Days passed and Kevin never came down, never returned to feeling normal. Late that week, watching a news report on the Mars landing, it dawned on him that he was never going to feel normal again. This startled him, made him faintly uneasy.
Not that he wasn’t happy. When he recalled the night in the hills with Ramona he got lighter, physically lighter, especially when working or swimming. Exhilaration resisted gravity as if it were a direct counterforce. “Walking on air”—this extravagant figure of speech was actually an accurate description of a lived reality. Amazing.
But it had been such a strange night. It felt like a dream, parts of it seemed to slip away each time he thought of other things, so that he didn’t want to think of anything else, for fear the whole night might slip away. When he saw Ramona again, down at their streetwork, his heart skipped a beat, and shyly he looked down. Would she acknowledge it? Had it really happened?
Then when he looked up he saw that Ramona smile, a beacon of pleasure, black eyes looking right at him. She remembered too. If it was a dream, they had dreamed it together. Relief gave his exhilaration another lift, he slammed a pick into the broken asphalt and felt like he might be tossed aloft.
Now he was truly in love. And for the first time. Late bloomer indeed! Most of us first fall in love in our teens, it’s part of the intensity of those years, falling for some schoolmate, not so much because of the qualities of the loved one but because of a powerful unspoken desire to be in love. It is part of the growth of the soul. And though the actual nature of the loved one is not crucially important, it would not be true to say that first love is thereby lessened, or less intensely felt. On the contrary—because of its newness, perhaps, it is often felt with particular strength. Most adults forget this in the flood of events that the rest of life pours over them, or perhaps they’re disinclined to remember those years at all, filled as they were with foolishness, awkwardness, shame. Often enough first love was part of the awkwardness, inappropriately directed, poorly expressed, seldom reciprocated… we prefer not to remember. But remember with courage and you will feel again its biting power; few things since will have made you as joyfully, painfully alive.
Kevin Claiborne, however, had not fallen in love in adolescence—or, really, at any time thereafter. The desire never struck him, and no one he met inspired him to it. He had gone through life enjoying his sexual relationships, but something was missing, even if Kevin was only vaguely aware of it. Doris’s angry attempts to tell him that, years before, had alerted him to the fact that there was something others felt which he did not. It was confusing, because he felt that he loved—loved Doris, his friends, his family, his housemates, his teammates…. Apparently it wasn’t what she was talking about.
So the affair with Doris had ended almost as it began. And when Kevin felt romantic love for the first time, at the age of thirty-two, after years of work at home and abroad, after a thousand acquaintances and long years of experience with them, it was not because of the obscure adolescent desire to love somebody. Nor was it just forces in his own soul, though no doubt there was movement there too, as there always is, even if it is glacially slow. Instead it was a particular response, to Ramona Sanchez, his friend. She embodied what Kevin Claiborne loved most in women, he had known that for some time, somewhere in him. And when suddenly she became free and turned her attention to him—her affection to him—well, if Kevin’s soul had been glacially slow, then it was now like a certain glacier in Alaska, which had crawled for centuries until one year it crashed down hundreds of yards, cutting off a whole bay.
It was a remarkable thing, this being in love. It changed everything. When he worked it was with an extra charge of satisfaction, feeling the sensual rush of the labor. At home he felt like a good housemate, a good friend. People relaxed around him, they felt they were having a good time, they could talk to him—they always could, but now he seemed to have more to give back. At the pool he swam like a champion, the water was like air and he flew through it, loving the exertion. And he was playing ball better than ever. The hitting streak extended without any worry, it was just something that happened. It wasn’t very hard to hit a softball, after all. A smooth stroke, good timing, a line drive was almost inevitable. Was inevitable, apparently. He was 43 for 43 now, and everyone was calling him Mr. Thousand, making a terrible racket when he came to bat. He laughed, he didn’t care, the streak didn’t matter. And that made it easier.
And the time spent with Ramona. That morning in their torn-up street he understood what it would be like—she was there, he could look over at her whenever he wanted, and there she would be, graceful, strong, unselfconsciously beautiful—and when she looked at him, he knew just what it said. I remember. I’m yours.
My God. It was love.
For Doris, the days after their party were like a truly enormous hangover. She felt queasy, disoriented, dizzy, and very irritable. One night when Hank was over for dinner she said angrily to him, “God damn it, Hank, somehow you always get me to drink about ten times more of your damned tequila than I really want to! Why do you do that!”
“Well, you know,” Hank said, looking sheepish. “I try to live by the old Greek rule, you know. Moderation in all things.”
“Moderation in all things!” Doris shouted, disgusted.
The rest of the table hooted. “Moderation in all things,” Rafael said, laughing. “Right, Hank, that’s you to a T.”
Nadezhda said, “I visited Rhodes once, where that saying was born. Cleobolus said it, around 650 B.C. The guide book I bought was a translation, and they had it ‘Measure is in all the best.’”
Andrea smiled. “Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it.”
“What the hell do you mean, Hank?” Doris demanded. “Just how does moderation in all things explain pounding twenty-five bottles of atrocious tequila?”
“Well, you know—if you say moderation in all things, then among all things you gotta include moderation itself, see what I mean? So you gotta go crazy once in a while, if you ask me.”
Then Tom showed up, and after dinner he and Doris began poring over the records Doris had taken from Avending. At one point Tom shook his head. “First of all, a lot of this looks to be coded. It may just be a cipher, but if it’s in cipher and coded too then we’re shit out of luck.”
Doris scowled.
“Besides,” Tom went on, “even if we break the code—hell, even with the straight stuff—it won’t make that much sense to me. I’m no financial records analyst, never have been.”
“I thought you might be able to see at least some trends,” Doris said.
“Well, maybe. But look, your friend John is not likely to have had access to Avending’s most intimate secrets anyway, especially if they’ve been involved in some funny stuff. His clearance just wouldn’t go that high.”
“Well, shit,” Doris said, “why did I bother to take this stuff in the first place!”
“Don’t ask me.”
Nadezhda said to Tom, “Don’t you have any friends left in Washington who could be helping you with this kind of problem?”
Tom considered it. “Maybe. I’ll have to make some calls. Here, while I’m doing that, sort this stuff into what’s in English and what’s coded. Where you can tell the difference.”
“Actually John’s clearance is pretty damn high,” Doris said.