Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  Melanie laughed and put her hand up to her mouth. Roger Swann did the same. His eyes squinted down to little black points of happiness and moist shine.

  Mr. Sunquist remembered Roger Swann. What a perfect fool he had been! He had missed his chance with Melanie at her twentieth birthday party. Look at him now—Mr. Sunquist could see the romantic fantasies fill his mind. “Enjoy it while you can,” he chuckled.

  One of the bartenders swung up the counter to let someone through. It was Bill Sunquist. He looked sheepish at first. He saw the clock above the bar and lowered his head and sighed. Then he saw the fervent little banker paying for Melanie’s wine. This wicked leer kinked up the corner of his mouth.

  Roger Swann never looked up, but Melanie did. Melanie said not a word as Bill Sunquist pushed by the two of them to take a seat on her left. Roger Swann was explaining the intricacies of Darwinian programming strategies. She seemed perfectly content to listen.

  Mr. Sunquist remembered looking across at Melanie as Swann continued on about his work—Are you looking for a job? What? That’s when he saw the amusement in her eyes. What a hoot this would be!

  Bill Sunquist had a low boredom tolerance. There was only so much arlatrage trading and Darwinian software business to put up with before the joke ran out. Just for fun, he leaned across Roger’s lap to argue with the waiter over the provenance of a gram of hashish.

  “A spicy aroma of ginger,” he read off the thumb-sized packet. “Redolent with earth musk and cardamom.” Bill Sunquist opened it up for the maître d’ to smell. “Would you describe that as ‘redolent with earth musk and cardamom?”

  The waiter looked at him long, a patronizing half-smile at the corner of his mouth. “We have a fine roan from Lebanon, with the elusive sweetness of late-harvest Riesling. Would you care to try that?”

  “For my friend here.” Mr. Sunquist remembered smiling down on Roger Swann. “For my friend.” He remembered Roger Swann smiling back, confused and helpful and friendly as a pup. Bill Sunquist nodded across at Melanie. “Are you ready, mi amor? To Grandmother’s house we go.”

  A priceless moment—Roger Swann turns his hopeful gaze back to Melanie. But Melanie is already moving past Bill for the open side of the bar.

  Looking on from the darkness of their alcove, Mr. Sunquist could not helpan ornery cackle. Ohh, he was terrible in those days!

  They shook hands like gentlemen, give them that. Such was his commitment to sportsmanship that Roger Swann would have shaken Melanie’s hand as well, but something made her turn away at the last moment. She stumbled into Bill, pushed past him blindly for the door.

  Mr. Sunquist had to bite his fist to keep from laughing at the ridiculous tableau—Roger Swann, staring after them with three half-empty wine glasses on the bar and a look in his eyes like crushed violets.

  Mrs. Sunquist squeezed his arm the way she always did when she was trying to make him behave. Oh, but her eyes shone. Even before she said it, he knew that she must be exulting in their perversity.

  He might have skipped the proposal at this point. He had no need to fight the crush of other Sunquists, all hurrying out to see the same thing. He had seen what he wanted. Only courtesy made him remind his wife why they had come here in the first place.

  “Right out there on the porch,” he told her, “I’m proposing marriage to you.”

  Mrs. Sunquist had her eyes on Roger Swann. He had to nudge her for attention. “You still want to see this, don’t you?” She laughed then, the way she always did. She assured him that she was all right, as if he had asked.

  They had managed to snag a prime parking spot from the clutches of their own grasping iterations. From here, the Sunquists looked on as Bill Sunquist dug in his coat pocket and came up with something small, wrapped in velvet and chintz.

  Even now, Mr. Sunquist remembered the moment. He remembered the way Melanie drew her hands to her face, and looked from his hands to his face as if to catch him in a lie. He remembered the feel of her fingers in his palm as she took the box, the little breath as she opened it and turned the ring toward the light.

  Mr. Sunquist tried to remember what was going through the mind of the young man on the porch. Maddeningly, all he could think of was Roger Swann. People like that, you humiliate them and they think they can win you over. Any minute, he had expected the door to open and a myopic smile to appear beneath the wall seance.

  The realization made him anxious for something to say. “We look like we’re very much in love.” In truth, Mr. Sunquist had no idea what people in love were supposed to look like.

  “I hate to tell you what I was really thinking.” Mrs. Sunquist gave a glance over her shoulder. There was another couple in a car just a few spaces down. She leaned forward so they would not hear what she had to say. “I had just downed a glass-and-a-half of cheap white wine and all I could think about was finding someplace to pee.”

  “And, of course, you couldn’t go back in the bar—”

  “Roger Swann was in there.”

  Mr. Sunquist found himself roaring. Mrs. Sunquist hushed him; she was a shy person by nature, and people might be listening. That made him laugh even harder.

  The couple in the next car turned to see what was funny, but he didn’t care. He knew those people well enough, he had nothing to prove to them.

  They would be a couple in their thirties. They would be having a conversation very much like this one. A little breathless, the woman hints to her husband how these past fifteen years are as much a product of bladder control as love.

  Perhaps she intends a joke. Perhaps an insult. Things are not so good between the man and the woman at this point in their marriage. The woman realizes this too late, and starts to back up and stammer.

  To himself, the man thinks . . .

  “Romance is one of those things that doesn’t really work as a first-hand experience. Why we come back here every year, I imagine.”

  “What?” Mrs. Sunquist looked up at him. “You must have heard that somewhere.”

  It was not an especially generous thought, Mr. Sunquist realized. He was a little surprised he had said it out loud. More surprised how much he believed it to be true. “We should move on,” he said. “Let these kids have their privacy.”

  She put a hand to his wrist as he reached for the touchpad. “One more minute,” she whispered. “They’re almost done.” She stared so intently that Mr. Sunquist wondered what she was looking at. Her head tilted to her right, and her mouth gaped in little-girl awe.

  “I was a beauty in my day, wasn’t I?” She smiled a little, as if to make a joke, but she could not hide the shine in her eyes.

  It must be the baby, he thought. The baby makes her sentimental. A half-dozen things came to mind. All had the antiseptic cheer of a get-well card. He squeezed her hand. “Steady on, old girl. Let’s not break the mood here.”

  Mrs. Sunquist nodded. Of course, of course. Suddenly, she was laughing again. She waved all his worried looks aside. Perhaps she had been having him on after all.

  A few minutes further up the road awaited the Hotel Mozambique they had known as youngsters. White stucco bungalows crowded protectively around a medium-sized black bottom pool. They opened at the far end to show the sky at evening.

  Mr. Sunquist got them the room they always asked for, looking out through the top of a date palm toward Mer Noire.

  Mrs. Sunquist pushed open the window. A blood-warm breeze came in off the bay, sour with brine, pungent with road tar from the asphalt bike paths just beyond the courtyard.

  “What was the name of that soap opera they filmed down the beach?” Mrs. Sunquist eased herself into the corner of the sill, hugging herself in the dreamy light that spilled through the palms just beyond.

  “Indigo Something,” Mr. Sunquist recalled. “Shades of Indigo, I think.”

  “They filmed right outside my window for six months when I lived with Bobby Shelbourne. The next year, the production company followed their expanding time signature up the bea
ch and filmed the actors playing opposite their own earlier iterations. You remember that?”

  “Mr. Sunquist said he did. This was a lie—Mr. Sunquist had no money for television when he was young—but all lies are sweet in La Jetée in August.

  Mrs. Sunquist smiled at him, knowing and unconcerned. She led him by the hand to the bed. They made love in the cool shade of the whitewashed room—sweetly, awkwardly, stopping to see if everything was all right with the baby.

  Later, as the heat of the day enveloped them, Mr. Sunquist pressed his arm around Mrs. Sunquist’s shoulders and drew her close. They had not slept this way since they were newlyweds. Her hair had the soapy smell of newborn babies. The scent of it followed him into his dreams.

  Here was Melanie Everett, the girl that would be his wife. He remembered her all golden under the sun, bashful but hardly uncertain. She had perfected the fascination that goes with being the second-prettiest girl at every party. Boys became aware of her in stages, the way they became aware of the first hit pop tune of the summer.

  Forthright kids like Bob Shelbourne were always going to get around to Melanie Everett, right after they investigated the fulsome charms of Jenn LeMel, or the Maynard sisters. Shy kids always thought of her beauty as their secret. Being shy, they assumed their secret safe.

  Lying beside her now, Mr. Sunquist dreamed not of his wife, but of his friends—the things they would tell each other. What did they think when they heard Melanie Everett had gone home with him? His had been an epic battle, as pure as a fairy tale. A rival had been vanquished. A maiden won. Being a man living at a certain moment in history, he had learned to savor these stories. Nothing is more vivid than a moment re-lived, he would say. Not even the moment itself.

  The heat of the day had broken when Mr. Sunquist shook off the last of his dreams. The breeze had shifted around to come in from the south, from the future—side of the bay. Mrs. Sunquist said she could lie beneath the billowing curtains all night long. Perhaps Mrs. Sunquist still had doubts. If so, Mr. Sunquist hardly heard. He was planning their road trip.

  He asked Mrs. Sunquist if she remembered the first time they made love.

  “Of course I do.” As indignant as she could manage.

  “We had to take a blanket out to Mourning Shoals because your boyfriend was setting up your apartment for a surprise birthday party. You remember? And the fog rolled in so we almost couldn’t find the truck, and then we got back an hour and a half after the party started?”

  Mrs. Sunquist laughed, embarrassed. She remembered.

  “You know,” Mr. Sunquist said, “that’s one place you and I have never gone back to.”

  “Oh, William. No!”

  “It’s a birthday party. It would be easy to slip in. And we had such a time that night.”

  Mrs. Sunquist touched his cheek. “You remember everything so perfectly,” she said.

  Something in her tone struck Mr. Sunquist as odd, so that he smiled and frowned at the same time. Perhaps his wife had not enjoyed the scene in the bar as he expected. Time for something frivolous, he decided. Pieczyznski, the chess master, perhaps. Or maybe they could see Shades of Indigo filming up at the old Hartringer. Hotel.

  He didn’t tell her what he planned. He thought to surprise her. He expected that she might even mention these places herself, but the scene in the bar had left Mrs. Sunquist in some reverie of her own.

  Seven miles up the highway, and as many years further back, Mr. Sunquist found a neighborhood he recognized. Lola’s Bookstore was just up the street in a bus barn it shared with an equity waiver theater. If someone could give them the local date and time, they would pin down the moment of their arrival.

  The Sunquists discovered a young couple hiding among the shadows of Ciriquito Street. Mr. Sunquist called to them. The boy glanced back at him—what? The girl turned around to see what he was looking at. The Sunquists realized they were looking at themselves.

  Mr. Sunquist knew immediately where they were. Somehow, they had stumbled onto Melanie Everett’s twentieth birthday party. This was the night that she had ended her relationship with her boyfriend. The night that she had gone home with him.

  Bill Sunquist and Melanie Everett stood in the shadow of a large real estate sign. The sign showed an artist’s rendering of tennis courts, a condominium, a hotel complex.

  The Ciriquito Street pier, where fishing boats still headed into the sun each morning, that was to be subsumed into a two-hundred slip marina. Bill Sunquist noticed none of this. The sign was nothing to him but cover. He had Melanie under his left arm and they were studying the beach-front apartment she shared with Bobby Shelbourne, the man who promised to love her, “no matter how much she disappointed him.”

  They were talking. The Sunquists were too far away to hear the words. No matter; the Sunquists had remembered this story to each other till they could mouth the words. Bill Sunquist and Melanie Everett had parked along Kleege’s Beach and spent the afternoon under the tarp in the back of Bill Sunquist’s two-ton army surplus lorry. Now she was late to her own birthday party. Late, and sunburned and sweaty and very guilty.

  Mr. Sunquist thought of Piecziznski, the chess master. Well, they were here now. Whatever he had intended could wait until after. Mrs. Sunquist smiled, though she plainly was embarrassed. “William, I don’t know about this.”

  “What are you worried about? You know how it turns out.”

  “I don’t want to see this.”

  “You were asking if you were beautiful.” He nodded toward their younger reflections. “Look at how young we are in this place.”

  “It’s a world of ghosts,” Mrs. Sunquist said to the car window. “I don’t care how young they are.”

  Mr. Sunquist did not blame his wife for being negative. He ascribed her unease to Bobby Shelbourne’s oppressive aura. Understandable, certainly. Bobby Shelbourne was a vegetarian and pathological spoilsport, one of those people who savored his slights. No wonder Mrs. Sunquist quailed at the memory of this night. He studied the girl standing under the real estate sign. Look at how frantic she is to make her story, he thought.

  “The only way out is through,” he told Mrs. Sunquist. And then: “Don’t be scared.” It was the sort of patronizing admonishment a six-year-old uses on a younger sibling.

  Mrs. Sunquist pureed her lips with a moment’s thought, then she nodded at an open curb down the block.

  They pulled up in front of a shaded courtyard between two bungalows. Bill and Melanie had disappeared. Mr. Sunquist heard whispers and laughter though a screen of rust-colored bougainvillea. Up ahead was the ocean, and a small yard inside a rusted fence that separated the apartment from the beach. He heard flapping above his head. A banner cut from bed sheets stretched between a pair of upstairs windows. It read: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MELANIE. I LOVE YOU.

  Mrs. Sunquist paused when she saw the painted bed sheet. “Really,” she said. “Let’s not do this.” Just for a moment, she glanced back the way they had come. She might have been gauging her chances of making the street.

  “Don’t tell me you feel guilty.” Mr. Sunquist hooted. “Guilty for Bobby Shelbourne! Oh, wouldn’t he love that.”

  “There’s not enough people for us to slip in. Someone will recognize us. They’ll know we came from down the beach.”

  Indeed, a young man with mild blue eyes had been stationed at the top of the stair to guard against crashers.

  For one moment, Mr. Sunquist cringed as Roger Swann nodded down at them. He thought of the humiliation. Roger had suffered in Sonny’s—wondered if he might have to answer for it. But no, that bar scene was seven years in Roger Swann’s future. Swann gave them only a look of rueful curiosity. He nodded toward the next bungalow over, where he imagined they had come from. He asked if they were here to complain about the noise.

  Mr. Sunquist was thinking up a suitable lie when Melanie Everett stepped out onto the landing.

  She had this nervous laugh as a kid, which was odd. Watching her, Mr. Sunquist suddenly
realized that Melanie herself was not nervous at all. The laugh was for the benefit of whoever she spoke to. It worked to spectacular effect.

  Suddenly, Roger Swann was over his terror of pretty girls. He leaned forward to hear her as she asked him something under the music. Smiling, he answered.

  Mrs. Sunquist took her husband by the wrist. “You know what he’s telling me?” Even now the boy’s words affected her. “He’s telling me how Bobby’s been waiting for me since four. And then he tells me he himself has been waiting for me all his life.”

  “Aww,” Mr. Sunquist gave her a look of arch sentimentality. Together, they went “Aww,” loud enough to attract the gaze of the kids on the stair. He thought that Melanie regarded them with some look of secret humor. Who knew what she was really thinking. Mr. Sunquist imagined pretty girls used this look when they could think of nothing to say.

  Roger got a peck on the cheek for his sweetness. Melanie disappeared into the party without a backward glance, but that was enough for Roger Swann. The Sunquists were forgotten. He slicked the thinning wedge of hair back from his forehead. He followed after her. The Sunquists trailed a short distance behind.

  One thing that Mr. Sunquist remembered about Bobby Shelbourne’s apartment, it was dangerous to show too much interest in any bit of ornament.

  Bobby Shelbourne lived in a museum of Melmac ice cream dishes, mis-matched kitchen chairs, and determinedly outdated electronic entertainment gear. Every one with a little story about where it had been found, and how much it was really worth to some mythical dealer in garage-sale lamps, or kitchen Formica, or digital video downloaders.

  A whir-sound passed by overhead. A scale model of the Hindenburg was making stately passage from the living room to the kitchen. Normally, Bobby would be following it around, pointing out the hand-painted swastika on the tail rudder. But the mood had gone out of him today.

  He saw Melanie and his pale blue eyes went all weepy and proud. His pouty lip grew heavier than it was already. If Bobby had promised to forgive Melanie no matter what, he had not promised to make it easy. He would not even acknowledge Melanie till she took his arm and made him face her.