Futures Near and Far (11 page)

Gradually the conversation became real, more than small
talk. Neil managed to get past his tendency at earlier parties to keep it
light. Dr. Rosen said that trait was a defense mechanism, a habit leftover from
his twilight decades when any friend he made died. Old widowers risked much to
try to forge deep relationships. Neil didn’t care about the analysis. He just
did what felt right. Heart pounding, he got the words out: “Can I see you
again?”

Thea played with one of her tightly kinked curls, like a cat
next to a mouse it has trapped, letting the poor thing wonder if it will again
set down its paw. “Yes. I would like that,” she said.

o0o

For their first date, they took the Slingshot up to low
earth orbit, on a ten-hour tourist package Thea had signed up for on a whim
years back. She’d never cancelled the reservations for two, figuring that when
the time finally arrived, she’d find someone who wanted to accompany her.

Neil and Thea spent the bulk of the visit strolling along
the view decks of the Earthrise Mall, goggling at the starscape. Their favorite
moments, though, took place in what Thea labelled “the trampoline chamber,” a
sphere eighteen meters in diameter, attached to the space station just so
Grounders could fly back and forth to their hearts’ content. They giggled like
children, hysterical at the peculiar effect of weightlessness on their faces
and figures. By the time they took their berths in the descent vehicle, they
were so pleasantly exhausted that they napped for the last half of the glide to
sea level.

As they strolled out of the station into a blustery night,
Thea threw back her head and hooted enthusiastically, “Oh, I
love
doing new things, don’t you?”

Her arm drifted into the crook of his elbow. Neil’s wits
seemed to vanish into the breeze, knocked out of his brain by the unexpected
chill of natural planetary atmosphere. He recognized the cue. The decision,
said her body with a theatrical shiver, was his.

She looked so perfect, black flesh framed against a black
sky. The warmth of her radiated all the way from his cradled elbow up his arm
and down his torso to his crotch. Yes, he told himself, trying to reestablish
his ability to breathe. If she were ready, so was he.

o0o

She took Neil into her with velvet-glove softness. She
squirmed on top of him, rolling like an otter on the slick, firm surface of his
torso. Her breasts tickled the hairs of his chest, pasting them down with her
own sweat. Casting off his anxiety, he concentrated on pleasing her.

She was riding him again, much, much later, when his climax
arrived. The ejaculation seemed to originate from the tips of his toes and the
surface of his scalp, rushing to his penis and into her with flash-flood
suddenness and force. As his hips collapsed to the mattress, he thought he
would faint.

“Well!” she said, arching back and purring, still straddled
across him. “What’ll we do tomorrow?”

He opened his eyes, peering under heavy lids at her beaming,
gratified smile. His body still basked in post-orgasmic tremors, but his mind
was working again. He replayed her comment from earlier in the evening.
“I love doing new things, don’t you?”

The night lost the transcendence that came from banishing
thirty-five years of abstinence. In its place rose the shame of having read the
signs wrong. Neil choked down his disappointment. He began to count the days
until Thea would no longer consider him to be “the new thing.”

o0o

Felice pranced across the tennis court, playing
aggressively, forcing Neil to call upon old tricks to hold his own. Though
small and fine-boned, she whacked the ball over the net with blistering vigor.
The sweat flew from Neil’s hair as he lunged to catch her serve. The upper
quarter of his racquet got there just in time, sending the ball arcing lazily to
her side.

She caught it before the bounce, slamming it into a far
corner of his court, far out of his reach.

“C’mon, Neil,” she yelled. “You can move those hunky thighs
faster than
that
.”

He stuck out his tongue, and on her next serve, fed her the
ball straight back to her face — another old trick. Startled, her backhand
counterstroke fell apart.

“Barbarian!” she called cheerfully.

Neil grinned, enjoying the steady pounding of his heart, the
burn in his legs. But she’d gotten him with the comment about sluggishness. He
was trying hard, but whenever he flung himself full-tilt across the court, he
recalled the time, at age 74, when a knee had locked up without warning,
sending him to the asphalt so hard he broke his nose. He’d given up tennis at
that point.

His body was good now. He should trust it.

He hated seeming less than ideal in front of Felice. She
seemed like just the person to ease the bruises left by his three-week liaison
with Thea. The winter had been long and lonely.

In other areas of his life, he was adjusting. He’d resumed
his architectural career. He’d moved out of Matthew’s apartment into a place of
his own. Dr. Rosen seemed satisfied with his progress. Yet this new world
remained flat without a companion to share it with.

Felice was a miniature tornado. She played with a
determination that intimidated blossoms right off the nearby trees. She was
easy to admire, and it was likewise easy for him to imagine building on that
respect until it included an erotic element.

He was thinking of that, not his stumbling, as their court
time expired. They collected their balls and ambled away, surrendering their
spots to another couple.

“Good game,” he said. He’d been ahead, but she’d been coming
up on him rapidly; if they’d had time to play out the match, she’d probably
have won. He told her so.

“I did okay,” she said, shrugging in such a genuinely modest
way that he couldn’t help but feel even better about her. The woman had no
pretensions; he didn’t have to strut for her. He didn’t have to invent compliments.

“Want to shower together?” Neil asked.

Felice raised her eyebrows. He supposed she was wondering
why go to the trouble — their nanodocs could scrub out their pores, dissolve
the grit, and freshen them up. But showering together had a definite romance to
it, like roasting marshmallows over a campfire under the starlight. He knew he
wasn’t the only traditionalist left, or the locker rooms wouldn’t still be
there, over at the edge of the courts by the redwood grove.

“Sure,” she replied, as if catching his mood. “Why not?”

The spray did wonderful things to Felice’s body. The
rivulets born on her upper chest and shoulders twisted and forked as they
negotiated her curves. The fine, almost transparent hairs at the base of her
neck caught droplets like dew on strands of spider web in a morning garden. Her
nipples rose. She arched her breasts toward him, as if to say, “Here, these
need the touch of warm, soapy hands.”

He hesitated. The way her wet hair clung to her skull, and
the color of it, reminded him of his own daughter — may she rest in peace — as
a toddler.

“How old are you, Felice?” he murmured.

Old enough, her wink told him, but she answered, again
without guile, “Thirty.”

He’d been a widower longer than she’d been alive. Christ,
she might not even have reset her age yet; he might be seeing her natural
youth. He stepped behind her, and used his warm, soapy hands — on her back. He
didn’t want to let his body language commit him to a course he didn’t intend.

She leaned into him, rubbing her slick form against his. The
spray couldn’t wash away her fresh, feminine aroma. His penis stirred against
the curve of her buttocks.

He shifted his hips away abruptly, as he would have done had
a child, wriggling in his lap, prompted an inadvertent sexual response.

He needed time. An evening of candlelight and good food
would reshape his mood, make him forget the ninety year difference in their
ages. Even a few minutes might be enough, but not
now
, with the water rinsing away the delicacy of his fantasies.

He didn’t have time. The stiffening of her shoulders told
him she’d taken offense.

Ah, thought Neil, he’d buried himself now. She’d made an
offer, and he had slapped it down. She wouldn’t leave herself open for
rejection a second time. If he wanted anything to happen later, he’d have to
pursue her with diligence. She’d make him ask, in words, and would give him no
encouragement until her ego had recovered.

But he didn’t want to pursue her with that kind of fervor
until he was more sure of his feelings for her. Yet to delay would surely cause
yet another insult. He didn’t have to be a genius to know that all too soon,
Felice would be looking for a new tennis partner.

Slowly, like a senior citizen, Neil rinsed the soap from his
hands.

o0o

Daffodils bloomed along the walkways of the cemetery. The
heat of late spring had already shriveled natural daffs, but here the yellow
King Alfreds and orange-and-tan Saharan Lords stood tall and proud, maintained
by their own versions of nanodocs, programmed by the groundskeeper.

Neil followed a route his feet had traveled many times
before, until the headstones took on dates-of-birth that sent a burble of acid
up his esophagus. 1950. 1955. 1960. 1965. The last generation to die of old
age. He could find the names of kindergarten classmates on those marble and
granite markers. By the law of averages, his mortal remains should be here,
too. But that burst appendix hadn’t claimed him, the lymphoma had been
treatable, that drunk driver had swerved at the last moment. Here he was.

An ancient oak tree shaded the particular resting site that
he had come to see. Weather had muted the sharpness of the carved letters. He
scanned across the name to the impossible date-of-death. How had thirty-two
years passed with so little in them?

Kneeling, he placed a lavender rose upon the grass, over the
spot he imagined his good wife’s heart to be.

“You spoiled me, Stacey,” he said to the earth. “You set my
damn standards too high.”

Was that it? Was he carrying a torch? Was her ghost
jealously guarding him, perhaps? Convenient, to think it was only that.

The rose caught a sunbeam that slipped through the oak
leaves. The petals drooped in the increasing heat. The flower had not been
programmed to last.

That was the way it had to be.

A family appeared through the cemetery gates, making a
procession toward a large crypt near the fountain. Every adult of the group
walked on long, supple legs, their unlined faces tilted away from the day’s
brilliance.

Two lanky men, so similar in appearance they could’ve been
twins, brought up the rear. From their body language, Neil doubted they were
twins. More likely the one on the left was the great-grandfather of the one on
the right.

Neil worked his way back through the graves. At the
entrance, a woman stepped onto the lawn with a small bouquet in her hands. As
the distance between them closed, he automatically made eye contact.

Her fine reddish curls and her figure brought a concealed
smile of appreciation to his face, but when he saw recognition spark in her
green eyes, he stopped short. So did she.

“I know you, don’t I?” she said.

“Yes,” he replied. “I saw you at the clinic, the morning
after my nanodocs were implanted.”

“My morning-after, too.” She looked at her bouquet, and then
at a set of headstones, as if measuring the distance between the two. But she
didn’t walk on. Instead, she smiled.

“My name’s Neil.”

“Nadine.”

Neil and Nadine — it had
a nice, alliterative ring. Suddenly his scheduled plans for the rest of
the morning dissipated.

“Are you a local girl?” he asked, waving at the cemetery.
“Family here?”

“Just my husband. He died not long after we retired out here
in ’41. I didn’t see much point in moving him or me back to Texas. So ah jus’
stuck him in th’ ground with his boots pointed up.” A chuckle accompanied her
last sentence, adding to the color of the deliberately exaggerated twang. Neil
recognized that kind of mirth; it was the type people used to bandage a deep
wound.

“You know,” Neil said, half to himself, “when I saw you on
that bench outside the clinic, I just naturally assumed you were twenty-two.
Old habits, I guess.”

Abruptly she raised the bouquet to her nose, covering a
bashful smile. She glanced again toward the headstones. “Would you excuse me
for a moment . . . Neil?”

“Of course.”

She nodded, grateful for his instant understanding, and
traced her way across the cemetery. Neil found a shady spot beneath an oak much
like the one growing near Stacey Corbin’s resting spot. He sat on a retaining
wall, watching the patterns of the clouds in
the sky. Nadine joined him there, sans bouquet.

A babble of thoughts seemed to dance across her brow. Neil
tentatively broke the silence by asking her occupation.

“I was in furniture
sales,” she answered. “But there’s not much need to sell things like new
sofas when a homeowner can just command the old one to change its color, or
create a spare from garden dirt. So I’ve shifted into interior design. You’d be
amazed how picky everyone’s become about their decor, now that they can afford
any style they want, and can change it every day.”

“No, I wouldn’t be amazed,” he said, and told her of some of
the home redesign requests that had flooded his office.

Before Neil knew it, an hour had passed, and his mouth had
become cottony from all the conversation. Suddenly Nadine glanced at her watch.
“Oh, my lord! I have to go!” She winced, as if wishing she’d forgotten to put
the timepiece on that morning.

“Can I take you out to dinner some time?” he asked. The
question tumbled out without having to think about it.

The green of her eyes deepened, or was that just the
widening of her pupils? “Yes.”