By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  Behind the bar, the proprietor glanced around and recognized Paul, and his expression changed radically. He had been in the midst of punching a phone number; now he cleared the screen and came over to Paul.

  “Hi, Scotty.”

  “Another one, Mr. Curry?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the back of the bar. Just around a corner and out of sight, a small riot seemed to be in progress; as Scotty pointed, a large man sailed gracefully into view and landed so poorly that Paul decided he had been unconscious before he hit. The ruckus continued despite his absence.

  “Afraid so, Scotty. I’m sorry.”

  “Jesus Christ. It’s bad enough when they cry, but what the hell am I supposed to do with this? I dunno, I’m old fashioned, but I liked it back when ladies had to be ladylike.”

  A half-full quart of scotch emerged from the rear of the room at high speed and on a flat trajectory. It took out the mirror behind the bar and at least a dozen other bottles.

  Paul almost smiled. “That is, and always has been, ladylike,” he said, nodding toward the source of airborne objects. “What you mean is, you liked it better when, if it came to it, you could beat them up.”

  “Is that what I mean? Maybe it is. Mr. Curry, why in hell don’t he just tell them?”

  “Think about it, Scotty,” Paul advised. “If it were you…would you tell them?”

  “Why—” the innkeeper began, and paused. He thought about it. “Why—” he began again, and again paused. “I guess,” he said at last, “I wouldn’t at that.” The sound of breaking glass took him back from his thoughts. “But honest to God, Mr. Curry, you gotta do something. I’m ready to call the heat—and I can’t. You know who she is. But what if I don’t report it and somebody gets—”

  A scream came from the back, a male voice, but so high and shrill that both men clenched their thigh muscles in empathy.

  “—see?”

  “You’re covered,” Paul told him. “From here on it’s my problem,” and he legged it for the source of the commotion.

  As he rounded the corner she was just disposing of the last bouncer. The man had height, mass, and reach over her, but none of them seemed to be doing him any good. He was jackknifed forward, chin outthrust, in perfect position from her point of view; she was slapping him with big roundhouse swings, alternating left and right, slapping his unshaven face from side to side. Paul could not decide whether the bouncer was too preoccupied with his aching testicles to be aware of the slaps, or whether he welcomed them as an aid to losing consciousness. If the latter, his strategy worked—one last terrific left rolled up his eyes and put him down and out before Paul had time to intervene.

  Paul Curry was, if the truth be known, terrified. He was slightly built, and lacked the skill, temperament, and training for combat which had not been enough to help the sleeping bouncer. Utensil, he thought wildly, where is there a utensil? Say, a morningstar. Nothing useful presented itself.

  But love can involve one in strange and complex obligations, and so he moved forward emptyhanded.

  She pivoted to face him, dropped into a crouch. He stopped short of engagement range and displayed the emptiness of his hands. “Miss Wingate,” he began. He saw her eyes focus, watched her recognize him, and braced himself.

  She left her crouch, straightened to her full height, and in the loudest voice he had ever heard coming from a woman she roared, “He doesn’t know ANYTHING about love!”

  And then—he would never forget it, it was one of the silliest and most terrible things he had ever seen—she clenched her right fist and cut loose, a short, vicious chop square on the button. Her own button. She went down harder than the bouncer had.

  Scotty stuck his head gingerly around the corner. “Nice shot, Mr. Curry. I didn’t know you could punch like that.”

  Paul thought, I am in a Hitchcock movie. Briefly he imagined himself trying to explain to the bartender that Anne Wingate had punched herself out. “Well,” he said, “you’ve never pissed me off, Scotty. Give me a hand, will you?”

  They got her onto a chair, checked pulse and pupils, failed to bring her around with smelling salts. “All right,” Paul said at last, “I’ll take her to my place and she can sleep it off.” The bartender looked unhappy. “Don’t worry, Scotty. I’m a gentleman.”

  “I know that, Mr. Curry,” Scotty said, looked scandalized. “But what do I—”

  “There’ll be no beef to you,” Paul said. “I’ll see to it. She was never here, right?”

  “I’ll say it was a platoon of Marines.”

  “That’ll work.”

  “Mr. Curry, honest to God, if Senator Wingate comes down on me, forty years of squeeze goes right down the—”

  “The Senator will never hear a word about this, Scotty. Trust me.”

  Paul was painfully aware that his promise was backed by nothing at all. By the time the cab arrived he was feeling pessimistic—he insisted that the driver prove to him that his batteries held adequate charge. It is not necessarily a disaster to run out of juice, even in an Abandoned Area; one simply buttons up and waits for the transponder to fetch the police. But if one is in the company of the unconscious daughter of an extremely powerful man at the time, one can scarcely hope to stay out of the newstapes.

  The batteries were indeed charged; the offended driver insisted that Paul prove he had the fare. As Paul and Scotty were loading her into the cab, she opened one eye, murmured, “not a single thing,” and was out again. The trip was uneventful; even when the driver was forced to skirt Eagle turf, they drew only desultory small arms fire. She slept through it all.

  Luck was with him; she did not begin vomiting until just as he was getting her out of the cab. Nonetheless he tipped the cabbie extra heavily, both by way of apology and to encourage amnesia. Mollified, the driver waited until Paul had gotten her safely indoors before pulling away.

  She was half awake now. He managed to walk her most of the way to the bathroom. She sat docilely on the commode while he got her soiled clothes off. He knew she would return to full awareness very shortly after the first blast of cold shower hit her, and he was still determined not to be beaten up by her if he could avoid it. So he sat her down in the tub, made sure everything she would need was available, slapped the shower button and sprinted from the room while the water was still gurgling up the pipes. He was halfway to his laundry unit when the first scream sounded. It was the opening-gun of a great deal of cacophony, but he had thoughtfully locked the bathroom door behind him; the noise had ceased altogether by the time he had coffee and toast prepared.

  He went down the hall, unlocked the bathroom door. “Miss Wingate,” he said in a firm, clear voice, “the coffee is ready when you are.”

  The response was muttered.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I said, Phillip Rose doesn’t know one goddamned thing about love.”

  “The coffee will stay hot. Take your time.” He went back to the kitchen and poured himself a cup. In about five minutes she came in. She wore the robe he had left for her. Her hair was in a towel. Very few people can manage the trick of being utterly formal and distant while dressed in robe and towel, but she had had expert training from an early age. She did not tell him how seldom she did this sort of thing, because she assumed he knew that.

  “May I have some coffee, Mr. Curry?”

  He watched the steadiness of her hand as she picked up the cup, and wondered if, given her money, he could buy himself physical resilience like that, or if a person just had to be born with it.

  “Thank you for looking after me,” she said. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a bother. I’ve put you to no end of expense and difficulty and I…not the first damned thing about it. This is very good coffee, Mister how can you work for a phoney like that?”

  “I liked you better drunk.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “And if you call Mr. Rose a phoney again, Miss Wingate, I will as politely as possible punch you in the mouth.” Or die
trying, he added to himself.

  She took her time answering. “I apologize Mr. Curry. I am a guest under your roof. Forgive my bad manners.” She looked suddenly sheepish. “This really is excellent coffee. Are my clothes salvageable?”

  He was getting used to her Stengelese conversational style. “There was no difficulty and your apology is accepted and I’m pleased you like the coffee and he knows a great deal more about love than anyone alive and your clothes are in the laundry. Did I leave anything out?”

  She looked stubborn and drank her coffee. He poured more, and passed her her purse so that she could have a cigarette.

  “Don’t worry,” he said as she lit up. “The aspirins should take effect any minute.”

  She almost choked on smoke. “How do you know I took aspirins?” she asked sharply.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Afraid I spied on you in my own bathroom? Miss Wingate, how do you think you got in the tub? I don’t strip all my guests, but you were covered with vomit. Look, you got hurt and then drunk and then crazy, and then you passed out and woke up in a squall of icewater. If your head doesn’t hurt, you’re dead. There are aspirin in my medicine chest, clearly marked, and I assume you have an instinct for self-preservation.”

  She wore an odd expression, as if there were something extraordinary or dismaying about what he had said. “Oh,” she said finally in a small voice. “Again I apologize.”

  “De nada, Miss Wingate.”

  “Anne.”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul, why do I get the impression that none of this is new to you?”

  He poured himself another cup. “New to me?”

  “You’re too competent, too skilled at coping with troublesome drunken women. I’m not the first, am I?”

  He laughed aloud, surprising himself. “Anne, you are not the twenty-first. I’ve been Mr. Rose’s personal secretary for about ten years, and I would say that one of you manages to get past me every six or seven months, on the average.” He frowned. “Too many.” And thought, but you looked intelligent and stable.

  “And you say he knows about love.” She put down her cup, got up and paced. She came to his powered cookstool: the proper height for counter and cabinet work; a pedal for each wheel, heel for reverse, toe for forward. She sat on it and heel-and-toed it into rotating. It was a whole-body fidget, annoying to watch.

  “Anne, love rides his back like a goblin. It lives in his belly like a cancer. He wears it like a spacesuit in a hostile environment. It wears him like a brake drum wears shoes. I can’t tell whether he generates love or the other way around.” His voice was rising; he was irritated by her continued rotation on the stool. “I think everybody knows that. Everybody who can read.”

  She stopped the stool suddenly, with her back to him. “Was there ever anything that ‘everybody knew’ that turned out to be so?”

  His irritation increased. “I worry about anyone under eighteen who isn’t a cynic—and anyone over eighteen who is. There are thousands of things that everybody knows that are true. Falling off a cliff will hurt you. It gets dark at night. Snow is cold. Philip Rose knows about love. Damn it, you’ve read his books.”

  “Yes, I’ve read his fucking books!” she yelled at his refrigerator.

  Something told him that now was the time to shut up. He sat where he was, elbows on the table, pinching his lower lip between his thumbs, and looked at her back. It was some time before she spoke, but he did not mind the wait.

  “When I was eight years old,” she said at last, “my Aunt Claire gave me one of his juveniles. Latchkey Kid. It smacked me between the eyes.”

  He nodded uselessly.

  “I’d always been loved. So thoroughly, so completely, so automatically that both I and the people who loved me took it for granted. The book made me understand what it felt like not to be loved. That would have been enough for most writers. But Rose went further. He made me love Cindy, even though she wasn’t very likeable, and he made me see how even she could find love, even in a world like hers. He wasn’t famous then, he only had a dozen or so books out.

  “The next one I tried was Tommy’s Secret. I don’t suppose I could quote you more than a chapter or so at a time without referring to the text. For my tenth birthday I asked for a hardcover set of everything he had ever written. My father was scandalized—it wasn’t expensive enough—so I let him buy me two sets. That way I had one copy to preserve, immaculate, and one I could mark up and underline and dog-ear. Soon I found I needed a third set. Some writers you want to keep, special and private, for yourself and a few close friends. Rose I gave away to anyone who didn’t duck fast enough.

  “There is a story he wrote, ‘A Cup of Loneliness,’ that is the only reason I didn’t kill myself when I was sixteen.”

  Unseen, Paul nodded again.

  “By then I was old enough to realize how much I owed Aunt Claire. Unfortunately I realized it at her funeral. After a while I decided that I was repaying her by giving Philip Rose to other people. I mailed copies of his books to every critic and reviewer I could find. In college I got three credits of independent study for a critical analysis of Rose’s lifework to date that must have taken me forty-eight hours to put on paper. My professor got it published. I began to realize just how much weight my father’s name carried, and I used it, to see that Philip Rose’s career prospered. Eventually I had persuaded enough influential people to ‘discover’ him that public awareness of him started to grow.

  “Part of that was selfish. He was obscure, next to nothing was known about him as a person in any references I could find. I wanted to know about him, about his life, about where he had been and what he had done and whether or not he had enough love in his own life.”

  Paul nodded a third time and lit one of her cigarettes.

  “He didn’t accept visitors and didn’t give interviews and didn’t return biographical questionnaires from Who’s Who in Books and didn’t put more than he could help in his ‘About the Author’ blurbs. All I knew was that it said in the back of Broken Wings that he was married, and then the PR for the next one, A Country We Are Privileged to Visit, mentioned that he lived alone in this city. It never occurred to me to actually approach him myself, any more than it would occur to most people to look up the President.” (Curry happened to know that the President had been Anne Wingate’s godfather.) “But I threw reporters and scholars at him until I realized I was wasting his time and mine. If People magazine can’t get past you to him, no one can. I suppose I could have just put a good agency onto researching him, but the idea of setting detectives on Philip Rose is grotesque.

  “I decided that I would make him famous, and sooner or later he would simply have to open up. Not that I claim to be responsible for his fame—even I’m not that arrogant. He was already certain to be a legend in his own lifetime—but I speeded up the process. And it didn’t work worth a damn. Not since Salinger has a writer been so famous, so loved, and so little known. You cover him well. I still don’t know what went wrong with his marriage—or even what her name was.

  “Finally I decided there was only one way to thank the man who had taught me everything I know about love. It’s because of him that I studied lovemaking, so that I could give my lovers a gift that was something more than commonplace. It’s because of him that I’m still involved in politics. It’s because of him that I don’t hate my father. It’s because of him that I don’t hate myself.”

  Paul interrupted for the first time. “You don’t hate yourself, Anne, because he taught you how to forgive.”

  She banged her fist against the stool’s flank. “How can I forgive him for what he did?”

  He kept his own voice soft and low. “Don’t you mean, How can I forgive him for what he didn’t do?”

  “Damn it, he didn’t have to do anything. Just lay back and let me do the doing—”

  “And that wouldn’t be doing something? You say you’ve studied lovemaking: is there any such thing as a passive partner? Aside fr
om necrophilia and rubber dolls? You wanted him to do you the favor of accepting pleasure from you. You’re young and very beautiful: perhaps you’ve never met a man who wouldn’t count that a privilege. You made your offer, and he declined politely—I’ll bet my life it was politely—and so you decided to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. And learned the sad truth: that there is no offer a man cannot refuse if he must.”

  “Why ‘must’? There was no obligation of any kind, expressed or implied—if he’s half the telepath his books make him seem, he must have known that. All I wanted to do was say thanks.”

  “You did thank him. And then before he could say ‘you’re welcome,’ you tried to ram your thanks down his throat, or down yours, or whatever, and made him throw you out. There’s an old John Lennon song, ‘Norwegian Wood.’ I’ve always felt that he changed the title to avoid censorship. I think the song is about the nicest compliment a man can receive from a woman. Isn’t it good?: knowing she would. But that message can be conveyed from twenty feet away, by body language. Only children need it confirmed by effort and sweat, that’s what Lennon was trying to say. Damn it, Anne, haven’t you ever been turned down?”

  “Not like that!”

  “You gave Mr. Rose exactly two choices: be raped or be rude. I wasn’t there, but I know. Otherwise he would not have been rude.”

  “But—”

  “Anne, I’ve been through this before, and I must say they usually take it better than you. But once every couple of years or so we get one so young and so blind with need that he has to be rude to turn her off. It always upsets him.”

  “Damn you,” she yelled.

  “Anne, the first step to forgiving yourself is facing up to what you’ve done wrong. Or did you think that your own upset was only hurt pride and frustration?”

  “And how do you handle the dumb young insistent ones?” she asked bitterly, and spun the stool around to face him. He saw tear tracks. “Take the Master’s sloppy seconds?”

  “I lie to them, generally,” he said evenly. “I talk to them until I get an idea of which excuse they’re willing to be sold, and then I sell it to them. If it seems necessary, I figure out what sort of bribe or threat it will take to keep their mouths shut, and provide that. As for myself, I prefer bed partners who know as much about love as they do about lovemaking.”