On Getting to the Bottom of this "Equestrian" Business

by McPoodle

Chapter 6: Confrontation in a Small Hotel Room

Chapter 6: Confrontation in a Small Hotel Room

Dinner was taken at a café that bragged about their steaks.

Gus got a hamburger. “Oh, I remember the days I could eat steak without consequences,” he said sadly patting his belly.

Delver, Gnosi and Meridiem all ordered vegetarian.

“That isn’t a requirement for all Markists, is it?” Gus asked as they waited for their food.

“No,” answered Delver. “There is a general concern that any animals we eat died humanely, but nothing more than that, at least for laity. For priests, however, strict vegetarianism is seen as a sign of piety, much like celibacy among Catholic priests. Personally I just see it as a test of obedience—if you have enough willpower to stop eating bacon, then you’ve proven you can be trusted with the Sacred Secrets.”

“Second question,” Gus prompted after a laugh. “Who else was in the running for my job?”

“I beg your pardon?” asked Delver.

“Well, you interviewed a few people to find out more about me. Why would you do that unless you were making up your mind who to offer the job to? I just want to know if I beat out Linus Pauling or not.”

“No, it was always just you,” Delver explained. “The point of the interviews was to convince my boss to drop his objections.”

Gus smiled mischievously. “Well if you’re a bishop, then that means your boss is an archbishop. I gotta say, I never thought I’d reach the glorious height of offending an archbishop! What did I possibly do to get on his naughty list?”

“You’re right that my superior is an archbishop, in fact the only remaining archbishop in the Markist religion, the archbishop of Baltimare [Baltimore]. And he got his opinion of you from your FBI file: ‘possible communist, possible anarchist, and most certainly…’”

Delver looked around at Gnosi and Meridiem, cueing all three to complete the quotation: “‘Too smart for his own good.’”

Gus had a good belly laugh at that. “I dearly hope that last part ends up being my epitaph,” he said.

He noticed that Meridiem’s grin at uttering the assessment soon faded into her usual glumness.

“As for the more-serious charges, the communism one was for you not testifying against Oppenheimer in 1954 and the anarchist one was tied to your safe-cracking activities at Las Alamos.

“I refuted the communism charge by quoting arch-patriot Wernher von Braun: ‘In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted.’ And as for the safe-cracking, that was you pointing out an obvious security hole to people with no sense of humor. That got me to the point where I only had to perform a security clearance, complete with interviews, before he allowed me to have anything to do with you. And as your wife probably told you, we ended up dropping the matter anyway.”

“Speaking of which, what business does even an archbishop have to gain access to classified FBI files?”

“‘It turns out there are certain perks that come from having one of our own in the Oval Office,’” Delver said, quoting the archbishop. “I’ve just got to hope that he doesn’t decide to drop in one day and interview you in person.”

“What? I can be good.”

“It wouldn’t help,” Delver said with a shake of his head. “The Archbishop strongly believes that science has no business mixing with religion. If it wasn’t for…a powerful friend on my side, my research lab would have been shut down years ago.”

It was at that point that the group’s meals arrived, ending their conversation.

& & &

That night, Gus was in his room, reading The Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results when there was a knock at the door. Seeing as he was still dressed, he merely had to make sure his hair wasn’t too “mad scientist” before opening the door.

Standing before him was Meridiem Tempest, wearing a trench coat that appeared to be covering at least three layers of clothing.

The air conditioning in the hotel was turned up a little high, but Gus still thought this was over-kill.

“Can we talk?” she asked.

“If it will clear the air between us, then by all means,” Gus said, stepping aside to let her in. He started to close the door, but then on second thought left it open.

Meridiem sat in an office chair at the far end of the hotel room and then waited for Gus to sit on the edge of the bed opposite her. “It’s about something Mary Louise Bell said in her interview.”

“My second wife.”

“Yes.”

“Well in general I would say that for anything bad she says about me, half are outright lies, and the other half only slightly exaggerated truth.” He put on a rueful smile. “Whatever else I can say about her? She was and is one of the smartest women I have ever met, so she’d certainly be clever enough to lace her worst accusations with truth. So, what did she tell you?”

“She said you slept with your students. Is that true?”

Gus was quiet for several moments, looking Meridiem coolly in the eyes. “I engaged in several affairs between the years of 1948 and 1963, a period that overlaps in its entirety with my marriage with Mary Louise. I don’t deny that I was mostly at fault for our divorce. Were some of them students? Yes. But they wanted it as much as I did. You have to understand it was a different era—the Eighties appear to me to be a moral throwback compared to the swinging era of the Fifties and Sixties. I hope I’m not offending you.”

“I’m not offended.”

“Good. Then you can understand that we were just having fun. And from ’52 to ’56, when I was married to Mary Louise, I refrained from approaching my female students at all, to keep them from being tarnished with the false accusation of being a ‘home wrecker’. Does that satisfy you?”

“No,” Meridiem said simply.

“Well, let me assure you that I did not coerce them. If I found a student attractive, I’d find a moment when we were alone together to let her know how I felt, and I made it very clear that she could say no, and it wouldn’t affect her negatively in any way. And there were a few young women who said no to me, and I held to my word. And none of them have come to me or a newspaper afterwards, to say that I did something wrong.”

Meridiem was quiet for nearly a minute before relying. “Well, that’s not as bad as I feared, but I gotta tell you something: you did coerce them. You didn’t think you were, but you were. I speak from experience.

“I was the only female in my graduate physics classes. I had to constantly deal with the prejudices of my classmates—that I was only there because I was pretty, or that I must be a lesbian, or that there was something wrong with me. Because ‘good girls’ didn’t do science. And this feeling of disapproval hit me anytime I told someone else what I was studying. Even from a lot of Markists. So, without any social support, I was utterly dependent on the fairness of my teachers, something I could never be sure of getting.

“I had had a rough year, with bad financial planning on my part forcing me to take two jobs to afford my third year, when I had my biggest and hardest course load. And then my father died, and my mother remarried almost immediately to the man she had been cheating with for years. My new step-father was the teacher of the class I was having the most trouble with. He was willing to tutor me for free. Only it wasn’t free at all.”

Gus began to feel rather uncomfortable.

“I’ll skip past the After-School Special part of the story. Eventually, far too late, I tried to break it off. And he flunked me. I appealed to my mother, and rather than believe that her husband was a monster, she threw me out of the house.

“That man was a hero in the town I grew up in—he single-handedly saved three thousand jobs when the local factory shut down a decade ago. There was no way that a ‘tramp who gave away her virginity’ would be believed, not against him. So I dropped out, moved to Canterlot, and started over.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “And then I had my nervous breakdown, and Gnosi pulled me out, but that’s a story for another day. What I’m saying is that people that age think they understand how the world works, and they don’t bother to ask around to see if they are wrong or not. I’m positive that I’m not the only young woman in a male-dominated field who believed that the only way to succeed was to sell our bodies. The only thing that makes you different is that you didn’t stoop so low to take advantage of the power you had been given by dumb girls like me.”

“I…I don’t know what to say,” Gus replied. “I had no idea.”

“Oh, I’m sure some of them were just as sexually liberated as you thought they were. But I seriously doubt that all of them were like that.”

“Well…I’ll seek them out. Find out what happened. And apologize. This late in the game, it’s all I can do.”

Meridiem nodded and got up. “Yes,” she said. She held out her hand for Gus to shake. “I’m glad we got that settled. I’m a lot more comfortable with working with you now. Well good night, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

The door closed. Gus went to the bathroom, took his handful of pills, got undressed, went to bed, and turned out the light.

He lay there for several hours in the dark, reviewing his memories.

Comments

[McPoodle]

Consider this chapter my response to particle_pony's little comment on the Prologue regarding the womanizing ways of Gus's real-life inspiration.

[Jordan179]

8693079

Yes. Though he became that way mostly after the death of his first wife, which made him for a time very cynical about love.

[Velvet-Fresh]

just realize does this make Sunset and Twilight the Markism's jesus?

[McPoodle]

11183581

I hadn't intended it, but I do believe you're right. Except they didn't have to die to save humanity, just take back their souls from their own inner demons--that's the way they'll be seen a few hundred years from now, in the splinter sect of "Twisetism".