All the Lives He Led-A Novel (11 page)
The old lady spoke, Dr. Chi-Leong said something in agreement, and the family began to move away. The doctor pulled out a roll of euros—actually ink-printed-on-paper euros, I mean—and scattered a selection of them to cover their bill. “We wish you a good-bye, Mr. Bradley Sheridan,” he said over his shoulder. “I hope that we shall meet again.”
“Sure, fine, thanks,” I called after them. I even meant it. The tips had been impressively good and they’d left at least a liter and a half of wine undrunk in their cups to replenish my vats.
When I finally got away from the wine vats it didn’t take me long to find Gerda. She was in the refectory, waiting for me. Looking healthy and well rested, too, as she sat by herself at a corner table, picking at some fruit salad the kitchen staff had made up for her. She gave me a welcoming hug, just as though we’d been old pals. Or even in fact old going-to-bed-together pals. “Things all right with you, Brad?” she asked. “Care for some pineapple?”
I took a piece of the pineapple and sat down before I answered her question. “Fine,” I said. “And you?”
“Well,” she said, thinking it over, “I guess you’d say I’m really well, Brad, only hungry. Want to eat here? Or shall we go out and get a pizza?”
There it was, another installment of that old-pals-togetherness. I played it as dealt. “Pizza,” I said, and that’s what we did. We took the long walk around the outside of the Jubilee area to the Porta Marina train station, where all the little food and trinket shops had sprung up. I noticed that somewhere between the refectory and the entrance to the grounds we’d begun to hold hands as we walked. I also noticed—very carefully observed—that Gerda’s earlobes were bare and teeth all uncapped. I knew what that meant. Well, sort of. I knew it meant either that she had no special sexual demands and was not currently in a formal relationship … or else that she didn’t want to advertise her sexual tastes, as most young people did, because she didn’t think it was anyone’s business but her own. Anyway, we ate pizza from the first shop we passed, or at least she did. I didn’t have much appetite. I was too busy looking her over, especially when she was looking the other way, and wondering what she’d been doing on the old
Chang Jang
. Not to mention that that fishy rice was clumped like a lead weight in my belly.
And then, when she had finished devouring her pizza, she exploratorily ran her tongue over her teeth a time or two. Unsatisfied with the result, she unwrapped a coat of ruby-red foil from something she pulled out of her bellybag and popped it in her mouth. I guess I was really enjoying watching her chew, and showing it, because she grinned and pulled out another stick of the stuff for me, this one wrapped in green foil. “Cleans your teeth,” she informed me. Maybe it did. That wasn’t why I enjoyed it so much, though. It was the taste of the gum itself, I guess, that really got my little buds tingling, fruity and flowery and, I think most of all, just a tad warmed by the flesh of Gerda Fleming.
What I was basically doing at that time, you see, was falling in love.
I didn’t talk much. I mostly just listened while she told me that, boy, those zeppelins were really something, weren’t they? And she’d taken passage in one on the spur of the moment to go to Munich to see her sick old great-aunt Mirabelle, who wasn’t really an actual relative (Gerda explained, though I hadn’t asked) but had been her granddad’s live-in girlfriend when Gerda was little and they’d kept in touch. When she let me know that it was my turn to talk a little she was sympathetic (demonstrated by little hugs) as I told her how boring the wineshop was. Then, when it was getting late I walked her home. She lived in volunteer quarters, a lot nicer than mine, in a building that had once, I think, been the Italian equivalent of a pretty comfortable motel. She invited me in for a drink and we wound up in bed. And by the next day she was my recognized girl. And, short version, kept on being my girl for the next week, and the next, and the next, and, for all those weeks, we never did get around to visiting the Jubilee’s gift shop or Ferris wheel. Never had the time.
MY GIRL
Was I surprised that all this happened?
You bet I was. Not so much by the way I was feeling about Gerda—which really was not totally unlike the way I’d felt about, say, Tina Gundersack, back in the processing camps in North Carolina, right after the evacuation or, for that matter, eight or ten other nubile young girls one time or another. But none of which, when you came right down to it, had ever showed any signs of feeling that way about me. I could only suppose that what was going on was some totally unexpected case of the “L” word.
You know the word. Love. The word that had never accurately described any relationship of mine before.
And why was I graced with this new thing now? I couldn’t think of a reason. The old Romans (it had said in one of my readings) explained it pretty well. They thought that love was a kind of lunacy. Probably the old Romans were right. But when Gerda and I did things together it didn’t feel like lunacy. It felt fine.
So Gerda was a whole new continent for me to explore. For one thing (but not the only thing) I hadn’t had much particularly fine screwing before Gerda came along—the New York teenagers and the Cairo pros were rarely creative, so maybe I wasn’t the best qualified judge. All the same I would have to say that in bed Gerda was—let’s not let the truth scare us off—well, awesome. She knew just where to touch and how to squeeze and when to do the unexpected what. And she was right every time.
I thought she read my mind.
Of course, there was really a different explanation, but you couldn’t have convinced me of that at the time.
So we enjoyed ourselves, we two kids (only Gerda was definitely not a kid) in love (or in something a lot like it, anyway). We would rent a three-wheeler, that is, I would rent one, and go down the coast or up it just to see what we would see. (Usually bars.) She didn’t like to drive, though. She turned the driver’s seat over to me, although she made up for it in criticisms and advice. I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind much of anything. We were having fun. Once or twice I talked her into hiking the lower slopes of Vesuvius, where the virt installers were setting up the projectors for the big sky shows to come. And one time she insisted on taking the chair lift all the way up to the lip of Vesuvius’s deep, hundreds of meters deep, crater. She was the one who talked me into that one. She mentioned that if we wanted we could go down closer on rope ladders, but she didn’t say it as though she was really suggesting we do it. All she said was, “Just look at it, Brad! Isn’t it gorgeous?” I looked. But I didn’t think it was all that interesting, not to mention that it was smoky and hot and generally unpleasant. And I didn’t much like thinking about volcanic eruptions, because Yellowstone had permanently taken the fun out of that kind of thing for me.
We took the electric in to Naples a couple of times. Drinks in the Galleria. The compulsory museum visit so Gerda could stand rapt before fifteen or twenty old oil paintings. (I didn’t mind. Gerda looked at the paintings, I looked at Gerda.) Maybe for a decent meal of something like those baby shrimp that they fry head and all in a deep-fry kettle. (The shrimp imported from somewhere along the Dalmatian coast, of course. Nobody in his right mind would eat anything that came out of the Bay of Naples.) We took one weekend in Ischia, soaking in the hot springs and losing as much money as I could afford, and maybe a little more, in the casinos.
That was where our only identifiable problem was.
It was kind of a big one, too. I’m talking about money. Gerda, being a volunteer, got to keep all her basic pay and her tips each month, and thus had about ten times the disposable income of an Indentured with a debt to pay off, not to mention a family to support back home, like me. That didn’t signify for her. Gerda was an old-fashioned girl. To her that meant that when a man and a woman went somewhere together it was the man who picked up the check.
Quaint, right? Not to say sexistly offensive? But there it was.
On the other hand Gerda was, after all, Gerda.
The one thing that didn’t cost us an as was about the best part of the summer. All it took to be wonderful was a bed. Or, in the case of my room, a cot, but Gerda’s room had a really big bed and that was a lot better. That was even true of the view. Gerda’s room looked on basically the same things as mine, but as it was up higher it saw a lot more of them. It wasn’t only bigger than mine, it had its own private bathroom, and old-fashioned wicker furniture and carved wooden screens and shelves and shelves of these and those personal possessions. There were, it’s true, a few puzzles, notably a framed photo of a good-looking woman of maybe thirty or thirty-five next to her bed, but she explained that right away. “My cousin Mary Elaine,” she said. “She pretty nearly raised me after my mother got divorced and moved away. I wish Mary was still alive. You’d like her.” Which I had no doubt was true. And Gerda’s place had one big advantage over my own digs. Although Jiri was a roommate who was seldom present, Gerda didn’t have any roommate at all. Except, quite a lot of the time, me.
All in all, it was turning out to be a pretty good summer, not to say absolutely the positively best summer of my whole entire life, and its name was Gerda Fleming.
I didn’t spend all of my time with Gerda. I got the same weekly allowance of 168 hours of time as everybody else, but Gerda, at my very luckiest, didn’t ordinarily fill more than twenty or twenty-five of them for me. I did still have to work. So did she, and sometimes the Welsh Bastard would schedule us, I honestly think out of pure meanness, so that I would be off while she was working. Or vice versa. Then I was thrown on my own pre-Gerda resources, which weren’t much.
Of course, there was always Maury Tesch.
He was almost always up for a game of chess, which I almost always wasn’t, or a gape at whichever Chinese zep happened to be blotting out the sun that day. “Holy Jesus, Brad, you know what that thing can do? A couple hundred kilometers an hour, sliding right over the ocean or the desert or the cities, it doesn’t matter to a zeppelin, does it? And the size of the damn thing! They can easy hold two, three thousand passengers with swimming pools and restaurants and who knows what else?” But when I asked him if he was hoping to fly in one of them sometime he just scowled and wagged his head and said, “I wish,” and wouldn’t talk about it anymore.
He had some funny little ways, like the time in the staff refectory when I went to get a fresh glass of water and brought Maury one, too. He waved it away indignantly. “Drink water from the municipal system? Me? No way! Do you have any idea what the lining of those old pipes looks like?”
“Well,” I said, finishing my glass and reaching for his, “I like it. It’s about all I can afford.”
“You can afford your health. If it has to be water, get the good stuff. Sparkling water, in a bottle. All those bubbles keep your juices flowing.” He paused, looking up at me with that kicked-puppy expression. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got some up at my place. And maybe a little chess, if you’re in for it?”
Actually I did give it a moment’s thought, but then I shook my head. “I think I’d better—” I began to say, intending to invent some time-consuming and unavoidable errand, but he was ahead of me.
“Or,” he said, “how about a little picnic in my pine grove? It’s really a part of the Giubileo’s water supply system. It isn’t open to the public, just our people and their guests, and there’s a little wine bar that makes sandwiches.”
I had never heard of a grove of pine trees that had a wine bar. Maury didn’t let me mull over it. “Yeah,” he said, getting enthusiastic, “that’s what we want. We can pick up a three-wheeler at the gate.”
So I didn’t argue. The three-wheelers were where he said they would be, the pine grove was a couple of klicks farther up the slope, and when we got to the razor-wire fence around it, the Security man at the gate glanced at the card Maury held up to his face and waved us through.
It was pleasantly coolish under the pines. A couple dozen men and women were at picnic tables scattered around the trees to enjoy it. What Maury was enjoying, I was pretty sure, was the expression on my face as I took all this in. “Nice, isn’t it?” he asked. “We like it. Right here—under the ground, I mean—is where the basic water intake treatments are done for the whole park. Let’s get our sandwiches.”
There was a third class of workers at the Giubileo besides the Indentureds and the volunteers. Maury filled the gaps in. “It has to be like this,” he told me. “They have to have technicians, don’t they? Trained ones. You think they’d let, oh, say, Elfreda or what’s-his-name, Abukar Abdu, run the hydro systems here? They’d have pee coming out of the showers and God knows what in the drinking water!” So the Giubileo hired trained hydrologists like Maury, with certificates from three schools and about a dozen cities around the world. And equally trained virt operators, power engineers, dieticians, medics, machine tenders, technical specialists of a dozen kinds—all of the skills that kept our little town safe and functioning. Even Maury—only a second-floor technician, nowhere near the penthouse elite in pay scale—still drew down a hell of a lot more than either Gerda or I.
He had it made.
We talked. He asked after Gerda, and didn’t leer or make jokes about her, either. And he was interested in my family. He listened patiently—no, not patiently; as though he was really interested—to how tough it was for me to keep sending them money. “At least,” he said, “you do have parents.”
That was right out of left field. “Don’t you?” I asked.
“Not anymore. They died. I’m alone in the world.” Then he sort of shook himself and gave me a grin. “But enough of this depressing stuff. How are you getting along with the Bastard?”
The subject was definitely changed. I did my best to be noncommittal about a person I really disliked. I thought maybe I could get him to answer the question that had been nagging at me. “Oh, he’s not so bad. Why do they call him that, do you know?”
