Читать книгу Oval - Elvia Wilk - Страница 11
ОглавлениеANJA SKIDDED DOWN THE SLOPE, WHICH WAS BECOMING MUDDY from overuse by feet. It still hadn’t been paved or even scattered with gravel, since Finster didn’t want to admit that the state of the pathway could no longer reasonably be called temporary. Rather than upgrade the provisional solution to make it slightly more functional in the interminable interim, it was ignored, as a signal that something better, something great—the best possible path—was coming.
Louis likened this situation to a general societal problem. The refusal to improve a nonsolution with a makeshift solution, he said, was the attitude that left most of the world a muddy slope in need of repair. Making exactly this argument had in fact consumed a lot of his time in his first year at Basquiatt, the NGO where he worked, which he believed was overrun by an ideological insistence on grand solutions that would be forever unattainable instead of small-scale, implementable compromises. “Let’s be realistic” was his self-parody catchphrase. “What can we do right now to make things better?”
“Why do you think refugee camps are never outfitted with proper infrastructure?” he’d asked Anja just a few days before he’d been yanked back to the U.S. They were hiking up the mountainside in the rain toward their apartment, torsos harshly angled against the incline, sneakers slipping in the mud, dragging grocery bags; it was pathetic.
“Muddy scenes of neglect,” he shouted downhill at her, intent for some reason on having this discussion right at that moment. The worse things had gotten in the house, the more he’d taken to ranting. “The mud is meant as a message that the bad situation isn’t going to last forever, no matter how long it’s already lasted. They want you to think the camp is just temporary, so nobody actually has to take responsibility for it.” His voice rose as she lagged farther behind him. “The quality of the now,” he yelled over his shoulder, “is sacrificed for the ideal. Know what I’m saying?”
Of course she knew what he was saying. “But you realize you’re comparing the Berg to a refugee camp, right?” That had ended the discussion.
Today she was carrying only a few avocado peelings in the pockets of her vinyl windbreaker. The whole apartment was a hot, puffy bruise; she didn’t dare force anything down the drain. She waved to a group of electricians in blue coveralls, who were standing, bored, around a post that was supposed to be supporting one of the vine-cables of the cable car. They had raised the car onto a stack of wooden pallets. One of the workers dropped a cigarette butt onto the exposed end of a vine-cable half-buried in mud, and it let off a sorry spark.
Unhitching her bike from a post at the bottom of the slope, she saw that Louis’s racer was still locked to a tree. He must have taken the train. She plugged her phone into the charger between her handlebars, checking it for messages. Dam had already sent out his first weather blast of the day: dry 35º / lavender / wet west gust.
She checked her phone’s weather app for comparison. High of 24 degrees, calm, clear. The gap between the official version and Dam’s version—the real version—shouldn’t have still bothered her, but it did. She slotted an earbud in each ear and began the long ride up to Prenzlauer Berg, to Howard’s. It would normally take half an hour, the length of one podcast, but she was lumbering on the pedals today, swinging from side to side with each push. She was exhausted, and, true to Dam’s forecast, there was a hot wind coming from the west. The sky was purplish with stratified layers of clouds, each like identical, faded copies of one another. Add a layer. Add a layer. Duplicate this layer. Flatten visible.
She listened to the podcast with one part of her brain, thinking with another part about what must have been happening in the lab at that very moment. She was mildly anxious to be missing the morning there. She probably should have asked Howard to meet in the evening after work instead.
The week before, the simulation she and Michel had been hard-coding for weeks had finally authorized cell culturing; today would be the first day in at least two months that they’d be liberated from their screens, finally doing tiny things with their actual hands in an actual polystyrene dish. It was strange to look forward to an action while knowing already without a doubt how it would unfold. They had seen the routine perform itself again and again in high-definition render; the airtight predictability of the chain of events was the only reason they were allowed to make it happen in a dish at all.
She saw the animation in her mind. One cell membrane swelling to accommodate a new blot on its periphery—for one freak moment an egg with two yolks—then, the new blot forcing itself outward to the splitting point, when the edge of the cell would erupt from its boundary to become a whole new edge, scooping remarkably away and burping into its own self-contained shape—from impossible to possible. “Plop,” said Michel each time they watched the duplication unfold on-screen. “Plop-plop-plop.”
She consoled herself with the fact that today wouldn’t really be the most important day. It would be tomorrow, when a surface visible to the naked eye would begin to form from all those slow plops. The plops were designed to perform very slowly—growing into a skein of tangible matter. The surface would be translucent at first, shaping itself over the hours into a perfectly symmetrical double wave, like the contour of the roof of a mouth, but impossibly smooth. And so small, conformed perfectly to its given constraints, the shallow dish only 88 millimeters in diameter, the simulated site map of the simulated shelter, the architecture’s designated terrain. By the end of the second day the duplicating cells would have built a delicate little home, rising layer upon parametric layer until it was exactly right, a perfectly circular double-arched roof. Then it would stop. Cartilage in its first official architectural application. A perfect, growable, reproducible, scalable, durable roof, which Finster could send anywhere in the world as a tiny bundle of cells that would sprout on demand. Cells that would be first grown in their lab at RANDI.
She could already see Michel struggling to repress his excitement. She’d mock him, call him Dr. Evil, but they’d both give in to self-congratulation for a few minutes when the thing was finished growing. This week would offer a release valve from the tedious months plugging variables into a giant data sheet and pretending not to give any fucks about their jobs. (On the other hand, they would have to admit to each other with a few uncomfortable glances, the success was a turning point, it made them responsible for what they were doing at RANDI. Until now, the eye rolling and the sarcasm had masked the unease, but soon they’d have to pretend even harder not to care, work even harder not to know where this was all headed. She’d think about that next week, once they had accomplished this small exercise in form, a proof of concept that was surely just a small step in a process that would take years before implementation.)
The stoplight at Jannowitzbrücke gave pause to the pedaling and the imaginary cell growth. A swarm of teenagers in red caps crossed the street, briefly enveloping her. A trio of girls wearing their caps backward—oh, pitiful resistance!—followed closely behind one another. It was easy to spot the popular girl at the front of the pack right away, simply from the geometry of the flock in motion. What was it about the girl, Anja wondered, the homely girl preoccupied with her phone, that made her the focal point, the yolk at the center of attention? What was the factor upon which the self-replicating algorithm turned, that remarkably consistent geometry of popularity? How had Anja still not figured out the answer, the hidden parametric logic to social arrangements, even after all these years, even as an adult scientist?
The light turned yellow, and the group hurried by, ushered forth by a red-shirted chaperone. At the same time, according to the podcast she now zoned back into, jellyfish were taking over the oceans as other species died out in the too-warm water and made way for them to proliferate, spreading across the surface in a thick quilt, clogging the gears of power plants and blocking the flow of oxygen to the depths of the sea.
Howard made her wait two minutes, almost long enough to ring him again, before he buzzed her into the front door of his building. She knew he could see her through the little camera above the buzzer and wondered if he had taken the time to inspect her before pressing the button. She hauled her sticky body up to the top floor, pausing on the landing to wipe the area under her eyes with a tissue from her pocket. A lot of her supposedly waterproof mascara had melted below the lashes. Sweating burns calories, her sister would say.
Howard opened the door and gave each hot cheek a kiss. She noticed a mist on the top of his head—the head was sweating, which she’d somehow never incorporated into the realm of possibility. But, of course, a bald head sweats, just like any other head. She remembered not to stare—men didn’t like that—but then, this was Howard; he was secure. He’d been bald for so long that he wore his skull without the anxiety of a man who it happens to later in life, and so he didn’t associate it with waning virility or whatever else.
He wore most of his distinguishing traits in that way, as incidental and entirely unremarkable. Such as the fact that he was the only Black person in Finster’s upper echelons in Germany, which he never, ever spoke about. He was technically in PR at Finster, but Anja had come to understand that the kind of soft power he’d acquired over the years was much more substantial than his official title accounted for. He would never move back to London, that was clear. He was firmly planted here. His German was impeccable, it sliced you like a paper cut.
Howard led Anja down the corridor past the living room, a mid-century forest of teak and mahogany, to the narrow kitchen where they always sat. Very far from the bed.
“Just water, thanks,” she said to his offer of a mug.
“Detox?”
“A bit jittery. I don’t need caffeine.”
“Busy in the lab lately?”
“Yes, actually. Or we’re about to be. This week is a big one.” She scare-quoted “big one.”
Without asking, he tipped a packet of electrolytes into the glass of water he’d filled and passed it to her with a spoon to stir.
“This is good timing, then. I have big news.” He scare-quoted “big news” in turn. “You probably know this already, but Finster is restructuring some departments at RANDI.” She was silent, then capitulated to admitting she didn’t know, shaking her head slightly. “Oh,” he said. “Well, now you know. They aren’t cutting the whole sector or anything, but they’re consolidating a lot of the subsectors. Most of Alloys is merging into General Futures. And Cartilage is merging back into Biodegradables, where it probably should have stayed in the first place.”
She got a split-second heart palpitation. “Back to Biodegradables? I used to be in that sector, remember, but then we all decided Cartilage should split off, because we were doing construction, not degradation.”
“Right. Your special mission, which you’ve bemoaned so much. But now your mission is complete. Voilá.”
She chewed the inside of her cheek and fingered the earbuds in her pocket. Ear buds, she thought. Small lumps of cartilage from which ears will sprout.
“It’s not technically finished, though,” she said slowly. “We still haven’t actually grown the thing in the lab that we were supposed to be making.”
“I don’t know anything about the science,” he said, and laughed, “but think of this as a big high five from the top. Apparently, they think you accomplished what you set out to do.”
“So we’re going back from whence we came. Compost.”
“Nope. That’s the thing. I don’t know about the other guy who you were working with, but they’ve set you free.”
“Free? Am I fired?”
“Why do you always expect the worst?” He paused for drama. “In fact, you’re promoted straight to consultant. Laboratory Knowledge Management Consultant, I think they’re calling it.”
She shook her head. It didn’t make any sense. “No, Howard. I’m just a lab tech. I haven’t done anything they could consult me on.” Consultant was not a title she’d ever associated with her present or future. Louis was the consultant, not her.
He seemed to be following her thoughts. “Oh, and Louis has? You know you don’t need to have any consulting experience to become a consultant.”
She bit back. “Louis is highly qualified for his job, actually.”
Howard raised his hands in mock defense. “I didn’t mean he wasn’t. I’m just saying that the qualification is not what you think it is. The qualification is just that they decide you can do it.”
She chewed her cheek, hard. “What does a knowledge manager do?”
“Whatever you want. You get a pay raise and go around telling people what to do. Threaten them if they don’t work fast enough. Do audits, interviews, suggest some restructuring where you think it’s needed. You know the drill.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know how long your first term is. Probably a year.”
“But why would they want to fire me from my job and hire me back to do nothing for more money?”
He raised his hands. “That’s how companies run. You do the time and you move up the ladder, if you’re lucky. Why all the questions?”
She swirled her glass of electrolytes without taking a sip. “Here’s a question. Since when did you become my boss? HR should be telling me this.”
He shrugged innocently. “I was on the phone with HR this morning, mentioned you were coming by, and they said I should go ahead and tell you myself. Call over if you don’t believe me.”
Howard had, of course, been involved marginally in her job at RANDI, her house—everything—for a long time. Finster was involved in all of it, and at some point Howard had become her main interface with Finster’s back end. Howard knew stuff, Howard was the cloud, that was the point of Howard. In that regard, his giving her this information was not surprising. Nothing was changing between them, not really. But she couldn’t ignore the feeling that this news he was bestowing upon her was more intrusive than some of the other ways he’d elbowed into her life.
“Am I being insensitive about this?” Howard asked. “You seem sort of subdued.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“Don’t be such a girl.” He smiled. “Man up. Take what’s yours.”
“I love it when men tell me to man up.”
“Just trying to boost your confidence. But take your time. Someone will email you a draft of the contract to look over. That’s all I know.”
“Thanks.” She tried to sound grateful. Guilt, gratitude: they were always twins. It was time to steer the conversation elsewhere. When Howard chose to play dumb there was no piercing the shell.
“Do you think they’ll let me consult on my own house?” she asked. “The Berg could use a scientist.”
Howard laughed. “I doubt it. The Berg is a whole beast of its own. How are things at home? I guess that’s what you actually came to talk about.”
She realized that, actually, she didn’t have a very good reason for having come here, any more than Howard had a good reason for being the one to fire and rehire her. Neither the technical malfunction in her home nor her job officially had anything to do with him. What she had really come here for was Howard himself: his signature blend of affection, approval, and authority. He would, as he always did, oblige her complaints in exchange for feeling depended upon. He liked to be needed; she offered an assortment of needs.
“I was just wondering if you have any sort of . . . overview about what’s going on with the mountain,” she said. “The temperature and everything is totally erratic. All the doors are swollen shut. People must be complaining.”
“Not as much as you guys,” he said, smiling. “Have you been talking to the neighbors?”
“A few.”
This was a lie. Anja and Louis never talked to the neighbors. At the start, Anja had spent a few afternoons with a middle-aged couple of Danish consultants who had befriended her, but they’d left for vacation months earlier and had never come back. Come to think of it, at least three of the houses were empty most of the time. One of them was used intermittently as a studio for photo shoots of some sort.
“I know you guys don’t like the whole community vibe, but you could be a little more outgoing.”
Her phone vibrated in her pocket and she checked it under the table. Louis: flowers on my desk this morning, for mourning. a touching bribe :)
She wedged the phone between her legs and looked up. “Neither of us signed up to live in a commune.”
“True. I’m just saying that it’s easier to handle if you all talk to each other. Everyone up there is figuring out how to deal with the same issues. Renewable energy isn’t foolproof; you can’t depend on it like clockwork. You know that. All the risks are in your contract.”
“I know. Sorry for freaking out. It’s just that”—a moment on the edge, wavering—“we’re kind of stressed right now.” With the “we” she’d let Louis into the conversation, and the real reason for her being here rose to the surface. She was handing the need to Howard on a platter.
At least she had a punch line, a shoe to drop: the death of Louis’s mom, how awful it sounded, how unarguable.
But Howard was already nodding in anticipation, “I didn’t want to intrude,” he said, “but I heard about Louis’s mother, and I’m so sorry. It’s really awful.”
This was the worst shock of the morning—an intrusive, many-layered shock. She’d thought the death was hers to tell. Only now that she’d been robbed of it did she realize how tightly she’d been clutching the news to herself. She’d thought many times already of how to deliver the news to Howard, somberly, using “passed away” instead of “dead,” blinking back tears. She remembered the dark thrill of saying the words to her own parents and his friends who “deserved to know,” the assuredness that she was the one entrusted to disseminate the privileged information.
Knowing before anyone else, knowing first, had been proof of something. The thinness of the proof, now disintegrated, revealed the pettiness of the need.
“How did you hear?” she asked, knowing before she had said it that the question was dumb. Louis had been out of town for two weeks. Nothing like this was ever a secret. Death unfolded private pain into the open.
“I was over at Basquiatt last week doing some consulting,” he said. “I’m sorry. I wanted to send my condolences earlier, but like I said, I didn’t want to intrude.” But of course he wanted to intrude. “How is he?”
“I don’t know. He’s fine.”
“It must be tough.”
“I don’t know what he wants me to do.”
“You just have to be there for him.”
“That’s what everyone keeps saying. But where am I supposed to be being? Where is there?”
“You know what it means. It means being present and attentive. He probably just wants to get back to normal.”
“That seems fucked up on some level, though.” She shook her head. “Normalcy seems cruel in this situation.”
“Maybe he needs to repress.”
“Everyone wants to repress! That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”
“You can’t expect a person to suffer all the time. He has to compartmentalize if he’s going to survive a death.”
“Survive a death,” she repeated, remembering that Howard’s dad was gone, had died a long time ago. They’d never really talked about it. She contemplated flipping the conversation around on him. It wouldn’t work.
“There’s no predicting what’s going to happen or what he’s going to need,” Howard said in his reassuring voice. “Just be patient. Trauma works in mysterious ways.”
“But aren’t there also universal things? It’s just categorically bad when a parent dies. Even if you’re ambivalent about them, or you hate them, it’s just overall bad when they die.”
“Maybe it’s not that bad for everyone.”
“If my parents died I would want everyone to act insane, burning shit and ruining everything.”
“But it didn’t happen to you. It happened to him.”
She sucked air in, then opened up all the way. “I know I’m not supposed to map my own feelings onto him, but I don’t want to be waiting around, unsuspecting, when he snaps.”
“He might never snap. Life is just easier for some people.”
“Do you seriously think that? That’s privilege speaking.”
He circled his face with his finger. Look at me. A minority.
“Oh, come on. You know about privilege.” She circled the air more widely, mimicking his gesture, indicating the renovated Altbau kitchen, with its blue ceramic sink and stainless-steel dishwasher.
“All I’m saying is, Louis is in some ways an uncomplicated person.” The not-so-subtle digs at Louis were piling up. She ignored them. She had asked for advice; she had to take what came with it. “You tend to get overly involved in the lives of people you care about,” he said, “which is very endearing and commendable, but doesn’t always serve you. Put on your own oxygen mask first.”
“All right. That’s enough paternal advice for the day.”
“It’s just the accent that makes me seem condescending.”
“You always say that.” They smiled at each other, and then she asked: “And how are your—things? Do you have any of your own issues?” The classic false overture. They both knew their dynamic. It was off-kilter, but it was stable. His knowing her was what she knew about him.
He leaned forward slightly, a barely perceptible shift that wouldn’t have been possible to construe as anything meaningful by anyone watching, but which transmitted a message all the more intimate precisely because it was so stunted.
“Since you ask, we are having a bit of a PR crisis at the moment,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Just between us.”
“Okay.”
“Not even for Louis.”
“I get it.”
“To be perfectly candid,” he said, placing all his fingertips on the table, creating little tents with his palms, “some of the problems with the Berg aren’t just tech issues.” She looked at him blankly, worried for a moment that he knew about their cheating with the trash. No one was watching, she reminded herself. Just the silent, rotating lens of the cameras. “There’s been some infighting among the consulting architects, the engineers, even PR. Things are stalled because of the disagreement.”
“Disagreement about what?”
“They never officially agreed on how much tech should actually be on the mountain. Some of the architects don’t think you guys should be so comfy. Some of them don’t believe it’s really authentic for you to have climate control, for instance.”
“But the climate-control system is independent of the central grid. It’s a thousand percent carbon neutral. It’s not doing any harm to the environment.”
“Obviously. I’m on your side. It’s always an arbitrary decision, what you call natural and what you call artificial. Those choices are all symbolic, and they each represent a political position.”
“But if someone decides that our heating and cooling are unnatural, what’s next? Then someone will decide that clean water is fake, and then someone will decide that LEDs are fake, and then someone will say we can’t eat anything we don’t grow ourselves. Who actually decides these things?”
“That’s sort of the other problem. A group of the architects have quit. They’re upset that their plans were treated like suggestions and not blueprints.”
“And nobody knows about this.”
“Thus the PR element. It’s a lot of work for me to keep a lid on this. We don’t want to freak people out.”
“You don’t seem worried about freaking me out.”
“I think you can handle it.”
“I can handle it. But what are we supposed to do? We can’t wait forever in that place. You got us into this, you know.”
“Oh, be patient. As soon as they make some executive decisions, the solutions are simple. To fix the heating, I think they just have to reconnect some severed wires to the beating heart, or whatever they’re calling it, the CPU thing.”
“You really don’t know anything about the tech.”
“Not even a little. I stick to politics. I mean PR.”
Her sister was the one who had convinced Anja to stop seeing Howard. “He’s projecting an imaginary fantasy onto you,” Eva had said. “How old is he, forty-five? He wants someone permanently young. He thinks you’re fine with being a piece on the side. He’ll never commit.”
Anja hadn’t been looking for Howard to commit—actually, that was exactly what she hadn’t wanted—but the idea of being a “piece on the side” (on the side of what?) in the eyes of anyone else was bad enough to convince her to end it. Somehow unable to cut things off, she managed to trick herself into feeling rejected by him, leading herself down a tunnel of body dysmorphia. She convinced herself that Howard was looking for some ideal of girlish perfection that any lump would disqualify her from. It couldn’t be that she was maybe not that interested in him romantically; no, that was not an option; he was a powerful person; the only option was that she was inadequate.
She let herself be consumed by self-doubt, shielding her arms, her calves, her breasts in his presence, becoming volatile and causing increasingly embarrassing scenes. At the low point, she accused him of grabbing the fattiest parts of her body during sex. He’d said, “Obviously, I like them best,” and that was the end of that.
Of Louis, Eva approved. “I found his picture online,” she said. “He’s hot. See, it only took you a month to find someone better. You should think more highly of yourself.”
Anja decided not to listen to Eva on these topics anymore. She’d decided that before and always relapsed, but with Louis she finally managed to stop feeding Eva details; Louis was going to stay a sacred space, free from probing. “You must be serious about him,” Eva had said. “I never hear a peep. Is he taking advantage of you? I just read an article online about this thing called mansplaining.”
She couldn’t blame Eva’s bad advice when she and Louis hit a breaking point after only a few months of dating. It was the fault of their living situation—which was Anja’s fault. They were deadlocked about where to go after the impending loss of the garden house, which they were living in illegally and which was on the verge of demolition. The whole age-old Schrebergarten was going to be flattened for an apartment block as soon as a final piece of paper got stamped somewhere deep inside the Ordungsamt. You could complain about losing history and heritage, but you could complain louder about the lack of affordable housing, and so the development had moved forward with very little protest.
Their garden allotment was just inside the S-Ring, which demarcated the limit of the conveniently livable part of the city. Once upon a time, the thousands of subdivided gardens had been built as urban escapes, chunks of nature scattered across the city where hearty children could be set loose. But when food was suddenly in short supply during the first war, the little gardens were quickly converted into urban farms, amounting to an ur-sustainable-living movement. Later, when the war ended and the embargoes were lifted and the bombed-out city was temporarily left to its own devices, displaced people set up camp in the gardens. Sheds became homes. Temporary visitation became habitation. But before anyone could get too comfortable, the next war emptied the gardens again and the spaces were left to grow wild, reverting to real nature for the first time in maybe a thousand years.
In the next postwar phase, the period of grand division, some gardens were sliced down the middle and became portals for smuggling among the overgrowth. Eventually, Wall came down, or rather Wall was torn down in bits by thousands of hands and machines; city was once again an enormous expanse of empty real estate; gardens were once again parceled and converted into weekend leisure destinations; and the forebears of urbanites like Anja and Louis started to show up. One by one each tiny garden and all its historical baggage became a sliver of private vacation property. The whole thing, meaning the whole city, was going in circles, history looping and tangling itself like hairs clogging a drain.
By the time Anja arrived in the city, when rents everywhere inside the S-Ring were at an all-time high, the central Schrebergarten had all been renovated and taken over, not overdeveloped like most city blocks but rather their miniature charm canonized into tiny overpriced rentals for urban getaway “experiences.” Only a few of the far-flung gardens beyond the periphery were still neglected and unregulated. Anja had discovered hers on a long weekend walk due south. Far from any train station, she came upon the fenced-in cluster of twelve little houses separated by scraggly hedges, which all together occupied only two city blocks. Most of them were squatted, but three were empty, and one of those had a decent roof. After coming back a few times and sniffing around, she’d found the woman who seemed to be improvising administration and paid her in cash for six months upfront.
After the six months were up, by which time Louis had moved into the garden with her, they couldn’t decide what to do. They agreed that the house was unlivable for much longer, the roof becoming less decent by the day, but finding and paying for a real apartment seemed impossible. Anja was making ridiculously little money at the time, still technically a RANDI intern, and she neither wanted to tap into her trust fund to contribute half the rent for a new apartment nor allow Louis to pay for the majority himself. Louis didn’t care if he had to pay (he could easily cover the rent for a new place with his ballooning Basquiatt salary), he just wanted to get out of the wet, crumbling, doomed garden house. And yet Anja was adamant that letting him pay would create an unhealthy dependency. They couldn’t agree on how to move forward; they were teetering on the edge of a breakup.
Out of nowhere, the six-page formal invitation letter to join the new socio-environmental living experiment had arrived at their post office box. It was written in complex bureaucratic German, which Louis had tried to plug into Google Translate before Anja got home, which caused him to panic, thinking it was a notice saying they were about to be evicted. Scanning the first page, Anja immediately understood who was responsible.
(Howard was well aware of the garden house’s ramshackle condition, having slept there a few times himself in the pre-Louis days. Its shabbiness appealed to him, as it offered tangible proof that he was having sex with a twenty-six-year-old. Being with her on the floor mattress made him feel open-minded.)
The letter was an ostentatious display of magnanimity, whose scale alone—the number of social and professional levers Howard must have had to push and pull to accomplish the feat—practically billboarded his history with Anja, while boasting the extent of his influence. She understood the submessage easily. Howard was a mature adult who did not hold grudges. He had not only bestowed on her a free place to live, loaded with cultural and ethical capital, but a place for both of them to live: Anja plus Louis, the guy who had replaced him. Had she expected petty jealousy or vindictiveness?
She’d hesitated to take the offer, but Louis was firm. The eco-village was too good to pass up, no matter how it had come about. Jealousy was not an issue for him, which, overall, she decided she was grateful for.
