Paul Theroux - O-Zone

But if she began to talk about it, she knew, it would seem a paltry story-mostly memory and not enough of it. She did not have the answers to her own crucial questions, so she knew she would not be able to answer Holly's sharper ones. Moura decided to say nothing about her lover, Fizzy's father. But it was not only caution: she was thrilled by her silence and that secret.

Holly sent the car for her. It was a kind of bragging and so Moura did not feel she had to be abjectly grateful. The house was less than a year old. A tower had been pulled down to make room for a development of tall narrow houses, like slender bottles in a row, their curved glass side facing west and the river.

Living so close to the ground was noisy — nothing like a tower and hardly anything like the cloudland of Coldharbor. But it was obviously such an expensive house, and Holly was so pleased, that Moura vowed to herself that she would not mention the noise — traffic, rotors, even voices and horns.

"We're at a very low altitude," Holly said, making a joke of her explanation, because she had had to stop talking when a rotor went overhead. "I used to hate looking at the ground."

She had been saying, "Who does your face?"

The admiration in her voice was undisguised, but Moura knew that Holly would never understand how her quiet life had kept her youthful.

"If you're taking something I'd like to know what it is," Holly said. "I need all the help I can get."

As if capsules explained everything. Moura exercised and ate well, and she felt rueful when she looked in the mirror and saw an attractive woman. She thought What for? and sensed her petals trembling and about to drop.

"You look great, Holly."

"I'm feeling piggy."

It was so exact Moura laughed out loud and saw a fat snout on Holly's face. The secret image a woman had of herself was often unexpectedly true — it came from studying the mirror and comparing other women and becoming obsessive about a single defect- Moura had sometimes thought: My ears — and had worried about making Fizzy bat-eared. "Pig" was perfect for Holly; not the huge oafish thing but a little selfish squealing creature with a piggy appetite.

Lust made people gleam like meat, and Holly had a lusty roasted look, which at its piggiest was like a kind of pork sausage. The year had left her fleshier and squinty, as if she'd had too much sun. Her lines marked expressions on her face — all her expressions, all at once — and it confused Moura to see amusement, pain, joy, and disgust scribbled one over the other in wrinkles, as though her face was a used bag of old emotions.

She looked lazier and smugger — probably the Godseye pension: somehow there was a Federal supplement in their insurance plan. Moura knew the government sweetened the so-called militias' funds — it certainly wasn't private money. And Moura had heard that Murdick Elevator Supplies had been sold.

"You could live here in the Colony and keep me company," Holly said. She wore a one-piece with windows and it crackled as she rolled over on the sofa and stuffed another cushion under her stomach.

"Is that what they call it, the Colony?"

"Yeah, that's why I sent the car. If you had come on your own they would have put you through the wringer. Live behind a high fence — that's what Willis always said."

Moura was thinking: The Colony—

"He believed in perimeters," Holly said.

She had never been faithful to Willis, but she had lost him in a good cause; and now that the nuisance had been murdered, and she was rid of him, she could safely think of him as a hero. She talked about him in a lying widowy way, as if she was proud of him. But Holly was also the sort of friend who could win back Moura's affection by saying something like: Of course, I'm not a hypocrite — the whole point of sentimentality is that it has to be insincere!

"And how's Hardy?" Holly said.

Moura was annoyed, because it sounded as if Holly wanted to compare husbands. Moura could not match that simple chummy tone. It was all right for Holly to ramble on about Willis — he was dead, after all, and safe. But Moura was uneasy saying anything about her husband. Apart from the fact that whatever she said would probably be wrong, it was also, she felt, a little dangerous. It was the live people who came back and haunted you, not the dead ones.

"Hardy's in Africa," Moura said. "He's got a big project there. Some sort of surfacing thing. Hooper told me about it — Hardy's so secretive. Apparently, it's to make up for that O-Zone fiasco."

"I love the islands in Africa," Holly said.

"There are no islands in Africa," Moura said. "You mean countries."

"No, islands. Like Earthworks. Those perimeter places with hotels. God, the guys out there were great stuff, weren't they?"

"I thought you had someone on board," Moura said.

"Can we talk about this next New Year's party?"

"That Woody-something you introduced me to."

They all had someone on board — Hooper, Rinka, Fizzy too probably, and Holly and her dumb muscleman. She imagined this man showing off in the pool of this housing complex in Upper West — the Colony pool, whatever it was called — in one of those little shiny bathing suits, strutting 'around showing his pouch, and Holly gleaming like a piglet. Undoubtedly Hardy had someone on board in Africa — the place was impossible without another friendly face. He was welcome to whoever — she could only do him good.

Holly said, "Woody's still around," and giggled and added, "I was going crazy, dating these guys. I think sex is part of my insecurity. I have to prove myself, like a kid. But it wasn't working. That's why I needed Woody."

"I'm glad things have worked out between you two."

"You don't understand. I needed him so that I could be unfaithful to him. Now I really am humping away. I've given up that stupid clinic."

"The routine," Moura said — lying, to keep her secret. She had not felt that way at all, but only a sadness when she became pregnant and could not justify going anymore. It had seemed worse than the end of a love affair. But at least I have his child, she had thought. Yet it had turned out to be Fizzy, and he had been like a death for her.

"No," Holly was saying. Her face had changed — more lines, conspiratorial, sharing a scandal; disgusted and glad. "A scare went around the place. Some fungus or another. Maybe a virus. At first I thought: This is supposed to be a clinic? Then I found out that this great so-called clinic lost its license a few years ago—"

"Holly, it wouldn't be the same party."

The suddenness of the interruption registered on Holly's face, and she blinked and squeezed her cheeks at Moura.

"Everything's different now," Moura said. Holly was pouting at her like a fat little baby. "Hardy's away. The Eubanks are in Florida. Fizzy's gone. Hooper's got that young girl— he'd never go. And Willis—"

"Is dead but that's not a problem," Holly said briskly. "You and I are here, and why shouldn't we do what we want?"

"We're a pretty small party, darling. And we'd never get there without Fizzy."

"I hate it when things change like this," Holly said, looking more brattish than ever. "It's awful when people tell you time's up, and you can't go back. I don't want it to stop!"

Moura made a sympathetic noise, but thought: I am going back, and not to the scene in O-Zone of that desperate party — it had been a failure as a party, it had overwhelmed them, it had changed everything. But no, she was returning to the deeper, the happier past and that lost love. The past wasn't a riddle: it was only illegible at this distance. Who had said that the past was a mystery, but the future was familiar?

"Fizzy's gone," Holly said, echoing what Moura had just said. "Don't you ever worry about him?"