There was a phone ringing. Just to shut it up, Bobby went to it. Her voice said, "Oh my God, did I wake you up? I woke you up."
There was that bliss again. Unadulterated, immeasurable. The moments of the night before feeding him joy, almost worth the moment later when Bobby was gutted once more with the memory that she was Snowden's whore, and all the joy poured painfully out of him.
"I was there, at your place, this morning. I didn't hit the bell, it was like seven. I couldn't sleep last night, I was so charged. Robert, I had such a good time. I left you a package, though, outside your door. I got your name on the directory, someone was walking out so I just, you know, came up. Don't think I'm a freak, OK? I wanted to thank you for the book before I forgot. When I put something off for a minute, it can be months, a year before I get around to it. Right?"
Listening to Piper's voice over the receiver brought visions to Bobby's mind. Although he'd never actually read the Kama Sutra, suddenly Bobby could imagine what the poses looked like, imagine them very easily with Snowden and Piper as the sweating, heaving partners. Positions as absurd as a world that would do this to him.
"So did you and your lover Snowden have an exciting evening last night? He's not there now, is he?" There was a halfhearted intention at lightness, at carefree flirtation, it was just that the amount of sugar needed to make his voice not sound bitter was beyond Bobby's means for the moment.
"What? No. I just crashed. I was so tired. I just. . I had such a good time talking to you, I was pretty much exhausted. From the whole night. I didn't see him; I don't know where he is. He's probably off working on his Special Project, right?" There was derisiveness there. Bobby liked that, in theory, but he didn't know what she meant so asked for clarification.
"You know, that's what he calls the overtime work he does for Horizon, cleaning out the apartments and stuff. It's what they have him doing for extra credit in that little competition you've got going there. It's just grunt work. I'm sure whatever extracurricular assignment they have you doing is far more interesting."
"Oh yes," Bobby said, but Oh no was what he was thinking. Snowden had soiled his soul mate, now he was secretly slipping past him in the Horizon game as well. What kind of world was this where genius meant so little, where mediocrity was so often the champion? What was the worth of a species that recoiled from the brilliant and rejoiced in the dull? Another question: Was it the hangover that was hurting his head like that, or the force of the overwhelming dread that had besieged him?
Outside Bobby's door was a cardboard cylinder. Bobby told Piper this on his phone and she sighed back through hers. She told him to wait and open it until after she hung up, which wasn't much of a request since she hung up right after saying that.
Bobby put down the phone. Piper's package sat on the floor leaning against the hall wall, and soon he was as well. He knew what was inside it. It was one of the paintings she had talked about the night before, she wanted him to see one. Bobby wondered if it would be any good. Bobby began to pray it wouldn't be any good. Bobby began to believe, in those few seconds, that the unseen painting would reveal itself to be very bad, hackish, an arts and crafts reject, hence proving that he'd been right the second time, that Piper really wasn't his destined companion. There was no way his soul mate could be a hack. This painting, Bobby realized, could be the one piece of evidence that would turn this whole series of events from a tragedy into a funny sidebar. It was his emotional out.
The one relationship that Bobby had been able to maintain for more than a year had been with a mentally ill administrative assistant (Borderline Personality Disorder — DSM IV) who had believed with all her crazy little heart that she was put on earth to be a singer. She took classes, she sang in studios, she sang in bands. The thing is, she never sang in key, and there lay the problem. She was so tone deaf she didn't even know she was, and it meant so much to her that nobody had the heart to tell her otherwise. The longer the charade went on, the more impossible it became to end it. She was attractive enough and had a British accent so bands kept asking her to sing with them, and even though each pairing never lasted more than two practices after she first opened her mouth, it encouraged her to keep at it. At times, at those deluded times when Bobby feared she was it, she was the one, he would imagine with great horror that he would spend his whole life this way, contributing to the conspiracy. Lying to her. Lying to himself until he went mad and actually believed that her shrieks were beautiful. When she'd dumped him to go on tour with a ska band who'd only heard her (computer-enhanced) audition tape, Bobby had actually laughed. It still hurt pretty bad, getting dumped, but while she was still midsentence in the dumping he'd burst out laughing.
Praying for ugliness, Bobby yanked the canvas from its container, unrolled it, and looked for liberation. The work was a mess. There were colors everywhere. All primary. A bunch of cartoons traced onto the background. None of them seemed to bleed into each other, yet just by sitting so close together in space they seemed to blend in the eye and create the illusion of tertiary colors everywhere. The illustrations were originals, not tracings, done in one unlifting pencil stroke, freehand. It was making Bobby's heart race, just looking at the energy of it. It was so vivid you could almost hear it talking to you, almost smell things that weren't there. It was brilliant. It was the greatest work Bobby'd ever held in his hands. Bobby rolled it up, shoved it back in its tube, and then really got down to the wailing portion of his morning.
Bobby got himself to stop by saying, "That's it, I'm done playing. I accept the rules of this world, and I vow to win by them. As I owe this world nothing, I hereby free myself artistically and morally to do whatever I have to. I will use all of my intelligence, my creativity, my passion to capture everything I want. I will reclaim the love that is rightly mine and forge a life for us together. I will write the book that makes the world bow before me. In this Horizon contest I will burn brightly, high above the others."
Bobby was in his suit when he went down to the storefront. Walking by Nina, he went straight into Lester's office, closed the door behind him. Lester was sitting behind his desk eating a corn beef special on rye, the juice from the coleslaw streaming down the man's fingers and into a pool on the wax paper. The sight made Bobby want to vomit, but he stayed focused, began the speech he'd spent the last hour rehearsing.
"My name is Robert M. Finley."
"I know that, Bobby. Good afternoon. Did you have a good time last night? I had a ball. No pun intended."
"Yes, but listen, sir, my name is Robert M. Finley, and I know you have an idea of who I am, but I don't think you understand who I really am, or what I'm fully capable of. That is my fault, because while I feel I've outperformed my contemporaries, I know I haven't really pushed myself to realize my potential. May I continue, sir?"
"Continue."
"I am by far the smartest, most dedicated participant in the Second Chance Program. No one believes as much in the goals of Horizon Realty, Harlem, or in the African-American community as a whole than me, sir. I, Robert M. Finley, dedicate myself with all my heart and by any means necessary to the uplifting of all three, and I live to prove that to you. Now, I have been made aware that Mr. Snowden has been involved in a special project for the cause, and I am here to ask for an extracurricular opportunity as well."