Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [54]
“You can’t be in love with me, Marjorie.”
It was Saturday and they lay out on his porch, soaking up both the sun and the spectacular view of the bay from his apartment. Across the water eclectic house-boats gleamed Tom Sawyer white in the treed crotch of Sausalito. Alcatraz was a rough gray diamond set in a diadem of gray-green, and cargo container ships piled high with the amputated abdomens of eighteen-wheelers plied the watery boulevard between Oakland and Manila, Richmond and Seoul, San Francisco and Hong Kong.
“Tell that to my heart.” Reaching over from her lounger, she put her hand on his bare arm.
“Your hormones, you mean.”
The hand twitched but stayed. “That was cruel, Joel.”
He turned over to face her, and the desperation in his eyes was underlined by the raw emotion in his voice. “Oh God, I’m sorry, Marjorie! I didn’t mean that. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.” His fingers stroked her cheek, her neck, the sweat-beaded hollow between her breasts. They were trembling. “I—I can’t love you back. You know that. I can’t fall in love with anybody. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair.”
She smiled hopefully at him, not sure how to proceed or what road to take or where to go: only knowing that go there she must. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that? I love you, Joel.”
He rolled back onto the other lounger. “Don’t you think I’ve thought about having a woman say that to me? Much less someone as beautiful and sweet as you. I’m almost forty and I’ve done everything possible to avoid it.”
She kept her tone as gentle and reassuring as possible. “Then you shouldn’t have died on my couch.”
Lips pressed tightly together, he was shaking his head. “It just wouldn’t be fair. What kind of a life would we have, me dying every night, you not knowing if the next morning would be the one when I didn’t wake up? How would we explain it to our kids? What if my condition has something to do with some freak genetic mutation? What if it can be passed on?” A hand came down hard and angry on the white plastic of the lounge. “Whatever the damn thing is, when I die for the last time, when I don’t wake up, I want to be sure it dies with me.”
Unfolding herself from her lounge, she lay down next to him, hearing the metal and plastic complain, feeling the sun-sweat of their bodies mingle and flow together. Her arm fell lazily across his chest to lie there reassuringly. “Joel Farrell, you’re a better man dead than most of the men I know who are alive. If I’m willing to take a chance on a life together, why can’t you?”
She didn’t know if he sustained the kiss that followed out of pure passion or a need to give himself time to think of an appropriate response. Frankly she didn’t care.
“I’ll think about it, Marjorie. That’s all I can promise.”
“Then that’s enough—for now.” Turning in his strong, tanned arms, she gazed out and down at the glorious bay. Though she had lived in San Francisco all her life, it had always been just “the bay.” Now it was much more, so very much more, thanks to him. Just as everything was so much more. She sighed and closed her eyes, thinking and feeling and hearing as she never had before in her life.
When she found the note in her mailbox the next week, her screams brought Carol running from down the hall. When pounding on her friend’s door failed to elicit a response from within, the other woman swiftly used her copy of the key.
Bursting in, she saw Marjorie sitting on the old couch, clutching a crumpled piece of paper in one hand and holding the other over her mouth. It did not come close to stifling her uncontrollable sobs.
“Marjorie—Christ, what’s the matter?”
“He’s gone! Joel’s gone!”
Sitting down alongside her friend, Carol put an arm around her shoulders and drew her close. “The guy you’ve been telling me about for months? What do you mean, ‘he’s gone’? Did something happen? Was he called away on work? Did he—is he—dead?”
‘Marjorie’s sob froze in mid-rack as she gaped abruptly at her friend. When she