Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [103]
His phone rang.
His phone rang. It was Ursula and Phyllis, calling to tell him that Maya was having another fit and was inconsolable. He got up, put on unders and went to the bathroom. Waves leaped over a line of backwash. Maya, depressed again. Last time he had seen her she had been in high spirits, almost euphoric, and that was what, a week ago? But that was Maya. Maya was crazy. Crazy in a Russian way, however, which meant she was a power to be reckoned with. Mother Russia! The church and the communists both had tried to eradicate the matriarchy that had preceded them, and all they had achieved was a flood of bitter emasculating scorn, a whole nation full of contemptuous russalkas and baba yagas and twenty-hour-a-day superwomen, living in a nearly parthenogenic culture of mothers, daughters, babushkas, granddaughters. Yet still necessarily absorbed in their relationships with men, desperately trying to find the lost father, the perfect mate. Or just a man who would pull his share of the load. Finding that great love, and then more often than not destroying it. Crazy!
Well, it was dangerous to generalize. But Maya was a classic case. Moody, angry, flirtatious, brilliant, charming, manipulative, intense— and now filling his office like a huge slab of dejection, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, her mouth haggard. Ursula and Phyllis nodded and whispered thanks to Michel for getting up so early, and left. He went to the venetian blinds and opened them, and the light from the central dome poured in. He saw again that Maya was a beautiful woman, with wild lustrous hair and a dark charismatic gaze, immediate and direct. It was dismaying to see her this upset, he never got used to it, it contrasted too sharply with her usual vivaciousness, the way she would put a finger to your arm as she rattled on in a confiding tone about one fascinating thing or other. . . .
All strangely mimicked by this desperate creature, who leaned forward onto his desk and began to tell him in a ragged hoarse voice about the latest scene in the unfolding drama of her and John, and then, again, Frank. Apparently she had gotten angry at John for refusing to help her in a plan she had to get some of the Russian-based multinationals to underwrite the development of settlements in Hellas Basin, which being the deepest point on Mars was going to be first to benefit from the atmospheric changes they were beginning to see. The air pressure at Low Point, four kilometers below the datum, was always going to be ten times thicker than that on top of the great volcanoes, and three times thicker than at the datum. It was going to be the first human-viable place, perfect for development.
But apparently John preferred to work through UNOMA and governments. And this was just one of the many basic political disagreements which were beginning to infect their personal life, to the point that they were fighting pretty frequently about other things, things that didn’t matter, things about which they had never fought before.
Watching her Michel almost said, John wants you irritated with him. He wasn’t sure what John would say to that. Maya rubbed her eyes, leaned her forehead on his desk, revealing the back of her neck and her broad rangy shoulders. She would never look this distraught in front of most of Underhill; it was an intimacy between them, something she only did with him. It was as if she had taken off her clothes. People didn’t understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one’s life. Although it was true she would be beautiful naked, she had perfect proportions. He recalled the way she looked swimming in the pool, doing the backstroke in a blue bathing suit cut high over the hipbones.