Different Dreams (20 page)

Malou's mind whirred frantically as she searched for a way to head off this impossible conversation.

“School of hard knocks.” Cam grinned.

At last, the horrible fact that their daughter's escort held
no
university degree dawned on Mrs. Sanders and she looked to her husband, who with that eloquent quirk
of his eyebrow confirmed her fear and her sliding opinion of the man before her.

They stood in awkward silence for a moment before Professor Sanders asked, “What do you make of the Higgs boson, Landell?”

“The Higgs bison?” Cam asked. “Sounds like a very specific kind of buffalo to me.”

Malou could not restrain an impish smile at Cam's jibe or her father's dour lack of amusement. Professor Sanders turned to her.

“I don't see what's so funny, Mary Louise. This discovery confirms some of the theories I've devoted my life to proving.”

The smile faded from Malou's lips. She felt frivolous and disrespectful.

Assuming the tone he used to lecture particularly dull students, Professor Sanders turned back to Cam. “The Higgs boson is one of several subatomic particles that may very well be the ultimate component of matter. Their discovery is the most important event in physics since the invention of the solid-state transistor.”

“I don't doubt its significance in the least,” Cam stated, his voice cool and even. “And if there were time enough in this life, I would love to learn everything I could about it. But there's not. So, like you, I am forced to tend to the business I've chosen. Perhaps you'd like to
tell me now what you think of derivatives such as credit default swaps.”

“Credit what?” Professor Sanders asked querulously, unused to being challenged. “Just a bunch of financial machinations, I'd say.”

“And you may very well be right, but they nearly caused the collapse of the worldwide banking system.”

“Hmmff.” Professor Sanders folded his arms in front of him.

“How very interesting,” Mrs. Sanders said mechanically. She put an arm around her husband and began herding him away. “We've been neglecting our other guests.” She turned back to Malou. “Now, don't be standoffish the way you usually are. Mingle,” she commanded, waving a finger in the direction of a young man who reminded her of Ernie, with his beard and wire-rim glasses. “There's Lawrence Steward over there. Go on over and talk with him. He just got back from Botswana, where he was doing a Fulbright on native linguistics. It really is fascinating.” She waved her fingers vaguely at Cam. “So nice to meet you, Mr. Landell.”

Cam waggled his fingers at the couple's departing backs. “Toodle-oo,” he called after them in a tone edged with a blade of sarcasm. Malou looked up at his cocky grin and tried to gauge his reaction to the exchange. She thought her parents had been rude, snobbish, and
insulting. But it was impossible to tell if Cam had been hurt.

“They can really be pretty high-handed sometimes,” she ventured. “I hope you weren't offended by anything they said. Or implied.”

“What? Me? Offended? Why? Simply because they treated me like a drooling idiot because I didn't flash thirteen degrees and a Fulbright at them?” The edge of sarcasm in his tone sharpened to a degree that frightened Malou. “And speaking of Fulbrights,” he continued, “that enchanting Larry Steward is over there just dying to tell you all the fascinating details about linguistics in Botswana. So, why don't you run and mingle with him and some of these other escapees from a Mensa meeting and let a business cretin like myself just slither on out the door.” As he looked deeply into her eyes, his features momentarily softened. He caught both of her hands in his and brought them to his lips. “I'm truly, truly sorry, Malou. But if I ever doubted before how far apart our worlds are, I've had my doubts erased today.” He turned abruptly and left. His sharp, thrusting stride revealed how deeply angered he was.

Malou watched him pass the butler and charge on toward his car. She looked back at her parents. The president of the university was kissing her mother on the cheek. Her parents would never understand if she were to simply leave without so much as the formal
good-bye that usually terminated their meetings. Particularly if she were to leave chasing after an undegreed despoiler of the land. Cam was sliding into his car. The president of the university was shaking her father's hand and patting his back.

She started walking. Past a Nobel Prize winner, past a white-jacketed waiter, past the chamber music group. By the time she passed the azaleas, Malou was running. She dropped the bow-tied package she'd forgotten to give her parents, and broke into a sprint. She reached the passenger side of the SUV just as Cam was starting to pull out, and she threw herself in the door.

“You really don't want to be around me right now,” was Cam's greeting.

“Oh, but I really do,” Malou countered.

“I'm in as foul a mood as I've probably ever been in in my life, and am planning to spend the rest of the afternoon at my club in San Antonio getting quietly smashed.”

“Sounds like an inspired idea to me.”

Cam turned to her, an icy distance frosting his gaze. “Malou, I can't, or rather won't, bodily eject you from this vehicle, but it really would be a better idea if you stayed here where you belong.”

Malou's answer was somber. “I don't especially feel like I belong here anymore.”

“And you
do
feel like you might belong with me where I'm going?” His question was harsh.

Malou's heart pounded at the enormity of the response she gave. “Yes.”

He stared at her. “Maybe it is time for both of us to find out the answer to that question.” He seemed galvanized into action by that decision. An odd purposefulness filled the car as Cam swiveled to look behind him. He accelerated past the Greek-columned house a bit too fast. A snatch of chamber music lilted into the car before it was grabbed away by Cam's burst of speed. The last thing Malou saw was her mother's puzzled expression as she bent over and picked a brightly wrapped package out of her azalea bed.

As Malou settled back against the leather seat, she felt that a tiny bit of her fate had been sealed. For good or ill? she wondered, glancing over at Cam. His expression was grim, his gaze locked onto the highway spooling out in front of them. She doubted whether knowing the answer to her question would have made any difference. Good
or
ill, she would have gone with Cameron Landell.

* * *

Cam's club was private and sat on the top of San Antonio's tallest bank building.

“Why, Mr. Landell,” a hostess in a silk dress and pearls purred as they walked off the elevator into the reception area, “what a pleasant surprise. It's been far too
long since we've seen you. Sam Stevens and Lou Chesler are in the bar. Or would you like a private table?”

“No,” Cam answered with a quick look at Malou. “The bar will be fine. We're on a sort of tour here. A tour of Cameron Landell's world, so we'd better see all the animals in the zoo.”

The hostess smiled as if Cam were making a joke that she understood perfectly and pointed a gracious hand in the direction of the bar.

It was crowded, and at every table they passed, someone stood up to grip Cam's hand or pull him aside to meet someone or to extract his promise to talk with them in private later on. It took nearly half an hour for them to make their way to the center table, where two men—like twins with their identical tans, blow-dried silver hair, two-thousand-dollar watches, and female companions one-third their ages—were holding court. Chesler and Stevens. Even Malou knew the names. Anyone who read a newspaper in Texas did. Chesler had been a U.S. senator for years, ending his political career with an unsuccessful run for the presidency. Stevens was reputedly even bigger in politics than his partner ever had been. But Stevens was a backroom maneuverer, a kingmaker who wielded more power than those who held the offices whose doors he opened.

Both men rose as Cam and Malou approached the
table. Chesler spoke first, in a booming voice trained to be heard across the floor of the Senate and bars crowded with powerful men.

“Durn your hide, Landell, it worries me when I don't see your face for a couple of months. What city have you snuck out and bought up while our backs were turned?” Hearty guffaws rose from an appreciative audience.

“It's states now, Chesler,” Cam answered, shaking the hands extended to him. “I don't deal in anything smaller than a state these days.”

Chesler whooped at Cam's comeback and pulled up two empty chairs. Cam introduced Malou.

“You may not know a damn thing about development, Landell, but you know a fine-looking woman when you see one, don't you, you old barn owl!” With a smarmy grin he turned to Malou. “I hope I didn't offend you, Miss Sanders.”

Malou had no choice but to smile sweetly and take the chair Chesler held out for her. After that, she was ignored entirely as the talk turned to development deals and who was speculating on what land and what the inside word from the capital was about what property the state was planning to buy. Occasionally one of the women sitting beside one of the half dozen men around the table would make a comment. The man she had spoken to would nod without looking at her and continue his conversation as if she hadn't spoken. From time to
time, Chesler would circle his finger over the table and the waitress would bring fresh drinks.

Malou listened for an hour, though she had gotten the message in the first five minutes: Cam's was a world where money and power were synonymous. A world where university degrees were worthless. It was a world in which Cam had succeeded handsomely at an exceedingly early age. She was totally out of her depth with all the talk about flipping land and grandfather clauses and municipal utility districts. Finally their eyes met, and in one glance she told him that she was more than ready to leave. Cam gulped down the drink in front of him and put the empty glass down with the small collection he'd already assembled.

“Cam,” she said as the elevator doors slid shut, closing them off together, “you didn't have to drag me all the way up here to make your point.”

“I didn't?” he asked, his voice giving nothing away.

“No. I know that it's no fun feeling out-of-it and unaware. I probably like the feeling even less than you do. I'm sorry about what happened at my parents'. But those are my parents, not me. I love and respect them, but I recognize that they're snobs. Intellectual snobs. Just because they don't understand your world and what you've accomplished doesn't mean that I don't.”

“Don't you?” Cam asked thoughtfully. “I wonder.” The elevator doors slid open. Though evening was crowding in fast, it was still light outside. “I think that before we
come to any final decisions, we need a bit more data. We need one more stop on the tour. Landell Acres.”

“But Cam,” Malou enthused, “I'd love to see your development.”

“And so you shall,” he announced, sweeping her into the car. As he slammed the door shut, Cam looked off into a distance that encompassed more time than space, and he repeated solemnly to himself, “And so you shall.”

Malou saw signs reading “Landell Acres, Affordable Housing” for several miles before they pulled off the highway. Within minutes they were winding down the roads of the half-completed subdivision. The expectant smile on Malou's face froze as she studied the frames for the houses that were Cam's dream. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. Couldn't believe that
these
were what he was willing to sacrifice her troop for. Nor could she stop the words that tumbled out, unloosed by her shock.

“The houses . . .” she muttered, oblivious to what she was saying, “they're so . . .”

“So what?” Cam prompted, though he had no need to hear the words. He'd known what they would be for a long time. Though his heart had for a time tried to make him forget that sure knowledge, he'd known precisely how Malou Sanders would react to the materialization of his dream. She looked over at him with startled guilt, and he asked again. “So what?”

“So . . . so small,” she finished.

“So small and what? Tacky?” Cam probed.

Malou heard him badgering the words from her and felt she no longer knew Cam. Maybe she never had. Her father's face, eyebrow cocked in disapproval, superimposed itself on his handsome features. Then came Ernie's face, his round glasses two circles of light as he told Malou his worst suspicions about Cam. Behind Cam were the boxlike houses, crammed one against the other, that meant everything to him. Certainly far more than she could ever mean. She remembered him as he'd been on the racquetball court, a relentless predator who played to win or didn't play at all.

“Yes,” she agreed, “tacky.”

“I had a terrible feeling that you'd see the houses that way.” Regret was the dominant emotion in Cam's voice. He turned away from her to stare out at the row upon row of identical house frames cramped together. When he spoke, his voice had the flat monotony of his project. “I had a chance to see where you grew up today. Would you like to see where
I
grew up?”

Cam didn't pause at her puzzled expression. “Well, just go to any movie that takes place in a big city slum. Watch any TV show where kids play in the street and their big brothers shoot heroin in abandoned buildings and their parents never have enough time or money or
love for them. That's
my
neighborhood, Malou. That's where
I
grew up. There wasn't chamber music playing in the background; there was the sound of the guy next door beating up his wife, and ambulance sirens and bottles breaking on concrete. That was where
I
grew up.”

“Cam, I . . .” Malou didn't know what to say, how to answer the pain that was still raw and fresh on Cam's face. She knew he'd grown up in the city and come a long way from his beginnings, but she'd never really stopped and thought about just how far he had come.