“That’s true. You do. You’ve told me many times.”
“Submarines. You wouldn’t catch me on one of those death traps, I’ll tell you what.”
He’d looked at her then and smiled, and Richard, that poor, powerful man, hadn’t any idea the pain his smile conveyed. Lainie senses that he’s seen too much, in Korea, in the Amazon. There are things he’ll never share. This is a sort of mercy toward her, she tells herself, even as it makes her feel as if she’s all alone and floating away like a helium balloon.
No man who’s spent seventeen months in the South American jungle can reacclimate to civilian life just like that. Lainie knows this and tries to be patient. But it’s challenging. Those seventeen months changed her, too. Overnight, Richard had been stolen away by the ghastly General Hoyt and dropped into a world without telephones or mailboxes. Household decisions had to be made, all the time, and they’d hit her like a spray of buckshot. Where to take the car when it broke down. What to do with that skunk carcass in the backyard. How to stand up to plumbers, bankers, other men who thought a lady alone was ripe to be rooked. All while herding two kids bewildered and hurt by an abruptly vacated father.
And she’d been good at it. Yes, she’d spent the bulk of the first two months envisioning her new life from behind a gloss of tears: a widowed mother of two terrors who’d grow up shredding drapes and crayoning walls as she gulped down cooking sherry. Soon, though, her evening collapse had begun to feel like satisfied exhaustion. Gradually, tentatively, in private nooks of her mind, she began to shape a plan for when Richard was declared missing in action and the army ceased sending her checks. She scribbled figures on matchbooks, Timmy’s school reports, the back of her hand, calculating estimated wages versus concrete expenses. She knew she could handle a job. It even sounded exciting. It also made her feel like the world’s worst wife to find any spark of enthusiasm at all in the vanishing of her husband. But there would be a sort of peace without Richard, wouldn’t there? Hadn’t he always been a little hard? A little cold?
It’s fruitless to rehash. After all, Richard did come home, didn’t he? A full week now they’ve been back together, and doesn’t he deserve the same wife he left behind? Lainie works up a smile until she believes in it. If those submariners trusted Westinghouse’s nuclear whatsits, why, she should be proud to stand in her living room and use the Spray ’N Steam, the very first item she’d bought in Baltimore. Richard needs to look sharp for his new job, a place called Occam, and that makes ironing a priority. With so much wardrobe still boxed up, the children’s clothes need ironing, too. Timmy looks feral in his ragged playwear, and Tammy’s favorite velveteen jumper is dishrag thin. A housewife, she insists to herself, has plenty of interesting, important jobs to do.
3
TOUPEES ARE MADE from human hair. That Giles Gunderson’s hairpiece doesn’t altogether match the tussocks sprouting above his ears galls him. His real hair is brown, but get close enough and you’ll see strands of blond and orange. Not that anyone has gotten close in years. Had he known he’d be shiny-domed by age thirty, he would have begun stockpiling hair decades ago. Every young man should do so; they should teach it in health classes. He pictures bulging trash bags of hair crowding his childhood closets, lugging them from his parents’ house to his first apartment and beyond. He chuckles. No, sir, nothing strange about that.
Giles pockets one pair of his glasses, moves a second pair down from his forehead, tugs shut his suede coat, and steps from the cream-colored Bedford van that Mr. Arzounian, the Arcade’s owner, lets him park behind the theater, that of the rusted sliding door and water-stained upholstery, dubbed by Elisa as “the Pug” for its buggy headlights and flat snout. Baltimore hasn’t had a drop of moisture in months, but the wind is a cat-o’-nine-tails. Giles feels his toupee begin to lift from his scalp. He mashes his palms to his skull to restick the double-sided tape and rounds the Pug, head lowered against the wind.
It’s the posture of a bruiser, but he feels the opposite, feeble and overweening. He fights the van’s side door and removes his red-leather, brass-buckled portfolio case. Carrying it makes him feel important. He scrimped for a full year in his thirties to buy it, and it remains the single piece of professional gear he’d set right alongside anything owned by Manhattan hotshots. He heads up the sidewalk, the gale giving him a brisk shove. Negotiating a door with a portfolio case is a sophisticated procedure; by the time he’s through, everyone inside should be buzzing about the debonair gent with the giant leather bag.
Giles feels a familiar jab of doubt. His need to cushion his ego is pathetic, especially at a joint like this. Look around. Not a single soul has noticed his arrival. Giles stands taller in his own defense. Can these diners be blamed for their distraction? Dixie Doug’s Pies is a fun house of colored lights and reflective surfaces, from the pedestals atop which plastic pies revolve to the refrigerated display cases backlit with jukebox plastic and piped with chrome.
Giles mazes into the queue. It’s a weekday midafternoon, a peculiar time for pie, and he’s second in line. He likes being here, he tells himself. It’s cozy and warm and smells of cinnamon and sugar. He doesn’t look at the cashier, not yet; he’s too old to feel this nervous. Instead, he studies a five-foot glass tower, each level presenting a different dessert. Double-decker pies like department-store hat boxes. Sculpted pies like the bout of a cello. Pie puffs like a woman’s breast. There is room for all kinds, all kinds.
4
F-1 IS SIX times larger than Elisa’s apartment, modest for an Occam lab. The walls are white and resplendent above clean concrete floors. Silver ranks of tables wait against the walls while caster-wheel chairs in packing plastic huddle like homeless people around a trash-can fire. Braided cables dangle from the ceiling and hospital lamps on jointed arms ogle down at nothing. Along the eastern side is a bank of beige machinery, the type Elisa has heard called a “computer.” Janitors are forbidden to touch these imposing agglomerations of switches and dials, though they are expected to use compressed-air sprayers to blast away dust the final Friday of every month.
What is unique about F-1, and what beckons Elisa past the balking Zelda, is the pool. The crackling they’d heard was water expelling from an industrial hose into what resembles a giant stainless-steel sink built into the floor and enclosed by a knee-high ledge upon which three laborers have planted their boots. They are blue-collar Baltimoreans plainly uncomfortable with the job’s confidentiality; they watch their foreman hold out a pen and clipboard to a man of receding brown hair and spectacles—an Occam scientist, for sure, but one she’s never seen. He’s late-forties but squats on the ledge like a hyperactive boy, ignoring the foreman so as to compare his notes to three gauges extending from the pool.
“Too hot!” he cries. “Much too hot! Do you want to boil it?”
The man has an accent. Elisa doesn’t recognize it, and this wakes her up: She recognizes none of these people. Six workers, five scientists; she’s never seen so many people at Occam this late. Zelda pulls on Elisa’s elbow, and Elisa lets herself be backpedaled before a voice both of them know in their marrow speaks up.