Monogamy. Part 2

"What about supper?" I asked Grace.

"Oh, I'll be sure to wrangle up somethin' you like. I won't let the fun and games of the sewin' circle get in the way of takin' care of my baby." I felt a twinge.

"All right, honey," I told her. She stood. She was shapely, s.e.xy, for me. She wiggled slightly in that yellow dress as she walked. For me. I closed my eyes as she left. What was she saying earlier? I had to think back, I'd blanked out on her, drifted off into another plane. I remembered with my body's memory, and could hear her speak.

"Darlin', are you awake?"

"Uh, yeah, yeah; just daydreaming." I'd been looking out the window.

"I was saying, the Circle girls will be here. We're doin' a charity quilt.

I want you to get out, go riding, don't think about me for a while."

"Oh, I don't know --"

"Please, go. Enjoy it. I've already called down to have Agni saddled." Agni, my favorite Arabian. A beauty.

Remembering now that that was what I was to do, I nodded to myself, and strode like a horseman through the house, past the closed door of the ma.s.sive chamber she called her "sewing room," and down into the gaping Great Room, where we'd married some seven years before. I could almost see all the guests, the room full of old widows and the rarer old men, the air full of the smell of lavender and potpourri and her dress smelling of cedar. She had wooed me; in this lifetime, I was an entirely self-made man, but she built me up. It was as if she expended all her time and all her energy -- to be my wife. And, G.o.d, I loved getting married. To her, to the others, to -- it was just d.a.m.ned Romantic. And it was too bad that the magic left, always left. Well, not here. The magic of her absolute adoration, however I had won it, was worth all the other lives put together.

I walked down to the stables to find Agni saddled and ready to go, but I wasn't in the mood. I sat on the horse, stroked her shining hide, breathed in the aroma of her pungent horseflesh, and could not get the now-seven pleasant years of marriage to Grace from my head. How unlike Laura she was! Thank G.o.d.

I tried to shake the comparison, and rode, but Grace's image, surrounded by the yellow flowers of our wedding bed, floated in front of me, and the more I thought of her, the more I thought of that d.a.m.ned Laura and that first real marriage, and I generated a desire for Grace to build up the contrast. I shook my head and spurred Agni into a gallop, the green fields like a carpet in every direction.

The thought of Grace back in that house called to me. I wanted her; I wanted her as I wanted no one else, no other wife, no other possible wife. Certainly not Laura.

I turned the horse's head unexpectedly and went back. The big house grew larger.

I rode through the gate and down the narrow old carriage lane below the moist magnolias.

"Okay," I said to myself. "She is it. Not Laura, d.a.m.n her, not anyone else. I'm gonna stay, close off the other frequencies, never leave again. This is home, her home and mine, because she lives for me."

I didn't bother to take the animal to the stable, but tied her to a post on the veranda. A car had already arrived while I'd been riding. Sewing circle -- well, they could leave. I wanted to make love with Grace as I'd never made love to anyone. This moment and no other counted. This love. This life. I felt the hormones rushing in a cloud through my taut muscles; the cupid-like desire pulsing as lightning through me.

I leaped up the stairs to the door. I heard voices. A man's voice; it was ugly and coa.r.s.e to my ears, because I had expected the voices of lavender-smelly grandmothers. It said, "You're beautiful. You --" And then there were noises, animal, wet, unbridled, grotesque. I pushed the door, found it locked, then kicked it open.

There she was, on the sewing table, on her back, her dress hiked up above her thighs, and some man with his face buried between them.

"What the h.e.l.l!" I cried at them and the yellow statue I'd been broke. Her head whipped around with an ugly, alien stare; and the man, sloppy with their s.e.x, stood and pulled a gun.

I was unable to respond.

Then she said in a cavernous, distant, animal voice that "This wasn't the way we planned it, but it'll do."

I realized the "we" did not include me but him, the co-conspirator. Then they were on top of me, binding me, the Colt .45 -- something from my own collection -- squeezed into my temple. It didn't seem possible.

"What the h.e.l.l --" I grunted. I was too stunned to move.

"It has to look like an accident," she sneered at me. Inhuman.

"How long have you been --" I groaned as he kicked me in the gut. It didn't matter how long she'd been conspiring against me: all the seven years or from the moment her name was on my will or just this last moment. A single flash of it was enough to bring me down.

They dragged me to the top of the stairs. I looked, I swooned, I felt deeply empty. And I pushed against them, but only half-heartedly, then fell into a wide expanse of blue.

I was looking at blue toilet paper. I was in the john at the house on Elm Street. I heard Madhur singing to herself in the next room. What the h.e.l.l was she doing? Counting the money. She'd broken into the d.a.m.ned money.

I flushed the toilet. 1 couldn't believe she'd broken into the money without me.

She knew better than that. She knew better than to cross me. She knew better, d.a.m.n her.

The shotgun was at my feet. I jerked my underwear and my trousers up in a single motion and grabbed the gun, too. I'd hit her with it before, many times, and with many other things, too, mostly my fists, but obviously that was not enough.

It hadn't taught her jack. It hadn't taught her obedience or to respect me or to love me. Never go to Vegas in a fast car with a lot of whiskey and a drug-wasted physics student. Turns a man into a d.a.m.ned criminal, with no respect. Okay, so it'd once been exciting. Bonnie and Clyde. Now she needed a real lesson. d.a.m.n her, she needed something she would never forget.

The pulse in my tracked-up arms raged against the skin. I shouldered the gun and burst in on her, and there she was surrounded with little slips of paper. "WHAT THE h.e.l.l ARE YOU DOING?" I leveled the barrels at her chest, pushed them against her, pushed her with them across the room and up against the wall. My fingers throbbed with a heartbeat.

She said, "Go ahead. It's all fake anyway."

"What?" I sneered into her face, my eyes and teeth rushing like a bull toward hers.

"That old man," she said in a small, unemotional voice. "He gave us bags of monopoly money, ole Jack. He didn't even give us real money. You wasted him for monopoly money."

My fingers strained against the triggers, and rage burst out of the top of my head like a furious, flaming bird. And then I was left, a vibrating ma.s.s barely holding the gun. I looked into her eyes, and knew something more was going on than what was happening on the surface. I said, "You want me to do this. You're making me do this."

She shook her head at me. "Do you see our outcome, at least? I mean here, the outcome of this? It comes to killing me, too?"

Who was me? The end of the gun quivered visibly. For some reason I thought of my father-in-law, on a distant plane, on Laura's plane. He'd died there from natural causes. There, at least. I sensed acutely the dried blood splattered across the end of my gun. Then I tried to look deeper into her eyes. They were brown, radically different from those of my other wives in my other lifetimes.

Or maybe not. Maybe not radically.

"Now," she was saying. Tears were streaming down her face. "Don't you see, that our marriage needs this now, this moment?"

I looked at her bewildered, startled, awed. I said, "He gave you one, too? The implant --"

"And why not? Do you think he believed in some sort of macho double standard? Do you think he would have been so supportive of us and not believed in marriage?"

"But, I-"

"Do you know how hard I have worked to save our marriage..'" She was crying, really crying, and I was, too.

"But, Laura," I couldn't help the tears; I wasn't even sure why. "Laura, what are you saying --"

"Do you know how hard it was to find you in those other places? In all these five worlds?"

I couldn't bear what she was telling me. I couldn't take it. With the stupid, awesome, shaking sobs running through my body, cracking the sh.e.l.l so that the vulnerable softness inside me could again meet the softness inside her, I touched the implant just below the skin and was gone again.

Red. I had not been here for some time. It was the first of the four lifetimes I'd visited beyond the real one with Laura, the first persona I'd created, and the first to bore me, with deathly boredom. In the world of this city, other users walked by-- users who would be strangers to me on any other frequency, in any other world. A lot of strangers used the technology, shifting worlds, living multiple lives simultaneously on different planes, interacting in fantasies that were all too real. Strangers: but maybe they weren't all strangers.

I went to Becky's house. The proverbial red light was on outside, illuminating a weathered peac.o.c.k on the sign that said simply, "Becky's." I'd been such a juvenile in these daydream worlds, in the marriages I felt I needed and wanted.

I couldn't believe now that I'd married a madame, or that at one time I'd found purely physical l.u.s.t to be a good reason to do it. What the h.e.l.l: it was just fantasy, right?

Becky no longer did tricks, so that was cool. She just did me; my persona in this world lived with her on the top floor of the brothel, and lived off the fruits of the labor of her girls. Had she sensed the absence of my consciousness at all? I doubted it. Most of us walk around only semiconscious anyway; no one seems too upset about it. I doubted she cared.

Now as I walked into the house, past the girls in the lobby, I wanted her again.