Tilting the Balance

“It does feel better without overshoes,” he said. He guided himself into her. “Oh, God, does it!” Their mouths met, clung. Neither of them said anything then, not with words.

“I always said you were a gentleman, Sam,” Barbara told him as he rolled off her: “You keep your weight on your elbows.” He snorted. She said, “Don’t go away now.”

“I wasn’t going anywhere, not without you.” He put an arm around her, drew her close. She snuggled against him. He liked that. In some ways, it seemed more intimate than making love. You could make love with a stranger; he’d done it in a fair number of minor-league whorehouses in minor-league towns. But to snuggle with somebody, it had to be somebody who really mattered to you.

As if she’d picked the thought out of his head, Barbara said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too, hon.” His arms tightened around her. “I’m glad we’re married.” That seemed just the right thing to say on a wedding night.

“So am I.” Barbara ran the palm of her hand along his cheek. “Even if you are scratchy,” she added. He tensed, ready to grab her; sometimes when she made jokes in bed, she’d poke him in the ribs. Not tonight-she turned serious instead. “You made exactly the right toast this afternoon. ‘Life goes on’… It has to, doesn’t it?”

“That’s what I think, anyhow.” Yeager wasn’t sure whether she was asking him or trying to convince herself. She still couldn’t be easy in her mind about her first husband. He had to be dead, but still…

“You have the right way of looking at things,” Barbara said, serious still. “Life isn’t always neat; it’s not orderly; you can’t always plan it and make it come out the way you think it’s supposed to. Things happen that nobody would expect-”

“Well, sure,” Yeager said. “The war made the whole world crazy, and then the Lizards on top of that-”

“Those are the big things,” she broke in. “As you say, they change the whole world. But little things can turn your life in new directions, too. Everybody reads Chaucer in high-school English, but when I did, he just seemed the most fascinating writer I’d ever come across. I started trying to learn more about his time, and about other people who were writing then… and so I ended up in graduate school at Berkeley in medieval literature. If I hadn’t been there, I never would have met Jens, I never would have come to Chicago-” She leaned up and kissed him. “I never would have met you.”

“Little things,” Sam repeated. “Ten, eleven years ago, I was playing for Birmingham down in the Southern Association. That’s Class A-1 ball, the second highest class in the minor leagues. I was playing pretty well, I wasn’t that old-if things had broken right, I might have made the big leagues. Things broke, all right. About halfway through the season, I broke my ankle. It cost me the rest of the year, and I wasn’t the same ballplayer afterwards. I kept at it-never found anything I’d rather do-but I knew I wasn’t going anywhere any more. Just one of those things.”

“That’s just it.” She nodded against his chest. “Little things, things you’d never expect to matter, can turn up in the most surprising ways.”

“I’ll say.” Yeager nodded, too. “If I hadn’t read science fiction, I wouldn’t have gotten chosen to take our Lizard POWs back to Chicago or turned into their liaison man-and I wouldn’t have met you.”

To his relief, she didn’t make any cracks about his choice of reading; someone who dove into Chaucer for fun was liable to think of it as the literary equivalent of picking your nose at the dinner table. Instead, she said, “Jens always had trouble seeing that the little things could make-not a big difference, but a surprising difference. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“Mm-hmm.” Yeager kept his answer to a grunt. He didn’t have anything against Jens Larssen, but he didn’t want his ghost coming between them on their wedding night, either.

Barbara went on, “Jens wanted things just so, and thought they always had to be that way. Maybe it was because his work was so mathematically precise-I don’t know-but he thought the world operated that way, too. That sort of need for exactitude could be hard to live with sometimes.”

“Mm-hmm.” Sam grunted again, but something loosened in his chest even so. He never remembered her criticizing Jens before.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than she said, “I guess what I’m trying to tell you, Sam, is that I’m glad I’m with you. Taking things as they come is easier than trying to fit everything that happens into some pattern you’ve worked out.”

“That calls for a kiss,” he said, and bent his head down to hers. She responded eagerly. He felt himself stirring, and knew a certain amount of pride: if you couldn’t wear yourself out on your wedding night, when were you supposed to?

Barbara felt him stirring, too. “What have we here?” she said when the kiss finally broke. She reached between them to find out. Yeager’s lips trailed down her neck toward her breasts again. Her hand tightened on him. His found the dampness between her legs.