Wetware (20 page)

CHAPTER 9

April 12, 2029

IN A café not far from the auditorium, Jack picked up a newspaper on the table next to where he and Kay sat. The front page had a picture of some men in stylish suits beneath a headline that said, SPIKE HEEL GANG CRASHES. The men in the photo had the stylized bravado of rich South Americans who thought they operated according to special rules of physics. The Spike Heel Gang were traders in São Paulo who had tried to corner the future markets in copper, and while it had originally seemed to be nothing more than the usual scandal, the damage from it was spreading in a way that showed weaknesses in the financial institutions far away from South America. They were called the Spike Heel Gang because when things were booming, they drank champagne out of a woman’s spike-heeled shoe. Jack read of suicides of bankers in Tokyo and Paris. What was one to make of this? Were these suicides a matter of money, or some private concern? And if it was personal, why were the suicides coming in a cluster?

Jack tried to imagine a Brazilian nightclub: women in sequined dresses, the movement of sleek hips under the red and blue shimmer, a leg extended with a shoe dangling from the toe as a dare, the shiny bubbles rising from a dark green bottle . . .

He held the paper out.

“You think this is the one we’re waiting for?” said Jack.

Kay glanced at it.

“I don’t know,” said Kay. “It’s got possibilities. First it will have to spread into Asia, or maybe Russia. A week or two, I guess.”

A waiter brought some ice cream in metal bowls covered with a frosty, silver condensation as bright as the quicksilver of a mirage. Kay idly put her fingers into the spots the waiter made where he touched the bowl. Then she picked up the spoon and dipped it into the white ice cream.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” said Jack. “You wowed them. Wowed them.”

“I thought I played all right,” said Kay. “Some of it still gets away from me, though.”

“Well, it didn’t get away from them,” said Jack.

He looked at the paper again. The faces of the men appeared, in the moment, like a fad that is the latest thing and is about to be replaced by yet another quickly changing style. Dated, but not yet knowing it. Jack stared at their faces and said, “Yeah. It was just a matter of time, I guess. What do those economists you’ve been reading have to say about something like this?”

“A good kick in the right place and it all collapses,” she said. “That is, if the circumstances are there.”

She looked down at the paper.

“What’s the right place?” he said.

“Credit,” she said.

“Oh yeah,” said Jack. “Well, speak of the devil. He’s out there watching you. What did I tell you? Wild horses couldn’t keep him away.”

CHAPTER 10

April 12, 2029

BLAINE STOOD in the street and looked in the window of the café. Kay dipped the tip of the spoon into the ice cream and put it into her mouth. Then she closed her eyes and slowly withdrew the spoon, leaving a little ice cream on the tip of it. Jack sat opposite her, his back to Blaine. Blaine had left his coat at the auditorium, and he shivered a little in the breeze. The glass of the front of the restaurant seemed familiar to him, but he couldn’t say why until it occurred to him that the reflection of the blue sky in it reminded him of the sheen of a soap bubble that he had blown, as a child, with a toy that his father had given him. He hadn’t thought about such a thing for years, and the recollection of innocence added to his impatience, his confusion, and his desire to spend a moment with Kay. As he saw her lips and skin, the movement of her long fingers as they held a spoon, the pursing of her lips over the cool ice cream, he thought of the music she had played, the phrasing that seemed to express so perfectly his own longings and chaotic desires and a sense of beauty he had never known existed. His newly remembered innocence, the impact of the music, and her sultry presence left him trembling in the cold, not knowing whether it was the cool air of spring or the fact that he was compelled, in a way he didn’t really understand, to stand here looking at a young woman eating ice cream.

Kay came out first, then Jack. When they walked out to the sidewalk, Jack looked one way and then another, but his eyes stopped on Blaine’s face. Kay smiled.

“Hi,” she said. “You were at the audition, weren’t you?”

Even now Blaine didn’t trust his voice. He ran his hand over his face, and he was repulsed by his appearance, the way he had aged, the creases in his face. It was evidence of how he had wasted time. He realized with a kind of self-loathing that he had earned the face he now had, and yet he was almost hysterical in his desire to get rid of it, to start again. This was one of the qualities of the music that Kay had played, maybe not the ability to start over so much as the promise of understanding. In a way, they were almost the same thing. And if he was going to start over (which, he realized, was part of Kay’s attractiveness), how in God’s name could he get rid of the appearance of his face, which so obviously revealed the days he had spent pursuing order, precision, stability. It was as though he had been rotting from the outside in.

Kay went on smiling. Blaine swallowed.

“You know,” said Jack, as though he had seen what he wanted, “I’ve got to see someone.”

“Do you, Jack?” she said. She turned her eyes on him.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said. “Do you want me to hang around for a while?”

“No,” she said. “That’s okay. Go on. Go do your errand.”

Jack looked at her carefully. Was she sure about this?

“Go on,” she said. “I’m all right. Mr. Blaine and I want to talk. You do want to talk to me, don’t you?”

Blaine nodded.

“Okay,” said Jack. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Blaine.”

Jack put out his hand as though he were a courier who had delivered something and was going on his way. Blaine turned his eyes from Kay to Jack. Was something being offered here, or, better, conveyed or given? Blaine looked back at Kay, who smiled. Jack shook Blaine’s hand and went up the street, not turning around, doing nothing but going away with his frank, athletic way of walking, not swaggering, but confident, certain.

“Where do you live?” said Kay. “Is it far?”

She seemed more frank in the street, and without the window between the two of them, her presence seemed more real. He looked at the color of her eyes, which he hadn’t been able to see before. Gray, with a pupil of exquisite darkness. She seemed to invite him to look at her.

“Not too far,” said Blaine.

“Shall we walk?” she said.

“No,” said Blaine. “I . . . My car and driver are up there, at the end of the block.”

“All right,” she said. “Come on. I’ve been waiting to talk to you.”

“Have you?” said Blaine.

“Yes,” she said. “The moment I saw you in the auditorium. It’s strange to think that one can be so curious at a distance.”

She looked at him as though trying to determine whether she had been right, and her consideration left Blaine wondering what it would be like to have the current atmosphere between them, which was one of almost infinite possibility, evaporate because she had decided that she had made a mistake. He flinched.

“Is something wrong?” she said.

“No,” he said. “Maybe not.”

When they came to the car, Jimmy got out and opened the door, and Blaine said, “We want to go home.”

In the car, she slid across the seat, not right against him, but close. He tried to concentrate on being polite or charming, or somehow to make sense of having her here, right next to him, but instead he felt her presence in such a way as to leave him overwhelmed by a scent, a caress in the air, a change in what being alive felt like that was so keen as to be almost alarming. She hummed a little something, a bit of music that he didn’t recognize. He tried to say to himself,
There’s no fool like an old fool,
but he instantly dismissed this, or just put the consequences of it off, knowing instinctively that he would gladly pay the price later. That is, if there was going to be anything to pay for.

They came into Blaine’s apartment and went down the hall with its brown shadows and gilt-framed pictures, Blaine’s footfalls suggesting an almost staggering exhaustion. At the end, through the doorway of the library, they saw the luster of the piano, the black and white keys, the pedals at the floor curved and antiquated like the levers of a clarinet.

The housekeeper came in, her apron in her hands. Blaine’s schedule never varied, and the slightest deviation was, as far as she was concerned, evidence of a certifiable emergency.

“Mr. Blaine?” she said.

“I’m going to have a guest,” said Blaine.

“A guest?” she said. She blinked. Mostly Blaine did not have unexpected guests. “Well, there’s plenty,” she said with the voice of someone who has been filling a refrigerator with left-over food for years on end. She went out, stopping once in the hall to turn and look back into the room. In the hall, a clock with roman numerals on its face and with a pendulum swinging beneath it made a steady tick, tock, tick, tock, the sounds as definite as someone dropping washers into a metal bucket.

Kay sat next to the piano. She held one of her knees with both hands. Blaine was still shaky from the afternoon—
o f guard
was the way he put it to himself, and he blushed when she glanced at him in a such a way as to make him think she could read his mind. Then he thought,
Who the
hell cares if I blush or not?
It was as though every bit of discipline, every moment when he had had to go without something he had craved, had produced a sum, and he was suddenly aware of the scale of the amount and the interest he had had to pay on it, too, the instant Kay looked at him with that expression of exquisite frankness.

Now, though, when Blaine tried to speak, he stopped and swallowed, trying to get control of both his feelings and the obvious signs of them, too. He put the shaking tips of his fingers together.

Of course he wanted to ask the obvious questions, such as where she had studied. Also, he wanted to know what the piece of music had been at the audition. How could she have been playing anywhere in the world and not be known? Where had she lived? As he sat there, it occurred to him that there was a more obvious explanation: maybe she had had a nervous breakdown, as young musicians often did, and had been tucked away in some psychiatric hospital. This seemed quite possible, yet when he looked at her, when she smiled and flashed her eyes at him, he had the impression of succulent vitality, at once youthful and fertile, and while he detected emotional turmoil of some kind, it only made the strength of her spirit that much more obvious.

The aroma of dinner came into the room, and it made the shadows in the library seem warm and domestic. Blaine tried to think clearly. He wondered if he was losing his mind. He considered the possibility that it was happening so suddenly as to leave him with no way to confront the fact, no time to come up with a theory, a strategy, some illuminating notion that would get him through it. So he sat there, looking into the golden light of the library, at Kay. She had a vein in her forehead, hard to see, but there. It made her more striking, as though the vein were an indication of passionate intensity.

She picked up one of his hands. He felt the touch of it so keenly as to have the sensation that he couldn’t tell where he stopped and she began. She looked around the room. “You live alone, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I wonder why,” she said. “This place, the comfort of it, seems made to have someone else here.”

“My work,” said Blaine. “It takes up a lot of time.”

“Oh?” she said. “Well, that’s too bad, isn’t it?”

Blaine swallowed.

“But I guess someone has to be responsible. Did you see the paper today? Something about men in South America drinking champagne out of a woman’s shoe,” she said.

“It’s not the champagne that’s the problem,” said Blaine.

“No,” she said. “I guess not.”

She reached down and took off one of her shoes.

“Would you like me to play?” she said, gesturing to the piano.

Kay had been working on another piece, and she began to play, her shoulders square and her head up. Blaine saw her profile, her short hair against the lights of the city, although now, as she played, the lights had an order that he hadn’t noticed before. They appeared bright and filled with his most secret longings. She was the element that allowed him to forgive himself, and God knew he wanted to be forgiven for his failures. He thought of the look his wife gave him as she waited for him to die. After a moment or two, he stopped thinking altogether. He only knew that he wanted to spend some time with Kay.

She came to the end. When Blaine got up to look into the dining room, he found the housekeeper on a chair behind the door, listening, so distracted that she trembled and picked at a strand of her hair. He put his arm around her, the first time they had ever touched in this manner, and pulled her against him.

“My God,” said the housekeeper. “Oh my God.”

They sat for a while. Then the housekeeper got up and said, “Here. It is on the table. It will be getting cold. What could I have been thinking?”

Kay and Blaine sat down.

She talked about many subjects: butterflies, mountain climbing, rare fish, mushrooms. Then she went on to the history of coins. Did he know where the first coin had been minted? After each new subject was introduced, she watched. Was he interested in one rather than another? He spoke now, not in his usually dry and viciously witty way, but slowly, with some hesitation.

She described a method of tracking financial indices and cross-checking them so as to predict the markets, and while it was abstract, having only to do with numerical trends, it had always intrigued Blaine. Of course he knew the work and he’d thought he understood it, but Kay made some small adjustments in the way these theories were applied, and then spoke of the history of panics, from tulips onward through the IBM sell-off, and as she went through each one, she explained it according to the revised theory. Then he turned his head to one side, as though he had heard something at once true and at odds with what he believed.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he said.

“Of course,” she said. “It’s just an idea I had . . . ” She shrugged. “We can talk about it some other time,” she said.

“Maybe what you say is true,” said Blaine. He put a hand to his head.

“Think about it,” said Kay. She shrugged. “It might be useful sometime. In a panic.”

They finished and sat in the quiet room. Kay got up and stood next to Blaine and then knelt next to him. Her hand reached out for the napkin that was in his lap and slowly drew it away, and as it slipped from his hands like some worry that was simply being forgotten, he felt the touch of her lips against his face, and the pressure of her breath as she said, “Come into the other room for a minute. Can’t you humor me? I get so tired of practice, of work. That’s why I wanted to come here, to be someplace where I can be safe and where I can relax. Won’t you help me?”

He stood up and came after her, going into the room with a view of the city and where the enormous bed, in which he had been conceived, stood between two windows. Blaine wanted to do the right thing, to think clearly, and he tried to do so, but what got in the way was an enormous fatigue which manifested as a restraint. As she touched his hand, or rubbed a smooth cheek against him, the fatigue seemed to evaporate. He sat next to her as she took off his tie and opened his shirt. She took off his shoes and then stepped out of her jeans, wearing just her underwear, and then the two of them lay back, into the heavy goosedown of the pillows.

“Please,” she said. “Just let me lie down with you here. Put your arm around me. Just like that. I promise you there will be other times, but now just lie next to me.”

Blaine felt the heat of the two of them together, which seemed to be indistinguishable from the fragrance of her hair. More than anything else, what he wanted was to live in the moment, but instead he found that all he could do was to keep thinking, over and over again, of the puzzle of good fortune and of his mystification that he could have been so wrong about so much for so long. Now he could see his errors clearly, or at least he could feel them dissipate in the warmth between them, in the touch of her skin, in the memory of her playing. He had never felt so close to another human being. She hummed something, and as he felt the slight vibration of her lips against the skin of his neck, he wondered for an instant whether or not actually sleeping with her might kill him, and as he put his hand under the elastic of her underwear, feeling the softness of the skin of her hip, he stopped. She wanted to lie like this, and he didn’t want to do anything to interfere with the delicious intimacy of the moment. He hovered there in the warmth of their mutual touch, in the scent of her hair and skin, the soap that she had used to wash her hands, all of it validated or made real by the almost infinitely small sounds of the room: the rustle of her blouse, the hush of one of her bare legs crossing another, the small, wet drawing of her breath, the almost audible sound her tongue made as it touched her lips. She put her lips against his ear and hummed, the vibration seeming to somehow be the one detail that he knew he would remember, the diminutive buzz seeming to linger like the memory of a bee on some languid, hot afternoon. More than anything else, he wanted to go on hanging there in the touch and sound of her, since for a short time, anyway, he found that he was only giving thanks for this opportunity, for which he realized he had been waiting for years. She sat up a little sleepily, dragging her short hair down the side of his face, and said, “I so needed to be able to trust you like this. You can’t understand what it means.”