Small World (9 page)

‘A fair hearing.’

‘I’m busy,’ she responded. Fumbling among tools on the worktable, she seized an X-acto blade and began shaving the thin piece of wood before her.

‘I never would have expected this attitude from you, Lucy,’ he said quietly.

‘Really.’ Lucy didn’t look at him. The clutter on her worktable might have been the contents of a treasure chest, so riveted was she by it. ‘Evidently we don’t know each other as well as we thought we did.’

‘I thought you might be a little more mature—’ he was cut off by another savage attack on the wood with the sandpaper. It was almost a relief; he felt like he was saying all the wrong things, and couldn’t help it.

‘I don’t care about Leyna Shaw. Or Dolly. Any of those women,’ Lucy said suddenly, her voice high with anger.

‘Lucy,’ he said, hating the pleading in his own voice, ‘nobody was cheated or ill-used. I slept with some lonely women. Not even that many. They weren’t lonely for a while. Is that so bad?’

‘And you got money for the Dalton, or wherever you were working. Or something, a painting or a piece of sculpture or an invitation to the right party.’ The tools on the table clinked and clattered as she shoved them around savagely.

‘Goddamn it, Lucy, there’s lot more to my job than sucking up to donors. I’m good at my job, all of it,’ he exploded. ‘It’s my job.’

‘I’m so happy for you. I’d say screw your job but that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Is there a woman in this country who hasn’t had to listen to that song, “It’s my job”. It ought to be grounds for divorce. Between adultery and mental cruelty, “my job”.’ Her hands moved ceaselessly, frantically, over the wood. She caught her breath and plunged on. ‘It’s sickening enough you'd screw Dolly. And then me. Do you keep a scorecard or was it just for fun, or were you keeping the help happy? It makes me want to puke.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Lucy. Dolly and I were finished years ago. I’m forty-three. Was I supposed to save myself for true love?’

‘I told you, Nick. I don’t care who you slept with or that you slept with them at all. I care about why. The point is, we don’t seem to share the same standards about that. It’s important to me, a lot more important, apparently, than it is to you.’

‘It was never unimportant. I liked them. I never went to bed with a woman I didn’t like. Oh, shit,’ he said helplessly. Why didn’t she understand? How could he explain to her how it had been all his life, the women who came to him, the sad rich women with their terrible emptiness? How it had always seemed like the courteous thing to do, the kind thing.

‘Rah, rah.’ Lucy’s voice was like breaking glass.

Desperate, he tried to recover lost ground. ‘You’ve been listening to Dolly, the fucking witch of the North, and Leyna Shaw. Two of the biggest bitches on the surface of Mother Earth.’ ‘Are you sure you never slept with a woman you didn’t like?’ Lucy pecked with bloody glee.

‘I didn’t sleep with either one of them. It was more like horizontal war games. I was lucky to get away with my balls.’ ‘Charming. I can’t wait to hear your assessment of me.’

‘Lucy, you’re too harsh,’ he insisted. ‘I’m standing here trying to justify myself to you. Isn't that some kind of proof of sincerity?’ He passed a weary hand over his face. ‘I’m telling you the world just isn’t always black and white.’ It seemed to Nick that it was something he had perceived almost literally on his mother’s knee. Why was it so hard for her to understand?

‘How would you feel about me if you found out the same kind of thing?’ Lucy asked in a low voice.

‘That’s an unfair question. I’ve taken you at face value from the first. I never asked for proof of anything from you.’ It was all true but self-serving. He had known from the first she would not come to him, that he would have to seek her out. Was that his real mistake? Falling in love with a good, sweet, fastidious middle-class American girl, who believed that love was always"pure and fortuitous, if only you were virtuous enough, as if it were some kind of natural law?

She was slipping away from him. He sensed the slack in the line. Her face, stony and pale, was still turned away from him.

Nick leaned back against the doorpost, looking out into the bright sunlight. He could hear Zach and Laurie and the voices of children he didn’t know outside. It sounded like a tag game. He wondered how long it would take before he didn’t know their voices anymore. He sucked in breath and turned back to her.

Her hands shoved the sandpaper like a washerwoman. Wisps of hair had escaped her braids and floated around her face.

i’m trying,’ he said slowly, carefully, ‘to tell you that I’m sorry. That’s all over. With Dolly, with Leyna, everyone else. I only want you.’

‘You’ve got one thing right.’ She looked at him full in the face for the first time since he’d come to the door, it’s all over.’ She looked down again quickly. ‘I have work to do. I know you understand. Good-bye.’

He stood silently for a moment, thinking
Th'at's the last marble
as the childen’s voices faded and died away. He turned and walked quickly away.

Lucy’s hands came at last to rest, but she didn’t look up. She felt stupid, and somehow, in some shapeless indeterminate way, in the wrong. After a long time, she reached slowly, like a blind person moving through memorized spaces, for an X-acto blade. Carefully, precisely, she drew it this way and that, and then repeated the pattern.

Suddenly, she threw it down and grabbed one hand in the other. A thin red line welled across the palm of her hand. ‘Shit,’ she muttered and blotted it on her overalls. She pushed the tools beyond child’s reach and tossed the splintered wood in the cardboard box that was doing duty as a waste receptacle. Head down, she abandoned the workshop.

The minivac hummed mechanically along with Dolly as she moved it over and around the tiny settee. The Gingerbread House was having what Dolly thought of as a
nice clean.
It had had dozens of
nice cleans
in the absence of its neighbor, her pride and joy, the Doll’s White House. The task felt vaguely like potting around a graveyard, enjoying the hovering spirit of the late departed.

Dolly considered her morning conversation with Nick Weiler on the phone.

‘ . . . record-setting attendance, ’ he said, the way people say
at least he went quick.
‘I wish you’d let us keep it longer.’

He could have been a little sweeter, a little more enthusiastic. Dolly had to scold.

‘Yes, and if I did, you’d pretty please later on to let you lend it around with the rest of the show.’

Nick caved in like Wonderbread. ‘Well, we’ve got Missy Updegraff’s Fondtland Manor to replace it.’

‘There’s nothing tacky about that, now,’ she told him. 'What are you complaining about?’ she asked, though really she thought

Fondtland Manor was a thoroughly unworthy successor to her Doll’s White House, and of course Nick hadn’t really complained at all.

"I appreciate your lending it to us, Dorothy. I’d like to point out that it hasn’t been stolen.’

A feeble, unfunny joke, Dolly thought. How could the silly man believe that there was no threat to the Doll’s White House with all the Christless thieving going on?

No, he hadn’t been himself. Polite, as always; that old bitch Maggie Weiler would probably crawl out of her antique bed and beat him with her chamberpot if he wasn’t. Old Maggie would disapprove of his being so dishwater dull, though, too. All because he and dear Lucy were on the outs. The thought made Dolly hum a little louder.

The idiocy of the man. hopping into the sack with Leyna Shaw, for a rerun, and her living in that complex where half of official Washington lives, to witness Nick’s car parked next to hers in the parking garage, a nice symbol, Dolly giggled to herself, of what else he was parking and where. And then the
Sunday
segment, with Leyna purring at him like a cat hearing a can opener, in case anybody had any doubts left. It was more than amusing, the two of them taking care of each other like that, the same way they’d always gotten everything: Leyna, screwing anybody who knew anything plus the necessary network executives to get her promotions, and darling Nick, cheerfully, politely making rich women happy, and his museum nicely endowed. Which brought up the interesting speculation of whether either of them or both had ever screwed the president. Leyna liked to hint around she had, and Matt Johnson wasn’t about to deny it. Still. Dolly had never heard of him lusting after any but his own sex, and the best part of that official secret was that Nick Weiler was exactly the type of dear friend that Matt always chose.

Ah, well, Lucy was too quick to miss the signals and there had been some convenient gossip-column talk, and Dolly herself had had a nice chat with Connie Winslow, who Lucy thought was a friend of hers. Connie, with her beautiful voice trapped in a scarred ugly body, knew very well that Nick Weiler would never love her and so kept her yen for him well buried, even to the extent of cultivating his girl friends. Connie had been happy to tell Lucy, by mistake, of course, that darling Nick was being a bastard, oops, and that was appropriate wasn’t it?

Only now, he was a dull bastard, but then, weren’t they all,

after a while? And it was pleasant to think that snotty Lucy had discovered her true love was just a male whore.

The door bell rang against the hum of the minivac. Dolly ignored it. It was followed shortly by her maid’s characteristic knock at the door of the dollhouse where she was working.

‘Come in,’ she sang.

Ruta slouched in and thrust a small manila envelope at her. Dolly examined it quizzically and then shut off the minivac. She ripped the top clean off the envelope.

Peeking inside, she could discern no paper, only a shadowy square like a small flat matchbox. She turned the envelope upside down and shook the contents into her hand. It
was
a matchbox, from a fashionable restaurant. Dolly opened it half an inch and quickly closed it. She waved her hand dismissively at Ruta, whose face was hanging out avidly. The maid rambled out unwillingly.

Locking the door behind Ruta, Dolly opened the box again. With trembling fingers, she plucked the contents from the matchbox. A half dozen inch-long roses, from stem to blossom, the buds less than a quarter of an inch. The stems clung to the skin of her hand without quite piercing it. It was as if they were pricking her. She shook the roses gently into the cupped palm of her hand. They glowed like fresh droplets of blood, set off against a field of green leaves and stems. Dolly raised them to her nose. Her stomach fluttered. The unmistakeable scent of roses, real roses, faint as a promise of love, reached her.

She fished out a jeweler’s loupe that she always carried in the watchpocket of her apron. Studying the roses, she could see the thorns that had plucked at her skin like small caresses. She examined the matchbox, discovering a small square of paper, printed with minute letters, on the bottom. Using the jeweler’s loupe, she was able to decipher the message on it. A name and a phone number.

Dropping the loupe thoughtfully into its proper pocket, Dolly went to the nearest telephone. Her finger shook so, she had to dial three times to get it right.

Roger was
trying to relax. He had a hamburger and a beer. Between munching and slurping, he rolled the little pink-bullet-car across the round glass top of the coffee table. When he looked up, he could see the digital traveling clock blinking patiently an arm’s length away on the nightstand. It was almost time for the appointment, and he finished off the burger with two cheek-ballooning bites. He rolled the little car, one-handed, around the circumference of the table, making squealing noises and revving engine noises and tipping it as if he were two-wheeling it on a real racetrack. He ran it back and forth between the beer can and the manila envelope.

Roger drained the beer can and crushed it with one hand. Sadly, he dropped it into the wastebasket, wishing he’d bought more or that there was time to go out for another bagful. But there wasn’t. The digital clock went on blinking its calm alarm at him. He flipped the car casually with his famous fingertip flick, perfected on a series of turtles he had owned as a kid. It was one of those skills, once learned, for which a person never really lost the knack.

Ready or not, he jumped when the knock came at the door. He licked his teeth hastily, in case of onion bits or other flotsam. Grabbing the little car, he dropped it in his pocket. It would make the pocket bulge a little, but Roger didn’t care. His car would be on the table soon enough.

He wore his interview suit, an iridescent blue-green, a mark of respect for his visitor. It was profoundly uncomfortable, and he longed for the soft bagginess of his cords and T-shirt, with their convenient holes for scratching. Roger didn’t dress like this for anyone less than a potential employer. It was part of the small collection of self-made rules that he thought of as his code.

His hand was almost too wet with sweat to get a grip on the doorknob, but somehow, he opened the door. He was looking right at the famous lady. It was startling how much she looked like herself. Three dimensions, and nice ones, he thought, and natural coloring. She smiled at him, and the beer and hamburger gurgled in greeting.

‘Mr. Tinker?’ she asked. Her voice was so
polished
, Roger thought, so high class.