The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

by Sheri S. Tepper

  ‘Confusion is winning,’ she admitted. ‘Not so far ahead that one gives up all hope, but far enough to make me very anxious. It uses up a lot of energy.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, wiping his lips with his napkin before reaching out to touch her hand. ‘Do your rules allow transfer of points?’

  ‘I don’t understand. What do you mean, transfer?’

  ‘Well, my own lifetime cumulative score is somewhat better than yours. I have several thousand points ahead for order. Of course, I have an advantage because of the Cave of Light – no. Don’t say that you don’t believe in it, or that it’s all terribly interesting, but… All that isn’t really relevant. I simply want to know if your rules allow transfer of points, because, if they do, I will transfer a thousand points to you. This will take off the immediate pressure, and perhaps you can strengthen your position sufficiently to mount a counterattack.’

  If there had been any hint of amusement in his voice, even of a teasing sort, she would have laughed politely and – what? Accepted? Rejected? Said something about one having to play one’s own hand? The surface Marianne, well educated in the superficial social graces, could have handled that. However, this did not sound like a social offer. The tone was that of an arms control negotiator placing before the assembly the position of his government. It reminded her that she was speaking with a Prime Minister, all too seriously, and yet how wonderful to be ahead for a while. A gift of such magnitude, however, might carry an obligation. Begone, buried, she whispered to herself.

  ‘It’s too much,’ she whispered to him, completely serious. ‘I might not be able to repay.’

  ‘Kinswoman,’ he said, laying his hand upon hers, the tingle of that contact moving into her like a small lightning stroke, shocking and intimate. ‘Kinswoman, there is no obligation. Believe me. If you know nothing else of me, if we do not meet again, know this of me. There is no obligation.’

  ‘But – a thousand. So much?’

  ‘It is important to me that my kinswoman win her battles, that she be decisively ahead. That she be winning and know herself to be winning.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t be me who was winning.’

  ‘Nonsense. If a gunner at the top of a hill uses all his ammunition and an ally rushes ammunition to him at a critical time, it is still the gunner who wins if he keeps his head and uses all his skill. He has merely been reinforced. We are kinsmen, therefore allies. You will forgive me if I do not say “kinspersons.” I learned my English in a more elegant setting, in a more elegant time. However, you need not decide at this moment. Merely remember that it is important to me that you win. There is no obligation beyond that. You would favor me by accepting.’ And he left the subject, to talk instead of Alphenlicht, of his boyhood there, being light and gracious.

  When they parted, it was like waking from a dream. Fragments of their conversation fled across her mind only to dissipate. The lecture hall, the restaurant assumed dream scale and color. When she turned to see the restaurant still behind her, solid and ordinary as any other building on the street, it was with a sense of detached unreality. She attended a class, took notes, entered into the discussion, and did not remember it five minutes later. She went to her apartment, stopping on the way to shop for food and milk, and stood inside it holding the paper sack without knowing where she was. It was a square, white envelope on the carpet that brought her to herself at last, her name written on it in a quick, powerful hand. The message read, ‘I have transferred one thousand order points to you. If you do not wish to receive them, you may return them to me. May I have the pleasure of your company at dinner on Thursday night? I will call you tomorrow. Makr Avehl.’

  When she touched the envelope, she received the same tingling shock she had felt from his hand, but as she read the words, most of the cloudy confusion vanished.

  ‘He did give me a thousand points,’ she told herself, knowing with certainty that it was true. ‘I’ve got them, I can tell I have,’ knowing that she not only had them but had accepted them. If she had not had them, she would have been too confused to accept them. Now that she had them, she knew she would keep them. ‘It’s like an anti-depressant,’ she said to herself, caroling, doing a little jig on the carpet so that the groceries ripped their way through the bottom of the brown bag and rolled about on the rug, oranges and lemons and brown-and-serve rolls. ‘Before you take it, you’re too depressed to want it. After you take it, you know it was what you needed.’

  There was, of course, one small confusion. Her door had been tightly locked. No one had a key except herself. How, then, had the square white envelope come to rest in the middle of the carpet, where she could not fail to see it but where no one could possibly have put it?

  Magus, she hummed. Magi, Magian, Magician.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was a knock at the door. Someone turned the knob and Marianne heard Mrs Winesap’s voice.

  ‘Girl? I heard you coming in. Someone brought you a pretty.’ Mrs Winesap was addicted to slightly regional speech, the region in question varying from day to day so that Marianne was never sure whether the woman was from the South, West, or New England states. On occasion, Mrs Winesap’s speech approached an Elizabethan richness, and Marianne thought the true source of her changing accent might be overdoses of BBC period imports.

  ‘Mrs Winesap. Come on in. What is it?’

  ‘Crocuses,’ the woman replied. ‘In a pretty pot. A man brought them. I was out front, and he came along looking lost, so I asked him who he was looking for. After he told me they were for you, we got to talking. I thought at first he might be your brother, there being a family resemblance and my eyes not being that good. Then I knew that was silly, your brother being the kind of person he is and all.’

  Marianne had never discussed Harvey with Mrs Winesap that she could recall, and her attention was so fixed on the gift that she completely missed the implications of this statement. Mrs Winesap often seemed to know a great deal about Harvey or, perhaps more accurately, knew a great deal about people and things that affected Marianne.

  ‘The man who brought these is … he’s a kind of cousin, I guess, Mrs Winesap. I met him today. It was nice of him to be so thoughtful.’ The crocuses were precisely as she had visualized them, purple ones, in a glazed pot of deepest, persian blue.

  ‘Same name of yours, so I guessed he was some kind of kin,’ commented Mrs Winesap. ‘Anyhow, he left the flowers with me after he made me promise six times I’d see you got them as soon as you got home. Seemed like a very determined sort of person. You got something cold to drink, Marianne? I been moving that dirt out back, and it’s hotter’n Hades for April.’

  Marianne hid a smile as she went to the refrigerator. It was true that Mrs Winesap was a bit dirt-smeared, and also true that she was largely responsible for the emerging order in the garden, but it was not even warm for April, much less hot. Mrs Winesap simply wanted to talk.

  ‘Larken bought an edger at the flea market. Paid a dollar and a half for it. Want to go halfies?’ This was rhetorical. Mr Larken would present Marianne with a written bill for seventy-five cents, which Marianne would pay without demur. Sometimes Marianne believed that the two downstairs tenants suspected Marianne owned the place and were playing a game with her. Other times she was sure they had no idea. Whatever their suspicions or lack thereof, they had decided that garden maintenance was to be their particular responsibility, and that the upstairs tenant should pay what they delighted in calling ‘halfies.’ Since the expenditures never exceeded two or three dollars at a time, Marianne managed to cope.

  ‘An edger?’ she asked.

  ‘You know. A flat blade on a handle, to cut the grass straight where it comes along the flower garden. It was all rusty is how come he got it so cheap. You know Larken. Give him something rusty and he’s happy as a clam all day cleaning it up. Does your brother know this cousin of yours?’

  As usual with Mrs Winesap’s more personal inquiries, the question caught Marianne completely by sur
prise and she answered it before she thought. ‘No. I just met him today myself.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mrs Winesap with deep satisfaction. ‘So you’ll have to call your brother and tell him about it. About meeting a new relative and all.’

  The emotion Marianne felt was the usual one, half laughter, half indignation. Her response was also the usual one: dignified, slightly cool. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I was just going to call Harvey, Mrs Winesap. Take that soda along with you. I do need to catch him before he leaves for the evening…’ Polite, firmly shutting door behind her visitor, Marianne fought down the urge to peer through the keyhole at the landing in fear she might see Mrs Winesap’s eye peering back at her. Instead she went to the phone, moved both by her assertion and the need to leave some kind of message.

  Harvey always considered it an intrusion for Marianne to tell him anything. Nonetheless, he would deeply resent not being told. A quick message on his machine would be the least risky way of informing him, and if she avoided answering the phone for a while after that, he might see Makr Avehl Zahmani’s name on the news and realize that Marianne was, in fact, only telling him the truth. It was part of Harvey’s usual treatment of her to accuse her of making up stories, as though she were still seven years old, and once committed to the assertion that she was fabricating it would be hard for him to back off. She encouraged herself to take a deep breath and do it, managing to make the message sound calm and good-humored. She unplugged the phone with a sense of relief. She didn’t want to hear it ring if he called her back.

  ‘I am ahead on points,’ she told herself. ‘Well ahead, and I have no intention of ever getting behind again.’ She tried the pot of crocuses in various places, finally putting them on the window seat as she had originally intended, then threw together a few scrappy bites of supper. When she had finished, she started to take the dishes into the kitchen, stumbling unexpectedly over something which was not supposed to be there.

  The Box.

  It was at the edge of the kitchen counter, where she could not avoid stepping over it, where she must have already stepped over it while preparing her meal without seeing it, without remembering. She stared at it in confusion. That morning – yes, that morning it had been in the living room under the coffee table. Who could have moved it? Mrs Winesap? Perhaps out of some desire to help, some instinct to tidy up? With a grimace of actual pain she lifted it back to the place she last remembered it being, half under the table, possessed in that moment by a completely superstitious awe and fear.

  The Box was a symbolic embodiment of Harvey-ness. If she gave him cause for disturbance up in Boston, then the Box would take it out on her down here in Virginia. She knew this was ridiculous but was as firmly convinced of it as she was of her own name. Her mood of valiant contentment destroyed, she went about her evening chores in a mood of dogged irritation. Sounds bothered her. Traffic. Mrs Winesap rattling the trash cans. Doors closing. A phone ringing. Mrs Winesap laboring up the stairs and a repetition of that firm, brook-no-nonsense knock, the knob turning, her voice.

  ‘Girl, your brother called our phone. Says he’s been trying to reach you and can’t get an answer.’ Broad face poked around the edge of the door, eyes frankly curious as the face was frankly friendly.

  ‘Oh – shit,’ said Marianne, breaking her own rules concerning language and behaviour.

  Mrs Winesap pulled a parody of shock over her face. She had heard Marianne’s lecture on scatology directed more than once at Mr Larken. ‘Got the phone unplugged, haven’t you?’

  Marianne nodded in dismal annoyance. ‘How did he know to call you? He’s never been here. He’s never even met you.’

  ‘Yes, he did. Came by one day about two weeks ago. Told me he was your brother. Introduced himself. Course, I introduced myself back. We talked some.’

  ‘You … talked some.’

  ‘I told him it was a nice day,’ she reported with dignity, ‘and I told him you weren’t in your apartment but I’d be glad to take a message. He pumped me all about you, and I let him know I was blind in both eyes and couldn’t hear out of either ear. Did tell him my name, though, and I’m in the book.’

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘No reason to. Why upset you? I didn’t like him, so I figured you probably didn’t either. He was all over sparkle like a merry-go-round horse, expecting anyone with a – with breasts to fall down and play dead.’

  ‘Oh.’ This was precisely Marianne’s view of Harvey, but she had not thought it generally shared. This explained why Mrs Winesap had at first thought Makr Avehl was her brother. ‘So, he knew your name and looked you up in the book.’

  ‘Most likely. Anyhow, just now I told him the reason you didn’t answer was you weren’t in and I’d be glad to leave a message for you to call him. Consider message delivered, OK? Seemed best.’

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Winesap.’

  ‘One of these days, girl, you’ll get tired of calling me “Mrs Winesap,” and the name “Letitia” will just slip out. I won’t mind, whenever that is.’ She shut the door firmly behind her, leaving Marianne in some limbo between laughter and tears.

  The door opened again to allow Mrs Winesap to deliver herself of an utterance.

  ‘Marianne, whatever it is you don’t like about that man, brother or not, you got a right. Don’t you sit up here feeling guilty because you don’t like him.’

  This time tears won.

  Oh, yes, she did feel guilty about it. The only family she had left, the only kin, and she frequently wanted him gone. ‘Begone, burned, buried,’ she chanted quietly. If there was any actual guilt, it was Harvey’s, not Marianne’s, but knowing this didn’t seem to make the horrid nagging weight of it any easier. She often tried to reduce the whole conflict to one of disparate personalities. ‘He is domineering,’ she told herself, ‘and authoritarian. He relishes power, and he uses it, but he is not some all-devouring monster.’ Saying this did not convince her this time any more than it had before.

  ‘So, I’ll return his call,’ she told herself, plugging in the phone and tapping his number with hesitant fingers.

  ‘Harvey? Returning your call?’ She listened with suppressed, seething warmth as he complained that she had not been in earlier, that she should not leave messages on his machine unless she would be available to take a call, that—

  ‘Harvey, I am sorry. I didn’t intend that you should have to take the trouble to call me. I just wanted you to know about the Zahmani Prime Minister from Alphenlicht. I thought you’d be interested.’

  Oily sweet, the voice she hated. ‘Bitsy? Are you playing one of those infantile “let’s pretend” games again?’

  She heard her own voice replying, ‘Harvey, hold on a moment, will you? Someone’s at the door.’ She took a deep breath, strode to the door, opened it, closed it, mumbled to herself, struck the wall with her hand. Her usual response to him under like circumstances would have been something full of self-doubt, something cringing. Harvey, I don’t think so. He really did look as though he was related. He really did say…

  She returned to the phone. ‘Harve. Someone has come and I have to go now. If you catch the news tonight or tomorrow, you’ll probably see the Prime Minister on it. He’s here to speak at the UN. Sorry I have to run.’ And hung up on Harvey S. Zahmani without waiting for permission.

  He would not want to appear foolish, not even to her. Give him time to find out that what she had told him was the simple truth, and he’d be less likely to take some irrevocably punitive decision about money matters – always his last argument when others failed. She unplugged the phone again, resolving not to connect herself to the world again until morning. ‘One more point for order,’ she sighed. ‘Score for order, for the day, one thousand and one.’

  In the morning, she forgot to connect the phone. When she got home, it was ringing. There was no time to think who? How? She knew it was Makr Avehl and answered it without a qualm. ‘Thank you for the flowers,’ she said, her voice slipping sideways into c
hildlike pleasure.

  ‘You said you intended to shop for some,’ he replied, ‘but I knew you wouldn’t have time yesterday if you were in class. I took most of your afternoon, so it was only proper to repay.’ His voice was enthusiastic, warm. It changed suddenly. ‘I was in New York today, at the UN. I met your brother. He’s very like you in appearance.’

  ‘Harvey’s in Boston,’ she said. ‘Not at the UN. You can’t have—’

  ‘Sorry,’ he laughed. ‘I didn’t lead up to it. A woman named Madame Delubovoska and I are on opposite sides of a very small international issue. Madame and I are related. Madame, it turns out, is your half-brother’s aunt, his mother’s much younger sister. Today, in New York, your half-brother was visiting his aunt and I met him. Is that somewhat more clear? I said he much resembled you.’

  ‘It’s you he resembles, actually. When I first saw you, I thought you were Harvey.’

  ‘That’s true. You even said so.’ There was a long silence, a calculating silence. ‘Marianne, may I come see you?’

  ‘You’re in New York.’

  ‘No. I was in New York. I’m about two blocks from you, in a phone booth.’

  ‘Well, of course. Yes. Can you find the house – oh, you’ve already been here once.’

  ‘I’ll find you.’ Dry-voiced, humorous, amused at her confusion. She put her hands against her flaming face. It took practice to behave with calm and poise around men like Makr Avehl – around men at all. Marianne had not practiced, had no intention of practicing, for she had decided not to need such skill. She told herself that just now her concerns were housewifely. She hadn’t dusted, hadn’t vacuumed since the weekend. Well, it didn’t look cluttered, except for the Box. Better leave it, even if he noticed it.

  There was nothing in the house to offer him except some sherry and cheese and crackers. Well, he couldn’t complain, dropping in unexpectedly this way. Quick look in the mirror, quick wash up of hands and face. No time for makeup. No need with that hectic flush on lips and cheeks. ‘Lord,’ she thought, ‘one would think I had never had anyone drop in before.’ A moment’s thought would have told her the truth of this. There had been no one to drop in. Except for Mrs Winesap. And the plumber. And the phone man. And people of that ilk. The stairs creaked outside her door.