The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (12 page)

Sally stood under the dead cottonwood tree, counting the windows so she could figure out which was Ulric Henry’s apartment. There were three windows on the sixth floor with lights in all three, and the middle window
was open for some unknown reason, but it would require an incredible coincidence to have Ulric Henry come and stand at one of the windows while Sally was standing there so she could shout up to him, “Do you speak English?”

I wasn’t looking for him anyway, she told herself stubbornly. I’m on my way to meet my father, and I stopped to look at the moon. My, it certainly is a peculiar blue color
tonight. She stood a few minutes longer under the tree, pretending to look at the moon but it was getting very cold, the moon did not seem to be getting any bluer, and even if it were, it did not seem like an adequate reason for freezing to death, so she pulled her hat down farther over her ears and walked past the bonsais and over the curved bridge towards Research.

As soon as she
was across
the bridge, Ulric Henry came to the middle window and shut it. The movement of pulling the window shut made a little breeze. The torn piece of printout paper that had been resting on the ledge fluttered to a place closer to the edge and then went over, drifting down in the bluish moonlight past the kite, and coming to rest on the second lowest branch of the cottonwood tree.

Wednesday morning
Mr. Mowen got up early so he could get some work done at the office before the press conference. Sally wasn’t up yet, so he put the coffee on and went into the bathroom to shave. He plugged his electric razor into the outlet above the sink, and the light over the mirror promptly went out. He took the cord out of the outlet and unscrewed the blackened bulb. Then he pattered into the kitchen in his
bare feet to look for another light bulb.

He put the burned-out bulb gently in the wastebasket next to the sink and began opening cupboards. He picked up the syrup bottle to look behind it. The lid was not screwed on tightly, and the syrup bottle dropped with a thud onto its side and began oozing syrup all over the cupboard. Mr. Mowen grabbed a paper towel, which tore in a ragged, useless diagonal,
and tried to mop it up. He knocked the salt shaker over into the pool of syrup. He grabbed the other half of the paper towel and turned on the hot water faucet to wet it. The water came out in a steaming blast.

Mr. Mowen jumped sideways to get out of the path of the boiling water and knocked over the wastebasket. The light bulb bounced out and smashed onto the kitchen floor. Mr. Mowen stepped
on a large ragged piece. He tore off more paper towels to stanch the blood and limped back to the bathroom walking on the side of his bleeding foot, to get a bandaid.

He had forgotten about the light in the bathroom being burned out. Mr. Mowen felt his way to the medicine cabinet, knocking the shampoo and a box of Q-Tips into the sink before he found the bandaids. The shampoo lid wasn’t screwed
on tightly either. He took the metal box of bandaids back to the kitchen.

It was bent, and Mr. Mowen got a dent in his thumb trying to pry the lid off. As he was pushing on it, the lid suddenly sprang free, spraying bandaids all over the kitchen floor. Mr. Mowen picked one up, being careful to avoid the pieces of light bulb, ripped the end off the wrapper, and pulled on the orange string. The
string came out. Mr. Mowen looked at the string for a long minute and then tried to open the bandaid from the back.

When Sally
came into the kitchen, Mr. Mowen was sitting on a kitchen chair sucking his bleeding thumb and holding a piece of paper towel to his other foot. “What happened?” she said.

“I cut myself on a broken light bulb,” Mr. Mowen said. “It went out while I was trying to shave.”

She grabbed for a piece of paper toweling. It tore off cleanly at the perforation, and Sally wrapped Mr. Mowen’s thumb in it. “You know better than to try to pick up a broken light bulb,” she said. “You should have gotten a broom.”

“I did not try to pick up the light bulb,” he said. “I cut my thumb on a bandaid. I cut my
feet
on the light bulb.”

“Oh, I see,” Sally said. “Don’t you know better
than to try to pick up a light bulb with your feet?”

“This isn’t funny,” Mr Mowen said indignantly. “I am in a lot of pain.”

“I know it isn’t funny,” Sally said. She picked a bandaid up off the floor, tore off the end, and pulled the string neatly along the edge of the wrapping. “Are you going to be able to make it to your press conference?”

“Of course I’m going to be able to make it. And I
expect you to be there, too.”

“I will,” Sally said, peeling another bandaid and applying it to the bottom of his foot. “I’m going to leave as soon as I get this mess cleaned up so I can walk over. Or would you like me to drive you?”

“I can drive myself,” Mr. Mowen said, starting to get up.

“You stay right there until I get your slippers,” Sally said, and darted out of the kitchen. The phone
rang. “I’ll get it,” Sally called from the bedroom. “You don’t budge out of that chair.”

Mr. Mowen picked a bandaid up off the floor, tore the end off of it and peeled the string along the side, which made him feel considerably better. My luck must be starting to change, he thought. “Who’s on the phone?” he said cheerfully as Sally came back into the kitchen carrying his slippers and the phone.

She plugged the phone cord into the wall and handed him the receiver. “It’s Mother,” she said. “She wants to talk to the sexist pig.”

Ulric was getting dressed for the press conference when the phone rang. He let Brad answer it. When he walked into the living room, Brad was hanging up the phone.

“Lynn missed her plane,” Brad said.

Ulric looked
up hopefully. “She did?”

“Yes. She’s taking one
out this afternoon. While she was shooting the breeze, she let fall she’d signed her name on the press release that was sent out on the computer.”

“And Mowen’s already read it,” Ulric said. “So he’ll know you stole the project away from her.” He was in no mood to mince words. He had lain awake most of the night trying to decide what to say to Sally Mowen. What if he told her about Project Sally
and she looked blankly at him and said, “Sorry. My wetware is inoperable?”

“I didn’t steal the project,” Brad said amiably. “I just sort of skyugled it away from her when she wasn’t looking. And I already got it back. I called Gail as soon as Lynn hung up and asked her to take Lynn’s name of the press releases before Old Man Mowen saw them. It was right lucky Lynn missing her plane and all.”

Ulric put his down parka on over his sports coat.

“Are you heading for the press conference?” Brad said. “Wait till I rig myself out, and I’ll ride over with you.”

“I’m walking,” Ulric said, and opened the door.

The phone rang. Brad answered it. “No, I wasn’t watching the morning movie,” Brad said, “but I’d take it big if you’d let me gander a guess anyway. I’ll say the movie is
Carolina Cannonball
and the jackpot is six hundred and fifty-one dollars. That’s right? Well, bust my buttons. That was a right lucky guess.”

Ulric slammed the door behind him.

When Mr. Mowen still wasn’t in the office by ten, Janice called him at home. She got a busy signal. She sighed, waited a minute, and tried again. The line was still busy. Before she could hang up, the phone flashed an incoming call. She
punched the button. “Mr. Mowen’s office,” she said.

“Hi,” the voice on the phone said. “This is Gail over in publicity. The press releases contain an inoperable statement. You haven’t sent any out, have you?”

I tried. Janice thought with a little sigh. “No,” she said.

“Good. I wanted to confirm nonrelease before I effected the deletion.”

“What deletion?” Janice said. She tried to call up the
press release but got a picture of Ulric Henry instead.

“The release
catalogs Lynn Saunders as co-designer of the project.”

“I thought she
was
co-designer.”

“Oh, no,” Gail said. “My fiancé Brad McAfee designed the whole project. I’m glad the number of printouts is nonsignificant.”

After Gail hung up, Janice tried Mr. Mowen again. The line was still busy. Janice called up the company directory
on her terminal, got a resume on Ulric Henry instead, and called the Chugwater operator on the phone. The operator gave her Lynn Saunders’ number. Janice called Lynn and got her roommate.

“She’s not here,” the roommate said. “She had to leave for back east as soon as she was done with the waste emissions thing. Her mother was doing head trips on her. She was really bummed out by it.”

“Do you
have a number where I could reach her?” Janice asked.

“I sure don’t,” the roommate said. “She wasn’t with it at all when she left. Her fiancé might have a number.”

“Her fiancé?”

“Yeah. Brad McAfee.”

“I think if she calls you’d better have her call me. Priority.” Janice hung up the phone. She called up the company directory on her terminal again and got the press release for the new emissions
project. Lynn’s name was nowhere on it. She sighed, an odd, angry sigh, and tried Mr. Mowen’s number again. It was still busy.

On Sally’s
way past Ulric Henry’s housing unit, she noticed something fluttering high up in the dead cottonwood tree. The remains of a kite were tangled at the very top, and just out of reach, on the second lowest branch, there was a piece of white paper. She tried a
couple of halfhearted jumps, swiping at the paper with her hand, but she succeeded only in blowing the paper farther out of reach. If she could get the paper down, she could take it up to Ulric Henry’s apartment and ask him if it had fallen out of his window. She looked around for a stick and then stood still, feeling foolish. There was no more reason to go after the paper than to attempt to get the
ruined kite down, she told herself, but even as she thought that, she was measuring the height of the branches to see if she could get a foot up and reach the paper from there. One branch wouldn’t do it, but two might. There was no one in the gardens. This is ridiculous, she told herself, and swung up into the crotch of the tree.

She climbed swiftly up to the third branch, stretched out across
it, and reached for the paper. Her fingers did not quite reach, so she straightened up again, hanging onto the trunk to get her balance, and made a kind of downsweeping lunge toward the piece of paper. She lost her balance and nearly missed the branch, and the wind she had created by her sudden movement blew the paper all the way to the end of the branch, where it teetered precariously but did not
fall off.

Someone was coming across the curving bridge. She blew a couple of times on the paper and then stopped. She was going to have to go out on the branch. Maybe the paper is blank, she thought. I can hardly take a blank piece of paper to Ulric Henry, but she was already testing the weight of the branch with her hand. It seemed firm enough, and she began to edge out onto the dead branch,
holding onto the trunk until the last possible moment and then dropping into an inching crawl that brought her directly over the sidewalk. From there she was able to reach the paper easily.

The paper was part of a printout from a computer, torn raggedly at an angle. It read, “Wanted: Young woman who can generate language. Ulric. H.” The
ge
in “language” was missing, but otherwise the message
made perfect sense, which she would have thought was peculiar if she had not been so surprised at the message. Her area of special study was language generation. She had spent all last week in class doing it, using all the rules of linguistic change on existing words: generalization and specialization of meaning, change in part of speech, shortening, prepositional verb clustering, to create a new-sounding
language. It had been almost impossible to do at first, but by the end of the week, she had greeted her professor with, “Good aft. I readed up my book taskings,” without even thinking about it. She could certainly do the same thing with Ulric Henry, whom she had been wanting to meet anyway.

She had forgotten
about the man she had seen coming across the bridge. He was almost to the tree now. In
approximately ten more steps he would look up and see her crouched there like an insane vulture. How will I explain this to my father if anyone sees me? she thought, and put a cautious foot behind her. She was still wondering when the branch gave way.

Mr. Mowen did not leave for the press conference until a quarter to eleven. He had still been on the phone with Charlotte when Sally left, and
when he had asked Charlotte to wait a minute so he could tell Sally to wait and he’d drive her over, Charlotte had called him a sexist tyrant and accused him of stifling Sally’s dominant traits by repressive male psychological intimidation. Mr. Mowen had had no idea what she was talking about.

Sally had swept up the glass and put a new light bulb in the bathroom before she left, but Mr. Mowen
had decided not to tempt fate. He had shaved with a disposable razor instead. Leaning over to get a piece of toilet paper to put on the cut on his chin, he had cracked his head on the medicine cabinet door. After that, he had sat very still on the edge of the tub for nearly half an hour, wishing Sally were home so she could help him get dressed.

At the end of the half hour, Mr. Mowen decided
that stress was the cause of the series of coincidences that had plagued him all morning (Charlotte had spoken Biofeedback for a couple of weeks), and that if he just relaxed, everything would be all right. He took several deep, calming breaths and stood up. The medicine cabinet was still open.

By moving very carefully and looking for hazards everywhere, Mr. Mowen managed to get dressed and out
to the car. He had not been able to find any socks that matched, and the elevator had taken him all the way to the roof, but Mr. Mowen breathed deeply and calmly each time, and he was even beginning to feel relaxed by the time he opened the door to the car.

He got into the car and shut the door. It caught the tail of his coat. He opened the door again and leaned over to pull the coat out of the
way. One of his gloves fell out of his pocket onto the ground. He leaned over farther to rescue the glove and cracked his head on the armrest of the door.