Slant (20 page)

ended it all early and stupidly, for nothing, he thinks.

For nothing at all.

2O

Night is coming on to dark morning and the storm is gentled, the lightshow is off. All the house shutters are drawn and the monitor is set to store and be quiet. Alice has calmed Twist and given her some fast OTC anxiolytics. She is not hyperventilating now and she lies on Alice's couch with a cold cloth

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stopped sobbing. Alice is exhausted but she watches over the young woman with feelings of irritation and peculiar gratitude.

She can rely on Twist to always have more urgent and tangled problems. Twist's words tumbled out of her as soon as she came through the door--her awfulness was back, she said, in force, and she could hardly see straight. She has cycled in and out of total darkness, "Like looking at a black dog with sick eyes," she said; skirted slashing her wrists, listened to the most awful silent urgings, and imagined the most vivid hells. Some of these she described while Alice fixed her some food and dosed out the anxiolytics. Alice listened, grimly sympathetic.

Twist is having one severe fallback, no doubts. Tomorrow they will talk about her temp situation and see where some long-term medical and therapy might be gotten.

But now it is peaceful. A slow drizzle falls outside, little finger-taps of rain barely audible on the blanked windows, and all there is in the world exists within these walls.

Alice puts on her plush robe and curls up on the chair beside the couch, drawing up her knees, eyes closing of themselves. She feels like a squirrel after it has been chased by a cat. Her thinking comes in slow waves of reason mixed with soft tremors of fkntasy.

Mary Choy has filed her request with Seattle Citizen Oversight to get the records she needs. Humans have to make that decision and they are all at home asleep, and so after checking in with Nussbaum and finding that he has gone

home, she hooks a police shuttle, empty but for her, on its ride to the north. At her apt, she undresses. Showers.

Sits staring at the rain on the antique thermopane plate glass windows. Bs3' day, little girl.

It is a day she would not mind forgetting. Nussbaum could have tried her out on something a little less gruesome, a little less disturbing and pointless.

Her legs stretch long and her back slumps in the soft chair. She is not ready for sleep yet. She stands and performs a slow dytch, Tai-Chi and Aikido moves choreographed to her own dance rhythms, until her muscles and attitudes relax and allow her basic status self, ground and reference for all her endeavors, to come to balance and emerge like the moon from behind clouds.

She yawns. The images are tightly bottled. She will release them tomorrow,

122 GREG BEAR

SEXSTR pounds M:

Legitimate and Sincere Discussion of Sexuality in Our Time, REAL and IMMEDIATE in Your Pad! (Vids and Yox of REAL people available for YOUR sincere needs!)

(This piece has had 10230 accesses in 10 years. Author not listed; public access free of additional licenses.)

THE HUSBAND:

I have always been courteous and sweet, and thought of you. You yourself told me I was the best lover you ever had. I watched with dismay the cooling, the change from excitement to responsibility, to keeping the home on course... When I am gone, I hope you'll look back and realize what opportunities you missed. You'll think of all those times you could have felt more and done more, and as you're lying there, completely alone in bed, you'll have so many regrets...

That's what I dream of. The body's reckoning.

THE WIFE:

Yes, he is conscientious, but lord... After he is gonemand I do hope I survive himml can spend all morning in the garden, and then have toast and a little marmalade for breakfast. I hope I am too old and withered for men to pay me any attention. I will travel with my friends and read whenever I wish. I suppose he thinks I will miss him in bed, but really, after, what will it be, probably, forty years of having to service him--that's what he himself calls it sometimes--wouldn't any reasonable human being hope for a vacation?

That's what I dream of. A long vacation.

In the back of Marcus's limo, without Marcus, Jonathan is on his way home. He is gray smooth neutral now; he feels he has been manipulated into tracking a slick fast groove he does not think can lead anywhere good. By feeling neutral he can let himself think there is some way out, some room to maneuver; he has not really made any decisions. Marcus's offer sounds so very ridiculous, nineteenth-century; a secret society, perhaps, with handshakes and fezzes, Ancient Revelations Unveiled upon signing a binding pact in blood...

What he feels, most of all, is lost, like a small boy. He wants to belong someplace, but where--with Marcus and his unknown opportunity? With Chloe and her hidden emotions and reluctance?

Jonathan travels in someone else's car to a house where he is no longer at

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God, I'm feeling sorry for myself, he thinks. Time to get maudlin and look for a sympathetic shoulder.

But he is a mature man and playtime is long over.

He can see his house from the road. The limo pauses at a crossing. He wonders whether Chloe is still awake.

Penelope and Hiram have gone to bed. The house is quiet. Chloe stands by the living room window watching the clouds tatter.

Chloe's thoughts have been more and more ragged and bitter through the evening, veering between self-judgment and self-justification. Yet there is nothing she can blame specifically for her mood. Jonathan has done nothing unusual to irritate her. The children have simply been themselves, and she is used to that sort of stress.

Maybe she can blame a crazy toilet that says they are sick; it has even told her now, based on a straightforward pee, that she is the one who has a viral cold. She has phoned in a repair order, though the toilet's own opinion of its condition is that there is nothing wrong.

No member of the family has ever had a cold. She hardly remembers what the symptoms might be.

For reasons she cannot fathom, she has been thinking with sharp persistence about the months before and after she met Jonathan, that time when she could have reliably bedded a new man every week, sometimes two, and often did. Back then, she would not have hesitated to call it fucking around; now the term seems crude. She is a mother, after all, and a good and responsible one.

Jonathan at first seemed just another of those men, less handsome than most, but from the beginning she treated him differently. Even as she dated and bedded others, she would not immediately give herself to him, give him what her mother called "the physical privilege." No privilege--just sex, delightful exercise. But with Jonathan--

She felt differently about Jonathan, not strongly attracted sexually, yet not uninterested; he moved her in different ways.

In those weeks before she finally allowed him to persuade her, she gave herself to other men and behaved with them in ways that she would not with Jonathan, and has not since. She has never tried to explain that to herself and in fact has seldom thought about it, but this evening, the question comes out of the murk with a disturbing rough edge.

She remembers now that she had twenty men in all--eight of them after she began dating Jonathan, sometimes inviting a man over hours after Jonathan had left. Why twenty, she wonders; it seems so rounded and artificial a number, so meaningless, nothing to do with actual people, with arms and legs and cocks and pretty eyes and thrusting hips.

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turn down the quiet good and intelligent man and then bed the loud, self-assured and brightly plumed boys. It was the last, the monster, that broke her and sent her straight to Jonathan. He was what she needed. The frame house creaks softly as the last of the wind fetches up against its eaves. Jonathan to her seemed honorable and decent and therefore much less of a challenge. Getting the posturing boy-men to pay attention to her was a real accomplishment. "Bitch thinking," she murmurs. He knows little or nothing about the men who had her but were not hers, knows only about the last, and she will never tell him; he is not the sort who would react well. She would not want him to be that sort. Though he has tried to get her to engage in fantasizing about other relationships, she has resisted; there is something about such demands that lessens him, in her eyes. He's changed. Sex, for this older Jonathan, seems to be some sort of adventure, some way of making up for a stiff youth; she has long since discarded that notion. Yet she and Jonathan get along well enough in bed, she believes. She feels his occasional dissatisfactions, his attempts to change their sexual routines; she resists with a tree-like stubbornness, hoping to keep their relationship on a firm and level ground, away from the jagged mountains of her early behavior. She will not go back to the out-of-control passion, the pain, the loss of self through giving all and getting nothing she needs in return. She knows little about Jonathan's other sexual experiences. A few things he has admitted to--unsatisfactory, half-hearted couplings with confused young w-men--things Chloe scrupulously dismisses as inconsequential, and indeed I are. The present moment is supreme. Family is what counts. Yet increasingly she has felt Jonathan's entreaties turn bitter. He does not know why she resists; she doesn't either, not really. He has asked for things, after all, that she once freely gave to others. Perhaps he senses that. He's not stupid. And his requests are not extreme--no marriage counselor would call them extreme, or do more than offer mealy-mouthed placating defenses for Chloe's reluctance to go along. It is after all a game for two, and the rules have to be agreed to by both partners. They have been together for twenty years and who can expect the experimenting and exploration to stretch on forever? It has now come to what he calls stiffness. She gives herself often enough, she thinks, and with sufficient response; he ,-is not a bad lover and he knows it. But the strain is showing. Then the question rubs with a sandpapery grit. Does she still feel anything for Jonathan except the need for continuity, for stability and level ground, for

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"Shit, shit, shit," she mutters. What she did when she was eighteen is a ghostly irrelevance, numbers and bleached memories and even many of the names lost; what she gives or does not give to her husband is her own business. They have their children and their lives, their social connections and many friends... That is more than enough. She opens the rear glass door and stands on the porch. A few drops of rain splash on her face. She wipes them away with well-manicured fingers. Jonathan does his share. But feeling any kind of guilt angers her. She has given the children her free hours and thoughts and her passion; they are strong and they are good children. The time is coming soon when they will be adults. Penelope is dating sporadically and Hiram is hiding his interests well enough. Chloe hates the thought of life demanding more of her than she has already given. She has given up the tradition of her family, disappointing her father; she has not used her education. Suddenly, in the cooling breeze, she jerks upright and grips the railing. The tears flow freely and she hates, herself, him, all the demanding forces. What she fears is that she is coming to believe any sex at all diminishes her. She does it for Jonathan, not for herself. She has no strong needs, none at all. Jonathan will be home any minute and she does not want to show this side to him. He has become an adversary; she loves him but gave him so many parts of herself and her life that she feels she could have done other and better things with; and then she thinks of the children and really the obligations and losses haunt her, make her feel a little sick. What could she have been, given complete freedom from all the sandpaper demands of sex, including children? She goes back into the house and swings the door hard but it catches and closes with a soft snick. She would prefer to have slammed it. The lights switch on in the living room. "Lights off." she shouts. The house is controlling her; she cannot break free from anything. The lights obediently dim and go out. She is bound on every side in the darkness. The front door opens. Jonathan is home. Her muscles tense and she composes herself. He must not see her this way; he does not deserve that satisfaction. She hears him in the front hall, and then he stops, and she imagines him listening to the house, like a cat trying to locate a mouse. He wants to know where she is. He wants to know if she is asleep or awake, and if she is awake perhaps he will try to hug her and touch her, arouse her. He seems to need to believe that being away for a few days or even a few hours increases her need for him. It is not so. She could go for months, years, forever. "Hello?" he calls softly. "In here," she says. "How was the meeting?" Jonathan walks into the living room. He looks drained. "Weird," he says. "Why is it dark?" He stands a few feet away, arms folded. For a moment she is relieved that

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"I've been watching the storm," she says.

"Kids asleep?"

"Yeah. The toilet says we're sick." He laughs. He sounds nervous. "Was the speaker interesting?"

"I suppose. Marcus was the really interesting speaker tonight." Then he

remembers he is not supposed to tell Chloe. "Christ, I'm tired. Ready for bed?" "Marcus the kingmaker?" "The same," he says. "What's he offering now?"

"Nothing worth the bother," Jonathan replies, but the words sound false,

or at least unsure.

He is hiding something. Everything she has thought and felt this evening

seems to double back like a cobra and she is suddenly afraid. What if she has denied too much, been too inflexible? She is vulnerable; she does not and cannot stand alone.

"I've never understood the whole mentor thing," she says.

"Neither have I, but there it is."

She steps across the metabolic carpet. Her feet are bare and her toes in the

warm plush feel nice, distinct. All the parts of her body feel separate and distinct. She does not like it, but her insecurity is working on her. She does not want to lose Jonathan, this situation, all she's worked for. It's nonsense to think anything has happened, but everything she feels seems nonsensical.