He didn't want to say it, and I couldn't blame him. 'She may be alive,' I said. 'Maybe she's out of the country. Maybe she's mixed up in something illegal. That might explain why she hasn't been able to get in touch with you.'
'It's hard to imagine Paula involved with criminals.'
'Maybe it just looked like an adventure to her.'
'I suppose that's possible.' He sighed. 'You don't leave much room for hope.'
'No, but I wouldn't say you have grounds for despair yet, either.
I'm afraid all you can do is wait.'
'That's all I've done from the beginning. It's… hard.'
'I'm sure it must be.'
'Well,' he said. 'I want to thank you for your efforts, and for being straight with me. I'll be happy to send you more money if you think there's any point at all in putting in more time.'
'No,' I said. 'I'll probably put in a few more days on this anyway, just on the chance that something'll loosen up. In which case you'll hear from me.'
'I didn't want to take any more money from him,' I told Willa.
'The original thousand had put me under more obligation than I wanted to be. If I accepted any more of his money I'd have his daughter around my neck for the rest of my life.'
'But you're doing more work. Why shouldn't you get paid for it?'
'I got paid already, and what did I give him in return?'
'You did the work.'
'Did I? In high school physics they taught us how to measure work. The formula was force times distance. Take an object that weighs twenty pounds, move it six feet, and you've done a hundred and twenty foot-pounds worth of work.'
'Foot-pounds?'
'That was the unit of measurement. But if you stood and pushed against a wall all day and didn't budge it, you hadn't performed any work. Because you'd moved the wall a distance of zero, so it didn't matter how much the wall weighed, the product was zero. Warren Hoeldtke paid me a thousand dollars and all I did was push a wall.'
'You moved it a little.'
'Not enough to matter.'
'Oh, I don't know,' she said. 'When Edison was working on the light bulb, somebody said he must be discouraged because he wasn't making any progress. Edison said he'd made great progress, because now he knew twenty thousand materials that you couldn't use for a filament.'
'Edison had a better attitude than I have.'
'And a good thing, too, or we'd all be in the dark.'
We were in the dark, and seemed none the worse for it. We were in her bedroom, stretched out on her bed, a Reba McIntyre tape playing in the kitchen. Through the bedroom window you could hear the sounds of a quarrel in the building behind hers, loud voices arguing a point in Spanish.
I hadn't intended to drop in on her. I'd gone out walking after my call to Hoeldtke. I was passing a florist and had the impulse to send her flowers, and after he'd written up the order I found out he couldn't deliver until the following day. So I'd delivered them myself.
She put the flowers in water and we sat in the kitchen with them on the table between us. She made coffee. It was instant, but it was a fresh jar of a premium brand and no killjoy had taken the caffeine out of it.
And then, without needing to discuss the matter, we'd moved to the bedroom. Reba McIntyre had been singing when we entered the bedroom and she was still hard at it, but we had heard some of the songs more than once. The tape reversed automatically, and would play over and over if you let it.
After a while she said, 'Are you hungry? I could cook something.'
'If you feel like it.'
'Shall I tell you a secret? I never feel like it. I'm not a great cook, and you've seen the kitchen.'
'We could go out.'
'It's pouring. Don't you hear it in the airshaft?'
'It was raining very lightly earlier. What my Irish aunt used to call a soft day.'
'Well, it turned hard, from the sound of it. Suppose I order Chinese? They don't care what the weather's like, they hop on their kamikaze bicycles and ride through hailstorms if they have to. 'Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night shall keep you from your moo goo gai pan.' Except I don't want moo goo gai pan. I want— would you like to know what I want?'
'Sure.'
'I want sesame noodles and pork fried rice and chicken with cashews and shrimp with four flavors. How does that sound?'
'Like enough food for an army.'
'I bet we eat all of it. Oh.'
'What's the matter?'
