Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1 Page 19

  I got up presently, and going to the window looked out on the winter morning; the river was before me broad between outer bank and bank, but it was nearly dead ebb, and there was a wide space of mud on each side of the hurrying stream, driven on the faster as it seemed by the push of the south-west wind. On the other side of the water the few willow-trees left us by the Thames Conservancy looked doubtfully alive against the bleak sky and the row of wretched-looking blue-slated houses, although, by the way, the latter were the backs of a sort of street of “villas” and not a slum; the road in front of the house was sooty and muddy at once, and in the air was that sense of dirty discomfort which one is never quit of in London. The morning was harsh, too, and though the wind was from the south-west it was as cold as a north wind; and yet amidst it all, I thought of the corner of the next bight of the river which I could not quite see from where I was, but over which one can see clear of houses and into Richmond Park, looking like the open country; and dirty as the river was, and harsh as was the January wind, they seemed to woo me toward the country-side, where away from the miseries of the “Great Wen” I might of my own will carry on a daydream of the friends I had made in the dream of the night and against my will.

  But as I turned away shivering and downhearted, on a sudden came the frightful noise of the “hooters,” one after the other, that call the workmen to the factories, this one the after-breakfast one, more by token. So I grinned surlily, and dressed and got ready for my day’s “work” as I call it, but which many a man besides John Ruskin (though not many in his position) would call “play.”

  [1] Probably one of the Calverlys, a Cheshire family, one of whom was a noted captain in the French wars.

  [2] Forestaller, one who buys up goods when they are cheap, and so raises the price for his own benefit; forestalls the due and real demand. Regrater, one who both buys and sells in the same market, or within five miles thereof; buys, say a ton of cheese at 10 A.M. and sells it at 5 P.M. a penny a pound dearer without moving from his chair. The word “monopolist” will cover both species of thief.

  A FEW GOOD MEN

  Richard A. Lovett

  At first glance it looked like a familiar old story, but it was a lot more complicated than that . . .

  Brenda Brewster gazed across the thin streamer of steam escaping the plastic lid of her coffee cup. “Have you noticed that there just don’t seem to be any good guys anymore?” she asked.

  Tiffany Robertson suppressed a chuckle. “Since when have you known any good men?” She cautiously raised her own cup and took the tiniest possible sample of the scalding liquid. “And why’s this stuff always too hot until all of a sudden it’s ice cold?”

  “It’s that miracle cardboard in the cups. It puts on this great show until all of a sudden it just gets tired and gives up. Kind of like—”

  “Don’t say it.” Tiffany wasn’t sure precisely what analogy Brenda was about to make to her latest boyfriend, the gone, but-not-gone-long-enough Brad, but whatever it was, Tiffany had heard the refrain too many times before.

  Brenda’s disgust with the opposite sex was legendary. Sometimes she blamed the men, sometimes her parents for afflicting her with an impossible name. Not that there was anything wrong with “Brenda.” It was that awful alliteration. When Tiffany and Brenda met, in junior high school, Brenda was going through a chubby period and the boys had called her BB behind her back (and sometimes to her face) “because she’s round as one.” Ha-ha. Brenda had long ago lost the weight, but she was still wearing the scars of adolescence—scars that caused her to swoon over any hunky guy who looked her way, even the ones Tiffany reflexively dodged. But if Tiffany said any of that, Brenda would tell her that when your parents bequeathed you a name like a sorority queen and the mane of golden hair to go with it, you were never going to want for men, and by luck of the draw, a few just might be marginally okay. Although, come to think of it, there hadn’t been many good ones of late.

  Sometimes, the best way to deal with Brenda was to take the initiative. “What’s wrong with those guys over there?”

  “What, you mean the chiropractic students?” Brenda let the disapproval practically drip from her voice. The coffee shop wasn’t far from a chiropractic college, and before and after classes, it often filled with students poring over their books. Four students at the next table were grilling each other on what sounded like anatomy. “That’s the anterior cruciate ligament,” one was saying. “There’s also an MCL. What’s the difference?”

  “What’s wrong with chiropractors?” Tiffany asked. The students tended to be her age—people who’d chosen to live a few years before venturing to grad school. In Tiffany’s book, that was a mark of maturity.

  Brenda snorted. “Can you imagine what would happen if you needed a back rub? I want a guy who’d make me feel good. Not ‘Oh gee, can I adjust your vertebrae?’ Crunch, crunch. How romantic.”

  Tiffany started to object, but then another snippet of conversation drifted their way from a second study group. “What’s first aid for a sucking chest wound?” a woman, apparently studying for her EMT certificate, asked a quartet of males.

  “A what?” one of the men responded. Most likely they were studying for their EMT certificates. Tiffany had hung out in the shop long enough to know that many of the students supplemented their credentials in this manner.

  “That’s the question written here,” the woman said, gazing at a pamphlet. “We never used that term in class.”

  The man pondered a moment, then his voice brightened. “Oh,” he said. “I bet it’s a really nasty pneumothorax. First, you need to—”

  Brenda laughed. “I rest my case,” she said. “Do you really want to date someone who deals in sucking chest wounds, but only if you call them pneumo-whatevers? And who’s likely to talk about it at dinner?”

  From there, the conversation shifted not only from chiropractors, but also from men. Or at least from attainable men. Brenda was updating Tiffany on the loves and losses of the Hollywood set. “So now Patrick’s taken up with Julianne,” she said animatedly. “How stupid can the man get? She’ll dump him within a month, just like she did Brent.”

  Tiffany knew that Patrick was the hunk to end all hunks. But she was a bit vague on Julianne and Brent. She liked movies, but the actors’ off-screen lives always left her mind in a whirl.

  Her attention kept drifting back to the study groups. There’s nothing wrong with these guys, she thought. A bit nerdish, perhaps, but what trade doesn’t have its specialized terminology? Try dating a stockbroker, for heaven’s sake. If you let him talk shop, he’ll bury you in P/E ratios, margins, betas, and phrases like “right now, the technical doesn’t look good on that one.” Tiffany knew. She’d gone out with one last year and had made the mistake of asking the difference between a good and a not-so-good technical. Ten minutes later, her dinner was cold and she’d still not understood.

  She surprised herself by smiling at the memory. Randall Wilkins III hadn’t been half-bad until he’d stood her up on their fourth date. In fact, she’d been starting to have illusions that he might be the one. Then he’d failed to show up and hadn’t even bothered to call with a lame excuse. Tiffany had been so furious she’d left a trail of angry phone messages all over town. But he’d never returned any of her calls.

  The sound of snapping fingers pulled her back to the present. “Earth to Tiffany,” Brenda said. “Are you planning to throw yourself at those guys now, or finish your coffee first?” The EMT trainees had shifted to head injuries, while the anatomy group was working its way downward from the knee. “I bet they’d happily explain the bones of the foot to you. Maybe you could offer up your size sixes for show-and-tell, and we could find out who has a foot fetish.”

  “Brenda!” Tiffany fixed her friend with as stern a gaze as she could muster. “Sometimes you’re disgusting! And keep your voice down! There really isn’t anything wrong with those guys.”

  Brenda grinned wickedly. “So go ahead, finish your c
offee and abandon me for them.” She faked a teary sniff. “Or maybe you better not wait.” She tilted her head toward the far side of the coffee shop. “It looks like you’ve got competition.”

  Tiffany had no intention of throwing herself at anyone, but she couldn’t resist looking in the direction Brenda indicated.

  At a table near the door, a pair of women were gazing intently, almost hungrily, at the two study groups. They were young—no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight—tall and willowy, with wide-set eyes, hollow cheeks, and narrow chins that gave their faces an almost triangular look. They almost looked like sisters, but one had skin the color of heavily creamed coffee, while the other was fairer, with blotchy pigmentation that looked as though it came from a cheap tan-from-a-bottle. In combination, their look was exotic—a cross between East African and Eurasian—and Tiffany guessed that they were more likely to be fellow immigrants than relatives.

  “Aren’t they a pair of odd ducks?” Brenda asked. “I wonder where they’re from.” Even their attire was out of place. The dark one was dressed in a crisp navy blazer, designer jeans, and a white turtleneck—evening-on-the town clothes that were too sexy for work, too formal for coffee. By comparison, the fairer-skinned one looked like a character from a vampire novel, with black eye makeup, wine-dark lipstick fringed in black, tight black pants, and a sleeveless, figure-enhancing top. Even with the weird tan, there were plenty of settings in which she, too, would turn heads. Maybe the tan was some Goth style Tiffany had never seen before.

  Tiffany realized she was staring, and pulled her attention back to Brenda. “So who’s Julianne?” she asked, just to change the subject.

  Brenda laughed. “You really don’t pay much attention to the tabloids, do you? The woman’s a shark. The moment she set eyes on Patrick, she zeroed in and prepared to chow down. She’s starring with him in his latest movie, and the day filming began . . .”

  A few minutes later, Brenda glanced at her watch. “Oh-oh,” she said. “Here’s hoping traffic’s light.” She stole a last sip of coffee, made a face, and gulped the rest. Then she gave Tiffany a quick hug and turned for the door, wagging her fingers behind her as she went. “Toodles,” she called over her shoulder and was gone.

  Tiffany sat a while longer, drinking the cooling remnants of her own coffee and skimming the morning paper. She wondered if Brenda realized how strongly the predatory references she used for the women who shared tabloid space with Patrick mirrored the state of her own social life. Tiffany couldn’t remember exactly what Brad’s sin had been, but before him there’d been a man whose idea of fun had been dragging Brenda to strip clubs, and she’d let the guy humiliate her that way at least a dozen times before she finally dumped him. Then there’d been one who could never pass a mirror, or even a windowpane, without flexing and preening—plus an endless succession of frat-boy types who’d never grown up. Yeah, Brenda really did draw the wrong type of men. Or maybe most men really were like that, but only Brenda managed to go out with all of them. The more Tiffany thought about it, the more she realized that Randall truly had been the only semi-decent man to come her way in years. His disappearance really had seemed out of character; that was part of why she’d been so angry. Maybe he’d gone hiking and had fallen off a cliff. Maybe someday a hunter would stumble across his skeleton.

  Tiffany shuddered. What a gruesome thought! Maybe Brenda was right, and she should throw herself at the chiropractors. The same two study groups came in like clockwork every Friday: eight men plus a woman they treated as a colleague; no wedding rings, no disgusting passes at her or anyone else. In fact, they’d never paid her any attention, but that didn’t necessarily mean they’d brush her off. Tiffany had been a graduate student once, chasing a master’s degree in applied economics, and she remembered all too well the ability of exams to eclipse all else.

  Tiffany glanced at the door and noticed that the two women were still there, barely touching their coffee, gazes still fixed on the students. Sharks, she thought. Checking out the chiropractors. That’s why they’re all gussied up. This could get interesting.

  She turned back to her paper but the words might as well have been hen scratchings for all the sense she made of them. She was shamelessly eavesdropping, her attention centered in her ears and peripheral vision. The EMT group continued grilling each other on emergency medical procedures, but the anatomy group was winding down. Two of them packed their book bags and exited together, watched not only by Tiffany but also by the women at the corner table. But while their eyes burned so intently it was amazing the men never noticed, neither woman moved or said a word. Wrapped in conversation, the students strode through the parking lot until, spying an oncoming bus, they broke into a trot and disappeared around a corner of the building, heading in the direction of the stop.

  A few moments later, one of the two remaining members of the anatomy group drained his coffee, gave his friend a desultory wave, and headed for the door. As soon as he’d passed the corner table, Tiffany saw the two women nod briefly to each other. The pale-skinned Goth rose and followed the student out the door. Her dark-skinned companion picked up her coffee and sipped at it, but her eyes never left the fourth member of the anatomy group, now chatting with one of the EMT students.

  Outside, the first student pulled a key chain from his pocket, heading for the far side of the parking lot. Watching through the shop’s broad windows, Tiffany found herself holding her breath as the Goth followed him, only a few paces behind and closing rapidly. Finally, the man heard the footsteps. He tossed a quick glance over his shoulder and may have said something, but if he did, it was merely the briefest of acknowledgements. Unless Tiffany had lost all ability to judge character, the Goth was very much not his type. Then, the two stepped behind a van and passed out of sight.

  It was a big van, obscuring Tiffany’s view of an entire aisle of parked cars. Wherever the anatomy student had been heading, Tiffany never saw him emerge on the other side of the van. Nor did any cars leave the parking lot for several minutes. When one finally did, the only person in it was an old man.

  Meanwhile, the fourth anatomy student packed away his own books and a laptop computer and headed in the opposite direction, toward a back corridor leading to the bathrooms. To Tiffany’s amazement, the dark-skinned woman quickly rose, grabbed her handbag, and moved in the same direction, disappearing into the corridor so close behind him that she was practically stepping on his heels.

  Five minutes passed, during which neither the woman nor the student returned. Tiffany’s coffee was gone, and even without a traffic jam, she was going to be late for work. She sighed, pulled her own keys out of her purse and headed for the door.

  The following Friday, the chiropractic students were again at their usual tables as Brenda and Tiffany made their way through the latte line. Last week’s EMT group was at full strength, although they were now tossing around phrases like “cytokines” and “pyruvic acid.” The other group was still doing anatomy—arteries and veins this time—but it was missing two members. The two who were present seemed distracted, checking their watches and glancing toward the door between questions.

  Brenda had been late enough to work the previous week that this time she left early, and Tiffany decided to leave with her. On the way out, she stepped aside as one of last week’s women breezed through the door with nary a glance in her direction. It was the Goth, although she’d ditched the dark lipstick and black pants in favor of a preppy look. She’d also done something about the tan; the pigmentation was more uniform, although the indoor light now gave it a slightly jaundiced hue.

  Tiffany gazed after her as she took her place in the coffee line. Whatever changes she’d made in attire, every angle of her body radiated the same intensity Tiffany had seen last week. Tiffany hoped she was ordering decaf. That woman did not need caffeine.

  Brenda had noticed, too. “Truly an odd duck,” she murmured. “Trying to masquerade as a swan, but not quite making it.”

  A week
later, there were only six students: three men and the woman at one table, the same two guys at the other. The week after that, Tiffany counted only five.

  Then, there were four: the woman and two men in one group and one lonely man in the other. This time, Brenda was in no hurry to get to work. And with Brad an increasingly distant memory, men—even Patrick—were no longer her chief topic of conversation. Rather, she cited statistics about the local basketball team (on an extended losing streak) and the weather (ditto). “Can you believe this is April?” she complained, wrapping her hands around her coffee cup. “It feels like November.”

  Nearby, the group of three was getting down to business, but the solo student was staring out the rain-streaked window, slowly flipping a pen end over end, tapping first one end and then the other on his unopened anatomy text. One of the members of the other group glanced his way. “Want to join us?” he asked. “We’re doing physiology.”

  The other student shook his head and continued flipping the pen, like a card shark idly honing his dexterity. Tap, flip. Tap, flip. In a quieter room the sound would have been irritating, but competing with the café babble, it was barely audible. “Thanks,” he said, a couple of pen-flips later. “But I really need to study anatomy.” Then to nobody in particular, “Where are those guys?”

  The physiology student twitched his head: a brief, disgusted half-shake. “Damned if I know. We haven’t seen Tony or Jim for a while, either. Some folks are just flaky. They’re not even returning phone calls. As far as I’m concerned, they can just flunk out.”

  A moment later, the door swung open, and the pen-flipper’s hand froze, mid-tap. But rather than one of his friends, the gust of cool air heralded the arrival of Brenda’s odd duck, and the pen resumed its metronomic action.