John Varley - Mammoth

Until Andrea de la Terre opened her mouth and spoke, and then he was lost. ANDREA had brought grapes.

Let's don't get into that, Howard thought.

She stood there, every man's fantasy, every woman's unattainable ideal, and Howard marveled again at a thought he would never express to her: she was not really beautiful. She was attractive, no question about it, and no single part of her face was anywhere near grotesque... it's just that the parts were not assembled in a way that would normally qualify a girl as gorgeous. Howard was reminded of Judy Garland, or of Barbra Streisand, though Andrea looked nothing like either of them. If she was sitting in a bus station or on a stool at Schrafft's you'd walk right by her.

But in the same way that, when Streisand began to sing, you forgot all about the nose and she became the most wonderful thing in the universe, when Andrea looked at you, when she spoke, when she moved... you were lost. From the moment she started talking, Howard would have given her anything she wanted. (Lucky for him, she never realized that, but he did concede half a dozen points he had not intended to budge on.)

Howard was in love.

He had never expected to be, not at his age, not at this point in his life. He had had the usual crushes on the prettiest girls in school, those times when he had been in school and not self-educating in an anonymous trailer park or a juvenile hall in one state or another. They were purely sexual attractions, since he had seldom exchanged so much as two words with any of those prom queens and cheerleaders. That had lasted right on through college. Then he was working, inventing, devoting himself to his computers, and there was no time for romance, even in the event he believed any of the engineering majors he met in the pathetic thing he called a social life would respond to him.

Then one day he looked around and realized he was rich. It really seemed to happen overnight. And when others realized it, the girls began to show up. He went so far as to marry one, and the divorce a year later had cost him (and he got a lot of satisfaction every month when he wrote her a check that seemed pitifully small to him now, and must have seemed miniscule to her avaricious heart when she saw what he was worth now), and he learned the lesson all rich, homely men learn if they intend to stay rich: Your bank balance is the most attractive thing about you.

Then he was a billionaire, and one of the most eligible bachelors on the planet, and everything he had learned applied doubled, tripled, squared, and cubed. When you have billions, the pool of possible women who might actually love you for yourself narrows enormously. Basically, they had to be either rich or famous, or both, and he simply didn't move with any ease in that social milieu.

He had made a few halfhearted moves to spruce himself up, hired an image consultant who gave him a new haircut and chose his wardrobe for him, but he soon drifted back to his old familiar cowlick and comfortable clothes. He even tried plastic surgery, electing to fix, of all the disastrous features the sawbones swore he could tidy up, his unfortunate nose which, he had always thought, could adorn Mount Rushmore with very little alteration in scale if George Washington ever lost his. But he felt the new schnozz didn't look all that much better than the old one, on the one hand, and yet, on the other, he was sure it was enough different that everyone who knew him saw nothing else but the nose, and were snickering behind his back.

The week after that conference they were dating, and a month after that they were sleeping together and dodging the tabloid photographers because, let's face it, though Howard had never been of much interest to the celebrity-mad masses, being at least as nerdy and homely as Bill Gates and twice as boring, Andrea was right up there with Liz and Di and Michael and Elvis and Jackie, who were all dead now except for Elvis, and maybe Michael, and then there was the Romeo and Juliet angle, not the star-crossed lovers part or the teenage mad infatuation though it sometimes felt that way to Howard, but the fact that they were from warring houses, the putative rapist of the environment versus the Queen of Green.

Now they were to be married, Andrea up to her unlinered eyebrows in preparations for the Wedding of the Century on a remote Pacific atoll whose name and location were the most closely guarded secret since the Manhattan Project, a place the paparazzi couldn't reach if they tried to fly in on a cruise missile, with a guest list part Billboard Top Twenty, part Variety box office leaders list, part Who's Who in Washington, New York, Paris, and Geneva, and Howard spent a few minutes every day with his lawyers, honing the language of the prenuptial agreement so it would be generous but not profligate, conservative but not insulting, because no matter how infatuated Howard might be his permanent adolescent doubts lingered in an atavistic corner of his brain and he sometimes woke in the middle of the night silently screaming She couldn't possibly love me!

But it really seemed she did. There she stood in her high-heel sneakers, her red dress, with her wig hat on her head, and over it all a full-length coat of Columbian mammoth fur, one of only twenty such coats on the planet, a gift from Howard valued at well over a million dollars and the subject of endless controversy among animal lovers worldwide (Is fur murder if the animal was already dead? Would a roadkill possum coat be okay? Is it moral to wear a century-old mink?)... feeding grapes to Fuzzy.

Fuzzy loved the coat. It was possible that the pelt had come from his mother, though Howard had been adamant about never doing the DNA testing to determine just which Curson Avenue carcass was the mother.

Until the events on Wilshire Boulevard no one had known anything about the skin and possible furriness of a Columbian mammoth. It turned out that Columbians did have hair, three to four inches in length. This was nothing like the luxurious coat of the woolly, up to three feet long in some places, black or reddish brown, but it would do, it would do, and Howard found the very best tanners and furriers in Russia, who worked wonders with the coarse and lifeless material they were given, ending with a small number of coats, hats, and stoles that sold for unbelievable prices.

Now Fuzzy momentarily ignored the offered handful of grapes and reached through the bars of the enclosure to rub the sensitive tip of his trunk over Andrea's coat, from her shoulders down to the hem at her knees... and what must he be thinking? Howard wondered.

So who knew what was going through that large brain? Though there could be little of mammoth scent or of mammoth texture on the hairs Fuzzy was so fondly stroking, who knew what Fuzzy's incredibly superior nose and extremely sensitive trunk tip smelled and felt? Howard looked into the old, wise eye—and all mammoth eyes were old and wise, just like elephants, even when they were infants—and he looked at the slight figure of Andrea standing there, looked at the two beings most beloved to him in the universe, and he felt himself smile.

THE feeling persisted out of the mammoth house and into a slow Oregon drizzle, Warburton carefully holding a big umbrella over Andrea and a bodyguard holding open the door of the pearl-gray 1936 Cord Cabriolet convertible. Howard was about to get behind the wheel when Warburton leaned over and said something into his ear, and Howard's mellow mood vanished at once. He got in the car and slammed the door and just sat there for a moment, until his fiancee looked at him with a brow wrinkled in a way only Andrea de la Terre could wrinkle an eyebrow.

"Something wrong, darling?" she asked.

For a moment Howard could only sit there, the oversized steering wheel in his hands. It had been five years, five long frustrating years since that face had loomed in his sights, so close he had felt he could reach out and touch it, and in those five years he had never again felt that feeling of utter omnipotence, never held a man's life in his hands so intimately. And for the first two years he had felt, at best, ambivalence about his decision not to shoot because, after all, there might be answers to secrets locked up in that head, the secrets of how the universe was really put together, if answers there were.