“Well, if you must know …” There was a lovely blush rising. “And you’ll badger me forever. And you’ve promised to go to the psychiatrist thirty-three times. I had great admiration for him and he needed to conduct final tests before sending the device into production. So I did it. You don’t need any sick details.”

“I guess not.” His brain was soaring along at fifty knots with visions of his beloved in the laboratory stirrups. “He never did you by himself?”

“He might have once. We took a strange South American drug in the living room and I woke up without my clothes.”

“Where was he when you woke up?”

“In the kitchen cooking dinner. Let’s stop this, Johnny. It’s meaningless.”

He bridled his curiosity with strain, stopping short of asking her what Rabun had cooked that evening. There was a tinge of inappropriateness to that question, he thought, getting up to put the pizza in the oven to rewarm.

“Sometimes I think we midwesterners from the country are not on our toes, you know? We’re a little too altruistic and gullible. I mean we’re not dumb….”

“The tapes,” she whispered with alarm, “he made videotapes for research. But I wore one of those black eye-masks.” She slumped back into the chair with relief. “He gave me a set of seven of those toys in a leather case with my name monogrammed on the outside. I think we should burn them.”

“It might be stupid to burn something worth that much.”

He turned the oven up to maximum bake, impatient for the pizza. It would be best to roust Rabun for the tapes to prevent the likely event of blackmail, and, knowing the man, the tapes might be of professional quality. Despite the mask, he would not like to see the fair Diana as a short subject in a porn theater, under one of those absurd titles such as Women in Science. He was leaning against the oven, lost in thought, when he noted the heat was having a strange effect on his pecker. They exchanged a deep, wordless smile.

Diana suffered a modest mental relapse during the rest of May and all of June, a relapse he felt poignantly, knowing that he was partly the cause. In her own mind she had fallen from a high place, an utter dupe: since her teens she had read biographies about Madame Curie, Einstein, Schweitzer, Bohr, Oppenheimer, articles about Pauling, Debakey, Shumway. Every month he failed to do so much as open her inscrutable copy of Scientific American. Now she felt that her reverence for genius had brought her to shame. He tried to be inventive in his attempts to help.

“Look at it this way. If you were in the arts you might have fallen for the great Gauguin or Picasso.”