The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (51 page)

“It’s kind of a shame,”
said his father, in a low voice with a burr underneath it, as if he needed to
clear his throat with a strong cough, “that you didn’t bring Marjorie with you.”

Outside, alone, Hector
walked over to a low concrete structure, three feet in all directions, perhaps
some sort of bunker or store, and sat on the edge of this and smoked a
cigarette. The fact that the ranch was in a declivity gave it a weirdly
foreshortened, film-set feel; the horizon looked close enough to touch. The sky
above was pure, cyanide blue. The sunlight felt heavy and hot. He wondered,
absently, whether he shouldn’t borrow a hat from his Dad.

No cicadas spoiled the
perfect silence.

At Yale, where he’d
majored in Art History, Hector’s room-mate had been a theology student, a
lawyer’s son from Pennsylvania called Orwell Matthiesson. Hector remembered his
own astonishment, imperfectly hidden behind a bottle of beer in a dim-lit bar,
when Orwell had described — laughing, as if it were the biggest joke in the
world —
punching
his own father during a fight. “You actually hit him?”
Hector had asked, goggling. Orwell was a bean-polish, sharp featured guy with
long arms and big hands. “Sure,” he had replied. “I whaled him in the stomach.
He saw the blow coming, he was able to tense up, no harm done. He was
mad,
though.
Man he was mad with me. But you know how it is when you’re having a fight with
your Dad, you know how fierce it can get.”

But Hector didn’t know.
He had never once fought with his Dad, never so much as raised his voice, or
stormed out of a room. He had barely even contradicted his father, during all
the long years growing up in the LA house. In fact, as he looked back on his
childhood and adolescence from the vantage point of Yale freshmanship, he could
barely remember talking to his father at all. What did they have to talk about?

He had decided to study
Art History because, he told himself, he loved art; but his first year at
school had been a process of fastidiously unlearning his visual tastes; or if
not unlearning (for the sorts of paintings that moved him as a teenager still
stirred something in him as a student, against his better judgment) then rather
a carefully modulated process of systematic repression of his gut-responses.
His mother had been an artist, producing brightly coloured figurative canvasses
depicting lush natural landscapes, or animals, or nudes with animals, or
sometimes, Hector shuddered to recall (for these were the paintings that sold
in California in the seventies) unicorns, dolphins, pumas, starscenes, zodiacal
interpretations. As a child Hector had almost worshipped his mother’s ability
to conjure these images out of two boxes of paint and a stretch of canvas. As a
teenager, he had of course acquired distance from them, which out of her
presence sometimes took the form of disdain; but his taste in the fine arts was
indelibly marked by his childish immersion in those images: he loved Gauguin,
he admired (without true heart’s yearning) Van Gogh, he thought Chagall
beautiful. At Yale, however, after some over-enthusiastic partisanship, it
dawned on him that these sorts of artists marked him as insufficiently
aesthetically sophisticated, and so he conditioned himself to love abstract
art, to prefer Leonardo’s sketches to his completed paintings, to drop names
like Ben Nicholson and Karen Waldie. He had settled on Cézanne as a doctoral
topic in part as a compromise between the figurative and the abstract.
Compromise was one of the badges of his life, like stretch-marks on his soul.
Coming to terms with the world, the world meeting him less than half way. It
was the realization that growing up was, beyond a certain point, a kind of
shrinkage.

He had never really
known what his father did for a living. Something in business, it seemed.
Something involving selling, or speculating, with the now-wealthy ex-hippies of
San Marino and Silverlake and Los Feliz.

Hector sat on the
concrete cube in front of the ranch house and pondered as the smoke scraped
into his lungs with its delicious thousands of miniature hooks, and his skull
relaxed minutely. When he said to his Dad, about the Verne novel, “You see how
crazy that is?” he had actually been saying “you see how crazy your life is
now, Dad? You see how insane you were to sell the house and buy this ranch and
move here with these weird followers, these cultists, whatever they are?” But
if his Dad had deciphered this particular communication, he didn’t show it.
There ought to be a way, Hector thought to himself, that I can tell Dad what I
really feel.

The Bulgarian woman
(Hector had forgotten her name) had come out of the house and was walking over
the dirt towards him. As she approached the sound of an industrial drill
started up, from somewhere well away, behind the main building. The distance
shrank it to an amplified mosquito noise.

“Hello,” she said. “Do
you mind if I sit with you?”

By way of response
Hector offered her a cigarette. “Smoke?”

She didn’t reply,
instead settling herself on the edge of the concrete, disconcertingly close to
Hector. Their hips were touching. Her legs, as long as Hector’s, stretched
straight out. Even in heavy-duty jeans, he could see that they were good legs,
shapely legs. Trying to be surreptitious, he glanced up and down her body. His
intimate from-above perspective of her breasts gave her a shelf-like
forcefulness of figure. Her curling hair was dark brown. It smelt faintly of
candy. Her face, which had struck Hector earlier as conventionally pretty in a
broad-set sort of way, looked better in profile: the clean lines of her nose
running down to a proportioned tip of flesh at the end, lines at the edges of
her mouth suggesting a laughing personality. Despite his Dad’s warning, Hector’s
libido, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say his mere habit of bodily
response, perked up at the prospect represented by this woman. He imagined her
undressing. He imagined placing his hand, purposefully, on the spot where his
hip had accidentally achieved contact with hers. He speculated about the way
her flesh would feel under his fingers; not too taut, not too slack. And
straight away, without thinking about it, without weighing the propriety or
even likelihood of success, he began wondering about the best way to get her into
bed — a direct address, a sly insinuation, a slow seduction. His cigarette had
burnt into a drooping hook of ash. He dropped it in the dirt.

“I’m sorry?” he asked.
She had said something to him, but he’d been too preoccupied with the entwining
physicality of her presence, and he hadn’t properly heard.

“Je pense que vow
cherchez,”
she said, looking straight ahead,
“une
simple question qui n’exigera qu’un oui ou un non. Mais c’est n’pas ça facile.”

The fact of her speaking
in French further confused Hector’s fidgety, jetlagged mind. “I’m sorry?” he
said again.

“You have,” she said,
turning her head enough to see him out of the corner of her eye, and presenting
another attractive half-profile, lips that Hector felt an actual physical itch
to reach over and kiss, “just come back from France, I think?”

“Yes,” he replied. And
belatedly, he added, in his flat American-accented French,
“c’est vrai. C’est
simplement que votre mots prononcés . . .”

“It’s alright,” she
said, smiling warmly and thickening the laughter lines prettily at the edges of
her mouth. “Only I wanted to say that this question does not exist. It is more
complicated than a simple yes or no, is all I wanted to say. If you could stay
here longer, you’d maybe understand.”

This puzzled Hector; and
piqued him too, as if he were being banished from the sexual possibilities of
this woman as soon as he had been introduced to them. “I can stay,” he
insisted. “Why can’t I stay? Does Dad want me to go?”

She was still looking at
him out of the side of her eyes. “You misunderstand. I have not expressed
myself well. You will stay as long as any of us. Only, if you could have come
earlier, it would have perhaps been better.”

Hector had an insight
into what she meant. “Is it happening soon, then? This end of the world stuff?”

“Tonight,” she said.

The sound of the drill
rose and fell in the hot air.

“Well,” said Hector,
trying to think of something witty and ingratiating to say to this woman, whose
hip was still pressed so suggestively against his, “I guess I’ll get an answer
to my question soon enough. Tonight, I guess.” He fiddled a new cigarette out
of the packet, and slipped it into his mouth. “What happens when, or if, I
should say — if tomorrow dawns and everything’s still the same as it was? I
mean, like the millennium. I often wondered how the people who really believed
the world was going to end in 2000, how they felt waking up the next day and
realizing they were wrong.”

Instead of answering
this, the woman said, “I said
if you could stay here longer
because we
hoped you could have come weeks ago, and then we could have persuaded you of
the inevitability of this thing. But your father thought you would get into a
temper and leave, and then you would be away from the ranch when it happens.”
Her accentless English slowed over these last three words, to give the unspoken
“it” an appropriate weight. “So it is better that you are here only today,
although it will be a shock for you when it happens.”

“If
it happens,” said Hector. He clicked his skull-topped metal lighter
and placed a knob of fire on the tip of his cigarette. “I’m sorry,” he said,
drawing and blowing off a lungful of smoke before removing the cigarette from
his mouth and holding it away from her, “I should have asked — do you mind?”

She was looking away
from him now, which gave Hector licence to peer closely at the interwoven
fibres of her curly brown hair, at the snuffbox indentation in the exact centre
of the back of her neck. She smelled sweet, the heat and light squeezing wafts
of whatever conditioner she used out of her hair straight to Hector’s nose.

The drill stopped its
noise, and sudden silence was almost as startling as sudden loudness. Hector
looked hastily to the front, not wanting to be caught staring.

“I love Hector,” the
woman said. And for a moment Hector’s heart scurried in his chest, and he could
sense the blood pumping in his head; but she meant his father, of course. The down
stroke of this realization, with its release of petty annoyance, almost tipped
Hector into vindictiveness; he almost asked,
and are you sleeping with him
then?
But he did not ask this question. Instead he dragged on his
cigarette, and looked away to cover his confusion.

“If you’d been able to
stay for a few weeks,” she said, “you might have had one of the visions yourself.”

“Oh,” he said,
scornfully. “Visions, is it?”

“They are very eloquent
visions.”

“Yeah?”

“Without your father,”
she said, simply, “I would be, now, in Europe, and tomorrow I would be dead.
You also.”

“Everybody dies,” he
said; but although he intended this as debonair and fearless, it came over
merely as flip and rather callous. He sucked too strongly on his cigarette
again, and had to stifle a cough. “I used to imagine,” he said, spontaneously,
with a tingling in his chest of the sort he felt when he was doing something
reckless, something filled with the possibilities of huge triumph and huge
disaster mixed together, like asking a beautiful woman out, or attempting a
risqué answer to a crucial question in an important interview, “I used to
imagine exactly what it would be like to fight with my Dad. I used to lie awake
at night, when I was at college, planning exactly what I’d say, exactly what
his response would be, how I would cut him down to size, everything. But it
never came to the right moment in actual life. There are so many things,” he
went on hesitantly, although in fact exaggerating his hesitancy of expression
because he felt this was something he ought to express in a circumspect
fashion, “so many things that I’ve never been able to communicate to him, about
how I feel.”

“Your father thinks,”
she said, as if replying to this confession, “that it is merely a random matter
that he got the visions. That it could have happened to anybody. But I don’t
think so. I think he got the visions because of who he is.”

She hopped off the ledge
and turned to look at him. Her breasts moved just out of synch with the rest of
her body, a fact of physics that sent jangles of electric excitement along
Hector’s nerves.

“Hey,” he said, uncertain what to say.

“I think you like me,” she said, and smiled.

Hector simply stared at her.

“Perhaps you are worried
about Tom, but after tonight it won’t matter so much. The first child I have
will
be his, and maybe the second. But genetic mixing is an important part of
this, of this whole thing, and there are only a few men here, and it would be
foolish to be too exclusive.”

This, Hector thought,
wide-eyed, was perhaps the most extraordinary speech a woman had ever spoken to
him. “Christ, you’re forward,” he said, gruffly, suddenly aware of his own Adam’s
apple, like an unswallowed lump in his throat. “Christ.”

“You do not remember my
name,” she said, smiling again. And then she turned and went back inside.