“I still don’t know your name,” I said. “I don’t recall Hildy mentioning you.”
“She wouldn’t have.” As she said this I noticed — or imagined I noticed — the vestige of an accent of some kind. “My given name is Nayagünem Menügayan.”
No sooner had she uttered those extraordinary syllables than the déjà vu was gone, as if a hex had been broken, and a tiny, jewel-like memory replaced it. I remembered where I’d met her, though I did my best to keep my face composed. Not that it made the slightest difference. She could tell.
“Pleased to meet you, Ms.—”
“But you can go ahead and call me Julia. Everyone does, in the industry.”
“Julia. Okay.” I hesitated. “What industry might that be?”
Menügayan spread both arms wide, to indicate the jumble of phantasmagoria around us.
“Right!” I said, getting to my feet. “You certainly were very kind to let Hildy leave this note in your keeping. I won’t take up—”
“She didn’t leave it in my keeping. She left it hidden in a book inside her mailbox. I found it there, Waldemar Gottfriedens Tolliver, and I took it out. Now sit down and listen.”
I should have demanded to know what this passive-aggressive troll was doing rummaging through your mailbox, or — better yet — have fought my way out with a flaming battle axe, if necessary; instead I sat back down, avoiding her stare, feeling as if I’d been kicked in the kidney. We’d crossed paths once before, a decade earlier, in the parlor of my father’s house on Pine Ridge Road — but the woman I’d met then had been bashful and sweet. I’d never seen a person so transmogrified.
“I’m listening, Julia.”
Menügayan gave a throaty cluck and launched, without further preamble, into something very like a sermon. You were her subject — you and the Husband — and she had plenty to say. The two of you were her obsession, her fetish, her area of personal expertise; over the next half an hour she divulged the particulars of your private life with the precision of an entomologist describing the life of the bee. She spoke a pidgin of her own invention, a shambling amalgam of business clichés and expletives and acronyms hijacked from trade magazines, some of them whole decades out of date. It was the idiom of an acutely solitary creature, somewhere between the ramblings of a hermit and the coded patois of a paranoiac — but I learned more about you in those fifteen minutes, Mrs. Haven, than I could have in a year’s worth of surveillance.
* * *
“Here’s the drill-down, Tolliver. The first thing you need to understand is that the man you’re dealing with is the industry leader in client-specific brainfuckery. We’re talking about a man who founded a religion — a religion, Tolliver — before he was legally old enough to drink. He’s a tactical thinker and he’s patient as hell. Think innovation, Tolliver. Think iteration management. Think long-term convergence. Just think.” She sucked in a breath. “He and Hildy have been making the grand tour: Aruba to Phoenix, Phoenix to San Salvador, San Salvador to Managua, Managua to Dar es Salaam. He’s a ‘financier,’ nota bene: a bankruptcy jockey. He buys companies and sells them at a loss. Strictly a bricks-and-clicks operation, OBVS. And the house always wins.
“Here comes the kicker, though, Tolliver: she likes what he does. She calls him her Galactus, her Eater of Worlds. He’s always flying somewhere in that jet-propelled dildo of his, and if it’s somewhere she’s never been — and he deigns to invite her — she always says yes. Hildy bores easy: that’s her feature set. Time moves more slowly for her than for the rest of us. It’s what makes her step out, de vez en cuando, and it’s what brings her back. Pack this into your pipe: she comes back every time. It’s a synergy game. You think you’re the first one she left him for, Tolliver? Don’t kiss your own ass. You need to get some transparency on this issue. He knows all about her ‘sympathetic friends.’
“Which brings us to you. You’re the retiring type, a garden-variety milquetoast — anyone can see that. That’s the profile she falls for. The non-integrator. She has a soft spot for wallflowers, bookworms, beatniks, self-anointed deep thinkers: for the unemployable, to call a spade a spade. She doesn’t believe in her own brainpower, at the end of the day. She doesn’t see herself as a resource, going forward. That’s her back-of-the-line, Tolliver, and Haven leverages it to the hilt. Strictly plug-and-play: that’s his game in a chestnut. Strictly transactional. She’s susceptible to Vuitton and Lambrusco, to happy cabbage, to payment in kind, no matter what pie-eyed spiel she tries to sell herself. She puts out for people with pull, like anybody else who’s got no Schwerkraft of their own.
“To summarize, Tolliver: she’s en route to a safari in Kenya. The ‘relationship’ you’ve had, such as it was, is not extensible. YHNTO, if you understand me. It is what it is. At the end of the day, the day’s over.”
Menügayan paused at this point, as if expecting me to ask some sort of question. I bobbed my head morosely for a while.
“What does YHNTO stand for?”
For an instant she regarded me with something approaching affection. “You have nothing to offer.”
“Okay.” I shut my eyes to keep the room from spinning. “One more question. Does Mrs. Haven — does Hildy have any idea what the Church of Synchronology actually—”
“Hold that thought, Tolliver. Excuse me a tick. I’ve got to go see a Chinaman about a music lesson.”
Before I could reply she was gone from the room. I sank back and pressed my palms against my temples. I hadn’t been able to follow half of what she’d said — more than half, to be honest — but I was a changed man by the end of her soliloquy. I felt postoperative, the beneficiary of a complex but necessary surgical procedure, one no less effective for having been performed by a gorilla.
If I’d had a higher opinion of myself — or of you, Mrs. Haven, come to think of it — I might have doubted some of what she’d told me; as it was, I believed every word. Whatever role this depressive occultist was destined to play in my life, it was clear to me that our affair — yours and mine — had passed some hidden point of no return. I tried to call your face to mind and could not do it.
“It’s hopeless, then,” I said when she came back.
“Eh?”
“I never had her. Isn’t that what you’re telling me? Not for a second.”
Menügayan shrugged. “The best-laid plans of mice and midgets, Tolliver. You don’t have the hit points to take Haven on, you don’t have the charisma points, and you sure as hell don’t have the gold doubloons.”
I nodded and got to my feet.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m grateful for your candor, Ms. Menügayan—”
“Julia.”
“I appreciate your telling me all this, Julia, but I’m going home now. You’ve just made it clear that there isn’t anything I can give Hildy that her husband can’t give her sixteen times over, and that her fling with me was nothing more than that: the latest in a long and trifling sequence. As you can probably imagine, I’d like to be alone.”
I felt proud of my self-control, under the circumstances, but Menügayan only laughed. Her laugh was a dull, toneless thing, oddly damp and forlorn, like the call of some creature of the lightless deep.
“You’ve got a funny way of talking, Tolliver. Kind of old-timey. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Lots of people,” I said, buttoning my coat. “Most recently R. P. Haven’s wife.”
“I’m disappointed in you, I have to say. One tiny cloud on the horizon and you’re calling it quits. What would your daddy say?”