“No, I won’t. I know you think this might be good for me, but you’re wrong, it’s not good. I can’t do it. I’m not that kind of person. Stop asking me.”
He laughed. “I can’t believe that you just said that. That’s exactly what you said the very last time we argued—those were your very words!” He shook his head. “All right, all right…. I always ask too much of you, don’t I? It was stupid of me to ask this. I’m full of meddlesome plans for other people who still have lives to live. You don’t like to take chances. I know that. You were always careful, and you were wiser and smarter than me. Bad luck to you that the two of us ever met.”
An empty silence stretched between them. A little foretaste of the silence of death.
He roused himself. “Tell me that you forgive me.”
“I do forgive you, Martin. I forgive you everything. I’m sorry I wasn’t right for you. I never could do what you needed from me. I never gave you what you asked from me. Please forgive me for all that, that was my fault.”
He accepted this. She could see from the flushed look on his pallid face that he’d reached some long-sought apotheosis. He’d said everything that he wanted to say to her. His life was over now. He’d wound it up, packed it away.
“Go your way, darling,” he told her gently. “Someone that I used to be truly loved someone you used to be once. Try not to forget me.”
The dog did not rise to see her to the door. She left Martin’s apartment, numbly retrieving her purse and coat. She walked the vivid summer brightness of the halls. She took an elevator, she entered the chill of the autumnal city. She reentered the thin but very real texture of her thin but very real life. She stepped into the first taxi she found, and she went back home.
Mercedes was in the apartment, cleaning the bathroom. Mercedes came into the front room, carrying her mop and her septic sampling equipment. Mercedes wore her tidy civil-support uniform, baby blue jacket with red epaulets, slacks, and discreetly foam-soled shoes. Mercedes had fifteen elderly women on her civil-support rounds and came by twice a week to tidy up, usually in Mia’s absence. Mercedes called her civil-support work “housekeeping,” because that was a kindlier description than “social worker,” “health inspector,” or “police spy.”
“What’s happened to you?” Mercedes said in surprise, setting down her mop and her bucket of gel. “I thought you were at work.”
“I had a bad experience. A friend is dying tonight.”
Mercedes slid immediately into a role of professional sympathy. She took Mia’s coat. “Sit down, Mia. I’ll make a tincture.”
“I don’t want a tincture,” Mia said wearily, sitting at the corrugated, lacquered cardboard of her kitchen table. “He made me take a mnemonic. I’m still on it, it’s nasty.”
“What kind?” said Mercedes, tugging off her hairnet and slipping it into her jacket.
“Enkephalokrylline, two hundred fifty micrograms.”
“Oh, that’s just a nothing little mnemonic.” Mercedes fluffed her dark hair. “Have a tincture.”
“I’ll have a mineral water.”
Mercedes rolled Mia’s tincture set to the side of the table and sat on a kitchen stool. She decanted half a liter of distilled water, and methodically set about selecting and crushing dainty little wafers of mineral supplement. Mia’s tincture set was by far the most elaborate and most expensive kitchen fixture that Mia owned. Mia didn’t consider herself a possessive and materialistic person, but she made exceptions for tinctures. Also—to be fair—she was fond of decent clothes. She also made certain exceptions for the cardboard covers of old twentieth-century video-game and CD-ROM products. Mia had a minor weakness for antique paper ephemera.
“I suppose I’d better talk about it,” Mia said. “If I don’t talk to somebody about it, I won’t sleep tonight. I have a checkup in three days and if I don’t sleep tonight it will show.”
Mercedes looked up brightly. “You can talk to me! Of course you can tell me about it.”
“Do you have to put it all in your dossier?”
Mercedes looked wounded. “Of course I have to put it in the dossier. I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t keep up my dossiers.” She fed a hissing gush of bubbles into the mineral water. “Mia, you’ve known me for fifteen years. You can trust me. Civil-support people love it when their clients talk. What else are we here for?”
Mia leaned forward, propping her elbows on the table. “I knew this man seventy years ago,” she said. “He was my boyfriend then. He kept telling me today that we haven’t changed, but of course we’ve changed. We’ve changed beyond recognition. He’s consumed himself. And me—seventy years ago, I was a young woman. I was a girl, I was his girl. I’m not a girl anymore. Nowadays I’m someone who used to be a woman.”
“That’s kind of an odd way to put it.”
“It’s the truth. I’m not his woman, I haven’t been anyone’s woman for a long time. I don’t have lovers. I don’t love anyone. I don’t look after anyone. I don’t kiss anyone, I don’t hug anyone, I don’t cheer anyone up. I don’t have a family. I don’t have hot flashes, I don’t have monthlies. I’m a postsexual person, I’m a postwomanly person. I’m a crone. I’m a late-twenty-first-century techno-crone.”
“You look like a woman to me.”
“I dress like a woman. That’s all very calculated and deliberate.”
“I know what you mean,” Mercedes admitted. “I’m sixty-five. Pretty much past it. Not too sorry to see it go. Being a woman—the really hard part of womanhood—it’s not the sort of life you’d wish on a friend.”
“It was very wearing,” Mia said. “He was very polite about it, but just being near him exhausted me. The worst part was that there’s no clean break between me and my earlier life. My romantic life, my sexual life. I could remember how exciting it had been. How flattering. Being pursued by some large energetic insistent good-looking boy. How it felt when I let him catch me. The mnemonic made it all a lot worse.”
“Most people would say that clean breaks are bad for you. That you have to come to terms with that aspect of your former life, and integrate it so you can put it to rest and get beyond it.”
Therapeutic suggestions irritated Mia in direct ratio to their tact. “I did have to come to terms with my earlier life today. I’m not a bit happier for it.”
“Are you sorry he’s dying? Are you grieving?”
“I’m a little sorry.” Mia sipped the mineral water. “I wouldn’t call this grief. It’s too thin for grief.” The water felt good. Very simple things conveyed most of the pleasure in her life. “I wept some today. It felt really bad to cry. I haven’t wept in five years.” She touched her swollen eyes. “It feels like there’s membrane damage.”
“Was there a bequest?”
“No,” Mia lied smoothly.
“There’s always some kind of bequest,” Mercedes prodded.
Mia paused. “There was one, but I refused it. He had a postcanine dog.”