Читать книгу Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles - Kira Henehan - Страница 15

9

On the occasion of my second meeting with Mr. Uppal, Professor Uppal, a meeting for which I was one hundred percent more prepared, having been armed, as it were, with at last the proper details of place and name and time et cetera, without which one might as well send in an amateur, I was received with exemplary formality by a uniformed manservant and deposited into the hands of Dame Uppal.

Dame Uppal was what one might refer to as a Handsome Woman, which has never to me seemed much of a compliment. I do not, therefore, mean to suggest a compliment by my use of the term. Handsome is not something a woman should be.

I passed the time awaiting Early’s late arrival in a sitting room with Dame Uppal. She did not offer me snacks, sodas, canned fruits, trays of meats—cured or otherwise—or anything much in the way of hospitality.

She instead lay on the divan in a sort of meticulous disarray. If you find this suggestive of nothing so much as an oxymoron, you are reading correctly. Catching my drift, so to speak. She lay on the divan as if disarrayed on purpose—hair fetchingly disheveled; scanty nightclothes not quite covering as much of her legs as one might prefer, if one were not some manner of fetish-magazine deviant; lipstick as if recently ravished right across her mouth and so forth. Yet her limbs had none of the languor such disarray would suggest. She did not seem loose on pills or drink. She did not seem quite mad, or even mildly perturbed. She spoke, when she spoke, which was in fact much sooner than this laborious descriptive passage might lead one to believe, with dignity and care.

—You are my husband’s colleague, she said.—From the University, or one of Binelli’s?

—One of Binelli’s, I said.—Not the Most Hated, either.

I don’t know why I felt the need to elaborate in that particular way. It wasn’t a statement intrinsically bound to elevate one in another’s estimation. And why I might even deign to gain this woman’s respect or approval, I’m sure I have no idea. She was not important insofar as my objective. She was not a vital contact I was obliged to woo. She was not the bearer of snacks, sodas, canned fruits, trays of meats—cured or otherwise. She was merely the wife, the dizzy broad, zonked out, to all appearances, on the divan, left to entertain Mr. Uppal’s ‘colleague’ as he freshened up.

Yet I said it, and was undeniably pleased to see her thoughtful nod.