Chapter Fifteen - Conrad
Well, here we go. After cleaning up breakfast and getting dressed, we go for a walk in the woods. There’s something I want to show her. As we step onto the trail I take her hand. When she looks at me, I say, “We have to know what we’re working with. People hold hands, right?”
“Yes.” There’s a lightness in her tone that I love. “So let’s examine the sensation, professor. How does it make you feel?”
It feels like she’s delicate. Her hand is so small. The bones are fragile. “It reminds me of how small you are. I like the feeling of your skin on mine. It makes me feel protective. I don’t know how you feel about the white knights that want to swoop in and save every woman, but I mean it. I’m bigger than you and holding your hand makes me feel like I’ve taken responsibility for you.”
“But,” she says, stepping ahead of me and pulling me along, “It looks like I’m leading you. That means I’m in charge, right?”
I catch up. “Maybe. I’ll make a note of it.” The leaves are changing. The forest is a riot of vivid color.
“Where are we going?”
“I know a spot.” I haven’t been out here in a long time, and there’s a reason for that. But there’s a peace that you can’t feel anywhere else. “I’ve always loved stepping into the trees,” I say. “Doesn’t it just make you feel like you should whisper? It’s kind of like going to church.”
“Are you a church going lad?”
“Oh no, not me. My parents took me when I was a kid. Catholic. I don’t have an ax to grind, but it wasn’t for me. Hey, look.” I point up the trail, which is opening into a clearing. It’s been so long, but the giddiness comes back like I stepped into a time machine.
“Whoa!” says Maya, stepping into the clearing. She looks up, and up, and around.
The clearing is ringed with totem poles. They’re each at least 50 feet high, but some are upwards of 100. My favorite is painted blue, yellow, and red. “You’re not going to believe this,” I say, “But my dad carved these.”
“No way!” She’s practically hypnotized and I know the feeling. “What got him into that?”
“This all used to be a Boy Scout camp,” I say. “He bought the land and developed it as a surprise for a friend. He just loved the scout organization. Family tradition.”
“That’s quite a surprise.”
“He was quite a friend,” I say. “But even for all the money we had, my dad liked to work with his hands. He was always making things. He didn’t like to just ‘do deals,’ as he put it. Didn’t really fit into the knowledge economy. So we’d come out here, chop down a tree, and he’d get to work. It’s incredible.”
She runs her hand along the beak of a fierce-looking head. Then she looks at me. “How exactly does this fit into our experiment?”
“They say that one’s parents are the windows to the soul, right?”
“No, I think that’s eyes.”
“I like mine better. So, I’ll go first. My relationship with my parents was pretty near perfect. It might have been helpful if they had made me struggle a little more. I work because I like to work, but I think they would have been happy to let me sit around and read or play all the time if I had been the kind of kid who just wants to be idle.”
“I’m sure they were wonderful,” she says. “This is good data.”
“What about you?”
Maya frowns. “There’s not much to say. I had a good, short relationship with them. They died when I was ten years old.”
“Maya. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Of all things, it was a boating accident. I was staying with my grandmother while they were deep-sea fishing. That was my dad’s real passion. I didn’t go because I get motion sick on the water. If I had, then…anyway, my grandmother raised me. I had a happy childhood, I just didn’t get to have it with my parents for as long as I would have wanted.” She looks up at the poles again. “My dad would have loved this. He said that people who can’t work with their hands don’t know what they’re worth.”
“What did he do?”
Maya doubles over laughing. “Actually, he was a journalist. He typed, but it wasn’t what I would call working with his hands. His soul wasn’t shaped in a workshop or anything.” She’s quiet for a moment. Then she smiles and walks towards me. “If I want to jump your bones right now, does that mean we’re falling in love? Or am I just feeling crazy because you make me feel crazy?”
I pull her close and squeeze her ass. “It could be a little of both. I have to say, I feel similarly. We should probably wait and see if it fades.” I let her go, take her hand, and keep walking. “I’ve got something else to show you.”
“Aw. Can’t you show me out here? I think I’m ready to see it again.”
Maya is turning out to be far better than I could have guessed, even though I’ve been working off of the most sophisticated models known to mankind. Brilliant, gorgeous, and freaky. But I’m being serious when I say, “Not here. I don’t think I could live with myself if I did anything dirty in this place. But that doesn’t mean I’m forgetting.” I pull her into the trees and we keep walking. The silence is comfortable. Most people don’t know how to be quiet. Maya seems as if she’s totally happy with her own thoughts. Must be nice.
“So what’s the deal with Zima?” she says finally.
I start laughing. “Zima makes me laugh. She does her job okay, but I keep her around because I like her, and also because she reminds me of something.”
“What’s that?”
“That I don’t want to be used. Zima’s a user. Just trust me on this one. And I’ll tell you something else. People who are willing to live their lives with someone else’s money don’t know what they could aspire to. It cuts off their ambitions. And I want to see people reach for things they want.”
The way I reach for her now. Now that we’re out of the clearing, I have no guilt and wrapping my arms around her and kissing her.