Chapter 6 #3
The restaurant was dim, nearly empty, and the air simmered with spices. In the corner was a jukebox pumping out a current Top 40 hit. After a glance at a sign that read Please Seat Yourself, Libby led Cal to a corner booth. “The pizza’s really wonderful here. Have you had pizza before?”
He flicked a finger at the hardened candle wax on the bottle in the center of the table. “Some things transcend time. Pizza’s one of them.”
The waitress toddled over, a plump young woman in a bright red bib apron that had Rocky’s and a few splashes of tomato sauce dashed across the front. She placed two paper napkins beside place mats decorated with maps of Italy.
“One large,” Libby said, taking Cal’s appetite into account. “Extra cheese and pepperoni. Would you like a beer?”
“Yeah.” He tore a corner from the napkin and rolled it thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger.
“One beer and one diet cola.”
“Why is everyone here on a diet?” Cal asked before the waitress was out of earshot. “Most of the ads deal with losing weight, quenching thirst and getting clean.”
Libby ignored the quick curious look the waitress shot over her shoulder. “Sociologically our culture is obsessed with health, nutrition and physique. We count calories, pump iron and eat a lot of yogurt. And pizza,” she added with a grin. “Advertising reflects current trends.”
“I like your physique.”
Libby cleared her throat. “Thanks.”
“And your face,” he added, smiling. “And the way your voice sounds when you’re embarrassed.”
She let out a long, windy sigh. “Why don’t you listen to the music?”
“The music stopped.”
“We can put more on.”
“On what?”
“The jukebox.” Enjoying herself, Libby rose and extended a hand to him. “Come on, you can pick a song.”
Cal stood over the colorful machine, scanning the titles. “This one,” he decided. “And this one. And this one. How does it work?”
“First you need some change.”
“I’ve had enough change for a while, thanks.”
“No, I mean change. Quarters.” Chuckling, she dug into her purse. “Don’t they use coins in the twenty-third century?”
“No.” He plucked the quarter from her palm and examined it. “But I’ve heard of them.”
“We use them around here, often with reckless abandon.” Taking the quarter back, she dropped it and two more into the slot. “An eclectic selection, Hornblower.” The music drifted out, slow and romantic.
“Which is this?”
“‘The Rose.’ It’s a ballad—a standard, I suppose, even today.”
“Do you like to dance?”
“Yes. I don’t often, but . . .” Her words trailed away as he gathered her close. “Cal—”
“Shh.” He rubbed his cheek against her hair. “I want to hear the words.”
They danced—swayed, really—as the music drifted through the speakers. A mother with two squabbling children rested her elbow on her table and watched them with pleasure and envy. In the glassed-in kitchen a man with a bushy mustache tossed pizza dough in quick, high twirls.
“It’s sad.”
“No.” She could dream like this, with her head cushioned on his shoulder and her body moving to their inner rhythm. “It’s about how love survives.”
The words floated away. Her eyes were shut, her arms still around him when the next selection blasted out with a primeval scream and a thundering drum roll.
“What about this one?”
“It’s about being young.” She drew away, embarrassed, when she saw the smiles and stares of the other patrons. “We should sit down.”
“I want to dance with you again.”
“Some other time. People don’t usually dance in pizza parlors.”
“Okay.” Obligingly he walked back across the room to their table. Their drinks were waiting. As Libby had with the drink in his galley, Cal found enormous comfort in the familiar taste of American beer. “Just like home.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you at first.”
“Babe, I didn’t believe me at first.” In a natural gesture he reached across the table to take her hand. “Tell me, what do people do here on a date?”
“Well, they . . .” His thumb was skimming over her knuckles in a way that made her pulse unsteady. “They go to movies or restaurants.”
“I want to kiss you again.”
Her eyes darted up to his. “I don’t really think—”
“Don’t you want me to kiss you?”
“If she doesn’t,” the waitress said as she plopped their pizza in front of them, “I get off at five.”
Grinning, Cal slipped a slice of pizza onto a paper plate. “She’s very friendly,” he commented to Libby, “but I like you better.”
“Terrific.” She took a bite. “Are you always obnoxious?”
“Mostly. But I do like you, a lot.” He waited a beat. “Now you’re supposed to say you like me, too.”
Libby took another bite and chewed it thoroughly. “I’m thinking about it.” Taking her napkin, she dabbed at her mouth. “I like you better than anyone I’ve met from the twenty-third century.”
“Good. Are you going to take me to the movies?”
“I suppose I could.”
“Like a date.” He took her hand again.
“No.” Carefully she removed it. “Like an experiment. We’ll consider it part of your education.”
His smile spread, slow, easy and undoubtedly dangerous. “I’m still going to kiss you good-night.”
***
It was dark when they returned to the cabin. More than a little frazzled, Libby pushed open the door and tossed her purse aside.
“I did not make a scene,” Cal insisted.
“I don’t know what they call being asked to leave a theater where you come from, but around here we call it making a scene.”
“I simply made some small, practical comments about the film. Haven’t you heard about freedom of speech?”
“Hornblower—” Stopping herself she held up a hand and turned to the cupboard to get the brandy. “Talking throughout the picture about it being a crock of space waste is not exercising the Bill of Rights. It’s being rude.”
With a shrug, he plopped down on the couch and propped his feet on the coffee table. “Come on, Libby, all that bull about creatures from Galactica invading Earth. I have a cousin on Galactica, and he doesn’t have a face full of suction cups.”
“I should have known better than to take you to a science-fiction movie.” She sipped the brandy. Then, because she decided it was as much her fault as his, she poured another snifter. “It was fiction, Hornblower. Fantasy.”
“Rot.”
“All right.” She passed him the snifter. “But there were people in the theater who had paid to watch it.”
“How about that nonsense with the creatures sucking all the water out of the human body? Then there was the way that space jockey zipped around the galaxy shooting lasers. Do you have any idea how crowded that sector is?”
“No, I don’t.” She sampled more brandy. “Tell you what, next time we’ll try a Western. Remind me not to let you turn on Star Trek.”
“Star Trek’s a classic,” he said, and sent her into a fit of giggles.
“Never mind. You know, I almost think I’m losing my grip. I spent the morning in a spaceship and the afternoon eating pizza and not watching a movie. I don’t seem to be able to make sense of it all.”
“It’ll come clear.” He touched his glass to hers before settling his arm around her shoulders.
It was comforting, the glow of the lamplight, the warmth of the brandy, the scent of the woman.
His woman, Cal thought, if for only a moment.
“I like this better than the movies. Tell me about Liberty Stone.”
“There’s not much.”
“Tell me, so I can take it with me.”
“I was born here, as I told you before.”
“In the bed I sleep in.”
“Yes.” She sipped her brandy, wondering if it was that, or the image of him in the old bed, that warmed her. “My mother used to weave. Blankets, wall hangings, rugs. She would sell them to supplement what my father grew in the garden.”
“They were poor?”
“No, they were children of the sixties.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s difficult to explain. They wanted to be closer to the land, closer to themselves.
It was their part of a revolution against material power, world violence, the entire social structure of the time.
So we lived here and my mother bartered and sold her work in the surrounding towns.
One day an art buyer on a camping trip with his family came across one of her tapestries.
” She smiled into her brandy. “The rest, as they say, is history.”
“Caroline Stone,” he said abruptly.
“Why, yes.”
With a laugh, he downed the brandy and reached for the bottle in one smooth motion. “Your mother’s work is in museums.” Bemused, he picked up the corner of the blanket beside them. “I’ve seen it in the Smithsonian.” He poured more brandy in her glass while she gaped at him.
“This gets stranger and stranger.” She drank again, letting the brandy influence her sense of unreality.
“It’s you we need to talk about, you I need to understand.
All these questions.” Unable to sit any longer, she cupped the snifter in both hands and started to pace.
“The oddest ones pop into my mind. I keep remembering you spoke of Philadelphia and Paris. Do you know what that means?”
“What?”
“We made it.” She lifted the snifter in a toast, then recklessly drained it. “It’s still there, all of it. Somehow, no matter how close we came to blowing everything, we survived. There’s a Philadelphia in the future, Hornblower, and that’s the most wonderful thing I can imagine.”
Still laughing, she spun in a circle. “All these years I’ve been studying the past, trying to understand human nature, and now I’ve had a glimpse of tomorrow. I don’t know how to thank you.”
Just looking at her left his stomach in a knot. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement. Her body was long and slim and wonderfully graceful as she moved. Wanting her was no longer an urge, it was an obsession.
He drew a long, careful breath. “Glad I could help.”
“I want to know everything, absolutely everything. How people live, how they feel. How they court and make love and marry. What games do the children play?” She leaned over to pour another inch of brandy in her glass.
“Are hot dogs still the best bet at a baseball game? Are Mondays still the hardest day of the week?”
“You’ll have to make a list,” he told her. He wanted to keep her talking, moving, laughing. Watching her now, animated, bursting with enthusiasm and humor, was as arousing as being in her arms. “What I can’t answer, the computer can.”
“A list. Of course. I make terrific lists.” Her eyes glowed as she laughed at him.
“I know there are more important things for me to ask. Nuclear disarmament, world peace, a cure for cancer and the common cold. But I want to know it all, from the inconsequential to the shattering.” Impatiently she pushed her hair back from her face.
Her words couldn’t seem to keep up with her thoughts.
“Every second I think of something new. Do people still have Sunday picnics? Have we beaten world hunger and homelessness? Do all men in your time kiss the way you do?”
The snifter paused halfway to his lips. Very slowly, very deliberately, he set it down. “I can’t answer that, because I’ve only practiced on women.”
“I don’t know where that came from.” She, too, set the snifter aside, then rubbed her suddenly damp palms on the thighs of her jeans. “I suppose I’m a bit wired.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nervous, excited. Confused.” She pushed her hands through her hair. “Oh, God, Caleb, you confuse me. Even before . . . before all this.”
“We’re even there, Libby.”
She stared at him. He hadn’t moved, but she saw that he had tensed.
“That’s odd,” she murmured. “I don’t usually confuse anyone.
Nothing seems to be exactly the way I expect it to be with you.
I guess I’m a coward, because every time you come near me I want to run.
” She closed her eyes. “That’s not true.
You asked me once if I was afraid of you, and I said I wasn’t.
That’s not true, either. I am afraid. Of you, of me, and most of all of thinking I might never feel this way again with anyone else.
” She began to roam the room again, picking up a pillow, tossing it aside, shifting a lamp.
“I wish I knew what to do, what to say. I don’t have any experience with this kind of thing.
And, damn it, I wish you’d kiss me again and shut me up. ”
He thought he could feel each separate nerve in his body stretch. “Libby, you know I want you. I haven’t kept it to myself. But under the circumstances . . . the fact that I’ll be gone in a few days . . .”
“That’s just it.” Suddenly she wanted to weep. “You will be gone. I don’t want to wonder what it might have been like. I want to know. I feel . . . oh, I don’t know how I feel. The only thing I’m sure of is that I want you to make love with me tonight.”
She stopped, shocked that she had said it aloud, stunned that it was perhaps the truest thing she’d ever said. Then the nerves were gone, and the shock with them. She was absolutely calm, and absolutely certain.
“Caleb, I want to be with you tonight.”
He rose. The hands he tucked in his pockets were two tense fists. “A few days ago it would have been easy. Things have changed, Libby. I care about you.”
“You care, so you don’t want to love me?”
“I want to so badly I can taste it.” When his gaze whipped to hers, she could see that he spoke nothing less than the truth.
“I also know that you’ve had a little too much to drink and more than too much to deal with tonight.
” He didn’t dare touch her, but his voice was like a caress. “There are rules, Libby.”
She took what she knew might be the biggest step in her life when she moved to him and held out both hands.
“Break them.”