"It was the job," Gabe said, suddenly wanting to make her understand once and for all, if she was going to leave him. "The job took too much out out of me, I didn't have enough energy left over for my own work."
"No," she said firmly. "You just didn't want it badly enough. Otherwise you would have pulled yourself together and just done it. You'd have done it under any circumstances, in any condition-Christ, quadriplegics used to paint pictures holding brushes in their teeth, because they wanted to paint more than anything in the world-"
"Look, I didn't have to live like this, I could have lived with less-"
"But I wouldn't." Her dark hair fell forward over her left shoulder, and she slapped it back. "And we had a daughter to think about. It wasn't her art, it wasn't my art, it was yours. It was up to you, not us, to find a way. It was up to you to work around our needs. If you'd wanted to starve under a pier, you shouldn't have had a family."
"But we didn't have to have my income-"
She sat up straight, looking at him as if from a great height. "I don't carry anybody. And nobody carries me. You knew that when we got married."
"Poor Sam," he said suddenly.
She looked as if he'd slapped her. "What about Cassandra?"
He tried to put it into words, but it wouldn't come. "Never mind. That slipped out. You're leaving. Case closed. To tell you the truth, I don't know why you didn't leave me a long time ago. What's the matter, couldn't you afford a house till now?"
She didn't answer, but her gaze slid away from him. He burst out laughing.
"My God, I hit it! You've been marking time to put together a down payment on a house!"
"Not a down payment," she said in a low voice. "The whole thing, outright."
He could feel all expression leaving his face. "Damn. You've got millions."
"Because I wanted it badly enough!" She had a startlingly desperate look now, as if she were also trying one last time to be understood. "I worked around the clock, no matter how tired I was, no matter how bored, no matter how dead the market seemed. When there were no leads, I made them out of nothing. Instead of sitting around bitching, I kept watch so that when something showed even the slightest hint of promise, I was the first to see it and the first one on it. I kept track of the buyers and the sellers, I charted their spending patterns and their activities so that I knew when they wanted to buy or sell even before they did, and I was right there to make it happen for them."
She rose smoothly, brushing at her trousers and her vest. "I didn't worry about making friends. I didn't waste my energy or my work time letting some clown cry on my shoulder and get my expensive clothes all wet. I didn't let myself get marked as a troublemaker, a screwup, or a loser."
"Like me," he said simply.
She glanced upward. "God, you had a very clear grasp of all the politics at Diversifications. You could have played them like a Stradivarius, but instead you chose to bitch about them, show opposition, huddle with the other moaners and whiners. It kept you back. That's the pity of it, that's the uselessness, that's why I'm so mad at you. It wasn't that you couldn't. You just said no." She folded her arms and gave a small shudder. "I'd be embarrassed if I were you."
The faint voice-over from the dataline jumped out at him. "… don't know how to relax, we have the solution. If you're driven too hard, we have the brakes. The Coves Clinic. We don't do anything to you that you wouldn't do yourself, if you knew how. The only implant clinic with its own on-site spa. Triple-A rating by the Neurological Council, on file with the Food, Drug, and Software Administration."
The beachscape on the screen had been enhanced a little, Gabe knew. LeBlanc had done that spot; she'd thought she was going to get a couple of days on location, but instead Diversifications had jobbed the taping out to some students and called it "intern-work," beating the union fees and LeBlanc's hopes for an incidental vacation.
"You won't be able to keep this place by yourself," Catherine said. "When the time comes, I'll handle the sale for you. You'll do well, even after I take my share and my commission."
He kept staring hard at the dataline as her quiet footsteps went toward the front door. "You gonna find me something else more in my range?" he called suddenly as he heard the lock disengage.
"I don't work in your range."
At least she wasn't a door-slammer. He continued to stare at the dataline, which was babbling a report on consumer spending habits from BizNet, watered down for civilians. Obviously this was supposed to mean something to him, but he couldn't bring himself to care. It was going into the capture buffer anyway, and if he ever did find a reason to care, he could look at it later.
Sam would be happy, he thought after a bit, when his mind began to work again. Well, perhaps not happy. Relieved would be more like it. Or maybe it wouldn't matter to her one way or the other-her emancipation had put her beyond having to care about the state of her parents' marriage. If it had come to this three or four years ago, it might have made a difference to her. Even two years ago. She'd only been emancipated for a year then-he might have been able to persuade her to move in with him, go to college, get some legitimate work in programming, or simulations. She had a lot of talent-
Oh, yah. Legitimate work with some corporation, perhaps, some company like Diversifications, turn her into another corporate employee. If she'd wanted to have the spirit ground out of her, she could have stayed home and let Catherine do it.
Sure, I'll come back, Dad. As soon as you can give me one goddamn good reason why you didn't leave a long time ago yourself.
What could he have said to that-Well, Sam, you had to be there? It would have been just one more way to tell her she didn't understand, and she already knew that. He wouldn't have understood himself, back in the beginning. He hadn't been a whole lot older than Sam was now when he and Catherine had married. There had been no room in him then for the idea of a Plan B, what to do if things didn't turn out the way he wanted. There had been no room for looking ahead to a time when the dreams hadn't come true and there was no love anymore, and instead of the art he had some bootleg simulations he played with on the company clock, the way he passed the days until such time as he dropped dead. Of disinterest, most likely.
"First warning," Melody said suddenly, and he jumped at the sound of her voice.
"What?"
"You can still get to work on time if you leave now. Commuter units are still available at the nearest rental lot. Call ahead and reserve?"
"Yah, sure," he said. Yah, sure. Go to work, why not? He had that lunch with Manny, but what the hell-when your wife left you first thing in the morning, how much worse could the day get?
He'd have to remember to feed that line to the Melody Cruz module. Or maybe Marly. Yes, Marly; it was a good line, and it sounded far more like her than it did him.
8
When Gina found out, Mark thought, she was going to kick his ass. She'd done it before, for a lot less.
It wasn't that everything had happened so fast the night before-no, two nights ago. Jesus. It was getting by him, it was all getting by him. There'd been so much happening. It sure hadn't been the night he'd gone out to have.