Stupid; she felt embarrassed at lying to him. “Yes,” she said, and had to look away. More and more stupid; tears were on her cheeks.
“Aw, hey.” His hand slid away, and Manny clambered up from the floor to sit beside her on the sofa and awkwardly pat her arm, to comfort her. “Don’t feel bad about it. That could happen to anybody.”
She didn’t trust herself to answer him, the situation was too confused and unlikely. Her shoulders twitched and she shook her head and continued to face away from him.
“Listen,” he said. “You wanna play Surrealism? You know how you play that?”
Now she did turn, and looked at him, and found his childlike face twisted with sympathetic concern. “No, I don’t,” she said.
“You pick somebody famous,” he said. “Like Humphrey Bogart or W. C. Fields or somebody. And then you say, if this person was a car he’d be such-and-such a kind of car. Or such-and-such a color. Or what season this person would be if they were a season. See, not what car would they like, what car would they be. Surrealism, see?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Manny turned his eager face. “Jessup? You wanna play?”
“I’m hungry,” Jessup said. “I want to get something to eat.”
“Why not have her get it?”
“I don’t want her to touch my food. You want anything?”
“What for? You mean to eat? What for?”
Jessup shrugged. “Keep an eye on her,” he said, and walked out of the room.
Manny turned back. “Okay, I got somebody. Ask me a question. You know, like what car would I be or what color, or make up something.”
Claire tried to concentrate her mind. She was distracted by fear and uncertainty, and now she was supposed to think about a game. She rubbed her forehead and said, “What car? I guess, that’s what I want to know. What car would you be?”
“A Datsun,” he said promptly, and from the way he grinned this was a person he had used in this game before. “You tell me when you think you know who it is,” he said. “Give me another question.”
Like she vms dead and all laid out. That sentence of Manny’s circled in her mind now every time she heard his voice. Was he a possible ally to be cultivated against Jessup, or was he the true danger?
“Come on,” he said, a happy impatient child. “Come on.”
“What, uh—what color? What color would you be?”
When the doorbell rang, a little before nine, the three of them were eating dinner at the kitchen table. Jessup had insisted on preparing the meal himself, and then had insisted on Manny and Claire eating it with him, though neither of them had much appetite.
Claire found Manny both fascinating and terrifying. There was a temptation to react to him as though to a willful but charming child, but Manny was no child; he seemed, in fact, to be not human at all, and Claire found she was treating him finally like a charming but unpredictable animal, a pet that might or might not be domesticated. As with an animal, the reasoning processes in Manny’s head seemed both primitive and incomprehensible. And, as with an animal, Claire understood there would be no arguing against him if he should turn on her; as much argue with a leaping mountain lion. The strain of watching his volatile moods and trying to keep out in front of him was fraying her nerves, but distracting her from the large problem of Jessup, who was after all the leader, the mart with the reins of the situation in his hands.
Whatever Manny was high on—and it was clear he’d been taking some sort of drug—the peak had apparently passed during his time in the bedroom, leaving him now in a pleasant cloudy afterglow, his mind turning slowly and coming up with strange materials from the bottom of his skull. The game of Surrealism had been full of a kind of morbid beauty, Manny’s images sometimes being very odd and personal and irrational, but frequently they contained touches of poetry and at times were amazingly indicative of the person he had in mind.
But always dead people. They had taken turns asking the questions, and when Claire had chosen a living woman senator, it had taken Manny a long time to guess who she meant, and then he was angry and upset. “No fair, she’s still alive!”
“You didn’t tell me we were—”
“You can’t use live people! They don’t have any aural So they had remembered only dead people after that.
Jessup had refused to join in the game. Now that his larger game, whatever it was, had moved into a phase of waiting—he expected to have to wait thirty-one hours from Parker’s phone call to Parker’s appearance here— Jessup was surly and uncommunicative. The sparks and flashes of light were deep in his eyes, but they showed as irascibility and bad temper now.
Somehow the meal he’d prepared reflected his mood. It was vaguely Mexican, full of tomatoes and peppers, very hot, and lay in an unappetizing mass on the plate. But Jessup watched the two of them with narrowed eyes, demanding that they eat, and they both ate, Manny making a game out of this too, joking with Jessup about the meal looking like dead people’s stomachs, while Claire mechanically moved the fork from plate to mouth, plate to mouth.
The doorbell both shocked and relieved her; she had no idea who it could be or what it could mean, but it made it possible, at least for the moment, to stop eating. She put the fork down at once, and looked across the table at Jessup.
Jessup was looking twice as irritable as before. He said, low-voiced, “Who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t expect anybody?”
