Richard Powers - Generosity

She greets him with a kiss, apologizing. “I don’t have much for dinner. Gabe is at his father’s.” Stone wonders why people can never call their former spouses by name. He suggests they go out, to a Lebanese place four blocks away. Lebanon: far enough for mutual comfort. Candace perks up at the idea, a chance holiday.

He tells her over the mezze . He’s been debating all day whether to say anything. But withholding finally seems the bigger betrayal. He says, “I heard from one of my students today.” Is it possible for anyone to go through forty-eight hours without inviting someone else to buy a lie? “She was very concerned about Thassa.”

Candace folds her arms on the table in front of her. She looks up, bright, game. But she’s not about to volunteer a thing.

“She thinks the hormone treatment for the the donation thing might be making Thassa emotionally unstable.” He lets the statement hang just long enough for the two of them to die a few times. “Can they do that?”

Her smile doesn’t waver, per se. It just turns inward, chastising itself for the foolishness of hope. Of course they had to arrive here, eventually. What self-respecting author would let them escape alive? Weld spreads her palms out flat on the tabletop. “I suppose they can, Russell. It’s not really my line. You might see what you find on the Web.”

He throws his knife down on his plate. A dime-sized chip shoots off the edge, narrowly skirting her eye. She cries out and shields her face. She drops her hands into her lap, looks down, and composes herself, yoga-style.

He wants to apologize, but his body won’t let him. A censorious waiter comes by to swap out the broken plate. They sit silently while order is restored. Then she’s all decorum again. It relieves and maddens him, how quickly she recovers.

“Russell, don’t hate me. I’ve worked so hard on this. Since I was two years old I’ve been a helper. Total facilitator. Absolutely codependent. My first marriage?” She hears the adjective, and flushes a little. But practice powers through embarrassment. “All my life I’ve defined myself by what I can do for others. I’ve finally found a way to do that legitimately, without slighting myself or anyone else, with the help of a whole lot of other people to keep me honest. Don’t make me backslide. You know I love you.”

“Me?” he intones dully. “What about her?”

Her head tilts. “Thassa? Of course I love her. What do you think? The whole world loves her. That’s the problem here.”

Some primal mucus thing seizes his brain, and he can’t even have thoughts, let alone speak them.

“Russell. She’s beyond my help now. Letting her go is my gift to her. Honoring the work that I’ve done on myself. Trusting her. Not interfering.”

“Your gift? Your gift to her?”

“And to myself. To my real clients. The ones I can keep helping, if I can keep this job.”

“What if they tell you to stop seeing me? What if I still taught at that hellhole?”

She reaches across the table to stay his buzzing hand. Or contain it, before it throws something else. “You don’t. And they won’t. Truth is? Thassa doesn’t need us. She has more inner strength than any person her age I’ve ever met. The public is already sick of her. When this is done, she can go back to living her own rich life.”

But the truth is in her voice as clear as if she spoke it: Not at Mesquakie. Not in Chicago. Not in this country. He takes his hand away from her and applies it industriously to removing the condensation from his water glass. “It doesn’t sicken you, what’s happening? This psychosis over the eggs?”

She nods, infinitely patient. She closes her eyes in admission. Her understanding disgusts him. “I hate that this is happening. It makes me very sad. I hate myself for not fighting it. But this is the life I have to live in.”

The words sound to Stone like some kind of pop-psych Serenity Prayer. Yet screaming at her would be insane. Everything he values-even his bedrock fidelity-is as arbitrary as any sequence of nucleotides. How valuable can fidelity be, anyway, if it isn’t viable? Candace is more fit for the future than he will ever be. She must be right about all of this. About everything except the only thing: Thassa does need them.

After dinner, they walk ad hoc back toward her apartment. Candace chatters about a beautiful book she’s reading, in which a contemporary man falls in love with a nineteenth-century woman on the basis of the comments she has scrawled in the margins of several books. Stone freezes at the top of her street.

“You know, I should probably go home.”

Something spasms across her face and is gone in a heartbeat.

“I’m about three weeks behind at the magazine. Also, I didn’t sleep that well last night.”

She’s nodding sympathetically before he even finishes explaining. “Of course, of course. I didn’t think I’d see you until What a treat!” She kisses him full on and squeezes his ribs until he gasps. He smiles apologetically, breaks free, waves, then turns back toward the El stop.

But he doesn’t go straight to the train. Instead, he wanders down Ridge until he finds a pharmacy. He’s nervous going in, ready for someone to stop him and check his motives. He wants to call his brother, Robert, for advice, but of course the only good pay phone is a dead pay phone. He tells himself that if any twelve-year-old in America can do this, so can he. He goes to the sleep-aid aisle and focuses, until he finds a package with a bright-red starburst reading, “Most powerful help with insomnia available without a prescription!” Active ingredient, doxylamine. The high school cashier can’t sell the person in front of Stone a bottle of beer, but she can sell Stone the sedative.

“Hi!” She greets Russell hugely. “Are you a member of our Rewards Program?”

He blinks. “You’re going to reward me for taking these?”

“You don’t have to take them.” Her laugh turns timid. “You just have to pay for them.”

“And my reward?”

She looks at him the way she might regard a mid-season-replacement show destined to be canceled itself after two episodes. “You get to buy more of them, for less.”

He has what he’s sure is a billion-dollar idea: a single punch card valid at all the outlets owned by the top multinationals, from maternity hospitals to mortuaries. A huge lump of cash-percentage of your gross lifetime payout-handed back at the finish line.

“I try not to store up my rewards in this world,” he tells the cashier.

He’s still feeling guilty about the crack long after he gets home. It’s the most aggressive thing he’s said to any stranger in years.

He’s so fatigued he’s sure he’ll be all right without the doxylamine. In fact, he does fall asleep, but wakes several pages later, in what he thinks must be the middle of the night. It’s 10:18. He tosses for a while, until he’s sure he has exhausted the possibilities of stoicism. He gets up and takes exactly 50 percent of the recommended dose. He does that three more times, at twenty-minute intervals, until consciousness is just some dim glint in the proto-eye of some bony fish in him, evolving on the cold sea floor of the Carboniferous.

The tear of a fire alarm rips him awake. It’s still just half past ten, and his brain works for many cycles before it latches onto the concept of morning . His room blazes with sunlight. The fire alarm is his phone. He wonders whatever possessed him to keep the phone by the bed.

He’s an hour and a half late for work. The phone must be his old relay-race buddy from high school, the owner of Becoming You , calling to fire him. If he ignores the call and gets to the office before the phone stops ringing, he might still be able to save himself.