“Your house is fine,” Clare said. Too quickly.
A hairline fracture shot through him. Don’t get anxious, he thought. Don’t think too fast. This isn’t one of the other ones, this is Clare. This is Clare, this is doable.
Oscar wanted direly to confront the source of trouble. That would be very stupid. Work around it. Let her open up first. Be funny, be charming. Make some light conversation. Find a neutral topic. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of one.
“We’ve been having a picnic,” he blurted.
“That sounds lovely. I wish I were there.”
“I wish you were, too,” he said. Inspiration struck him. “How about it? Can you fly down? We have some plans here, you’d be interested. ”
“I can’t go to Texas now.”
“You’ve heard about the Louisiana air base situation, right? The Senator’s hunger strike. I’ve got very good sources here. It’s a solid story, you could fly down, you could cover the local angle.”
“I think your friend Sosik’s got that story sewn up already,” Clare said. “I’m not doing Boston politics. Not anymore.”
“What?” He was stunned. “Why not?”
“The net’s reassigned me. They want me to go to Holland.”
“Holland? What did you tell them?”
“Oscar, I’m a political journalist. How could I not do The Hague? It’s the Cold War, it’s a dream gig. This is a big break for me, my biggest career break ever.”
“Well, how long is your assignment overseas?”
“Well, that depends on how well I do at the job.”
Oscar’s brain began to hum. “I can appreciate that. Of course you want to do well. But still… the diplomatic situation… the Dutch are so provocative. They’re very radical.”
“Of course they’re radical, Oscar. Their country is drowning. We’d be extremists too, if most of America was below sea level. The Dutch have got so much to lose, they’ve really got their backs against the dikes. That’s why they’re so interesting now.”
“You don’t even speak Dutch.”
“They all speak English there, you know.”
“The Dutch are militant. They’re dangerous. They make crazy demands from Americans, they really resent us.”
“I’m a reporter, Oscar. I’m not supposed to scare easily.”
“So you’re really going to do it,” Oscar concluded leadenly. “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?”
“I don’t want to put it that way …”
Oscar gazed emptily at the back of the bus. The blank shell of the bus suddenly struck him as an alien and horrible thing. It had stolen him from his home and the woman in his bedroom. The cam-paign bus had kidnapped him. He turned his back on the bus and began walking with his phone, randomly, toward the tangled Texan woods. “No,” he said. “I know. It’s the work. It’s our careers. I did it first. I took on a big job, and I left you. Didn’t I? I left you alone, and I’m still gone. I’m far away, and I don’t know when I’ll come back.”
“Well,” she said, “you said it, not me. But that’s very true.”
“So I really have no business finding fault with you. If I did, I’d be a hypocrite, wouldn’t I? We both knew this might happen. It was never a commitment.”
“Tha t’ s right.”
“It was a relationship.”
“I liked the relationship.”
“It was good, wasn’t it? It was very good, for what it was.”
Clare sighed. “No, Oscar, I can’t let you say that. Don’t say that, it wouldn’t be fair. It was better than good. It was great, it was totally ideal. I mean, you were such a great source for me. You never tried to spin my stories, and you hardly ever lied. You let me live in your house. You introduced me to all your rich and influential friends. You supported my career. You never yelled at me. You were a real gen-tleman. Brilliant. A dream boyfriend.”
“You’re being so sweet.” He could feel himself hemorrhage.
“I’m really sorry that I was never able to… you know… quite get over your personal background thing.”
“No,” Oscar said bitterly, “I’m very used to that.”
“It’s just — it’s just one of those permanent tragedies. Like, you know, my own troubled minority background.”
Oscar sighed. “Clare, I don’t think anybody really holds it against you that you’re a white Anglo-Saxon.”
“No, life is hard in a racial minority. It just is. I mean, you of all people ought to have some feeling for what that really means. I know you can’t help the way you were born, but still … I mean, that’s one of the real reasons I want to do this Dutch assignment. There’s been so much white flight from America back into Europe… My people are there, you know? My roots are there. I think it might help me, somehow.”
Oscar was finding it hard to breathe.
“I feel bad about this, sweetheart, like I’ve really let you down.”
“No, this is better,” Oscar said. “It hurts a lot, but it hurts less than dragging it on and keeping up a false pretense. Let’s part as friends.”
“I might be back, you know. You don’t have to be all hasty like that. You don’t have to turn on a dime. Because it’s just me, your pal Clare, you know? It’s not like an executive decision.”
“Let’s have a clean break,” he said firmly. “It’s best for us. For both of us.”
“All right. If you’re sure, then I guess I understand. Good-bye, Oscar.”
“It’s over, Clare. Good-bye.” He hung up. Then he threw the phone into the trees.
“Nothing works,” he told the red dirt and gray sky. “I can’t ever make anything work!”
3
Oscar peeled a strip of tape from a yellow spool and wrapped the tape around a cinder block. He swept a hand-scanner over the block, activating the tape. It was close to one in the morning. The wind out of the tall black pines was damp and nasty, but he was working hard and the weather felt bleakly appropriate.
“I’m a cornerstone,” the cinder block announced. “Good for you,” Oscar grunted.
“I’m a cornerstone. Carry me five steps to your left.” Oscar ignored this demand, and swiftly taped six more blocks. He whipped the scanner across each of them, then pulled the last block aside to get at the next level in the stack.
As he set his gloved hands to it, the last block warned him, “Don’t install me yet. Install that cornerstone first.”
“Sure,” Oscar told it. The construction system was smart enough to manage a limited and specific vocabulary. Unfortunately, the system simply didn’t hear very well. The tiny microphones embedded in the talking tape were much less effective than the tape’s thumbnail-sized speak-ers. Still, it was hard not to reply to a concrete block when it spoke up with such grace and authority. The concrete blocks all sounded like Franklin Roosevelt.
Bambakias had created this construction system. Like all of the architect’s brainchildren, his system was very functional, yet rife with idiosyncratic grace-notes. Oscar had full confidence in the system, a pragmatic faith won from much hands-on experience. Oscar had la-bored like a mule in many Bambakias construction sites. No one ever won the trust of Alcott Bambakias, or joined his inner circle, without a great deal of merciless grunt work.
Heavy labor was the heart and soul of the Bambakias intellectual salon. W. Alcott Bambakias had quite a number of unorthodox be-liefs, but chief among them was his deep conviction that sycophants and rip-off artists always tired easily. Bambakias, like many members of the modern overclass, was always ready with an openhearted ges-ture, a highly public flinging of golden ducats. His largesse naturally attracted parasites, but he rid himself of “the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots,” as he insisted on calling them, by demanding fre-quent stints of brute physical work. “It’ll be fun,” Bambakias would announce, rolling up his tailored sleeves and grinning fiercely. “We’ll get results.”