“Do what?” said Miro, wondering what she had just been saying before this outburst.
“Tune me out and talk to her.”
“To Jane? I always talk to Jane.”
“But you used to listen to me sometimes,” said Val.
“Well, Val, you used to listen to me, too, but that’s all changed now, apparently.”
Val flung herself out of her chair and stormed over to loom above him. “Is that how it is? The woman you loved was the quiet one, the shy one, the one who always let you dominate every conversation. Now that I’m excited, now that I feel like I’m really myself, well, that’s not the woman you wanted, is that it?”
“It’s not about preferring quiet women or –”
“No, we couldn’t admit to anything so recidivist as that, could we! No, we have to proclaim ourselves to be perfectly virtuous and –”
Miro rose to his feet — not easy, with her so close to his chair — and shouted right back in her face. “It’s about being able to finish a sentence now and then!”
“And how many of my sentences did you –”
“Right, turn it right back on –”
“You wanted to have me dispossessed from my own life and put somebody else in –”
“Oh, is that what this is about? Well, be relieved, Val, Jane says –”
“Jane says, Jane says! You said you loved me, but no woman can compete with some bitch that’s always there in your ear, hanging on every word you say and –”
“Now you sound like my mother!” shouted Miro. “Nossa Senhora, I don’t know why Ender followed her into the monastery, she was always griping about how he loved Jane more than he loved her –”
“Well at least he tried to love a woman more than that overgrown appointment book!”
They stood there, face-to-face-or almost so, Miro being somewhat taller, but with his knees bent because he hadn’t quite been able to get all the way out of his chair because she was standing so close and now with her breath in his face, the warmth of her body just a few centimeters away, he thought, This is the moment when …
And then he said it aloud before he had even finished forming the thought, “This is the moment in all the videos when the couple that were screaming at each other suddenly look into each other’s eyes and embrace each other and laugh at their anger and then kiss each other.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the videos,” said Val. “If you lay a hand on me I’ll ram your testicles so far up inside your abdomen it’ll take a heart surgeon to get them out.”
She whirled around and returned to her chair.
Miro eased himself back into his own seat and said — out loud this time, but softly enough that Val would know he wasn’t talking to her — “Now, Jane, where were we before the tornado struck.”
Jane’s answer was drawled out slowly; Miro recognized it as a mannerism of Ender’s when he was being ironically subtle. “You can see now why I might have problems getting the use of any part of her body.”
“Yeah, well, I’m having the same problem,” said Miro silently, but he laughed aloud, a little chuckle that he knew would drive Val crazy. And from the way she stiffened but did not respond at all he knew that it was working.
“I don’t need you two fighting,” said Jane mildly. “I need you working together. Because you may have to work this out without me.”
“As far as I can tell,” said Miro, “you and Val have been working things out without me.”
“Val has been working things out because she’s so full of … whatever she’s full of right now.”
“Ender is what she’s full of,” said Miro.
Val turned around in her chair and looked at him. “Doesn’t it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother?”