“Where’s Victoria?” he inquired, for lack of any other subject.
“Showering down. She smells, and I told her so.” Norman’s tone was absent, but behind the words Donald could detect all the inverted snobbery of the modern Afram.
You dirty black bastard …
Since Norman was apparently disinclined to prolong the exchange, he let his attention wander back to the Wholographik picture on the floor. He remembered the latest come-on he’d seen, one which Norman had left lying around in this room; it had claimed accurate genetic analysis given nothing more than one nail-paring from each of the subject’s parents. That was such a flagrant lie he’d considered reporting it to the Better Business Bureau. Even in this year of grace you had only a sixty-forty chance of proving who your father was on such slender evidence, let alone of tracking back into the Caucasian side of what was predominantly an Afram heredity.
But he had changed his mind about making the complaint, for fear of infringing his cover.
God, if I’d known it was going to be such a lonely life I think I’d have …
“Hi, Donald,” Victoria said, emerging from Norman’s bathroom in a veil of steam and Arpège Twenty-first Scentury. She walked past him and threw one leg challengingly across Norman’s lap. “Smell me now! Okay?”
“Okay,” Norman said, not raising his head. “Go put some clothes on, then.”
“You’re a bleeder. Wish I didn’t like you.”
But she complied.
On the sound of the bedroom door shutting, Norman cleared his throat. “By the way, Donald, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Are you going to do something about—?”
“When I find someone suitable,” Donald muttered.
“You’ve been saying that for weeks, damn it.” Norman hesitated. “Frankly, I’ve been thinking I might be better off if I took in Horace in your place—I know he’s looking for a spare tatami.”
Suddenly alarmed, but concealing his reaction, Donald gazed directly at his roomie. Overlaid on his image he saw, as brilliantly as if she had still been in the room, Victoria: a high-Scandahoovian natural blonde, the only type Norman had ever brought into the apartment.
Does he mean it?
His own last steady, Gennice, had been his favourite: not one of the shiggies working the executive circuit like most of the ones they’d had in, but a woman with a strongly independent personality, almost forty and born in Trinidad. The reason he hadn’t replaced her was partly lack of inclination, partly the impression that he wouldn’t find her equal in a hurry.
He felt bewildered all over again, almost nauseatingly confused—the last thing he would have expected in his own home. He had imagined that he had made an accurate assessment of Norman, identified and typed him as the sort of self-conscious Afram who was uneasily balanced between insistence on having a white roomie and ill-concealed annoyance at that roomie’s preference for Afram girls. But Horace, to whom he’d referred a moment previously, was shades darker than Norman himself.
He was relieved when the phone went. Answering the call, reporting over his shoulder to Norman that it was Guinevere Steel inviting them to a forfeits party, he was able to complete in his mind, privately, the conclusion he had come to. Norman must have undergone a traumatic experience today.
If he’d come right out and said so, though, he’d have risked Norman putting his threat into effect; the Afram hated anyone to see beneath the calm mask he usually maintained.
And I don’t think I could face adjusting all over again to a stranger the way I’ve adjusted to Norman. Even if I can’t claim that we’re friends.
* * *
“What’s the theme of this forfeits party, by the way?”
“Hm?” Pouring himself another slug of whisky, Donald turned his head. “Oh—twentieth century.”
“Talk and behave in period, is that the idea?” On Donald’s nod: “Sort of stupid thing you’d expect from her, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s stupid,” Donald agreed, only half his mind on what he was saying. “She lives so obsessively in the here-and-now she probably thinks the twentieth century was a solid arbitrary chunk of thought and behaviour. I doubt if she remembers she was in it herself a decade ago. So we’ll have people going around saying ‘twenty-three skiddoo!’ and ‘give me some skin daddy-o!’ and wearing niltops with New Look skirts all in one hopeless, helpless bungle.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that,” Norman said. “You make it sound even worse than I imagined.”
“What were you thinking of?” Donald said. Half-sensed at the back of his mind there was a need to talk—it didn’t have to be about the shock he’d experienced earlier. Any kind of talk would do provided he could open out and feel he wasn’t being secretive. The strain of never really communicating with anyone was getting on his nerves.
The corners of Norman’s mouth turned down to hint at bitterness. “Why, I’ll wager I’m the first Afram on her guest-list, and since I’ve accepted I’ll remain the only one, and someone’s going to be programmed to make like—let’s say—Bull Clark. And she’ll get a bunch of her entourage to gang together and claim a forfeit off me for not Uncle-Tomming.”
“You really think so? Whyinole did you accept, then?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Norman said with a trace of grim satisfaction. “A lot of other things happened last century besides what Guinevere likes to remember, and I shall take pleasure in stuffing them up her aristocratic nose.”
There was a silence. Both of them felt it as intolerably long. Norman had smoked barely half his Bay Gold, not enough to elasticate time for him, but because he had trespassed to the edge of the subject above all others where people like himself preferred not to be too open, he could not continue, a fact of which Donald was well aware. For him, though, the grouped references to the twentieth century had started his mind working on a train of association which forked and forked until he could no longer tell which point was relevant to what had been said at the beginning and which was not.
* * *
Perhaps I shouldn’t have made that remark about putting Donald out and taking in Horace. One thing about keeping company with a WASP, especially a worrisome intellectual type like Donald: our private problems are far enough apart not to reinforce and multiply each other.
* * *
Wonder what did happen to Norman today? Something’s shaken him, no doubt of it. What does it feel like to be inside his skull? The Children of X can’t approve of codders like him, and his obsession with blue-eyed blondes. The company probably laps it up, of course; that big turnover in the eighties and nineties still casts its shadow. “The ideal company wife nowadays is an extremely ugly member of another racial group with no known father and two Ph.D.’s!”
But a company is no substitute for kinship.
Like to ask why he dislikes Guinevere so much. I can take her or leave her and she always has useful people to her parties, so I don’t give a pint of whaledreck. Footnote: I must try to discover when that phrase leaked into common parlance; it was the sludge left when you’d rendered blubber down for oil, if I remember right. Maybe it was public guilt when they found it was too late to save the whales. The last one was seen—when? ’Eighty-nine, I think.
* * *
I envy Donald the element of detachment in his makeup. I’d never dare tell him, though. Could be it’s only what mine is: a mask. But Guinevere is such a … and he hardly notices. What annoys him about her proposed party is like he said, the anachronism of treating the twentieth century as a lump. And it wasn’t. Who should know better than one of us?
I’m behind the times. Prophet’s beard, I’m practically obsolete. So I’m a VP for the world’s richest corporation—have I succeeded in terms personal to myself? I’ve just chopped my way through the soft rotten feelings of ancestral guilt these WASPs suffer from till I’ve reached my nice cosy comfortable den. And here I am.