would be if she took enough trouble to keep it up. Certainly more than Ellie was used to, or had any right to expect, but he supposed the place was just as much for himself as her. From nineteen floors up, the streets and everything in them were just things to frown down at, turn your back on. For the right price, anyone could feel like royalty.
Ellie let him in, and he said little for the longest time, content to sit with her on opposite sides of the living room and watch some game show on TV. He sank back into the plush depth of a sectional sofa, kicked his feet up on a coffee table whose top was a thick slab of gray and black marble. He could still remember when the surface held a reflection, now so smudged and dusty the shine was a memory. Two bags of taco chips were going stale on it at the moment.
“When’s the last time you washed your hair?” he finally had to ask.
Ellie shot him a look and shrugged. “When was the last full moon?”
So she was in one of those moods. With some effort she might be a little shy of beautiful. Instead, she settled for striking, which didn’t necessarily connote the same thing. Her skin was a creamy alabaster; her hair electric with a deep violet rinse, hitting her at the shoulder blades, on the sides razored to stubble in a sidewall over each ear. He supposed some guys would find that a turn-on, a kind of urban pagan allure. He supposed, too, that it was probably a generational thing, and he was simply too old to appreciate it.
Barely twenty-two and she’d lucked into what surely was a prime arrangement for someone like her. Found a sugar daddy who didn’t care what she did with her time, expected no favors for himself, demanded only that she practice safe extracurricular sex if she practiced it at all. He’d become a fanatic on the subject; didn’t want to have to be procuring any abortions. That could louse up all kinds of plans and timetables.
He had come to believe that, if he’d had a daughter, this was the way he would feel about her.
Valentine had no children, at least none that he’d ever been told of, from the era that had ended more than a decade ago, when he had been shackled by the same drives as any man. His cradle of seed had then metastasized into something foul, and so the idea of children was now academic, at least in a biological sense.
But fate, destiny, evolution — these could give a man children no less his own than those from his loins.
From a shirt pocket he slid out a picture and flipped it into Ellie’s lap. Looking at it with downcast eyes, she let nearly a minute tick by before touching it, turning it right-side up.
“Which is this one?” she asked. “They all look alike to me.”
“Daniel Ironwood. He’s the one in Seattle.” Valentine watched her go over the picture with mild appraisal, milder interest. “He’s nice-looking enough. Do you like him?”
Ellie shrugged. “He’s all right. He’s coming here?”
“In a few weeks. Right after Christmas. I talked to him a couple of days ago, and that’s when he thought he could get away.”
She dropped the picture to the floor beside her chair, aimed the remote to boost the television volume. “
“Who is William Harvey,” she said, and looked down at the picture again. “You know, Patrick, who I think I could really go for is Mark Alan Nance. There’s a look in his eyes I get off on.”
“It’s called waiting to die,” he told her. “There’s a lot I can do, but arranging a conjugal visit to death row in Texas isn’t one of them.”
“What is
“I’m guessing that
“Har har.” Ellie rolled her eyes. “Who were the Cathars.”
He listened to her volley back and forth with the television, decided against opening his mouth when he knew an answer, because, frankly, she looked to be edging him out by a two-to-one margin. This was embarrassing. Better she be left in the dark as to how much he knew, or didn’t.
Ellie stretched, arms fisted high, legs out stiff before her, stocking feet wiggling. Then she curled back into the chair. “Now that geek from Indianapolis, now there was a disappointment. You let that happen to me again, Patrick, and I don’t care how good I have it here, I’m not doing it any more.”
He told her sure, sure, he understood. Well, it had been an unqualified fiasco, and he’d tried to tell himself that Timothy Van der Leun must have had more problems beyond Helverson’s syndrome. Some irritating vein of guilt morality beaten into him since birth, maybe. He was, after all, a preacher’s son; lots of damage potential there.
“What about the new guy, that Clay guy?” she asked.
“What about him?”
“Are you going to bring him here?”
“What’s the rush? I just found out about him the first part of this month. I’m not going to push it before it’s time, if that’s what you’re driving at. Backfired on me once, with that one from L.A. I’ll take an extra two or three months if that’s what it takes to keep it from happening again.”
That was the problem with the young: their impatience, their need to get things done posthaste, forget the groundwork. It wasn’t their fault, though. He recognized signs of their conditioning by a world trapped in hyperacceleration. Children reached puberty a full three years earlier today than they did at the time of the American Revolution. He envisioned a massive social vise, squeezing tighter and tighter these malleable young bodies and minds. Such resilience, though. They found their ways to cope, to survive; to thrive, even. And for the very lucky few, biology had found it for them.
What a prophet Nietzsche had proven to be, a century before his time. If only the man had lived to see his concept of the
If only the man were here now, to seek out as one might seek a guru, for wisdom. Their strained and wretched lives, these first growing pains of a genetic monarchy taking its first wobbly steps toward the throne, might be given succor, balm, and meaning.
He liked to think so, anyway.
“Well,
Ellie slithered from the chair down to the floor, advancing toward the sectional on all fours, swaying side to side like a predator in torn black tights, white skin luminous through the rips. A panther, stalking slowly and willfully, eyes cruel in their curiosity; violet hair hanging before her face; she blew a lock of it off her cheek with a sharp and feral gust.
“Why not you, Patrick?” saying it soft, saying it low, as she palmed both hands over his knees. “What’s your secret, why so chaste around me? Nobody ever got a madonna vibe off me.” Sliding her hands higher along his thighs.
He caught her wrists and held them; thin little twigs, he could have broken each. And twenty years ago, might have broken her wrists and flipped her over; he’d have torn her clothing free and made her regret she had ever thought of seducing him. Shown her what seduction had brought — the beast that, once awakened, could not be put back in its cage.
But twenty years could change a lot, cancer even more. The same name but hardly the same man, the Patrick Valentines of then and now connected primarily by strands of DNA.
“I like whores,” he said. “You’re not a whore.”
They did have their merits. Anonymity, and the assurance that you never had to look the same one in the eye again if you’d rather not. And you could pay them to never, ever mention that they noticed your deformity. Actresses in the end, they could lay a hand on you and pretend you were whole. Their faces would never betray the shocks that would cause a normal woman to snatch her hand back as if defiled by a malignant void. Whores were just dandy that way.
And Ellie laughed.
“Then what do you call me?” she asked, drawing back, not one visible wound from the rejection; just a game she played. So little real power she possessed, but that she did, she was certainly aware of. “I mean, you’re paying
