And one night she kept returning to his side during the cocktail gathering. With all the others they watched the terran news reports of the day’s progress, and saw again how oddly distorted and flattened they appeared, like tiny players in an incomprehensible soap opera. And then they left together, and ate, and then went walking down the wide grassy boulevards, eventually coming to his room in the lower town. And she accompanied him inside. Without explanation or comment, in Maya’s usual way. As if she always did this. It just happened, was happening. She was in his room, and then in his arms, hugging him. They lay on his bed and she kissed him. The shock of it was such that Frank felt completely removed from his body, his flesh was like rubber. This was beginning to worry him when the sheer animal presence of her broke through the shock, body spoke to body and he suddenly he could feel her again— sensation flooded back into him, and he responded to it with animal intensity. It had been a long time.
Afterward she walked around with a white sheet draped over her like a cape, getting a glass of water. “I like the way you work those people,” she said, her back to him. She drank from the glass, looked over her shoulder with her old affectionate grin, with that full and open gaze of hers— a gaze that seemed so insightful, like lazed light shining right through him, that suddenly he felt not only naked, but exposed. He pulled the remaining sheet up over his hip, then felt that he had given himself away. Surely she would see, see the way the air turned to cold water in his lungs, the way his stomach knotted, the way his feet froze. He blinked, returned her smile. He knew it was a wan and crooked smile, but feeling his face like a stiff mask over his real flesh he took comfort. No one could accurately read emotions from facial expressions, that was all a lie, a bogus relationship as in palm reading or astrology. So he was safe.
But after that night she began spending a lot of time with him, both in public and private. She joined him at the receptions given every night by one or another of the national offices; she sat beside him at many of the group dinners; she sailed the hot sea of conversation with him afterward, as they watched the bad news from Terra, or sat in the close knot of the first hundred. And she went with him to his room at night, or even more disturbing, took him to hers.
And all without any sign of what she wanted from him. He could only conclude that she knew she did not have to speak of it. That just being with him was enough, that he would know what she wanted, and try his best to do it without her ever having to say a word. That she would get what she wanted. For of course it was impossible that she was doing it all without cause. That was the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply a lover. Inevitably they all wanted things you could give them— if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powerful. That was prestige that Maya did not need, but she knew what she wanted. And wasn’t he doing it, after all? Infuriating a large part of his power base, to forge a treaty that would please no one but a handful of locals? Yes, she was getting what she wanted. And all without a word, or without a direct word. Nothing but praise and affection.
So that as he talked in the endless caucus conferences, carefully hammering out the wording of each clause of the new treaty, playing James Madison to this strange simulacrum of a constitutional convention, Spencer and Samantha and Maya would wander around helping him, and Maya would watch him with the most fractional smile, which revealed to him alone her approval, her pride in him. And then, energized by the day’s work, he would roam the evening reception, and she would laugh at him and stand at his side and chatter with all the rest, a kind of consort. Hell, a consort! And at night shower him with kisses, until it was impossible to imagine that she did not like him.
Which was intolerable. That it should be so easy to deceive even the people who knew you best. . . that she should be so stupid.. . . It was shocking to realize these things more strongly than ever before. How hidden the true self is, he thought, under the phenomenological mask. In reality they were all actors all the time, playing their video parts, and there was no chance of contact with the true selves inside others, not anymore; over the long years their parts had hardened into shells and the selves inside had atrophied, or wandered off and gotten lost. And now they were all hollow.
Or perhaps it was just him. Because she seemed so real! Her laughter, her white hair, her passion, my God: her sweaty skin and the ribs underneath it, ribs that slid back and forth under his fingers like the slats of a fence, ribs that clamped down on the paroxysms of orgasm. A true self, didn’t it have to be so? Didn’t it? He could hardly believe otherwise. A true self.