“Well,” Jim says uncomfortably. “I tried to call—”
“Bullshit! Bullshit! If you want to call someone you can get through to them, you know that. You can leave a message! There’s no way you tried to call her.” She points a finger at him accusatively and anger makes her voice harsh: “You screwed her, Jim! You fucked her over!”
Jim hangs his head. “I know.”
“You don’t know! I visited her after you suddenly disappeared out of her life, and I found her sitting in her living room, putting together one of Humphrey’s jigsaw puzzles, one of those ten-thousand-piece ones. That’s all she would do! And when she was done with that one she went out and bought some more, and she came back home and that’s all she did was sit there in her living room and put together those stupid fucking jigsaw puzzles, for a whole month!”
Eyes flashing, face flushed, relentlessly she holds Jim’s gaze: “And you did that to her, Jim! You did that to her.”
Long pause.
Jim’s throat is constricted shut. He can’t take his eyes from Debbie. He nods jerkily. The corners of his mouth are tight. “I know,” he gets out.
She sees that he has gotten it, that he sees the image of Sheila at that coffee table, understands what it means. Her expression shifts, then; he can see that she’s still his friend, even when she’s furious with him. Somehow that makes the anger more impossible to deny. And even though he’s gotten it, Debbie is so angry that that isn’t, at the moment, quite enough. Perhaps she has thought it would mean more to her. Jim can see her remembering the sight herself; her friend studiously sifting through the pieces, focusing on them, not letting her attention stray anywhere else; suddenly Debbie’s blinking rapidly, and abruptly she turns and walks off. And he sees the image better than ever; it’s burned into him by Debbie Riggs’s distress.
“Oh, man,” he says. He turns and leans on the balcony rail. Headlights and taillights swim through the night. He feels like he’s swallowed one of the flower pots by his elbow: giant weight in his stomach, tasting like dirt.
Jigsaw puzzles.
Why did he do it?
For Virginia Novello. But what about Sheila? Well, Jim didn’t think of her. He didn’t really believe that he mattered enough that anyone would care about him. Or he didn’t really believe in the reality of other people’s feelings. Of Sheila Mayer’s feelings. Because they got in the way of what he wanted to do.
He sees these reasons clearly for the first time, and disgust washes over him in a great wave.
Suddenly he sees himself from the outside, he escapes the viewpoint of consciousness and there’s Jim McPherson, no longer the invisible center of the universe, but one of a group of friends and acquaintances. A physical person out there just like everyone else, to be interacted with, to be judged! It’s a dizzying, almost nauseating experience, a physical shock. Out of body, look back, there’s this skinny intense guy, a hollow man with nothing inside to define him by—defined by his fashionable ally and his fashionable beliefs and his fashionable clothes and his fashionable habits, so that the people who care about him—Sheila—
Empty staring at a jigsaw puzzle. Concentrate on it. The headlights all blur out.
50
Stewart Lemon’s sitting at his desk, in a reverie. It’s been another miserable morning, Elsa keeping up the silent treatment and walking around the house mute, like a naked zombie… how long has it been since she stopped speaking? Lemon sits and dreams of leaving her for his secretary, starting a new alliance, free of such a long history of pain. But if he leaves he’ll lose the house. And doesn’t Ramona have an ally? Ah, it’s a fantasy; looked at realistically it falls apart. So that means he has to continue with Elsa.…
Ramona buzzes. Donald Hereford is in Los Angeles on Argo/Blessman business, and has decided to drop on down for a visit. He’ll be here in half an hour.
Lemon groans. What a day! It’s always tense for him when Hereford comes by, especially lately. Given the various troubles LSR is having, the visits can only be in the nature of judgments—check-ups to see whether Argo/Blessman’s aerospace subsidiary is worth keeping.… This is even more true when there is no specific reason for the visit, as in this case.
So as much as he tries to compose himself, he is nervous as Hereford arrives. He leads him into his office and they sit down. Hereford looks at the ocean as he listens to Lemon go over the latest on the various LSR projects of note.
“How’s the appeal of the Stormbee decision coming?”
“The court rules on it end of this week or the beginning of next. Did you see the GAO report?” Hereford shakes his head briefly. Lemon describes the report. “It’s pretty favorable,” he concludes, “but our lawyers can’t tell if it will be enough to sway Judge Tobiason. They think it should, but given Tobiason’s background they aren’t making any promises.”
“No.” Hereford sighs. “I wonder about that case.”
“Whether it was…” Lemon was going to say, “a good idea to protest the decision,” when he recalls that it was Hereford’s idea.
Hereford looks up at him from under mildly raised eyebrows, and laughs. “A good idea? I think so. We had to show the Air Force that they can’t just flaunt the rules and walk over us. But we’ve done that, now, I think. They’ve had to kowtow to the GAO pretty seriously. So that whatever Tobiason says, we may have accomplished our goals in the matter.”
“But—winning the contract?”
“Do you think the Air Force would ever allow that, now?”
Lemon considers it in silence.
Hereford says, “Tell me all the latest about the Ball Lightning program.”
Now it’s Lemon’s turn to sigh. In a matter-of-fact voice he describes the latest round of troubles the program has been experiencing. “McPherson has put them onto tracking the ICBMs longer, in a phased array, so that their defenses can be overcome, and it looks as promising as anything we’ve tried. But the Air Force specs don’t really allow for anything more than the first two minutes after launch, so we don’t know what they’ll make of this.”
“You have asked them?”
“Not yet.”
Hereford frowns. “Now the Air Force already has test results that show we could do it in the two minutes, right?”
“Under certain special circumstances, yes.”
“Which are?”
“Well, a stationary target, mainly.…”
Slowly and patiently Hereford drags the whole story out of Lemon. He gets Lemon to admit that the early test results reported by Dan Houston’s team could be interpreted as fraudulent if the Air Force wanted to get hard about it. And since LSR has gotten hard in the Stormbee matter.…
Lemon, squirming in his seat, gets the strong impression that Hereford already knew all these details, that he has been making him go through them again just to bake him a little. Lemon tries to relax.
“McPherson’s involved with this one too?”
“I assigned him to it to help Houston out. McPherson is a good troubleshooter.” And troublemaker, he thinks. Don’t the two always go together?
Hereford nods. “I want to see the on-site facilities for the Ball Lightning program.” He stands. Lemon gets to his feet, surprised. They walk to the elevator, take it down to the ground floor and leave the executive building. Over to the engineer’s offices, and the big building housing the labs and the assembly plant. It’s your typical Irvine Triangle industrial architecture: two stories high and a couple hundred yards to a side, the walls made of immense squares of coppery mirrored glass, reflecting the obligatory lawns and cypress trees.
They enter and Lemon leads Hereford, by request, through all the labs and assembly rooms that have any part in the Ball Lightning program. Hereford doesn’t really look at any single one very closely, but he seems interested in determining their locations in the building, strangely enough. When he’s done doing that, he wants to survey the grounds outside the plant: the picnic benches in the small groves of cypress, the high security fence surrounding the property… it’s strange. Lemon’s beginning to get a headache thinking about it, out in the bright sun, coffee wearing off, stomach growling.… Finally Hereford nods. “Let’s go have some lunch.”