pervert I turned out to be, when push came to shove! It’s all too clear now as I speak this on Belson: I didn’t move out of your place because of the cold or because you were memorizing blank verse. I moved out because I had fallen in love with you. There I would stand in that high-ceilinged old kitchen with its white walls and its wooden counter-tops, and all the sexual energy that your body had inspired in me—that waist, those hips, those sweet breasts—went into my doleful midafternoon peeling of carrots, my weeping over stacks of shiny brown onions! My analyst, the Great Orbach, would call it sublimation; I call it a fraud and a cheat. I should have been arrested for gross and illicit orality. (Officer, do you see that big man over there, with the glasses and the lumberjack shirt, the one with the stack of vegetables at his elbow? I want him taken into custody and charged with criminal avoidance of manhood.)

I’d had Henri Bendel’s send over a set of steel cookware, but all I ever used of it was one big pot. Sometimes the small saucepan for thickening gravy. Twelve hundred dollars, plus the 12 percent New York City tax and eighty dollars for delivery, and all I used was two pans. The damned roasting pan didn’t even have a rack in it; I had to balance the meat on top of the carrots and onions to keep it from boiling. But my pot roasts were terrific. I served them with strawberry jam on the side, and a Bibb and arugula salad. Chocolate mousse for dessert. If my alienated member had been less shy, I could have gotten into the pants of every actress on Broadway that season, from the quality of my pot roast and the big wood fires I had in my living room to eat them by. Not to mention my charm, good looks and money. Ah well! What really happened was that I made a lot of women furious with me for not even trying. What I wanted was to eat with them and look at them and talk. Sometimes I did try rolling around in the bed, but I knew before I started that it would come to grief and anger. And it always did. I got some heady oral satisfactions with women whom schoolboys would have given their souls to fondle: a Belgian movie star, two leading ladies, a diva, a ballet dancer, the estranged doxy of a uranium man even richer than I, a handful of courtesans who did sex more dexterously than Chinese women assembled radios. The oral satisfactions were nice, but I’d have been better nourished eating fruit. Some very huffy women left that apartment in the mornings.

I had sense enough to realize it was a midlife crisis. I’d been studying the history of the uranium explorations and had come to feel—as a lot of well-informed people felt—that the government had stopped looking for uranium at just the wrong time. It had been the repercussions of all those wasted voyages and all the spent nuclear fuel that finally brought about the CEASE agreement, banning space travel. “Use the fuel at home!” President Garvey had shouted in her school-teacherly way, and a lot of politicians had breathed sighs of relief.

But the fact was that safe uranium was just around the corner. A lot of experts felt that way; but no government was willing to take the risks anymore. Just one space voyage would use about 6 percent of the Earth’s entire supply of uranium. Enough to heat Shanghai for ten years. You couldn’t go out into the Milky Way without putting the ship into a spacewarp, and you couldn’t do that without a few trillion megawatts at your disposal.

I had been toying with the idea for two or three years, ever since that conversation in Jamaica with the geologist. I did some talking around and found the thing was like ESP, a lot of knowledgeable people were believers; it was just that governments were uptight about it. And private industry was afraid to touch it—especially in those unprofitable times. Hell, the prime rate was 4 percent.

The SALT talks were still going on—SALT 17, in fact—after a hundred years. But it took exactly six months of martinis and tea in Geneva for the whole goddamned world to decide to quit looking for uranium in space. We could still bomb one another into radioactive dust at the touch of a few well-placed fingertips; but we would now sit and freeze because the gamble for energy scared the politicians more than the gamble with Armageddon did. Well. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I figured it would cost me about eight hundred million to outfit a ship, hire a crew, and go to Fomalhaut. If I could find uranium and bring it back in quantity my profits would be almost beyond measure. Eight hundred million was half of what I was worth. If I lost it all I would still be rich, would still have more money than I could spend in a long lifetime. What the hell. I was getting tired of pot roasts and of angry women. I was unmarried. I hadn’t used my stock exchange seats for a half-dozen years, and interest rates were abysmally low. And I am a restless man. I had been looking, unconsciously, for something big to put money into. What the hell, I might captain a spaceship off to the stars. Captain Belson. Why not?

It was insane for me to spend that cold winter in New York with temperatures at twenty below zero when I could have gone to the Yucatan in my boat. Getting coal for a boat was easy enough; transportation came under a special heading in the Energy Act. But the Wit’s End stayed tied up in the East River that winter and got its hull cracked when the river froze solid in January. It didn’t bother me much when that happened, though; I had my mind by then on other modes of transport; I had begun buying the Flower of Heavenly Repose and the uranium the trip would take. It was as complicated as preparing a small nation for war and I was thankful to throw my energies into it. I had six telephone lines put into my apartment in the Pierre and eventually installed a staff of five men and seven women on the two floors above mine. When the first warm day finally came, in June, we all toasted the spring together in my living room and got pleasantly drunk on Moët et Chandon. One of my purchasing agents was an amiable fat lady named Alice. She wore pink coral jewelry and sipped her champagne like a bird. Alice asked me what we would call the ship. Peking had just agreed to sell. I tossed off a fizzy mouthful before I spoke. “Isabel,” I said. “The ship is the Isabel.”