Читать книгу No One You Know - Jason Schwartzman - Страница 10

L. and I still work in the same office. Our boss doesn’t know we’re not together anymore, doesn’t know we were ever together. He has invited us north to help with his new home and to learn about carpentry. He has been renovating for seven years, but it is finally almost finished. Every free second he has goes into the house. His Saturdays. His Sundays. His fiancée is there too; he calls her “love.”

We bike past crumbling brick houses until we reach the dreamy property where they live. There is a secret passageway that joins two rooms, for their kids someday, and we squeeze through its small hole. He gives us a tour of the bedroom and the kitchen, showing us a painstaking amount of detail: seven years’ worth of the texture of certain woods, of the way the light hits specific windows. It is as though his love for the house lives inside the details he describes.

L. and I are there to learn, but mostly we stand on ladders, stuffing insulation recycled from jeans. Blue dust slips past our surgical masks. It clings to our throats. One day soon, I’m sure, she will remove my picture from her wallet. We are still transitioning out of our intimacy. There is so much dust I can barely see. Not her constellation of freckles, not her ink-colored eyes.