Stranger in a Strange Land

At which point something happened which was totally unexpected to her because Mike had never explained that it was possible. She had been letting herself receive as much as possible of the stranger’s emotions, intentionally teasing him with eyes and body, and relaying what she felt from him back to Mike—when suddenly the circuit was completed and she was looking at herself, seeing herself through strange eyes, much more lavish than she considered herself to be—and feeling the primitive need with which that stranger saw her.

Blindly she stumbled and would have fallen flat had not Mike instantly sensed her hazard, caught her, lifted her, straightened her up, and steadied her until she could walk unassisted, second-sight gone.

The parade of beauties continued on through exit. Once off stage the girl behind her said, “What the devil happened to you, Jill?”

“Caught my heel.”

“Happens. But that was the wildest recovery I ever saw. For a second there you looked like a puppet on strings.”

(—and so I was, dear, and so I was! But we won’t go into that.) “I’m going to ask the stage manager to check that spot. I think there’s a loose board. A gal could break her leg.”

For the rest of the show whenever she was on stage Mike gave her quick glimpses of how she looked to various men while always making sure that she was not again taken by surprise. Jill was amazed to discover how varied were their images of her: one noticed only her legs, another seemed fascinated by the undulations of her torso, a third saw only her proud bosom. Then Mike, warning her first, let her look at other girls in the tableaux. She was relieved to find that Mike saw them as she saw them—but sharper.

But she was amazed to find that her own excitement did not diminish as she looked at, second hand, the girls around her; it increased.

Mike left promptly at the finale, ducking out ahead of the crowd as she had warned him to do. She did not expect to see him again that night since he had asked for relief from his job as croupier only long enough to see his wife in her show. But when she dressed and returned to their hotel room, she felt him inside before she reached the room.

The door opened for her, she stepped inside, it closed behind her. “Hello, darling!” she called out. “How nice you came home!”

He smiled gently. “I now grok naughty pictures.” Her clothes vanished. “Make naughty pictures.”

“Huh? Yes, dear, of course.” She ran through much the same poses she had earlier in the day. With each one, as soon as she was in it, Mike let her use his eyes to see herself. She looked at herself and felt his emotions and felt her own swell in response in a closed and mutually amplified re-echoing. At last she placed herself in a pose as randily carefree as her imagination could devise.

“Naughty pictures are a great goodness,” Mike said gravely.

“Yes! And now I grok them, too! What are you waiting for?”

They quit their jobs and for the next several days saw as many of the revues as possible, during which period Jill made still another discovery: she “grokked naughty pictures” only through a man’s eyes. If Mike watched, she caught and shared his mood, from quiet sensuous pleasure in a beautiful woman to fully aroused excitement at times—but if Mike’s attention was elsewhere, the model, dancer, or peeler was just another woman to Jill, possibly pleasant to look at but in no wise exciting. She was likely to get bored and wish mildly that Mike would take her home. But only mildly for she was now nearly as patient as he was.

She pondered this new fact from all sides and decided that she preferred not to be excited by women other than through his eyes. One man gave her all the problems she could handle and more—to have discovered in herself unsuspected latent lesbian tendencies would have been entirely too much.

But it certainly was a lot of fun—“a great goodness”—to see those girls through his eyes as he had now learned to see them—and a still greater, ecstatic goodness to know that, at last, he looked at her herself in the same way… only more so.

They stopped in Palo Alto long enough for Mike to try (and fail to) swallow all the Hoover Library in mammoth gulps. The task was mechanically impossible; the scanners could not spin that fast, nor could Mike turn pages of bound books fast enough to read them all. He gave up and admitted that he was taking in raw data much faster than he could grok it, even by spending all hours the library was closed in solitary contemplation. With relief Jill moved them to San Francisco and he embarked on a more systematic search.