@Expectations Page 9

  Understand how this happens. At some point in their early conversations, after they have learned all they care to tell each other about themselves, he says, “I set my fingertip in the hollow just below your ear.”

  Miles away, she shivers, imagining his delicate touch. It is more immediate than anything in the room where she types. She responds, “I lean into your hand and press my face into your palm.” Framing a wish, she makes it come true.

  They are both breathing faster.

  Anticipation. This love is perfect because it’s all about anticipation. The lovers vibrate, shimmering at the brink of things to come. Everything is in the future. This powerful love affair built out of words.

  He says, “Every one of us is an island, yes, but with you, I feel less isolated. If only we could…”

  She says, “We see the best parts of each other.”

  “The essence. Work with me and we can make it fuse.”

  “If only I could be with you.”

  “You are.”

  Reverdy and Mireya are both extremely good writers. Lesser lovers type pornography at each other. It is cheap and heavy-handed. But experts can make words stand for much, much more than face value. When the lovers are finished for the time being, tremulous and shaky, she asks him the most intimate question of all. “What does the room look like that you’re typing from?”

  Her lover says, “I can’t tell you that. I don’t know you well enough to tell you that.”

  “You know me better than anyone.”

  “You only think so. Darling. And because you are my darling I’m going to remind you. Look at me.” Reverdy used to tell Mireya this. When they finished he would leave her with the reminder, Reverdy is not what he seems.

  It was wonderful. They were wonderful. Until.

  Until he betrayed her, just like fucking Harry with his fucking size-four post-teen popsy. She caught Reverdy with Velvet. All right, she spied. If she’d only logged off and trusted the man, she’d never have found out. Instead she logged back on after saying good night and caught the two of them together. Another woman! Her exclusive love! So it was Velvet, not Zan, who took Reverdy away from her, although Velvet tried to poison the well by implicating Zan. Mireya stuck it to him. Reverdy accused her of spying. She gave him hell for being unfaithful. He said, “You sound like my wife.” Livid, she attacked: “I AM YOUR LOVER, AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT! I’M NOT ANYBODY’S WIFE!” Once they began to fight they couldn’t quit. Mireya logged on day and night in a frenzy of jealousy, typing, @find Reverdy, @find Reverdy, and even though she never again caught him with Velvet, they fought. They fought.

  Poor Florence pinned everything on him. Everything. Exposed herself in all her weakness. He knew all her soft spots and he hit them every time, hitting until she was ragged and weeping at the keyboard and in real life, but they were still in love. They were! Then she made her big mistake. OK, she phoned his house. She spoke to the wife. She moved into the man’s physical world and he’ll never forgive her. They made love one last time and then fought to the finish and kept on fighting; they can’t get enough!

  Now Mireya is with Azeath. Azeath walked in on one of their bitterest fights, saw the words burning themselves into the screen and did the right thing. He leapt to her defense. Az is a hunk, he’s handsome, she loves having a defender. Awkward with words, but what isn’t to love? Still. Az says he hates Reverdy for the way he treated her, but there’s more.

  He hates Reverdy for being smarter. Quicker. For writing better and making fun of him. And Azeath has a temper. Reverdy kited a post into his online enemy’s everyday offline world and it is this that Azeath will never forgive him. “I’ll kill him,” Az says, without explaining to Mireya where his physcial life spins itself out or how Reverdy’s post has affected it. “Even if he doesn’t tell you where I am.”

  She can’t ask her ex-lover. He’ll only torture her by not telling. Mireya prompts, “You are…”

  “In trouble with some people,” Azeath says significantly. He’s feeding on her interest. “If you love me, don’t ask.”

  OK, she has a weakness for men who aren’t necessarily good.

  And Reverdy? Reverdy’s been with a dozen women since their colossal breakup, nobody important, Mireya knows. Until Zan.

  Until Zan came along, Mireya had hopes. Zan ruined everything. Mireya thought Reverdy would get tired of his cyberbimbos, he’d see how superficial they were, how brittle and stupid, and he’d come back to her. No more. It’s over. All because of Zan.

  Her one great love has gone sour.

  Well, Mireya has soured too. She tried to warn Zan about the bastard and what did she get? Insulted. Thrown out. If Reverdy wants me to know, he’ll tell me. Doesn’t the bitch want the truth?

  I’ll show her, Florence thinks, furious. I’ll get her out of my life.

  Zan doesn’t know it, but she has a mortal enemy. And she’ll know it soon enough. Mireya won’t just finish her on StElene. She’s going to step out of the box and do something conclusive to the bitch in her actual space. Learn her name. Find out where she lives. Go there.

  Ruin her life.

  eleven/@eleven

  JENNY/ZAN

  How do you fall in love with a man in a place you know by heart but that exists in what is, essentially, ether? Fast, because you think you’ll never see him. It happens in an instant. Snap. Like that. Sex is one thing; true love is another. He lives halfway across the world; there are a million electronic seekers out there and yet you find each other.

  As if it is fated.

  You can’t see him so there’s nothing to make you hesitate, or reconsider. You fall into each other’s minds. It’s like plunging into a volcano, brilliant.

  You think you’ll never meet him. The miracle is that you don’t need to see him, what you have together is perfect. Then you understand you’ll die if you don’t see him, so go figure.

  How do you fall in love with a man you’ve never met? Like this.

  The first thing Reverdy said to me was, “Are you all right?”

  I was sitting in Brevert, South Carolina, with my mouth filling up with tears, he was typing from God knows where and we were so close; it was astounding. He knew me! I said, “Does it show?”

  “It’s OK.” He was astonishingly sweet with me. “There are a lot of unhappy people here.”

  It was the week after we moved to Brevert. I married Charlie so we could stay close and he was already leaving. I’d made lamb vindaloo, but his promises were like air kisses, empty gestures. He was just back from Cherry Point. He sauntered in whistling, after we hugged he said in that absentminded way of his, “I thought you’d have me packed.”

  I covered the lamb he wouldn’t have time to eat. “Packed? For what?”

  “For Washington. Oh honey, didn’t I tell you? I know I just got back but I have to go to DC.” He put his arms around me and I let him move me upstairs; I touched his cheek. When our bodies moved together like that I could convince myself that the kids were no problem really, Charlie and I fit so well that we can make it through anything, but his mind was somewhere else. He pulled out a bag; it was not the weekender. “Something’s come up. My aide was supposed to phone and give you the word.”

  “Your aide!”

  “I have to do some stuff at the Pentagon. It’s important.”

  Just when I thought we were … “Oh, Charlie! How long?”

  “Three weeks. You’ll be fine.”

  “Three weeks!” I grabbed some things and threw them in on top of his. Clothes. Jewelry. Underwear.

  “What’s that about?”

  “I can’t do without you for three weeks, Charlie.” I was thinking, if I could only get this man alone in some hotel, I mean really alone, if we could have just a few hours to ourselves without those needy kids of his … “I’m coming.”

  “Oh, babe, you can’t.” He was already unpacking my things—regretful, maybe, but firm. No way. This is how the man I thought I knew put me in my place
for good and all. He ran his hands down my arms with a sad, sweet smile. “What would we do with the kids?”

  “The kids? A sitter?” I was too hurt to see what was coming.

  “It’s too soon.” He was already shaking his head. “If you could just hold the fort for me?”

  There are things you never say because you know they’ll undo a marriage. I did not say: Is that why you married me? I said, “Oh Charlie, I miss you already.”

  The kids behaved right up until Charlie’s plane took off. Then they grew fangs. Rusty set his action figures on fire and jammed all of Patsy’s Barbies into the flowerbed head down. Patsy threw a book at him but it hit me and she bawled. I thought about how they must be missing their mother and I said, “It’s OK, he’ll be back.”

  Rusty snarled, “What do you care?” It was embarrassing, they were about to see me cry, poor kids, lost their mom and now this, we should be bonding and we can’t. Try. He was sweaty and struggling but I grabbed him, in the striped T-shirt he was like a fat, cranky bug.

  “I know just how you feel.” I reached for Patsy, thinking we’d all feel better if we hugged. I meant, I would feel better if I could only get a hug.

  “What are you doing?” Rusty squawked. “Cut it out!”

  “I just.”

  Patsy knuckled me in the breast. “Let go!”

  “So, what.” Never let them see you cry. “Is this war?” It took a while to talk them down. Did I really hear, “Wicked stepmother”? It took hours to get them to bed. By that time I was too wired to sleep. I went upstairs to Charlie’s computer. I did what you do when you’re miserable, I loaded Netscape and started clicking around on the World Wide Web. The funny thing about netsurfing is, it gives you the illusion that something is just about to happen. I wasn’t looking for sex sites, I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I just wanted to take my mind off hurting for a while.

  OK, I sent the search engine after entries under “excitement.” You can imagine. Ads for services you don’t want to know about, home pages where a person could download porn or order leather underwear, hot spots for interactive sex sites, piercing, you name it, sites for people who liked being tied up. It was like a tour of the velvet underground, stuff you read about in abnormal psych. Sniffling, I clicked around until I hit the Suntum web page: this corporation was sponsoring an experimental community, it sounded pretentious but clean— “gathering place for high-level professionals and intellectuals from all over the world.” Why not?

  Text, it was just text. A change from the jumpy, bizarro graphics on the web. StElene was so quiet. It was like opening a book.

  The name Guest is taken, so you will be Tourmaline_Guest. You are blundering around in a dark vestibule. It is littered with the luggage of transients and new players checking into the GrandHotel StElene; you are isolated here, alone in pitch darkness, although you can hear others talking. This is where you’ll stay until you learn how to live in our society. To learn more about how to get around, type “House Rules.” Just outside you hear a party going on, but you have to learn before you can join it. You are aware that there are others waiting here in the dark. The island of StElene is unknown to you. You won’t know who you’re talking to until you’ve been here a while, so be careful what you say to strangers. StElene is a party, but it’s only as good as what you bring to it.

  My imagination did the rest.

  The vestibule was jammed with people jabbering; dialog scrolled up my screen so fast that I couldn’t catch the tune. I should have typed: house rules to find out what was going on but I couldn’t quit reading the conversation! It was like magic, strangers I couldn’t see were typing—no. Talking to each other; I followed, speed-reading until I hit Mach 4 and began to hear their voices. Instead of being alone in the room I was surrounded by talks—funny talk, stupid talk, snappy one-liners, off-the-wall come-ons and cries for help.

  I saw at least five separate conversations going on. I tuned in on one that I liked—somebody named Jazzy (Jazzy is terminally frivolous. He looks so festive that you know you’ve gotta dance) said, “… shrinks have a name for people like that. Put a fortune up their noses.”

  Wait a minute, I thought but did not say. I am a shrink.

  LavaKing said, “Snow angels.”

  Stone_Guest said, “Or snow cones.”

  Brilliant said, “Snow business of mine.”

  Fearsome said, “Snow good. Here’s who snows you, shrinks!”

  Hey, I’m a shrink. Words, that’s all they were doing, playing with words; it made me grin, even though I was home alone typing and nobody could see. Should I say I’ve met the enemy and she is me? Funny—I was completely protected, anonymous—Nobody even noticed Tourmaline_Guest and I was still afraid of looking like a jerk. I was the new kid on the block—hot to play and scared to death of looking dumb.

  “Do snow angels go to snow heaven?”

  “You want heaven?” Jazzy laughs. “Azeath thinks heaven is life without Reverdy. Azeath even got him barred from here.”

  Fearsome said, “Barred from the vestibule?”

  “Az said he was a bad influence. Said he was poisoning minds.”

  “The vestibule.” Fearsome snorted. “Who the hell wants to be in the vestibule?”

  Jazzy said to Fearsome, “You’re here.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Yeah, right,” Del said. “What are you, our resident internet stalker? <> Fearsome, get a life!”

  Granite_Guest said, per instructions, “Hello, I’m new here.”

  LavaKing bubbles ominously. “The thing is, when Reverdy gets his mind around people, he can make them do anything he wants. No wonder the Directors hate him.”

  Fearsome said, “Careful. Reverdy hears everything.”

  LavaKing said anyway, “He wants to overturn the government.”

  Wait a minute, I thought. This place has a government?

  Granite_Guest said, “Isn’t anybody going to talk to me?”

  “Reverdy knows everything, too,” Jazzy said. “If you’re his friend, terrific, but if you’re not … The man forgives, but he never forgets.”

  “If you hate him, Jaz, why don’t we just get him erased?”

  “I don’t hate him, I like the guy. It’s Azeath who wants him erased.”

  I wanted to ask what Reverdy had done that was so bad, but I was afraid to speak.

  Fearsome said, “Because he’s a manipulative bastard?”

  “Simpler than that. Azeath wants him off because Mireya told him that’s what he wants. The guy is a dim bulb. Mireya’s tool.”

  Granite_Guest said, “Can anybody hear me?”

  “And what Mireya says, Az does. Leads him around by his…”

  “… Dick.”

  For the first time since Charlie left, I laughed. This mysterious setting, the rapid-fire talk were exciting. And there was this—what. Hint of intrigue. Just lurking there in the vestibule, I felt furtive, like a thief grabbing bits of other people’s lives. Then I thought, Why? I’m not hurting anything. I’m not even doing anything. All this life! It was unfolding almost too fast for me, you bet I was excited, never saw anything like it, walk into the world’s longest-running soap opera and become someone!

  Del said, “Oh, Mireya, Mireya. Talk about your woman scorned. She’s pissed because Reverdy dumped her. It’s all about sex.”

  “Isn’t everything?”

  “Face it, StElene is about sex.”

  Jazzy was quick. “Depends on who you are.”

  “And what you come for.”

  “And Reverdy, what do you think Reverdy comes for?”

  Fearsome said to Granite_Guest, “Too much spam in here. We can’t hear ourselves think. Want to go someplace quiet?”

  I thought that was interesting. Electronic singles bar?

  Jazzy said, “Reverdy comes here for power. It’s that simple. That’s why they want him out.”

  “Because he tangles with the Directors? He�
�s a damn hero.”

  “Or a spoiler. You choose.”

  Fearsome said to Granite_Guest, “I know a private place.”

  Granite_Guest disconnected.

  The chorus went on. “The Directors move fast.” “Forget Reverdy, Reverdy’s over.” “One more black mark and he’s out on his ass.”

  Pebble_Guest said, “Anybody here from Australia?”

  Anybody here from South Carolina? What if one of these people was really my patient, Rick Berringer? What would go on between us here? I was alone at Charlie’s computer and at the same time I was surrounded. Connected. It was so immediate and so vital that all I wanted was to belong. Lives sprang up in front of me like figures in a pop-up book. I’m not a voyeur, I’m a psychologist! My inner watchdog bared its teeth in a sardonic grin. Yeah, right.

  OK, I stayed because I couldn’t not stay. One hour on StElene and I was deep in the neverending story. Hooked. This place I couldn’t see but could not stop reading was huge, and it was real. I had walked into unfolding history, with its heroes and villains. This Reverdy. Who was he? Listening, I leaned in so close that I almost fell into the screen. I was like Alice with my nose pressed so tight to the looking glass that it fogged up, wondering what came next. Reverdy, I eavesdropped until a noise in the outside world distracted me and I looked up and it was dawn.

  What was it exactly, that excited me? I wasn’t sure. I slept badly and woke up wired. That morning I didn’t hear what my patients said, I was too busy replaying dialog from StElene—funky, erratic and truer than anything that got said in Brevert that day. The second night Charlie was gone I logged on and typed “House Rules.” I couldn’t bear to miss the party in the vestibule so I printed the instructions to study at the office. Between patients, I learned what to type to get around on StElene. Commands for “walking.” Teleporting. Directing speech. Strings that would bring up information on other players—their descriptions, where they were on the island at a given time. How to build a room of my own—no need, I’m just passing through.

  Still. Charlie was gone, I was only the sitter, what better did I have to do? Why not give his kids Happy Meals and park them in front of the TV, which is where they’ve made clear they’d rather be? I was starved for company. Maybe I missed my neurotic New Yorkers, maybe I missed adult conversation, maybe I just felt trapped. I went upstairs and logged on to StElene. It wasn’t like walking into a movie, it was like going to live in one. Being unseen was liberating. Strangers typed in real time; their words took flight. I saw close friends, enemies and lovers gossiping and politicking. They made me laugh. Something big was happening.