Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

All I can say is the whole thing was as easy as anything I’ve ever done in my life, as easy as drinking cold water on a hot day. God what a lovely, relaxed woman. A little drunk, but I thought: so what, if that’s what she needed . We did everything in bed we could think of doing. Weight fell from my troubled spirit—some of it was weight I hadn’t even known was there—and it was like zero-gravity on the bed afterward. Free fall. If only we could live our whole lives in moments like those. I pulled the curtains open, finally, after we had both napped, and we copulated in twilight as the hills of Pennsylvania rolled by under an August moon.

The next morning she was hung over and threw up in the little sink. It seems she’d gone to the parlor car while I was sleeping and had drunk for three or four hours before coming to bed.

“What a crazy thing to do!” I said, exasperated at the way she looked and the way she sounded at the washstand. Her hair was sweaty, and in the morning light I could see a roll of fat at her waist. There were blue veins behind her knees.

“I’m an alcoholic, Ben,” she said, washing her face.

“I can’t believe that,” I said. “You’re in too good shape for a boozer.”

“I only started about a year ago. After my divorce.”

“How do you feel?” I said.

“I’ve got a terrible headache.”

“I can fix that,” I said, and got one of the little packets out of my briefcase. “Here. Dissolve this in a glass of water.”

She did as I told her. She dried her face and went on talking. “I never had an orgasm with my husband until I started getting drunk.”

I just looked at her. After a minute she sat on the bed and sighed. We were both silent. Then she said, “Hey! my headache’s gone.” Her voice was brighter, and with her face freshly scrubbed and her hair combed she was beginning to look good again.

I washed myself up, got dressed and had a silent breakfast while she drank a bloody mary. The morning scenery outside the window began to restore my spirits. Sue’s problems were Sue’s problems; she had been no problem to me where it counted. I ordered extra toast and coffee and sent a silent prayer of thanks toward Fomalhaut.

At noon she ordered a couple of drinks—martinis this time—and by one we were back in the sack again. I feared failure for one bad moment, thinking that maybe I needed the force of abstinence to impel me. But the fear was dispelled by the salute of my comfortable member. It is a remarkable and wonderful thing to be a man.

During lunch at two-thirty she talked of how coal could supply the world with all its energy, if only it was mined and distributed right. I nodded agreement with her, not going into what I knew about it—considerably more than what any professor knew. That greenhouse effect was only an inconvenience compared to the fights among Mafia families. This was the twenty-first century, for Christ’s sake. But the Mafia was run the way General Motors and the Roman Catholic Church had been run in the twentieth. It was an assemblage of bureaucrats whose only loyalty was to the institution.

Well, people like that ran the world in the Middle Ages. The people who run it now are little different. The laws of the Church meant more to the Church than the happiness of mankind. Ditto the Mafia. Ditto General Motors. Ditto Belson Industries? Yes, sometimes. A corporation is more intelligible than life; one can more easily learn its rules and live by them.

I began talking. “The trouble with coal, Sue, is that it’s heavy and dirty. It’s hard to get it out of the ground and hard to ship it where you want it. You can gasify it or grind it up and mix it with water and send it through pipes, but the pipes are an invitation to sabotage. They chopped pipes like Christmas ribbons during the gang wars thirty years ago.”

I realized I was talking more heatedly about this than I had planned to. What in hell was I angry with?

She had listened attentively, with an opened book primly in her lap. I was leaning against the green back of my chair, making gestures with my cigar. I wasn’t wearing the rings, since I was already heartily sick of them.

When I finished, Sue leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Ben,” she said, “you’re Ben Belson, aren’t you?”

I stared at her. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, your hair’s dyed for one thing. I noticed that last night. And you talk like a tycoon.”

I thought about that for a moment and almost said I was more pirate than tycoon. But what the hell was the use of being defensive about it? “Okay,” I said. “But for Christ’s sake don’t tell anybody. I’m on the lam.”

She laughed. “On the lam? That’s a quaint way to talk. Didn’t the government make you an outlaw or something?”

“A pirate. They took away my citizenship and made me a pirate. Or L’Ouverture Baynes did, the son of a bitch.”

“I voted for Baynes when he ran for President,” she said.

“He’s still a son of a bitch.” I drank some coffee angrily. “I voted for him too. Set a thief to catch a thief.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the drink in front of her. I had been mulling over an idea ever since breakfast. “Look,” I said, “why are you going back to California anyway?”

She closed her book and took a sip from her drink. “To write up my research. I need to publish.”

“Do you have to teach?”

“I’m on leave for six months.”

“Well, look,” I said, “I have two interests in life: spiritual growth and financial resurrection. I’m going to Columbus to make money, so I can take my spaceship away from Baynes. If you’d stay with me I’d be able to continue my spiritual growth.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Let me mull it over, Ben.”

“Sure,” I said.

Well, I needed to mull, myself. One problem was Ruth, my motherly redheaded spaceship pilot. I’d chosen Columbus and Lao-tzu Pharmaceuticals partly because Ruth lived there and I had some idea of staying with her awhile. And Ruth’s brother was Howard the biophysicist, whose help I would need before I saw any of those wily Chinese. Ruth was fond of me, and I was fond of her. I was concerned with how things would work out if I showed up in Columbus with a new sweetie.

Why do I complicate things so much—as Anna would say. As Isabel would say. As Sue would be saying soon enough. Orbach didn’t ask that question; he answered it. The reason you complicate things so much, Ben Belson, is that you are trying to get your mother’s love and your father’s attention. Since they are both dead, it’s a complicated thing to do. I had to admit there was truth in that; there are simpler goals in life than jarring the dead loose from their sleep.

Sue suddenly spoke up. “Sure, Ben,” she said. “I’d like to stay in Columbus with you.”

By mutual consent Sue and I split up for a while. I found a Newsweek and read its Energy section. There was another of those pieces about plutonium—that malign transuranite stuff. Newsweek did acknowledge that Buenos Aires had been lost to it but claimed plutonium was now safely under lock and key. They talked about the Chinese breeder reactors and about all the cheap energy available in the stockpiles, but they didn’t mention what a microgram of plutonium could do to a human lung.

There was another Newsweek piece, about coal distribution, full of false hope. I knew far too much about the way coal was moved around to have any faith in it at all. If the United States was going to revive, it was going to be with Juno uranium making steam for the next millennium and beyond. I could feel the straightforward power of it the way I felt my sexual power.