A Time of Predators

In fourteen years of marriage she had never had an orgasm. Where Curt’s blunt but deeply personal love-making had failed, where candlelight and verse had failed, a vicious gang of teen-age boys had succeeded. In the brutality of this mindless coupling she somehow had found fulfillment. So what sort of disgusting little beast crouched inside Paula Halstead to peer out with wild, beady eyes? What sort of perverted woman was she?

Paula shuddered with a bone-deep revulsion.

She laid her right hand, palm up, in her lap, with her left hand drew the razor blade across the wrist coolly and without qualm. It just stung a little. She dropped the blade, let her hand hang down to aid the flow. Then she sat motionless in front of the mirror and watched the subtle change flow into her face. Too bad, kiddo, she told her suddenly sleepy image. You were pretty good in there a time or two. But not tonight, when it counted. Not tonight. Sorry, Curt darling. At least you won’t ever know that I had to fake it with you, but that...

She fell face forward and a little to her left. Her face struck the glass table top and knocked off a bottle of hand cream. The bottle bounced on the rug and came to rest by the limp fingers of her left hand.

It was 11:33 P.M., four minutes after she had cut her wrist.

Chapter 5

Curt glanced at his watch and quickly drained the last of his coffee. Already 10:59, and Paula had been querulous.

“Warm up that coffee, sir?”

Curt hesitated. “I really should be going...”

Just then Belmont, who had delivered that evening’s paper, said from across the booth, “I understood you to imply tonight, Doctor, that the social sciences ought really to deny hereditary influences on the development of human personality, and stress environment instead.”

The waitress poured coffee. Curt leaned back with a sigh.

“Well, Chuck, I’d go even further than that. I would agree with Ashley Montagu that human nature is the result of gradually supplanting instinctual primate drives with intelligence. In man the instincts, through lack of use, have withered away.”

“Isn’t that implying an unbridged behavorial gap between us and our closest relatives?” Shirley Meier was short and overweight, but Curt knew there was nothing sloppy or undisciplined about her mind.

“Culture fills the gap.” He leaned forward across the narrow booth; some three hours before, Rick and Champ had shared a similar booth in the same drive-in. “Modern man’s uniqueness is that he has been freed from instinctual behavorial determinants.”

Belmont nodded raptly, but the Meier girl’s face was stubborn. “Instinctual influences, Dr. Halstead, are not determinants. I think man has an inborn hostility, for instance, which urges him to—”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Shirl,” said Belmont complacently. “No kid is born aggressive; his hostilities arise from frustration, every time.” His thin, intelligent face was self-satisfied as his dark eyes turned to Curt for approbation. “Wouldn’t you agree, Doctor?”

Curt nodded. “John Dollard’s classic, titled Frustration and Aggression and first published in 1939, points out that aggression is an inescapable consequence of frustration — i.e., the ghetto, where Negro frustration explodes like an unvented gas heater bursting from a buildup of fumes. More important, however, is Dollard’s point that the opposite also is true: aggression always presupposes frustration. Without frustration in the environment, there would be no hostility.”

“You said that was published in 1939.” Shirley Meier remarked flatly. “Wasn’t that the year that Hitler invaded Poland?”

“Come on, Shirk” hooted Belmont. “That’s ancient history.”

Curt surreptitiously checked his watch. 11:17. He really had to leave. With an apologetic little cough, he slid from the booth. “I’d best get along, or my wife will display some aggressive behavior of her own.” He shook hands with Belmont. “A terrific job on the paper, Chuck.” And then he smiled at Shirley. “Young lady, I’m afraid some of your ideas need rethinking before you carry them out into the world.”

It was a pleasantly tough smile on a face itself pleasantly tough, despite the blurring of line that overweight and the passing years had brought, and Shirley’s answering smile lit up the corners of her personality. “I’m sorry, Professor, but I think it’s a jungle out there and I think that man, by nature, is the chief predator.”

Curt drew in a deep breath on the way to his car. The air, even at night, had the faintest tinge of industrial haze. Thank God for the universities, last enclaves of sanity in a hurried, pushy, grinding America. With tenure at Los Feliz, Curt was secure from it all. He would spend the summer thinking through his book on man’s nature.