“You must let him go!”
But Maria Elena would not be sidetracked. “You said that you deserve happiness. But why? Why do you deserve anything? Why you?”
This time Kate Monroe heard the question. It made her blink, and look briefly evasive. “I said a chance,” she decided, and became self-assured again, crying, “You had your chance!”
“Yes, I did,” Maria Elena agreed.
Kate Monroe misunderstood: “If you lost what you—”
“Oh, not Jack,” Maria Elena told her. “No. My chance at happiness was long before that.”
Kate Monroe couldn’t follow the conversation, and it was making her angry. She’d come into this house with a clear simple burning truth to express, but now it was all turning muddy and difficult. Maria Elena could understand what had happened there, could almost sympathize with the woman; this is the way it is when you try to act out your fantasies in the real world.
Trying to recapture the initiative, Kate Monroe said, loud and angry and vicious, “If that’s the way you feel, if you never cared for John, if all you ever wanted was a ticket to the United States—”
“Yes, that’s true.”
Kate Monroe stared, thunderstruck. “You admit it?”
“Why not?”
“Then why won’t you let him go?”
“Because he hasn’t asked.”
“That’s a lie!”
“I’ve never heard of you, Miss Monroe,” Maria Elena said. “Jack and I don’t talk much. But of course, he can go, if he wants.”
“He did ask you,” Kate Monroe insisted, clutching to the chair arms. “You refused.”
Maria Elena got to her feet. “John will be home in six or seven hours. Why don’t you look around the house, become familiar with it? When he comes home, you can discuss it all with him. You can tell him I will not stand in your way. That you yourself asked me if I would let him go, and I said yes.”
Kate Monroe was getting frightened now. The solid base of her universe was sliding beneath her feet. Staring up at Maria Elena, she said, “Where are you going?”
“I have a friend to visit in the hospital. I will probably be several hours.” Maria Elena pointed at the television set. “You could watch TV while you’re waiting for Jack. There are several interesting dramas on in the daytime. I hope your car isn’t blocking the garage.”
“No, I put it on the— Why? Why won’t you stay and talk with me?”
“Because it has all been said,” Maria Elena told her. Imagining Kate Monroe’s future, she couldn’t hold back the smile. “You’ll have your chance,” she told the wretched woman. “At happiness.”
27
More and more, in these latter days, Grigor couldn’t get out of bed at all. He had a knob of controls handy beside the bed, and could raise himself to a sitting position, and there he’d stay all day, sometimes reading, but more often — when the books were too heavy to hold, even the paperbacks — watching television. There were many channels to watch, and almost always there was something of a news or non-fiction nature somewhere within range. Grigor watched such programs because he still thought of them as grist for the mill, the raw material for more jokes for Boris Boris. But the truth of the matter was, there were now weeks when he didn’t fax even one miserable reject of a joke to the studio in Moscow.
He knew what the problem was, of course. It was obvious, and inevitable, and there was no way to counteract it; like the disease itself. The problem was that he’d been away too long. He no longer knew Russia as naturally as before, as automatically as he knew himself. What changes had taken place there, that Boris Boris should be commenting on? What was the au courant subject in Moscow this week? Grigor didn’t know He would never know.
Almost the only bright spot in his darkening and narrowing world was Maria Elena Auston, that strange lady they’d picked up at the demonstration. She wasn’t exactly a cheerful person, not as enjoyable as for instance Susan, but Susan had her own life to live, had a man of her own now — not some bedridden shell of a man — and very seldom came all the way up from the city to visit. Maria Elena did visit, usually twice a week, and there was something about her very solemnity, that awareness that at all times she carried sorrow somewhere deep within her, that made her a comfortable companion for the person Grigor had become.
We have both been damaged by life, he thought. We understand each other in a way the undamaged can’t know.
What a quality to share; he ought to make a joke about it.
When Maria Elena walked in, it was her third visit that week, a new record, and she was in better spirits than he’d ever seen her. “The plant is on strike!” she announced.
Grigor had just been brooding on how little of the world he recently understood, and here came Maria Elena to prove it. Unable to keep the impatience and irritation out of his voice, he said, “Plant? What plant?”
“Green Meadow! The nuclear plant!”
“Oh, yes. Where we first met. But you said you didn’t go there any more.”
“I drove by it.”
Maria Elena pulled the green Naugahyde chair closer and sat down, her strong face transformed by what appeared to be happiness. She was actually a beautiful woman, in a dark and powerful way.
It’s more than a nuclear plant being on strike, Grigor thought, but he didn’t know enough about her private life to be able to guess at what had changed her. A new lover? Something.
Something to make her drift away from him, like Susan?
Maria Elena was saying, “It’s the quickest route, so I sometimes drive by, and today there were many more pickets, and some had signs saying they were on strike! The workers are, because they know the experiments in there are too dangerous. A school bus was just going inside, with the pickets trying to stop it, so I had to wait, and one of the strikers told me the school bus was full of managers and supervisors!”
“But it’s still operating?”
“Oh, yes. And they’re still experimenting. But you know how they are, they don’t care about the danger, the most important thing to them is that their authority not be questioned.”
Grigor looked at the window. “That’s very close to here.”
“Eight miles.”
“Too close.” With a bitter smile, he asked, “Am I going to be assaulted by two nuclear plants in one lifetime?”
Maria Elena looked startled, then frightened, then disbelieving. “They wouldn’t let that happen!”
“No, of course not.” Grigor nodded. “No more than the officials at Chernobyl would let such an unthinkable thing happen.” Again he brooded at the window, thinking of that structure eight miles away. “I’d like to get inside that place,” he said. “Alone. Just for a little while.”
Sounding breathless, Maria Elena said, “What would you do?”
Grigor turned his head to look at her. When he smiled, his gray gums showed, receding from the roots of his discolored teeth. “I would play a joke,” he said.
X
What is he doing?
I prowl the earth, I tear furrows from the ground in my frustration, I sear the rocks and lash the gravestones. What is that silken slavey up to?
I can’t attack him head-on, that’s the most aggravating part of it. I have to acknowledge that now, after two encounters. He’s too strong for me to meet in direct confrontation.