“Eventually. Pretty much. The one who’s still in college goes a long way toward making up for the other two, though. And there are the lawyers’ bills, too, but you know about those,” Colin said.
“Fuck, do I ever!” Sanchez winced. “Those mothers send their kids to Harvard, and it’s, like, petty cash for them. No wonder they run the country.”
“No wonder at all.” Colin nodded. Gabe had that one straight, all right. Did he ever! Colin consoled himself by remembering that even lawyers’ brats at Harvard fell foul of booze and dope. And some of them would decide they were more interested in discovering themselves than in getting a diploma. Some would figure they already knew it all, and again leave without the sheepskin. Some would graduate, and then try to make it as rock’n’ rollers instead of sensibly imitating Dad and Mom.
He knew all the verses to all those songs. Maybe, in the end, things evened out. Maybe. He wouldn’t bet anything he couldn’t afford to lose.
Dr. Ishikawa came out of Mrs. Peterfalvy’s neat little house. “We won’t be sure till the DNA results come in, but it sure looks like another one.”
“Yeah, I figured the same thing,” Colin said. “Will this guy ever fuck up?” He’d put on an optimistic face for the TV morons. Among his own kind, he could say what he really thought. Cops were like family. They didn’t-usually-hold the truth against you.
Not that that did you a hell of a lot of good. But there it was, and Colin took what small advantage of it he could.
The Rockies. There they were, right out the apartment window. Vanessa liked that. On clear days, you could see mountains in Los Angeles, too, but they sat lower on the horizon, and they sure didn’t march from north to south in one magnificent straight line. When it got smoggy, they disappeared.
Then again, the Rockies also disappeared when it got smoggy. Till Vanessa moved here, she hadn’t thought Denver could get smoggy. Surprise! Too many cars in not enough space could do that almost anywhere. Denver had so many cars, and so many people who’d moved here in the past twenty-five years to escape the crowding and pollution in wherever the hell they were from, that its freeway system was hopelessly overstretched. Morning and afternoon traffic crawls made Vanessa miss L.A.’s commutes. Before she moved, she wouldn’t have imagined anything could.
Pickles was not a big Denver booster. He’d spent the first couple of days after he got here pissing and shitting on the apartment rug. She’d gone through a bottle of that Nature’s Miracle enzyme junk, but the place still smelled of cat. Part of that was marking his new territory, of course. And part was expressing his opinion of anybody who could coop him up in a carrier for as long as it took to get from California to Colorado. He couldn’t write angry e-mails, but he got the message across.
Vanessa’s new job didn’t pay as well as the one she’d left. But the apartment was bigger, newer, and cheaper than the one she’d had before. People in Denver bitched about the high cost of housing. Vanessa wasn’t impressed. Even after a couple of market meltdowns, L.A. still cost more.
She didn’t particularly like her new job. Amalgamated Humanoids made everything from crash-test dummies to fancy audio-animatronic robots. They competed for a lot of government grants, so they needed someone to write and edit proposals. Reading RFPs from the Feds proved that Washington did believe in capital punishment, at least by boredom. Reading what allegedly bright Amalgamated Humanoids engineers fondly imagined to be English proved some people grew up without a native language. That was the kindest explanation Vanessa could find, anyhow.
She hadn’t likeeli job she’d quit so she could move to Denver, either. And she hadn’t liked the one before that. She really hadn’t liked the classes she was taking at Long Beach State, which was why she’d got a job instead.
She wasn’t happy unless she disliked something, not that she’d ever put it like that. Bryce had, not long before she told him to hit the road. Cause and effect? She would have denied on a stack of Bibles that the crack had anything to do with the breakup. She would have said the same thing about the poem he’d had accepted. It was, when you got right down to it, a pretty goddamn stupid poem.
One thing she didn’t love about Amalgamated Humanoids-she was starting a collection, the way she always did-was the wild up-and-down workload. Proposals had iron deadlines. If they had to go out by 3:27 p.m. Tuesday precisely, you made sure they did. If that meant pulling sixteen-hour days Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, you pulled them.
And if, after that, you spent the rest of the week counting paper clips and rubber bands and goofing around online, the boss didn’t care. You stored up energy for the next crazy time.
Not everything in Denver was perfect, then. But it was no worse than L.A. As soon as Vanessa turned in her California license plates for ones stamped out by Colorado convicts, she felt more or less at home.
The one down spot-the place where she was unhappy without wanting to be unhappy, in a manner of speaking-was her love life. When she was in the throes of writing, or of translating into English someone else’s godawful attempt at writing a proposal, she didn’t have time for Hagop. And she soon started to wonder if Hagop ever had time for her.
“I am too busy,” he would say when she called him. Not all the time, but often enough to be annoying. More than often enough: Vanessa had a low annoyance threshold.
He wasn’t always too busy. Oh, no. When he woke up with a bulge in his pants, he was charming and attentive and sweet… till she put out. Then the carpet business consumed him again.
Bryce had been horny all the damn time. He’d sulk and get pissy when she said no. And if she said no two or three days running, he’d play with himself instead. It made her feel she was just a convenience for him, maybe a little more enjoyable than a hand but not absolutely necessary. She’d told herself things would be different with an older man. He wouldn’t keep bugging her the way Bryce did. And he’d be grateful when she gave herself to him.
Well, yes and no. Hagop wasn’t horny all the damn time. Biology wouldn’t let him be. But, when he was, he bugged her just as much as somebody half his age would have. Once he got what he wanted, he ignored her till the next time he started feeling the pressure again.
Vanessa had never been one to suffer in silence. As soon as she got irked enough-which didn’t take long-she called him on it. “The only reason you want me around is so you can fuck me,” she said one evening, after he’d done just that. The blunt language would have made her father flinch, so she hoped it would have the same effect on any man his age.
No such luck. Hagop leaned up on one elbow and looked at her, his heavy-featured face expressionless. He liked a light on in the bedroom; seeing what they were up to helped him get where he was going. After a moment, he said, “And this surprises you because…?”
“If we’re lovers, you’re supposed to love me. Not just lay me. Not just make love to me. Love me,” Vanessa saidot just›Or what the hell did I go and get rid of Bryce for? She kept that part to herself: she had an accurate suspicion that Hagop wouldn’t care why. Bryce sure hadn’t cared why she’d dumped the guy she was living with before she met him. All he’d ever cared about was getting it in.
Hagop’s face remained studiously blank. “I am afraid you may ask more than I am able to give.”
“Oh, yeah? I’d better not.” Vanessa glared at him. “I’ve got news for you-I didn’t pack up and move to Colorado just to be your fuck toy.”
“I did not expect you to move here at all,” he answered with a shrug. “As long as you did, though, do you expect me not to enjoy it?”
Things were falling apart. Vanessa didn’t need to be the King of Babylon to see the writing on the wall. “You filthy son of a bitch!” she snarled-not the ideal endearment when they were both naked in her bed and his seed still dribbled out of her to make a wet spot, but most heartfelt. “You moved here to get rid of me!” It was obvious now. Why in blue, bleeding hell hadn’t it been while she was still back in San Atanasio?
With dignity, Ha
gop shook his head. “I moved here for exactly the reason I told you in California: I saw the chance to make more money.”
“Rug merchant!” she jeered. “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it?”
He got out of bed and started to dress. “I am going to pretend I did not hear that. Count yourself lucky that I am.” His voice held.. nothing.
Vanessa knew all about hot rages. Meeting a cold one gave her pause. She’d fight like a wildcat. All the same, it wouldn’t be hard for her to end up dead in this apartment where she hadn’t lived very long.
“So I did not move here for the purpose of getting rid of you,” Hagop continued tonelessly, tucking his shirt into his slacks. “That, as they say in the trade, was an added bonus.”
An added redundancy. But she didn’t say that, either. She did say, “What am I supposed to do now?”
He shrugged again. “This is no longer my worry. You are old enough to be an adult, unlikely as it sounds. You will land on your feet or on your back-whichever suits you. And then, before too long, you will find out that the next one, whoever he is, does not measure up to your imagination, either.”
He walked out of the bedroom. Pickles meowed at him. He didn’t answer the cat. The front door opened. It closed. It didn’t slam-Hagop was still holding things in. His footsteps faded down the stairs. With the door closed, she couldn’t hear them at all by the time he got to the bottom.
“You bastard! You stinking, shitheaded bastard!” she whispered. Then she all but ran into the shower. She’d used it not long before he came over, but so what? Now she wanted to scrub every trace of his touch off her body. She didn’t usually use a bath sponge. Tonight she made an exception. She turned the water up as hot as she could stand, too.
Once she finally came out, she stripped the sheets off the bed. She wanted to throw them out. She really wanted to douse them in gasoline and make a bonfire out of them. Wasn’t some ancient movie called The Burning Bed? If she could douse Hagop in gasoline and make a bonfire out of him…
But she couldn’t. Oh, she could, but she was much too likely to get caught. The asshole wasn’t worth doing hard time for. As a cop’s kid, she knew better than most how godawful state prison was.
And she couldn’t even toss the sheets. Replacing them wouldn’t be cheap. After making this move-making this move for that worthless, reptilian turd! — she couldn’t afford a lot of grand gestures. She’d just have to shove quarters into one of the building’s machines and wash that man right out of her bedclothes. Any of Amalgamated Humanoids’ products had more in the way of warmth, more in the way of feeling, than he did.
So why hadn’t she realized that when she fell for him after she gave Bryce the heave-ho? She shrugged. She’d been looking for a lifeline, and she’d found one. Now she discovered it had an anvil on the end, not one of those cork floats.
She pulled fresh sheets out of a cabinet in the hall. All the bed linen in there had been washed since Hagop’s nasty sweat last polluted it. It would have to do. Grimly, she started making the bed. Pickles thought it was a game, and tried to help. In lieu of punting him, she tossed a couple of kitty treats out into the hall and bribed him to go away.
Bryce Miller wondered if he would ever see a job after he finally finished his thesis. The way the economy looked these days, odds were against him. He’d played the grad-school game as well as anybody could. He’d been a reader. He’d had research assistantships and TAships. He’d tutored high-school kids. He’d taught at a couple of community colleges. The proof of his success was that he could see the end of the dissertation ahead, and he wasn’t broke. Yet.
Maybe if he’d chosen a sexier field than Hellenistic poetry… He shook his head. Wrong comparison. Hellenistic poetry could be plenty sexy. It could, here and there, be downright filthy. Maybe if he’d chosen a more practical field than Hellenistic poetry…
“But then I wouldn’t be me,” he murmured. He had his laptop set up on the table in the dining nook of the little one-bedroom place he’d hastily found after Vanessa decided change was in the air. Papers and books covered about two-thirds of the tabletop. When he needed to eat, he had to put the computer away.
If he hadn’t found a secondhand copy of The Persian Boy when he was in high school, he might never even have heard of the Hellenistic age, much less ended up trying to make a living studying it. Somewhere out in the big, wide world, there might be people, possibly even English-speaking people, who could resist getting drawn in by Mary Renault’s prose. There might be, but Bryce wasn’t any of them. He’d started trying to find out how much in the novel was real and how much she was making up. Most of it and not a whole lot, respectively, he’d soon discovered.
Writers were dangerous people. They could warp the lives of readers they’d never met, readers they couldn’t meet because they were dead by the time some beat-up old copy of one of their books fell into the right-the wrong? — hands.
Bryce wondered if he would ever write a poem that affected even one person as much as The Persian Boy had changed him. He laughed at himself. Talk about setting your sights high!
Out in the courtyard, one of the poolside regulars did a cannonball that raised a splash like a young mushroom cloud. Three or four of the others gave forth with whoops and applause. Maybe a dozen people-more men than women-pretty much monopolized the pool here. There was no law that said Bryce couldn’t swim in it. He didn’t think they would have gone out of their way to make him feel unwelcome if he had.
But that was the point. They hung out there, and he didn’t. The same kind of group, down to sex ratio and precancerous tans, had ruled the roost at the building where he’d lived with Vanessa.
He looked down at his own hands. He was pale almost to invisibility. No need for him to worry about melanoma, no sir. He’d probably die of some fungus infection he caught from an Egyptian papyrus of the second century BC, or else of pneumonia brought on by aggressive library air-conditioning.
Another cannonball, this one even bigger and wetter than the last. More cheers from the regulars. Bryce eyed the waves rolling across the pool and slopping over the coping on the far side. If you threw an asteroid into the Pacific somewhere near New Zealand, waves would swamp Los Angeles the same way.
“Cheery thought,” he said. The longer he lived alone, the more he talked to himself. He would have worried about it more if Vanessa’s dad (which was still how he thought of Colin Ferguson most of the time) hadn’t told him he did the same thing.
Susan thought it was funny-peculiar that he’d stayed friends with his ex’s father. It wasn’t even that they both found themselves in the same boat at the same time (or that the boat was named Titanic). Dammit, Bryce liked Colin, and for some reason it worked both ways. Had the older man’s life worked out differently, he would have made a good scientist instead of a good cop. He had that restless itch to know, to put pieces together till they formed a satisfying whole.
It probably wasn’t an accident that his new lady friend was a geologist. Bryce wondered what he’d seen in Louise, back in the day. She was nice enough-she worked at being nice, in fact, worked hard at it-but she wasn’t what you’d call long on brains.
“So what?” Bryce wondered, again out loud. Chances were Colin had been so happy he was getting laid regularly that he hadn’t cared about anything else.
Kai su, teknon? Bryce wondered. That was Greek, and it was what Julius Caesar had really said when he saw that Brutus was one of the guys shoving knives into him on the Ides of March. It meant You, too, kid?
Bryce was aiming it at himself. Now that Vanessa was gone, he wondered what he’d seen in her past a pretty face, nice tits, and long legs that opened for him like the door into heaven. What more did you need? When you were first starting out, you thought everything was just like the movies and you were guaranteed to live happily ever after.
He knew what she’d seen in him. She’d been fighting with her then-boyfriend, and Bryce looked like an escape hatch. That she’d be
en fighting with the other guy should have been a red flag. But when you had a boner that wouldn’t quit, it was easy enough to figure the fights were all the fault of the SOB she was ditching.
Did Hagop What’s-his-name figure Vanessa’s fights with Bryce were all his fault? Maybe, but then again maybe not. Hagop had a good many miles on the odometer. Chances were he’d seen that things were rarely as one-sided as the person talking about them made them out to be.
Of course, why would he care? When you landed a girl young enough to be your daughter, why would you care about anything? It might not last long, but wouldn’t you have fun while it did?
When I’m in my fifties, will I troll for girls in their twenties? Bryce was sure he’d still look at girls in their twenties; that was one of the things they were for. But to touch instead of just look? He hoped to n agaappily settled with someone by then. He’d hoped to be happily settled with Vanessa. Whatever else might happen, that wouldn’t, not now.
His phone rang. He picked it up, and smiled when he recognized the number. “Hey, Susan,” he said. “I was just thinking about you.” In a manner of speaking, it was true.
“Well, good. I was thinking about you, too,” Susan Ruppelt said. German or maybe Dutch, Bryce guessed. One of these days, he’d get around to asking her. It wasn’t urgent, not the way it might have been a lifetime earlier. In L.A. these days, any white whose first language was English counted as an Anglo. That cracked up Bryce and some of his Jewish friends, which didn’t mean they didn’t take advantage of it. Susan went on, “How crazy should you get before your orals?”
“There’s an interesting question. You’re going to, you know, whether you want to or not,” he answered. She was scheduled to take them fall quarter. It seemed a long way off to Bryce, but it wouldn’t to Susan.
“Tell me about it!” she yipped.
“I know. I know.” He tried to sound soothing. He’d survived his exams almost three years ago now, and got blasted afterwards. “Listen, if your chairperson’s worth the paper she’s printed on-”
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