Страница 45 из 76
“Those are narcissi,” she said. “Daffodils are a kind of narcissus.”
It was spring in Hyde Park, and we were almost able to forget the city surrounding us. We stopped at an ice cream stand and bought two violently colored frozen ice cream confections.
“Was there someone else?” I asked her, eventually, as casually as I could, licking my ice cream. “Someone you left me for?”
She shook her head. “You were getting too serious,” she said. “That was all. And I wasn’t a homewrecker.”
Later that night, much later, she repeated it. “I wasn’t a homewrecker,” she said, and she stretched, languorously, and added, “-then. Now, I don’t care.”
I had not actually told her that I was divorced. We had eaten sushi and sashimi in a restaurant in Greek Street, drunk enough sake to warm us and to cast a rice-wine glow over the evening. We took a golden-painted taxi back to my flat in Chelsea.
The wine was warm in my chest. In my bedroom we kissed and hugged and giggled. Becky examined my CD collection carefully, and then she put on the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Sessions, singing along in a quiet voice. This was only a few hours ago, but I ca
I had put on some weight. She had not.
“Will you go down on me?” she whispered, when we reached my bed, and I did. Her labia were engorged, purple, full and long, and they opened like a flower to my mouth when I began to lick her. Her clitoris swelled beneath my tongue and the salty taste of her filled my world, and I licked and teased and sucked and nibbled at her sex for what felt like hours.
She came, once, spasmodically, under my tongue, and then she pulled my head up to hers, and we kissed some more, and then, finally, she guided me inside her.
“Was your cock that big fifteen years ago?” she asked.
“I think so,” I told her.
“Mmm.”
After a while she said, “I want you to come in my mouth.” And, soon after, I did.
We lay in silence, side by side, and she said, “Do you hate me?”
“No,” I said, sleepily. “I used to. I hated you for years. And I loved you, too.”
“And now?”
“No, I don’t hate you anymore. It’s gone away. Floated off into the night, like a balloon.” I realized as I said it that I was speaking the truth.
She snuggled closer to me, pressed her warm skin against my skin. “I can’t believe I ever let you go. I won’t make that mistake twice. I do love you.”
“Thank you.”
“Not, thank you, idiot. Try I love you too.”
“I love you too,” I echoed, and, sleepily, I kissed her still sticky lips.
And then I slept.
In my dream, I felt something uncurling inside me, something moving and changing. The cold of stone, a lifetime of darkness. A rending, and a ripping, as if my heart were breaking; a moment of utter pain. Blackness and strangeness and blood.
I must have dreamed the gray dawn as well. I opened my eyes, moving away from one dream but not entirely coming awake. My chest was open, a dark split that ran from my navel to my neck, and a huge, misshapen hand, Plasticine-gray, was pulling back into my chest. There was long dark hair caught between the stone fingers. The hand retreated into my chest as I watched, as an insect will vanish into a crack when the lights are turned on. And, as I squinted sleepily down at it, my acceptance of the strangeness of it all my only clue that this was truly another dream, the crack in my chest healed, knit and mended, and the cold hand vanished for good. I felt my eyes closing once more. I was tired, and I swam back into the comforting, sake-flavored dark.
I slept once more, but the rest of the dreams are now lost to me.
I awoke, completely, a few moments ago, the morning sun full on my face. There was nothing beside me in the bed but a purple flower on the pillow. I am holding it now. It reminds me of an orchid, although I know little enough of flowers, and its scent is strange, salty and female.
Becky must have placed it here for me to find when she left, while I slept.
Pretty soon now I shall have to get up. I shall get out of this bed and resume my life.
I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine.
I feel nothing at all.
MY LIFE
“My life? Hell, you don’t want to hear about my life. Jesus, my throat is dry…
A drink? Well, since you’re buying, and it’s a hot day, sure. Why not. Just a little one.
Maybe a beer. And a whiskey chaser. It’s good to drink, on a hot day. Only
Problem with drinking is it makes me remember. And sometimes I don’t want
To remember. I mean, my mom: there was a woman. I never knew her as a woman
But I seen photographs of her, before the operation. She said I needed a father,
And seeing my own father had dumped her after he regained his eyesight (following
A blow on the head from a Burmese cat, which jumped from a penthouse apartment window and fell
Thirty stories, miraculously striking my father in exactly the right place to restore his sight,
And then landing uninjured on the sidewalk, proving it’s true what they say about
Cats always landing on their feet) claiming he had thought he was marrying her twin sister
Who looked completely different, but had, through a miracle of biology, exactly the same voice
Which was why the judge granted the divorce, closed his eyes and even he couldn’t tell them apart.
So my father walked out a free man, and on the way from the court he was struck on the head
By detritus falling from the sky; there was folks said it was lavatorial waste from a plane
Though chemical examination revealed traces of elements unknown to science, and it said
In the papers that the fecal matter contained alien proteins, but then it was hushed up.
They took my father’s body away for safekeeping. The government gave us a receipt
Though in a week it faded, I guess that it was something in the ink, but that’s another story.
So then my mom a
And she worked a deal with that doctor so when the two of them won the Underwater Tango contest
He agreed to change her sex for nothing. Growing up I called her Dad, and knew none of this.
Nothing else interesting has ever happened to me. Another drink?
Well, just to keep you company maybe, another beer, and don’t forget the whiskey,
Hey, make it a double. It isn’t that I drink, but it’s a hot day, and even when you’re
Not a drinking man… You know,
It was just such a day as this my wife dissolved. I’d read about the people who blew up,
Spontaneous combustion, that’s the words. But Mary-Lou-that was my wife’s name,
We met the day she came out of her coma, seventy years asleep and hadn’t aged a day,
It’s scary what ball-lightning can do. And all the people on that submarine,
Like Mary-Lou, they all were froze in time, and after we were wed she’d visit them,
Sit by their bedsides, watch them while they slept. I drove a truck, back then.
And life was good. She coped well with the missing seven decades, and me, I like to think that if
The dishwasher had not been haunted-well, possessed, I guess, would be more accurate-
She’d still be here today. It preyed upon her mind, and the only exorcist that we could get
Turned out to be a midget from Utrecht and actually not a priest at all,