Cockteasing, though . . . That was harder to handle, especially when it was cockteasing that interrupted his work. He wondered if Janine knew she was doing it, or how badly timed it was.
He also wondered if he wanted to make an issue of it. She went on and on about how controlling Paul was, and how that drove her nuts. Wouldn’t she think Marshall was acting the same way?
He scratched his head, mumbled, and eventually got back to writing. He was making up his story as he went along. He was making up living with Janine as we went along, too. He’d had girlfriends before, but the only people he’d lived with were his folks and, for that freshman year, the Korean guy he’d roomed with at the Santa Barbara dorm.
Janine, on the other hand, got what she knew about living with a man from her time with Paul. Marshall wasn’t just like her ex. That was one of the reasons she’d dumped Paul for him, or it should have been. But she’d got Paul to pay attention to her by yelling. So she yelled at Marshall, too, often snarkily.
That wore thin even faster than getting teased while he was writing did, because it happened more often. Finally, Marshall said, “Hey, you don’t have to go on like that, you know? I was already taking care of it.”
His new squeeze looked astonished. “You were, weren’t you?”
“Um, yeah,” Marshall said. The dishes had been going from the drainer into the cabinet. As soon as that got done, the silverware would go into the drawer, and the glasses into the cupboard over the stove. If you noticed what was happening and what was likely to happen, it should have been obvious before you started yelling.
“Whenever Paul would do stuff—and he didn’t do much—he’d crow like a rooster or like he wanted a medal for it,” Janine said. “You just went ahead and did it, and it, like, went under my radar.”
“I’m not Paul,” Marshall said pointedly. Trying to soften that with a joke, he added, “I’m not even the walrus.”
“The what?” Janine didn’t get it.
“Never mind.” Marshall didn’t bother explaining. He was fuzzy on the details himself, anyway. The Beatles were a band from long before his time, a band people older than his father listened to on oldies stations.
“You come out with the weirdest shit sometimes,” Janine said.
“Yeah, well, that’s what you get for messing with a writer,” Marshall said.
“What else do I get?” She grabbed him below the belt. She didn’t tease all the time. The silverware and the glasses went into the drawer and the cupboard later than Marshall’d thought they would. Since Janine didn’t bitch about them any more, that didn’t bother him.
She did keep coming on to him and not following through while he was writing, though. She thought it was a hoot. He was less amused. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said at last. “It’s like . . . I don’t know . . . like grabbing somebody’s arm when he’s driving.”
“Nobody drives any more. Not unless you’re in a bus or a truck.” Was Janine missing the point because she was dense? Or was she wiggling around so she wouldn’t have to argue about what bugged Marshall? He wasn’t sure himself. He wasn’t sure she was sure, either.
He made a couple of sales not long after he moved in with her. That felt mighty good. He didn’t want her saying he brought in no money. He wasn’t going to make as much as she did, but he needed to make something. He didn’t want to think of himself as her kept man, and he didn’t want her thinking of him like that, either.
The day-to-day grind ate most of his life, the way it eats most people’s lives most of the time. He was happy enough. Was he happier than he had been while he was still living with his dad and stepmom and little half-sister? He was getting laid a lot more often, which certainly didn’t hurt.
He rarely had the time to ask himself Do I want to be doing this for the rest of my life? He did sometimes wonder. From the looks Janine sent his way every so often, he suspected she sometimes wondered, too. He was still trying to figure out what a relationship was and how you kept it going. She’d just had one blow up and sink.
“It wasn’t your fault, Marshall.” She said that a lot. “I was already in the water, and you were a life ring.”
“Glad to be of service,” he would answer. In a way, it was reassuring. He didn’t want to blame himself for her leaving Paul—for her kicking Paul out of this house, if you wanted to be exact. Her ex still had boxes of junk in the garage. Marshall left them severely alone.
He didn’t want to blame himself, no. But every once in a while he did wonder what would have happened if he couldn’t have gone to help old Mrs. Lundgren move. Would Janine and Paul still be together? Would she have found herself some other life ring instead? Would that different life ring be living here now? Would he be asking himself these same unanswerable questions?
Or would he just count his blessings, figure Janine was more than cute enough and not impossible to get along with, and go from there? Most of the time, that was what Marshall did himself.
• • •
Rain came down as Kelly got out of Colin’s Taurus at the airport. It could rain any old time of the year in L.A. these days, but winter was still the season with the most wet stuff. She leaned back in to kiss Deborah in the car seat. “’Bye, Mommy,” Deborah said tragically.
“So long, sweetie,” Kelly said. “I’ll be back Monday.”
Colin got out to haul her carry-on out of the trunk and to hug her and kiss her before she went into the terminal. “I’ll miss you, too, you know,” he said.
“Well, I hope so. And I’ll miss you,” she answered. “But I’m not going to Helena or any other part of the end of the world this time. It’s just Chicago, for the geologists’ convention.”
“It’s winter,” Colin said. “In Chicago, it’s really winter.”
“That’s why they have it this time of year,” Kelly reminded him. “Since the eruptions, everybody holds conventions in the summertime, when it’s—”
“Warmer,” Colin finished for her.
“Well, yeah.” She nodded. “But hotel rates and everything are a lot cheaper this time of year, and the convention committee really got its rocks off on that.”
Her husband winced. “You’ve stuck around with me too long.” He turned back toward the open driver’s-side door. Traffic wasn’t a fraction of what it had been once upon a time. “See you Monday. Have fun with all your scientific buddies.” One more hug and he was gone.
The flight to O’Hare was routine. The cost wasn’t. If her department hadn’t sprung for some of it, she would have stayed home. The convention had laid on a shuttle bus to the Hilton. A good thing, too. Some Internet work had shown that cab fares were as bad as in L.A. Without every seat filled and a couple of fare-savers riding in the trunk with the luggage, no human being who wasn’t an All-Star second baseman or point guard could have afforded a taxi. Even a millionaire wouldn’t stay a millionaire for long if he took taxis very often.
At the hotel, most of the people in the check-in line were also in her line of work. She said hello to friends and acquaintances even before she got her key card and took her stuff to her room. Like the front desk, the bar was on the second level. It was only Thursday afternoon. The convention hadn’t officially opened. Kelly could see the bar was already doing a land-office business anyhow. She’d never gone to a professional gathering that worked any other way. From what Colin said, it was the same with cops. It was probably the same with birders and stamp collectors, too.
She met Geoff Rheinburg for dinner. “Better food than in Helena. Better beds, too,” she said.
He was presenting a paper on what they’d learned on their excursion to the abandoned capital of Montana. “Lord, I hope so,” he said. But he seemed distracted. He looked out through the glass curtain wall at the snow sifting down.
“You okay?” Kelly asked after several minutes when he said nothing else.
“Me?” He came back to himself with a wry chuckle. “Yes, I’m fine, Kelly. I’m wondering about Manic-Fi
ve and La Baie James, though.”
“You’re wondering about . . . what?” Manic-Five sounded like a band whose songs she’d almost heard. She didn’t know what La Baie James sounded like. Nothing she was familiar with.
Patiently, her mentor answered, “They’re Hydro Québec power plants. Manic-Five is on the Manicouagan River. The others are even bigger. They’re at, well, La Baie James—James Bay, it’d be in English. It’s the little bay at the southern tip of Hudson Bay. They’ve been putting power, more and more power, into the grid since the 1970s. And it’s cold up there. I mean, it’s really, really cold up there, and it gets colder every winter with all the supervolcano crud in the stratosphere.”
“Cold enough to freeze the rivers?” Now that Kelly knew what he was talking about, she could connect the dots. “What happens if it is?”
“We all find out,” he answered with what might have been gallows humor or the simple truth. “The grid’s . . . complex. It’s gone out for weird computer glitches, and it’s stayed up for the hell of it. But I don’t like the way I’ve had to learn about the situation through the back door. It tells me the people who know more about it than I do don’t want word leaking out.”
Kelly looked out at the snow, too. “Even these days, cold in L.A. or Berkeley’s just a word. Turn off the lights and most of the heat in a town like this in the middle of winter, though . . .” She didn’t go on, or need to.
“Uh-huh,” Rheinburg said. “If we can get out of the airport and back to California before things hit the fan—or before the ice up there stops the turbines—I’ll be a happy man.”
“If you feel that way, and if you know that much, I’m surprised you came to the convention,” Kelly remarked.
“If I were a totally rational man, I wouldn’t have,” he answered. “That’s about the size of it. But things up there may last till we get home. They may find better workarounds than I expect. I want to see some people here I may never see again if the Northeastern grid does crap out. And what the hell, Kelly. Sooner or later, we’ll get home again even if things do fall apart. It may mean standing in line for a train ticket and not making it back for three weeks, but we’ll get there.”
“Easy for you to say,” Kelly told him. “You don’t have a little kid who expects you back Monday no matter what.”
“Well, no,” Rheinburg said. “Although I might, if I were in the habit of hitting on my students. I’ve been tempted a few times, but never enough to do anything about it.”
He’d been married to the same woman as long as Kelly had known him, and for a fair number of years before that. There’d never been any hint of scandal about him. He was, if anything, scandalously normal. At a campus like Berkeley, that stood out more than it might have somewhere else. Kelly wondered, not quite for the first time, if she’d ever tempted him. She didn’t ask. This wasn’t science. Just because you wondered something didn’t mean you had to know the answer. Sometimes you were better off not knowing, in fact.
When the waiter came by again, Rheinburg ordered a second gin and tonic, which he seldom did. Then he said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t keep anything you really need in your room. You may have trouble getting back in there. The computer key may not work if there’s no power. I don’t know that. I haven’t researched it. The door units may have batteries in them. Why set yourself up for hassles you can duck, though?”
That was such a good question, it prompted Kelly to say, “Anybody would think you were a grownup or something.”
“I doubt it, even if I can play one on TV,” Rheinburg answered. She laughed. They finished dinner. He grabbed the check. She squawked. He wouldn’t listen. “I’m senior to you. Hell, these days I’m senior to damn near everybody. I can do things like this. I can afford to do ’em, too.”
There were receptions and cocktail parties after dinner. Kelly got a little buzzed, but only a little. Some people did use them as an excuse to drink hard. Some people needed no excuse to drink hard. And some people used drinking as an excuse to come on to others, while, again, some people needed no excuse. Still, there was less of that than there had been in the days before cell-phone cameras and harassment lawsuits.
Buzzed or not, when Kelly got back to her room she made sure she stuffed everything she had to have into her purse. Normally, she would have thought leaving it here was safer. From what Geoff Rheinburg said, these weren’t normal times. She wondered if there’d been any such thing since the supervolcano erupted.
The presentations got rolling on Friday. Kelly went to Professor Rheinburg’s, and made a couple of comments from the audience. She bought a fat book on the supervolcano at the Oxford University Press booth. Oxford books weren’t cheap, but weren’t so bad as the ones from Cambridge. Since it was deductible, the price didn’t seem too outrageous.
More geologists poured into the Hilton. There were more receptions and parties in the rooms Friday night. Kelly kept a drink in her hand in self-defense. As long as she had one, people didn’t try to press others on her. She still did some drinking, but less than she would have otherwise.
Because she did some drinking, she needed to get up in the middle of the night. She’d left the light on in the bathroom when she went to bed. She always did that in hotel rooms. Enough light leaked around the door so she could get there if she needed to without breaking her neck.
Except she couldn’t tonight. The room was pitch black. The digital clock on the nightstand was out. So was the red LED at the bottom of the flat-screen TV. The smoke detector’s red LED still worked—it had to be hooked to a battery. But one firefly didn’t spit out enough photons to do her any good.
She groped for her purse. Fumbling in it, she found her phone. It showed no bars. “Oh, shit,” she said softly. But she could—and did—use it to show her the way to the john. The toilet still worked. She went to the window. The light-blocking curtains did a good job. Little more light came in when she pushed them aside. Chicago and Chicagoland had just fallen back into the nineteenth century.
No—there were some lights way off in the distance. Maybe that was O’Hare, running on generators. Whatever it was, it had precious little company.
She thanked the God in Whom she didn’t particularly believe they’d given her a room on the sixth floor. When day gave light, she could use stairs to get up and down. If she were on the twenty-sixth, she might go down once but she wouldn’t want to come back up again.
And if she were in an elevator on the way up to or down from the twenty-sixth floor when the lights went out . . . she’d probably still be in that elevator now. Did the cars have battery-powered emergency lights? She sure hoped so. How long would the lights last? What kind of arrangements were there for evacuating passengers in a power outage? She was glad she could wonder about such fascinating questions in a nice, comfy bed.
How long would the room stay comfy? It was eerily quiet—the fan and the heat were out. Pretty soon, the chill outside would start leaking in; lows for this weekend were expected to be right around zero. Kelly used the light in her phone to go to the closet and grab the spare blankets off the shelf. She piled them on the bed. They weren’t spare any more.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. She’d read the poem in some lit course. Well, the bang had already come. It didn’t end the world, but the whimpering aftermath wasn’t much fun. And either her imagination was working overtime or it had already started getting colder in here.
XVI
“T hanks, Marshall,” Colin said to his younger son. He added a one-word editorial: “Adventures.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Marshall gestured vaguely. “I’m glad for you and Deborah she’s finally getting back. I’m kinda sorry for me, on account of I’ll miss the paydays I’ve got from you.”
“Nice to be loved for myself alone,” Colin said. Marshall laughed. Colin stepped out into the night. Marshall had it easy tonight—Deborah was already asleep. With any luck at all, Marshall could do as he pleased and get
paid for it.
Colin tried to remember if he’d driven at night since he’d taken Kelly to the hospital to give birth. A few times in the line of duty, yeah. He’d driven to the station in the wee small hours when Mike Pitcavage killed himself. They’d already had Deborah then. And some other times on police affairs. Not many, though.
He’d have to be extra careful tonight. Too many people forgot any cars remained on the roads. They didn’t bother with lights for their bikes or trikes. If a car encountered one of them before it could stop, he or she would be sorry . . . but not for long.
He picked his way east along Braxton Bragg Boulevard, heading toward the Harbor Freeway (though more people called it the 110 these days). He hit no stupid cyclists, though he had one near miss. When he got to the onramp, he smiled to himself. He’d faced down the LAPD over a big petroleum shipment right there. But the smile quickly vanished. He’d led San Atanasio’s finest in that caper at Chief Pitcavage’s orders.
He wouldn’t have had to think about any of that if Kelly were flying back to LAX. But the delays for flights were even longer than the ones for train travel. O’Hare had limited flights and limited hours. If it hadn’t been the busiest airport in the country before the grid went down, it wouldn’t be operating at all. Midway wasn’t, along with plenty of other airports back East.
So . . . Union Station instead of LAX. San Atanasio was only fifteen or twenty minutes from downtown L.A. by car. Amazing how little downtown impinged on the suburb, though. Most of the time, Colin had neither need nor desire to go there. He and Kelly had spent their wedding night at the Bonaventure Hotel. That was the night snow came back to L.A. Since then, he’d been there only a handful of times.
Things Fall Apart Page 26
