fur"I have that effect on some men," Yvonne says with such innocent truth-
ess that Giffey knows she is not boasting. "I just wish they were quality,
like you. Why can't you stay a while?"
"I'll be here, but I'm going to be busy," Giffey says.
"Backwoods business, probably," she says.
Giffey grins but does not nod.
"I know all about what men do here to make money. We've brought the
hard times on ourselves. I wish to God I could just pack up and move to
Seattle, get a job there."
Giffey shakes his head. "Bad idea, unprepared."
"We've talked about this already," Yvonne says.
"We have."
She is interrupted by heavy knocking on the door. Giffey is up and has his
pistol out of a drawer before the third knock. The knock is followed by a loud
male voice.
"Yvonne, this is Rudy. We know you're in there with somebody."
/
SLANT 119
"Go to hell, Rudy, I am not yours to bother!" Yvonne shouts back. She
stands on the bed and looks for her clothes. Giffey bunches them up in a fist
from the chair and throws them to her.
He is standing naked with his gun in one hand, and she tilts her head to
one side and closes her eyes. "Dear sweet Jesus," she whispers.
"Bill's friends?" Giffey asks softly.
"Yeah."
"Will they hurt you?"
"No," she says. "They are such clucks."
"Will Bill hurt you?"
"They don't tell him," she says, exasperated. "The bastards think they're
watching out for me. They think I'm Bill's property."
"I see. You've been here before."
"Haven't you?"
Giffey chews this over for a moment, and then his wise old smile returns.
"Not for some time."
There is this other woman, whose name and face he can't quite recall. He
shakes that cold little sliver of memory out of his thoughts.
Yvonne sees his expression and her face wrinkles in disappointment. "I'm
sorry," she says.
"They tangle with me and they are going to be hurt. You get dressed and
get out there. It's been a pure pleasure, Yvonne."
"For me, too, Giff."
"Yeah, well, call me Jack," he says, and retires with his clothes and gun to
the bathroom, shutting off the light. He hopes Yvonne is smart enough to
close the door and let it lock on her way out, before the men decide they have
to do something more.
He hears them talking on the walkway outside. He doesn't hear the hotel
room door close.
There are two men and they sound like they're about Yvonne's age, maybe
younger. He hopes they do not come into his room.
Footsteps on the room's threadbare carpet. Giffey's senses become very keen,
in the dark behind the bathroom door. Whoever is in his room--just one
person--is taking it slow and easy, looking things over.
"I don't want to hurt you," the young man, Rudy, says. "I just want to talk
things over. Let me know where you are."
Giffey keeps quiet. Quiet is spookier.
"Come on. Just talk."
Yvonne tells Rudy to get out of the room, they should just leave.
"This bastard isn't worth it," the other young man says. "Let him go."
"Yeah. Well, he should know something, that's all. You listening? Where
are you, you fucker?"
"Rudy," Yvonne whines, "he's a pro. Federal army. He'll kill you."
120
GREG BEAR
Giffy cringes.
"Pro what? Pro federal woman-stealer? Talk to me, or I'll shoot through
the goddamn walls!"
Giffey holds up his pistol and pulls back the automatic target seeker switch.
It makes a small sliding click. Through the door or the wall, it won't be very
good, but it will give him a better chance if the man decides to jump into the
bathroom. Some of these young Ruggers are just crazy enough to do a thing
like that.
"Around here, we don't mess with another man's woman!" Rudy says, his
voice hoarse. He's not happy with this quiet.
"Oh, Rudy, 0z, h-leeze!" Yvonne says.
"I'd go home if I were you, Mister, back to fucking District of Corruption
or wherever you call home. Leave this town to the good people, the ones who
know better than to--"
"Rudy," the other man calls. "Let's go."
Rudy thinks this over. He hasn't come any closer to the bathroom door.
"Yeah, crazy bastard," Rudy murmurs. The footsteps retreat.
Giffby stays in the bathroom for ten or fifteen minutes, listening. He can't
hear a thing outside the room, though car and truck noises from the street
could mask some sounds. There's a couple of minutes of almost complete
silence, and slowly, he emerges from of the bathroom.
tie feels like a crab scuttling out from under a rock with gulls wheeling
overhead.
The room is empty.
When he is sure the hall and the street outside the building are clear, he
packs up everything in a small suitcase and leaves. Giffby does not want any-
knowing where he is, where he
be,
after that.
might
or
tomorrow
or
e is furious with himself for losing sight of his goal. This could have
ended it all early and stupidly, for nothing, he thinks.
For nothing at all.
2O
Night is coming on to dark morning and the storm is gentled, the lightshow
is off. All the house shutters are drawn and the monitor is set to store and be
quiet. Alice has calmed Twist and given her some fast OTC anxiolytics. She
is not hyperventilating now and she lies on Alice's couch with a cold cloth
/
SLANT 121
stopped sobbing. Alice is exhausted but she watches over the young woman
with feelings of irritation and peculiar gratitude.
She can rely on Twist to always have more urgent and tangled problems.
Twist's words tumbled out of her as soon as she came through the door--her
awfulness was back, she said, in force, and she could hardly see straight. She
has cycled in and out of total darkness, "Like looking at a black dog with sick
eyes," she said; skirted slashing her wrists, listened to the most awful silent
urgings, and imagined the most vivid hells. Some of these she described while
Alice fixed her some food and dosed out the anxiolytics. Alice listened, grimly
sympathetic.
Twist is having one severe fallback, no doubts. Tomorrow they will talk
about her temp situation and see where some long-term medical and therapy
might be gotten.
But now it is peaceful. A slow drizzle falls outside, little finger-taps of rain
barely audible on the blanked windows, and all there is in the world exists
within these walls.
Alice puts on her plush robe and curls up on the chair beside the couch,
drawing up her knees, eyes closing of themselves. She feels like a squirrel after
it has been chased by a cat. Her thinking comes in slow waves of reason mixed
with soft tremors of fkntasy.
Mary Choy has filed her request with Seattle Citizen Oversight to get the
asleep, and so after checking
in with Nussbaum and finding that he has gone
home, she hooks a police shuttle, empty but for her, on its ride to the north.
At her apt, she undresses. Showers.
Sits staring at the rain on the antique thermopane plate glass windows. Bs3'
day, little girl.
It is a day she would not mind forgetting. Nussbaum could have tried her
out on something a little less gruesome, a little less disturbing and pointless.
Her legs stretch long and her back slumps in the soft chair. She is not ready
for sleep yet. She stands and performs a slow dytch, Tai-Chi and Aikido moves
choreographed to her own dance rhythms, until her muscles and attitudes relax
and allow her basic status self, ground and reference for all her endeavors, to
come to balance and emerge like the moon from behind clouds.
She yawns. The images are tightly bottled. She will release them tomorrow,
122 GREG BEAR
SEXSTR pounds M:
Legitimate and Sincere Discussion of Sexuality in Our Time, REAL and IMMEDIATE
in Your Pad! (Vids and Yox of REAL people available for YOUR sincere needs!)
(This piece has had 10230 accesses in 10 years. Author not listed; public access free
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THE HUSBAND:
I have always been courteous and sweet, and thought of you. You yourself told
me I was the best lover you ever had. I watched with dismay the cooling, the
change from excitement to responsibility, to keeping the home on course...
When I am gone, I hope you'll look back and realize what opportunities you missed.
You'll think of all those times you could have felt more and done more, and as
you're lying there, completely alone in bed, you'll have so many regrets...
That's what I dream of. The body's reckoning.
THE WIFE:
Yes, he is conscientious, but lord... After he is gonemand I do hope I survive
himml can spend all morning in the garden, and then have toast and a little marmalade
for breakfast. I hope I am too old and withered for men to pay me any
attention. I will travel with my friends and read whenever I wish. I suppose he thinks
I will miss him in bed, but really, after, what will it be, probably, forty years of having
to service him--that's what he himself calls it sometimes--wouldn't any reasonable
human being hope for a vacation?
That's what I dream of. A long vacation.
In the back of Marcus's limo, without Marcus, Jonathan is on his way home.
He is gray smooth neutral now; he feels he has been manipulated into tracking
a slick fast groove he does not think can lead anywhere good. By feeling neutral
he can let himself think there is some way out, some room to maneuver; he
has not really made any decisions. Marcus's offer sounds so very ridiculous,
nineteenth-century; a secret society, perhaps, with handshakes and fezzes, Ancient
Revelations Unveiled upon signing a binding pact in blood...
What he feels, most of all, is lost, like a small boy. He wants to belong
someplace, but where--with Marcus and his unknown opportunity? With
Chloe and her hidden emotions and reluctance?
Jonathan travels in someone else's car to a house where he is no longer at
/
SLANT 123
God, I'm feeling sorry for myself, he thinks. Time to get maudlin and look for a
sympathetic shoulder.
But he is a mature man and playtime is long over.
He can see his house from the road. The limo pauses at a crossing. He
wonders whether Chloe is still awake.
Penelope and Hiram have gone to bed. The house is quiet. Chloe stands by
the living room window watching the clouds tatter.
Chloe's thoughts have been more and more ragged and bitter through the
evening, veering between self-judgment and self-justification. Yet there is
nothing she can blame specifically for her mood. Jonathan has done nothing
unusual to irritate her. The children have simply been themselves, and she is
used to that sort of stress.
Maybe she can blame a crazy toilet that says they are sick; it has even told
cold. She has phoned in a repair order, though the toilet's own opinion of its
condition is that there is nothing wrong.
No member of the family has ever had a cold. She hardly remembers what
the symptoms might be.
For reasons she cannot fathom, she has been thinking with sharp persistence
about the months before and after she met Jonathan, that time when
she could have reliably bedded a new man every week, sometimes two, and
often did. Back then, she would not have hesitated to call it fucking
around; now the term seems crude. She is a mother, after all, and a good
and responsible one.
Jonathan at first seemed just another of those men, less handsome than most,
but from the beginning she treated him differently. Even as she dated and
bedded others, she would not immediately give herself to him, give him what
her mother called "the physical privilege." No privilege--just sex, delightful
exercise. But with Jonathan--
She felt differently about Jonathan, not strongly attracted sexually, yet not
uninterested; he moved her in different ways.
In those weeks before she finally allowed him to persuade her, she gave
herself to other men and behaved with them in ways that she would not with
Jonathan, and has not since. She has never tried to explain that to herself and
in fact has seldom thought about it, but this evening, the question comes out
of the murk with a disturbing rough edge.
She remembers now that she had twenty men in all--eight of them after
she began dating Jonathan, sometimes inviting a man over hours after Jonathan
had left. Why twenty, she wonders; it seems so rounded and artificial a number,
so meaningless, nothing to do with actual people, with arms and legs and cocks
and pretty eyes and thrusting hips.
124
GREG BEAR
turn down the quiet good and intelligent man and then bed the loud, self-assured
and brightly plumed boys.
It was the last, the monster, that broke her and sent her straight to Jonathan.
He was what she needed.
The frame house creaks softly as the last of the wind fetches up against its
eaves.
Jonathan to her seemed honorable and decent and therefore much less of a
challenge. Getting the posturing boy-men to pay attention to her was a real
accomplishment. "Bitch thinking," she murmurs. He knows little or nothing
about the men who had her but were not hers, knows only about the last, and
she will never tell him; he is not the sort who would react well. She would
not want him to be that sort.
Though he has tried to get her to engage in fantasizing about other relationships,
she has resisted; there is something about such demands that lessens
him, in her eyes. He's changed. Sex, for this older Jonathan, seems to be some
sort of adventure, some way of making up for a stiff youth; she has long since
discarded that notion.
Yet she and Jonathan get along well enough in bed, she believes. She feels
his occasional dissatisfactions, his attempts to change their sexual routines; she
res
ists with a tree-like stubbornness, hoping to keep their relationship on a
firm and level ground, away from the jagged mountains of her early behavior.
She will not go back to the out-of-control passion, the pain, the loss of self
through giving all and getting nothing she needs in return.
She knows little about Jonathan's other sexual experiences. A few things he
has admitted to--unsatisfactory, half-hearted couplings with confused young
w-men--things Chloe scrupulously dismisses as inconsequential, and indeed I are.
The present moment is supreme. Family is what counts.
Yet increasingly she has felt Jonathan's entreaties turn bitter. He does not know why she resists; she doesn't either, not really. He has asked for things,
after all, that she once freely gave to others. Perhaps he senses that. He's not
stupid.
And his requests are not extreme--no marriage counselor would call them
extreme, or do more than offer mealy-mouthed placating defenses for Chloe's