But apparently John preferred to work through UNOMA and governments. And this was just one of the many basic political disagreements which were beginning to infect their personal life, to the point that they were fighting pretty frequently about other things, things that didn’t matter, things about which they had never fought before.
Watching her Michel almost said, John wants you irritated with him. He wasn’t sure what John would say to that. Maya rubbed her eyes, leaned her forehead on his desk, revealing the back of her neck and her broad rangy shoulders. She would never look this distraught in front of most of Underhill; it was an intimacy between them, something she only did with him. It was as if she had taken off her clothes. People didn’t understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one’s life. Although it was true she would be beautiful naked, she had perfect proportions. He recalled the way she looked swimming in the pool, doing the backstroke in a blue bathing suit cut high over the hipbones. A Mediterranean image: he was floating in the water at Villefranche, everything flooded with sunset’s amber light, and he was looking in at the beach where men and women were walking, naked except for the neon triangles of cache-sexe bathing suits— brown-skinned bare-breasted women, walking in pairs like dancers in the sunlight— then dolphins sliced out of the water between him and the beach, their sleek black bodies rounded like the women’s—
But now Maya was talking about Frank. Frank, who had a sixth sense for trouble between John and Maya (six would not be necessary), and who came running to Maya every time he felt the signs, to walk with her and talk about his vision of Mars, which was progressive, exciting, ambitious, everything that John’s was not. “Frank is so much more dynamic than John these days, I don’t know why.”
“Because he agrees with you,” Michel said.
Maya shrugged. “Perhaps that’s all I mean. But we have a chance to build a whole civilization here, we do. But John is so . . .”
Big sigh. “And yet I love him, I really do. But . . .”
She talked for a while about their past, how their courtship had saved the voyage out from anarchy (or at least ennui), how John’s easygoing stability had been so good for her. How you could count on him. How impressed she had been by his fame, how she had felt that the liaison made her part of world history forever. But now she understood that she herself was going to be part of world history anyway; all of them in the first hundred were. Her voice rose, became faster and more vehement: “I don’t need John for that now, I only need him for how I feel about him, but now we don’t agree on anything and we’re not very much alike, and Frank who has been so careful to hold back no matter what, we agree about almost everything and I’ve been so enthusiastic about that part that I’ve given him the wrong signal again, so he did it again, yesterday in the pool he— he held me, you know, took my arms in his hands—” she crossed her arms and clasped her biceps in her hands—”and asked me to leave John for him, which I would never do, and he was shaking, and I said I couldn’t but I was shaking too.” So later she had been on edge, and had started a fight with John, started it so flagrantly that he had gotten truly angry and had left and taken a rover out to Nadia’s arcade, and spent the night there with the construction team; and Frank had come to talk to her again, and when she had (just barely) put him off, Frank had declared he was going to live with the European settlement on the other side of the planet, he who was the colony’s driving force! “And he’ll really do it, he’s not one to threaten. He’s been learning German the way he does, languages are nothing to Frank.”
Michel tried to concentrate on what she was saying. It was difficult, because he knew full well that in a week everything would be different, all the dynamics in that little trio altered beyond recognition. So it was hard to care. What about his troubles? They went much, much deeper; but no one ever listened to him. He walked back and forth in front of the window, reassuring her with the usual questions and comments. The greenery in the atrium was refreshing, it could have been a courtyard in Arles or Villefranche; or suddenly it reminded him of Avignon’s narrow plane tree-shaded plaza near the Pope’s palace, the plaza and its café tables which in the summer just after sunset had just the color of Mars. Taste of olive and red wine . . .
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said. Standard part of therapy hour. They crossed the atrium and went to the kitchens, so Michel could eat a breakfast which he forgot even as he swallowed; we should call eating forgetting, he thought as they walked around the hall to the locks. They put on suits— Maya entering a change room to get her unders on— then checked them and went in the lock and depressurized it and then opened the big outer door and stepped outside.