Free The Golden Fleece by Brian Stableford Page B

was, because your existence proved me right...but the situation wasn’t conducive to that.”
     
    “Do you always talk like that?” she asked, with a hint of asperity. “Analytical...pernickety...pedantic.”
     
    “Yes,” Adrian told her. “I try not to, but the scientific turn of mind keeps coming through. People call it pedantic, but it’s not.” Only a pedant, he knew, would pull people up on the propriety of their use of the term “pedantic,” but he didn’t voice the joke. It was hardly the time.
     
    “I’m the one that’s at fault,” she told him, with a sigh. “If I’d had a more scientific turn of mind...I’d have understood too. If I’d thought like you, I’d probably have gone into advertising as well. What a marriage I’d have had then eh? Jason and I would be partners instead of...not that it would be any guarantee of happiness. Are you happy, Adrian?”
     
    “No,” he relied, bluntly.
     
    She looked at him carefully: not hard, the way she had looked at him up at the Manse, but curiously, inquisitively. He was not the only one, he realized, who had been led by their encounter to re-examine all the decisions he had made, and wonder what might have happened if the flip of the coin had gone the other way.
     
    “Jason says you’re not gay,” she told him, brutally, “just socially retarded. He had to find out—even in this day and age, closeted gays can be vulnerable to blackmail.”
     
    “I don’t mind,” Adrian said. “My sexuality isn’t an issue.”
     
    “Which is exactly what’s puzzling. Has it anything to do with your supersight?”
     
    Adrian thought long and hard about dropping out of the conversation altogether, but he felt that he had an obligation to help Jason Jarndyke’s wife, if he could—to help her to understand, that is.
     
    “Indirectly,” he said. “Although it was nothing visible, it still marked me out as different—slightly alien. You must have experienced that too. It’s not an insuperable obstacle in itself, even when coupled with the social awkwardness that often comes with a scientific mind, but I had my looks to contend with too.”
     
    “You’re quite pretty, in a way,” she said.
     
    “Exactly,” he said. “I’ve always looked five years younger than I am—not such a handicap now that I’m in my late twenties, and I’ll probably be grateful when I’m forty, but as an adolescent... what teenage girl wants to become involved with someone who looks five years younger than she is? It didn’t take long to figure out that I wasn’t cut out for that side of life, so I decided to concentrate on the other. A little obsession can be a good thing, in science. So can a measure of oblivion to potential distractions.”
     
    She didn’t sympathize, but she did nod her head to show that she could follow the argument. “It’s different for girls,” she observed, stating the obvious. “Same problem, in a way— totally different consequences.”
     
    Adrian nodded his head, to show that he understood. What man didn’t want to become involved with a woman who looked five, ten or twenty years younger than he was?
     
    “Ungrateful bitch, aren’t I?” she said. “Four women out of five would kill for my looks, and I just resent the way they define me. I could probably have done with your mentality—but I didn’t have that sort of ability, any more than I could cut it as a painter. I have everything I need to be happy—loving husband, nice kids, more money than Croesus—but I’m not. The fault isn’t in my stars but in me. I hid it away, where Jason couldn’t see it—where no one could see it. But you can, can’t you? And you can’t even lie about it, like a normal person. You had to tell me.”
     
    “I could never understand how liars kept their stories straight,” Adrian muttered. “It always seemed simpler just to tell the truth. Normally, it doesn’t cause any difficulties.”
     
    “Bullshit,” she retorted.