Damon Knight - Orbit 18

“Here I am, darling,” she said. “Surprise.”

“Hey! Surprise is right. How did you know what plane to meet? I wasn’t expecting you.” Her cheek tasted cool and fragrant in the surrounding heat.

“I called your office. Your secretary had been trying to get me too. Good thinking on your part to have your ribbon on.”

He cast a half glance at his own lapel where a discreetly narrow scrap of scarlet ribbon crawled, like a légion d'honneur badge. Except that he was no légionnaire. Nor had he put the ribbon there himself. He hadn’t remembered. It must have been done at home last night, or early this morning, before he’d caught the train. The ribbon exactly matched one pinned to the sleeveless knit blouse worn by the woman now walking at his side. The presence of the ribbon made them, in fact, a couple, two people wholeheartedly committed to each other. Which they were, of course; they must be. That was what life was all about.

As they hurried through the crowd in the waiting room, she slightly in the lead now, because she would take him to where she’d parked the car, he looked at her. She was as tall as he, athletic-looking, sunbrowned, yet intrinsically feminine. Angular but quite beautiful face, he noted as she turned back to tell him: “Before I forget, you have a meeting tonight. You’re chairman of the county planning commission and there’s a red-hot problem about whether to approve the building of a half-acre condominium at the sacrifice of that much greenbelt.”

He groaned and said truthfully, “I’d rather stay home with you. Sometimes I think I’m into too much volunteer work.”

Then they were in the parking lot and she was unlocking a new Chrysler station wagon with a beach ball and some sand pails and things tumbling around in the back.

As they hummed through city traffic and then speedily out a parkway, between two lines of royal palms like ushers at a military wedding, he continued to watch her as much as he politely could, without seeming to stare. Her long, careful hands lay lightly upon the wheel of the Chrysler. He could not see her eyes but seemed to recall that when she had removed her sunglasses in the terminal the irises had been gray. A light gray or perhaps very pale green, ringed with deep turquoise. Prominent bones at cheek, shoulder, wrist and hip. With the gray-blue knit top she wore elegantly tailored trousers of a darker blue, and white sandals.

He mentally reran the information culled hastily that morning from the new assignment sheets and thought: Dinah. I must remember. Dinah. Dinah. Dinah.

As if he’d spoken her name aloud, Dinah turned to him and smiled.

The apartment seemed small to him, too small, though it was ground-floor, and though it had three bedrooms—one for them, one for the children, and a third done over by the decorator as a study—as well as a large lanai with a barbecue arrangement and outdoor furniture around a small swimming pool. The pool, however, was shared with the apartment across the central court.

“I’m not mad for it either,” Dinah admitted. “It’s just what we happened to find during a time when housing was scarce around here. But that situation has loosened a little since, or so I’ve heard.”

“Then maybe we could look for a place farther out in the hills. A house, ranch even. Better for the children.”

“Do you think we can afford it? After this month’s support payments to the pediatrician and the orthodontist, I mean?”

“Don’t worry about that. I had a raise just last quarter.”

“Lovely. Then we could start investigating this weekend, if you aren’t too snowed with work. There’s a party at the Petersons’, but Sunday’s free all day. If we should land a country place Kimmie’ll be thrilled. She’ll start planning for a horse right off.”

“Kimmie? Her name is Kimmie? That’s funny, I—”

But Dinah hadn’t heard him. She’d gone back to the kitchen to make him a drink. Which was fortunate. This was the second time in a day he’d flipped a little. Once in the car this morning. And now. Third, if he counted forgetting all about the ribbon. Maybe things were beginning to get to him. He hoped not. That would mean the beginning of the end for him, in every way. He would be let go in favor of a newcomer with a better set of nerves. Reject in a throwaway society, canceled cell in a kinetic universe.

(Who was the true father of interchangeable parts, anyway? Eli Whitney? Samuel Colt? Henry Ford?)

He wondered idly, but not for the first time, what the women did. There had been women on every one of the projects so far. Women engineers. Women physicists. Did they go home in the evenings too? (Personal lives were not discussable, naturally.)

He remembered that when he was younger, just out of job training so there was utterly no excuse, he’d had an overwhelming, almost irresistible impulse to write a note—a love letter it would have turned out—to Ann. (Or had her name been Cathy? Yes, he believed it was Cathy.) More, he had gone so far as to wonder if she had ever wanted to write to him, to affirm the reality of what necessarily for them had to remain an illusion. Fortunately for him the sickness had passed without crisis. Not that the problem was so unusual, evidently; it was at least common enough for Personnel to have a coinage for it, the Lot’s Wife Syndrome. For the firm had no choice but to deal harshly with those who turned back. Sentimentality was grossly uneconomical. (To err is human; to forgive is not company policy.)

He rubbed his eyes now with the heels of both hands, trying conscientiously to expunge all that had been in his thoughts before this moment of the living present, to make his mind a blank, an empty receptacle for all that would now come.

Then he sighed and leaned back in the chair on the lanai, watching the reddening sun begin to tip toward the horizon of indigo mountains. It was still hot, but with a promise of late-afternoon chill.

It would be hot again when he went to work tomorrow. But he would have thinner suits in his closet than the one he presently wore.

It occurred to him that he didn’t know when the children were due home or even where they were.

Dinah brought him a glass, satisfyingly cold and squat, Scotch on the rocks, the way he preferred it, and he watched her settle with seeming content into the chair opposite. Yes, her eyes were gray, luminous. She had changed into shorts and a halter. Her feet were bare. He wondered how much time they would have alone together, before the kids came in from wherever they were.

On the other hand, he didn’t want to rush things, make her uncomfortable. They’d have a lot of time together. Seven weeks that he knew of for sure. That was how long the project was scheduled to run. And then it might be extended, depending on how things went.

He let his eyes drift shut, which was his fourth mistake, for the images of the day just past began coming back at him like a card pack in a fast shuffle. In self-defense he rose suddenly from the chair, setting down his drink so abruptly that icy liquid sloshed over his knuckles. “Oops. Sorry. I—”

“You’re nervous,” she said with a concern undeniably genuine. “You’ve been working too hard lately. Better lie down for an hour before the meeting tonight. There’ll be time.”

(How loyal was she to the company herself? Would this incident be reported? But no, he was far off base even to have such a thought.)

“No, really,” he said. “I’m all right. I’m fine.”

And searched his mind for blessings he could count to reassure himself. Of course he stumbled over one right away: at least ennui was not a problem.

The morning’s snowfall had by noon been translated into a seething slush over the roads, and then frozen at nightfall so that she had to drive to the station very slowly, favoring the ailing clutch.