Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  “She knew you. I mean, you were a public person.” Lila sighed in relief. Sometimes she could hardly believe the hussy she had been. On the other hand, she’d been a force: just last week a man in a weather-beaten coat had come running across the street to shake her hand: “Is it you? Is it really you?”

  “You were wonderful,” Michelle said in a puzzled way, her lovely face clouding, and what Lila felt most keenly was the “were.” Lila was, once. “That’s why I wanted to come talk with you.” Michelle was sitting up straighter now, her crisp tone returned. “But I don’t have much direct information now. I’m here solely to prepare the soil. Don’t be surprised if you hear more from us. Be prepared.”

  “Us? Who’s us?” Stupid thing to say. The old Lila could do better than that. Prepare the soil: Michelle must be an Agro to her bones.

  “We’ll call you,” Michelle said. “When we need you, we’ll call.” Lila felt a flicker of unease, a brief pause and thump of her heart, a sensation she was having more often these days. Michelle unaccountably winked. “You could have fun.”

  An up-and-comer. Federal had sent Lila an up-and-comer. “Are you staying here?” Lila heard herself asking. “Are you going to be in Dayton a while?”

  “I live in Pittsburgh, but I’ll be in and out.” Pittsburgh, east up the Ohio River.

  What did that mean? What did that mean? And Lila knew, as Michelle rose and walked out the door, that Lila would have difficulty resting that evening, that she’d be up with her discarded laptops flicking through old and potent images, Ohio water history, herself in the old days, her lovers in the old days, periodically squirting honey in her mouth and sucking on a piece of lemon. Tonight she’d probably go through two lemons, maybe three, putting off the moment that she placed her head on her pillow and pulled up her covers, nestling her hands, which always needed warming, between her thighs. Tonight the rituals of her solitary sleeping wouldn’t console her, because when the lights went out she would be troubled relentlessly, wondering her old worries about where she’d gone wrong, and on top of that, what were the Feds thinking, who was behind it, and why had they had sent to Lila, a woman who made no secret of her proclivities, such a young and creamy up-and-coming girl?

  “WANT A BUZZ?” Kennedy, her hand trembling, lifted the bottle from the table.

  “No thanks, just straight coffee. I’m cutting back.” A relief to sit in this familiar seat, across from a familiar face, after the events of her morning. Lila felt the memory of Michelle whirl away, the simple sight of orange-and-blue cushions washing her morning clean. Coffee-bar decor, like the national mood or skirt lengths, tended to cycle: bright and garish to cozy and dark. The latest incarnation was bright.

  “Self-denial.” Kennedy rolled her eyes. “Are we getting old or what? I got up in the middle of the night to pee and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Oh my God, talk about an uto.” This was a private joke, their own acronym: uto, pronounced oo-toe, meaning ugly, tired, old. Lila wasn’t sure anymore which one of them had made it up. Kennedy’s belly was as vast as Lila’s; she had a problem—freely discussed—with recurring yeast under her breasts. “So what have you been up to?” Kennedy said. “They still working you hard at water?”

  Lila shrugged. She had nothing to hide from Kennedy. Back in the late twenties, when Kennedy was executive director of the Metro Library, she and Lila had shared a difficult lover named Leesa. Over time and multiple conversations, Kennedy and Lila had become allies. Leesa threw over both of them to marry an African male, and was now stuck in Cleveland in an enclave of traitors and Alliance functionaries. Lila and Kennedy both enjoyed the thought of Leesa growing old with a devious man. “A lot of undercurrents these days,” Lila said, shaking her head. In her old days she was delighted how many metaphors referred to water and liquids. Now she barely noticed.

  Kennedy nodded. “In the library too.”

  “Agriculture sent a youngie-girl to talk with me.”

  “To talk with you? In person? A youngie-girl in your office?” Not surprising that Kennedy focused on the youngie: Kennedy had never been interested in politics. Agriculture to her was probably no more suspect than Education. She shook her head in wonderment. “Why?”

  “You tell me. Her manner was oblique. Referred to my being a hero to her mother.” Lila and Kennedy exchanged a rueful look. “Said they’d be contacting me. Then she left.”

  “Was she sexing you?”

  “Maybe. Can you believe it? Nothing direct”—Lila paused—“damn it.”

  Kennedy shook her head in appreciation. “I’m surprised anyone from Agro could be subtle.”

  Lila bit her fingernail consideringly: maybe Kennedy did understand about Agro. “She seemed apologetic about it.” Lila eyed Kennedy. “That might be subtle.”

  Kennedy frowned. “Maybe they told her to act apologetic.”

  “Subtler yet.” Lila shook her head, dislodging the image: the girl’s wanton eyelashes, her dim scent of lemon … “You read anything good lately?”

  Kennedy smiled. “Believe it or not, yes. I read Nenonene’s autobiography. I can see why they want to suppress it. It’s inspirational.”

  “Poor beginnings and a rise to consciousness and power?” Nay-no-nay-nay, Lila thought, accenting the third syllable slightly. Quite a melodious name for a despot.

  “Exactly! He was one of fourteen children. And his father died of HIV, even though the vaccine was out. Did you know he taught himself English using a typewriter?”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “He did! Tremendous discipline. He doesn’t believe in waste, so he drinks only water from the faucet, never uses a cup. He has a special chef he trusts, but he eats right out of the pan. He sleeps in a single bed. And every morning he wakes up and walks around the basement of the old Cleveland Ritz-Carlton thirty times. Thirty times.”

  “For exercise? Why not take a walk outside?”

  “People might shoot him, that’s why. Lila. Don’t be naive.”

  “He’s pure.” Lila smiled, remembering a photo of Nenonene standing on the hood of a parked car, wearing a white suit with a high collar and a fez-like cap with horizontal stripes, holding up his right arm in a benediction to the hundreds of people around him. A brilliant move, that outfit: a get-up like a priest’s when he was actually a general. “That’s why people like him.”

  “Pure, right. Some people think he’s pure Antichrist.”

  Lila smiled. “Someone called me the Antichrist once. You come home and rub lotion on your hands and think, are these Antichrist hands?”

  “I wouldn’t think anyone would call you that, you being a woman.”

  “Ah, but not a real woman.”

  The coffee-bar door opened, and a man of maybe twenty-five entered, a small boy with curls at his nape holding his hand.

  “Have they invited you up to the Grid yet?” Kennedy said. “I hear a whole brigade from Consort’s going.”

  As the young man waited at the counter, the boy beside him sagged to his knees. “Daddy!” the boy said.

  “On to the Grid? A tour?” Lila asked, Kennedy’s words just sinking in. No one went on the Grid. When the Gridding occurred the adults of the area had all been classified into Farming, Manufacturing, or Professional, and the farm people alone—the effs—were given the option to stay. Now the effs who worked the Grid were so cloistered the government paid the state of Florida to arrange a private Grid getaway two weeks every February.

  “Stand up!” the father snapped.

  “Apparently. It’s a business thing, I’m sure. No one really thinks they’re going for free.”

  “You can’t stand up?” The father jerked up the boy by his arm until his feet barely grazed the floor. “Three years old and you can’t stand up?”

  Lila said, “Why would they be wooing Consort?” But her eyes were on the father and son.

  “You should call Agriculture. Demand a tour yourself. They think they can buy you with a pretty girl?”


  But Lila was no longer listening to Kennedy. The father had thrust the boy into a chair and returned to the counter; behind Lila the boy was whimpering, snuffling squeaks that reminded Lila of a pet rat she’d had as a child. “I can’t stand it,” Lila said.

  Kennedy shrugged. “We’re not parents.”

  “He’s tired. Can’t his father hear he’s tired?”

  “We’re all tired, Lila.” Kennedy reached for her handbag.

  The man came back to the table with a drink and some bread. The boy quieted as he sat down. “Pood?” he asked hopefully.

  “Daddy doesn’t buy pood for whiners.” The “p” of “pood” exploded on his lips.

  “You go ahead,” Lila said to Kennedy. “I’ll stay and finish my coffee.” When Kennedy was gone, Lila went to the counter and ordered bread and apple juice, and as she left she placed these on the table in front of the boy. “If you eat, he eats,” she said to the father.

  The little boy looked terrified. “Daddy, can I eat it?” The father’s eyes went shifty; Lila waited a moment to watch the boy pick up the bread and hunch away from his father. “He gets every bite, okay?” She hissed, pleased when the father cowered.

  I still have it, Lila thought as she walked out the door, not sure why she hadn’t wanted Kennedy to witness what she’d done.

  LILA COULDN’T SLEEP. The oldest trick in the book. A younger person, a sexually attractive person, and they walk in and drape you with flattery and when you’re practically licking their fingers they ask you for something. Was Lila supposed to fall for that? Was she that transparently weak? Did the Agros (or someone beyond the Agros, someone in the Defense Department or Environment or God knows where) really think she’d jump for their bait like some widemouthed fish? Had they pegged her as that desperate, that lonely?

  She was desperate, she was lonely. She’d wasted her life. In interviews, in discussions, what did people say made their lives worth living? The small things: family, friends. For years, Lila had thought the small things didn’t matter. Her successful gestures were all public. Her father had left the family, dying years later in a residential hotel. Her mother had passed away in a nursing home four months after Lila last saw her. Her siblings were like strangers. And then there were all those lovers, come and gone.

  Lila got up, flicked on the bathroom light, and inspected herself in the mirror. Salt-and-pepper hair in a pageboy, bangs chopped across her forehead, a sagging chin, gray teeth, breasts lying almost flat against her chest. The mole beneath her left eye, once a beauty mark, now drooped on its stalk like a wilted flower. An uto, just like Kennedy. Ugly, tired, old. It wasn’t the ugly that offended her; it was the tired. Years ago she’d loved being alive. She wanted love, she wanted fame, she wanted a child. What had happened to all that energy? Was there anything she yearned for now? Even something simple like eating ice cream or feeling a breeze? Sitting on the edge of the bathroom cabinet, surprised and almost grateful for such emotion, Lila started to cry. The youngie, the youngie had woken her up.

  what sharis knew

  SHE MAY NOT have gone to college, but Sharis knew things. Here was knowledge she kept to herself: deprivation and the threat of danger made her feel alive. Weeding, stirring, chopping, always planning. Every day was not the same. Basic things mattered.

  Food mattered. Food mattered tremendously, and Sharis’s parents each summer, as part of their survivalist ethos, had planted an enormous garden. Sharis knew how to start lettuces, the best way to post tomatoes, the mixture of soap and water to spray on Swiss chard. All her married life (which was all her adult life) she had not planted anything, but this spring, with Cleveland being taken over and the whole world, it seemed, turned against America, she’d said to Chad, her husband, Sweetness, we should plant things this year. Chad had tilled a large rectangle in the sunniest and flattest portion of their yard. This happened to be in their front yard, which a year ago would not have been acceptable, but neighborhood standards had changed.

  Now, by mid-July, they had … Well, anyone could guess what they had, because Sharis was an industrious woman and the weather was good and even the Grid, which critics said raped the soil, exhausted resources, used too many chemicals, etc, was projected to have a record year.

  Chad and Sharis lived south of Dayton in the suburbs, on a private lane off Far Hills, the main road from downtown. Chad and Sharis’s street wound down a hill through trees, and then curled up a hill to a sunnier area. Chad’s drawing of their street would make it a snake. Its tail would touch the main road, the cul-de-sac where Chad’s and Sharis’s house sat would show up as the snake’s open mouth.

  Chad and Sharis lived in a nineties home built with a two-story great room. Like most of those homes, theirs had been modified during the Short Times with new, lowered ceilings. Sharis liked the puddles of light that formed below the ceiling cans. She liked the overstuffed chair in the corner, the beautifully grained wooden bowl, the hanging clock decorated with hand-painted flowers. Sharis had grown up in a dark house; for her father, closed curtains were a moral imperative. In contrast, now Sharis had drapes only in the bedrooms. Sometimes, lying on the couch in the great room, looking out the wide front window, Sharis imagined the empty space above the ceiling as a hidden room: if the troops swept down from Cleveland, she and Chad and the boys would have a place to hide. What an adventure that would be, something for the boys to remember forever—the aim of an adventure, always, being the exhilaration of survival.

  There was one cabbage in her garden that Sharis had watched for a month, getting bigger and bigger and not precisely rounder but vaster. When the cabbage was as big as it reasonably could get, Sharis cut it and carried it into the house. She and Chad made a sort of party of it.

  “Ten pounds,” Sharis guessed. She set the cabbage on the bathroom floor and peered at her weight on the scale. “Hand it to me, honey.” If she was editing their family, this was a moment she’d leave in. Of course, she took on only respectable clients, not people with cameras in their bathrooms or even bedrooms. Chad picked up the cabbage, its dark outer leaves studded with slugs and wormholes, and handed it to his wife. “Eleven,” Sharis said firmly. Her voice rose in its girlish way: “Char, as Howard would say.”

  “What’s char?” Howard asked breathlessly, arriving at the top of the stairs. Even a trip up the stairs made him pant.

  “The average war lasts seven months,” Derk said from the blue table in the kitchen. Derk had been a history minor and, after Dayton: The Roots of Midwestern, one of Chad’s most enthusiastic students. He worked at American Motors running a paint machine for tanks. Derk lived with his parents. He’d tried to enlist in the military, but a childhood infection had left him with a bad heart. “Your husband taught me that,” Derk added.

  “I did?” Chad said.

  Derk’s shirt was off because of the heat, and the thumping of his defective heart twitched the few hairs on his chest. Chad hoped that Sharis didn’t notice this; it was the sort of thing she might comment on.

  It was fun then, it really was. Sharis was slicing her huge cabbage in the kitchen: a quarter for cabbage rolls, a quarter for coleslaw, and a half for sweet-and-sour soup. Her massive knife flashed and gleamed. She thought of a cabbage seed, sun, water, something-from-nothing. How could anyone doubt the existence of God in a world with eleven-pound cabbages? She wasn’t a religious maniac like her parents (never), or a dopey optimist like Chad, but a cabbage like this gave you hope.

  “How you doing with the Calmadol, Derk?” she asked.

  His wife didn’t realize, Chad thought, that she intimidated people. She was small—“petite,” people said, “like a little ballet dancer.” When she turned, her dark brown hair spread out shining over her shoulders, and when she was busy or impatient, she would grab the whole great hank of it, twist it around her hand and drop it to the left of her neck. Her lips were full and pink; her brown eyes heavily lashed and often narrowed.

  Derk’s mouth jerked, and Chad, thinking of
his friend’s wispy father, his impossible mother, gave Derk a smile and a roll of his eyes. Chad was six foot four and two hundred eighty pounds, but he scared no one. “Make yourself small,” Chad’s mother used to say, marshalling her sons through the crowded aisles of the grocery.

  “I’m fine. I’m on the lowest dose,” Derk said, his eyes fixed on the blue table.

  “They passed it out up north the day they did the Gridding,” Chad said in a companionable way. “Didn’t give people a choice. Just woke people up, lined them up in the streets, and squirted it in their mouths.” He glanced at Sharis as he spoke, invoking her complicity. She had watched this from a stand of trees twenty feet from her parents’ house, a fact known only to herself and Chad.

  “What was wrong with those people?” Derk said. “Why’d they stand there like sheep and take it?”

  “Maybe they were stunned, Derk,” Sharis said, her voice rising. “Maybe it was like a dream for them.” Chad shifted in his seat, wondering how much she was going to give away. “Plus, if you wouldn’t open your mouth for the Calmadol, they gave you a shot. Those shots knocked people out.”

  “Gridding was the stupidest thing the government ever did,” Derk said. “They wouldn’t be dropping bombs on Shaker Heights if the government hadn’t done that.”

  “No one’s dropping bombs on Shaker Heights,” Chad soothed, relieved Derk hadn’t noticed the immediacy of Sharis’s words. “From what I’ve heard, the Cleveland takeover’s been remarkably peaceable. I think the Alliance will be sorry they did it.”

  “You may think the Grid’s stupid, but we’re eating,” Sharis said. “For thirteen years we’ve been eating. We’re still eating.” She was parroting Chad’s words, and Chad felt suddenly—uncomfortably—as if she were his child, spouting his ideas in a speech contest.

  “Those Africans and the Suds, they don’t eat hardly anything,” Derk said, his animation returning. “That’s how they can run such a big military. I mean, they practically feed all their troops off what they draw from Canada.”