Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (16 page)

Paul smiled. “If you say so.”

Callie poked at her pot roast. She glanced at Paul and started to laugh, and she covered her mouth. “Meteo-roll-ologist.” She
feigned an anchorwoman hair toss. “Meteor-ol-ographer.” Paul laughed.

“Course, I should talk,” Callie said. “I can’t pronounce half the words I come across.”

“You did alright on . . . what was it again? The one you asked me about.”

“You know.”

“Yeah, but I want to hear you say it.”

Callie put down her fork and gave Paul a very engaging look. “Synecdoche.”

“I love it when a woman talks literary.”

“Antagonist.” Callie batted her eyelashes at him. “Protagonist.”

“Careful, Callie, you’re getting me hot.”

She dropped her voice and said, in a slow, sultry moan, “Iambic pentameter.”

Paul clutched her hand across the table. “Marry me,” he said. “Have my children.”

Callie stiffened and tugged her hand away. “They got real good desserts here, too.” She picked up her fork and worked at her pot roast. They ate in silence for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “Did I say something I shouldn’t?”

“It’s okay.”
Hit’s okay
. She put down her fork and glanced over the rail. “Mr. X left me when I got pregnant. I got rid of it, thought he might come back.” She looked at Paul. “But he didn’t.”

Paul met her gaze. Don’t screw this up, he told himself. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Callie sighed. “Is this too much information? Am I break-in’ the first date regulations?”

“I’ll have to check, but I don’t think so.”

“Twenty questions, right?” She smiled wryly. “I’m a regular Patsy Cline song.”

After dinner, in the car, he asked her if she wanted to get a drink someplace, and she said, “I got some beer back home. If you don’t mind sitting on the floor.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant until she let them into her
apartment. Her air-conditioning was on full blast, thank God, but the living room, a whitewashed box with a glaring overhead light, was empty from wall to wall. Callie steadied herself with one hand against the wall and kicked off her shoes.

“I had to sell the furniture when X moved out.” She stooped to pick up her shoes and started barefoot across the carpet. “Sumbitch wouldn’t even help pay for, you know, the abortion. So I sold his Fender Stratocaster, too.” With this last she gave her hips a fetching little dip. “Serves him right.” She tossed the shoes through a dark doorway. “It’s easier to keep clean anyhow.” She switched on the kitchen light and grinned back at him. “Sit anywhere you like.”

Paul kicked off his sandals and sat against the wall under the living room window, the only place in the room where he figured they couldn’t be seen from the parking lot. The kitchen light winked out, and Callie came into the living room dangling two bottles of beer. He watched her cross the room to switch off the overhead light. Then she padded across the carpet in the gathering dusk and held out a Cuervo to him by its neck. She knelt beside him, then tucked her legs under her, tugging her skirt towards her knees, and leaned on one long arm.

“Here’s to meteorologists.” Callie lifted her bottle.

“And singer/songwriters,” Paul said, as they clinked bottles. They each took a long pull.

“To anchorwomen,” said Callie.

“And beauty queens.”

“Here’s to Oral Roberts,” she said, lifting the bottle to her lips.

They sat silently in the dusk for a moment, watching each other, then Callie lowered her gaze and dug her fingernails into the carpet. Paul set his bottle against the wall and tilted her chin and kissed her. She retreated a fraction of an inch, just for a moment, then kissed him back, curling her hand over his shoulder. Then she lifted her eyes to the window above them and said, “We have to be careful. I sold the drapes, too.”

“Well, I won’t swing from the ceiling,” he said. “Not tonight, anyway.”

She hooked her arm around his neck and kissed him again, then she pulled away and held his face between her palms. He could feel the blush of warmth from her face in the dark.

“You’re not a son of a bitch, are you, Paul?” Her eyes peered into his. “I done had my lifetime quota.”

Paul was glad it was dark; who knew what she could see in his face? That question had a lot of possible answers: Yes. Maybe. Used to be. Not so’s you’d notice. But she was waiting, and he said, “Are you still in love with Mr. X?”

She gasped, and her eyes widened, but she didn’t let him go. Different shades passed quickly over her eyes like cloud shadow. He could feel her trembling. Her palms were hot against his cheeks, and he laid a hand on top of one of hers. “Are you?” he whispered.

“Not anymore,” she breathed.

He put his lips to her ear. “That’s what I was going to say.”

After a while one of them knocked over a beer. Callie tugged him by the wrist and said, “Come on, I’m getting carpet burn anyway.” Keeping out of sight of the window, they crawled on all fours, naked and giggling, across the empty expanse of carpet and into the doorway where Callie had tossed her shoes. The swaying moon of her ass vanished into the dark, and Paul rose to his feet and felt along the wall.

“You’re headin’ for the closet, hon,” she said, from the other side of the room, and he stepped towards the sound of her voice, stubbing his toe against something hard and heavy, like a cinder block.

“Ack!” Paul hopped on one foot as Callie laughed in the dark. “The hell was that?”

She turned on a little lamp set on an overturned milk crate, and in the dim yellow light Paul saw a couple of boxes overflowing with clothes, a plastic patio chair against the wall, her shoes in a heap near the closet door. Callie stretched out naked amid the rumpled sheets of a mattress on the floor, as shameless
as a cat; she was propped up on her elbow, her other hand stretched along her freckled thigh. Paul looked at his feet and saw that he had stubbed his toe on the
Norton Anthology of English Literature
.

“What is it with you and this book?” He swooped towards the bed, and Callie pivoted suddenly on her hip and stuck out her long leg and kicked the book with her heel, sending it spinning across the carpet. Paul snatched her ankle and tugged her, squealing, halfway off the mattress.

“Stop it!” She pushed against his shoulders, but she wrapped her legs around him. “You’ll laugh at me if I tell you.”

“I don’t think so,” said Paul, and he slid inside her, closing his eyes at the exquisite shock of entry. Neither of them moved for a moment, enjoying the sweet tension. Paul opened his eyes and found Callie searching his face.

“I got it at a yard sale.” She tightened her calves around the backs of his knees, drawing him deeper. “From a box of free books.”

“Did you.” Paul dug his toes into the carpet and began to move inside her.

“It was the biggest book.” Callie rocked with him on the edge of the mattress. “I figured it’d last the longest.”

“You like that?” Paul said, breathing hard. “Things that last a long time?”

“Uh huh.” She bit her lip in concentration and fixed him with her blue eyes. “How long you gonna last?”

“Not as long as the
Norton Anthology,”
he gasped.

She hooked her arms around his shoulders and pulled his ear down to her lips. “Try,” she whispered.

Much later, long after they had fallen into a tangled sleep, Paul started wide awake in the darkness. He was alone on the mattress, but he knew instantly that someone else was in the room. He heard a sigh and a swallow, then he felt a pressure on the side of the mattress, and he sat up sharply and pushed himself against the wall, his chest heaving. What if it’s Boy G and the other homeless guy from the library? he thought. He was afraid he was going to see their ferocious teeth glowing in
the dark. Or what if it’s worse? What if it’s Charlotte? Dear God, Paul thought, don’t let that cat follow me here. It’s not fair. It’s breaking the rules.

Callie switched on the light, and she and Paul squinted at each other in the sudden glare. She was kneeling next to the bed; she had set the
Norton Anthology
on the edge of the mattress. Paul eased down from the wall, but he said nothing.

“I shouldna kicked this,” Callie said, and Paul saw she was near tears. “You probably think I’m stupid. You know everything in this book, and it don’t mean much to you anymore.”

Paul said nothing, but he edged towards her. His heart was still racing, and he was unnerved to see a woman cry, especially one he had been so joyfully fucking only an hour or two before. Callie touched him on the back of his hand, which meant,
Thank you, but don’t come closer
.

“Where I come from, nobody’s got much, so I didn’t know what I was missing.” She pressed the book to her breasts. “But when I got to Tulsa?” She drew a deep breath. “I know that must sound stupid to you, Tulsa as . . . as . . .”

“Babylon.” He sat very still.

She brushed her cheek with the back of her hand. “Some people got the best of everything. They got the best food, they got the best clothes, they got the best places to live.” She gripped the anthology tightly in both hands and held it up; the blue veins stood out between her knuckles. “But this is free. This is the best, too, and I can have as much of it as any rich man. I can know as much about what’s in this book as any college girl.
And there’s nothing they can do about it.”
She was trembling, and her voice was shaking. Through her tears, her eyes were piercingly blue.

“I can know as much about it as you do!” she nearly shouted, rattling the book at him. Then her face crumpled, and the book drooped in her grasp. Paul got his hands under it and lowered the volume to the carpet, and he tugged Callie onto the bed. He kissed her and wiped her tears with his thumbs, and he lifted her face in his hands and said, “I’m gonna try real hard with you, Callie.” To his surprise, he was nearly in tears himself.
Callie sobbed and curled onto her side and pressed her back against him, and he wrapped his arms and legs tightly around her. “I’m really gonna try,” he murmured, and at least until he fell asleep again, he believed it.

P
AUL CAME TO WORK A FEW MINUTES EARLY ON MONDAY
.

“There must be a winter carnival in hell this morning.” Preston bounced on the balls of his feet and glanced at his watch.

“Not only that,” Paul said as he took the temporary badge, “but this is the last time I’ll have to sign in.”

“You get another job someplace?” Preston lifted his eyebrows hopefully.

“It’s not that cold in hell.” Paul stepped back from the desk, swinging his lunch. “I’m getting a permanent badge today.”

“How’d you swing that?” Preston said. “I thought you was only here temporarily.”

Paul smiled as he backed away. Yesterday, during a long, leisurely, postcoital Sunday morning, he had been eating pancakes naked at Callie’s kitchen counter when she brushed his hip with hers and said, “Come see me tomorrow. I’ll get you a permanent ID.”

“That answers my question,” he had said.

“What question?”

“Who do I have to fuck to get an ID at TxDoGS?”

“Asshole,” she’d said, and had flicked her fork at him, spattering him with maple syrup. He’d flicked her back, and she had laughed as he clutched her round the waist and licked the sweet brown specks off her collarbone.

“Let’s just say,” Paul said now as he backed down the hall from Preston’s desk, “I’ve got a friend in high places.”

He put his lunch in one of the refrigerators outside the lunchroom, then took the stairs two at a time and hustled down the hall and around the corner to Building Services. He hadn’t seen Callie’s truck in the parking lot, but perhaps she’d come in while he was stashing his lunch. He felt jaunty and virile this morning; all his extremities tingled.

“We gotta keep it cool at work, okay?” she’d said to him, when they had finally parted on Sunday. “No PDA at TxDoGS. I mean it, Paul.”

He’d agreed, but surely she wouldn’t object if he nuzzled her a bit in her inner office, in the deeper recesses of Building Services, the two of them alone among the laptops and the video projectors; but as he rounded the corner and saw Preston at parade rest behind his desk below, he found the Building Services door closed and locked. Not even the florid Ray was in attendance yet. Paul started back down the hall towards his cube, feeling only a tad less jaunty and virile. Things are definitely looking up, he thought, Charlotte and spooky homeless guys notwithstanding. I’ve got a raise, I’ve got the respect of my boss, I’ve got a girl—hell, if my life were a musical, I’d start
singing
.

He swung around the corner of his aisle, trying to decide if he wanted to be Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire, and found his petite, nervous coworker Renee standing in the aisle outside the dying tech writer’s cube. Normally he’d have pulled himself up short and gasped an apology for nearly bowling her over, but today even Renee couldn’t puncture his good mood. He gave her a jaunty salute, more Astaire than Kelly, and paused in the doorway of his cubicle. Renee turned to him with a ghastly, wide-eyed look, her pale fingers pressed to her mouth.

“You okay?” Paul said. This morning he loved all women, even this one. Renee shook her head and leveled her horrified gaze through the tech writer’s doorway, both hands now pressed to her mouth. Paul came into the aisle, and she backed up a step as he edged past her.

The dying tech writer was dead. He lay back in his office chair with his legs splayed and his arms dangling to the sides, his bony wrists and knuckles hanging perfectly motionless. His baggy trousers and oversized sweater seemed to be draped across the chair, empty. His head was tipped back over the backrest, and his gaunt, lifeless eyes stared at the ceiling. The ceiling panel directly over him was askew, leaving a little isosceles triangle of perfect blackness. The yellowed breathing tube poking out of the gauze around the tech writer’s neck pointed straight up at the gap in the ceiling.

All the air went out of Paul. His mouth hung open, but he was unable to speak. He looked from the gap in the ceiling panels to the body in the chair and back again. The tech writer’s screen saver was running, an endless, slow-motion spray of stars.