I could have brought the Selectric downstairs, perhaps even lugged it out onto the deck where there was a little breeze coming over the surface of the lake, but I didn’t. I had brought it all the way to the door of my office, and my office was where I’d work… if I could work.
I’d work in there even if the temperature beneath the roofpeak built to a hundred and twenty degrees… which, by three in the afternoon, it just might.
The paper rolled into the machine was an old pink-carbon receipt from Click! the photo shop in Castle Rock where Jo had bought her supplies when we were down here. I’d put it in so that the blank side faced the Courier type-ball. On it I had typed the names of my little harem, as if I had tried in some struggling way to report on my three-faceted dream even while it was going on:
Jo Sara Mattie Jo Sara Mattie Mattie Mattie Sara Sara Jo Johanna Sara Jo Mattiesarajo.
Below this, in lower case: normal sperm count sperm norm all’s rosy I opened the office door, carried the typewriter in, and put it in its old place beneath the poster of Richard Nixon. I pulled the pink slip out of the roller, balled it up, and tossed it into the wastebasket.
Then I picked up the Selectric’s plug and stuck it in the baseboard socket. My heart was beating hard and fast, the way it had when I was thirteen and climbing the ladder to the high board at the Y-pool. I had climbed that ladder three times when I was twelve and then slunk back down it again; once I turned thirteen, there could be no chickening out—I really had to do it.
I thought I’d seen a fan hiding in the far corner of the closet, behind the box marked GADGETS. I started in that direction, then turned around again with a ragged little laugh. I’d had moments of confidence before, hadn’t I? Yes. And then the iron bands had clamped around my chest. It would be stupid to get out the fan and then discover I had no business in this room after all.
“Take it easy,” I said, “take it easy.” But I couldn’t, no more than that narrow-chested boy in the ridiculous purple bathing suit had been able to take it easy when he walked to the end of the diving board, the pool so green below him, the upraised faces of the boys and girls in it so small, so small.
I bent to one of the drawers on the right side of the desk and pulled so hard it came all the way out. I got my bare foot out of its landing zone just in time and barked a gust of loud, humorless laughter. There was halfa ream of paper in the drawer. The edges had that faintly crispy look paper gets when it’s been sitting for a long time. I no more than saw it before remembering I had brought my own supply—stuff a good deal fresher than this. I left it where it was and put the drawer back in its hole. It took several tries to get it on its tracks; my hands were shaking.
At last I sat down in my desk chair, hearing the same old creaks as it took my weight and the same old rumble of the casters as I rolled it forward, snugging my legs into the kneehole. Then I sat facing the keyboard, sweating hard, still remembering the high board at the Y, how springy it had been under my bare feet as I walked its length, remembering the echoing quality of the voices below me, remembering the smell of chlorine and the steady low throb of the air-exchangers: fwung-fwung-fwung-fwung, as if the water had its own secret heartbeat. I had stood at the end of the board wondering (and not for the first time!) if you could be paralyzed if you hit the water wrong. Probably not, but you could die of fear. There were documented cases of that in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which served me as science between the ages of eight and fourteen.
Go on/Jo’s voice cried. My version of her voice was usually calm and collected; this time it was shrill. Stop dithering andgo on!
I reached for the IBM’s rocker-switch, now remembering the day I had dropped my Word Six program into the Powerbook’s trash. Goodbye, oldpal, I had thought.
“Please let this work,” I said. “Please.”
I lowered my hand and flicked the switch. The machine came on. The Courier ball did a preliminary twirl, like a ballet dancer standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I picked up a piece of paper, saw my sweaty fingers were leaving marks, and didn’t care. I rolled it into the machine, centered it, then wrote Chapter One and waited for the storm to break.
CHAPTER 4
The ringing of the phone—or, more accurately, the way I received the ringing of the phone—was as familiar as the creaks of my chair or the hum of the old IBM Selectric. It seemed to come from far away at first, then to approach like a whistling train coming down on a crossing.
There was no extension in my office or Jo’s; the upstairs phone, an old-fashioned rotary-dial, was on a table in the hall between them—in what Jo used to call “no-man’s-land.” The temperature out there must have been at least ninety degrees, but the air still felt cool on my skin after the office. I was so oiled with sweat that I looked like a slightly pot-bellied version of the muscle-boys I sometimes saw when I was working out.
“Hello?”
“Mike? Did I wake you? Were you sleeping?” It was Mattie, but a different one from last night. This one wasn’t afraid or even tentative; this one sounded so happy she was almost bubbling over. It was almost cer tainly the Mattie who had attracted Lance Devore. “Not sleeping,” I said. “Writing a little.”
“Get out! I thought you were retired.”
“I thought so, too,” I said, “but maybe I was a little hasty. What’s going on? You sound over the moon.”
“I just got off the phone with John Storrow—”
Really? How long had I been on the second floor, anyway? I looked at my wrist and saw nothing but a pale circle. It was half-past freckles and skin o’clock, as we used to say when we were kids; my watch was downstairs in the north bedroom, probably lying in a puddle of water from my overturned night-glass.
“—his age, and that he can subpoena the other son!”
“Whoa,” I said. “You lost me. Go back and slow down.”
She did. Telling the hard news didn’t take long (it rarely does):
Stor-row was coming up tomorrow. He would land at County Airport and stay at the Lookout Rock Hotel in Castle View. The two of them would spend most of Friday discussing the case. “Oh, and he found a lawyer for you,” she said. “To go with you to your deposition. I think he’s from Lewiston.”
It all sounded good, but what mattered a lot more than the bare facts was that Mattie had recovered her will to fight. Until this morning (if it was still morning; the light coming in the window above the broken air conditioner suggested that if it was, it wouldn’t be much longer) I hadn’t realized how gloomy the young woman in the red sundress and tidy white sneakers had been. How far down the road to believing she would lose her child.
“This is great. I’m so glad, Mattie.”
“And you did it. If you were here, I’d give you the biggest kiss you ever had.”
“He told you you could win, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And you believe him.”
“Yes!” Then her voice dropped a little. “He wasn’t exactly thrilled when I told him I’d had you over to dinner last night, though.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t think he would be.”
“I told him we ate in the yard and he said we only had to be inside together for sixty seconds to start the gossip.”
“I’d say he’s got an insultingly low opinion of Yankee lovin,” I said, “but of course he’s from New York.” She laughed harder than my little joke warranted, I thought. Out of semi-hysterical relief that she now had a couple of protectors? Because the whole subject of sex was a tender one for her just now? Best not to speculate. “He didn’t paddle me too hard about it, but he made it clear that he would if we did it again. When this is over, though, I’m having you for a real meal. We’ll have everything you like, just the way you like it.” Everything you like, just the way you like it. And she was, by God and Sonny Jesus, completely unaware that what she was saying might have another meaning—I would have bet on it. I closed my eyes for a moment, smiling.