Novella: “They Say in Heaven Love Comes First” (Part Two; Final)

2.

A Life in the Day 

Kim Spaulding, née Volo, slept until ten and woke up to the smell of coffee in the first-floor apartment that she shared with her friend Walter.

            Kim was a short-statured, thin-lipped, fashionable woman who liked staying up late, sleeping in, and going to the movies in her free time; she had seen each of the Star Wars movies four or five times back when they had been coming out and had once attended a law firm Halloween party in a long-skirted white Princess Leia costume that she had assembled herself almost entirely from memory. Now she was on the old end of young or the young end of middle-aged and had now been divorced for longer than she had been married. She had an extremely high metabolism, drank copiously to little apparent effect, and was proud of how she looked when lying on the beach in one of the numerous swimsuits that took up the second-uppermost drawer in her dresser. (Within this collection bikinis and one-pieces were at a ratio of seven to three; the ratio was maintained almost as strictly as the bands for exchange rates under the Bretton Woods system, and at this point Kim had had the system for about as long as Bretton Woods had lasted too.)

            Kim was one of those people who had numerous very strongly held political, religious, and moral beliefs, despite a narrow emotional range and a limited capacity for expressing negative emotions about practices of which she disapproved. Abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty were all practices that she morally opposed for genuinely held and more or less principled reasons, despite not feeling much subjective personal distress at the fate of early-term conceptuses, terminal patients, or violent criminals, respectively. As this combination of moral hobbyhorses might have indicated to a theologically astute observer, Kim was a fairly serious Catholic, which was part of why, despite living together and having a strong mutual attraction, she and Walter nowadays never shared a bed.

            Kim worked as a researcher in semiconductors for a private-sector concern that had a working relationship with California Polytechnic. Her office was on the Cal Poly campus in San Luis Obispo, about a half-hour’s drive from the little beach town where she and Walter lived. Their apartment was a subdivision, among half a dozen or so, of a former upper-middle-class beach home dating from about the beginning of the century and executed in a countrified Old California style. It had been one among several homes of an Eastern Establishment family called Parker, the sort of people whom Kipling had devoted Captains Courageous to lauding and magnifying. They had lost it in 1929. Kim and Walter’s apartment was on the lowest floor; it actually had to be walked down to from the street, but it was not a basement because the building was on a hillside and they had windows and a back door open to the air, and a patio from which one could take a rocky path down to the beach.

            “Is that the new medium roast?” Kim asked Walter blearily as she stumbled half-clad out into the kitchen.

            Walter nodded. “Sure is,” he said. “You said you were interested in trying it yesterday, so I brewed enough for both of us today.” He grinned wolfishly. “Actually I brewed enough for both of us to have two or three cups,” he said, “although I know you’re trying to cut back.”

            “Trying to,” said Kim. “Doesn’t mean it’s going well.” She reached up to brush a mop of feathery hair upwards out of her face. “But sure, let me try some.”

            They sat down together and drank their coffee companionably. Walter was fully dressed, although “fully dressed” for Walter still typically involved beachwear since he worked at a boardwalk food kiosk in a town about fifteen minutes’ drive down the coast. (Their own town did not have much of a local economy to speak of, beyond a few cafés and an artists’ colony that Walter had been kicked out of under mysterious circumstances.) Kim had to be at work at one and Walter had the day off, so they had a good couple of hours together. Walter had rented videotapes of some movies from earlier in the decade that neither of them had seen in a while, both respectable ones like The Empire Strikes Back and probably-bootlegged videos of campy flops like Shock Treatment, and they would be watching them together piecemeal over the next couple of days, in the mornings and the evenings. Until then, they had about eight English muffins left, and both of them had a tendency to inhale the things so they would probably not need much else for breakfast.

            The medium roast was pretty good, but Kim thought that she still preferred the oddly thick green tea that she had had in lieu of coffee the previous morning. It had given her less of a headache than the coffee normally did.

            After breakfast they, indeed, watched movies for a bit. They actually started with a foreign film, probably French, that Kim had not seen before and that Walter had only the vaguest memories of having seen in the now-increasingly-distant past. Walter was a lot younger than Kim but was still old enough to feel nostalgic for the opening salvos of his adulthood; he would have been a member of the Cal Poly class of 1983 had he not dropped out partway through his junior year. He was not a California native, but his pre-California past was sometimes a little difficult to make out, and was not what he was nostalgic for.

            With things standing where they currently stood in Kim’s relationship with God and Walter’s relationship with Kim, it was indeed the case that they barely touched themselves, let alone each other. However, they had been sexually intimate briefly in the past, two or three years ago when Walter had been fresher out of college and Kim had been making, as she saw it, less of an effort where religion was concerned. It had only happened three or four times and those were the only three or four times Kim had known anybody other than herself in a sexual way since the divorce. Walter had been understanding when Kim had pulled back; he was still understanding, but she knew that he was frustrated, and that—New Age as he was, believing in love and to a lesser extent in indulgence as he did—the situation was causing him real suffering.

Kim felt badly about this, because she knew that Walter had fewer grounds than most on which to see suffering as potentially redemptive. His father had died recently in a state of real emotional agony at the age of fifty-three; the rest of their family had more or less abandoned him as a tiresome case on account of his pancreatic cancer. His mother, for her part, had attempted to kill herself shortly thereafter and been for about three months confined to a mental asylum, although she had been able to come home more or less safe and sound in the end. Since then Walter’s attitudes towards emotional suffering and difficult-to-understand moral situations had inclined towards analgesia, and for the past few months he had, with Kim’s knowledge, been seeing a psychic called Madame Z to help him keep a handle on things.

            “Have you seen Madame Z lately?” she asked offhandedly just a few minutes before she had to leave for her.

            He shook his head. “Gonna see her this afternoon, maybe; I’ve got some errands to do in SLO,” he said. “I might be able to grab an early dinner out with you if you have a spare hour.”

            “I’d like that,” Kim said.

            “I thought you didn’t like the fact I’m seeing Madame Z,” said Walter.

            “I don’t,” said Kim. “But I know it’s important to you that you be able to talk to her.” She smiled manfully and popped a mint into her mouth before giving him a quick kiss. “I should head out,” she said. “Love you; please do be in touch about dinner when you can.”

            “Of course. I can call you at the office?”

            “Of course.”

❦

The drive to San Luis Obispo went through some beautiful hills that Kim found it increasingly difficult to really see as beautiful. She found it difficult not because she was cynical but simply because they were familiar. She was aware that having a hard time seeing beauty in familiarity was, in some wise, a flaw on her part; it also made her less enthusiastic about revisiting pieces of art than Walter was, and it was mostly through revisiting pieces of art with Walter that she had begun to overcome it. The hills, she hoped, would do even more to help her overcome it, once she had the strength of mind and soul to let them.

            Kim had been born in Massachusetts and was a veteran of a Catholic college in that state. She had grown up in a slushy suburb without much in the way of natural beauty other than the oddly intense winter sunsets of those regions; her father had been a devout churchgoer, and the synagogue that her mother did not go to had been Orthodox. Both were still alive now, both in nursing homes; they had been almost forty when Kim had been born, and she had two much-older siblings, Irving and Lara, both resident contentedly within the Jewish community of New York City. Kim had three nieces and nephews through Irving and six through Lara, who was what was called a baalat teshuva, someone not raised religious who was now an Orthodox Jew. Kim’s relationship with her own religion was still more ambiguous and nerve-wracked than Lara’s relationship with hers, despite demurring as regarded Walter.

            Lara called her on her car phone.

            “Hi, Kim! It’s a little after three where I am. So it’s about noon where you are?”

            “A little after, yeah. What brings this on? It’s good to hear from you. I’m surprised you guessed that I’d be driving.”

            “I didn’t guess; I called your office and they said you weren’t there yet; then I called Walter and he said you’d already left.”

            “That’ll do it,” said Kim with a smile that she hoped Lara could hear. “So, well, what does bring this on? You’re usually not this desperate to get a hold of me; in fact I’ve often wondered why you don’t call me more often.”

            “Three kids still in school will do that to a person,” said Lara. “I was actually calling because I really need your opinion on something as a…well, not as a goy exactly…”

            “As a Christian?” asked Kim. Lara made a little assenting sound, the kind that got along famously with a nod. “Shoot,” said Kim.

            “How do you feel about Cardinal O’Connor?”

            “I know almost nothing about him. Why? Are some rabbis having some sort of problem with him?”

            “I’m not sure. There was that big dust-up over abortion last year, wasn’t there?” Kim suppressed a groan; she and Lara had been on opposite sides of that, which was rare for a front-line political issue discussed between them. “And I think something similar might be in the offing now, or maybe some people who were involved in that argument are trying to start it over again.”

            “I’ve heard that that AIDS thing is pretty damn bad back East,” said Kim. “Where are the rabbis on that? I know the Church is doing next to nothing. I’ve written to a few of the California bishops about it.”

            “That’s actually something I wanted to ask you about; would you recommend I write to some of the rabbis around here about these issues? I really don’t like the culture war,” said Lara. “That’s part of why I sided with the rabbis last time. The rabbis seem more live-and-let-live. I wonder why that would be,” she said, a little sarcastically, and with something of a barb directed to her sister, “in a mostly-Christian country.”

            “I can’t think,” said Kim, playing along with the sarcasm. The car swept along a particularly beautiful section of roadway.

            “I really don’t want to make this a religion argument,” said Lara. “It’s at heart an argument about social niceties. I’ve always felt that you’re better at that sort of thing than I am. Always have been. Even when—” She stopped short.

            “Even when my marriage was falling apart?” Kim guessed.

            “Yes,” said Lara. “Honestly, Al never really…he had always seemed a little crude to me. No offense,” she said, “but I always thought you deserved to be a lady paired with a gentleman.”

            “I thought the same,” said Kim. “Hence the divorce.”

            “Hence the divorce,” said Lara. “I know that’s created problems for you and I feel often as if I don’t take those problems seriously enough.”

            “It’s okay,” said Kim. “Walter and I don’t take them very seriously either. You know he’s seeing a psychic about them?” Lara made a little sound of polite-but-genuine interest. “Yeah, some woman going by Madame Z,” said Kim. “I think she’s out of…I don’t know, somewhere further down the coast towards LA, I think. It’s a big county. Anyway, I have to say I’m not thrilled with it myself, but apparently he’s found her helpful, so who am I to gainsay that? I am asking an awful lot of him, after all. I’m just deeply fortunate that he feels I’m worth it.”

            “I would feel you were worth it too,” said Lara.

            Kim laughed, and slowed down the car a little rounding a bend. “If you were a man and we weren’t related?”

            “No. Don’t be disgusting; you’re better than that. If something about your religion made it harder on us to be sisters, rather than harder on you and Walter to be together, I would feel that you were worth it.”

            “Thank you,” said Kim. “I see a cop car coming up; I should have both hands on the wheel so I’m going to hang up, okay?”

            “Okay,” said Lara. “Let’s continue this conversation when you get to work.”

            “Yep. I’ll call you back,” said Kim, and hung up. About five seconds later she passed the cop car without incident. She continued the drive and made it to her office with about ten minutes before she had been asked to come in; she could almost certainly get away, in a laid-back work environment, with a fairly lengthy call-back. She looked at her clothes and makeup—light pink jacket; dark lip liner; lots of blush—in the car mirror before getting out, to make sure nothing was out of place. Her shoulders were a little uneven so she adjusted them with an almost dismissive tug on one sleeve.

❦

The call-back to Lara went well and Kim was able to get away with giving her sister advice that was both literally and figuratively phoned in. Lara had a clear and present problem with deference to public or almost-public figures and so Kim’s brashness—which would have been so much more appropriate to New York than to California—always tended to come as a genuine revelation to her sister. Then Kim went into a meeting where she gave a brief presentation on some of the problems that Japanese-made PCs were starting to run into on the Japanese domestic market, problems that might start to create more of an opening for American-made machines over the next few years. She predicted an economic slowdown for Japan sometime relatively soon; to her surprise, nobody really seemed to dispute this, probably because Kim was one of the only Asian affairs experts on this particular team. (She had studied both Japanese and Chinese in college, although she had not majored in either.) After that it was time for a late lunch.

            “You’re staying until fairly late evening, right?” asked John Beck, her second- or third-favorite of her colleagues, over a split foot-long sub.

            “Probably,” said Kim, “although at a certain point I’m going to go for an early dinner with my boyfriend. You okay with that?”

            “Yeah; why wouldn’t I be? The main thing we had to get done today was that meeting. Not much else needs to be discussed as a group. We’re all gonna be working independently here for the next day or a few.”

            “It’s Thursday,” observed Kim.

            “It sure as hell is,” said John.

            “Forgive me, it’s just that…well…”

            “Spit it out.”

            “Are we working Saturday?” Kim asked.

            “Saturday and possibly Sunday afternoon—not morning, though, don’t worry,” said John. Kim, upon hearing this, was briefly, flickeringly angry; she had extensive plans for Saturday with Walter, and if those were going to have to be preempted, then they should, she felt, have told her much earlier than today. “I’m sorry,” said John. “It wasn’t my decision.”

            “Of course it wasn’t,” said Kim. “Did I look angry?”

            “Angry as you ever look, yeah,” said John with a weary shrug—weary, Kim could tell, about something other than her.

            “If you’re sick of working weekends too, we can always hang out in your office and shoot the breeze,” Kim said, although truth be told this idea did not really appeal to her much more than doing her job did.

            “Maybe,” said John, who sounded like he felt about the same way she did. “I’ll keep you posted.” He took another sip of Modelo. “You know, you could probably get a job actually teaching at this university if you really wanted to,” he said.

            “I don’t think I have the public university mindset.”

            “I don’t think you do either,” said John with a laugh.

❦

Walter had met John twice, once in San Luis Obispo and once in Monterey when they happened to have both been visiting friends there at the same time. After the second time, he had called Kim to tell her about it. “He’s the sort of man who was born to be an uncle,” he said. “Does that make sense? Not necessarily born to have kids—does he have kids?—but born to be an uncle.”

            “Avuncular,” said Kim.

            “Oh?”

            “The word you’re looking for, for somebody who seems like he was born to be an uncle, is avuncular,” Kim said. “John does look the type, doesn’t he? The beer gut and dun-colored moustache go well together. And he does have kids, two or three of them I think.”

            “I enjoyed talking with him. He thinks highly of you.” There was the slightest hint of tension in Walter’s tone of voice.

            “I think highly of him too,” said Kim as unemotionally as she could. This was true; but she wanted to downplay it. “Did he tell you about the deck he’s building?”

            “He did! It’s such a normal-guy thing to be doing, building a deck.”

            “High praise from a cool guy like you. Scored a hot older woman and everything.”
            “You’re lucky we met at the beach,” said Walter. Both of them held it together for about a second longer before dissolving into light laughter. He told her he loved her and hung up. That had been two or three months ago.

❦

“Do you still drive that Trans Am?” John asked her.

            “The Trans Am? No; I had to downsize. Those things really get screwed up after certain kinds of accidents; who knew? No, I’m actually driving one of the newer Japanese models now. The kind you think might have a computer in it; no idea if it actually does or not. I doubt it. I don’t know.” Kim shrugged. “Maybe that’s racist, I don’t know. You know. Like in Knight Rider.”

“A car with a computer in it, like in Knight Rider?”

“No, nimrod, racist, like in Knight Rider.” Seeing John’s face, Kim laughed theatrically. “I’m messing with you,” she said.

            “I can tell,” he said. “So you know, I really don’t watch much TV. I’ve only seen two or three episodes of Knight Rider.”

“It’s just as well; I don’t even think it’s airing anymore,” said Kim. “Would you believe me if I told you I liked Hasselhoff better in The Young and the Restless?”

“You’ve told me you were very bored for much of the seventies.”

            “I was. So you believe me?” John nodded. “Great,” said Kim. “Maybe in that case you’ll believe me about the figures I read out in that presentation and try to convince Professor Geier that, no, my resource wasn’t mistaken about them.” She shook her head and took what was probably going to be her second-to-last bite of the foot-long.

            “I’ll try,” said John.

            “Any particular reason Professor Geier doesn’t like me?” Kim asked.

            “You don’t think he likes you?”

            “I know he doesn’t; I’ve noticed. Women can tell.” Kim finished her half of the sub. “Or maybe it’s just me that can tell.”

            John leaned back and took another sip of beer. “You’re not the only person I know who can tell,” he said, without seeming to feel any need to elaborate further.

            “Thanks,” Kim said. “I appreciate knowing that.”

❦

She did end up able to call Walter and arrange to have a six o’ clock dinner at a certain Mexican restaurant. This restaurant had an interesting way of serving nopalitos that, were it not for Kim’s metabolism, she might worry would give her a heart attack sometime soon. They were served in a mix of salsa verde and melted cheese and she liked to eat them with a spoon. She liked to have them with margaritas if she was not driving within the next few hours and virgin margaritas if she was. Walter typically stuck with bean burritos; sometimes he got them with tofu inside; Kim had never developed a taste for tofu. “It’s because it’s been marketed as a meat substitute, and it’s a bad meat substitute,” Walter always said. “It’s good if you take it its own terms.”

            “I’ve never really thought of tofu as dictating terms,” Kim would always reply.

            “Absolutely anything can dictate terms if you’re weak-willed enough,” he had said once.

            “Do you consider yourself weak-willed enough, then?”

            “No.”

            This time, he did get the burrito with tofu, and she condescended to try a little bit of it, and see how it agreed with her.

            “This is actually excellent,” she said. “I’m surprised. I had no idea you could get it to hold a marinade like this.”

            “Neither does anybody back home,” said Walter. “Part of why I live in California. If you gave this to somebody in North Dakota then it might well give them explosive shits on top of everything else.” She started. He had only specified his home state once or twice before in the five years that she had known him. She supposed that, if the past was a lost home, and food was a reminder of the comforts of the hearth, then it was not so surprising that on each occasion it had been over a meal that he had mentioned it.

            “Would you like some of my nopalitos?”

            Walter shook his head. “That stuff makes me feel like my guts are sticking together,” he said. “I admire you that you can inhale it the way you do.”

            “Thank you; at least somebody does,” said Kim with a calculated upward flicker of her lips.

            “How’s your day been so far?”

            “Pretty good. I got a call from Lara while I was driving. That car phone is turning out to be quite the little investment.”

            “Did you have it in one hand while you were driving?”

            “Yes. I had to hang up when I passed a cop car.” Kim smiled more genuinely this time and took a sip of her margarita. Setting the glass down, she saw some of her lipstick on the rim; she made a mental note to touch up her lips after dinner before she had to sit through another one of those meetings.

            “You look worried,” said Walter.

            Kim nodded. She did not want to get into the fact that it was over her makeup; Walter, who had an ostentatious dislike for makeup that was probably feminist in theory but could become judgmental in practice, would not have been sympathetic.

            “Do you want to turn in early tonight?” Walter asked.

            Kim nodded again. She would, ideally, have liked nothing better than to curl up with Walter watching movies until finally drifting off on her own accord at some point during the witching hour. Alas, she was unhappy, vaguely and diffusely; and when she was vaguely and diffusely unhappy it was typically a good idea for her to sleep on it sooner rather than later.

❦

After dinner she went through the rest of her late workday on a sort of mental and spiritual autopilot before driving home. A song of which she was especially fond came on in the car as she drove, brightening her mood a little. When she got home, Walter was smoking a cheap cigarette and conducting a phone conversation with somebody called Leslie.

            “…experimental treatment?” Walter was saying. “Uh…sure, I suppose. Yes, my parents would probably have the money for it; I’m happy to put you in touch with them but…” He trailed off, then frowned, a worried frown. “No, Leslie,” he said, “I’m not on bad terms with them; we just don’t talk often is all. Yes,” he said. “Yes. Yes, I hope you’re doing better than you were last night. Bye now.” He hung up, and with tired eyes looked up at Kim.

            “Friend of yours?” she asked.

            Walter nodded. “Leslie, distant cousin.”

            “Guy Leslie or girl Leslie?”

            “Guy Leslie. He’s, well…” Walter waved his hand, the one not holding the cigarette, theatrically in the air. “Distant cousin,” he said. “Ran off to New York City. Came home recently, ‘home’ being my great-aunt’s place.”

            “I see,” said Kim, although she was not sure why Walter was uncomfortable just saying it. It wasn’t as if Kim and Walter had any room for judgment. “I hope he’ll do okay.”

            “I hope so too; we all hope so, day in, day out,” said Walter. He ran his free hand through his hair, then took one last long drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out. “Want to fall asleep in front of the TV together?” he asked.

            “You know what? Fuck it; yes, I do,” said Kim. She needed closeness, the closeness of the body, after some fashion, and this seemed to be about what she would allow herself to get.

            “Great,” said Walter. “I think Miami Vice is on. Let’s vegetate in front of that for a while. Then maybe we can put Empire Strikes Back on.”

❦

Kim fell asleep in Walter’s arms less than ten minutes into a Miami Vice rerun. When she woke up, it was well before dawn—grey light had only just barely begun to creep into the nighttime, and the television was still on, though at a low volume. Walter was still asleep but had shifted away from her at some point in such a way that her head was now in his lap rather than on his shoulder.

            She rubbed her eyes as she sat up—slowly, so as not to wake him. Her consciousness sloshed around sluggishly in her head as she gazed at the patterns on the television screen. For a few seconds it looked like one of the test patterns that she remembered from her childhood when stations had gone off-air for the night, but soon she realized that it was in fact part of some infomercial, shrill and hectoring and chrome. Something was imposing itself upon her from out of the screen, from out of the airwaves, from out of the network, and she could not tell what was being asked of her. She rubbed her eyes again, woke up some more, and saw that what was being asked of her was to shell out money for some barbecue grill. Yet somewhere within that request there was another request, encoded, descending, being proclaimed to her.

            Kim groped for the remote control and turned off the TV as soon as she found it. Somehow the absence of sound rather than its presence woke Walter up. He rolled over heavily, smacked his lips a few times, and smiled at her. “Morning?” he asked.

            “Not quite,” said Kim. “It’s maybe four. I’m gonna go to my room and try to get a few more hours.”

            “You sure? We could have an early morning of it.”

            “I’m sure, but thank you,” said Kim, and leaned down to kiss him on the cheek.

            “Any interesting dreams?” he asked, blearily.

            “I dreamed that the Pope and I were on a Star Destroyer and I vented him into space,” said Kim, her voice echoing oddly, like a hollow barrel.

            “I see,” said Walter. He turned over and went back to sleep. Kim stood up and retreated to her room. The grey light was absent here; she had to turn on a lamp to even see where her bed was, and when she got under the covers and turned the lamp off again, the only light she could see was the starlight on the sea. Somewhere west-beyond-west from here she felt that there was something for which she had long been searching—not west in Hawaii, in Japan, or in China, but in some wise ontologically west, closer towards an idea of sunset, closer to endings than to beginnings. She felt called out of herself and out on that long voyage, someday.

            She had trouble getting back to sleep. She drifted off, after a fashion, for a little while, and had waking dreams. They were all dreams of being called to, of being asked, of being requested, having her presence wanted. In some of the dreams Walter wanted her presence, as, indeed, he did in her waking reality, but in others she felt called into the presence of something else, something that she tried her best to avoid assuming was divine. The waves broke on the beach below their building more loudly than usual; she could hear them very clearly, awake and asleep. When she woke up fully again it was about eight-thirty and Walter was singing off-key in the kitchen. She had a snatch of lyric in her head, lyric rather than lyrics, poetry rather than whatever Walter was singing along to:

Rowing in Eden—

Ah—the Sea!

Rubbing her forehead because she felt an unpleasant clamminess as if she had slept the night through without taking all of her makeup off, Kim ascended from her mattress. She could hear Walter more clearly than she could hear the waves now. Love for both smote her heart. She changed out of yesterday’s clothes at long last, and set about picking out a new outfit for today—a little more casual, but still work-appropriate. She ended up with a geometric-patterned sweater over a collared blouse, a long narrow skirt, and low heels. By the time she moved from the bedroom to the bathroom to put today’s makeup on, Walter was shouting that there were waffles ready.

            It was not a difficult decision to eat her waffles before putting on her makeup; Kim seldom had a particularly big breakfast, and she had anticipated lunch being her first real meal of the day, so the waffles came as a pleasant surprise. It was a surprise that told her how loved she was, in spite of it all. She was happy almost the point of prayer as they ate the waffles together, and after she finished getting ready she actually did say a quick Hail Mary as she ran out to her car.

            The drive to San Luis Obispo went uninterrupted this morning. The car phone lay chaste and silent in its cradle. There were some clouds in the sky and the forecast on the morning radio said that there would likely be a shower in the afternoon, not shocking given the time of year. It was maybe sixty degrees out; she had the windows cracked and the wind whistled lowly around the car. A song that she liked came on the radio and she began humming off-key much as Walter had been singing, but she was humming not so much to the song as to that wind-whistle. The clouds cleared and gathered, gathered and cleared, and she realized, or remembered, that her life meant something, and did not mean something only to Walter or even only to herself.

            The workday was pleasant enough but something about the way in which it was pleasant made Kim feel fat. It was pleasant in the way that a eunuch swanning sedately through some palace of old would have found things pleasant. Kim gave another little presentation in the morning, played around with circuit diagrams in her office for another hour or two, went to lunch, came back from lunch, gave a guest lecture in one of the Cal Poly faculty’s intro-level class on computer hardware, and continued to play around with circuit diagrams in her office for the rest of the day. At a little bit before four-thirty she was told that she could go home for the day, on the proviso that she come back, as had been discussed, tomorrow.

            “I appreciate it,” she said. “Yes, I’ll be back tomorrow; I’m not happy about it, though.”

            “None of us are,” said Professor Western, the man to whom she was talking. He was tall and pudgy and had a short black beard. His glasses were aggressively unfashionable and he referred to his wife as “the wife,” but seldom without affection.

            “Well, have a good rest of your day, Terry,” said Kim, getting up and beginning to gather her stuff together. “Glad we’re getting a little rain.”

            “Really? I’m not.”

            Kim shrugged. “The plants could use it. The winters here remind me of the springs back home.”

            “Massachusetts, right?”

            “Originally, yes. Then New York and Pennsylvania, for a while.” She did not mention why she had lived in Pennsylvania, or why it had only been for a while. Professor Western was not privy to why and how she had become Kim Spaulding. Kim herself was barely even privy to why she remained Kim Spaulding now.

            As she drove home, it did, indeed, rain a little. The droplets splattered almost like gifts on her windshield; using the windshield wipers was almost like accepting those gifts, accepting them but in accepting them also putting them somewhere out of sight. Kim wondered why it felt so much like that to her.

            Walter was not home when she got in; she wondered if he had found some odd job to do, with a wrench or a screwdriver or a hammer. Somehow wondering this made her feel chilly and empty, not the anodyne emptiness that she was used to by now but something that came closer to genuinely upsetting her. His life being more easygoing than hers, and burdened by fewer obligations and perhaps by fewer authorities, had never struck her as particularly fair, but her frustration with its unfairness came and went. Today that frustration was flowing; tomorrow it might ebb, as indeed it had ebbed last night when she had been watching TV in his arms.

            She went to her drinks cabinet and poured herself a little whiskey. She was originally planning to make a whiskey sour but she ended up drinking it neat. It was a Japanese brand called Suntory that she had begun buying just recently. She liked it.

            On the kitchen table sat a letter that must have arrived earlier in the day and before Walter had left. It was from Jenny Del Susto, an older woman who worked for an East Coast-based company called Informatek and had become a friendly acquaintance of Kim’s about five years ago. At that time Jenny had, for reasons presumably best known to the people at Informatek, faxed Kim several dozen pages of information about a program being worked on at some university in the Midwest that the university did not want other universities to know about. Kim had been reluctant to look at this information at first but it turned out that some of the information that the Midwestern university was trying to withhold was in fact illegal to withhold from the public under antitrust law and so Kim had read the information from Jenny and passed it on to her own then-superiors. Something had possessed Kim to send Jenny a bouquet as a present, as a token of appreciation, as a salutation or valediction from one woman working on these matters to another. She had found Jenny’s home address in New Jersey and sent her a dozen long-stemmed pink roses; red would have sent an unintended message, and white might have as well, although the message with white would not have been the same. A few weeks later, a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses emerged on Kim’s own doorstep.

            Since then, Kim and Jenny had been in touch maybe three or four times a year—Christmas, their respective birthdays, and often on some desultory other occasion as well. They had met twice more in person since 1982, once in Los Angeles and once in New York; on both occasions one had been on the other’s home turf for work and had decided to give a call. Jenny apparently had some sort of colorful past with the nation’s intelligence services and had a habit of coyly alluding to time spent in foreign lands in days gone by. Kim, who had been on one business trip to Japan, two business trips to Taiwan, and one class trip to Mexico City with her Catholic high school, had on both occasions been beyond fascinated by the experiences that Jenny had implied. Jenny, for her part, probably seeing as she had never been married and had very seldom attempted serious romantic attachments, was for her part extremely interested in the story of the failure of Kim’s marriage. These two lunches, the Los Angeles summit (as it were) and the New York summit (as it were), had been the only occasions in Kim’s life in which she had actually felt comfortable telling this story, happy telling this story, and interested in this story herself as she was telling it. There was less to tell than in many divorces—it was a typical tale of controlling tendencies coming out after the wedding, boredom, arguments, mutual infidelity—but Kim embellished it in the telling for Jenny’s benefit, and felt as if she was taking hold of something by doing so.

❦

The letter from Jenny read:

❦

Dear Kim,

            How’s life by the sea? Life here in the suburbs is good; I’m getting outside, getting exercise (even in this dreary corner of the year), and eating pretty well. At almost sixty I’m going to try to get into snowshoeing this winter, although I’ll probably have to drive up into the hills to find anywhere where the snow’s deep enough for long enough to get much use out of them. I hope that global warming thing is a crock because if it’s not, then…well, I’ll be hot and cranky in my old age, I guess, as so many are!

            Have I ever told you about my Japanese friend Keiko? A few weeks ago I dashed off a letter to her that mentioned you. Do you still use Usenet? If you do, you might get wind her attempts to reach out to you at some point soon. She’s a career woman, like you are, and like I have been, and she sometimes strikes me as lonely in much the same way that you sometimes strike me as lonely. Not to claim that I know what’s best for everybody, but I think you might like her. Her family name is Hanadera. She works for MITI, which I’m sure you’ve heard of in your (our?) line of work!

            Lately I’ve been reading Tristram Shandy with a book group at a college near here. It is slow going, especially surrounded by younger people! I used to have a good head for philosophical novels and encyclopedic novels. I worry thirty-five years of cramming current events into my head 24/7 has made it more difficult for me to keep up with the classics. I think you might like the book. Have you ever given it a try?

Yours lovingly,

Jenny Del Susto

❦

Kim set the letter down. She had faith that Jenny did in fact know what Usenet was, unlike the last person who had asked her about it, but it was not clear if Jenny knew exactly how it worked, if she had any clear notion of how a Japanese woman unknown to Kim might search for her or find her through it.

            She shrugged. She was barely in the market for friends right now; friendship was something that, for some reason, she had always found cause to ask herself certain questions about. That was a vague way to put it, a vague way to formulate in her head what the issue was, but for some reason she could not remember the specifics of most of the bad friendships that she had had in the past. The past seemed—felt—closed to her, right now. She had managed to teach herself, or was managing to teach herself, the fine art of moving on, even if some things about the past still reached into the present, still had some sway over what she could do with herself, what she could get away with doing now.

Tornada

She picked the letter up again, read it again, and set it down again. Then she went out onto the patio and walked down the steps to the beach. The tide was high and the sand was narrow. It was about fifty-five degrees out and the western sky was beginning to redden. She walked out to wet her feet in the surf.

            Something opened up in front of her that stretched out over the sea. It was like a living bridge, between her heart and someone else’s—Keiko’s? Jenny’s? Walter’s? Her former husband’s (which heaven forfend)? The heart of some divine or universal being? It was almost as if she could see it—supple, reddish, infinitely long, narrow but gracious, swaying gently and lit as if with candles.

            “Kim?” she heard Walter calling, down the steps, down from the few small rooms where they did live happily together despite it all. “Kim, you down here? You okay?”

            She heard him come up behind her. She felt his hand on her shoulder. She smiled and she had faith somehow that he could see her smiling, from behind. But it was not behind her that she wanted him; or above her; or beneath her. She wanted him, only and always, to see what she saw before her now.

            “Look out!” Kim said. “Out over the waves. Do you see it? Can’t you see it?”

            “By God, I can,” said Walter wonderingly, and in that instant, he came to stand beside her.

The End