Hot Shot (27 page)

As they walked through the swinging door, Roberta said, "Mr. Blaine seems really interested in SysVal. He's just what the guys have been looking for."

"Not just the guys," Susannah replied sharply. "I'm part of SysVal, too."

"Well, sure you are, Susannah. So am I. But it's different with us. We're in it because of them. I mean, I'm in it because of Yank and you're in it because of Sam. Right?" Roberta slipped into the stall. "Although to tell you the truth, I'm starting to get a little impatient with Yank. I'm not getting any younger, and I think it's about time we got married."

As Roberta babbled on, Susannah stared at herself in the mirror. Was it true? Was she only part of SysVal because of Sam? Would she still want to pursue this impossible crusade if she weren't so desperately in love with him?

Her hand spun the faucet and water splashed from the bowl onto the front of her slacks.

SysVal was hers, too, dammit! She had bought into Sam's dream. Somehow, along the way, she had begun to believe that it could happen. Sam had called them the last buccaneers of America's twentieth century. She wanted it to be true, and she wasn't going to let them take it away from her.

Leaving Roberta still chattering in the stall, she went back out to the booth, determined to make some sort of stand, but only Yank was there, scribbling a diagram on the back of a napkin. Blaine and Sam were playing video games. She watched as Sam let out a whoop and Blaine slapped him on the back, the uptight millionaire executive suddenly as carefree as a teenager. She could almost feel the affinity developing between them, that mysterious attraction of opposites as Mr. Establishment met Easy Rider.

She planned to talk to Sam when they got home—to tell him how she felt about being closed out—but he and Blaine sat up until dawn weaving futuristic fantasies of how everyday life might be reshaped by a small, affordable computer. They were still talking when she finally excused herself to go to bed.

The next day Blaine rented a car and moved into a hotel, but except for a few hours of sleep at night, he spent all his time with Sam. The kinship they had developed continued to exclude her. Although they argued frequently, and Blaine steadfastly resisted all of Sam's efforts to get him to commit to SysVal, the bond between the men grew daily.

Each seemed to provide something the other lacked. Sam was attracted to Blaine's greater knowledge and breadth of experience—Blaine to Sam's vision and poetry.

When she was finally able to corner Sam alone, she tried to talk to him about how she felt, but he shrugged her off. "He's used to working with men, that's all. He's not ignoring you. You're making a big deal out of nothing."

But she didn't think so. Blaine's aversion to her seemed to run deeper than a general prejudice against women.

The next afternoon, while she was doing a shampoo for Angela, she heard Blaine and Sam on the other side of the partition discussing the prototype. "The SysVal I is only a toy for hobbyists, Sam. If you want to build a company, you're going to have to base it on that self-contained computer. Ordinary people aren't going to want to hook up a television set and all sorts of other equipment to make their computer work. Everything has to be in one piece, and it has to be simple. As soon as you get the funding lined up, you have to get that machine on the market."

They talked about possible markets for the computer, and then Sam asked Blaine what he thought they should name it.

"The most obvious name is the SysVal II," Blaine replied.

"Yeah, I suppose. I just wish we could come up with something more dramatic."

Sam had never asked
her
about a name for the new computer. Her resentment gnawed deeper. She went to the library for a few hours to get away from both of them, but only ended up reading everything she could find about Mitchell Blaine. What she discovered depressed her further. In addition to being an outstanding engineer, he was considered a brilliant marketing strategist, respected by some of the most important business analysts in the country. He was everything they could have hoped for and more. Except there was no "they" as far as Blaine was concerned—only Sam and Yank.

"You can't go back to Boston," Sam told Blaine the day before he was planning to leave.

"Boston's old history, man."

But the change of environment seemed to have healed some of Blaine's personal wounds, so that he was thinking more clearly. "I don't mean to insult you, Sam, but I can get a top position in just about any corporation in America. No matter how much fun I'm having, I'd be crazy to give that up to work with a couple of kids trying to run a company out of a garage. And I'm definitely not crazy."

Sam continued to badger Blaine all the way to the airport. Susannah sat in the backseat and listened as Sam asked Blaine the same question he had once asked her. "Are you in or out? I want to know."

Blaine gave Sam a good-natured slap on the back. "I'm out, Sam. I've told you that from the beginning. Do you have any idea what I was getting paid before I resigned? I was making almost a million dollars a year, plus stock options and more perks than you can imagine. You can't touch a package like that."

"Money's not everything, for chrissake. It's the challenge. Can't you see that? Besides, the money will come. It's just a matter of time."

Blaine shrugged him off. "I'm thinking about moving back to the Midwest. Chicago, probably. But I want to keep in touch. You helped me over a pretty bad time, and I won't forget it. I'll give you as much advice as I can on an informal basis."

"Not good enough," Sam persisted. "I want one hundred percent. And if you don't give it to me, you're going to regret it for the rest of your life."

But Mitchell Blaine didn't prove as easy to badger as Susannah had been. "No sale," he said.

Chapter 14

Blaine was a fast reader with an almost photographic memory, and he devoured the printed word like other people consumed junk food. But he had been looking at the same page in
Business Week
since he had left San Francisco on the Boston-bound 747, and he didn't have the slightest idea what he had read.

He kept thinking about Sam and Yank and what they were doing in the garage. He couldn't remember being so excited by anything in years. They were doomed to fail, of course. Still, he couldn't help but admire them for making the attempt.

The flight attendant serving the first-class passengers was covertly studying him. She bent forward to speak to a passenger in the row across from him and her straight skirt tightened across her hips. As a married man, he had always been scrupulously faithful, but his days of being Mr. Straight Arrow were over, and he imagined those hips beneath his own.

She turned toward him and asked him if he needed anything. The whiff of her perfume killed his arousal as effectively as a cold shower. She was wearing an old-fashioned floral scent reminiscent of his aunts' bathpowder.

He had smelled like that bathpowder himself for years—not because he had used it, but because the scent clung to everything in that rambling old house in Clearbrook, Ohio. He shut his eyes, remembering the bathpowder and his aunts, and the oppressive, cloying softness of his upbringing.

"
Mi-chull! Mi-chull
!" Every afternoon at four-thirty one of his aunts stood on the front porch of the house on Cherry Street and called him inside for piano practice.

Their names were Theodora and Amity. They were his father's relatives, and the only ones willing to take on the responsibility of raising an asthmatic seven-year-old boy after his parents were killed in a fiery automobile accident one Easter Sunday.

They were maiden ladies. Although they insisted they were unmarried by choice, not because they disliked men, in actuality there were only three males in the town of Clearbrook of whom they entirely approved—their pastor, their assistant pastor, and Mr.

Leroy Jackson, their handyman. From the moment they set eyes on the small boy who had come to live with them, they were determined to make little Mitchell Blaine the fourth male in Clearbrook to receive their unqualified approval.

It was all a matter of civility.

"Mi-chull!"

He dragged his eleven-year-old feet reluctantly up the sidewalk. Behind him, he heard Charlie and Jerry calling out taunts just loudly enough so that he could hear, but Miss Amity Blaine couldn't.

"Sissy boy. Sissy boy. Run home and get your diapers changed."

They always said that about the diapers. They knew he couldn't play sports because of his asthma, and they knew that he had to go home to practice the piano, but they always said he was going home to get his diaper changed. He wanted to curl up his fists and smash their faces, but he wasn't allowed to fight. Fighting might make him wheeze, and the aunts got scared when he started to wheeze. Sometimes, though, he thought that his aunts might be using the wheezing as an excuse to keep him clean, because more than anything in the world, they hated dirt. They also hated name-calling, dogs, sweat, scabby knees, sports, television, curses, and everything else that went along with being a boy growing up in Clearbrook, Ohio, in the 1950s.

His aunts loved books and music, church bazaars and crochet. They loved flowers and beautiful manners. And they loved him.

The hinge on the gate squeaked as he opened it. Everything in the old house squeaked, rattled, and clucked.

"
Mi-chull, Mi-chull
."

Aunt Amity reached out for him as he hit the steps. He tried to make a fast dodge to the side before she grabbed him, but she was too quick. She blocked the doorway with her bony, birdlike body and drew him into her arms. While Jerry and Charlie watched in the distance, she planted a kiss on the top of his head. He could hear their derisive hoots in the background.

"You've been running again, haven't you?" she said, tidying his already tidy hair, straightening his pristine white shirt collar, fussing over him, always fussing. "Dear, dear, Mitchell. I can hear that wheezing. When Theodora discovers that you've been running, I'm afraid she won't let you go out to play tomorrow after school."

That was the way they disciplined him. One of them would catch him in a misdemeanor and blame the punishment on the other. The punishments were always gentle and unimaginative—no play after school, sentences to be written fifty times. They thought it was the effectiveness of their methods that had turned him into the best-behaved boy in Clearbrook. They didn't understand that he tried desperately to please them because he loved them so much. He had already lost the mother and father he adored. In the deepest part of him, he was afraid that if he wasn't very, very good, he might lose his aunts, too.

He washed his hands without being prompted and settled himself behind the piano, where he stared at the keyboard with loathing. He had no musical ability. He hated the songs that he had to practice about sunshiny days and good little Indians. He wanted to be out with the other guys playing ball.

But he wasn't allowed to play ball because of his asthma. The wheezing didn't bother him much anymore—not like when he was a real little kid—but he couldn't convince the aunts of that. And so, while the other guys were out playing ball, he was playing scales.

But the scales weren't the worst. Saturday mornings were the worst.

The Misses Amity and Theodora Blaine supported themselves by teaching piano and giving deportment lessons. Every Saturday morning at eleven o'clock, the daughters of Clearbrook's best families dressed in their Sunday frocks and donned white gloves to knock politely on the Misses Blaines' front door.

Wearing a suit and tie, Mitchell stood miserably in the hallway next to his aunts and watched the girls enter. One by one they dropped a small curtsy and said, "How do you do, Miss Blaine, Miss Blaine, Mitchell. Thank you so much for inviting me."

He was required to bend neatly from the waist in front of girls like fat little Cissy Potts, who sat behind him in his sixth-grade class and wiped her boogers on the back of his seat.

He had to say things like, "How delightful to see you again, Miss Potts."

And then he had to take her hand.

The girls settled in the living room, where they were instructed in such skills as the proper method of performing an introduction, accepting an invitation to dance, and pouring tea. He was their guinea pig.

"Thank you, Miss Baker, I'd love a cup of tea," he said.

Snotty little Penelope Baker would pass him his cup of watered-down tea and stick her tongue out at him when the aunts weren't looking.

The girls hated the Misses Blaines' deportment class, and they hated him in turn, He spent his Saturday mornings gracefully balancing thin china saucers on his knee and taking himself to faraway places where no females were allowed. Places where a man could spit in the dirt, scratch himself, and own a dog. While he took Mary Jane Simmons's hand and led her to the center of the living room rug for a dance, he dreamed of feeling his legs fly out from under him and his hip hitting hard against the dirt as he slid into home plate. He dreamed of going up for a slam dunk and hanging off the hoop.

He dreamed of hunting rifles, fishing rods, soft flannel shirts, and blue jeans. But the aunts' duckings and warnings and sighings held him in gentle, unbreakable bondage.

Only in the classroom was it possible to let himself go, and no matter how much the other boys taunted him, he refused to rein in his quick mind. He answered questions in class, did extra-credit projects, and got the best marks in sixth grade.

Teacher's pet. Teacher's pet. Diaper Boy is teacher's pet.

When he was fourteen, his voice dropped and his muscles thickened. Almost overnight, he shot up until he towered over his aunts' small, birdlike bodies. His wheezing disappeared, but they continued to pet him. They made him wear a white shirt and tie for his first day of high school. Freshman year brought academic brilliance and gut-wrenching, aching loneliness.

The summer before his sophomore year, he was walking home from helping his aunts teach Vacation Bible School when a moving van and a paneled station wagon pulled up to the white clapboard house next to his own. The doors of the station wagon opened, and a man and a woman got out. Then a pair of long, suntanned legs emerged, followed by frayed denim cutoffs. He held his breath and watched as a beautiful girl close to his own age appeared before him. Her hair was arranged in a sprayed blond bubble kept neatly back from her face with a madras headband. She had a pert nose and soft mouth. A man's blue work shirt clung to a pair of high pointy breasts.