The man said, ‘Look, all I do I do for you.’
‘You don’t. You do it for yourself,’ said the woman.
‘You’re the selfish one. Why are you always attacking me?’
‘I don’t attack you, you liar. I was just asking you why—’
‘You were distinctly interrogating me,’ he said, breaking into her sentence. ‘You’re always on at me.’
‘I simply had a small suggestion to make, but you would not listen. You never listen.’
‘I’ve already heard what you have to say.’ He was red in the face now.
‘I do everything for you. What do you do for me?’
His manner changed entirely. ‘I do nothing for you, do I?’ He appeared completely crestfallen. The woman turned her head angrily away.
The film cut, the mirror returned.
Paula laughed with a rich kind of gurgle. ‘Okay, folks, now which of those two characters do you think was in the wrong, or was most wrong?’
We gave our opinions, the few of us sitting in the cafe. Some thought the man was feeling guilty about a misdemeanour. Others thought the woman was a nagger. Most of the speakers took sides. I said that they had got themselves into the kind of situation where both parties were wrong; they needed to stop quarrelling and try to find agreement, if necessary calling in a third party.
‘Gee, you’re an enlightened bunch,’ said Paula, joshingly. ‘Now tell me what you make of the woman’s last remark, “I do everything for you; what do you do for me?”‘
So we chewed it over, we cafe-goers, while Paula cooed over Alpha. We were more or less in agreement that the woman’s statement was destructive in itself. We disagreed about whether it was made more awful by being the truth or a vicious lie. Nor could we agree about the man’s response: was it a sullen repudiation of her remark or a wretched admission of the truth?
‘That’s enough,’ Paula said, sharply. ‘Thanks. Bevis, Vance…’
What we did not realise was that the mirror behind the bar was a two-way mirror. Later, we saw an edited version of ourselves in Paula’s new filmplay, Mine? Theirs? Since we never knew what the filmed pair were quarrelling about, our judgements seemed facile. It was one of Paula’s rather unpleasant tricks.
Perhaps that habit of hers caused the tragedy that was to follow – a tragedy that for a while eclipsed our preoccupation with Chimborazo.
Paula had a beautiful and strong face with marked features – a forceful jaw, in particular, and a beaky nose; her features were very unlike my rather ambiguous ones. Although she often took and discarded lovers, her real interests, or so it seemed to me, were directed elsewhere. Her predatory and creative mind wished to ingest the experiences of other people, and by so doing widen her own dimensions. Perhaps she had a driving need to resolve her own tensions.
Her clothes were designed by Bevis Paskin Peters. She rejected the customary unisex Now overalls, so Peters became the planet’s first popular costume designer. He evolved a classical line imaginatively in keeping with the shortage of materials. The other man in Paula’s ménage a trios was called Vance Aylsha. He was a technician and rather a genius, according to report. He also looked after the little cephalopods in the cafe aquarium.
At times Paula could be large and florid. At other periods she appeared smaller, perhaps when she was actually working in her studio and unconscious of her own persona. I cannot say I liked her much. She was bigger than I, and unpredictable.
Nevertheless I was quite frequently in her company because she adored – or at least was fascinated by the growth experience of – Alpha. She would cease her work, towards which she was otherwise obsessive, to play for two hours at a stretch with Alpha. There was nothing Alpha liked better.
Nor was there much I liked better than to see these two intellects, the mature and the awakening, meeting in quizzes and tricks and mock deceptions and sheer nonsenses. I was aware of the antiquity of these games and that awareness added to my happiness.
How starkly the lovely energies of the three of us, the warmth of our bodies, contrasted with the frozen world outside, making it more thrilling to be there!