So Much for That. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ was always proud to be seen with her in the company of other men and their washed-out, lumpy wives, but here at home the only adult for Carol to be better looking than was her husband. He wasn’t outright ugly or anything, but he worried that they were one of those couples about whom other people wondered in private, Carol’s a knockout, but what did she ever see in him? Why would such a fox pick a short, stocky working-class stiff with hair on his shoulders? He’d read somewhere that one of the things that made for a successful marriage was that both parties were roughly the same level of physical attractiveness, which had made him nervous. Most men would think him crazy, but he wished she were a shade homelier. The fact that homelier and homier shared so many letters didn’t seem a coincidence.

      Jackson laid out plates for the kids, catching Flicka’s look of dread. Sausage and peppers was one of Carol’s signature dishes, always a crowd-pleaser, but fennel seed and garlic were wasted on Flicka. With little sense of smell and a tongue smooth as shoehorn, she couldn’t taste for shit. She may have learned, painstakingly, to fold down her epiglottis to prevent food from leaking into the trachea, but she still chewed every bite so long that she might have been gnawing her way through the table itself, and if her mother turned her back for an instant she’d scrape the remains of her plate in the trash. The weird truth was that she made no association between hunger and food. Accordingly, she found the amount of time squandered on cooking bafflingly disproportionate. The cultural folderol to do with eating – separate salad bowls and fish forks, anguish over orders in restaurants, shared disappointment over a soggy homemade pizza crust that was keen enough to ruin an evening – was as impenetrable to Flicka as the sacrificial rituals of an arcane animist cult. Her chunky sister’s stuffing down chocolate when the organism didn’t strictly require more calories seemed simply nonsensical, as if Heather were continuing to squeeze the nozzle when gas was bubbling out the cap and running down the side of the car.

      “Flicka, I made you a separate portion, without any sauce.”

      “Keep it,” said Flicka sullenly. “I can just load in a can of Compleat.”

      “I don’t want to have this fight with you every night.” Carol’s delivery was so smooth that anyone listening would have thought, what fight?

      “Yeah, yeah, the family that swallows together stays together. Makes a lot of sense.”

      “Your feeding therapist says you have to try to eat something every day, and that serving is very small. Being able to eat even a little bit is important for making friends.”

      Flicka’s intended snort came out more like a gurgle, and she wiped the drool from her chin with the terrycloth sweatband on her right wrist. Since it was always soaked, the rash underneath had grown chronic. “What friends?”

      “We pay for that therapist out of our own pockets—”

      “Yeah, well how’d you like some goon sticking their fingers in your mouth all the time? Karen Berkley’s not for me, but for you—”

      “Just eat it.” Good Lord, Carol almost sounded flustered.

      After filching into her school backpack for a large battered Ziploc, Flicka pulled herself up with Carol’s cornflower-print curtains and lurched to the small pan of undressed sausage and peppers on the counter. Before Carol could stop her, she’d upended the pan in the blender, sloshed in two mugs of water, and turned the appliance on high. The meal churned to an aerated brownish pink that immediately put Jackson off his dinner. With a malignant glint in the Vaseline around her eyes, she fastened the wide-bore syringe to its clear extension tubing, the other end of which she connected to the capped plastic port on her stomach – one not much different from the screw-off pour spouts on cartons of Tropicana. She removed the plunger and drained a measure of the blitzed pink gunk into the plastic syringe. Its clamp released, the tube’s translucence made it all too easy to follow the progress of the vomit-colored drizzle. Flick raised the syringe high in her right hand, with a victorious look on her face, like the goddamned Statue of Liberty.

      Okay, it was hostile. Rubbing salt in the insult, Flicka announced, “I’m eating it.”

      “That tubing will be very difficult to clean,” said Carol, giving in to a hint of iciness as the phone began to ring. “Sweetheart, could you please get that? It seems I have some tidying up to do.”

      Well, that’s that,” Jackson announced curtly on return to the kitchen. “He’s not coming.”

      “He’s not coming, or he’s not going?”

      “Neither.”

      Carol fetched two more plates, and he caught a flicker in her face.

      “So what makes you so fucking happy about that?”

      “I didn’t say anything!”

      “You’re glad, aren’t you?”

      Carol nodded discreetly in Flicka’s direction, and shook her head. He may have been shouting. “I’m glad,” she said, her voice like a spatula spreading cream-cheese icing, “for Glynis.”

      “Don’t be.”

      Though Handy Randy had expanded into other boroughs, the main office and supply warehouse were still on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, less than a mile from Windsor Terrace. Since he could walk to work, it wasn’t hard for Jackson to arrive early the following Monday, hoping to ensure that when Shep walked in the wisecracks would keep to a minimum. He deliberately projected a protective air of pent-up explosiveness and impending violence, which under the circumstances came naturally enough. Still, the atmosphere in the office was of barely suppressed hilarity; the accountant, the Web page designer, the dispatcher – everyone down to the receptionist wore expressions as if they were stuffing fists in their mouths to keep from busting out laughing. When Shep did walk in, he didn’t appear to make anything of the fact that the rest of the staff suddenly fell silent, and he glided toward his cubicle with a robotic passivity that seemed familiar; maybe Shep and Carol had something temperamental in common. No matter what life threw at him – “life” was a gentle way of putting it; other people, more like it – Shep absorbed it, like that blithe, look-the-other way shit his family pulled when he paid for his mother’s funeral, from casket to pâté, as if covering all those expenses was like farting and you didn’t mention it in polite company. When Mark, the website guy whom Jackson had put in his place on Friday, asked archly, “What, no suntan?” Shep returned mildly that the weekend had been overcast. He sat at his terminal and checked his email for complaints; Jackson could tell at a glance from across the room that there were plenty.

      It was hot. Jackson had learned to wear short sleeves in the winter months, or he’d have come home drenched. Pogatchnik kept the heat cranked up full blast, if only to irritate Shep, who deplored the waste. According to their dickhead boss, waste was the point: a business that kept its premises tropical in January and arctic in August encouraged customers to feel confident that the enterprise was thriving. It was a sign of prosperity, just as fat used to be a badge of affluence: once you could afford to overeat; now you could afford to overheat. Shep had countered that he couldn’t understand why any red-blooded creature would be comfortable at eighty-five degrees in one season and fifty-five in another, but every position Shep ever took with Pogatchnik backfired, and the last time Shep had politely requested that they lower the thermostat the setting went up another two degrees. For that matter, just about every innovation Pogatchnik had installed was specifically tailored to goad Shep Knacker, down to the special seminar on “Getting Along with Difficult Co-Workers,” when Pogatchnik himself was the difficult co-worker.

      Their СКАЧАТЬ