The Silver Metal Lover(9)
The top floor has mother’s suite and study and studio on the north, all together, and these are soundproofed, and also locked. The rest of the floor is the Vista, a wonderful semicircle running almost all round the outside of the house, and blossoming into huge balcony-balloons like great crystal bubbles with the sky held in them. When you come in, the sky fills the room. One is in the sky, and not in a room at all. To make sure of the effect, the furniture is very simple, and either of glass or pale white reflective materials, which take on the colors of the upper troposphere outside. We’re not really up into the stratosphere, of course, that would be dangerous. Even up where we are, the house is pressurized and oxygenized. We can’t open our windows either. Nor do we ever close the drapes.
This evening, when I came into the Vista, the room was gold. Gold carpets, gold chairs, a dining table in a balloon-bubble seeming made of palest amontillado sherry. The chemical candelabra in the ceiling were unlit, but had gold fires on them from the sky. The sky was like yellow plum wine. I walked into one of the western bubbles, dazed, and watched the sunset happen there. It seemed to take weeks, as it always does so high, but as soon as the sky began to cool I crossed over into an eastern bubble and watched the Asteroid appear. It looks like a colossal blue-green star, but it pulls the winds with it, and the sea tides answer it in huge heaves and buffetings. It should have hit the Earth, but some of it burned off as it fell, and then the moon’s gravity also attracted it; it shifted, and then it stabilized. I think I have that right, don’t I? Men have walked on the Asteroid. Jason and Medea stole the bit of blue rock we had that came from it. It’s beautiful, but it killed a third of all the people in the world. That’s a statistic.
At the southern curve of the room is another little annex, and a small stair that goes up to my suite. The suite is done in green and bronze and white to match my physical color scheme. It has everything a contemporary girl could want, visual set, tape deck and player, hairdresser unit, closets full of clothes, exotic furnishings, games, books. But, though there are windows, they aren’t balcony-balloons, so I tend to stay in the Vista.
I was just wandering over to the piano, which was turning lavender-grey now, with the sky, when my mother came into the room.
She was wearing the peacock dress, which has a high collar that rises over her head and is the simulated erect fan of a male peacock, with staring blue and yellow eyes like gas flames. She was obviously going out again.
“Come here, darling,” said my mother. I went to her and she took me in her arms. The gorgeous perfume of La Verte enfolded me, and I felt safe. Then she eased me away and held me, smiling at me. She looked beautiful, and her eyes were green as gooseberries. “Did you look after Egyptia, darling?”
“I tried, Mother. Mother, I have to tell you about something, ask your advice.”
“I have to go out, dear, and I’m already late. I waited in the hope of seeing you before I left. Can you tell me quickly?”
“No—I don’t—I don’t think so.”
“Then you must tell me tomorrow, Jane.”
“Oh, Mother,” I wailed, starting to cry again.
“Now, darling. I’ve told you what you can do if I’m not able to be with you, and you’ve done it before. Get one of the blank tapes and record what happened to you, imagining to yourself that I’m sitting here, holding your hand. And then tomorrow, about noon, or maybe one P.M., I can play it through, and we’ll discuss the problem.”
“Mother—”
“Darling,” she said, shaking me gently, “I really must go.”
“Go where?” I listlessly inquired.
“To the dinner I told you about yesterday.”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s because you don’t want to. Come along, Jane. Let go of my sleeves. You’re intelligent and bright, and I’ve encouraged you to think for yourself.”
“And to talk to you.”
“And we will talk. Tomorrow.”
Although as a baby she had taken me everywhere, as a child, she had sometimes had to leave me, because my mother is a very busy woman, who writes and researches, is an expert perfumier and gem specialist, a theologian, a rhetorician—and can lecture and entertain on many levels. And when she used to leave me, I never could hold back the tears. But now I was crying anyway.
“Come along, Jane,” said my mother, kissing my forehead. “Why don’t you go to your room and bathe and dress and makeup. Call Jason or Davideed and go out to dinner yourself.”
“Davideed’s at the equator.”
“Dear me. Well I hope they warned him it was hot there.”
“Up to his eyes in silt,” I said, following her from the room and back toward the lift. “Mother, I think I’ll just go to bed.”
“That sounds rather negative.” My mother looked at me, her long turquoise nail on the lift button. “Darling, I do hope, since you haven’t yet found a lover, that you’re masturbating regularly, as I suggested.”
I blushed. Of course, I knew it was idiotic to blush, so I didn’t lower my eyes.
“Oh. Yes.”
“Your physical type indicates you’re highly sexed. But the body has to learn about itself. You do understand, darling, don’t you?”
“Oh. Yes.”