The Candy House(29)

The good news, vis-à-vis 3.36 (now 3.76) seconds having passed, comes via retroactive math: A conversational pause can last a full four seconds before it bursts, as it were, releasing its toxic contents. Up to that four-second mark, it is merely an expanding, tautening bubble of catastrophic potential.

“So,” I say, “what did you think about Avery’s speech?”

“Why are you asking?”

While I’m taken aback by M’s somewhat aggressive tone, I’m also aware that six additional lines of dialogue need to be uttered to get us to the safety of eight, so I hurtle forward: “Well, because you and I work together, and this was kind of a big announcement. I wanted to talk about it with someone.”

“You think it’s Marc.”

“That actually hadn’t occurred to me,” I say, “until this moment.”

“It isn’t Marc.”

“Okay,” I say. “It isn’t Marc. There are two hundred and seventy-three people in our unit—why would I assume it’s him?”

While our exchange is not entirely friendly, there is the encouraging fact that we’ve reached line seven without awkwardness, defining awkwardness as conversation consisting of a series of futile attempts to solve the problem of what to say next.

“Who do you think is helping the eluders?” I ask.

“An impressionist,” she says.

“My sister is an impressionist,” I say.

“Mine, too. But you can’t change your siblings.”

“I love my sister,” I say.

“You might not love her if she wasn’t your sister.”

“I might not know her if she wasn’t my sister.”

“Exactly,” she says.

I sit down on the stones beside M. “Do you mind if I sit with you?” I ask.

“You already did.”

“I can stand up again.”

“Don’t bother.”

“It’s no bother,” I say. “I have strong legs.”

“You just want to show off.”

“The ability to stand up from a sitting position is unremarkable,” I say, and I stand up again to prove it. “Tell me how this is showing off.”

“I can see your muscles.”

I look down at my jeans and T-shirt, but I do not see any muscles. “Is that a problem?”

“No,” she says. “Sit down again.”

I sit back down with my heart in an uproar. This is flirtation, plain and simple. The exhilaration I feel, flirting with M, is precisely what is always missing when I try to date typicals: I never know what’s going on, and because my attempts to find out lack the tactful goo that typicals smear all over their actions and words to blunt their real purpose, I come across as lurching and off-putting.

“I like you,” I tell M. “I always have.”

“Thanks. I didn’t know that.”

“What about Marc?”

“I’m in love with him,” she says.

“Will he mind that we’re sitting here together?”

“No. He trusts me.”

“Do you trust him?”

She hesitates. “Yes and no.”

“That means no. Trust is all or nothing.”

“No,” she says. “It’s a winner-take-all accounting system in which various gradations come into play.”

“Such as?”

“I trust his feelings for me,” she says. “But he could be helping the eluders.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Sometimes his mind seems far away.”

“The fact that someone’s mind is far away doesn’t mean they’ve defected to a secret network bent on destroying our business.”

“But it could,” she says.

“?‘Could’ and ‘is’ are so far apart as to be opposites.”

“No,” she says. “?‘Is’ and ‘isn’t’ are opposites.”

“I have an idea,” I say. “Since you’re attracted to me and I’m attracted to you, why don’t we go to my house and have sex and see what happens next, no strings attached?”

“That would be a betrayal of Marc.”

“You could call it that, or you could call it adding another gradation into the field of your trustworthiness.”

“Having sex with you would turn me from being trustworthy into being untrustworthy.”

“Not necessarily,” I say. “If we sleep together once and it’s not incredible, you’ll be more trustworthy and committed to Marc from that point on, because when you see my muscles through my T-shirt and feel attracted to me, you’ll think, I’ve already had sex with Lincoln and it wasn’t that great, so who cares about those muscles?”

“You’re cloaking your lust in logic.”

“My lust is logical.”

“Lust is never logical,” she says. “It’s biological.”

“My lust for you is totally logical,” I say. “Your combination of attractive properties makes it all but impossible for me to resist you. In fact, it takes a constant expenditure of energy to keep from reaching out and touching your hair right this minute.”