If she didn’t apologize, she could count on humiliation, because he would make her the butt of his wit — and it was fearsome — on every occasion offered him, the more public the better. In private, he would not speak to her at all; in public, he kept everyone weak with laughter at his jokes about her faults and her weight and her one front tooth that was crooked and any tiny miscalculation that she might have made in the course of the day… or the course of the night. He would set her up to fall into his traps, and sit back beaming while they roared at her misery; and he would raise one elegant eyebrow and cluck his tongue at her as you do at a pettish child and say, “Poor sweet baby, you have no sense of humor at all, do you?” It was a blessed relief to go to work and escape from him. Always.
The other women laughed at his jokes as well as the men, and Nazareth knew why. If they didn’t, two things would happen to them. First, Aaron would include them in his war of ridicule. Second, their husbands would accuse them of being sullen and of being “wet blankets that spoil everybody’s fun” and of being too stupid to understand even the simplest funny line. The men, most of them, thought Aaron was the most entertaining person they’d ever had the pleasure to have around.
If Nazareth was sufficiently humble, she might gain a day or two of respite, but no more. Not only did things she said hurt his feelings, and looks on her face hurt his feelings, and things she did or failed to do hurt his feelings, he could not bear it if she did anything well. If someone complimented her, Aaron was enraged. If she received a routine note of commendation for a job well done, he was furious. If she had a contract in hand and he had none, he was angry with a foul dark anger. She did not dare beat him at chess or cards, or win a game of tennis from him, or swim a few laps more than he could, because he couldn’t handle any of those things.
And it was Nazareth who bore the brunt of it when Aaron was bested at something by another man. In public he was the good sport, there to shake the winner’s hand and admire his skill; back in their bedroom he would pace endlessly around the room, raving about the bad luck and the series of mysterious accidents that had kept him from being the winner.
In public, his children were the apples of his eye, always tucked under Daddy’s arm or bouncing on Daddy’s knee. In private he detested them. They were useful only as possessions, something he could show off as he showed off his collection of swords or his cursed languages; he had no other interest in them. And he made no pretense of having any interest in Nazareth except for her sexual convenience, the money she earned for his private accounts (and how bitterly he complained about the 40 percent of her fees that went into the community accounts when he knew nobody but her could hear him!) and her value as a foil for his wit. If the day came when she could no longer be useful in any of those roles, he would have no more use for her than for a stranger… probably less. At least a stranger would have offered him novelty.
She might have complained, but there was no one to complain to. The men loved Aaron, since he had too much guile ever to turn his petulance on them — he had outgrown that, as Thomas had predicted that he would. And complaining to another woman would have been like shouting down a well. “If you live with a man, it’s like that,” they’d say, if they bothered to say anything. She believed Aaron to be far worse than most men — she knew, for example, that although her father was often angry with her mother he was always courteous to her in public, and she had seen no other man who tormented his wife as Aaron tormented her. But the women who did not have her problem had their own problems. There was no end to the inventiveness of men when their goal was to prove their mastery.
It was ironic that she had accepted this life for the sake of the Encodings, for there had not been any since the day of her wedding. It was not only that she never had an instant alone when she could have sat down and worked at them, not only the problem of a hidingplace for the work; she felt as if some sort of deadness had crept into her mind and removed forever whatever had been the source of her efforts.
I am stupid, Nazareth thought. And I am not alone in that opinion. Aaron thought her stupid, certainly; he would teach her sons to think so. And the one and only time that she had slipped and tried to tell another woman what her life was like, that woman had called her stupid.
“Good Lord, Nazareth,” she had said. “You don’t have to tolerate that kind of thing — you manage him, you little ninny. How can you be so stupid?”
Manage him. How do you manage a man? What did it mean, to “manage” him?
“Mrs. Chornyak, I’d better go in with you and explain.”
Nazareth jumped… she hadn’t realized that the traffic had started moving again, much less that they’d arrived.
“Thank you, Mr. Dressleigh,” she murmured. “I’d be very grateful if you would do that.”
“Part of my job,” said the driver, carefully making the point that nothing else would have caused him to exert himself on behalf of a woman of the Lines. And then he was off, with Nazareth doing her best to keep up with him. He would explain, he would be gone, and this evening some equally reluctant hero would come to collect her. It made no difference to Nazareth; she had never had a driver who was friendly, or even very polite. Or who could be bothered to get her name right. She came from Chornyak Household, she wore a wedding ring — she would, therefore, be “Mrs. Chornyak,” and never mind the details.
But when the explanations and the formalities were over, and she was finally seated in the interpreter’s booth and arranging her dictionaries around her in preparation for beginning her work, she found that the universe had not forgotten her birthday after all. It had in fact prepared for her an absolutely splendid birthday gift, something she never could have conjured up for herself.
She had expected that this day would be more than usually tiresome, because the subject of the negotiation was an import tariff — never a fascinating item — and because she had no help whatsoever. Her nine-year-old backup was solidly locked into a negotiation in his own Interface language that could not be postponed; the six-year-old was down with one of the contagious childhood illnesses; and Aquina Noumarque was working in Memphis and could not come to help her either. That meant no support, either formal or informal; it was not an easy way to work.
Because her mind was taken up with the problems this would mean for her, she didn’t even realize anything was wrong until she began to hear whispers and to feel the sort of tension that is the product of body-parl shouting distress. It caught her attention at last, and she looked up from her materials to see what minor catastrophe had upset the negotiations… perhaps she was in luck and a government man had broken a leg? Not painfully, of course, and not seriously; she wasn’t a vindictive woman.
And there sat her Jeelods in their usual coveralls, staring at heaven knows what, with an expression of grim pleasure on their square faces, and Nazareth gasped aloud.
“Dear sweet suffering saints,” she said under her breath, not even stopping to be sure that the microphones hadn’t yet been activated, “those are females!”
They certainly were. Even in the loose garments that were prescribed by their state religion, even with their hair close-cropped in a way that no Terran woman would have ever chosen, it was clear that they were females. Either they were unusual specimens, or the Jeelod woman was typically large of breast; large of breast and distinctly pointed of breast.