But the thing that mattered most to him about his wife, the thing that was the heart and core of the marriage for him, was none of those usual things. He could have hired almost anyone to do what she did around the house, including the sexual services — although he would have had to be exceedingly careful about that last. He would have been obliged to give orders rather than having his order anticipated, but he could have managed that. He could have bought servomechanisms to carry out many of those orders. And anything he had no permanent arrangement for, he could have dialed up by comset in a matter of minutes.
What really mattered to him, the one service that he could not have simply purchased, was Michaela’s role as listener. Listener! That was beyond price, and had come as a surprise to him.
When he got home from work in the afternoon, Ned liked to unwind for a while. He liked to stand there, maybe pace a bit, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of straight whiskey in the other, and tell her about his day. What he’d said, and what so-and-so had said back, the sonofabitch, and what he’d said then, and how it had showed the sonofabitch, bygod. The good ideas he’d had and how they’d worked out when he tried them. The ideas that should have worked, and would have if it hadn’t been for so-and-so, the stupid jackass. And what he just happened to know about the stupid jackass that might come in handy one of these days.
He liked to pace a while, and then stand there a while, and then pace some more, until he’d gotten rid of the energy from the morning, talking all of it out of his system. And then when he’d finally loosened up he liked sitting down in his chair and relaxing with the second glass of Scotch and the fifth cigarette — and talking some more.
That listening function of Michaela’s meant a tremendous amount to Ned Landry, because he loved to talk and he loved to tell stories. He loved to take stories and draw them out to a great length and polish them until he found them flawless. Adding a new detail here, inventing a bit of embroidery there, cutting a line that didn’t quite meet his standards. To Ned, that kind of talking was one of the major pleasures of a man’s life.
Unfortunately, he was not good at it, for all his excruciating effort, and nobody would listen to him long if they could help it. Talking to people other than Michaela meant that second of attention that tantalized his need; and then the sudden withdrawal, the blank eyes, the glassed-over face, the restless body, the furtive looks at the timespot on the wrist computer. He knew what they were thinking… how long, oh lord, how long? That was what they were thinking, no matter how much some of them tried not to show it, for the sake of politeness.
He didn’t understand it. Because he was a man of taste and intelligence and sophistication, and he really worked hard at being a raconteur, at shaping and polishing his narratives until they were works of oral art. It seemed to him that if people were too stupid to realize that and appreciate the skill with which he used language, it was their fault, not his… he more than did his part, and it was his considered opinion that he did it very very well indeed. Nevertheless, it frustrated him that people didn’t want to listen to him talk; it was their fault, but he was the one who paid.
Except for Michaela. If Michaela thought he was boring and pompous and interminable and a windballoon, no tiniest flicker of that judgment had ever showed on her face or in her body or in her words. Even when he was talking about the injustice of a man such as he was being afflicted with seemingly innumerable allergies — and Ned was willing to admit that his allergies were probably not the most gripping conversational topic of the season, he just needed to talk about them sometimes — even then, Michaela always looked interested. She didn’t have to answer him, because he didn’t have any desire for conversation, he just wanted to be listened to, attended to; but when she did answer, her voice never carried any of that taint of impatience and boredom that so irritated him in others.
Michaela listened. And she laughed at the lines that he considered funny. And her eyes brightened at just the places where he meant the tension to build. And she never, not once, in three years of marriage, said, “Could you get to the point, please?” Not once. Sometimes, before he really got a new story worked out, or when he was just bullshitting along about the morning and hadn’t had time to make stories out of it, he would realize that he had maybe wandered off his subject a little, or said something more than once… but Michaela never showed any awareness of that. She hung on his words. As he wanted them hung on — not slavishly, but tastefully. That was the difference. He could have paid some female to listen slavishly, at so many credits the hour, sure. But you’d know. You’d know she was only listening because of the money, like some kind of a meter running. It wouldn’t be the same. Penny for your words, Mr. Landry? Sure…
Michaela was different, she was a woman with genuine class, and there was nothing slavish about the attention she gave him. It was careful attention, it was intense, it was total; it was not slavish. And it fed him. When he got through talking to Michaela, somewhere into the down slope of the afternoon, and was at last ready to do something else, he was in a state of satisfaction that wiped away the rebuffs he got from others as if they’d never happened. At that point Ned believed that he really was one of those irresistible talkers, one of those men that anyone would feel privileged to sit down and listen to for hours, as it seemed to him that he ought to be. He knew his stories were as good as anybody else’s… hell, he knew they were better. One hell of a lot better! People were just stupid, that’s all; and Michaela made that trivial.
It was that particular thing that the baby ruined for him, when it came. He could have put up with all the other stuff. Having Michaela look tired in the morning instead of showing her usual fresh perfection was annoying; having her attention distracted during lovemaking because the baby was crying was irritating; twice he’d had to point out to her that the vases of flowers needed to be seen to, and once she had even let him run out of Scotch. (That did get to him, considering that all she had to do was push one button on the comset to get it delivered… but still, he could have put up with it.)
He understood all these things. It was her first baby, and she wasn’t getting as much sleep as she wanted; he was a reasonable man, and he understood. She had a lot of things to do that she wasn’t used to doing, it was hard on her, sure. Everybody knew you had to coddle new mothers, like you had to coddle pregnant women. He was willing. He was confident that she would be able to get herself straightened out and back to normal in a month or two, and he didn’t mind giving her all the time she needed. He had no respect at all for a man that didn’t treat his woman fairly, and he wasn’t that kind of man.
But it had never entered his head that the baby wold interfere with the time of talking to Michaela! Jeezus, if it had, he would’ve had her sterilized before he even married her. There were brothers to carry on his family line, and nephews all over the place for him to adopt at a suitable age if he wanted somebody to carry on the “son” role under his roof.
He’d no more than get started telling her how that goddam wimpoe of a technician had come up with yet one more stupid change in procedures, no more than get through a couple of sentences, when that effing baby would begin to squawl. He’d be right at a point in a story that he was starting to get perfect, one he’d only been telling a while but was beginning to see shaping up just right, just at a point where it was crucial for a person not to miss even one of the words he was saying, and the effing baby would start up!