Читать книгу The Girl in Times Square - Paullina Simons - Страница 11

It’s late Friday night and they’re in her apartment. They had been to dinner, she invited him for a drink and dancing in a wine bar near where she lives. He said no. He always says no—drinking and dancing in wine bars is not his strong suit—but you have to give it to her—she’s plucky. She keeps on asking. Now they’re in her bed, and whether this is his strong suit, or whether she has no more attractive options, he doesn’t know but she’s been showing up every Friday night, so he must be doing something right, though he’d be damned if he knows what it is. The things he gives her, she can get anywhere.

And after he gives them to her, and takes some for himself, she falls contentedly asleep in the crook of his arm, while he lies opened-eyed and in the yellow-blue light coming from the street counts the tin tiles of her tall ceiling. He may look content also—in tonight’s ostensible enjoyment of his food and his woman—to someone who has observed him scientifically and empirically, wholly from without. But now in a perversion of nature, the woman is asleep and the man is staring at the ceiling. So what is in him wholly from within?

He is counting the tin tiles. He has counted them before, and what fascinates him is how every time he counts them this late at night, he comes up with a different number.

After he is sure she is asleep, he disentangles himself, gets up off the bed, and takes his clothes into the living room.

She comes out when his shoes are on. He must have jangled his keys. Usually she does not hear him leave. It’s dark in the room. They stare at each other. He stands. She stands. “I don’t understand why you do this,” she says.

“I just have to go.”

“Are you going home to your wife?”

“Stop.”

“What then?”

He doesn’t reply. “You know I go. I always go. Why give me a hard time?”

“Didn’t we have a nice evening?”

“We always do.”

“So why don’t you stay? It’s Friday. I’ll make you waffles for breakfast.”

“I don’t do waffles for Saturday breakfast.”

Quietly he shuts the door behind him. Loudly she double bolts and chains it, padlocking it if she could.

He is outside on Amsterdam. On the street, the only cars are cabs. The sidewalks are empty, the few barflies straggle in and out. Lights change green, yellow, red. Before he hails a taxi back home, he walks twenty blocks past the open taverns at three in the morning, alone.