The Incrementalists (9 page)

Elise turned away from me without a word.

“Hiya!” the waitress chirruped. “My name’s Candy.”

I could have guessed that.

“I’m Ren,” I said trying not to watch Elise get the garnish. The focus wasn’t physical, but it wasn’t only mental either. I pointed my eyes at Candy.

“You look bored,” she said, with an overplayed moue on her bubble-pink lips. Elise would do better with that shade of lipstick.

“Just tired,” I said. “Business travel sucks.”

“But you get all your food for free, don’t you?” she said. “We just get sodas.”

Elise put a little glass bowl of the lurid cherries on Candy’s tray. Candy blew her a kiss and trotted off into the warren of snugs and cubbies. Elise rolled her eyes and got down two wineglasses.

“You here on business?” she asked as she poured.

“Yeah, but I’m thinking about moving here,” I lied.

“God.” She pushed a glass towards me and drank from her own. “Man or gig?”

“What?”

“Two reasons women move to Vegas: they’re following a man, or they’re chasing the showbiz dream.”

“Which brought you?”

“Both,” she said with a snort. “I was a ballet dancer in love with a drummer. We figured if I could just lower myself to showgirl, he’d join the band and we could work together all night.” She drained her glass and repoured.

“What happened?”

“We couldn’t get work.”

“Either of you?”

“He’s on the light crew for
Zumanity
.”

Candy bounced back into the bar carrying a plate almost wider than her shoulders. She delivered it to me at the tall bar, still managing to lean over it enough to serve up two eyefuls of double Ds that looked younger than my salmon. “What are you girls getting all serious about?”

I looked at her with my mouth full of fish and widened my eyes in the classic “who me?” face. She giggled and marched back to the dining room.

A drink order came in on Elise’s machine, and I watched her make the cocktails. “Ballet doesn’t translate out here?” I asked.

“God,” she said. “It’s not just that. There are so many girls at every audition that they hire by how the costumes fit. Tailor the dancer to the outfits, not the other way around. Makes you pretty damn interchangeable. I walked away from a
corps de ballet
position with San Francisco Ballet. Now I’d kill for a spot on the back line. But I’m all wrong. Nobody wants a dark-haired girl who isn’t ethnic, and I don’t have the tits.”

“But you’re thinking about getting them?”

“I don’t know.” Her hands cupped her breasts, squeezed them together, something between disgust and despair on her face.

“Oh yikes! Sorry!” Candy made a production of stealth-loading the drinks Elise had made onto her tray. “Looks like you ladies are doing a fine job entertaining yourselves!”

Elise watched Candy bop back out with the loaded tray. “I kinda hate her,” she said.

“She’s damn perky,” I agreed.

“I think she’s fucking my boyfriend.”

“Oh, hell,” I said. “That slut.”

Elise grinned and put her elbows on the bar. “Oh my God, you have no idea. The other night we had this eight-top in here, and the one guy kept dropping his bread roll. He’d drop it and she’d get down on her hands and knees and crawl after it.”

“No,” I said. “I meant your boyfriend. What a slut.”

Elise stood up and stepped back. Her drink order machine spit out another piece of paper, and I went back to my salmon.

If I had time to gather the switches, if I had known any of the words or smells, or even her boyfriend’s name, I could have done more. I could have taken the words she was trying on like costumes, words like “dancer” and “failure” and “fidelity” and meddled with what they meant. But everything I remembered about Celeste’s early days as Nelle’s Second, and Nelle’s as Rita’s, and Rita’s as Fred’s, all the way back to Betsy reminded me of how much I didn’t know yet. I hadn’t even been to the Garden.

I barely noticed Elise carrying the new drinks by. “What the fuck?” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

She repeated the trip with two more filled glasses.

“Okay, seriously. What the fuck?”

I met her eyes. I shouldn’t have touched this. I wasn’t ready. I was exhausted, and I missed Phil more than I should, but all I could hear was Celeste.

“Someone called me that,” I said. “Once.”

“Were you fucking her guy?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

“Well?”

“But I have still done things I’m not proud of.”

“Yeah, me too,” Elise said, the fight ebbing out of her.

“I’ve been things I only thought I wanted to be.”

Elise looked at me. She nodded.

“I don’t want to be a waitress,” Candy whispered.

Elise held my eyes for a single second before we both turned to stare at the weeping waitress. “This isn’t what I want to be at all,” she said. “I want to be a singer. Or a dancer. I want to go on auditions. And have secret dreams like you.”

“Candy?” Elise said.

“And I want to have a boyfriend who loves me and hangs out where I work just to get to see me an extra bit and never even notices other girls.”

Elise stopped trying to talk.

“What were you doing when you were Candy’s age?” I asked her.

“How old are you?” Elise asked.

“Seventeen,” Candy said.

“Living with my mom and taking ballet.”

“Okay.” Candy sniffed back the tears and shook her ponytail. “Daddy said he’d buy me a ticket from anywhere, whenever I wanted. I’m going to call them and ask to come home.”

“You’re not from here?” Elise put her wineglass down.

“Your parents let you move to Vegas alone?” I asked.

Candy sniffled. “They don’t know where I am. I ran away.”

Elise gave a low whistle. “I never would have come out here on my own.”

“Okay. I won’t ever come to Vegas alone.”

“And I finished high school,” Elise said.

“I’ll finish high school.”

“And I always practiced safe sex.”

“I’ll always do safe sex.”

“And I never fu—” I shook my head at Elise and she cut herself off. “Good luck, sweetheart,” she said.

“I love you,” Candy said. Then she blew her nose on a cocktail napkin and went back to work.

“Well, there are roles and models, and role models, I guess,” Elise said with a shrug.

“Guess so,” I said.

“I feel like I just made an audition. Role of a lifetime.”

“Congratulations,” I said, and gave her my corporate MasterCard.

Elise didn’t charge me for the wine, and when she brought the ticket back, she’d added her phone number to it. “Just in case you do move out here,” she said. “I owe you.”

I told her she didn’t, but I pocketed her number. I took the elevator to my room missing Phil like he’d been stolen from me. I showered with my own shampoo, but it wasn’t the miracle I remembered, and wrapped myself—hair and body—in fluffy hotel towels. Sitting, still damp on the edge of the big, empty bed, I changed the outgoing message on my cell phone. “Hi,” I said into the little microphone. “This is Ren. Leave a message.” Then, choosing my words carefully I added, “Bonus memo to that special guy in my life, I’ll plan to meet you at the 24/7 Café in The Palms tomorrow at eleven unless I hear otherwise from you.”

Both Liam and Phil would think I was talking to them. I wondered which one I’d see.

Phil

Some memories you don’t have to graze for, they’re just there. It was, I don’t know, about 1956 I think. Celeste and I were living in Chicago, where I’d tapped into a lot of private games. We had an apartment the size of a very small apartment. We took turns cooking, and she complained when I used olive oil instead of butter.

I was stretched out on the couch, feet up, the
Chicago Sun-Times
over my face.

“With all the advances in photography and film, with air travel now commonplace and telephone service for even the hillbillies of West Virginia, could not Irina have chosen an even moderately attractive girl to spike me into? I hate this hair more than I have words for. Twenty years ago, we were bobbing our hair and pinning it with papers. Now it’s tongs or permanent waves. And mine simply will not take a curl. Are you even listening?”

I removed the paper, sat up, and looked at her.

“And glasses! Look at me! I’m hideous.”

Bréch, our three-year-old Samoyed, lifted his head, thumped his tail once, and put his head back down. I’d have liked to do the same.

“Let me,” I said, “take this in reverse order. In the second place, you are not hideous. You are delightfully attractive. Witness the, ah, ardor of, well, pretty much every night. But in the first place, is that really what you think Irina should have looked for in a recruit? No, no; can’t have
that
genius with the heart of gold, her hair is too straight.”

“Your ardor has nothing to do with me, Don Juan. And yes, I think Irina could have looked harder for my recruit. She’s always been selfish, and I don’t think she’s ever liked me. I know coeds aren’t plentiful, and yes, an Incrementalist must be intelligent before all else, but Pretty has a power Smart does not. Could I not gather switches more quickly by batting my lashes than grubbing through microfilm? I can’t very well do the kind of work I need to for the organization if I’m only hireable at the back of the bank. I’m not even pretty enough to be a teller!”

I made myself stop grinding my teeth, because Celeste always noticed that. I said, “My ardor has everything to do with you. And—” I stopped. “You know what, Celeste? You’ve hit on something. Why is it so bloody important to be pretty, with such a narrow definition of pretty? That’s something we could work on. Plant a few ideas here and there. Meddle with some fashion magazine editors. Hollywood. Pretty is nothing, and needing pretty is shallow. We could work with that. And quit glaring, you are pretty. Very.”

“You’re talking out both sides of your mouth, dear Janus. You offer your ardor as proof of my beauty, then argue beauty doesn’t matter to you. But I watch you, and your eyes don’t follow the ugly girls at the club.”

“No argument. That’s exactly my point. Yes, beauty matters to me. And, what’s more, what I find beautiful changes each time I get a new Second. How much it matters changes, and exactly what appeals to me. But why should it matter so much? Sure, some of it is biology. But not all of it. Some of it is social. We should find out how much is which, and see what we can do about it. I’ll write to Ray.”

“He can do nothing for my flat, Irish hair.”

“Your hair is adorable. So are your eyes. And I like your chin. Also, a particularly graceful neck. Shall I keep moving down?”

“You just like women. And I’m the only one you can screw.”

I nodded, finally realizing that I was never winning this one. “That,” I said, “is something else we should work on.”

She shook her head, and gave me one of those smiles of hers—not dazzling, not even necessarily expressing happiness—a quirk of her mouth and glint of her eye that went right through me. Whatever Second she inhabits, Celeste has that same smile. When she was Fred, she, or rather, he, still had it, and that made me crazy. What is it in our coding that makes certain smiles hit us like that? Anyway, she didn’t say anything, but a little later we went to bed, still annoyed with each other, and had crazy mad sex.

I’ve been Phil for about two thousand years. Celeste has been Celeste for about four hundred. You get to know someone pretty well in that time. I wanted to talk to her.

I stared at the phone and hoped Ren would call me back.

Ren

I brushed my teeth and climbed into bed. Phil had left a voice mail, but I was falling asleep as I listened. It was important. But I’d never heard of anyone named Celeste, so I turned off the ringer, plugged my phone in to charge and let sleep swallow me whole.

SIX

You’ve Been Meddled With

Phil

Irina filled me in on her latest romantic meltdown, which could be distilled to the usual: Either we date someone who isn’t in the group, which is impossible, or we date someone who is, which is catastrophic. Irina goes for the former, I go for the latter. She politely asked about poker, to which I politely answered in generalities; I politely asked about her sugar spoon, clerking in Dade County, to which she also politely answered in generalities.

We continued being polite for a couple of hours, then Irina said she was going to graze for a while. I was just as glad. I turned on the TV and managed to catch forty-five minutes of the Fourth of July
Shadow Unit
marathon. After that, I was watching the news when Irina said, “Phil.”

I clicked off the television. She was looking pale and tired. “Welcome back,” I said. “Learn anything?”

“How long was I gone?”

“An hour or so.”

“Have you heard from Ren?”

“No.”

“Call her again,” was the answer.

“Why? She either got my message, or she—”

“Call her every two hours until it’s time to find her. Or I will.”

It was easier to make the call than to argue, so I did, and got her new message. I hung up.

“What is it?” said Irina.

“She didn’t answer. I got her voice mail.”

“What about it?”

“Give me a minute to decide if I want to lie to you, and come up with a good one if I do.”

“Jesus Christ, Phil. I can just call her myself.”

“She left a message saying she’d meet me at breakfast.”

“So? Why would you not want to tell me?”

“I don’t know. I suppose wanting you the hell out of my life right now is part of it.”

“Yeah, I’m meddling. Like we do.”

“Not, usually, with each other.”

“I know,” she said, giving me a slow nod. “We’re exempt.”

“Generally.”

“But you’ve been meddled with, and you don’t like it.”

“Am I supposed to? When we meddle, we’re trying to do good, and it’s usually the only way to accomplish it. Can you convince me that applies in this case?”

“No, Phil. I can’t, Phil. I’m pretty goddamned sure it doesn’t, Phil.”

“So, why are you doing it?”