William Sanders - Jennifer, Just Before Midnight.pdf

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WILLIAM SANDERS
JENNIFER, JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT
IT WAS JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT when Graham saw the woman at the bar. Or rather
that
was when he noticed her; she had, he realized, been standing there for some
time, and his eyes must have picked up her presence repeatedly, but only as
another figure in the human swirl around him. She was young and pretty, but
that
was true of most of the women in the room, and, as far as Graham had noticed,
of
those attending the convention in general. The con scene had definitely
undergone major evolution in that regard in the last decade or two. Either
that,
Graham reflected sourly, or the advancing middle years had affected his
perceptions. That sounded eminently plausible.
Be that as it might, the hotel bar had been lined all evening with
bright-faced,
trim-haunched young women -- you weren't supposed to call them "girls"
anymore,
though if some of the ones drinking here tonight were twenty-one he was H.P.
Lovecraft -- flashing perfect teeth and displaying, from beneath severely
abbreviated ensembles, a great deal of smooth, uniformly tanned skin. Graham
had
admired them in a vague distant way, as he might have admired the lines of a
fast sports car without feeling any real desire to drive it. They seemed
almost
an alien species; their reality barely touched his.
This one, however, was looking straight at him.
There was no doubt about it. She had turned clear around, to stand with her
back
to the bar, and her gaze was full on Graham. It was hard to read her
expression
from across the dim and smoky room, but he thought she was smiling.
And here she came now, pushing off from the bar with her elbows, moving
gracefully through the crowd, holding her drink carefully in front of her with
both hands. As she passed, men turned their heads to look --one large young
fellow in a Klingon costume spilled beer on his lap, watching the motion of
her
hips, and got a blistering look from the little redhead beside him -- and, the
con scene having evolved in more than one respect, so did quite a few women.
But Graham's primary reaction was to groan silently, and then to raise his
drink
and down a large and hasty swallow of bourbon. Not now, he thought and wanted
to
scream, Christ, not now of all times, I knew I shouldn't have come to this
stupid thing --
"I don't even want to go to the stupid thing," he had said, Wednesday morning.
"I hate conventions."
 
"You used to love them," Margaret reminded him. "You know you did, Keith. We
had
some good times at the cons."
"That was a different scene. Nowadays -- " He shook his head, a little
angrily,
a lot tiredly: He hadn't had much sleep the night before. Or any other night,
for longer than he could recall.
"It's not the way it used to be," he told Margaret. "Now, most of the cons you
go to, it's wall-to-wall Trekkies and role-players and costume freaks. And New
Agers, and grown men and women whose lives peaked the first time they saw The
Rocky Horror Picture Show -- "
"Oh, come on. The cons always did attract oddballs and misfits. That was half
the fun, wasn't it? And," she added, "I'll not mention how a certain elongated
young Nebula nominee was dressed the first time a certain promising young
illustrator laid eyes on him."
"Sure." Graham had to grin briefly at the memory. "But no matter how silly we
got, there was always the basic premise that this was about certain types of
written fiction, and the people who wrote it and read it. Nowadays, half the
guests at the average con don't read at all and don't see why they should."
He stopped, wondering why he was ranting like this. He sat down in the
uncomfortable chair beside Margaret's bed and took her hand in both of his,
feeling the bones through the frighteningly thin covering of flesh. "I'm
sorry,"
he said. "But really, I don't want to go."
"But it's something you need to do," she insisted. "You already promised the
committee -- "
"They'll understand. They know about you. I already explained that I might not
be able to make it."
"Bullshit," she said distinctly. "There's no reason whatever that you can't
go.
Either I'll be all right or I won't, and if I'm not there won't be anything
you
or anyone else can do about it."
She raised her head an inch or so from the pillow. "God damn it, Keith, I'm
not
going to let you waste any more of your life haunting my bedside. You know
what
they said -- it could happen any time, or I could still be lying here this
time
next year. You're fifty-four years old. You don't have that kind of time to
throw away."
Her head fell back; she breathed deeply for a moment, looking up at the
ceiling
with pain-widened eyes. Those eyes, Graham thought with a bottomless sorrow,
those wonderful violet eyes. Nothing else remained of the Margaret of years
past; her face was now no more than a pallid mask of lined and taut-drawn
skin,
and beneath the kerchief on her head was only bare scalp where that dense
red-brown mane would never grow again. The wasted shape beneath the stiff
white
 
hospital sheet was a cruel caricature of the magnificent body Graham
remembered.
"I've got this damned hideous thing inside me, and it's killing me." Her voice
was very weak but her words came out crisply clear. "I'm not going to let it
kill you too. Or let you use it as an excuse for refusing to live."
She turned her head on the pillow, looking at Graham. "Besides, you need this
professionally. You haven't had a book out in two years, only half a dozen
stories and nothing at all since last winter w you've all but quit, haven't
you?
And I suppose that's natural, it can't have been easy for you to write or even
think while you had to deal with what's been happening to me...but you've got
to
get back to work, and soon. The longer you wait, the harder it'll be."
She glanced about the hospital room. "And you do need to take care of
business.
The insurance isn't going to cover all of this." Her lips pulled back in a
crooked smile. "Not to mention what those ghoulish bastards are going to
charge
for hauling my ashes."
He squeezed his eyes shut. "I wish you wouldn't say things like that."
"Why not?" she said. "You may write fantasy, but it's reality time now. You
better learn to deal with it."
She reached across with her free hand and patted his forearm. "Go to the
convention, Keith. It'll do you good. Consider it a refresher course in having
a
life," she said. "God knows you need it."
GRAHAM BLINKED; his hand jerked slightly, almost spilling his drink. He looked
up at the girl -- the woman -- from the bar, who was now standing on the far
side of his table, one hand resting on the back of the other chair.
"Hello," she said.
Not, "Hi," Graham noticed, but a genuine hello; give her a point there,
anyway.
He saw now that she was even prettier than she had looked from across the
room:
long legs, slender waist, fine-boned features that came very close to
qualifying
as authentically beautiful -- even despite her efforts to spoil them with
over-the-top makeup; her lipstick could have stopped traffic in a Seattle fog.
Thick taffy-blond hair hung to her bare tanned shoulders. Quite a lot of her
was
bare, in fact; the little denim skirt barely reached below her crotch, while
the
skimpy matching top exposed many square inches of flat smooth belly and served
to advertise, rather than seriously conceal, a really impressive chest.
She said, "You're Keith Graham, aren't you? I recognized you from the
dust-jacket photos. Mind if I sit down?"
A reader? Have to be reasonably nice, then; as Margaret always liked to point
out, the readers were the ones who paid the rent and kept you from having to
get
 
a real job. This one might look like a reject from a Dallas Cowboy
Cheerleaders
tryout, but what the hell. At least she wasn't decked out in fake medieval
costume, and she didn't appear to be packing any quartz crystals.
Hastily, a bit clumsily, he got to his feet, pushing back his own chair and
rising to his full rangy six feet three -- Big Stoop, Margaret had named him
on
their first night together, after a character in the old Terry and the Pirates
comic strip -- and reaching for the other chair, before he remembered you
weren't supposed to do that anymore either. But the blonde didn't object; in
fact she seemed to take the old-fashioned courtesy for granted, and she
stepped
back and stood waiting while he pulled the chair out for her. "Thanks," she
said, sitting down and setting her drink on the table. "I hope I'm not
bothering
you. It's just that you look as if you could use some company. And I've really
enjoyed your work."
Graham sighed. "Actually," he said, resuming his seat, "I'm afraid I'm not
going
to be much company to anyone. You see -- "
"Oh, I know," she said quickly. "About your wife. I'm sorry."
Graham frowned. There had been nothing in any of the publications about
Margaret's condition; she had insisted on that. He said, "How did you know?"
She shrugged. "I heard from -- somebody I know on the committee. Never mind,"
she said. "I don't imagine you want to talk about it. I just wanted you to
know
that I understand."
Graham was filled with a sudden terrible anger. No you don't, he shouted
inside
his head, you understand nothing. How can you understand what it means to love
and live with someone for a quarter of a century, until you become almost
components of a single whole, and you find yourselves answering each other's
questions before they are asked? And then to see her body, that you know so
well
you could find her blind in a crowd of thousands by her private scent alone,
turn into a death trap for her splendid brave spirit; and to stand helplessly
while one door of hope after another slams shut in her face...how, you
flawless
nitwit, could you possibly understand?
"I'm sorry," she said then. "I shouldn't have said it that way. Of course I
can't understand what it's like for you." She picked up her drink and turned
it
in her hands without tasting it. "I don't suppose anyone ever really knows
what
anything is like for anyone else."
Astonished, Graham could only stare at her.
She extended a hand across the table. "I'm Jennifer."
Graham took the hand, which was pleasantly soft and cool.
"Jennifer," he repeated stupidly. Thinking, oh my God.
 
"They're all Jennifers. Even the ones who aren't named Jennifer."
Thus Margaret, three years ago -- was it? -- at the last convention they had
attended together. A colleague of long acquaintance, and approximately their
age, had just disappeared into an elevator with an edible-looking young fan in
buttock-high cutoffs and a Star Wars T-shirt; and Margaret had remarked that
old
Roy seemed to have found himself a Jennifer.
"You didn't know?" she said to Graham. "All women do, at least in our age
bracket. You get a bunch of middle-aged women sitting around dishing, somebody
asks what's happening with so-and-so, somebody else says, 'Oh, you hadn't
heard?
Her husband's got a Jennifer.'"
"A kind of code?" Graham asked, interested. "Like in a certain type of joke
the
gay guys are always named Bruce?"
"Something like that. Only it's not a joke, at least not to the woman whose
husband has gone Jennifer-crazy. Never mind booze, gambling, even drugs --
there's nothing in the known cosmos that can make a middle-aged man throw all
judgment to the winds, trash his own life and those of everyone around him,
like
a willing barely legal girl."
She looked about the crowded convention floor, which, now Graham noticed,
seemed
fairly alive with Jennifer material. "I can understand it," she said. "They
are
lovely. And I imagine they can do a lot for an older man's ego. We menopausal
women have no sense, you know. Just when we need to hang on to the men we've
got, when our chances of replacing them are in freefall, we miss no chance to
bust your asses. Then we wonder why you run off with the Jennifers."
"I don't," Graham pointed out.
"No," Margaret said, laughing, "you don't, do you? I may have the only truly
monogamous man left on the North American landmass. But that's just because I
keep you too tired to get up to any extramural antics. Come on, Big Stoop."
She
pulled him toward the elevators. "You're starting to look a little too fresh
and
rested. We'd better do something about that before a Jennifer gets you."
Graham downed the rest of his bourbon in a single shaky swallow. About to
signal
to the waitress, he looked at Jennifer. "Anything you want?"
She raised her drink, a horrible-looking blue concoction, and took a tiny sip.
"Ooh," she said, making a face. "Yes, something besides this thing. In fact I
think I'd like to have what you're having."
"Are you sure?" Graham asked dubiously. "It's straight bourbon on the rocks."
"Sounds perfect. Please."
Graham caught the waitress's eye, pointed to his empty glass, and held up two
fingers. The waitress nodded and hurried off through the crowd. Jennifer was
 

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