Читать книгу Sharp and Dangerous Virtues - Martha Moody - Страница 10

lila wakes up (1)

SEYMOUR, LILA’S ASSISTANT, appeared in her office. “There’s a Federal wants to talk to you.”

“You mean State.” The State people were pests. The loss of Cleveland had thrown them into a tizzy. By June 2047, the cavernous lakefront edifice that had been built as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a tracking station receiving information from Canada and Alliance ships in the Atlantic. The BP tower was a pile of rubble called Strike One, the Federal Building was the Centro de Gobierno (the Alliance had let the South American forces name this one), and the former Terminal Tower was a military headquarters, with General Nenonene’s quarters taking up the basement of what used to be the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. It was all confusing. Many people had left Cleveland, but many more people hadn’t. Why couldn’t they? Their houses. Their businesses. The schools for their children. Their elderly relatives who didn’t understand. All of it made sense, and yet it didn’t make sense. With the Grid already knocking out a good third of the state and Cleveland occupied, there wasn’t much State of Ohio left. The people in the state capital in Columbus reminded Lila of befuddled bees circling a destroyed hive.

“No, darling. I mean Federal.”

“Federal?” Lila sighed. Federal people rarely bothered her, but when they did it was never pleasant. What environmental edict were they obsessing about now? “Okay.” She turned to face her screen. “Put ’em on.”

“I mean they’re here,” Seymour said. “A youngie-girl.”

“In person?” Lila swiveled in her chair. She tried to remember the last time anyone had made a call on her in person. What made Federal think she had the time for in person? More ominously, what did Federal need that they sent a real person?

Seymour brought in the Federal, a tall woman—good Lord, did they take them straight out of college these days?—with an eager, open face and an athlete’s stride. The youngie sat.

“What a surprise!” said Lila. “You’re really a Federal? Who do you represent, exactly?”

“I’m from Agriculture,” the youngie said, dipping her head. The Department of Agriculture had planned and now controlled the Grid. Since the Gridding, Agriculture had become a shameful part of the government. People had been known to pretend they worked in other parts of the government. It took, Lila suspected, an act of will and faith to half-stand and extend her hand across Lila’s desk. “Michelle Everly.”

“Michelle,” Lila said. “Lila de Becqueville.” A lovely face, Lila realized, sculpted and high-cheekboned. The lashes at the corners of Michelle’s eyes tangled in a wanton way. A slight scent of lemon to her, probably perfume.

“I’ve heard about you,” Michelle said, settling herself back in the chair. “I’ve heard you have an excellent system. Best treatment system of any city your size. Superior flood protection, aquifer maintenance, nice leach fields, reliable sewage …”

“Thank you.” Everything she’d said was true. The Water Queen, Lila called herself. Not that she told anyone this.

“My mother remembers you coming to her school,” Michelle said, reddening slightly. Michelle’s mother! Lila was shocked at how this dated her, and she made it into a curse: tu madre. “You used to give talks on the history of water in Ohio.”

Michelle’s face was eager and imploring. Inside herself, Lila felt something shifting. “Your mother remembers me?” she said. It was true: early in Lila’s career, twenty, twenty-five years before, she had given talks. This was during New Dawn Dayton, the halcyon period before the Short Times when all sorts of industry—including Prestige Polymer, Armitage Steel, even Consort and its premier nuclear plant—had come to Dayton because of the city’s abundance of water. Lila thought how little she remembered of Ohio’s water history now, although somewhere she still had the data chips.

“You talked about the Great Black Swamp. And malaria.”

“Lima, Ohio, was named after Lima, Peru,” Lila said. “They imported quinine from Peru as a malaria medicine.” Malaria in Ohio: people used to be incredulous when she told them. The drainage tile used to dry northwest Ohio could be stretched from the earth to the moon. The diversion of water from the Great Black Swamp had created lakes that were still, over a century and a half later, among Ohio’s largest. Now the lakes were recreational areas, but in their early years after their formation they were notorious for mosquitoes and disease, places a sensible person avoided.

Lila said, “You know they used to call Cincinnati Porkopolis. That was because of water, too.”

Michelle gave Lila a thrilling sidelong glance.

“They built a canal south from Middletown to the Ohio River,” Lila said. “Once the canal was built, farmers could move their pigs to Cincinnati, and from there the pigs could be shipped by boat east to Pennsylvania or west to the Mississippi. People don’t think about it, but water opens markets.” Lila was surprised at the fervor in her voice; she did remember. She glanced at Michelle. A young youngie, Lila thought with a wave of fatigue. Then she relaxed: if Federal really wanted something from her, they wouldn’t send a girl like this. “So what are you here for?” Lila said brightly. “Training? Advice? Employees?” Michelle’s lips were parted, her dark hair swept down her back. God, that long hair. Lila could brush that hair across Michelle’s mouth and kiss her lips through the curtain of it. She could lift it off her neck and nuzzle the pale spot behind her ear. Lila’s voice came out surprisingly husky. “You running a little dry up on the Grid?”

A spot at the end of Michelle’s nose turned suddenly red. A flaw, there was always a flaw. Even in her glory days Lila had had one. The flaw had been Lila’s profile, her slightly bulging stomach. Now her belly lay across her thighs like a sleeping cat. Suddenly Lila felt angry at Michelle’s bosses. A little training mission here, get out and talk up the old folks, the powers-that-be of this or that inconsequential city. The jerks that would send a young woman to do this. “Am I a little too close for comfort here?” Lila asked, her voice quickening. “You are running dry on the Grid? I’ll tell you what: you get me a steady power supply for my treatment plant and I’ll give you all the water you Agros want.”

For a second the youngie looked confused, then she drew herself up and pulled on an invisible jacket of authority. “We don’t have any influence over electricity. That’s Consort.” Lila was old enough to remember the days before Consort, the aggregation of utility companies that had grown up in the early twenties. It had seemed so logical then, Consortium, with states shipping electricity and gas and wind and solar power back and forth, but then Consortium got bigger and bigger, the nickname “Consort” used first by the more intelligent, referring—ha, ha!—to its relation to the government, then taken up and somehow euphemized by the company itself, making it a cheerful name, a name implying convenience and compatibility and even a gleeful communion. “Consort with us,” the top of each bill used to read.

“But you’re a Fed,” Lila said.

“Of course.” Michelle leaned forward eagerly. “Consort is a business. Who are we to interfere with business?” This was a slogan: when the Alliance leaders pointed out how America forgot the poor, Americans responded with a truism about business.

God, Lila hated these rote answers. “Then why are you here?” She demanded. “You seem to want to interfere with my business.”

“You’re water. You’re still regulated. Water is local.”

“But you want to make my water not local.” Lila leaned forward. She decided to mention the rumor she kept hearing. “You want to transport it, just like those farmers who sent their pigs to St. Louis. You need it to irrigate the Grid.”

Michelle’s face had become shiny, more blotches joining the red spot at the end of her nose. “No. Not the Grid. Definitely not the Grid.”

“Then where do you want to send it?”

Michelle leaned forward into Lila’s desk and pushed up her sleeves, as if Lila were finally asking a grown-up question. “People at Federal are smart. You’d be surprised: Federal is very realistic.”

Lila was quiet, waiting.

Michelle, silent, propped her chin on her hand and stared at the wall behind Lila’s head. What was back there? Lila thought suddenly, wanting to turn and look.

“Extremely realistic,” Michelle said, lifting a hand to smooth her hair.

A hand-drawn picture of a fanciful fish, flowing in a blue stream. A photomontage of a turbine and the outflow over a dam. An old poster—Lila’s favorite—from the We Save Wawa series, featuring a priest and a transvestite. The transvestite was actually (no one but Lila knew this) her assistant Seymour in his younger days. The We Save Wawa campaign had been a huge hit. Not that individual conservation really made a difference—industrial water use, in New Dawn Dayton, had dwarfed any use of water for baths or yards—but the campaign gave ordinary people a goal, and promoted the image nationwide of Dayton as a water capital.

“And that means … ?” Lila said now. She’d never get to bury her nose in Michelle’s hair, never. Might as well give up lusting. Lila thought with regret of Janet, whose hair had always smelled of chlorine. How long ago was that, twenty years? Janet could never resist her. Lila intimidated people terribly, in her day. Lila had hammered them with questions they could neither answer nor forget. And she’d used her influence not just for seduction but also for public service. Lila de Becqueville, the governor of Ohio had introduced her, community asset. She wondered if she was too old to use her influence now. Not that it mattered. She was having no effect on Michelle.

And suddenly Michelle, looking much older, less ingenuous, was patting her cheek with her fingertips, little quick pats, as if she were dabbing it with powder, and indeed her little blotches were fading. “Not the Grid,” she repeated. “Definitely not the Grid.” Her eyes wandered, in an aimlessness Lila was sure was feigned, until they met Lila’s wide ones. “I know about you,” Michelle said, and Lila felt a buzzing thrill in her chest. “My mother doesn’t just remember your water talks. She remembers you later. She told me all about your leadership during the Short Times. I know about the ads, the time restrictions, everything. You know what my mom says? You made sacrifice fun.”

Was there a personal connection? Was that why this youngie was here? “Do I know your mother?” Lila asked.

“You should hear her talk about you. She was at the Needmore Rally.”

“Need less,” Lila mumbled, meaning to be dismissive, surprised by the wistfulness in her tone. RALLY ON NEEDMORE: NEED LESS! “Did I know your mother”—Lila hesitated—“personally?”

“She knew you. I mean, you were a public person.” Lila sighed in relief. Sometimes she could hardly believe the hussy she had been. On the other hand, she’d been a force: just last week a man in a weather-beaten coat had come running across the street to shake her hand: “Is it you? Is it really you?”

“You were wonderful,” Michelle said in a puzzled way, her lovely face clouding, and what Lila felt most keenly was the “were.” Lila was, once. “That’s why I wanted to come talk with you.” Michelle was sitting up straighter now, her crisp tone returned. “But I don’t have much direct information now. I’m here solely to prepare the soil. Don’t be surprised if you hear more from us. Be prepared.”

“Us? Who’s us?” Stupid thing to say. The old Lila could do better than that. Prepare the soil: Michelle must be an Agro to her bones.

“We’ll call you,” Michelle said. “When we need you, we’ll call.” Lila felt a flicker of unease, a brief pause and thump of her heart, a sensation she was having more often these days. Michelle unaccountably winked. “You could have fun.”

An up-and-comer. Federal had sent Lila an up-and-comer. “Are you staying here?” Lila heard herself asking. “Are you going to be in Dayton a while?”

“I live in Pittsburgh, but I’ll be in and out.” Pittsburgh, east up the Ohio River.

What did that mean? What did that mean? And Lila knew, as Michelle rose and walked out the door, that Lila would have difficulty resting that evening, that she’d be up with her discarded laptops flicking through old and potent images, Ohio water history, herself in the old days, her lovers in the old days, periodically squirting honey in her mouth and sucking on a piece of lemon. Tonight she’d probably go through two lemons, maybe three, putting off the moment that she placed her head on her pillow and pulled up her covers, nestling her hands, which always needed warming, between her thighs. Tonight the rituals of her solitary sleeping wouldn’t console her, because when the lights went out she would be troubled relentlessly, wondering her old worries about where she’d gone wrong, and on top of that, what were the Feds thinking, who was behind it, and why had they had sent to Lila, a woman who made no secret of her proclivities, such a young and creamy up-and-coming girl?

“WANT A BUZZ?” Kennedy, her hand trembling, lifted the bottle from the table.

“No thanks, just straight coffee. I’m cutting back.” A relief to sit in this familiar seat, across from a familiar face, after the events of her morning. Lila felt the memory of Michelle whirl away, the simple sight of orange-and-blue cushions washing her morning clean. Coffee-bar decor, like the national mood or skirt lengths, tended to cycle: bright and garish to cozy and dark. The latest incarnation was bright.

“Self-denial.” Kennedy rolled her eyes. “Are we getting old or what? I got up in the middle of the night to pee and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Oh my God, talk about an uto.” This was a private joke, their own acronym: uto, pronounced oo-toe, meaning ugly, tired, old. Lila wasn’t sure anymore which one of them had made it up. Kennedy’s belly was as vast as Lila’s; she had a problem—freely discussed—with recurring yeast under her breasts. “So what have you been up to?” Kennedy said. “They still working you hard at water?”

Lila shrugged. She had nothing to hide from Kennedy. Back in the late twenties, when Kennedy was executive director of the Metro Library, she and Lila had shared a difficult lover named Leesa. Over time and multiple conversations, Kennedy and Lila had become allies. Leesa threw over both of them to marry an African male, and was now stuck in Cleveland in an enclave of traitors and Alliance functionaries. Lila and Kennedy both enjoyed the thought of Leesa growing old with a devious man. “A lot of undercurrents these days,” Lila said, shaking her head. In her old days she was delighted how many metaphors referred to water and liquids. Now she barely noticed.

Kennedy nodded. “In the library too.”

“Agriculture sent a youngie-girl to talk with me.”

“To talk with you? In person? A youngie-girl in your office?” Not surprising that Kennedy focused on the youngie: Kennedy had never been interested in politics. Agriculture to her was probably no more suspect than Education. She shook her head in wonderment. “Why?”

“You tell me. Her manner was oblique. Referred to my being a hero to her mother.” Lila and Kennedy exchanged a rueful look. “Said they’d be contacting me. Then she left.”

“Was she sexing you?”

“Maybe. Can you believe it? Nothing direct”—Lila paused—“damn it.”

Kennedy shook her head in appreciation. “I’m surprised anyone from Agro could be subtle.”

Lila bit her fingernail consideringly: maybe Kennedy did understand about Agro. “She seemed apologetic about it.” Lila eyed Kennedy. “That might be subtle.”

Kennedy frowned. “Maybe they told her to act apologetic.”

“Subtler yet.” Lila shook her head, dislodging the image: the girl’s wanton eyelashes, her dim scent of lemon … “You read anything good lately?”

Kennedy smiled. “Believe it or not, yes. I read Nenonene’s autobiography. I can see why they want to suppress it. It’s inspirational.”

“Poor beginnings and a rise to consciousness and power?” Nay-no-nay-nay, Lila thought, accenting the third syllable slightly. Quite a melodious name for a despot.

“Exactly! He was one of fourteen children. And his father died of HIV, even though the vaccine was out. Did you know he taught himself English using a typewriter?”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“He did! Tremendous discipline. He doesn’t believe in waste, so he drinks only water from the faucet, never uses a cup. He has a special chef he trusts, but he eats right out of the pan. He sleeps in a single bed. And every morning he wakes up and walks around the basement of the old Cleveland Ritz-Carlton thirty times. Thirty times.”

“For exercise? Why not take a walk outside?”

“People might shoot him, that’s why. Lila. Don’t be naive.”

“He’s pure.” Lila smiled, remembering a photo of Nenonene standing on the hood of a parked car, wearing a white suit with a high collar and a fez-like cap with horizontal stripes, holding up his right arm in a benediction to the hundreds of people around him. A brilliant move, that outfit: a get-up like a priest’s when he was actually a general. “That’s why people like him.”

“Pure, right. Some people think he’s pure Antichrist.”

Lila smiled. “Someone called me the Antichrist once. You come home and rub lotion on your hands and think, are these Antichrist hands?”

“I wouldn’t think anyone would call you that, you being a woman.”

“Ah, but not a real woman.”

The coffee-bar door opened, and a man of maybe twenty-five entered, a small boy with curls at his nape holding his hand.

“Have they invited you up to the Grid yet?” Kennedy said. “I hear a whole brigade from Consort’s going.”

As the young man waited at the counter, the boy beside him sagged to his knees. “Daddy!” the boy said.

“On to the Grid? A tour?” Lila asked, Kennedy’s words just sinking in. No one went on the Grid. When the Gridding occurred the adults of the area had all been classified into Farming, Manufacturing, or Professional, and the farm people alone—the effs—were given the option to stay. Now the effs who worked the Grid were so cloistered the government paid the state of Florida to arrange a private Grid getaway two weeks every February.

“Stand up!” the father snapped.

“Apparently. It’s a business thing, I’m sure. No one really thinks they’re going for free.”

“You can’t stand up?” The father jerked up the boy by his arm until his feet barely grazed the floor. “Three years old and you can’t stand up?”

Lila said, “Why would they be wooing Consort?” But her eyes were on the father and son.

“You should call Agriculture. Demand a tour yourself. They think they can buy you with a pretty girl?”

But Lila was no longer listening to Kennedy. The father had thrust the boy into a chair and returned to the counter; behind Lila the boy was whimpering, snuffling squeaks that reminded Lila of a pet rat she’d had as a child. “I can’t stand it,” Lila said.

Kennedy shrugged. “We’re not parents.”

“He’s tired. Can’t his father hear he’s tired?”

“We’re all tired, Lila.” Kennedy reached for her handbag.

The man came back to the table with a drink and some bread. The boy quieted as he sat down. “Pood?” he asked hopefully.

“Daddy doesn’t buy pood for whiners.” The “p” of “pood” exploded on his lips.

“You go ahead,” Lila said to Kennedy. “I’ll stay and finish my coffee.” When Kennedy was gone, Lila went to the counter and ordered bread and apple juice, and as she left she placed these on the table in front of the boy. “If you eat, he eats,” she said to the father.

The little boy looked terrified. “Daddy, can I eat it?” The father’s eyes went shifty; Lila waited a moment to watch the boy pick up the bread and hunch away from his father. “He gets every bite, okay?” She hissed, pleased when the father cowered.

I still have it, Lila thought as she walked out the door, not sure why she hadn’t wanted Kennedy to witness what she’d done.

LILA COULDN’T SLEEP. The oldest trick in the book. A younger person, a sexually attractive person, and they walk in and drape you with flattery and when you’re practically licking their fingers they ask you for something. Was Lila supposed to fall for that? Was she that transparently weak? Did the Agros (or someone beyond the Agros, someone in the Defense Department or Environment or God knows where) really think she’d jump for their bait like some widemouthed fish? Had they pegged her as that desperate, that lonely?

She was desperate, she was lonely. She’d wasted her life. In interviews, in discussions, what did people say made their lives worth living? The small things: family, friends. For years, Lila had thought the small things didn’t matter. Her successful gestures were all public. Her father had left the family, dying years later in a residential hotel. Her mother had passed away in a nursing home four months after Lila last saw her. Her siblings were like strangers. And then there were all those lovers, come and gone.

Lila got up, flicked on the bathroom light, and inspected herself in the mirror. Salt-and-pepper hair in a pageboy, bangs chopped across her forehead, a sagging chin, gray teeth, breasts lying almost flat against her chest. The mole beneath her left eye, once a beauty mark, now drooped on its stalk like a wilted flower. An uto, just like Kennedy. Ugly, tired, old. It wasn’t the ugly that offended her; it was the tired. Years ago she’d loved being alive. She wanted love, she wanted fame, she wanted a child. What had happened to all that energy? Was there anything she yearned for now? Even something simple like eating ice cream or feeling a breeze? Sitting on the edge of the bathroom cabinet, surprised and almost grateful for such emotion, Lila started to cry. The youngie, the youngie had woken her up.