by J. M. Frey
The woman makes a sort of short, high-pitched squealing sound. “And the accent!”
“Bao bei,” Pip murmurs, and takes my hand. “Don’t worry.”
“About what?” I ask.
“There might be a lot of people who . . . I didn’t think about that. Damn.”
“About what? Pip?”
“I’ll . . . I’ll explain later. Right now, I can’t . . . never mind.”
“Can I get a pic?” the woman asks, pointing her cellular phone at me already. I nod my assent, and the machine clicks and whirrs, and then her fingers are flying over the keypad. “I’m so posting this. Have you got a handle?”
I look at my other hand, wound around the grip of my suitcase. “Yes?”
“No,” Pip answers. “He doesn’t tweet.” I feel my mouth twist into a frown. I want to ask, but now is not the time. “I’ll tell you later, bao bei,” Pip murmurs, clearly agreeing.
When we arrive at our inn, I allow myself a few short seconds of gawking. For reasons that I can’t explain, I had expected our lodgings to be rather like the taverna where Pip and I faced down the Schrödingers: reeking of grease and tallow, floor of packed dirt and rushes, walls stained with soot and stale splashes of old beer. Of course it is a towering, glittering sculpture of glass and chrome instead, rather like our condominium.
All the buildings stretch to the stars in this world, businesses and homes alike. Why should the inns be any different?
We make our way to a line of people awaiting their turn to approach a counter. I wave Pip toward the seats of a nearby lounge, but she shakes her head. “I’ve been sitting too much today. Swollen ankles or no swollen ankles, I am standing.”
“As you wish,” I concede, and it earns me the blinding grin I was looking for. She turns her face up to mine, and I obligingly lower my own for a kiss. It is soft, gentle, and, above all else, breathtakingly comfortable. The easy familiarity of it, the gift of having someone that I can kiss and it can be routine, is one in which I will never stop reveling.
Around us, a clamor of life rushes through the lobby; people of all walks clutching bags and talking animatedly with one another, embracing friends and shaking hands with new acquaintances, making exclamations over revealed identities, smiling and laughing and just happy to be here.
Pip surveys the spectacle with pride and joy in every line of her body. “My people, my tribe,” she says. “Welcome to the madhouse, Syth.”
I grin at the diminutive. It sounds a bit like Seth, which is a name of her world, and much less unwieldy for the people around us to use. We use it around her family, her colleagues at the university, our neighbors. My full name, my real name, is a secret treasure for Pip and Pip alone.
When we reach the counter, Pip tells the woman standing behind a computer terminal her full name and our reservation confirmation number. When the woman asks for the credit card we made the booking with, Pip looks to me expectantly.
Ah, yes, we are trying to build my credit rating and a paper trail. I fumble my wallet out of my back pocket and stare a bit dumbly at the contents, slightly overwhelmed by the plethora of shiny plastic squares that seem to stand in for everything here. The length of the flight and the noise around me has me a bit dazed, and I blink at the rainbow of squares dumbly.
“This one,” Pip murmurs gently, gesturing subtly at the black card.
The woman behind the counter continues to smile a thin, milk-water smile and judges us with her gaze. I can tell that she very much wants to be an actress by the way she does her makeup, the way she stands, the way she gestures in a measured, theatrical way, by the cut of her hair and the style of her earrings—all of these give her away. But she will never achieve her dream because, for all that she has copied the poise and the style of the glittering stars of the fashion magazines, she is too abysmal at disguising her true feelings to project another’s.
She finds the lobby full of geeks disdainful.
I sign the slip of paper she offers to us, and Pip takes the key cards; and then we are heading for the elevator doors. Even if there were servants to help with the luggage and to escort us upstairs, there are too many guests arriving at once. It is simply faster to attend to finding our rooms alone.
The first thing Pip does when we get inside our rented lodging is to make a bee-line to the bathroom.
“Your kid is napping on my bladder,” she moans.
“Perhaps he has the right idea,” I say back, voice raised to carry through the closed door. The room is dominated by a very large bed and an overabundance of beige. There is a set of drawers and a massive television, a small desk with a chair, a pair of armchairs set before the floor-to-ceiling window. We are very high up, and I abandon the suitcase in the closet to stare down at the people and cars crawling along the roads spread out below me like a map.
“No sleeping,” Pip says.
“Do we have any plans? You haven’t told me a thing about why we’re here.”
“No plans. Not until after dinner.”
“Then I don’t see why I can’t nap. I’m tired.”
“We crossed three time zones,” Pip calls back out of the bathroom. “It’s only three o’clock here, though. You can’t sleep yet.”
“Why not?” I ask, and the words come out a bit more petulant than I wanted.
“It’ll throw your internal clock out of sync. Just stay up until our regular bedtime.”
“That’s seven hours away, Pip!”
She chuckles. “So have some coffee, you whiner.” The toilet flushes.
I scan the room, shedding my overcoat as I go, and find a very small coffeemaker sitting on top of an equally small fridge. It is less than half the size of the machine at our house, but it looks like it operates the same.
I pull out the basket and flip open the lid, but there, I falter. There is no can of beans, no grinder, no paper filters, nor faucet to produce water for the machine anywhere in the room. The fridge has no freezer, which is where Pip stores our unground beans, and there are no cupboards stocked with cups and saucers and spoons. There are only metallic sachets that have pictures of flowers on the side. I read the words slowly, still having to take my time with Pip’s alphabet, and they declare themselves coffee. But when I rip open the packages, I only find outsized tea bags.
I cast about for cups and only find paper cylinders of the sort we get at the local take-away shop, and the closest thing to cream I can unearth is a white powder in plastic squares.
“There is no coffee!” I shout to Pip, kicking the fridge in my frustration.
What I do not admit out loud is: And if there is, I don’t know how to make it.
It is infuriating, this being unable. I was once master of my world, and now I cannot even decipher how to produce a simple cup of coffee from some stupid little machine! How I loathe feeling so stupid!
“Of course there is,” Pip says, coming out of the washroom with a towel between her hands. “Here, give me the pot, I’ll fill it.”
“From the bathing room?” I ask, horrified.
“From the sink,” Pip says. “Put that filter in the basket.”
“It’s tea,” I protest.
“It’s coffee. It’s just in a bag, like tea. Same principle, different beverage.” She turns her back to me to fill the carafe as soon as I put it in her hands. Good, because I do not want her to see how I shake.
Of course. Dumb old Forsyth. How could I not have reasoned that the tea-bag marked coffee would in fact contain coffee? I bite my lower lip hard enough that it stings, though I don’t taste blood.
I forget that there is mirror above the sink, and Pip looks up and catches my expression in the reflection. She puts down the carafe, steps out into the room, and wraps herself into my embrace. I lean my cheek against the top of her head, spread my fingers along her back, and inhale.
“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t realize how rough this was going to be on you.”
“I’m f-f-fine,” I say.
�
��You’re lying,” she replies. “You’re not fine.”
I nod slowly.
“Too much new in one day?”
It’s our code for talking about the differences between our cultures, technologies, the pace of life, and the speed of information in Pip’s world. I nod again.
“Culture shock sucks, eh?” Pip says.
I nod a third time.
“Listen, I’ll make the coffee. You lie down and close your eyes for a bit, okay?”
“You said I shouldn’t sleep,” I say.
“A small nap won’t throw you too far off.”
“No,” I say. “I’d rather stay awake and sleep well tonight. I will unpack the case.”
Pip smiles and offers up a kiss, which I gladly, desperately take, needing to breathe her in, to taste her, to surround my senses and ground myself with the known. Then, we move on to our appointed tasks. The gurgle of the coffee machine is familiar, and the room takes on the scent of mornings at home. I am so sharply, swiftly reminded of the two of us dancing around one another in the kitchen with beautiful, domestic familiarity that I feel the tension slide out of my shoulders.
Once our clothing and coats are hung in the closet and tucked into the drawers, Pip and I each take a seat in one of the armchairs by the window and gaze out at the city spread beneath us. To the south, a very tall, gray tower needles toward the sky, and I wonder what its purpose is. Does this city’s mayor or sheriff rule from this seat, or is it some monument to a past leader? Perhaps we will have time to visit it. Pip hands me a paper cup of coffee and puts her swollen ankles up on my knees. I obligingly rub the instep of one of her feet with my free hand.
Pip groans, and her eyes slip closed even as her hands tighten around her own coffee.
“Oh god, I love you, Forsyth Piper,” she moans. I like it when she says my name like that, the way it is written on our marriage license.
“And I you, Lucy Piper,” I reply. I take a sip of the coffee when I deem it cool enough and do my level best not to spit it back out immediately. I swallow and gag. “But I do not love this. This is disgusting,” I say, staring at the flecks of white that have yet to dissolve into my drink.
Pip eyes me sideways and sips at her own cup. Then her nose wrinkles, and her mouth screws up in one corner. “Blech, you’re right,” Pip agrees. “Fuck the budget, let’s phone up room service and get some proper coffee and cream. A snack, too; your kid is starving. Oh, do they have deep fried mozzarella sticks?”
“The inn provides a kitchen?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Then why did we not take advantage of this service before?”
“It’s expensive. And despite the mortgage, we’re not wealthy, bao bei.”
I used to be wealthy. But things here cost so much.
“We could be, if I could find better work.”
Pip grunts. “We’ve been over this. You need to be patient. We need to build up a paperwork background for you before anyone will consider having you on as a securities manager or accountant. People are paranoid.”
“What about being Shadow Hand? Can I not work for your queen?” I ask.
“She lives on the other side of the ocean,” Pip says.
“You could move with me.”
“We don’t have the paperwork for that. Visas and things. They cost money, Syth.” I make an indignant sound. “And when we get there, what would you have to recommend you? I doubt Liz has need for a spymaster—or, another one, at least—and Charles and Wills even less so. Prince William might have even read your books, and then what? They’ll think you’re a kook. They’ll never let you near Kate and Georgie and Charlotte.”
It is truth, but it still stings like a slap to the face. “I have services to offer. I hate being stagnant.”
“I know, bao bei,” she whispers, and leans forward, generous belly pressed to her thighs so she can bus a chaste, soothing kiss to my lips when I meet her halfway. “I know you do. But Queen Elizabeth the Second of the United Kingdoms of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth does not need a Shadow Hand. She has MI5.”
“And James Bond.”
Pip chuckles. “Nope, he’s fictional too. Books, as well as the films we’ve watched.”
“But if Double-Oh Seven showed up on the doorstep to her castle, she would employ him, I am certain.”
Pip looks at me with such sadness in her eyes, such pity, that I am forced to look away.
“Tell me how to phone up room service,” I say, rising to my feet and going to the telephone on the desk, desperate for a change in subject and mood. “I believe I have room for one more new thing today.”
✍
I lay down for a small nap while we wait for the food to be delivered to our door. Well, I close my eyes, at least. But with Pip pacing circuits around the room, reading through a plastic bag of documents that she acquired down in the lobby, my attention, if not my gaze, is on my wife.
Wife.
I had dreamed many times in Lysse that I would find a wife in the abstract, that I could attract a lovely, kind companion and helpmeet of my own. And when Pip and I began our affair, there had of course been fantasies of being able to keep her forever. But in her world, partners don’t have to be wed to be together, or to have children. Many couples simply cohabitate with no legal documents to bind them. When I learned this, I decided that proposing marriage to Pip would be unwelcome. She was of a world where it was the choice to remain together that was important, the romantic gesture, and not the actual binding.
Such a surprise, then, when Pip had come in to breakfast one morning, very shortly after I arrived in her world, when we were still in her old apartment, and said, “Yes, I accept.”
“Accept what?” I’d asked, attention on the newspaper spread out in front of me, practicing my reading.
“I’ll marry you.”
I had looked up so sharply that I had nearly bit my own tongue. “I . . . w-when d-did I . . . ?”
“On the road,” Pip had said. “You wanted me to laugh the shadows out of Turn Hall. I asked if you were proposing to me, and you blushed and didn’t answer. So, I’ll answer instead. Yes, I’ll marry you.”
I had folded up the newspaper carefully to buy myself a few moments in which to organize my thoughts and calm my tongue. Then, I had looked up and reached out, taken Pip’s hands between mine, threaded our fingers together and kissed each soft, small knuckle.
“You don’t have to simply because you think my morals dictate it,” I had said slowly. Pip had thrown back her head and laughed.
“I want to,” she said. “Besides, I was thinking about how to get your legal paperwork started. You have to exist somewhere. A marriage at city hall just needs some photo ID, and I’m sure I can find someone to make you a fake driver’s license. My undergrads do it all the time. And then, if there is something official on file, we can build you up. Get you a social insurance number, get you some legal work, you know.”
I had tried not to let the ball of icy disappointment that had been crystallizing in my gut show on my face. “So, it is a marriage of legalities?”
“Well,” Pip had said, “I’m twenty-five, and you’re twenty-seven, and I think calling you my boyfriend is just a bit juvenile, don’t you think? I much prefer the term husband.”
The icy ball shattered under a swift warm glow of relief. “I rather do like the term wife.”
Pip grinned. “Strange how something so blatantly economic and patriarchal can make me so gooshy.”
“You believe, as many of your compatriots do, that marriage is not necessary for a couple to declare their love?”
Pip had used her grip on my hands to pull them toward her mouth, kissing each of my wrists. “Marriage was originally a business contract, in which an object called daughter was exchanged with another man and changed into an object called wife.”
“But surely that’s not still the case.”
“No, now wives and husbands are meant to b
e equals in the relationship, to both have a choice. Marriage is now a declaration before friends, family, and the government that the relationship we have is one that we have decided to declare as permanent, and binding. And that whatever personal arrangement we have within the framework of a legal marriage—whether we’re poly, or swingers, or have decided to be solo monogamous—is ours alone, and one we are happy with.”
I had grimaced. “That is not very romantic.”
“Sure it is,” Pip had said, grinning cheekily. “There’s nothing more romantic in this world than being willing to do all that damn paperwork.”
I can’t help the chuckle that now escapes as I recall that morning. It is traditional for couples to exchange tokens of intent in Hain when an alliance is formed. The Pairing gift is an important and symbolic. Rulers exchange property, soldiers exchange knives or swords, knights may swap pennants or horses, and farmers offer tools or Words. With lovers, it is less dictated by tradition. If the couple is male, they will sometimes exchange garments, or tools or weapons appropriate to their trades. Bevel and Kintyre, it seems, bought each other clothing in the colors of House Turn. Between women lovers, I am of the understanding that the tokens are usually more sentimental—blank books for turning into diaries, or small decorative combs for the hair.
In Pip’s world, the proposer usually gives the propose-ee a ring. I don’t know why a ring, instead of any other piece of jewelry, but I do know that it is a tradition. I have seen it enough on the television.
Though I couldn’t afford it immediately, I did eventually procure a ring for Pip. And she one for me. Bands of matching silver reside on both our hands, and I brush the pad of my thumb over the smooth, warm metal now.
The soft moment is ruined by a subtle knock on the door. I rise and allow the serving boy to enter with the wheeled cart. He lays out a coffee service and a covered platter on the narrow desk, and then retreats as far as the door. He looks at me expectantly.
