1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:07,100 Unit 5. Too Much of a Good Thing? Page 126. Reading 1. 2 00:00:08,460 --> 00:00:11,540 Death Do Us Part by Robert Silverberg 3 00:00:11,540 --> 00:00:19,360 It was her first, his seventh. She was thirty-two, he was three hundred and sixty-three, 4 00:00:19,880 --> 00:00:26,440 the good old May-December number. They honeymooned in Venice, Nairobi, the Malaysia Pleasure Dome, 5 00:00:26,440 --> 00:00:33,440 and one of the posh L5 resorts, a shimmering, glassy sphere with round-the-clock sunlight 6 00:00:33,440 --> 00:00:39,320 and waterfalls that tumbled like cascades of diamonds. And then they came home to his 7 00:00:39,320 --> 00:00:45,500 lovely sky house, suspended on tremulous guy wires, a thousand meters above the Pacific, 8 00:00:45,980 --> 00:00:51,640 to begin the everyday part of their life together. Her friends couldn't get over it. 9 00:00:51,840 --> 00:00:55,220 He's ten times your age, they would exclaim. 10 00:00:55,740 --> 00:00:56,420 How could you not? 11 00:00:56,440 --> 00:01:02,840 You possibly want anybody that old. Maralisa admitted that marrying Leo was more of a lark 12 00:01:02,840 --> 00:01:10,080 for her than anything else. An impulsive thing. A sudden, impetuous leap. Marriages weren't forever, 13 00:01:10,280 --> 00:01:17,300 after all, just thirty or forty years, and then you moved along. But Leo was sweet, and kind, 14 00:01:17,740 --> 00:01:24,680 and actually quite sexy. And he had wanted her so much. He genuinely did seem to love her. 15 00:01:25,040 --> 00:01:26,400 Why should his age, 16 00:01:26,440 --> 00:01:32,220 be an issue? He didn't appear to be any older than thirty-five or so. These days, 17 00:01:32,440 --> 00:01:37,920 you could look as young as you like. Leo did his process faithfully and punctually, 18 00:01:38,320 --> 00:01:42,740 twice each decade, and it kept him as dashing and vigorous as a boy. 19 00:01:43,740 --> 00:01:50,800 There were little drawbacks, of course. Once upon a time, long, long ago, he had been a friend of 20 00:01:50,800 --> 00:01:56,200 Maralisa's great-grandmother. They might have even been lovers. She wasn't going to ask. 21 00:01:56,960 --> 00:02:00,700 Such things sometimes happened, and you simply had to work your way around them. 22 00:02:01,900 --> 00:02:05,340 And then also, he had an ex-wife on the scene. Number three, 23 00:02:05,760 --> 00:02:11,000 Katrine. Two hundred and forty-seven years old, and not looking a day over thirty. 24 00:02:11,580 --> 00:02:19,180 She was constantly hovering about. Leo still had warm feelings for her. A wonderfully dear woman. 25 00:02:19,280 --> 00:02:25,860 A good and loyal friend, he would say. When you get to know her, you'll be as fond of her as I am. 26 00:02:26,440 --> 00:02:33,600 That one was hard, all right. What was almost as bad, he had children three times Maralisa's age 27 00:02:33,600 --> 00:02:40,360 and more. One of them, the next to youngest, Fyodor, had an insufferable and presumptuous 28 00:02:40,360 --> 00:02:45,960 way of winking and sniggering at her. I want you to meet our father's newest toy, 29 00:02:46,640 --> 00:02:52,980 Fyodor said of her once, when yet another of Leo's centenarian sons, previously unsuspected 30 00:02:52,980 --> 00:02:56,420 by Maralisa, turned up. We get to play with her. 31 00:02:56,420 --> 00:03:02,400 When he's tired of her. Someday, Maralisa was going to pay him back for that. 32 00:03:03,560 --> 00:03:11,100 Still and all, she had no serious complaints. Leo was an ideal first husband. Wise, warm, 33 00:03:11,580 --> 00:03:17,520 loving, attentive, and generous. She felt nothing but the greatest tenderness for him. 34 00:03:18,360 --> 00:03:22,600 And then, too, he was so immeasurably experienced in the ways of the world. 35 00:03:23,240 --> 00:03:26,300 If being married to him was a little like being married to 36 00:03:26,300 --> 00:03:26,400 April, he would have been a little more of a man. But he was a little more of a woman. 37 00:03:26,420 --> 00:03:32,480 Abraham Lincoln or Augustus Caesar, well, so be it. They had been great men, and so was Leo. 38 00:03:33,160 --> 00:03:38,060 He was endlessly fascinating. He was like seven husbands rolled into one. 39 00:03:38,720 --> 00:03:42,020 She had no regrets. None at all. Not really. 40 00:03:43,260 --> 00:03:47,660 In the spring of 87, they go to Capri for their first anniversary. 41 00:03:48,620 --> 00:03:54,160 Their hotel is a reconstructed Roman villa on the southern slope of Monte Tiberio. 42 00:03:54,860 --> 00:03:56,160 Alabaster wall frescoes. 43 00:03:56,420 --> 00:04:01,780 Black and red. A brilliantly colored mosaic of sea creatures in the marble bathtub. 44 00:04:02,560 --> 00:04:05,680 A broad travertine terrace that looks out over the sea. 45 00:04:06,400 --> 00:04:11,240 They stand together in the darkness, staring at the awesome sparkle of the stars. 46 00:04:12,160 --> 00:04:18,720 A crescent moon slashes across the night. His arm is around her. Her head rests against his breast. 47 00:04:19,440 --> 00:04:23,620 Though she is a tall woman, Maralisa is barely heart-high to him. 48 00:04:24,460 --> 00:04:26,260 Tomorrow at sunrise, he says, he will be a man. 49 00:04:26,260 --> 00:04:28,220 He says, we'll see the Blue Grotto. 50 00:04:28,800 --> 00:04:33,720 And then in the afternoon, we'll hike down below here to the cave of the Mater Magna. 51 00:04:34,260 --> 00:04:41,280 I always get a shiver when I'm there, thinking about the ancient islanders who worshipped their goddess under that cliff, 52 00:04:41,880 --> 00:04:43,580 somewhere back in the Pleistocene. 53 00:04:44,220 --> 00:04:47,940 Their rites and rituals, the offerings they made to her. 54 00:04:49,040 --> 00:04:54,060 Is that when you first came here? she asks, keeping it light and sly. 55 00:04:54,300 --> 00:04:55,920 Somewhere in the Pleistocene? 56 00:04:56,260 --> 00:05:00,660 A little later than that, really. The Renaissance, I think it was. 57 00:05:01,260 --> 00:05:03,720 Leonardo and I traveled down together from Florence. 58 00:05:04,720 --> 00:05:07,320 You and Leonardo? You were like that? 59 00:05:08,060 --> 00:05:11,480 Like that, yes, but not like that, if you take my meaning. 60 00:05:12,840 --> 00:05:16,560 And Cosimo de' Medici, another one from the good old days. 61 00:05:17,280 --> 00:05:19,540 Cosimo gave such great parties, right? 62 00:05:20,480 --> 00:05:24,480 That was Lorenzo, he says. Lorenzo the Magnificent. 63 00:05:24,840 --> 00:05:25,800 Cosimo's grandson. 64 00:05:26,260 --> 00:05:29,360 Much more fun than the old man. You would have adored him. 65 00:05:30,140 --> 00:05:32,940 I almost think you're serious when you talk like that. 66 00:05:33,440 --> 00:05:35,960 I'm always serious, even when I'm not. 67 00:05:36,720 --> 00:05:38,340 His arm tightens around her. 68 00:05:38,840 --> 00:05:42,920 He leans forward and down and buries a kiss in her thick, dark hair. 69 00:05:43,760 --> 00:05:45,280 I love you, he whispers. 70 00:05:46,160 --> 00:05:47,880 I love you, she says. 71 00:05:48,340 --> 00:05:51,180 You're the best first husband a girl could want. 72 00:05:52,020 --> 00:05:55,080 You're the finest last wife a man could ever desire. 73 00:05:56,260 --> 00:05:58,080 The words skewer her. 74 00:05:58,940 --> 00:05:59,940 Last wife? 75 00:06:00,620 --> 00:06:04,520 Is he expecting to die in the next ten or twenty or thirty years? 76 00:06:05,500 --> 00:06:11,920 He is old, ancient, but nobody has any idea yet where the limits of the process lie. 77 00:06:12,620 --> 00:06:14,880 Five hundred years? A thousand? 78 00:06:15,680 --> 00:06:16,440 Who can say? 79 00:06:17,040 --> 00:06:23,400 No one able to afford the treatments has died a natural death yet in the four hundred years since the process was invented. 80 00:06:24,380 --> 00:06:26,140 Why, then, does he speak so normally? 81 00:06:26,140 --> 00:06:28,580 He speaks so knowingly of her as his last wife. 82 00:06:29,180 --> 00:06:33,820 He may live long enough to have seven, ten, fifty wives after her. 83 00:06:35,100 --> 00:06:37,540 Maralisa is silent a long while. 84 00:06:38,760 --> 00:06:42,680 Then she asks him, quietly, uncertainly, 85 00:06:42,980 --> 00:06:46,420 I don't understand why you said that. 86 00:06:47,380 --> 00:06:48,000 Said what? 87 00:06:48,680 --> 00:06:51,740 The thing about my being your last wife. 88 00:06:52,740 --> 00:06:54,240 He hesitates a moment. 89 00:06:54,240 --> 00:06:55,240 But why? 90 00:06:56,140 --> 00:06:58,720 Why would I ever want another, now that I have you? 91 00:06:59,720 --> 00:07:01,600 Am I so utterly perfect? 92 00:07:02,500 --> 00:07:03,540 I love you. 93 00:07:05,100 --> 00:07:09,860 You love Tedesca and Tane and Lavilda, too, she says. 94 00:07:10,620 --> 00:07:12,520 And Miole and Katrine. 95 00:07:13,100 --> 00:07:15,300 She is counting on her fingers in the darkness. 96 00:07:16,500 --> 00:07:18,580 One wife is missing from the list. 97 00:07:19,740 --> 00:07:21,440 And Siente. 98 00:07:22,340 --> 00:07:24,620 See? I know all their names. 99 00:07:25,260 --> 00:07:25,980 You must understand. 100 00:07:25,980 --> 00:07:28,280 You must have loved them, but the marriage ended anyway. 101 00:07:29,000 --> 00:07:29,920 They have to end. 102 00:07:30,500 --> 00:07:32,200 No matter how much you love a person, 103 00:07:32,580 --> 00:07:34,740 you can't keep a marriage going forever. 104 00:07:35,680 --> 00:07:36,880 How do you know that? 105 00:07:37,380 --> 00:07:38,260 I just do. 106 00:07:38,600 --> 00:07:39,640 Everybody knows it. 107 00:07:40,360 --> 00:07:44,040 I would like this marriage never to end, he tells her. 108 00:07:44,560 --> 00:07:47,520 I'd like it to go on and on and on. 109 00:07:47,880 --> 00:07:50,160 To continue to the end of time. 110 00:07:50,680 --> 00:07:51,460 Is that all right? 111 00:07:51,960 --> 00:07:54,320 Is such a sentiment permissible, do you think? 112 00:07:54,860 --> 00:07:55,820 What a romantic! 113 00:07:55,980 --> 00:07:57,240 Romantic you are, Leo. 114 00:07:58,160 --> 00:08:00,540 What else can I be but romantic tonight? 115 00:08:01,200 --> 00:08:05,880 This place, the spring night, the moon, the stars, the sea, 116 00:08:06,360 --> 00:08:08,420 the fragrance of the flowers in the air. 117 00:08:09,040 --> 00:08:09,940 Our anniversary. 118 00:08:11,000 --> 00:08:11,760 I love you. 119 00:08:12,380 --> 00:08:14,080 Nothing will ever end for us. 120 00:08:14,620 --> 00:08:14,960 Nothing. 121 00:08:16,040 --> 00:08:17,840 Can that really be so? 122 00:08:18,240 --> 00:08:19,020 She asks. 123 00:08:19,200 --> 00:08:20,460 Of course. 124 00:08:21,140 --> 00:08:22,200 Forever and ever. 125 00:08:22,640 --> 00:08:24,000 As it is this moment. 126 00:08:24,000 --> 00:08:28,660 She thinks from time to time of the men she will marry 127 00:08:28,660 --> 00:08:31,200 after she and Leo have gone their separate ways, 128 00:08:31,600 --> 00:08:32,780 for she knows that she will. 129 00:08:33,780 --> 00:08:35,980 Perhaps she'll stay with Leo for ten years, 130 00:08:36,520 --> 00:08:37,520 perhaps for fifty, 131 00:08:38,180 --> 00:08:38,980 but ultimately, 132 00:08:39,580 --> 00:08:41,900 despite all his assurances to the contrary, 133 00:08:42,500 --> 00:08:44,660 one or the other of them will want to move on. 134 00:08:45,300 --> 00:08:46,860 No one stays married forever. 135 00:08:47,740 --> 00:08:50,200 Fifteen, twenty years, that's the usual. 136 00:08:50,780 --> 00:08:52,340 Sixty or seventy tops. 137 00:08:53,200 --> 00:08:56,540 She'll marry a great athlete next, she decides, 138 00:08:56,880 --> 00:08:58,260 and then a philosopher, 139 00:08:58,800 --> 00:09:00,180 and a political leader, 140 00:09:00,880 --> 00:09:03,060 and then stay single for a few decades, 141 00:09:03,280 --> 00:09:05,060 just to clear her palate, so to speak. 142 00:09:05,500 --> 00:09:07,040 An intermezzo in her life. 143 00:09:07,560 --> 00:09:09,240 And when she wearies of that, 144 00:09:09,660 --> 00:09:11,820 she'll find someone entirely different. 145 00:09:12,400 --> 00:09:15,280 A simple, rugged man who likes to hunt, 146 00:09:15,820 --> 00:09:17,880 to work in the fields with his hands. 147 00:09:18,400 --> 00:09:21,940 And then a yachtsman with whom she'll sail the world. 148 00:09:22,340 --> 00:09:25,240 And then maybe when she's about three hundred, 149 00:09:25,660 --> 00:09:26,660 she'll marry a boy, 150 00:09:27,120 --> 00:09:29,260 an innocent of eighteen or nineteen, 151 00:09:29,840 --> 00:09:31,860 who hasn't even had his first prep yet. 152 00:09:32,520 --> 00:09:34,240 And then, then, 153 00:09:35,040 --> 00:09:36,360 a childish game. 154 00:09:36,940 --> 00:09:39,560 It always brings her to tears, eventually. 155 00:09:40,560 --> 00:09:43,860 The unknown husbands that wait for her in the misty future 156 00:09:43,860 --> 00:09:46,220 are vague, chilly phantoms. 157 00:09:46,900 --> 00:09:49,620 Fantasies, frightening and inimical. 158 00:09:50,080 --> 00:09:51,720 They're like swords that, 159 00:09:51,960 --> 00:09:52,320 will inevitably, 160 00:09:52,600 --> 00:09:54,360 fall between her and Leo. 161 00:09:54,880 --> 00:09:56,220 And she hates them for that. 162 00:09:57,240 --> 00:09:59,480 The thought of having the same husband 163 00:09:59,480 --> 00:10:01,740 for all the vast expanse of time 164 00:10:01,740 --> 00:10:02,960 that is the rest of her life 165 00:10:02,960 --> 00:10:04,040 is a little disturbing. 166 00:10:04,640 --> 00:10:07,420 It gives her a sense of walls closing in, 167 00:10:07,980 --> 00:10:10,880 and closing, and closing, and closing. 168 00:10:11,680 --> 00:10:14,580 But the thought of leaving Leo is even worse. 169 00:10:15,340 --> 00:10:16,620 Or of his leaving her. 170 00:10:17,680 --> 00:10:20,160 Maybe she isn't truly in love with him. 171 00:10:20,880 --> 00:10:22,200 At any rate, not as she imagines. 172 00:10:22,340 --> 00:10:24,160 Maybe she imagines love at its deepest to be. 173 00:10:24,860 --> 00:10:26,160 But she is happy with him. 174 00:10:26,840 --> 00:10:28,120 She wants to stay with him. 175 00:10:28,680 --> 00:10:30,780 She can't really envision parting with him 176 00:10:30,780 --> 00:10:32,380 and moving on to someone else. 177 00:10:33,300 --> 00:10:35,220 But of course she knows that she will. 178 00:10:36,060 --> 00:10:38,100 Everybody does in the fullness of time. 179 00:10:39,000 --> 00:10:39,480 Everybody. 180 00:10:41,280 --> 00:10:42,920 Leo is a sand painter. 181 00:10:43,760 --> 00:10:46,820 Sand painting is his fifteenth or twenth career. 182 00:10:47,580 --> 00:10:48,940 He has been an architect, 183 00:10:49,540 --> 00:10:50,540 an archaeologist, 184 00:10:50,540 --> 00:10:51,940 a space habitats developer, 185 00:10:52,340 --> 00:10:54,500 a professional gambler, 186 00:10:55,040 --> 00:10:55,800 an astronomer, 187 00:10:56,260 --> 00:10:59,340 and a number of other disparate and dazzling things. 188 00:10:59,900 --> 00:11:02,360 He reinvents himself every decade or two. 189 00:11:02,860 --> 00:11:05,660 That's as necessary to him as the process itself. 190 00:11:06,620 --> 00:11:08,240 Making money is never an issue, 191 00:11:08,640 --> 00:11:11,260 since he lives on the compounding interest of investments 192 00:11:11,260 --> 00:11:12,820 set aside centuries ago. 193 00:11:13,360 --> 00:11:14,880 But the fresh challenge, 194 00:11:15,280 --> 00:11:16,040 ah yes, 195 00:11:16,580 --> 00:11:18,540 always the fresh challenge. 196 00:11:20,750 --> 00:11:23,450 Maralisa hasn't entered on any career path yet. 197 00:11:23,910 --> 00:11:24,890 It's much too soon. 198 00:11:25,550 --> 00:11:28,190 She is, after all, still in her first life. 199 00:11:28,670 --> 00:11:29,990 Too young for the process. 200 00:11:30,610 --> 00:11:31,990 Merely in the prep stage yet. 201 00:11:32,510 --> 00:11:33,750 Just a child, really. 202 00:11:34,390 --> 00:11:36,190 She has dabbled in ceramics, 203 00:11:36,610 --> 00:11:37,550 written some poetry, 204 00:11:38,170 --> 00:11:39,450 composed a little music. 205 00:11:40,410 --> 00:11:43,310 Lately she has begun to think about studying economics, 206 00:11:43,810 --> 00:11:45,530 or perhaps Spanish literature. 207 00:11:46,390 --> 00:11:49,110 No doubt her actual choice of a path to follow 208 00:11:49,110 --> 00:11:51,010 will be very far from any of these. 209 00:11:51,570 --> 00:11:52,990 But there's time to decide. 210 00:11:53,590 --> 00:11:55,650 Oh, is there ever time.