A Song in the Daylight. Paullina Simons

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      Larissa rushed to Pingry in the morning to sit with Sheila and Leroy and line by line edit Much Ado down to high school production size, chewing the pencil between her teeth, mindful of the time, ten, eleven, nearly noon.

      “I gotta run, guys,” she finally said.

      “But we’re not done!”

      “Can you finish up? You have some very good ideas. Just a couple of things: Sheila, don’t cut too many of Don Pedro’s lines; he is after all the conscience of the play. And Leroy, same goes for Benedick, who is the hero. Even in a comedy that role is given some prominence.”

      “Um, did I cut something you didn’t want me to?” asked Leroy, sensing a rebuke.

      “I’m thinking you should probably keep the line when Benedick says, All hearts in love speak their own tongue,” Larissa said with a smile, counting out the beats before she could bound out of doors. “But otherwise you’re doing great. See you tomorrow.” My merry day isn’t long enough despite what Shakespeare says, she thought, seeking comfort in math, 5.2 miles in twelve splendid minutes.

      She was a few minutes past crisp and windy March noon when she found her Jag in the drive, but Kai not in it. Did he leave already? She saw the back gate by the garage ajar and when she walked around the side of the house to the back, she found Kai chasing Riot all over her yard.

      “He was barking at me,” Kai said, running up to her, panting. “I petted him, but he clearly had other things in mind. Not a very ferocious dog, is he?”

      “No, she isn’t,” said Larissa. “She is a mashed potato. She would show you to the good silver if we had any.”

      “Come on,” he said, even the whites of his teeth teasing her, “you must, in that house. What’s her name anyway?”

      “Riot. Like you, we thought she was a boy.”

      Riot was bumping Kai’s knees with her head, having brought the three-foot stick back. Kai wrested it away, threw it for her, and then chased her across the yard, yelling, “Riot! Give it! Give it back!” It was Riot’s favorite game. Pretending to fetch the stick and then being chased by a human for it. She could play it all day. How did Kai instinctively know this? Seeing him run after her dog in her back yard, like a carefree kid, filled Larissa with a troubling heaviness on this blustery day, like the new leaves were clogging up the drains of her heart.

      “Hey, you want a lemonade?” Did she even have lemonade?

      “How about ice water?”

      She left him with Riot and went into her kitchen. As she fixed him a glass, she watched him from the window. There was such young joy in his movements.

      He came in flushed and perspiring. “What am I going to do with my shirt?” he said. “I look like I’ve been rolling in it.”

      He took the drink from her hands, gulped it down, chewed the ice. “We never had a dog,” he said. “We lived in an apartment; hard to keep a dog in the apartment. But I love dogs.”

      “Clearly they also enjoy your company.” Riot was standing on her back paws at the door, banging on the screen with her front paws, as if to say, Get back out here, wimp.

      “What a great dog.” Kai drummed on the counter, looking around Larissa’s kitchen.

      She stood in her quiet house, around her clean black granite and white cabinets and watched him get his work face back. He was usually so composed; now suddenly he was panting. There was something vulnerably undeniably human about it.

      “Well, the nav looks pretty good. Have you seen it?”

      “No, I came straight in the back.”

      “You want me to show you how to use it?”

      “Sure.”

      “Come,” he said. “Because I’ve got to start heading back. I have an appointment at one. What time is it?”

      “Twelve thirty.”

      “Yeah, I gotta run. Normally I don’t schedule anything for lunch, but this is a sure sale, the widowed sixty-year-old man wants to buy a Jag for his thirty-year-old girlfriend.”

      “Isn’t that a bit of an overkill?”

      Kai grinned naughtily. “How else,” he said, “is he going to get her to sleep with him?”

      And in the afternoon Larissa stood in front of the mirror in the front hall, staring severely into her face, into her eyes, while the ice cream melted in the plastic bags, still in the trunk of her Jag. A small thing that might eventually be noticed by the discerning youngest members of her family, those who enjoyed eating ice cream. Mom, they might say, why does the ice cream always taste like it’s been melted and refrozen? Why are you bringing home melted ice cream? How long is the drive from King’s, Mom? Isn’t it just four minutes? Does ice cream melt this fast? What are you doing with your afternoons that you need to keep standing in front of the mirror while our precious ice cream turns to heavy cream?

      One thing Larissa did not do as the ice cream pooled on her Jaguar floor was write to Che. Dear Che, help me. How do I extricate myself from this awful thing I’m falling into, a thing made geometrically more awful by the stark truth of it: I don’t even write you this so-called letter asking for instructions on self-extrication. I rationalize it away like a college grad, a slightly mocking adult who can reason. I say, how in the world is Che going to help me? She can’t even help herself with Lorenzo. That’s what I say. But the real reason I can’t write to you is because I don’t want to, and that’s worse even than sitting in the car, the knowledge of my unashamed and actualized self. СКАЧАТЬ