As She Climbed Across the Table (8 page)

“You’re right.”

I raised my glass to her, then drank. The tequila was beginning to roil inside me.

“What’s funny is I’m probably getting close. For example, I bet you’re working with funding of some kind. A grant.”

“Maybe.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely funded.” I feigned disappointment. “It’s all coming clear. Whatever you do wouldn’t be possible without a major-league grant.”

She laughed. The first time I saw her teeth, I think. “You’re a very self-assured man, Dale.”

“You said that already. You haven’t said much, and you’re already repeating yourself. I like the way you said my first name, though. Dale. I should say yours more. You’re repeating yourself,
Cynthia
.”

“You’re repeating yourself, Dale.”

“Right. Very good. That’s the kind of contribution I’ll need from you from here on. Because I can’t go on like this. It isn’t possible. You’re going to have to come down off your heavily funded pedestal and muck around in actual conversation with me here.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You’re wondering how I sniffed you out about the grant. Well, I’m a consultant. I specialize in feasibility studies. Feasibility and viability, two very important words. To me they’re like pronouns or conjunctions: he, she, it, and, or, feasibility, viability. So I just sensed the aura on you, the data accumulating.”

I’d finished a margarita. I picked up another.

“This is actually very lucky for you, Cynthia. I could help you. I don’t mean anything has to happen between us. I just mean because I feel like it, because I like the aura.”

“Tell me more.”

“I specialize in Nobel Prizes. Nobel consulting, I call it. Basically I come in, evaluate the work that’s being done, and grade the Nobel potential. I help the client see what’s holding it back, keeping it from breaking into Nobel-caliber work. No reason not to work with the Prize in mind. Anyway, that’s my credo.”

“It’s fascinating,” she said. Her smile was skeptical. But sweetly skeptical.

“For example, here in your town I’m involved in a real dilemma. What we have is a very viable experiment, something quite exciting Nobel-wise, and it’s being headed up by a known quantity, a previous winner, in fact. But the project goes awry, turns up an unexpected result. It’s still exciting work, but out of control. The Prize committee likes it clean and simple. They like you to come up with the result you predicted. So I’ve had to go in there and say, you’re off the board, guys. You’re no longer in Nobel territory. Good luck with the work, but I’m sorry. I don’t feel it. I don’t smell it. When I look at good work I can smell the Prize, I swear. And in this case, the aroma’s evaporated.”

At that moment my words went sour in my mouth. Invoking Lack, I’d brought Alice to mind.

I started measuring my distance from the exits.

“But enough about me,” I said weakly.

Cynthia Jalter smiled, more sympathetically. She found my faltering charming. Dale was more likable tongue-tied. But in my drunken way I resented her now.

“Is something wrong?” she said.

“I’m fine. It’s these damn flights. I’m all screwed up. It’s four in the afternoon for me, or four in the morning. I should be running laps now, according to my schedule. Do you want to go outside and do some jumping jacks?”

“You don’t look like you want to do jumping jacks.”

“You’d be surprised.” I opened the shirt button at my throat. Serious trouble was close.

“You look like something is worrying you.”

“Actually, there’s a woman, Cynthia. If you have to know. I’m a little torn up about it, I guess. That’s why I wanted to meet someone intelligent and perceptive like yourself. I’m sorry it isn’t working out. Maybe I need a glass of water.”

“Stay there, Dale. I’ll get you a glass of water.”

“A glass water would be nice. Of.”

I drank in a panic, both hands around the glass, hoping to dilute the contents of my stomach to digestibility. I felt heat and pressure building up in my rib cage. A fire or disaster inside. When I looked up from the glass I seemed to be peering through the eyeholes of a loosely fitted mask. I blinked, and the air was spangled with phosphenes.

“I’m in sort of a situation,” I explained carefully. “My heart is being broken, very gradually, so I hardly notice it, even. I mean, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment it actually exactly happened. If it has yet.”

“I’ll drive you home,” she said.

“Not home,” I reminded her. “I wish I could remember the name of that damn hotel. All the same. Sunset … Mountainview? Bayview? Lodge? Inn? I thought I had a matchbook.” I feigned a search, turned my pockets inside out, dropping change on the floor. “No such luck. Mountain Lion? Sea Lion? Are we near the mountains or the sea?”

Cynthia Jalter drove me home. She powered down my window from her place in the driver’s seat, and the cool air whistled in my nostrils and blew tears out of my eyes horizontally, into my ears. I was silent, chagrined.

We pulled up outside my apartment. “Nice meeting you,” she said. “Feel better. Don’t forget your car.”

“Rental job,” I managed. “Let them find it. Fly out tomorrow.” I tugged on the ashtray, the cushioned arm, the window handle, finally opened the car door and got out. “They put me up on campus here. Fly out tomorrow. Another day, another city.”

“Give me a call sometime. I’m in the book. See you later.”

“Never again, I’m sure. Thanks profusely for everything. Fly out tomorrow.”

She drove away, leaving me there in the dark on my wobbly legs. I was surrounded by crickets. Lights burned in the apartment. The blind men were still awake. I tested myself, shook out my limbs, kneaded my numb jaw. I beat through the ferns to find the garden spigot, and splashed water on my face and down my collar. A toad groaned. I tiptoed back to the door.

When I went inside I found Garth, Evan, and Soft huddled around the couch. The lights in the room were dimmed. I focused, with difficulty, on the form across the couch.

Alice.

Her head was limp on the pillows, her hair splayed out, her forehead a pale beacon in the gloom. A blanket was tucked up to her chin. Were they admiring her, or mourning her? Or about to attack? I rushed over and saw her lips rippling gently with breath. Not dead.

I looked up at Soft. I must have looked a bit crazy, my eyes bugged and red, my collar wet.

“She’s fine now, she’s asleep,” said Soft. “She needs rest. Where have you been?”

I thought for a minute. “I was involved in the demonstration,” I said.

Soft frowned. I’m sure he thought I’d organized it. “I found her with Lack,” he said. “After the riots this afternoon she locked herself in with him. They had to call me. I have the only other key.”

“Why is she here, not the bed?”

“She’s hard to carry,” said Soft. “She passed out in the chamber. The recording devices were all shut off. So we have no way of reconstructing the events. I have some theories, though.”

I leaned over, tucked her hair behind her ear, and put the
flat of my hand on her forehead. I felt a twist of shame. This was stolen intimacy, the first time I’d touched her in more than a month.

“I should go,” said Soft.

He rolled his eyes to suggest that I should follow. We stepped out onto the porch together, leaving Garth and Evan, grim sentinels, to watch over Alice. Soft turned to me, his features drawn.

“She’s no longer competent to manage the project,” he said. “I’m looking at alternatives. But what’s important is that she slow down. She needs to step back, get some perspective. I need your help. Don’t let her spend any more nights in the lab. We’ve got students for that.”

“I don’t understand. What happened?”

“This business with the cat. Alice took it very personally. I don’t know, I can only speculate, but I think she may have tried to enter Lack.”

I stared at Soft. My face felt like Play-Doh receiving a footprint.

He nodded confirmation.

“Come see me in my office tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll talk more then.”

He crossed the street to his car. I went inside. Alice was still asleep. Evan and Garth were pacing, busy doing nothing, like their first night in the apartment. Alice’s return had unsettled them. Soft didn’t know of my recent distance from her, but they certainly did. I imagine their alert noses had sniffed out the traces of my drinking, too.

“Professor Soft suggested that she stay here at night from now on,” said Evan. “We certainly agree.”

“We’d be happy to sleep in the guest room,” said Garth. “Or out here if that’s better.”

“Take the guest room,” I said.

“Good. And Philip?”

“Yes?”

Garth grew solemn, raised his chin, fixed his ungaze on some infinite distance. “Evan and I want you to know we’ll do anything we can to help. You just have to ask.”

“Thank you.”

There was a pause, a leaden silence. “Huh,” said Garth. “I suppose we’ll go to bed now.”

They scuttled into the guest room, and closed the door.

I knelt beside Alice, careful not to wake her. I could hear the blind men running water, brushing their teeth. Outside, crickets pulsed. I don’t know how long it was that I sat there, silently contemplating her, tracking the flicker of dream state across her eyelids, the murmur of breath in her throat. Finally I spoke her name, and nudged her shoulder.

“Philip,” she said.

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“Soft brought you here. Everything’s okay. Come to bed.”

She nodded, still asleep, really, and let me guide her to the bedroom. She stood wobbling and mole-eyed while I tugged the disarrayed blankets and sheets into shape, then she slid into the bed. When I switched off the overhead light she looked up at me meekly through the dark.

“Philip?”

“Yes?”

“Where are you going to sleep?”

“I’ll sleep in the living room.”

Reassured, she curled up and fell asleep.

I closed the door to the bedroom and patrolled the apartment on tiptoe. In the kitchen I scraped food off the blind men’s plates and drank a glass of water. Then I remade the makeshift bed on the couch, stripped to my underwear, and put myself to bed.

But I didn’t sleep.

The alcohol had leached out of my brain. But now I was drunk on Alice. She was back in the house. A miracle. I pictured her alone in the chamber, clambering onto the steel table to offer herself up to Lack’s indifferent mouth. I shuddered. No wonder she couldn’t love me anymore. She’d become estranged from humanness. She was on the brink of the void.

My heart pounded with fear. But she was safe for the moment. Safe in my bed. Under my care. I just had to make it last, keep her here. I’d draw her back to the human realm. I’d teach her human love again.

I couldn’t afford any stupid mistakes. Any Cynthia Jalters. I had to walk the line. Be worthy.

Headlights from the road outside flared across the ceiling. In the kitchen the refrigerator hummed into midnight life. (I always imagine the light inside switching on, food cavorting.) My pulse slowed.

When I first heard the murmur I thought I was dreaming. But I opened my eyes, and it continued. Was it Alice, calling my name? I put aside the blankets, and crept out, cold and huddled, to the middle of the room, nearer the bedroom doors. The voices went on. I made myself still, to listen.

Evan and Garth arguing.

I went back to bed on the couch.

In the morning Evan and Garth vanished. I woke to see them breakfasting in decorous silence. I watched with half an eye as they tiptoed past me to the door. Then I went back to sleep, and a pleasantly forgettable dream.

An hour later I woke for real, to a hangover. I reconstituted myself in the bathroom with paste and swabs, drops and floss. I got a kettle boiling, its whistle-top propped open with a fork, shook coffee into a filter, and set out two cups. Evan and Garth had the cupboard stocked with a product called Weetabix. I opened a packet and poured milk over a desolate pod.

Alice padded in and sat at her place, not saying anything.

I gave her coffee, and we ate breakfast like mimes, yawning, stirring, and chewing in exaggerated silence. Alice hit the side of her cup with her spoon and spilled out a neat pylon of sugar. The room was washed with light. Alice’s mussed hair was a
backlit halo. We were a diorama labelled
Philip and Alice, Breakfast
. Circa two months ago. The past. Before.