Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (19 page)

           
Grigor had the box of Kleenex
tissues out of the glove compartment, and had twisted around to offer it to the
woman, who gave him a baffled look, then shakily smiled and took two tissues.
She was about thirty, dark-haired, exotically attractive, not thin.

           
The man with her didn’t really look
much like Ben at all, except that he was tall and blond and big-boned. But he
had a very different face, more open and easygoing and friendly than Ben’s.
(Ben had been a tortured intellectual.) He said to Susan, “Thanks for getting
us out of that. I think if s gonna turn bad.”

           
“It already did turn bad,” Susan
said. Clearing the last of the demonstration, getting back onto the road, she
could look in the rearview mirror at the woman daubing at her cut forehead with
the tissues.

           
“Worse,” the man said. “Much worse.
I’ve seen a lot of these things, I know.”

           
“You demonstrate a lot?” Susan
couldn’t keep the frostiness out of her tone. She didn’t care about the rights
or wrongs of specific arguments; all she knew for sure was, when people turned
ugly and mean and violent they were wrong, no matter how noble their cause.

           
“I
watch
demos a lot,” the man said. “I’m a sociologist at
Columbia
. I was there to observe this thing, and
then this lady got hit by one of the demonstrators’ signs—”

           
“It was an accident,” the woman
said. She had an accent, rough but not unpleasant.

           
The man grinned at her, easy and
comfortable. “I know,” he said. “You got hit by your own team. You still got
hit, though. It was still time to get out of there.” Grinning now at Susan in
the rearview mirror, he said, “Lucky you came along. Lucky for us, I mean.”

           
“Glad to help,” Susan said.
Something about this man attracted her, but something also—maybe the same
something?—made her apprehensive.

           
The man leaned forward, forearm on
the seatback behind Susan’s head. “My name’s Andy Harbinger,” he said.

           
“Susan Carrigan. And this is Grigor
Basmyonov.” She’d become quite practiced by now at saying Grigor’s last name.

           
They exchanged hellos, and then
everyone concentrated on the woman, who looked up from dabbing at her forehead
to say, “Oh, yes, excuse me. I am Maria Elena Auston.” She sounded weary, even
sad.

           
It was no good. Nothing was any
good. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Maria Elena’s head throbbed
where the sign had grazed her. Riding in the backseat of the car with three
strangers, alone in a land she would never understand, she felt sick,
exhausted, and in despair. She couldn’t even take part in an anti-nuclear
demonstration without being hit in the head by one of her own comrades.

           
She couldn’t do anything, right,
could she? She couldn’t even keep her husband.

           
At first, it had all been so
perfect. She and Jack Auston, together. In
Brasilia
, every day working with him, every night
sleeping with him, his sexual interest a surprising delight, unexpected that
such a quiet man could be so voracious in bed.

           
One day the necessary papers were
signed at the city clerk’s office and with the American embassy, and then one
other day they went down to the public register and were married in a private
ceremony and went back to his apartment—she’d moved in some time before—and
made love again, sweet love, and that was their honeymoon.

           
Jack then had two months remaining
on his contract with

           
WHO, and that was the most
satisfying time of Maria Elena’s life. Her miserable first marriage with Paco
was forgotten, her dead children nearly forgotten, her lost singing career no
longer painful to think of, her self-loathing buried so deeply beneath this new
self-assurance that she seemed to herself to be a thoroughly new person.
And
she was going to
America
.

           
Her happiness was so great in those
days that she barely ever even thought about the original reason for wanting to
go to America, for wanting to induce—seduce—John Auston into marrying her.
Occasionally the memory would come, particularly when they were in the field at
some especially horrifying site, but the fantasy had more or less shrunk from a
plan or a hope back to the simple childish fancy it had originally been.

           
The first month or six weeks in
America
were dazzling and distracting, the town of
Stockbridge
in
Massachusetts
as alien to her as a different planet in a
different solar system; yes, even the sun seemed like another sun. Learning to
shop at those stores, to drive on those roads, to live in that house, had all
been so heady and intense, requiring such concentration, that she couldn’t even
count that time as happiness; she was too busy then to be happy. And also too
busy to notice for some time that she’d lost Jack.

           
She knew now what it had been. In
Brazil
, his sexual excitement had blocked out
every other facet of his personality, like a radio jammer. But that kind of
excitement, based in the alien and exotic, had inevitably faded once they’d
returned to his normal mundane world. In Stockbridge, his insatiable craving
for her body had drained out of him with the speed and irreversibility of water
out of a cracked swimming pool. And when it was gone, there was nothing left.

           
Jack didn’t care for
her,
it seemed, had nothing in common
with her, neither liked nor disliked her, was absolutely indifferent to her
presence. There was no longer any sex at all between them, and her few efforts
to rekindle his passion had been such humiliating failures—how gendy and kindly
he had excused himself from performance—that she’d quickly given that up, but
then had no other way to try to reach him. He had returned to a previous
research job at a
Massachusetts
medical laboratory, and the people and events of his work were
absolutely all that held any interest for him. He didn’t actively object to
Maria Elena’s presence in his house, cooking his meals and doing his laundry,
but if she’d left he would have found another maid without a second thought. In
fact, it would probably be easier for him to have a maid who wasn’t inexplicably
all over his bedroom every night.

           
In a way, it would have been easier
to understand and live with if Jack had found another woman, but he had not,
and might never. He was a kind and gende man, but he just simply wasn’t much of
a physical creature. His job absorbed his interest. His on-site chat with
co-workers was all the social life he seemed to need, and that was it. His
sudden spurts of sexual excitement must be terribly rare, surprising and
pleasing while they were going on, but then gone without a memory, without a
regret.

           
That was the worst of it; Jack
couldn’t even seem to remember what it was about her that he’d liked. And she
knew now that it was only that deep polite indifference at the core of him that
had made him agree to marry her, that had permitted her to succeed in her
machinations. Oh, how clever she’d been!

           
If only she could talk to the first
wife, that mystery woman three thousand miles away in
Portland
,
Oregon
. Had the same thing happened with her? Had Jack suddenly noticed her
body, gone into that frenzy, worn it away inside her, and then reverted to his
natural phlegmatic self? (Except, of course, that a child had resulted that
other time.) And had the wife at last been unable to stand for another instant
that bland polite indifference?

           
How would an American woman react to
such an existence? Maria Elena was at a total loss. Nothing in her experience
showed her how to handle a passionless man. In her world, passion was a major
constituent, for good and for ill. When she and Paco had come together, it had
been like storm systems colliding over a jungle, and when they’d parted, the
storms had been even more fierce. They’d drawn blood, both emotionally and
physically, and if Maria Elena was eventually battered into an acceptance of
Paco’s hateful view of her, it was nevertheless the result of a
war,
not the result of an ice age
covering the Earth.

           
And when she had sung, and the
public had responded, that had been passion, too. She had been for a while the
latest in a tradition of forceful South American performers, almost a cross
between the emotional intensity of an Edith Piaf and the showbiz intensity of a
Liza Minnelli, but propelled by a purely Iberian torrent of feeling. How
powerfully she had been able to sing about sorrow and loss, then, before she
had known them. How far she was from singing now.

           
She had brought with her from
Brazil
the memorabilia of that career, the albums,
the rolled-up posters, the magazine articles, the photos, all stacked in two
cartons stored away in the Stockbridge attic. She thought of them up there
sometimes, thought about listening to one of the albums
—Live in
Sao Paulo
, for instance, with its almost terrifying
roar of audience response—but she never did.

           
Frustrated, shamed, alone, Maria
Elena clung at last to the wreckage of the idea that had caused her to be
united with John Auston in the first place. Somehow, she had to find the people
who owned the factories, the people who were indifferent to or ignorant of the
horror they brought into the lives of less powerful human beings in less
influential parts of the globe. Somehow, she had to reach them and convince
them to change their ways, reverse their policies, stop the slaughter. But who
were these people? How could she find them? How could she make contact with
them? How could she make her argument compelling to them?

           
Finally, there had been no route
open except to repeat her earlier political phase in
Brazil
: join the protestors. It gave her a way to
fill her days, it gave her a way to use her untapped passion, it gave her, at
least at moments, at least the illusion of accomplishment. She wasn’t doing
what had to be done, but she was doing
something.

           
But even there, satisfaction was
elusive. Her grasp of English, adequate in every other respect, was too clumsy
for the slippery nuances of political discourse. Even this demonstration; it
apparently wasn’t opposed to the nuclear plant as such, but to some sort of
research going on within it. What did Maria Elena know of science? Nothing;
only its leavings. Still she persisted, because something is better than
nothing, because movement at least distracted from the emptiness of her life,
and because maybe she
was
doing some
good. Maybe she was.

           
But it didn’t really work, it didn’t
really distract, and it certainly didn’t fulfill. She picketed in front of the
U.N., signed group letters to the
New
York Times
(that usually weren’t published), contributed toward the cost of
advertisements on environmental issues, showed up to help swell the ranks of
protests, traveled to Washington on buses chartered by action groups; and
always she was alone, always just a little to the side of the group, slighdy
lost, slightly out of sync.

           
And all of it culminating in this
embarrassment today. This was the worst so far, to be bloodied in front of
television cameras, to give the bastards of the media exacdy the kind of false
violent story they preferred, the kind of story they could use to avoid and
obscure the
real
story. Then, still
dazed from that inadvertent blow to the head, she’d permitted herself to be
taken away from the action, away from where she should be, to sit here in this
car full of strangers. “I am Maria Elena Auston,” she said. “And I thank you,
but I really shouldn’t leave my friends. They’ll worry about me.” Which wasn’t
at all true, a reality she resolutely ignored. “If you could just let me out,”
she went on, “I’ll walk back.”

           
They all argued that: the handsome
young man who’d pulled her out of the picket line, the pleasant young woman
driving, the very thin man in the passenger seat in front. They said her head
was cut, was still bleeding, had to be seen to. “We’re just a couple of miles
from the hospital,” the young woman said, and the thin man said, “That’s very
true.”

           
“I don’t want to take you out of
your way. Please, I’ll just get out—”

           
The thin man laughed, then coughed,
then turned to smile at her, saying, “It is not out of our way. I am afraid I
live at the hospital.”

           
Now she actually looked at him and
listened to him for the first time. He spoke English with an accent, possibly a
stronger one than hers, but very different. Polish? And he was so thin, the
shape of his skull was absolutely visible through the translucent blue-gray
skin of his face. Knowing what the truth must be, she nevertheless said, “Are
you a doctor?”

           
“Much more important,” he said,
smiling again. “I am a star patient”

           
“I’m sorry,” Maria Elena said,
feeling sudden embarrassment.

           
“Don’t
you
be sorry,” he told her. “Fll be sorry for both of us.” It was
strange to have such a skeletal figure behave in that elfin fashion. But then
his expression became more sober, and he looked past her out the rear window of
the car, saying, “If I had the strength, I might march with you.”

           
She read the connection immediately:
“You mean, the nuclear industry is why you’re sick?”

           
“Nuclear industry,” he echoed, as
though the words contained a joke only he understood.

           
The young woman driving said
tonelessly, “Grigor was at
Chernobyl
.”

           
Something constricted Maria Elena’s
throat. Unable to speak, unsure even what to call the emotion that had suddenly
flooded her, she reached out to fold her palm over his bony shoulder. So bony.

           
He smiled over her hand at her.
Gendy, to make
her
feel better, he
said, “I’ve had time to get used to it.”