Triton (Trouble on Triton) (45 page)

Audri nodded.

“I’m ...” Bron let her eyes move away. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I feel—Oh, look, I’ve already said much too much about it already. Any more, and I’ll just feel like the complete fool I am—”

“Oh,
no .
..” Audri said. “No—”

Which brought Bron up short. Because somehow Audri’s belief in all this was something she had not even considered a possibility. “Well, it’s ...” Bron began. “It’s like what you said about learning a lesson hard and late—what this woman has taught me. About the Universe, even about me in it. Audri, I couldn’t say yes to you, any more than I could say yes to her.” She looked unblinkingly at Audri who looked, unblinkingly back. Bron thought: I can’t believe this is happening. “Don’t hate me for that.”

“I don’t,” Audri said. “It’s just so hard to believe that this—” She blinked again. “Look, there won’t

... there won’t be any change at the office. I mean that. It’s just ... well, Philip, in his role as big brother to the universe, thought I’d feel better if I at least asked. I guess I do. But I think ... I think I better see you tomorrow. So long ... I’ll see you tomorrow!” and Audri turned quickly away, off along the street. Bron felt the third drop of sweat pause, halfway down her back, then roll on. At the corner she thought: Where am I ... ? Where—Involved in her explanation, she hadn’t noticed the street they had turned on. She looked at the street sign, took a great breath, and walked all the way to the next corner before she stopped.

Why did I lie to that woman?

She stood there, frowning at the next set of green coordinate letters and numbers across from her, losing their meaning behind her concentration.

Why did I lie to Audri? I
like
Audri! Why invent that incredible concoction about the Spike giving up everything for
me!
Not (she started walking again) that she’d said anything about the Spike’s character she wouldn’t stick by. Still, why choose to illustrate it with such a silly fiction? Especially when the truth was so much simpler.

Tomorrow at work, Audri
would
probably be back to normal—or; if not tomorrow, then a week from tomorrow, a month from tomorrow. But what about
me
...? Why
lie,
outright and unequivocally?

She wanted to talk to somebody. Brian? But she’d carefully kept from her the fact that the Spike even existed! Lawrence—? No, he was too old; she didn’t want his aged, caustic homilies. Besides, Lawrence was on another moon, another world. And Prynn of course was too young. Who else did she
ever
talk to about things?

Audri, sometimes. But she certainly couldn’t talk to Audri about this!

She crossed the street, found the transport station; all the way home, the annoyance wound her thoughts: sometimes she was annoyed with Audri, sometimes with herself, sometimes with the villainous Spike.

At the Eagle, in her room, she locked the door and sat on the side of her bed—did not answer when Prynn came pounding at seven-thirty, did not answer when Prynn came pounding and shouting again at nine. At ten, she went to a cafeteria over in the next unit to avoid meeting any of the women from the co-op, got something to eat, came back, went into her room, and locked the door again. Why did I lie to that woman?

She had been in bed over an hour. She had switched oii the public channels, switched them off,
switched
them on and off again. She turned over on one side, then turned back. But by now all her thoughts on the subject had been rehearsed a hundred times, repeating when they would not develop. Over three hours ago she had, for the first time, remembered she had mentally concocted almost the same story during the first two weeks she had moved here, in expectation of a proposition from that odd blonde with the black streaks in her hair who lived on the second floor and who was definitely gay; she had been
so
insistently generous to Bron with dinner invitations, offers of clothes, tapes, pictures (it was as bad as the woman’s heterosexual co-op she’d moved out of!), sex was the only explanation. All but the first of each Bron had refused. There’d been no pass; the woman had moved. The contemplated subterfuge had been forgotten.

But the point is, Bron thought, even though I was
thinking
of telling her something like that, if the woman had actually
said
anything to me, I certainly wouldn’t have used it. I would have treated her the same way I treated Lawrence; honest, straightforward. I mean if I learned one thing hustling it’s that, in matters of sex at any rate, it pays to be straight. I wouldn’t have told such a story to a complete stranger!

Why
did I tell it to someone I actually like? Hadn’t it
begun
as an attempt to spare Audri’s feelings, in some strange way? How ridiculous, she thought. Other people’s feelings, beyond maintaining general civility, had never been one of her major concerns. Nor did she think very highly of people for whom they were. People take care of their own feelings; I take care of mine. Besides, if I’d just said, “No,” to Audri’s request, it would have been far kinder than all those complicated theatrics! That was worthy of an actress like the Spike!—oh, come on: the Spike had nothing to do with that! Nothing! But what Bron also realized, and it was almost as annoying, is that somehow she’d gotten, in telling the lie, something she’d wanted: The first thing she’d felt (when it was just over, before this stupid and unstoppable ques—

tioning had set in) was satisfied. Now that’s the question: Why? Bron turned over again and thought: I can tell, this is just going to be another of those nights—

—and was dreaming about the bar, the place Prynn had taken her; but it was different, because there were only women present. What a strange dream, she thought. For one thing, most of the women were complete strangers. Over there, leaning against the wall, was the blonde lesbian who used to live on the second floor. Now why, Bron wondered, should I be dreaming about her? But then, I was just thinking about her, wasn’t I? A girl not much older than Prynn was sitting on a table corner playing her guitar. Charo? Over there sat a sixty-year-old woman with blue nails, blue high-heeled shoes, blue lips, and blue breast bangles. Bron was sure that if she’d ever seen her before, it was just in passing on the street. Still, all these strange women made her uncomfortable. She looked around again for someone more familiar and saw, to her astonishment, the Spike sitting at one of the tables, busily writing on the gold—and black-edged sheet of an interplanetary letter-form. And there was Audri, sitting not far behind her, with Prynn next to her; just behind them stood a woman she didn’t recognize at all: a very dark oriental ... was it that Miriamne person she’d almost been lumbered with as an assistant? No; too young. More likely it was somebody she had once seen with Alfred. Were they all looking at her? Or looking past her? Bron turned, thinking how silly it was to be in a pickup bar with nothing but women. But the door was opening. A man in maroon coveralls backed through it. Apparently he was still talking to a bunch of friends outside. He kept lingering at the door, calling to them, laughing at them.

Bron looked at the women. Some were definitely looking at her now. Charo was smiling, nodding in time to her strumming. The Spike had apparently covered several sheets. Indeed, the sheet she was writing on so busily now was much too large for a letter-form. Prynn and a black girl had stepped up behind the Spike and were leaning over her shoulder to read. Prynn reached down to point something out; the Spike immediately made a correction. She wasn’t writing a letter at all! She must be making notes on a new production. Bron turned to look at the man (he was at the bar now, but still looking away) and thought: This must be where
my part
comes in. Do I know my lines? At any rate, I’m sure they’ll come back to me, once I begin. Again she glanced: several of the women, with large, colored markers, were reaching over the Spike’s shoulder to add notes of their own. This is going to be quite a show, Bron thought. The woman with the blue lips and bangles looked up at her, smiled, nodded her on. Bron turned back to the man, who was leaning with one forearm on the counter, still looking away at the door—as if, Bron thought at once, he might go after his friends outside any moment and miss the whole production! Nervously, she walked toward him.

He turned to her.

Somehow, she had expected it to be Mad Mike the Christian. But the face, under pale, curly hair, was someone else’s. One eyebrow was rough and rumpled. The other had been replaced with a gold arc in the skin.

When she recognized him, she thought: Oh,
no
... ! It was just too ... well,
banall
For dream
or
theater! With this, no
mise en scene
was possible! Meeting her old self like that ... well, it was just too pat. It was as cliche as—well, “waiting for the dawn,” or “the horrors of war.” Wasn’t theater involved with belief? How could anyone believe such an absurd coincidence! Just running into herself like that, why the chances were fifty-to-one, fifty
billion
to one!—There had been some mistake! That’s not the way the production could have possibly been planned! The action, properly speaking, would be invisible from the pit ... She glanced at the Spike again.

Almost all the women were writing now, crowding each other, reaching over one another’s shoulders. With bright-colored pens, they filled in bright-colored numbers on the large paper grids scattered on the table—from just a glance, she knew they were filling in the plurality female deployment configuration. How
hopelessly
banal! Was she really going to have to take part in this absurb drama?

She turned again to Bron—

he stood at the counter, smiling at her, pleasantly enough, if a little nervous, but completely unaware. She raised her hand tentatively toward his face, then shrieked:

“I shall destroy you!” She clawed at his gold brow, hissing: “I shall destroy you, destroy you, do you hear!” Her nails, she noticed, were not the carefully-filed, surgically-narrowed ones from her last bit of cosmetic surgery, or even the broad and cleaned ones she’d had before the operation, but the bitten ones of her adolescence. “I shall destroy
you
—as you destroyed
me\”
The words tore at her throat. She turned, gasping, away.

It was over!

Some of the women were clapping politely.

She gasped in another breath, overcome with emotion. A terrible script! Devoid of whatever meaning—or was it meaninglessness?—it might have for an audience! But I
did
give a brilliant performance. I must have gotten carried away with the part. Completely carried away. Her eyes were tearing. She reached for a chair to collapse into, but it was over there, behind the third bar. So she staggered on another few steps. Lord, how many bars
were
there? But somewhere behind them all there must be a chair. She staggered on, still wracked by the emotions the performance had evoked, one fragment of her mind still aloof and objective: As moved as I was by it, it’s
still
a terrible part! I mean—she gasped another breath, as the emotions welled on; it was as if the whole production had been some tawdry, twilight melodrama the intellect could not bear but the heart could not resist—I
may
have been that kind of man. But I am
not
that type of woman! Hot, buffeting, embarrassing, her emotions roiled and seethed. Oh, I must sit down, she thought, reached out for the chair again—

—and woke, suddenly, completely, and (annoying-ly) with the same question she had drifted off with: Why did I lie to Audri?

The silly dream—its emotional detritus still falling away from the images—certainly didn’t suggest any answer. She turned over once more, with two ques—

tions, now, equally puzzling. First: Where had the lie come from? Second: Why was she so obsessed with it?

Why did I lie?

What could possibly have prompted it?

She lay, coldly and clearly awake: I never lied when I was a man. But thinking, for the hundredth time, over what she had said to Audri, it seemed to have resonances that filtered back through her entire life, the whole of it, on Triton, on Mars, as a man, as a woman. And she could not articulate any of them. You should always tell the truth, she thought, not because one lie leads to another, but rather because one lie could so easily lead you to that terrifying position from which, with just the help of a random dream, you can see, both back and ahead, the morass where truth and falsity are simply, for you, indistinguishable.

Oh, this is crazy, Bron thought suddenly. Why am I lying here, flagellating myself with guilt? I never
used
to lie: with Audri, or Philip, or anyone. If a situation came up, I faced it! Well, if I could before, I can now. It’s only one slip-up. There’s no reason to start being a moral perfectionist now. That’s not your job. Were women just less truthful than men? All right: Was
she
less truthful as a woman than she had been as a man? Very well, then that’s just one more thing I need a man to do—to tell the truth for me! Now turn over and go back to sleep!

She turned on her side, then to her back again, one hand against her chin. She bit at a piece of dead skin on her lip; and felt terribly empty. Here I am, she thought, as she had done from time to time ever since she’d come from Mars: Here I am, on Triton, and again I am lost in some hopeless tangle of confusion, trouble, and distress—

But this is
so
silly!

She breathed deeply and turned to the other side. It was just life and there was nothing logical you could do about it; and if sleep were denied her for the night, then there was nothing to do about that either but wait for dawn, that—suddenly and shockingly!—she was sure, sure for thirty-seven entire seconds (each counted with a louder and louder heart-thud that finally blocked her throat with terror), sure in a way that implied volumes on the rotation of the planets, on the entropy of the chemistry in the sun itself (moving and churning somewhere in the real universe beyond the sensory shield), sure with a surety which, if it were this subjectively complete must
be
objectivity (and wasn’t that the reason why, her scrambling mind careened on, unable to stop even for the terror, that, in these ice—and rock-bound moons, the subjective was held politically inviolable; and hadn’t they just killed three out of four, or five out of six, to keep it so—? Then, as suddenly, sureness ceased; and she was left, on her side, shaken, with stuttering heart and breath, biting her bleeding lip, with a memory of something that now only
seemed
—But ... no,
not
if she had felt like that about it; she
had
been sure!), sure would never come.
Appendix A. From The Triton Journal: Work Notes and Omitted Pages