Different Dreams

by Tory Cates

  To one side of the crowd was a chamber music group playing the kind of refined, ethereal music that set the tone for a gathering such as this. Through the crush, Malou caught a glimpse of her father. He was studying her and Cam with a cool, detached eye. A scientist’s eye, she’d always told herself when, even when she was a young girl he’d turned that analytical gaze on her. She’d never been able to escape feeling as if she were just another one of her father’s experiments. And not a terribly successful one at that. Her father made no effort to break away from the guests surrounding him. He let his daughter come to him. Malou’s hand tightened on Cam’s.

  “That’s my father watching us,” she whispered to him. He covered her clenched hand with his.

  “I thought I felt the hot glare of the paternal eye. Quite a distinguished-looking gent.”

  And he was. Arthur Sanders had, even as a young man, looked precisely like what he now was, a university physics professor. His hair, which had gone prematurely silver, contributed to the impression he gave of a man with his mind on matters far too abstract for the ordinary mortal.

  Professor Sanders held out a hand as Malou approached him. She presented hers and he clasped it with a practiced warmth.

  “Father, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Cameron Landell. Cam, my father, Professor Arthur Sanders.”

  Professor Sanders pressed Cam’s hand with the same precise degree of warmth. “Cameron, I’m pleased to meet you.”

  “And I you, Arthur.” Malou was sure she’d only imagined it, but conversation seemed to suddenly die around them and the chamber group to falter. Malou had never heard another living soul except her mother call her father anything other than Professor, and usually Doctor, Sanders. He never invited anyone to call him Arthur, and there were few, none within Malou’s hearing, who had ever presumed to take the liberty. No one who didn’t know her father as well as she did would ever have guessed that Cam’s presumption had offended him. But Malou saw the slight quirk in his eyebrow that signaled his slow-burning ire, and she knew that Cam had incited it.

  “Malou’s told me a great deal about you,” Cam continued cordially, oblivious to his violation of university protocol. In his world no man was his superior, and when someone used his first name, Cam took it as an open invitation for him to use that man’s first name in return.

  “Odd,” the professor commented with his trademark abstraction, “Malou hasn’t mentioned you to us.”

  “You remember, Daddy,” Malou cut in, trying to head her father off before he got started. “The cell reception at the station is almost nonexistent. I haven’t spoken to you at all for some time.”

  “Ah, that’s right,” Sanders said, having already gotten his dig in at the upstart. “Last I heard from you, your whole project was going on the block. Some developer had bilked Stallings out of the title to his ranch and was planning to auction off the monkeys to the highest bidder.”

  “That’s not exactly what I told you, Daddy,” Malou said coolly, knowing full well that her father remembered precisely what she’d told him about the situation at Los Monos and that Cam was the bilking developer.

  “What’s your line, Landell?” her father asked. Watching him jockey for position as blatantly as any macaque, trying to dominate Cam now by using his last name with no title, would have amused Malou if the scene had involved any other two men.

  “Development.” Cam cut his answer off short.

  “You’re not that Cameron Landell, are you?” Her father feigned ignorance. “The San Antonio developer who’s paving over one of the few breeding grounds left to the beleaguered golden-cheeked warbler, cutting down all those junipers they use to nest in?”

  “Guilty as charged,” Cam answered, his eyebrow beginning now to quirk just the slightest bit. With an offhanded glance, he looked about and asked casually, “I wonder how many junipers had to be cut down when this neighborhood was built.”

  Malou didn’t give her father the chance to answer, and since Cam showed no inclination to come to his own defense, she did it for him. “Hadn’t you heard, Daddy? Cam’s going to leave a big greenbelt running through the project in the prime nesting area.”

  “Yes,” Cam put in. “That should help with my PR profile and maybe even increase property values.”

  Malou winced. Cam was taking a perverse delight in placing himself in the worst light possible.

  “I suppose that, in your business,” her father pontificated, “PR and property values are paramount concerns.”

  “The only concerns, Arthur,” Cam said with a needling grin. Before Professor Sanders could begin lecturing on the topic, Malou’s mother drifted over to them.

  “Mary Louise, darling,” she called out, as if she were greeting an acquaintance at the faculty club. “I’m so pleased you could make it.” She kissed the air around Malou’s ears, her fingers lightly grazing her daughter’s forearms.

  “Happy anniversary, Mother,” Malou said to her mother, who seemed only to grow more handsome as the years passed. She was as stately and as refined as everything around her. But what Malou had always admired was that her mother had never let her looks or her house be her world. She’d achieved a position for herself nearly as prominent as the one her husband occupied so proudly.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said automatically, animation sparking her voice only when she moved on to the next topic. “Has your father told you my good news?”

  “We really hadn’t had time,” Malou replied awkwardly, not daring to glance at either Cam or her father.

  “My study has been funded. The Arthritis Foundation is going to pay for me to study that new anti-inflammatory I was telling you about a few months back.”

  “Oh, Mother, that’s wonderful!” Malou looked now at Cam to see if he was as impressed as she with her mother’s achievement, but his expression was unreadable. Her father’s wasn’t, though; he was beaming with pride. Malou was grateful for the happy note that had been introduced. Her parents were never better than when they were working together like this, both excited about the other’s work.

  “I just had an idea,” her father blurted out. “I’ll have my secretary run off some flyers tomorrow asking for volunteers for the study and have her post them around the campus.”

  “That would be most helpful,” Malou’s mother said to her husband as he took a small notebook out of his vest pocket and penciled in a reminder to himself. Though it didn’t diminish Malou’s pride in her parents, she noticed a strange formality between them. She couldn’t imagine them ever taking a “school vacation” day, as she and Cam had, to feed each other dewberries and make love in a sun-warmed field.

  “Mother,” Malou said to capture her mother’s attention, which had already wandered to the other guests milling about. “I’d like you to meet a . . .” She stumbled for the right word. “Friend of mine, Cameron Landell.”

  “Happy thirtieth, Mrs. Sanders,” Cam said, taking her hand in his.

  “Yes, thank you, Cameron.”

  Had that touch of condescension always been there in her mother’s voice, Malou wondered, or were both her parents just now bringing it out especially for Cam?

  “Do you work with Malou at the station?” her mother asked.

  “No, I . . .”

  But her mother had already turned from Cam and was asking Malou, “How is Ernie coming on his myopia study? He was explaining his research design to me last time we were out, and it sounded fascinating. I’d think he’d collect some very interesting data.”

  “Uh, I really don’t know, Mother. We haven’t spoken about it lately.”

  “Haven’t spoken about his research?” Mrs. Sanders echoed incredulously, trying to imagine the circumstances under which such a silence could occur. She returned her attention to Cam. “What did you do your graduate work in?” The question was as natural to her as asking where someone worked.

  “Creative financing,” Cam quipped.

  The joke was lost on Mrs. Sanders. “
Oh,” she replied blankly. “And where did you get your undergraduate degree?”

  Malou’s mind whirred frantically as she searched for a way to head off this impossible conversation.

  “School of hard knocks.” Cam grinned.

  At last, the horrible fact that their daughter’s escort held no university degree dawned on Mrs. Sanders and she looked to her husband, who with that eloquent quirk of his eyebrow confirmed her fear and her sliding opinion of the man before her.

  They stood in awkward silence for a moment before Professor Sanders asked, “What do you make of the Higgs boson, Landell?”

  “The Higgs bison?” Cam asked. “Sounds like a very specific kind of buffalo to me.”

  Malou could not restrain an impish smile at Cam’s jibe or her father’s dour lack of amusement. Professor Sanders turned to her.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny, Mary Louise. This discovery confirms some of the theories I’ve devoted my life to proving.”

  The smile faded from Malou’s lips. She felt frivolous and disrespectful.

  Assuming the tone he used to lecture particularly dull students, Professor Sanders turned back to Cam. “The Higgs boson is one of several subatomic particles that may very well be the ultimate component of matter. Their discovery is the most important event in physics since the invention of the solid-state transistor.”

  “I don’t doubt its significance in the least,” Cam stated, his voice cool and even. “And if there were time enough in this life, I would love to learn everything I could about it. But there’s not. So, like you, I am forced to tend to the business I’ve chosen. Perhaps you’d like to tell me now what you think of derivatives such as credit default swaps.”

  “Credit what?” Professor Sanders asked querulously, unused to being challenged. “Just a bunch of financial machinations, I’d say.”

  “And you may very well be right, but they nearly caused the collapse of the worldwide banking system.”

  “Hmmff.” Professor Sanders folded his arms in front of him.

  “How very interesting,” Mrs. Sanders said mechanically. She put an arm around her husband and began herding him away. “We’ve been neglecting our other guests.” She turned back to Malou. “Now, don’t be standoffish the way you usually are. Mingle,” she commanded, waving a finger in the direction of a young man who reminded her of Ernie, with his beard and wire-rim glasses. “There’s Lawrence Steward over there. Go on over and talk with him. He just got back from Botswana, where he was doing a Fulbright on native linguistics. It really is fascinating.” She waved her fingers vaguely at Cam. “So nice to meet you, Mr. Landell.”

  Cam waggled his fingers at the couple’s departing backs. “Toodle-oo,” he called after them in a tone edged with a blade of sarcasm. Malou looked up at his cocky grin and tried to gauge his reaction to the exchange. She thought her parents had been rude, snobbish, and insulting. But it was impossible to tell if Cam had been hurt.

  “They can really be pretty high-handed sometimes,” she ventured. “I hope you weren’t offended by anything they said. Or implied.”

  “What? Me? Offended? Why? Simply because they treated me like a drooling idiot because I didn’t flash thirteen degrees and a Fulbright at them?” The edge of sarcasm in his tone sharpened to a degree that frightened Malou. “And speaking of Fulbrights,” he continued, “that enchanting Larry Steward is over there just dying to tell you all the fascinating details about linguistics in Botswana. So, why don’t you run and mingle with him and some of these other escapees from a Mensa meeting and let a business cretin like myself just slither on out the door.” As he looked deeply into her eyes, his features momentarily softened. He caught both of her hands in his and brought them to his lips. “I’m truly, truly sorry, Malou. But if I ever doubted before how far apart our worlds are, I’ve had my doubts erased today.” He turned abruptly and left. His sharp, thrusting stride revealed how deeply angered he was.

  Malou watched him pass the butler and charge on toward his car. She looked back at her parents. The president of the university was kissing her mother on the cheek. Her parents would never understand if she were to simply leave without so much as the formal good-bye that usually terminated their meetings. Particularly if she were to leave chasing after an undegreed despoiler of the land. Cam was sliding into his car. The president of the university was shaking her father’s hand and patting his back.

  She started walking. Past a Nobel Prize winner, past a white-jacketed waiter, past the chamber music group. By the time she passed the azaleas, Malou was running. She dropped the bow-tied package she’d forgotten to give her parents, and broke into a sprint. She reached the passenger side of the SUV just as Cam was starting to pull out, and she threw herself in the door.

  “You really don’t want to be around me right now,” was Cam’s greeting.

  “Oh, but I really do,” Malou countered.

  “I’m in as foul a mood as I’ve probably ever been in in my life, and am planning to spend the rest of the afternoon at my club in San Antonio getting quietly smashed.”

  “Sounds like an inspired idea to me.”

  Cam turned to her, an icy distance frosting his gaze. “Malou, I can’t, or rather won’t, bodily eject you from this vehicle, but it really would be a better idea if you stayed here where you belong.”

  Malou’s answer was somber. “I don’t especially feel like I belong here anymore.”

  “And you do feel like you might belong with me where I’m going?” His question was harsh.

  Malou’s heart pounded at the enormity of the response she gave. “Yes.”

  He stared at her. “Maybe it is time for both of us to find out the answer to that question.” He seemed galvanized into action by that decision. An odd purposefulness filled the car as Cam swiveled to look behind him. He accelerated past the Greek-columned house a bit too fast. A snatch of chamber music lilted into the car before it was grabbed away by Cam’s burst of speed. The last thing Malou saw was her mother’s puzzled expression as she bent over and picked a brightly wrapped package out of her azalea bed.

  As Malou settled back against the leather seat, she felt that a tiny bit of her fate had been sealed. For good or ill? she wondered, glancing over at Cam. His expression was grim, his gaze locked onto the highway spooling out in front of them. She doubted whether knowing the answer to her question would have made any difference. Good or ill, she would have gone with Cameron Landell.

  * * *

  Cam’s club was private and sat on the top of San Antonio’s tallest bank building.

  “Why, Mr. Landell,” a hostess in a silk dress and pearls purred as they walked off the elevator into the reception area, “what a pleasant surprise. It’s been far too long since we’ve seen you. Sam Stevens and Lou Chesler are in the bar. Or would you like a private table?”

  “No,” Cam answered with a quick look at Malou. “The bar will be fine. We’re on a sort of tour here. A tour of Cameron Landell’s world, so we’d better see all the animals in the zoo.”

  The hostess smiled as if Cam were making a joke that she understood perfectly and pointed a gracious hand in the direction of the bar.

  It was crowded, and at every table they passed, someone stood up to grip Cam’s hand or pull him aside to meet someone or to extract his promise to talk with them in private later on. It took nearly half an hour for them to make their way to the center table, where two men—like twins with their identical tans, blow-dried silver hair, two-thousand-dollar watches, and female companions one-third their ages—were holding court. Chesler and Stevens. Even Malou knew the names. Anyone who read a newspaper in Texas did. Chesler had been a U.S. senator for years, ending his political career with an unsuccessful run for the presidency. Stevens was reputedly even bigger in politics than his partner ever had been. But Stevens was a backroom maneuverer, a kingmaker who wielded more power than those who held the offices whose doors he opened.

  Both men rose as Cam and Malou approached the tab
le. Chesler spoke first, in a booming voice trained to be heard across the floor of the Senate and bars crowded with powerful men.

  “Durn your hide, Landell, it worries me when I don’t see your face for a couple of months. What city have you snuck out and bought up while our backs were turned?” Hearty guffaws rose from an appreciative audience.

  “It’s states now, Chesler,” Cam answered, shaking the hands extended to him. “I don’t deal in anything smaller than a state these days.”

  Chesler whooped at Cam’s comeback and pulled up two empty chairs. Cam introduced Malou.

  “You may not know a damn thing about development, Landell, but you know a fine-looking woman when you see one, don’t you, you old barn owl!” With a smarmy grin he turned to Malou. “I hope I didn’t offend you, Miss Sanders.”

  Malou had no choice but to smile sweetly and take the chair Chesler held out for her. After that, she was ignored entirely as the talk turned to development deals and who was speculating on what land and what the inside word from the capital was about what property the state was planning to buy. Occasionally one of the women sitting beside one of the half dozen men around the table would make a comment. The man she had spoken to would nod without looking at her and continue his conversation as if she hadn’t spoken. From time to time, Chesler would circle his finger over the table and the waitress would bring fresh drinks.

  Malou listened for an hour, though she had gotten the message in the first five minutes: Cam’s was a world where money and power were synonymous. A world where university degrees were worthless. It was a world in which Cam had succeeded handsomely at an exceedingly early age. She was totally out of her depth with all the talk about flipping land and grandfather clauses and municipal utility districts. Finally their eyes met, and in one glance she told him that she was more than ready to leave. Cam gulped down the drink in front of him and put the empty glass down with the small collection he’d already assembled.

  “Cam,” she said as the elevator doors slid shut, closing them off together, “you didn’t have to drag me all the way up here to make your point.”