“That must be hard. Would you like me to get you a private lab, Greta? There would be less overhead, you could run it for yourself. It might help.”
“No thank you.”
“I could build a nice place for you. Someplace we both like. Where you can concentrate. Oregon, maybe.”
“I know that you could build an institute, but I’m never going to live in your pocket.”
“You’re so proud,” he said mournfully. “It could be doable. I could marry you.”
She shook her masked head. “We’re not going to marry.”
“If you gave me just a week, once a quarter. That’s not much to ask. Four weeks a year.”
“We couldn’t stand each other for four whole weeks a year. Because we’re driven souls. You don’t have the time for a real mar-riage, and neither do I. Even if we did, even if it worked, you’d only want more.”
“Well, yes. That’s true. Of course I would want more.”
“I’ll tell you how it would work, because I’ve seen it work. You could be the faculty wife, Oscar. I’ll still put in my eighty-hour weeks, but you can look after me, if I’m ever around. Maybe we could adopt. I’ll never have any time for your kids either, but I’d feel guilty enough to get them Christmas presents. You could look after the house, and the money, and maybe the fame, and you could cook for us, and who knows. Probably you would live a lot longer.”
“You think that sounds bad to me,” he said. “It doesn’t sound bad. It sounds very authentic. The problem is, it’s impossible. I can’t keep a family together. I can’t settle down. I’ve never seen it done. I wouldn’t know how to sit still. I’ve had affairs with three different women since last August. I used to line my women up one at a time. I can’t manage that anymore. Now I multiplex them. Giving you a ring and a bridal veil, that wouldn’t change me. I realize that now, I have to admit it. It’s beyond me, I can’t control it.”
“I despise your other women,” she said. “But then, I think of how they must feel, if they ever learn about me. At least that’s some comfort.”
He winced.
“You haven’t ever made me happy. You’ve just made me compli-cated. I’m very complicated now. I’ve become the kind of woman who flies to Mardi Gras to meet her lover.”
“Is that so bad?”
“Yes, it’s bad. I feel so much more pain now. But, I feel so much more awake.”
“Do you think we have a future, Greta?”
“I’m not the future. There’s another woman out there tonight, and she’s all dressed up and she’s very drunk. Tonight she’s going to have sex with her guy, and when she ought to be smart, she’ll just say ‘oh, the hell with it.’ She’ll get pregnant at Mardi Gras. She’s the future. I’m not the future, I’ve never been the future. I’m not even the truth. I’m just the facts.”
“I must be human after all,” Oscar said, “because I only get the facts in little bits.”
“We won’t ever marry, but someday we’ll be past this. Then I could walk with you on the beach. Feel something for you, just as a person, in some quieter, simpler way. If I have anything to give like that, it will be at the very end of my life. When I’m old, when the ambition fades away.”
Oscar rose and went to the glass doors. It was a very bitter thing to tell him, because he felt quite sure that she would in fact be doing that thing, in her old age. Wisdom and communion. But she would be doing it with someone else. Never with her lover. With a worship-ful grad student, maybe a biographer. Never with him. He stepped outside, shot his cuffs, and leaned out on the opulent grille of the balcony.
A large organized group was methodically working their way down Bourbon Street, under the blue and white banner of an extinct multinational bank. The revelers, grim and unsmiling, were neatly dressed in sober three-piece tailored suits and polished shoes. Most groups of this sort would throw cheap beads at the crowds, but the proles had cut all suppositions short: they were simply throwing away wads of cash.
“Look at these characters,” Oscar called out.
Greta joined him. “I see they’re in their holiday gear.”
A five-dollar bill attached to a fishing weight came flying up from street level, and bounced from Oscar’s shoulder. He picked it up. It was genuine money, all right. “They really shouldn’t be allowed to do this sort of thing. It could cause a riot.”
“Don’t be grumpy. I feel better now, it’s all right. Let’s go and break the bed now.”
She lured him into the bedroom. The damp air sang with erotic tension. “Shall I keep the mask on?”
He took his jacket off. “Oh yes. The mask is definitely you.” He set to work on her in a particularly levelheaded and elaborate fashion. During their long separation he had had enough time to imagine this meeting. He had formed a multilevel erotic schemata with a number of variable subroutines. The sheets were soaked with sweat and the veins were standing out on her neck;. With a strangled cry she tore the mask from her eyes, tumbled out of bed with a thump, and hurried out of the room.
He followed her in alarm. She was digging desperately in her purse. She came up with a pencil stub.
“What’s …” he began gently.
“Shhh!” She began scribbling frantically at the back leaf of a New Orleans travel guide. Oscar found a cotton bathrobe, put it over her shoulders, found his pants, sipped half a bottle of cold mineral water. When his temples stopped throbbing he returned to the bal-cony.
There were extraordinary scenes down on Bourbon Street. Their balcony, divided into segments, stretched the length of the little hotel and there were four women and three other men on it. There was a bizarre interplay between the people up on the balconies and the crowds at street level.
Women were showing their breasts to crowds of strangers, in exchange for plastic beads. Men were hoarsely yelling for the spectacle and throwing the beads as bribes. Women in the streets would display themselves to the men on the balconies, and the women on the balco-nies would display themselves to men on the streets. There was no groping, no come-ons; cameras would flash and gaudy necklaces would fly, but there was a ritual noli-me-tangere atmosphere to these exchanges. They were strangely old and quaint, like an elbow-link in a square dance.
A pretty redhead in the balcony across the way was tormenting her crowd of admirers. She would kiss her boyfriend, a grinning drunk in a devil suit, and then lean out with an enormous dangling swath of gold, green, and purple beads around her neck, and she’d teasingly pluck at the hem of her blouse. The men below her were booing lustily, and chanting their demands in unison.
After torturing them to a frenzy, she slung the beads over her shoulder and bared her torso. It was worth the wait. Slowly the stranger deliberately caressed her own nipple. Oscar felt as if he had been fish-hooked.
He went back into the hotel room. Greta had leaned away from her scribbling. Her face was pale and thoughtful now.
“What was all that?” he said.
“A strange thing.” She put her pencil down. “I was thinking. I can think about neurology while I have sex now.”
“Really?”
“Well, it’s more like dreaming about neurology. You had me all excited, and I was right on the edge… you know how you can sort of hang there where it’s wonderful, right on the edge? And I was thinking hard about wave propagation in glial cells. Then suddenly it came to me, that the standard calcium-wave astrocyte story is all wrong, there’s a better method to describe that depolarization, and I almost had that idea, I almost had it, I almost had it, and I just got stuck there. I got stuck there on the edge. I couldn’t get loose and I couldn’t quite come and the pleasure kept building up. My head started roaring, I was almost blacking out. And then it came all over me, in a tremendous rush. So I had to jump out of bed to write it down.”