reluctance to go along. It is after all a game for two, and the rules have to be
agreed to by both partners.
They have been together for twenty years and who can expect the experimenting
and exploration to stretch on forever?
It has now come to what he calls stiffness.
She gives herself often enough, she thinks, and with sufficient response; he
,-is not a bad lover and he knows it. But the strain is showing.
Then the question rubs with a sandpapery grit. Does she still feel anything for Jonathan except the need for continuity, for stability and level ground, for
/ SLANT 125
"Shit, shit, shit," she mutters. What she did when she was eighteen is a
ghostly irrelevance, numbers and bleached memories and even many of the
names lost; what she gives or does not give to her husband is her own business.
They have their children and their lives, their social connections and many
friends... That is more than enough.
She opens the rear glass door and stands on the porch. A few drops of rain
splash on her face. She wipes them away with well-manicured fingers. Jonathan
does his share. But feeling any kind of guilt angers her. She has given the
children her free hours and thoughts and her passion; they are strong and they
are good children. The time is coming soon when they will be adults. Penelope
is dating sporadically and Hiram is hiding his interests well enough.
Chloe hates the thought of life demanding more of her than she has already
given. She has given up the tradition of her family, disappointing her father;
she has not used her education.
Suddenly, in the cooling breeze, she jerks upright and grips the railing. The
tears flow freely and she hates, herself, him, all the demanding forces. What
she fears is that she is coming to believe any sex at all diminishes her. She does
it for Jonathan, not for herself. She has no strong needs, none at all.
Jonathan will be home any minute and she does not want to show this side
to him. He has become an adversary; she loves him but gave him so many
parts of herself and her life that she feels she could have done other and better
things with; and then she thinks of the children and really the obligations and
losses haunt her, make her feel a little sick. What could she have been, given
complete freedom from all the sandpaper demands of sex, including children?
She goes back into the house and swings the door hard but it catches and
closes with a soft snick. She would prefer to have slammed it. The lights switch
on in the living room. "Lights off." she shouts. The house is controlling her;
she cannot break free from anything.
The lights obediently dim and go out.
She is bound on every side in the darkness.
The front door opens. Jonathan is home. Her muscles tense and she composes
herself. He must not see her this way; he does not deserve that satisfaction.
She hears him in the front hall, and then he stops, and she imagines him
listening to the house, like a cat trying to locate a mouse. He wants to know
where she is. He wants to know if she is asleep or awake, and if she is awake
perhaps he will try to hug her and touch her, arouse her. He seems to need to
believe that being away for a few days or even a few hours increases her need
for him. It is not so. She could go for months, years, forever.
"Hello?" he calls softly.
"In here," she says. "How was the meeting?"
Jonathan walks into the living room. He looks drained. "Weird," he says.
"Why is it dark?"
He stands a few feet away, arms folded. For a moment she is relieved that
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GREG BEAR
"I've been watching the storm," she says.
"Kids asleep?"
"Yeah. The toilet says we're sick."
He laughs. He sounds nervous.
"Was the speaker interesting?"
"I suppose. Marcus was the really interesting speaker tonight." Then he
remembers he is not supposed to tell Chloe. "Christ, I'm tired. Ready for bed?"
"Marcus the kingmaker?"
"The same," he says.
"Nothing worth the bother," Jonathan replies, but the words sound false,
or at least unsure.
He is hiding something. Everything she has thought and felt this evening
seems to double back like a cobra and she is suddenly afraid. What if she has
denied too much, been too inflexible? She is vulnerable; she does not and cannot
stand alone.
"I've never understood the whole mentor thing," she says.
"Neither have I, but there it is."
She steps across the metabolic carpet. Her feet are bare and her toes in the
warm plush feel nice, distinct. All the parts of her body feel separate and
distinct. She does not like it, but her insecurity is working on her. She does
not want to lose Jonathan, this situation, all she's worked for. It's nonsense to
think anything has happened, but everything she feels seems nonsensical.
He's watching her in the dark. To him, she's just an outline. Now comes
the irrational response, the warming of her separate body parts. The carpet
feels like animal fur. She sees herself running her hands over a horse's flanks.
eme is going to be distant and quiet and withhold something, then she will
onstrate to him after a long while what she has, what she can do. It's
allowed, she thinks. And he wants it. This evening she will make the offer.
And forget all the contradictory voices: this is a simple courtesy in a long-term
relationship.
"Too tired?" she asks.
"What?"
She is close enough that she can see his eyes. Without a clue. Vulnerable as
a little boy. She unzips her top and lifts it free and peels it from her arms. She
still has good breasts; he likes her breasts, nuzzles them frequently, but as a
result of the matron conditioning, they have matured past their younger purpose
to become instrumsnts of nurture, and are not as sensitive as they once
were. She can no longer have an orgasm simply by rubbing her breasts. She
could have reversed this but has not.
Now, they feel more sensitive than they have in years.
The hair between her legs must feel rough, like the hair of a horse's tail.
She wonders if he will notice.
/
SLANT 127
Jonathan stares at her, at a loss. "Honey," he says.
"Now that you're away from the power-hungry, let's see how hungry you
are," she says.
She steps out of her pants and underwear and stands before him in the dark.
"Lights up half," she tells the house. The lights rise to a golden dimness.
"I want you to fuck me," she says.
The words stun. He does not move.
"Forget everything else. Fuck me."
She wants to lie back on the carpet and feel it warm and moving beneath
her like the hair on the back of a horse.
Jonathan, with Chloe's help, removes his clothes quickly, the sleeves catching
on his wrists, the pants tangling, and he stumbles they are working so
fast. Her lips and teeth and tongue are on his mouth, bruising him and stopping
any words, and she is murmuring around their touching tongues. "Give
it to me. Do it. I need your cock." She has never asked hi
m in this way before,
using these ancient words, so bluntly and powerfully, like a bad Yox.
Despite his confusion, he responds instantly. She grips with painfully strong
fingers.
She is going to show him. If he wants this, let him be dismayed and shocked
to get what he wants all at once, instead of in little rationed parcels. See what
he thinks. She wraps herself around him, pushes him roughly against the horsehair
matting between her legs. Her body is proving her value.
Jonathan's doubts die and he grabs her as if he has never had her before and
there have only been days or hours together for them and no children and no
other responsibilities have come between. She gracefully reclines to the carpet
and pulls her knees back like one of those Celtic stones they saw on vacation
on a horse irm, a Sheila something; she is a Sheila inviting him.
(Jonathan had stared at the Sheila with a silly boyish look of speculating
embarrassment. How could such a statue still exist in Catholic Ireland?)
He does not stop to stare but is over her and then inside her. She listens to
his urgency and wonders if all men feel alike if the eyes are closed; she thinks
they may. He does not feel differently from the brightly plumed boys in her
bingeing time. He moves quickly and with real strength and need that he has
not shown for months and she knows it is true, that he told her the truth, that
he had other keys she could use if she simply willed it. It is disgraceful really
that he is so easy; men are so easy this way. No challenge at all.
Her own pleasure is not intense. The sensation of his weight and motion
fluctuates between strangeness and complete familiarity and she is not sure
which is going to triumph. She hopes the strangeness; no, the familiarity, the
other would degrade, and finally she does not care.
But when she pushes him back and turns over and lifts herself and pulls
him back into her and thinks of the horses on the farm, of the bright-plumed
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GREG BEAR
boys with self-assured smiles and no brains, in this shamelessness her reaction
is intense. The pleasure rankles. How dare he. She grits her teeth and humps
back against him.
Jonathan feels as if his insides have been flooded with warm wax, an
overwhelming surge of joy and affirmation. His was not a useless desire;
she has finally felt it too and she loves him and needs him as no other. He
is the best. Suddenly the evening with Marcus seems even more ridiculous.
All is right here at home; she is confirming him, she needs him desperately,
she is giving him all he could ever want, all he could ask for has
asked for, he can go back to Marcus and refuse the nonsense and the mystery,
home is his center and always has been, all that he needs is here because
Chloe is here.
In the middle of his simple and extraordinary lust his eyes are moist with
a tenderness that he wishes she could see.
As he is nearing his limit, as large in her as she has ever felt him, even
when they were making the children and that extra fillip of biological meaning
increased their intensity, Chloe feels something break.
It sounds like a lightbulb exploding.
He is weighing her down. Her head is filled with slicing blades, the cruel
corroded edges whirling and blasting and reducing.
Jonathan comes as she begins whimpering and moaning. She is limp on the
floor beneath him, quivering, and he cannot tell whether she is having an
orgasm or is crying. Then with an awful sense of having gone too far, he realizes
she is crying. She has given too much and she is weeping like a child. Chloe
reaches back with her hands sharp tike claws to push him off. He rolls to one
side as she jerks about on the rug. This is his wife, not some fantasy woman;
has done something horribly wrong.
She stops writhing and lies with her breath drawn in in one horrible unrelenting
sob.
He reaches out to her, and with his other hand grabs his underpants to
cover himself.
The sob rushes out as a tearing shriek. Jonathan jumps as if stung by a
wasp, then tries to quiet her; Penelope and Hiram will hear and find them
naked. He tries to hug her, angling his hips away to avoid that connotation;
all he wants now is for her to stop this,she is frightening him to
death.
Her thrashing stops; she is hyperventilating like a pinned rabbit.
"Chloe," he says. "Chloe, I'm sorry. What's wrong?"
"Broken," she says.
"What's broken?"
"I hurt."
"My God, what did I do?"
She trembles and tries to get up, but her arm muscles fail her. Jonathan
/
SLANT 129
"I don't know whether I'm doing this deliberately... Am I faking? Jonathan,
what's wrong with me?"
Jonathan shakes his head, crying. "I don't know, honey. You tell me." He
continues to hold her but leans back and almost falls over, then fumbles with
one hand through his clothes for his pad. He pushes the emergency aid button
and lets the pad do the rest.
Penelope and Hiram stand in the entry, sleepy-eyed and dismayed.
"Your mother's sick," he says. He stands with the pad in one hand and his
pants clutched before him with the other. "I'm calling the medicals."
Chloe shuts her eyes tight. "I can't get away from it," she says.
"What is it?" Jonathan asks again, kneeling beside her. He supports her
torso between his legs and her head lolls back. She is sweating profusely.
"Me! I can't get away from me," she says.
Penelope comes back from the bathroom with washcloths. Even at fifteen,
she is cool and more collected for now than Jonathan or Hiram. She begins to
sponge her mother, making small comforting sounds.
"The toilet," Chloe says. "Maybe it knows."
"Shhh, Mother," Penelope says, her young voice smooth as pudding. And
the neighborhood medical arbeiters are through the front door and in the living
room. They clamp Chloe immediately in several diagnostic belts that writhe
like tentacles. There is nothing Jonathan can do but get dressed. He pulis on
his pants.
Hiram seems stunned, as if waking to another and nastier dream.
When the ambulance arrives, minutes later, Jonathan is dressed; Penelope
has managed to get her mother's slacks on, somehow, working around the
arbeiters and their many arms and tubes.
The orderly, a black woman with close-cropped reddish hair, tells Jonathan
the arbeiters have already put his wife on fast-acting anxiolytics. They can find
nothing physically wrong with her, she explains. "She may be having a drug
reaction--accelerants, maybe."
"She wasn't taking drugs," Penelope says angrily, defending her mother's
character, standing to one side now with her arms tightly crossed.
"No drugs," Jonathan confirms, but thinks of her seductive aggressiveness.
"Well, we aren't getting traces," the woman admits as they lift Chloe and
put her on a stretcher. The arbeiters dance and tag along as they carry the
stretcher outside. "Hospital is best. They'll figure it out."
"Penelope, you're in charge here," Jonathan says over his shoulder.
"As soon as you know, call us," Penelope demands. Her face looks as pale
and fragile as bone china.
"You're family," the orderly says, handing her end of the stretcher to a
uniformed male. "Here's your mother's emergency response number; you can
track her to the hospital with your personal code on the ribes."
Chloe opens her eyes as rain tickles her face. Jonathan is beside her; he will
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GREG BEAR
"My God," Chloe says. "I'd forgotten. Now it's back."
"What's back?" Jonathan asks. He scrambles into the rear of the vehicle,
bumping into a male orderly, who grins but takes no offense and makes room
for him on a bench seat.
"Black horse," Chloe says. "Black horse with sick eyes."
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