We Are Unprepared. Meg Little Reilly

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      “You know, bracing for these big weather events, finding industrious solutions to things, living without some of our old comforts. You like things a little difficult.”

      She was complimenting me, but teasing, too. Since we’d started making real money, modern life was feeling a bit squishy for me, all morning espressos and personal trainers. I secretly feared that I was growing too attached to it all. A tiny alarm in the primal recesses of my brain had been going off, warning me to stay sharp and focused in case of future uncertainty. I never told Pia about this growing discomfort, but I should have guessed that she could sense it.

      “Fingers crossed for frozen pipes.” I smiled.

      We stayed outside until nearly eleven, building our plan for The Storms and laughing—flirting even—as we huddled together in solidarity. When I finally convinced Pia that it was time to go to bed, she took my hand and led me upstairs to our bedroom, where she instructed me to sit in a small antique chair to watch her slowly peel off each layer of her clothing.

      It would have been comical on a less beautiful woman as she unbuttoned her oversize flannel shirt and pulled off fading green cotton underwear, but it wasn’t. My physical response to Pia’s naked body hadn’t flagged in the years we’d been together. If anything, it had grown more intense as sex tapered off a little. When she was done undressing, she turned and walked her naked body to the bed to wait for me. Her ears and nose were still cold from the evening chill, but the rest of her body was warm, hot even. I attempted restraint at first, but that didn’t last, and what followed was the wild, forceful passion that we’d founded our relationship on years ago. Better even. We fucked like two people desperate to occupy one another. It was feral, afraid. Pia was alive, the weather was our common enemy and I was relieved.

      As she fell asleep beside me, my mind drifted back to our unconceived baby and the news of The Storms. I wasn’t ready for a baby, not then, but I loved Pia’s desire for one because it was the embodiment of my favorite things about her: a hunger for new beginnings, adventure and, above all, optimism. Whether there was a place for optimism in the stormy new world we inhabited, I didn’t know. And I wondered—for the first time in my life—whether this was still a world that babies wanted to be born into. And how could the answer to that question be anything other than an emphatic yes if we are to go on living wholeheartedly? Is there a moment at which the human race should decide not to perpetuate itself, or will we keep going until the universe decides that for us and just wipes us out? The latter seemed more likely. So I wondered how the universe might kill off our species, whether it would be instantaneous and painless or cruelly slow. Perhaps it was already happening at a pace just slow enough to go undetected. Were we at a beginning or an end?

TWO

      WE WOKE UP early the next morning, a clear Saturday that seemed incongruous with the austere task ahead: storm preparations. Pia walked around the bedroom naked for a few minutes, checking her phone, tying her hair up and then taking it down again in front of the mirror. The warm mood of the previous evening still lingered, though daylight had brought a new urgency to our self-assigned task of storm shopping.

      I walked downstairs and turned the radio on even before making coffee, hoping for the latest from NPR on the new weather predictions. No one seemed to have any more information, but overnight, countless opinions had been hatched and opposing teams established. A conservative commentator suggested that this was part of a wider liberal scheme to divert public funds to global-warming-research and climate-change “slush funds.” Someone from a think tank feared that the president was withholding information and called for a congressional investigation into what the Department of the Environment and NOAA knew. Pia and I drank coffee with sweet local cream while we watched old men on network TV discuss how this might influence the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections. The Storms dominated everything, but they were still only an idea. It was just a Saturday project for us.

      We took showers and climbed into the Volvo, bound for the closest family-owned hardware store, twenty-five minutes away. That morning felt like what I thought our Vermont experience would always feel like. We were close, she was smiling and the landscape unfolded before us like a picture painted by a child in crayon: all blue skies and red barns. The windows were down and we talked about how the smell of manure made us feel. Pia said she hated it but couldn’t resist taking a few deep breaths. I took a native’s pride in sharing that I loved that farm stink. It evoked for me a million childhood experiences, most real and some fabricated in the haze of nostalgia. She leaned across the front seat to kiss my neck and call me a hick as I pulled into Dewey’s Hardware.

      * * *

      “You’re so country.” That was what Pia had said to me when we met nine years earlier. We were at a raucous costume party in Williamsburg and I was fighting my way through a wall of bare male torsos, trying not to touch the smooth, sweaty shoulders standing between me and the keg. The host, a mutual friend, was a professional party thrower and an amateur drug dealer. His events were always predominantly gay and half-naked, but this one was exceptional even by his standards. My chances of talking to a pretty girl seemed better than average, given the demographics, so I took a risk and smiled at Pia, who was still unknown to me then. She immediately grabbed my arm and pulled me through the crowd until we found safety in an unoccupied corner of the room.

      “You’re not from here, right?” she yelled in my ear.

      Her costume was composed entirely of a vine that snaked around her curvy body, with plastic leaves covering all the critical areas. It was held in place with flimsy green tape.

      “No one’s from here,” I said. “This isn’t real. It’s a costume party within the costume party of Brooklyn. This is a redundant party.”

      Pia seemed impressed by the profundity of this drunken observation, so I kept going. I explained that I had been living there since I graduated from Amherst, that I was working in graphic design and that I had no intention of staying in Brooklyn forever. “I miss trees,” I said, which she liked a lot. When Pia, who had attended Middlebury, learned that I was from Vermont, she touched my arm and told me that she was “madly in love with the dirt there.” I told her about a harvest festival near my hometown that she would enjoy, which was when she smiled an amazing smile and decided that I was “very country.”

      We slept together that night. There was no courtship or pretense. She just took me back to her messy apartment and, without a hint of modesty, pushed my head between her legs as if she was giving me a gift I had been waiting for. For the briefest moment, I considered fainting in the humid, earthy cave of her body, but I didn’t. I came alive. Pia didn’t exude the soapy perfume of the girls I’d been with before; she was all salt and musk. She was the most animate being I had ever encountered and a switch was flipped inside me. I wanted to consume her and she wanted to be wanted by me, so our frenzied union felt like a perfect fit. I knew from the start that with her passion came a moody and mercurial element, but that was fine with me. Life was so much more fun with her in it. So we built a relationship there, on a lumpy mattress, beneath glittery, draped tapestries, surrounded by stacks of books in unreal Brooklyn.

      My confidence in those initial days with Pia can be largely attributed to the recent realization that my specific brand of geekiness was in high demand in that particular corner of the universe at that moment in American culture. I had always been a tall, slightly awkward dork who would rather be reading nature journals or distance running in the woods than mingling at a party. In Brooklyn, this was misinterpreted as sensitive, progressive and cool. Even my accidental wardrobe (workman pants, flannel shirts, hiking boots) seemed to impress. I would have resented the objectification if it didn’t work so well with hot hipster girls.

      * * *

      “I СКАЧАТЬ