I let it loop four times before I looked over my shoulder at Elaine. She had her arms crossed tightly, elated and nervous. Sometimes you can live with people, sleep with them in fact, and still be surprised by their recesses. Her eyes jumped back and forth from my face to the screen; she was too worried about what I would say to be impatient. I smiled at her.
He’s going to love it, I said.
IT WAS IN the sex that things started getting strange, that I sensed I might not have my hands on all the ropes, so to speak, in terms of what I was feeling. I was used to all Elaine’s likes and dislikes by now. I didn’t try anything different, anything that would help me pretend she was someone else or anything along those lines. It was more perverse than that. I just remember thinking that it was like Elaine was wearing some sort of mask that night, a mask she couldn’t remove, and the mask was her — Elaine’s — own face.
* * *
IT’S NOT THAT I love Molly, at least not in the way that I used to, that’s over, but I still feel protective toward her and respect her and want the best for her. And I love Mal — I guess I can say that. Why should it bother me, then, the idea of the two of them?
I can’t deny there’s something strange about seeing them together — foraging for wine late at night in the climate-controlled closet next to the pantry, talking in the driveway (his hand under her chin), sitting in their low canvas chairs on the balcony outside their bedroom — something that goes beyond simple jealousy. They don’t seem to belong in the same room, or in the same world; they seem irreconcilable. Maybe that was just my mistake, viewing them not as people in themselves but as aspects, as cordoned-off areas, of my own life. Anyway, I’m shocked, every time.
Jealousy: well, maybe. But also, if those two people find what they need in each other, then, I think, I become truly superfluous in the world.
* * *
I STOPPED BY my office after dinner to check my voice mail and found a long message from the CEO of Virtech. Offering to fly out, any time it’s convenient for us, to have a look at our work in progress, possibly contribute some input, he says. I sat and thought about it for fifteen minutes or so. The last thing in the world I want to do right now is go to Tucson, but there seems no way out of it now. There was a tremor in this guy’s voice that makes me think he’s close to pulling the account, if he’s not under pressure to do that already. Not keeping Mal abreast of it is out of the question. I’ll make the arrangements in the morning.
SHE WATCHES MOVIES by herself in the projection room, she cooks a little bit, she goes off to the university or just out to explore the town — she can’t drive the Triumph so Mal has bought her a little red car of her own, a Sonata I think it is. She’s the only one who’s not here to work. And I think she is self-conscious about that, because she keeps strange hours, she’s all by herself up on the fourth floor — I guess; I don’t really know for sure where she is, or when she’s in the house at all — for long stretches during the day. She haunts the place. I’ve heard the others talking about her, but just in a fondly catty way, Jerry asking if now would be a good time to ask for a new matte system now that Mal’s getting laid, that kind of thing.
The anger that I feel is the reason that I don’t want to go to Arizona or anywhere else right now, the reason that I need to know that she’s somewhere nearby at all times. The anger’s all I have. I write these sentences down as they come to me, even when I don’t know what they mean.
JOHN, FIONA SAID. Can I talk to you?
I motioned to her to close the door behind her.
So Jean-Claude is back, she said, leaning against the wall with her hands behind her. She wore a black T-shirt with the word Pussy emblazoned on it in rhinestone script, and chunky shoes that really only call attention, I think, to how short she is.
I know. The work’s in the front hall for the next few days if you haven’t –
I’ve seen it, she said. It’s amazing. But I have this other thought.
I leaned back in my chair.
Have you seen him? Fiona said.
I hadn’t.
He looks … I’m worried about him. He’s so thin. And he came back and went to his room to sleep and that was like sixteen hours ago.
He’s been through something, I said. He’s weak and he needs some time to get his strength back.
Well, sure, she said, and she looked nervous, as if concern for him were something to be expressed only in confidence. But my idea was … There’s a lot of people here who work very hard, I mean, it’s their choice, but it takes a physical toll, and I wondered if you or Mal would be receptive to the idea of having a doctor on staff, or on call, or whatever the expression is. Not living here, obviously, the need’s not that great, but just on some kind of retainer so if we—
We already have somebody like that, I said.
Fiona’s mouth fell open. We do?
We do. His name is Cadwallader, great old Southern name. He’s at University Hospital. Do you want me to have him come over and take a look at Jean-Claude?
It took her a few more seconds to absorb, I suppose, this idea that everything around there had already been thought of. Then she shook her head and laughed. No, she said. I suppose not. He’ll wake up. Anyway, good to know.
And she left.
* * *
JUST AS IN some beach towns you’re always hearing the low growl of the surf even when you’re not conscious of it, so in Tucson your inner ear is always working against a backdrop of constant, unobtrusive noise, the roar of air conditioning. No one wants to take a step outside if they can avoid it. It seems an odd place for a city, is what I kept thinking. At the Hilton I took a shower and had the front desk call me a taxi, and I gave the driver one of those five-digit street addresses you find in new cities. Twenty minutes later we pulled up in front of an office tower that rose about five stories off the pavement, not an unimpressive sight when seen against the level desert that began immediately behind it and ran to the horizon.
The special suits, the gloves, the helmets, the sensory-deprivation chairs, all the stuff of today’s science fiction: the young people of Virtech go to their office every morning and work on making it real, about eighteen hours a day from the sound of it. The directors who met with me were all men, all just out of college, wearing concert T-shirts to a business meeting; standard dot-com culture stuff. Pulling somber faces, they escorted me into their boardroom, which was nothing but a long table and chairs on a blue wall-to-wall carpet. The furniture looked like it had arrived that day. I said no to coffee, no to snacks, no to bottled water, and got right to the point of my visit.
What would you say it is you’re selling? I asked them gently. I already knew the answer to that. The key to confrontation, in these cases, is to make it look like something else.
They glanced at one another. Then one of them, who wore glasses (well, actually, come to think of it, nearly all of them wore glasses), said, Nothing, right now. Not much VR technology is widely available yet, mostly for pricing reasons. But it’s all just around the corner, and what we want, basically, is to imprint our name with the public. So that when the time comes, they’ll associate us with the whole idea. If they hear of a thing, or dream of a thing, we’re the first place they’ll look to see if we have it.
I nodded. So the answer, then, is that you have no product to advertise. See, most agencies you might go to, that would be something of a stumbling block. (Laughter.) But you’ve come to exactly the right place. This is what we do. We don’t do product-related advertising. Palladio is a studio for the production of avant-garde art, and by subsidizing the wide dissemination of that art, Virtech becomes part of the avant-garde as well, in the public mind. Which is entirely appropriate. Because you guys are the vanguard. You are the bringers of the next big thing. We embody that idea, and you are going to borrow it from us.