by Kit Reed
It’s Charlie, calling, “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?”
I am sobbing, incoherent. “Oh, oh Charlie, it hurts so much!”
“Shh, don’t, it’s OK. You were crying.”
“Oh.” I am shivering with loss. Broken glass, I think, that’s what hurt because rescuing me, pulling me out of StElene or the dream of StElene, Charlie shattered my computer screen! After Daddy got killed I used to dream about being happy in Oz and never having to come back to our empty house, “Oh,” I can’t stop sobbing. “Oh!”
“Don’t.” Warm and close in the night, Charlie is rocking me. Something about my desperation rattles him; he is crying too. “Please don’t.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Shh, Jen. Another dream about your father?”
“I don’t have those anymore.”
“You’re sure?”
“Not since I met you. It’s not about my father, OK?”
“Then shh, just shh, babe, I’ll take care of you, I’ll always take care of you.”
This makes me wail with guilt. “Oh, Charlie. Oh!” Now I know why I couldn’t walk home with Rick, I love Charlie and I would never … near occasion of … Rick is a near occasion, whereas Reverdy, Reverdy and I have never touched. I’m not unfaithful; I am.
“Shh shh, whatever it is, it can’t be so terrible. What is it, Jenny, what’s so terrible?”
I am thinking about the baby. I already have my family. I’m thinking about the baby and I can’t tell him that either. “Nothing.”
“If you love me, you’ll tell me.”
“I love you and I … I don’t know.” And a deep, disloyal part of me is thinking, I do know, and Reverdy, Reverdy knows.
“Jenny,” Charlie says into my hair, “I don’t know what’s going on with you but I love you, if there’s anything, anything at all that I can do…”
And this is the hell of it. I love Charlie and I can’t ever tell him. “It’s OK, Charlie. Really. It’s just a bad dream and I’m fine.”
@nine
ZAN
I spent the afternoon at Brevert Hospital, sitting with the Yerkes while the people in the ER pumped their daughter’s stomach. That poor kid let herself get so skinny that it didn’t matter what I said or did, she couldn’t pull out of the spiral. The mother found her. The Yerkes parents blamed themselves, they blamed Amanda, they blamed me. Why not? I do. What is it with me and these Southerners, that I can’t get through to them? Is it something with me? I don’t know, I only know the failure made me feel rotten, as if it was somehow my fault. We hung in together, I did my best to talk the family through but we were only spinning our wheels, which we kept doing until the doctor came out and said Amanda was going to be fine. She asked for me. Mom and dad got up too but the doctor waved them off. So I went in to talk to her; I brushed her cheek. “Amanda, I’m not going to ask you why.”
She raised her chin like a cat being stroked. “Tell them if they force me to eat I’m going to do it again.”
“Oh, Amanda.”
“Promise.”
I didn’t promise. I did what I could. When I was done the family hugged all around, but the mother had that look. The thing is, I can give this case everything I’ve got—no, more than I have to give—and that mother will still be that mother with those social expectations, and as long as she has that mother, Amanda will starve. I’m lobbying for boarding school in the North, but helping Amanda is a little bit like sweeping the beach—every day the same debris washes back in. I came all the way down here with Charlie thinking at least I could start over with new patients, but these people have problems that I can’t touch.
I did what I do to decompress. I shopped for shrimp and snow peas and sesame oil and soy sauce, dried mushrooms and tree ears and ginger root and went home to cook. I threw in chicken and peanuts and made spring rolls, in hopes. Usually when Charlie and I sit down together these meals are like little celebrations, and we both need a celebration about now.
But Charlie comes in late and he’s in no mood to celebrate. He’s trying to smile but his face sags; even his khakis have wilted in the humidity. He’s trying to be nice about it but his voice is heavy with disappointment. “All the other wives were there.”
The commandant’s party. “Oh Charlie, I forgot!”
He sighs; our lives in Brevert are not what either of us expected. “You’re so great-looking, I wanted the commandant to meet you.”
“I was coming, I was, but then…”
“Everybody was asking for you. Swede, Rebel, Jay.”
“I had to go to the hospital, emergency.”
“You look all right to me.”
“Suicide attempt.” I’m trying hard to tell him more than just what happened, but it isn’t getting through. “By the time I got done with the family I was too wrecked to remember anything.”
Charlie is trying to keep it light, but he can’t. “You were missed. The brass are starting to think I hallucinated you.”
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t leave the family.”
I bring on the food; it is depressing, he eats without noticing what he’s putting into his mouth.
It’s more depressing, scraping the kids’ plates into the sink. Three dishes and they wouldn’t touch even one of them; I even gave them forks. They just pushed back their chairs and went outside to wait for the ice cream truck. Charlie follows me into the kitchen. “Is there a problem?”
“Do you think I’ll ever make anything that these kids like?”
“Kids?” Charlie sounds faintly surprised. What kids?
“Your kids.” … All the family I want … oh, Charlie. I don’t tell him that tonight they ambushed me again. I didn’t flinch so Rusty tried something new. I’m going to have to cut the bubble gum out of my hair. “Kids, you know. Patricia? Russell? Look like you, sleep in those cute bunk beds?”
“Oh, the kids,” he says absently. “Don’t sweat it, they’ll get used to you.”
“Great.” He never asks if I can get used to them.
Then he surprises me. “Babe, you look like you could use a break. I’ll find a woman to take care of the kids. Go to New York and go shopping. See your crazy friends.”
“My friends?” So much has happened on StElene that I have a hard time remembering who those people were. I am staring into Dispos-al. “Why would I want to go without you?”
“You seem so…” Charlie can’t find the word. He scrubs his hair with his knuckles. “If only you and I could get some time. The thing is, things at the base are tight right now, I have to be on deck so many nights that I just thought … Look. Go have fun in the big city. Have drinks at Windows on the World, get a makeover, buy some pretty shoes. Take in a Broadway show,” sweet, heedless Charlie says.
My God, don’t you know me? Don’t you know me at all? “Makeover? Take in a show?”
“Whatever. I know you miss New York.”
Homesickness rattles through me like a summer storm and in seconds, clears out. I have StElene to go to, I have Reverdy hanging on my arrival; my old life means nothing to me now. “I can’t.”
“Come on, babe. It’s on me.” Charlie puts his arms around me from behind, looking over my shoulder into the sink; I can hear his words vibrating in my skull. “Put everything on my plastic.” Generously, blindly, he blows it by adding. “OK, Mom?”
“Don’t, Charlie.” I am trying hard to tell him something.
“What?”
Funny how you don’t necessarily want a thing until somebody tells you that you can’t have it. Part of me is crumpling like tinfoil and I bark to counteract the pain. “Don’t call me Mom.”
He hugs me anyway. “Now I know you need to get out of here.”
Anxiety flickers in my belly. And leave Reverdy behind? Spend hours at airport email kiosks trying to connect just so we could talk? Could I connect? What would Reverdy do if he came into my room on StElene and found me gone? What would he think? Something terrible could happen to ou
r love. I am suddenly so panicky that I surprise myself. “I can’t!”
Charlie frowns. “Jen, are you OK?”
“I’m fine, it’s.” I have a hard time getting it out. “It’s just. I can’t leave right now. I have people depending on me.”
“Oh,” he says, “your patients.”
“Right.” Let Charlie think I mean my patients. I mean Reverdy and Lark; our lives are so tightly tied up that there’s no undoing the knots; cut the skein and one of us will die.
“You’ll remember that I offered,” Charlie says. Then, just as I’m starting to feel guilty all over again, he moves on to the next thing on the list in his head. “So, if you’re going to be here…”
“I am, Charlie. I’m going to be here.”
And this is how this wonderful, inattentive guy my husband releases me. “Do you think you could get Rusty a date with an orthodontist? He needs braces but Nelda never got around to it.”
* * *
It’s finally deep night in the thirties stucco on Church Street, which Jenny thinks of as Charlie’s house. There’s nothing of her here. For her, it’s just a staging area. Charlie’s living room is dominated by his Chinese rug, his mother’s jade chrysanthemums, the chow bench he bought in Honolulu. Pots and pans from his first marriage fill the kitchen. The closets are crowded with Charlie’s things and his kids are in every room. Wherever Jenny goes, they are. Big-boned, unconscious Charlie takes up more than his share of the king-sized bed, turning that well-muscled back to her, sleeping in absolute peace. He’s kicked all his unwanted covers into a heap on Jenny’s side, crowding her out. Across the hall, Charlie’s resentful children are snuffling into their pillows. Even in sleep they occupy a tremendous psychic space.
This house contains nothing of her, but when Jenny Wilder tiptoes upstairs and closes herself into the third-floor room and turns on the computer, her perspective changes. She changes. She is going to her place. Silent. Secure. Hers alone.
In seconds she’s connected to StElene. She sees: stElene is … She doesn’t need to read the opening statement of purpose; she has it by heart.… philosophical experiment in international communication.
Is that really why I’m here? Is it why any of us is really here? She loves the incantatory tone, she loves the sense that she is one of the elite—smart and tough and funny and flexible enough to make her way on a plane far above the one where ordinary people spin out their ordinary lives.
Most people stay trapped inside bodies and behind faces, rooted in what Reverdy calls “physical life.” Who wouldn’t rather be here? What Jenny can’t understand is how this got to be more real than the patient in the hospital, the kids downstairs, the husband in his car, driving away to the base. With her palms hot and her mouth tight she types:
co for CONNECT zan and then she types in her password: lalation
And is in her room on StElene. Zan’s Tower. Her place, where no one comes uninvited. She built it herself. In a way, it is the only place she has.
Zan’s Tower is a bright, airy space at the top of the GrandHotel StElene. Moonlight streams in through long windows and soft Caribbean breezes lift gauzy mauve curtains in this lovely plant-filled room with its silken pillows and Aubusson rug. In this peaceful place where souls can fuse and become one life is sweet and peaceful. Outside, the moon’s reflection strikes the water in glittering points. Sapphire is here.
Sapphire. The sleek leopard Zan programmed to do a few tricks and then set aside, one more decorative object in this lovely room. The room description comes up like a mantra, soothing and expected.
But there is extra text on her screen. An intrusion.
Mireya is here.
Violated, she shudders. Reverdy’s ex-lover. Here. “Mireya!”
“I have to talk to you.”
“No.”
“You have to listen,” Mireya says.
“Why, when I know you hate me?” Reverdy laid it out for Zan when they became lovers. “You’d better know, I have enemies here. Grave enemies.” Mireya and Reverdy hate each other with the ferocity peculiar to ex-lovers. Reverdy hints at a bitter betrayal, but betrayals in this compressed space are tricky, and even though Zan has tried to get to the truth of it, truth in this new dimension is elusive too. She knows it was ugly and that at the end, they fought like tigers. Still do. And even though Mireya’s with macho Azeath now, she harangues and posts poisonous attacks to a dozen lists because she wants more than anything to bring Reverdy down. She won’t quit until she has him erased from StElene. And Reverdy? He still isn’t over it. It bothers Zan, that he knows each injury by name; he doesn’t just number them, he dwells. “It’s all lies.”
“What makes you so damn sure?”
“How did you get in?”
“What do you care? I have ways.” She does. An adept programmer, she’s been on StElene four years, rallying people against Reverdy. She can thwart any security system. Except Reverdy’s.
God, Zan thinks, I should leave now, before she has a chance to poison the well.
page Reverdy Where are you?
“I know you’re trying to page him,” Mireya says. “And you know as well as I do that he isn’t here.”
“He’d do anything to avoid you.” If only she could phone him! It’s Mireya’s fault that Reverdy won’t tell her how to get in touch with him offline. This is grave: Understand, I am protecting both of us. He has Jenny Wilder’s phone number and street address but she doesn’t even know where in the West he lives. She dreams of opening her queue one morning and finding an email from Reverdy or picking up the phone and hearing his voice, but it’s impossible, he won’t do anything to give away his location, not even to her. He refuses even to take a numbered post office box and it’s all Mireya’s fault. “You know how he feels about you.”
Mireya scowls. “My point. Now, are you going to listen or what?”
“Leave or I’ll disconnect.” Time and again, Reverdy has rehearsed it—how with one careless, loving gesture, he let trouble out of the box and into the house where he lives. It almost ruined his life. The bitch almost wrecked him IRL. His fault: he thought it was real love. He and Mireya exchanged real names. She wanted more. Just tokens, she said. Tokens of love. Little things. His phone number, a gift in earnest. His address. Reverdy’s fatal error was giving them. She started calling the house.
The words pop onto her screen like bullets. “Are you that scared of what I’m going to say?”
“I’m not afraid of anything. Now, go.” Their breakup was uglier than divorce. Mireya took revenge out of StElene and into Reverdy’s daytime life. She got on the phone. She called day and night with her sordid accusations. If Reverdy answered, she clicked off. The most disgusting bits, she saved for his children. The sexiest, she told his wife. The most damaging, she gave to his employers—he damn near lost his job! He unlisted the phone, too late. The damage was done. Letters came. Packages. A bloody skirt. Muddy bikini underpants. Mireya poisoned his wife with lies. (“Zan, she had Louise so crazy with suspicion that I almost lost my kids! Mireya’s insane,” he warns. “She’d do anything to hurt me. Anything.”) My poor dear! If only they could talk! It’s killing her. She’d give anything to see him, to run her hands over that craggy face and make him smile. She just knows he’s handsome, in that dark, brooding way, even though he swears he has the kind of face that stops trucks. She doesn’t know why his pain is such an overwhelming aphrodisiac, but it is. All she thinks about is meeting him RL. What they have is fated. Unlike Charlie, he understands her. He knows her straight through to the center; he knows she’s the only person alive who can make him happy. If only they could meet! And she can’t even phone!
“I won’t go until you hear me out.” Mireya is bulging with secrets, hot to tell Zan all the things a new lover doesn’t necessarily want to hear but is dying to know.
“I don’t have to be here.” But she does. Perhaps because from childhood she’s been taught to believe everything she reads, Zan is a little int
imidated by Mireya’s terrible beauty, the authoritative way she raps out speeches that insist on being read.
The description alone is commanding:
Beautiful Mireya is slender and elegant but strong …
It goes on from there. Now, life in electronic space is not fixed, it’s fluid. Accounts and interpretations vary, which means that Zan has no way of knowing whether what Mireya types about herself is truth or wish fulfillment. What she does know is that in this society built on compression, emotions get huge. There’s a command Zan can type to get her angry rival out of her quarters. She enters it. Nothing happens. She is reduced to shouting. “GO!”
Mireya sneers. “I won’t move and you can’t move me. You might as well shut up and listen. You’ll thank me for this later, they always do, you know we’re not the only women who … Your sweet, sacred Reverdy…”
“Lies!”
Mireya says craftily, “What makes you so sure I’m lying?”
“I know what you’re like, Mireya. He’s told me all about you.”
“I bet he has,” Mireya says sourly. “What makes you think he’s telling the truth?” Then, surprise, she adds conversationally, “You know, if it hadn’t been for you, Reverdy and I would still be together. I bet you didn’t know he and I were meeting RL.”