The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [110]
He didn’t always understand the jokes, but he laughed at them anyway. He soon became her favorite source of puzzles, and she in her turn became his favorite consultant. Without actually intending to, they began to rely on one another, not merely for constructive assistance, but for all the kinds of reassuring strokes that made the routines of everyday life more comfortable. They never dated, and rarely saw one another in any kind of one-to-one situation, but whenever they were in a crowd, they gravitated together to form a distinct subunit.
If Mike Grundy was ever jealous of Morgan Miller—or, for that matter, of Chan and Burdillon—he never gave any sign of it. His sexual interest was routinely attracted by women much prettier than Lisa, and any flirtatiousness in their relationship was understood by both parties to be purely superficial. Once their friendship was solid and comprehensively defined, in fact, Mike frequently used Lisa as a useful source of advice on the management of his love life. Once he had grown used to seeing her as an expert, he tended to assume that her expertise was far less specialized than it was. He had such awesome faith in the linearity of her intelligence that he seemed to expect her to know everything he didn’t, or at least to be able to form a more reliable impression than his own. This did not, however, prevent him from disagreeing with her on various issues of personal importance. One of them was marriage.
“You’re wrong about there being no point in marrying if you don’t intend to have children, Lis,” he told her, while using her as a shoulder to cry on the first time he had made an unsuccessful proposal, in 2012 or 2013. “People aren’t programmed for the solitary life. They’re gregarious, and families—even if they’re just couples—are the real units of society, not individuals.”
“It’s a common argument,” she informed him loftily. “The couple as the atom of community—a hydrogen atom, one presumes. But which partner is to become the proton and which the mere orbiting electron? During courtship, it’s the men who buzz around the honey pot—but once the ceremony’s over, they expect the roles to be reversed, taking it for granted that they’ll be the nuclei around which their wives will helplessly circle. I can see why men like the idea—but I think I’d rather be a free radical.”
Mike had no idea that the metaphor had become disastrously mixed, although none of her university friends would have allowed her to get away with it. Even Ed Burdillon would probably have begun rhapsodizing about the analogies to be drawn between the waywardness of human passion and the counterintuitive wonders of quantum mechanics, but Mike Grundy’s intellect was cut from coarser and more utilitarian cloth.
“That’s so twentieth century,” he protested. “In fact, it borders on the Victorian. Modern marriage isn’t a matter of domestic slavery. Everybody works nowadays, if they can. Modern marriage is more like a business partnership.”
Lisa did not like to seem trite, and flatly refused to consider the obvious jokes about sleeping partners, shareholdings, and dividends. “Partnership creates unnecessary obligations,” she said instead. “The modern trend is toward freelance consultancy and free-floating labor.”
“Not in our Une of work,” he pointed out. “The consulting detective was a literary conceit, like the lone scientific genius making monsters in the basement.”
“Those are all surprisingly stubborn conceits,” Lisa observed, “but not as stubborn as the love story. You don’t feel obliged to fit your working life into the mold formed by TV cop shows, so why feel obliged to fit your private life into the mold of the kind of paperback pulp you’d be ashamed to display on your bookshelves?”
“Given the number of crimes of passion we have to deal with,” he said, “that’s ridiculously cynical.”
“Given the percentage of crimes of passion that fall into the thoroughly modern categories of road rage, phone rage, and store rage, it would be ridiculous to take any other view.”
“That’s frustration, not passion.”