“Okay,” she said.
“I’m confused.”
“And now I’m ready,” she said, and held out her towel. She rubbed it gently on my face.
The sex was wonderful and awful. I could not get Rob’s privilege out of my thoughts, no matter how much I reasoned that they had separated and he was dead, and that she had saved my life and I owed her something. I knew she felt as if she were going to bed with Rob again, and that creeped me out even as it excited the hell out of me.
“Don’t tell me I make love like Rob,” I said.
It was eight-thirty.
“You don’t,” she said.
“Don’t tell me I’m better,” I said, angrier still.
“I’m sorry,” Lissa said. She lay on her side, head propped up on one arm. Her breasts were close to perfection, one in repose on the stretched white sheet, the second draped so slightly above it a feather would have escaped. I wanted her again, now.
“You haven’t had a woman in how long?” she asked.
“Long,” I said.
“Poor man. Well, you have certainly done justice by me.”
I did not know what to say. I was out of my league and had been for several hundred million years.
She made coffee, using the room machine, and brought me a foam cup. “I boiled it,” she said. “The water’s a little salty, but this is the Imperial Valley.”
We drank from our cups in silence, trying to discover what we added up to in this new arithmetic. Lissa had a loose, relaxed way of moving when she was naked. She smelled like hay and Lipton tea, with a rich base of beef broth and lemons. She fluffed the pillow to cushion her back, then lay against the headboard. Her toenails were perfect, unpainted, carefully but not, I judged, professionally manicured, skin without blemish. Fine little blond hairs rose from her arms, the small of her back. She did not shave her legs, and it did not matter.
The coffee tasted pretty salty, and I only drank half. She took my cup and threw the rest down the sink. We got dressed and went downstairs.
Lissa bought a copy of the Los Angeles Times from a stand in the lobby and tossed it at me as I got in the car. In the headlines: three Marine helicopters, ditched off Malibu, had been recovered by a Navy diving team. The helicopters had flown from Camp Pendleton and strafed a neighborhood in Los Angeles almost two months ago, killing four, including a Hollywood director. No motive, no explanation. The bodies of six aviators had been recovered, still strapped into their aircraft.
“Anybody we know?” she asked. The look in her eyes—distant and cold—startled me.
“Sounds like a drug thing,” I offered.
“That’s it,” she said, jerking the car into gear. “Ace Marine pilots slam a house for a drug deal gone bad.”
She gunned us out of the parking lot and back onto the road. We were twenty miles down the freeway when she started talking again. “Have you ever thought that looking for eternal youth is just crazy?”
“It isn’t,” I said.
“But isn’t believing that crazy in itself, in a way? Such confidence?”
“Not if it’s based in science,” I said.
“Have you got it in your grasp?” she asked, holding up a hand and squeezing as if her fingers held a juicy orange.
“Not yet. Soon, if I can just get back to work.”
“I watched Rob disintegrate. It started with Rudy Banning, but what if it was in Rob to begin with? A gene for insanity. The capacity to just break up at a touch.”
“Rob wasn’t crazy,” I said. I looked out the window at fields of cotton, mottled green in the late-morning sun. The glare hurt my eyes. “Neither am I.”
“You and Rob have the same genes. What if it’s all a circle of deluded people”—she took a deep breath—“chasing around, killing and getting killed, for nothing?”
“Granted, it’s hard to believe any of this is happening,” I said. “But you’ve seen the results.”
“I’ve seen the craziness,” she said, her voice rising in pitch. “I can’t see anything that makes sense. Can’t you at least acknowledge the possibility?”
“As a hypothesis, sure. Now it needs to be supported by facts. Am I acting crazy?”
“Your life is a mess. You said it yourself.”
“Even paranoids have enemies,” I said, echoing Mrs. Callas.
“But what if Rob contracted some sort of communicable disease, a virus, in Russia, something that screws up your brain, before he even knew about Silk?”
“Now that sounds paranoid,” I said.
“Is it really any different from what you say is happening, any harder to believe?”
I acknowledged that it was not. “I still don’t see the point.”
“I want to tell you what happened between Rob and me.”
That was not high on my list of things I wanted to hear. The whole conversation was going south rapidly.
