The Silver Metal Lover s-1

by Tanith Lee

  As the computer chittered through its routine, Geraldine walked round and about, now and then picking things up and running a little calculator over them.

  “The computer will take the full scan in a moment,” she said. “But you have some nice things. I think Casa Bianca will be able to take most of this off your hands.”

  “There are clothes, too. And makeup cabinet. And a hairdresser unit. And all the tapes with the deck. You can take the bath fittings if you want, so long as you tie off the plumbing.”

  “Well, I shan’t be doing it personally,” she corrected me.

  I cringed, and just managed not to apologize to her.

  “Well,” said Geraldine. “I just hope your lover can give you all of this.”

  I kept quiet, this time. That was my business, wasn’t it.

  What my lover, my love, my beloved, gave me. Or could he give me anything.

  I opened the doll cupboard.

  “My!” said Geraldine. “Some of these are—” she stopped herself. “Of course, secondhand toys are much harder to sell. But they seem well-preserved. Did you ever play with them?”

  “They’re durables.”

  My mother had wanted me to be able to work out my aggressions with my toys, so they were the kind whose hair didn’t come out, and whose ears didn’t fall off. There was my unicorn rocking horse, unscratched, and my bear in shining coal-black fur. “See,” I thought to them, “people are going to buy you and love you and play with you, after all.” I wouldn’t cry in front of Geraldine. I wouldn’t.

  I poured some wine and didn’t offer her any. She hated me anyway.

  The computer put up a white light and a piece of paper. Geraldine read it carefully. “Yes, that’s all in order. I’ll just switch on the scan. There. Our relay department can let you know the offer we’re prepared to make first thing tomorrow. Or late tonight, if you prefer.”

  “I’m afraid I want everything cleared by tomorrow. And the money. Or else I’ll have to try another firm.”

  “Oh, come on now,” said Geraldine. “Our service is fast. But not that fast. And no one’s is.”

  If I held the glass much more tightly, I’d break it, like people do in visuals.

  “Then I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” I said.

  Geraldine stared at me. She looked impressed.

  “So okay,” she said. “What’s the hurry? Your mother doesn’t know you’re doing this?”

  “Your computer has just told you that I own everything in the suite.”

  “Yup. But Mother still doesn’t know the bird’s flying the nest. Right?”

  My mother did know. I’d told her.

  Geraldine looked at the white leather suitcase.

  “What’s in there? Don’t tell me. A few clothes, a bag of your favorite makeup, your boyfriend’s photo. What is this? You’ve fallen in love with some adolescent on Subsistence?”

  The computer put up a yellow light and closed itself off. The scan was complete.

  “What about the bathroom and bedroom?” I asked.

  “Oh, Fred here can see through walls. What about you?”

  I forced myself to turn and look at her. My eyes watered but I didn’t blink. The lenses of my eyes were flat and cruel. My face was silver.

  “I want your firm to call me with its offer in no more than two hours. If I agree to it, I want your removal machinery in here and out in one hour more.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” said Geraldine. “I’ll pass on your message.”

  “If I don’t get the call by ten P.M., I’ll go elsewhere.”

  “Nobody else could take this on in the middle of the night,” said Geraldine. She re-bagged the computer, dropped in the calculator. “I might be able to swing it for you,” she said. She picked up the jade panther. “I might.”

  I’m so slow. It was ages as she stood there with the panther, before I knew she wanted me to bribe her. I started to panic, as if I’d committed some breach of social etiquette. I didn’t know how to get over it. As I fumbled about in my mind, Geraldine put down the panther and walked crisply out.

  I followed her into the birdcage lift and touched the button. Geraldine looked into space with her hard sad eyes that had parcels of lines in the thick mascara under them. I wondered frenziedly if everyone always tipped her with some valuable piece, if her apartment was stuffed with collectors items, against her compulsory retirement, which would have to be any year now. I began to feel sorry for her, her tired skin, her carnivorous nails.

  We reached the foyer and she stepped out and over to the lift in the support. At the door she hesitated. She turned and looked at me.

  “You’re going to find it difficult,” she said, “being poor. But you’re a tryer, I’ll say that for you.”

  I was overwhelmed. It was ridiculous.

  “Geraldine,” I said, blatant, because suddenly I wanted her to have the panther, and so being devious was unimportant, “where do I send—?”

  “Keep it,” she said. “You’re going to need every money unit you can get your hands on.”

  The doors shut. I sat down on the foyer floor, wondering if she was ever someone’s daughter, too. I was still sprawled there three quarters of an hour later, when the phone went. It was Casa Bianca. They’d be at the house by midnight and they’d pay me—it was more money than I’d ever had, and it would just be enough.

  Guess what I did as the Casa Bianca removal took away all my things? I cried. (I feel I ought to edit out my tears by now. But, they happened.) It was my life going. Strange, when I’d hardly ever thought about any of it. Strange, that when I had thought about it, none of it had seemed like mine, yet there I was, wandering from place to place in the swiftly emptying rooms to avoid the machines, crying. Good-bye, my books, good-bye, my necklaces, good-bye my ivory chessmen. Good-bye my coal-black bear.

  Good-bye, my childhood, my roots, my yesterdays. Good-bye, Jane.

  Who are you now?

  I made a tape for my mother, and left it on the console for her, with the light ready to signal when she came in. I wasn’t very coherent, but I tried to be. I tried to explain how I loved her and how I’d call her, soon. I tried to explain what I’d done. I didn’t say anything about Silver. Not one word. Yet everything I said, of course, was about him. I simply might have been saying his name over and over. And I knew she’d know. My wise, clever, brilliant mother. I couldn’t hide anything from her.

  I and my white suitcase, with Casa Bianca’s Pay On Demand check in it, caught the four A.M. flyer to the city. There was a gang on the flyer, and they shouted obscene things at me, but didn’t dare do anything else because of the rightly suspected policode. I was afraid of them anyway. I’d never been so close to people like that, always taking cabs when it was late, always on the bright streets, or in another corridor, or on the other side of the walk. It was as if my mother’s aura had protected me, and now I had exiled myself, and now I was no longer safe.

  When I remember doing all this, I’m shattered. I still don’t quite believe I did. I dialed an instant-rental bureau from a kiosk at the foot of Les Anges Bridge, and then gave in and took a taxi to the address they gave me.

  The caretaker was human, and he swore at me for getting him up. It was very dark. There were no streetlights outside; the nearest was five hundred feet away up the street. My window looks on to a subsidence of brickwork and iron girders. I don’t know what it could have been before the tremor shook it down, but weeds have seeded all over it. I didn’t see till daylight crawled through the dirty window, and then the autumn colors of the weeds, smeared on the dereliction, made me unhappy. Unhappier.

  I didn’t sleep, of course. I huddled by my suitcase on the old couch by the window. I knew I couldn’t stay here. I knew I would have to go home. But where was home?

  When day came, I went on huddling. I knew my next move was to go to Egyptia, and then to Clovis. Repay Clovis, persuade Egyptia. And then I’d take Silver. I’d really have bought him, as Casa Bianca had
bought my furniture. He’d belong to me. And I couldn’t. After everything, I couldn’t. Couldn’t buy him or own him. Couldn’t bring him here to this frightful place.

  I dozed, and when I woke, the day was shrinking away behind the girders as if it were scared of them. My stomach was queasy and sore because I hadn’t eaten, except for a sort of sandwich I’d made myself in the servicery at the house. I drank some water from the drinking tap in the muddy bathroom of the rented apartment. The water tasted very chemical, and full of germs.

  My mother would be home, soon. I wondered what she would do. I became frantic, and saw her shock as she found the suite stripped of furnishings and me. I began to believe I’d done something truly awful to her. I wanted to run down to the pay phone in the foyer of the rental apartment block, down all the cracked cement steps, for the lift here didn’t work anymore. But then I knew I couldn’t. And then at last I knew that I was afraid, terribly, violently afraid, of Demeta, who only wants the best for me, the very best, as she sees it.

  Eventually, I found the paper pad I’d written on and which I’d put in the suitcase with the money and the few clothes, and I started to write this, the second chapter of what’s happened to me.

  When it got pitch dark, I turned on the mean bare overhead light, but it will cost money, so I worry about it. I have three hundred left on my card for the rest of the month. Whatever did I spend the rest of it on? I’m cold tonight, and I’d like to turn on the wall heater. Maybe I can wait a little longer?

  Stars are caught in the girders. The name of this street, actually, is Tolerance.

  Silver, I need you. I need you. All this is because of you and yet, how could I blame you for it? I’m nothing to you. (Does the touch of real flesh secretly repel you?) But I was beautiful with you. All night, all the hours of the day you were with me: Beautiful. And I never was before.

  I’m so tired. Tomorrow, I must make up my mind.

  There’s a flyer going over. It’s quiet here, I can hear the lines whistling, and below, the roar of the city, that never lies down to sleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A rose by any other name

  Would get the blame

  For being what it is—

  The color of a kiss,

  The shadow of a flame.

  A rose may earn another

  name,

  So call it love;

  So call it love I will.

  And love is like the sea,

  Which changes constantly,

  And yet is still

  The same.

  • 1 •

  I dreamed of him that night, after I wrote the second chapter of what had happened. The first time I ever dreamed of him. We were flying over the city. Not in a flyer, but on the wings of angels out of an old religious picture. I could feel the beat of the wings through my body as they opened and closed. It was effortless and lovely to fly, to watch him fly just ahead of me. We passed over the broken girders and our shadows fell on the ground among the orange foliage of the autumn weeds. It’s supposed to be a sexual dream to dream of flight. Maybe it was. But it didn’t seem to be.

  When I woke, it was early morning, just like the dream, and I looked out of the window at the orange twining the girders, where our shadows had fallen. Beyond the subsidence was a blue ghost of the city I could just see, cone-shaped blocks all in a line, and the distant column of the Delux Hyperia Building. The view wasn’t ugly or dismal anymore. The sun was shining on it. In five years, if they left the subsidence alone, a young wood of weed trees might be growing there. The sky was blue as Silver’s shirt had been.

  Dazed by the dream and the sunlight and the autumn weeds, I went into the bathroom and ran hot water, though it was expensive. I showered and dressed, and brushed my hair. My hair looked different. And my face. My hair, I guessed, was fading out of tint and needed molecular restructuring or the bronze tone would all go, but I’d sold my hairdresser unit. I could go to a beauty parlor, and get a color match and molecular restructure done, but it might not be the exact shade. Anyway, it would cost a lot. I’d have to revert to being dull brown, or whatever it was I’d been that hadn’t suited me on my coloressence charting. My face though, what had happened to that? I turned three quarters on and saw that my flesh had hollowed slightly. I had cheekbones, high and slender but unmistakably there. I looked older, and peculiarly younger, too. I leaned close to the spotted glass, and my eyes became one eye, flecked with green and yellow.

  I put the Casa Bianca P.O.D. check in a sling purse over my shoulder, and went out and down the cracked cement stairs.

  I couldn’t tell what I felt, but I didn’t feel as I had. The street turned into a run-down boulevard with an elderly elevated running overhead, the lines long unused, and rusting. I bought a bun and an apple and a plastic cup of tea at a food counter, and ate and drank as I waited for the city center bus. By daylight, I knew my way about far better than I’d thought, even here. Of course, I’d sometimes been in ramshackle areas, always with other people, always a tourist, but still enough to have a few scraps of knowledge.

  The blue sky made the sidewalk interesting. People moved about, ran, argued, and steam came out of food shops. Flowers spilled from the elevated.

  I’d always known the city. I had no reason to be afraid of it, even now. And my jeans looked shabby because I’d slept in them on the hairy old couch, shabby enough not to attract attention. The shirt would get shabby.

  “Bus late again,” one woman said to another behind me, in the verbal shorthand of the usual. “Thought of walking to South for the flyer, but it’s too much money.”

  “Mechanical failure at the depot,” said the other woman. “They don’t service regularly downtown, that’s the trouble. City center runs, that’s fine. But out here, we can walk all the way.”

  Then they muttered together, and I knew they were talking about me, and I went hot and cold with nervous fear. Then I caught the word “actress” spoken with pity, scorn and interest. I was startled, to have myself compared to exotic Egyptia, even on the streets of the poor. Glad, also. To be an actress from this end of town meant I was struggling, too. They wouldn’t hate me. I was a symbol of possibility, and anyway would probably starve.

  The bus finally came. I got off at Beech and went into the Magnum Bank, and cashed the check.

  Actress. They thought I was an actress, just like Copper.

  Then a flyer came, and I took it from force of habit, regretting it as I paid the coins. I was being so meanly careful of money, and then lapsing in unnecessary extravagance, and it was all a proof that I couldn’t deal with the situation, but I wasn’t going to think of it just now. Or of my mother. Or Clovis, or Egyptia, or even of him.

  I got off at Racine, and walked over the New River Bridge, to Clovis’s apartment block.

  As I came to the outside of his door every bone in my body seemed suddenly to turn to fluid, but I spoke to the door, anyway, asking to come in.

  Maybe he, they, were out. Or—busy. And the door wouldn’t open.

  The door didn’t open and didn’t open, and then it did.

  I walked in, holding my purse in front of me like a sort of shield, and not looking around at the living area with its couches and pillows and tasteful decor. No one was there.

  Snakes fought each other in my stomach, but I ignored them. I sat down on the couch with black cushions, and stared across at the window where I’d said “I love you” to his reflection in the glass, and he’d seen me and known.

  After a few minutes, Clovis came through from the main bedroom in a dark blue three-piece suit, as if he were going out. He appeared elegant and casual, as he always does, but as soon as he looked at me, he blushed. I’d never seen the adult Clovis blush, a wave of painful color, hitting the inside of his skin so fast the pulses jumped in his temples. I remembered again, he’s seventeen. And I started to blush in sympathy, but I wouldn’t look down, and it was Clovis who turned his back and walked over to the drinks dispenser.
r />   “Hallo, Jane. What’ll you drink?”

  “I don’t want a drink. I’ve brought your money.”

  “Dear me, and I was hoping to get the pound of flesh.”

  He turned around with something in a glass, drinking it, cool again.

  I got up, opened my purse, and counted out the large-unit notes on a table in front of him. It took quite a long while. He watched, sipping the drink from time to time, and there was lace on his shirt sleeves, like the Renaissance shirt Silver had worn on the Grand Stairway.

  When I stopped, he said,

  “He isn’t here, you know.”

  “I know.” I had known, too. Nerves or not, I’d have sensed if he were there, that near me. “Now please just tell me what you spent on Egyptia. Did you buy her the fur coat?”

  “No. She bought it herself on her delay account.”

  “Do you want the money for the lunch you bought her?”

  “No, Jane,” said Clovis. “Jane, it really could have waited.”

  “No it couldn’t.”

  “Did you have to cry all over your mother to get it?”

  I stared at him. It was funny how I could dislike him, detest him so much, and still feel such affection. I didn’t really want to fight with Clovis, I didn’t really want to confide in him, but something made me, perhaps because he was the first person I could tell.

  “Would you really like to know how I got the money?”

  “Am I going to be awfully shocked?”

  “You might be,” I said doggedly. “I sold everything I own. At least, I think I owned it. The contents of my suite. Bed, chairs, ornaments, books, stereo. Everything. And most of my clothes, and—”

  “Oh my God,” said Clovis. He took a cigarette out of the box, brushed it over the automatic lighter and started to smoke. “That explains why Demeta called me at seven-thirty this morning.”

  I drew away from him, actually backed a step.

  “What did she say?”

  “Oh, calm and collected, as ever, and not much. Just, Is Jane with you, Clovis? And when I said No, and Did she know what time it was, she said, Please don’t try to be rude to me, Clovis. Do you know where Jane might be? And I said, I haven’t a notion, and I find it quite easy to be rude, I don’t need to try. At which she switched off.”