One D.O.A., One On The Way. Mary Robison

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      “I don’t like how paranoid you’re getting,” I say to my husband.

      “Well, in order to think that, you’d have to be scrutinizing my every move.”

      “This here is what I mean,” I say.

      [31]

      Crawling on all fours over there by the coffee table is Saunders, the Sack twin of my husband, Save. Saunders is perhaps merely looking for a contact lens. I’m certainly not going to ask him. He’d engage me in an answer. Besides which, he probably doesn’t know.

      [32]

      ’Round Midnight

       Over 70 percent of New Orleans musicians remain displaced.

       Many of them are living in their cars.

       Friends who gutted the flooded homes of fellow musicians reported a terrible loss of instruments, including hundreds of ruined grand pianos.

      [33]

      I’m not going to be able to manage with these people and the things they do.

      Collie, for example, my niece, was this morning a little girl, wearing a smock and her carrot hair in two long braids, come to visit her grandmother. Then the grandmother whisked her off and took her someplace where clothes are turned pink and braids chopped and heads shorn and left looking like sprouting pineapples.

      I could smack that grandmother unconscious and roll her out into the yard. She could stay out there a good while, pondering the harm she’s done.

      Petal has arrived to pick up the kid.

      She stares straight ahead after experiencing a view of the haircut.

      I say, “Let us sit down here and smoke bags of dope at the dining table.”

      The room twinkles around us with snowy linen and crystal-dripping chandeliers.

      “One thing you could do is kill your husband,” I say. “He deserves it for being her son.”

      “I was already going to, for other reasons,” Petal says.

      “Adam?” she asks, halfway changing the subject.

      “Exists,” I say with a nod.

      “So, where are they?” she asks. “They should be down here, shouldn’t they?”

      I shake my head. “I can’t speak for all wives about all husbands. Only for me, about mine. He is far too fucked to participate in this situation.”

      The dope is burning a hole in my pocket. I keep offering it but nobody takes me up.

      The room, the chandelier light, the sad face on Petal, the sounds of the night coming on, the smells from the gardens around this palace, my longing, her longing.

      [34]

      The mother appears with a handsome silver teapot and pours from it without speaking to us at all. Her mouth is fresh with crimson lipstick. Her hair’s tucked behind a calfskin band. Her eyes shift left and right below her lowered lashes.

      She introduces a platter with ice chunks, lettuce leaves, a thousand Gulf shrimp.

      I close my eyes and rest my head on the back of my chair. She’s here now and there’s no more use in thinking. She’s brought enough tension and misery to last the three of us for hours.

      [35]

      “Good Night Nurse in the fourth,” Saunders says. “Lady’s Man in the fifth. Definitely. In the sixth, Wild Lightning. Then, some of these others, I still haven’t decided. Cosmo! Any fucking race he runs.”

      “What about Soldier Boy?” Petal asks. “I thought you were so impressed with him.”

      “Nah.” Saunders shakes his head. “Not anymore. I went down there and took a look at him last time. ’Cause, you know, I had won big money.”

      “We both went,” Adam says, angling his chair so he can face Saunders. “To see Soldier Boy. You don’t remember?”

      “Yeah, O.K., it was both of us.” Saunders nods. To Petal and me he says, “Utterly psychotic.”

      “I mean the horse,” he adds, because we’re both eyeing him.

      Adam says, “Oh, that was all drug induced, that we witnessed. Clearly a drugged up animal.”

      “I don’t care,” Saunders says. “He was foaming. He was slobbering.”

      “Drooling drool,” says Adam.

      “Playing with his own manure,” Saunders says.

      “All right, don’t be little babies,” Petal tells them.

      To me, she says, “Foaming, slobbering, playing with their own manure.”

      [36]

       I’m through reading lengthy bits of scripture into the answering machines of my enemies.

       I’m saying goodbye to Sloppy Joes.

       No more Foosball.

       I’m done hiding up in a tree.

       No more soaking cigarettes in little bowls of paregoric.

      [37]

      We’ve stopped in at a Waffle House, Lucien and I. It’s our first occasion being together outside the van. He looks different, naturally, seated opposite. I’m gazing at him, getting his face instead of his profile. Looking too hard, perhaps. Causing him to check his reflection in the glass between these booths and the team of grill cooks.

      I think it might help to mention the husband. “I have a husband,” I say.

      “I know, I met the two of them,” Lucien says.

      “Well, there’s only one, for the moment, but it can certainly seem otherwise.”

      “So, is this man your first marriage?”

      “No,” I say, “it isn’t. But I still try to keep it, you know, one at a time.”

      He says, “Now, didn’t I hear that your husband’s sick with a health problem?”

      I’m really not sure if yes is the answer, but I give it as one either way.

      “And, someone might’ve also told me, that he’s been that way a long time?”

      “Years and years, it turns out,” I say.

      There’s a guy leaning on the bathroom door over there, asking, “Melissa? Melissa. Are you sure you’re O.K.?”

СКАЧАТЬ