Wetware

by Craig Nova

  Warren looked up at him.

  “I hadn’t thought . . . ” he said.

  “No,” said Blaine.

  “I’m sorry,” said Warren. “I really am. My God, what have I done?”

  Blaine stood there, seeing the gray walls as they seemed to throb.

  “But,” said Warren, “the way you handled it made it all right. That was pretty good.”

  “You think I knew?” said Blaine. “I was guessing. And what happens if I made the wrong guess? I don’t know what those numbers are going to be any more than anyone else. I guessed.”

  “Oh,” said Warren. “Well.”

  “Go home,” said Blaine. “Keep your mouth shut. Can you do that?”

  Warren nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”

  Blaine went out the door and into the hall. In the elevator he buttoned his coat and took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, and when he came into the lobby he saw Carr’s reddish hair, her pale skin, her arm with a diamond bracelet on it under the fan of a palm tree. The band had stopped playing “Fascination.” Blaine sat down next to her and said, “Would you like a glass of champagne?”

  “Is something wrong?” said Carr.

  “No,” said Blaine. He got a waiter’s attention and ordered a bottle of champagne.

  “I missed you today,” said Carr.

  He was thinking about the indices and guessed that he had a chance, but then it was possible that he hadn’t seen the latest report. Had he looked at them before he left the office, or had he only seen the ones in the early afternoon? He didn’t know. The champagne arrived and they each took a glass. He put his on the small table between them.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  “You don’t even know I’m here,” she said.

  “Please,” he said. “Let’s just sit here for a moment.”

  His glass sat on the table, and she saw the room distorted there, bent into a shape like that reflected on the surface of a shiny spoon. That’s perfect, she thought, everything here is distorted.

  “You are trying to tell me to be quiet,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m trying to say I want a moment to relax. That’s all. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “I want to talk to you,” she said.

  “This may not be the best time,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “There’s nothing I can do about that,” she said.

  “Yes, there is,” he said. “You can wait.”

  “Why won’t you look at me?” she said.

  He turned his pale green eyes on her, the expression in them seeming as crisp and shiny as a scientific instrument, like the lens of a microscope. The glance seemed extremely bright, almost as though a light were being shined in his eyes, and she supposed that this was a matter of his remoteness, his refusal to be intimate.

  “Is that better?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “This way I can see what you are thinking.”

  “Can you?” he said. “And what would that be?”

  She looked away.

  “Not about me,” she said.

  “And is that a crime?” he said.

  “Right now it is,” she said.

  “Leslie,” he said. “I’m trying to decide whether or not I have made a mistake. If I have, why, then I have to do something.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You’ve made a mistake, all right. You’ve had many opportunities to discuss this with me, but you haven’t taken them. So if this is a bad time, it is your fault. Your mistake is thinking you can put me off. Well, sometimes there are people who will not be put off. Are you listening?”

  “Don’t,” he said. “Please.”

  “I want you to tell me you love me,” she said. “I want to know if you would risk everything for me.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Risk,” he said. He opened his eyes and looked at her with that same bright glance, which was almost mesmerizing in its intensity. “And what do you know about risk?”

  “Plenty,” she said. “Tell me. I want to hear it.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  He trembled with the effort.

  “Say it like you mean it,” she said.

  “Please,” he said. “I am asking you to wait just a few minutes. That doesn’t seem like too much.”

  “I bet you are going to a concert tonight to watch that Russian woman. Is she in town?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, well,” she said. “Say it like you mean it.”

  Beyond the palms, which opened with a fan of green fronds, the musicians picked up their instruments. Everything about them was so crisp and starched that it was almost possible to hear the scrape of their white collars against the skin of their necks. They looked at one another, each nodding his head, counting, One, Two, Three . . .

  “I think this has gone far enough,” said Blaine.

  “What has gone far enough?” she said. “This discussion? Let me tell you that this discussion has just gotten started.”

  “No,” he said. “Not this discussion.”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  Perhaps one of the guesses he had made was wrong. He looked around, seeing the fans of palms, the green blades that looked so sharp. If he only had someone he could talk with about it. The light pulsed here, too, and he looked around the room for a dark recess where the throbbing might be less. Maybe he had picked the wrong indices. But then, he hadn’t had any time. Didn’t this matter? No, it didn’t matter at all. He was in the position of being right or wrong.

  He looked back at her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What are you sorry about?” she said, raising her voice one shade above the conversational. The other people in the room turned toward her with all the speed of a reflex, but after they saw her, their expressions changed again, from mild alarm to a subdued smirk of amusement.

  “Leslie,” he said. “We don’t have to do this here. Not like this.”

  “That’s what you’ve got to say?” she said. “Great. Do you think I give a shit what these people think?”

  She stood up.

  “Do you?”

  “No,” he said. “I guess you don’t.”

  She pushed the small table in front of her out of her way and it fell over and lay there on its back, like a dead animal in a cartoon. The waiters who stood in a small group by the kitchen door had the sense to stay out of the way. Then she dropped her glass into the absolute silence of the room. She put a hand to her face, and when he tried to take her arm, she jerked away from him.

  “Don’t you dare,” she said.

  She went across the soft carpet, through the gazes of other people, even raising her arm once as though these glances were so palpable as to feel like spiderwebs. Blaine picked up the table and put it back up, right where it had been. Its legs had made little indentations in the carpet, and Blaine was careful to make sure that the table was placed so that the small metal caster, about the size of a nickel on each leg, went right back into the indentations. As though everything was put back precisely the way it had been. He thought about the indices. Then he picked up her glass from the floor and put it on the table with his. He signaled for the check. A couple of people still stared at him, but he avoided them. Maybe, he hoped, it would just look like a lovers’ quarrel.

  Outside, she noticed that the lights above her now seemed ugly. The bracelet on her wrist looked that way too, and she took it off and carried it like some dead thing. She couldn’t bring herself just to drop it into the gutter, but when she came to a cross street, she struck the bracelet against the corner of a building, the diamonds not breaking, but coming out of the setting and falling onto the street like flecks of ice.

  Then she stood there, her back against the wall, where she felt the cool pressure of the stone through her dr
ess and against her shoulder blades. Blaine had often told her what a beautiful back she had and how, when he saw the movement of her defined muscles under the white skin, he was reminded of the movement of wings, not of a bird, but of an angel. She had thought this was idiotic, but with the cold caress of the building behind her, she remembered it with a mixture of fury and the desire to have him say something like that again. And as she stood there, she looked up the avenue, feeling the cool air. Then she looked down at the diamonds, which were spread out around her shoes.

  She realized that only a fool would walk away from them, and while she had the impulse to do so, she found that she was frozen like someone at the edge of a precipice. Too scared to move. She looked down, telling herself that if she could just leave the diamonds here, she could walk away from Blaine too, and never look back. She took a step up the sidewalk, but as she did so she knew she was bluffing and that such posturing was for no one aside from herself. And what was the good of that? To try to outsmart herself? Well, she had done that well enough, thank you. Even as she reached down and picked up each one, pinching it between her fingernails to get it off the sidewalk, she had the sensation that these shards of light were evidence of how she was bound to him. The effect of his charm overwhelmed her even now like the scent of a flower, honey-suckle, for instance, that is associated with some piercing intimacy. He had power, and he had put it to use in his understanding of her, and this combination had been the essence of his charm.

  She refused to get down on her hands and knees (which, she realized, was a desperate gesture to her somewhat tattered dignity), and as she squatted in her high heels, she heard a hush, hush, hush. The street sweeper came along, pushing his broom with three quick shoves and then stopping, setting his feet and getting ready to do it again. He had short, thick, ugly hair and a pug nose, like some Irish prizefighter who should never have gotten into the ring. His clothes hung around him as though they had been cut from a tattered tent, and his gait was brutish, a kind of side-to-side swaying, as though he were a little unsteady on his feet but nonetheless unstoppable. One of Briggs’s early models. He halted just in front of her and said, “Hey. Look. See?” When she followed the direction of his finger, which had knuckles the size and shape of walnuts, she saw the one she had missed. “You don’t want to miss that, hey? That’s worth something, hey?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I guess it is.”

  In the morning she woke and sat at the side of the bed, where she was instantly alert to the silence of her apartment, which had a new, stark quality. It wasn’t just the bad scene with Blaine, but the presence of a terrifying isolation. In the mirror that was hung on the inside of the closet door she saw the freckles on her shoulders and arms which made her look younger than she was. The corners of her eyes had a few almost invisible wrinkles, and she was amazed that she should have them at all. The silence, the wrinkles, the sight of the diamonds on her dressing table, like disorder itself, made her think that her anger of the previous night had been a mistake, but not necessarily one she couldn’t handle. Least said, soonest mended, she thought. That’s the way to handle this.

  She called Blaine, but she didn’t even get past the first secretary, who was new. A lot of people thought they wanted to work for Blaine, but the pressure got to them, and soon they looked for something else. Carr hung up and thought nothing of it, although she noticed a deepening of the silence in the room where she sat. If nothing else she would be able to find him at night, since she knew that he was going to a concert. Her plan was to run into him as though they had planned to meet, and to tell him that she’d had a headache the night before. She would act as though nothing had happened at all. If he had any lingering resentment, he would feel that he was making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, she wouldn’t appear to make much of it. No abject apologies, no begging for forgiveness, and this would throw him off balance. Was he going to be peevish or spiteful? She would use his best qualities against him. He hated being unreasonable, and her lack of concern would leave him no place to go. The diamonds lay on her dressing table, winking at her with a cold light as she moved around the room.

  At the theater, she didn’t have a ticket, and when she tried to walk past an usher, she was stopped. It made her uneasy, not just for the momentary embarrassment, but through the sense of having a guard, like an angel at the gates of paradise, telling her that she was no longer allowed. She had begun to think she belonged here as much as Blaine. She went across the street to a polite café and had a drink, and then another, and when she saw Blaine’s car pull up in front of the theater, she paid her check and went out, running a little, glad to have the cool air on her face and to see the lights of the theater. She heard the voices of an after-theater crowd, a laugh or two, a shout of recognition, and then a general wash of sound made up of rustling skirts, the click of high-heeled shoes, the sound of satin liners hissing over a dress, and through it all she could smell the perfume and the lingering whiff of champagne. Carr saw Blaine and the Russian musician coming across the sidewalk. Jimmy got out of the car and moved toward the rear door and opened it. Just as the young woman got to the curb, she looked up at Blaine, her eyes filled with light, like diamonds, and before she slipped into the car she put her lips together and gave him a kiss, the intensity of which was somewhere between a suggestion and a promise. Carr stood at the edge of the crowd, wanting to speak, or to shout, but she did neither. She heard the heavy, armored door close. This sound had changed too, like everything else around her. Whereas before it had been a sign of powerful elegance, it was now just a thud, a signal that she was no longer wanted.

  At home, she took a bottle of wine from the refrigerator and held it against her eyes, which were swollen. The cork broke when she tried to get it out, and then she was reduced to pushing it into the bottle. This just showed how inept she had become. She poured the wine, flecked with pieces of cork, into a glass as she came into the living room and sat down in front of the TV. After flipping back and forth, she found a channel that showed nothing but storms. A big one was moving across Central America, and she watched as brown water washed down a hill, slowly undermining the shacks with corrugated tin roofs that stood on the bank. Palm trees swayed back and forth in the gales, and at the height of the hurricane the debris from the disappearing roofs of buildings looked like black birds, like bats, like shreds of funeral bunting blowing in the wind. Dead creatures, all black in the current, were being carried down to the ocean. She listened to the sound of the hurricane and thought, Yes. Listen.

  She looked out the window at the city. It had changed too, no longer the impossibly romantic collection of lights, but just the rankest physical phenomena. Electrons in a void, absolutely indifferent to her or to anyone else. She had an overwhelming desire to go back to those afternoons when she and her father had broken computers into bits, when they had worked until they were out of breath. Her father was long dead, but she now realized that he had been trying to warn her. He had resisted hope, and now she wondered if he had had a night like this one, and in a moment of recognition that came with a sense of weight, she was certain that he had. Of course, in her innocent beliefs she hadn’t been able to understand him, or to do anything but disapprove of his brutality. Her innocence had shown everywhere, and in particular she now saw that it had been in her notion, which she had just accepted at face value without a moment’s thought, that if she just worked hard enough, hid who she really was long enough, spent enough time alone, did without, at least in any part of her existence that could have been warm and delicious, she would turn into someone admirable and even grand. She sat there and thought, And look at me now. Just look.

  The odd thing was how flimsy this entire construction of herself seemed now, just a bunch of fraudulent habits and gestures that had probably fooled no one. She had built herself up, bit by careful bit, and now this analog of a person, this thing made by years of blinding effort, seemed like a dress that had at one time seemed fashionable but was no
w obviously just a knock-off of the real thing. She hated what she had been and yet didn’t have a clue of where to go, of what to do.

  She closed her eyes now and realized her father had been telling her a secret, the kind of thing no one wanted to admit, at least not out loud. Chaos has its own charms. It grows, it advances, it seeks out weakness, it lives for revenge. Then she thought that Blaine was really at the center of her grief. How in God’s name could he have come into her life, changed her, and then discarded her in such a manner and still think that he was immune?

  And what did darkness have to offer? As she considered this, she remembered with a thrill her father’s wink of understanding. She felt the attraction of the darkness through the seductiveness of it, as though she were looking at a woman in black, shiny underwear, who put out her hands to be tied, her eyes filled with an expression of subdued, even languid, but still definite pleasure. Carr considered this not with understanding, but with a delicious impulsiveness about the shadows’ possibilities. Now she saw darkness, like malice, as a stain on the light, its promise so perfect and so much more reliable than innocent delusion. And Blaine, of course, loved the light, the force of reason, the power of music, the beauty of discipline. All she wanted, in the moment, was to be close to her father. After she had stood at the window, imagining the winking out of each light, she went to a market and bought a can of sardines and ate them with her fingers, picking the silvery fish out of the olive oil they came in and sprinkling them with hot sauce, just like her father. It burned her mouth. The heat felt like happiness.

  The next morning she went to work, and she tried to go through a new section that Briggs had done, but just the sight of the blue case it came in left her feeling seasick. It was like seeing stains on the sheets on the bed in Blaine’s apartment, or some other evidence of what a fool she had made of herself. It reminded her of finding a book of poetry that had made sense at one time, but was now just another incomprehensible book. She found herself dialing the number of a headhunter who often called her, and she agreed to accept what he had to offer, the phone call made with the air of floating, of just surrendering to an impulse she had tried to deny, but which had finally taken over. She went down the hall, turned in her resignation, and cleaned out her desk, although, as she picked the papers up, she decided she couldn’t bear to look at them, either, since they were just reminders of what she had lost. She slammed a drawer shut, but it didn’t close, and she slammed it again and again. As she walked out, one of her assistants said to the other, “Well, whatever she was smoking, she isn’t smoking it anymore.”