Forty Signs of Rain (31 page)

“Good for you.”

“Yes, it’s fun. A good workout.”

“It makes you strong.”

“Well, the legs anyway. It’s good for legs.”

“Yes,” Frank agreed, and took the invitation to glance down at hers. She did as well, tucking her chin and looking as if inspecting something outside of herself. Her skirt had fallen so that the whole side of her left leg was exposed.

She said, “It bulks up the quads.”

Frank intended to agree by saying “Uh-huh,” but somehow the sound got interrupted, as if he had been tapped lightly on the solar plexus while making it, so that it came out “nnnnn,” like a short hum or purr. A little moan of longing, in fact, at the sight of such long strong legs, all that smooth skin, the sweet curve of the underthigh. Her knees stood distinctly higher than his.

He looked up to find her grinning at him. He hunched his shoulders and looked away just a touch, yes, guilty as charged, feeling the corners of his mouth tug up in the helpless smile of someone caught in the act. What could he say, she had great legs.

Now she was watching him with an interrogatory gaze, searching his face for something specific, it seemed, her eyes alight with mischief, amused. It was a look that had a whole person in it.

And she must have liked something about what she saw, because she leaned his way, into his shoulder, and then pressed farther in and stretched her head toward his and kissed him.

“Mmm,” he purred, kissing back. He shifted around the better to face her, his body moving without volition. She was shifting too. She pulled back briefly to look again in his eyes, then she smiled broadly and shifted into his arms. Their kiss grew more and more passionate, they were like teenagers making out. They flew off into that pocket universe of bliss. Time passed, Frank’s thoughts scattered, he was absorbed in the feel of her mouth, her lips on his, her tongue, the awkwardness of their embrace. It was very hot. They were both literally dripping with sweat; their kisses tasted salty. Frank slid a hand under her skirt. She hummed and then shifted onto one knee and over onto him, straddling him. They kissed harder than ever.

The elevator phone rang.

She sat up. “Oops,” she said, catching her breath. Her face was flushed and she looked gorgeous. She reached up and behind her and grabbed the receiver, staying solidly on him.

“Hello?” she said into the phone. Frank flexed under her and she put a hand to his chest to stop him.

“Oh yeah, we’re here,” she said. “You guys got here fast.” She listened and quickly laughed, “No, I don’t suppose you do hear that very often.” She glanced down at Frank to share a complicit smile, and it was in that moment that Frank felt the strongest bond of all with her. They were a pair in the world, and no one else knew it but them.

“Yeah sure—we’ll be here!”

She rolled off him as she hung up. “They say they’ve got it fixed and we’re on our way up.”

“Damn it.”

“I know.”

They stood. She brushed down her skirt. They felt a few jerks as the elevator started up again.

“Wow, look at us. We are just
dripping.”

“We would have been no matter what. It’s hot in here.”

“True.” She reached up to straighten his hair and then they were kissing again, banging against the wall in a sudden blaze of passion, stronger than ever. Then she pushed him away, saying breathlessly, “Okay, no more, we’re almost there. The door must be about to open.”

“True.”

Confirming the thought, the elevator began its characteristic slow-motion deceleration. Frank took a deep breath, blew it out, tried to pull himself together. He felt flushed, his skin was tingling. He looked at her. She was almost as tall as he was.

She laughed. “They’re gonna bust us for sure.”

The elevator stopped. The doors jerked open. They were still a foot below street level, but it was an easy step up and out.

Before them stood three men, two in workers’ coveralls, one in a Metro uniform.

The one in the uniform held a clipboard. “Y’all okay?” he said to them.

“Yeah” “We’re fine” they said together.

Everyone stood there for a second.

“Must have been hot in there,” the uniformed one remarked.

The three black men stared at them curiously.

“It was,” Frank said.

“But not much different than out here,” his companion quickly added, and they all laughed. It was true, getting out had not made any marked change. It was like stepping from one sauna to another. Their rescuers were also sweating profusely. Yes—the open air of a Washington, D.C., evening was indistinguishable from the inside of an elevator stuck deep underground. This was their world: and so they laughed.

They were on the sidewalk flanking Wisconsin Avenue, next to the elevator box and the old post office. Passersby glanced at them. The foreman gave the woman his clipboard. “If you’d fill out and sign the report, please. Thanks. Looks like it was about half an hour from your call to when we pulled you.”

“Pretty fast,” the woman said, reading the text on her form before filling in some blanks and signing. “It didn’t even seem that long.” She looked at her watch. “All right, well—thanks very much.” She faced Frank, extended a hand. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Yes, it was,” Frank said, shaking her hand, struggling for words, struggling to think. In front of these witnesses nothing came to him, and she turned and walked south on Wisconsin. Frank felt constrained by the gazes of the three men; all would be revealed if he were to run after her and ask for her name, her phone number, and besides now the foreman was holding the clipboard out to him, and it occurred to him that he could read what she had written down there.

But it was a fresh form, and he looked up to see that down the street she was turning right, onto one of the smaller streets west of Wisconsin.

The foreman watched him impassively while the technicians went back to the elevator.

Frank gestured at the clipboard. “Can I get that woman’s name, please?”

The man frowned, surprised, and shook his head. “Not allowed to,” he said. “It’s a law.”

Frank felt his stomach sink. There had to be a physiological basis for that feeling, some loosening of the gut as fear or shock prepared the
body for fight-or-flight. Flight in this case. “But I need to get in touch with her again,” he said.

The man stared at him, stone-faced. He had to have worked on that look in a mirror, it was like something out of the movies. Samuel L. Jackson perhaps.

“Should have thought of that when you was stuck with her,” he said, sensibly enough. He gestured in the direction she had gone. “You could probably still catch her.”

Released by these words Frank took off, first walking fast, then, after he turned right on the street she had taken, running. He looked forward down the street for her black skirt, white blouse, short brown hair; there was no sign of her. He began sweating hard again, a kind of panic response. How far could she have gotten? What had she said she was late for? He couldn’t remember—horribly, his mind seemed to have blurred on much that she had said before they started kissing. He needed to know all that now! It was like some memory experiment foisted on undergraduates, how much could you remember of the incidents right before a shock? Not much! The experiment had worked like a charm.

But then he found the memory, and realized that it was not blurred at all, that on the contrary it was intensely detailed, at least up until the point when their legs had touched, at which point he could still remember perfectly, but only the feel on the outside of his knee, not their words. He went back before that, rehearsed it, relived it—cyclist, triathlon, one mile twenty mile ten k. Good for the legs, oh my God was it. He had to find her!

There was no sign of her at all. By now he was on Woodson, running left and right, looking down all the little side streets and into shop windows, feeling more and more desperate. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. He had lost her.

It started to rain.

T
HE DOORBELL rang. Anna went to the door and opened it. “Frank! Wow, you’re soaked.” He must have been caught in the downpour that had begun about half an hour before, and was already mostly finished. It was odd he hadn’t taken shelter during the worst of it. He looked like he had dived into a swimming pool with all his clothes on.

“Don’t worry,” she said as he hesitated on the porch, dripping like a statue in a fountain. “Here, you need a towel for your face.” She provided one from the vestibule’s coat closet. “The rain really got you.”

“Yeah.”

She was somewhat surprised to see him. She had thought he was uninterested in the Khembalis, even slightly dismissive of them. And he had sat through the afternoon’s lecture wearing one of his signature looks—he had a kind of Jon Gruden face, able to express fifty minute gradations of displeasure, and the one at the lecture had been the one that said “I’m keeping my eyes from rolling in my head only by the greatest of efforts.” Not the most pleasant of expressions on anyone’s face, and it had only gotten worse as the lecture went on, until eventually he had looked stunned and off in his own world.

On the other hand, he had gone to it. He had left in silence, obviously thinking something over. And now here he was.

So Anna was pleased. If the Khembalis could capture Frank’s interest, they should be able to do it with any scientist. Frank was the hardest case she knew.

Now he seemed slightly disoriented by his drenching. He was shaking his head ruefully.

Anna said, “Do you want to change into one of Charlie’s shirts?”

“No, I’ll be all right. I’ll steam dry.” Then he lifted his arms and looked down. “Well—maybe a shirt I guess. Will his fit me?”

“Sure, you’re only just a bit bigger than he is.”

She went upstairs to get one, calling down, “The others should be here any minute. There was flooding on Wisconsin, apparently, and some problems with the Metro.”

“I know about those, I got caught in one!”

“You’re kidding! What happened?” She came down with one of Charlie’s bigger T-shirts.

“The elevator I was in got stuck halfway up.”

“Oh no! For how long?”

“About half an hour I guess.”

“Jesus. That must have been spooky. Were you by yourself?”

“No, there was someone else, a woman. We got to talking, and so the time passed fast. It was interesting.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yes. It was. Only I didn’t get her name, and then when we got out they had forms for us to fill out and, and she took off while I was doing mine, so I never caught what hers was. And then the guy from the Metro wouldn’t give it to me from her form, so now I’m kicking myself, because—well. I’d like to talk to her again.”

Anna inspected him, startled by this story. He was looking past her abstractedly, perhaps remembering the incident. He noticed her gaze and grinned, and this startled her once again, because it was a real smile. Always before Frank’s smile had been a skeptical thing, so ironic and
knowing that only one side of his mouth tugged back. Now he was like a stroke victim who had recovered the use of the damaged side of his face.

It was a nice sight, and it had to have been because of this woman he had met. Anna felt a sudden surge of affection for him. They had worked together for quite some time, and that kind of collaboration can take two people into a realm of shared experience that is not like family or marriage but rather some other kind of bond that can be quite deep. A friendship formed in the world of thought. Maybe they were always that way. Anyway he looked happy, and she was happy to see it.

“This woman filled out a form, you say?”

“Yeah.”

“So you can find out.”

“They wouldn’t let me look at it.”

“No, but you’ll be able to get to it somehow.”

“You think so?”

Now she had his complete attention. “Sure. Get a reporter from the
Post
to help you, or an archival detective, or someone from the Metro. Or from Homeland Security for that matter. The fact you were in there with her, that might be the way to get it, I don’t know. But as long as it’s written down, something will work. That’s informatics, right?”

“True.” He smiled again, looking quite happy. Then he took Charlie’s shirt from her and walked around toward the kitchen while changing into it. He took another towel from her and toweled off his head. “Thanks. Here, can I put this in your dryer? Down in the basement, right?” He stepped over the baby gate, went downstairs. “Thanks Anna,” he called back up to her. “I feel better now.” When he came back up, the sound of the dryer on behind him, he smiled again. “A lot better.”

“You must have liked this woman!”

“I did. It’s true, I did. I can’t believe I didn’t get her name!”

“You will. Want a beer?”

“You bet I do.”

“In the door of the fridge. Oops, there’s the door again, here come the rest.”

——

Soon the Khembalis and many other friends and acquaintances from NSF filled the Quiblers’ little living room and the dining room flanking it, and the kitchen beyond the dining room. Anna rushed back and forth from the yellow kitchen through the dining room to the living room, carrying drinks and trays of food. She enjoyed this, and was doing it more than usual to keep Charlie from doing too much and inflaming his poison ivy. As she hurried around she enjoyed seeing Joe playing with Drepung, and Nick discussing Antarctic dinosaurs with Curt from the office right above hers; he was one of the U.S. Antarctic Program managers. That NSF also ran one of the continents of the world was something she tended to forget, but Curt had come to the talk, and liked it. “These Buddhist guys would go over big in McMurdo,” he told Nick. Meanwhile Charlie, skin devastated to a brown crust across wide regions of his neck and face, eyes brilliantly bloodshot with sleep deprivation and steroids, was absorbed in conversation with Sucandra. Then he noticed her running around and joined her in the kitchen to help. “I gave Frank one of your shirts,” she told him.

“I saw. He said he got soaked.”

“Yes. I think he was chasing around after a woman he met on the Metro.”