The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [87]
Andrew was the first to speak after the considerable unease of silence. “So, we both have questions about what the other does. Nothing wrong with that. We’re both starving for harmless answers about one another. You must like me, or you wouldn’t be here, and I’m sure you’re not here to win the Pulitzer Prize on my humble life. Tell me about yourself, or ask me anything you want. I’m sorry too, for that passing bit of awkwardness.”
Mel raised her brandy glass in a toast and Andrew raised his in turn. “Here’s to informal introductions,” she proposed. Glasses clinked, and spirits lifted. “Now, if you want to, ask me a question about myself.”
Andrew sipped his drink. It was brandy also, and more of it, diluted with Coke in a tall glass. “What’s your favorite color?”
“Orange. It used to be black, but black is too common.”
“Like your hair,” Andrew noted. “But your hair is far too beautiful to be common. Come on, black is supposed to be beautiful. That’s my favorite color.”
“Okay, let me ask a question,” Mel said. “What turns you on?”
“Well....orange, now.” Andrew found himself less comfortable now than with the previous subject, though he tried his best not to show it. He hoped this was working. “And you?”
“What turns me on is how we have so much in common.”
“We do?” A sip of brandy-Coke, a mouthful of vegetables.
“Ask me more about myself."
“All right,” Andrew swallowed. “What do we both have in common?”
“We both serve two masters: ourselves and the one we’re servants to. We hate one, and despise the other. It doesn’t matter which. We hate ourselves for clinging to the other as much as we do and we hate our other for having us be that way.”
“Yet we don’t completely despise the other, do we?” Andrew replied, delighted by the depth of conversation the evening had submerged into and barely even an hour had passed since it began. “I mean, there’s something we appreciate in them still, isn’t there, important things that we have learned from them, throughout what they’ve turned into?”
“What I’ve learned is to not appreciate my master so much anymore,” Mel said, almost bitterly, mesmerized as she was by the utter honesty of it all, how she so desperately needed a release to her deep tremulous burdens like this. “I used to love him and part of me still does, but all I find lately is that I try too hard to keep that love going and he simply keeps defeating the purpose. All I ever wanted to do was paint, to be an artist, and to explore myself, not someone else’s obsessions, as intriguing as they always were,” and then, “...are.”
Perhaps it was the brandy talking. She only had three, or was it four? It was at least four when she asked Andrew for another. How many bottles of that shit did he hold there within his kitchen cupboards, anyway? This was not the direction the interview was supposed to have gone. Who was interviewing whom, here?
“So, Melony,” Andrew asked his date, curious and unaware of her struggle to maintain her preplanned interrogative approach to talking to him, “Who is this master you despise?”
A short distance behind Melony and from Andrew’s point of view, somewhere in the direction of the refrigerator’s car—shaped Zat’s Auto & Body promo magnet, a blurry distortion appeared. It was the left side of Bari’s head, displaying an attentive ear up and listening.
Bari was merely humoring him; Andrew knew she could hear just as well unseen. This was also an attempt to remind Andrew that she was listening and if there was anything else she was doing, she was annoying him.
What Bari was doing was more than that, Andrew realized. She was feeding Melony thoughts and ideas. This was not a manipulation, but an...influence. Bari was known to do this sort of thing.
He was going to have to talk to her about that.
He focused onto Melony, deliberately, despite Bari. To Melony, his expression suddenly hinted of determined concentration.
Thus her answer: He was interviewing her.
And her answer to Andrew’s last question: “Max Polito. You’re right, though, I don’t completely