Читать книгу Fat Man and Little Boy - Mike Meginnis - Страница 19

WHAT FRANCINE KNOWS

Francine lies awake in bed, pretending to know where her husband is now. She pretends to know he is with another woman. She pretends to know they’re sitting together outside an abandoned café, her husband and the other woman—a blonde—and that he brought them cheeses and melon chunks to share in the dark, seated on chairs he took off a tabletop and set down for them. He makes two flirtatious jokes before forgetting to charm the other woman, before resuming the comfort of his usual half-sullen silence, the silence that makes him pout so pretty. The one that makes his eyes seem to float in his skull like paper lanterns on the water. He pours wine for himself and neglects to offer her any. She has to pour it if she wants it. He’s smoking between chews. It would be rude if it were anybody else.

She pretends her husband will not be home tonight. If she weren’t sure of this, she would have to watch the door, or, more discreetly, the wall opposite the door, for changes of light. She would wait for a wedge of yellow to open, and his shadow. Now she doesn’t have to wait, because she is certain. Instead she clenches closed her eyes.

Her hard heart wavers. She is no longer certain. So she changes the story. Now he is sharing a hotel room with this other woman, who is a brunette, who is also married, whose husband is away on business—scrabbling for a piece of the new action, the foreign investors, large Americans. They are making raucous love to each other. He presses her face and breasts to the cool thick window, through the curtains, but he tells her to imagine he’s drawn the curtains. And it’s light out. And everyone can see her. They can see the way she moans, the way her nipples press flat against the glass, like veal medallions.

When she comes he comes too. He doesn’t pull out, doesn’t spray the brunette’s back, doesn’t watch it trickle down her thighs, but pushes deeper in her; damn the consequences; damn him, he’s coming. He grits his teeth the way he does. They squeak, he’s sucked them dry. Francine’s sure of it, lying in bed.

She’s sure of it. She reaches down between her legs, then stops, thinks better.

“It shouldn’t bother me if he doesn’t want to do it inside me,” she says to herself, fortified by her confidence that even now her husband’s clever sperm are striving for this other married woman’s eggs.

Francine is thirsty. She climbs out of bed and puts her feet in their blue slippers. She goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. There’s a faint chill on the air like an unwelcome secret. She tips back the glass, finishes the water in one gulp, and licks the dewy moisture from her lips. Her husband never believed in marriage, as he acknowledged on the night of his proposal. He asked her anyway, during all the excitement, when people did these things. But clearly children are out of the question.

She pours herself another glass of water and walks back to bed. Should he come home early, Francine doesn’t want to seem to have been waiting up. She isn’t waiting for anybody. She only woke up thirsty.

Francine reflects that her husband would not leave her alone all night simply for sex. “He’s more discreet than that,” she whispers to her glass. She revises her confidence again. Her husband is still in a hotel, but now it’s more expensive, and yet no one’s having fun. He sits up in the bed, back to the headboard, married brunette head in his lap. He’s just paid for her abortion, so he strokes her hair and twists the ends between his fingers. The brunette rubs her stomach very slowly and wonders how it would be to feel a kicking thing inside her. He whispers drowsily how everything will be all right, like drooling honey in her ear. He’s drooling honey, that’s his fault, but the brunette doesn’t turn her head to block the flow. They’ll spend the night together. He’ll leave early in the morning while she pretends to sleep, buy them a sweet breakfast and chocolates, and carry the food back to the hotel in a small brown basket. This might be the end of their affair, or not.

Francine won’t know about that until circumstances call again for certitude, for deciding for herself what she can’t know and won’t ask.

Francine has finished her water. She rolls a cigarette. She puts it between her lips and chews the paper without chewing hard enough to break it. That feels like breaking skin. When she can’t wait anymore she strikes a match and lights it. She breathes deeply and blows smoke through her nose. She’s never been like the leisure-soaked, cold-blooded women who can drag out a cigarette for nearly an hour, lace an evening, threading wisps of smoke through conversation. She huffs and puffs, Francine. She pauses only to cough. The taste still tickles her throat.

It must be a stranger knocking at her door. It must be a small stranger: the door makes a small sound. Francine finishes her cigarette and drops the stub in the trash before going to the door. On second thought, she brings a large knife with her. The small hand knocks again. Put-pat. She peeps through the peephole. There’s the top of a dirty blond head in the hole and a thin white hand drawn back, waiting, shaking. It looks like a girl’s hand, if the girl chewed her nails and her knuckles were knobby and pale. The hand moves as if to knock again and then falls out of sight, defeated. The dirty blond head turns away.

Francine opens the door. There is the blond boy sucking his thumbnail. He shivers pointedly. A fat man steps into view, a real behemoth. He shivers too. When he opens his fat mouth and hazards a greeting in clumsy, fat French, she knows he’s American. He holds out his hands open-palmed, showing her they’re empty, except for a charred blackness and a floppy blue hat that hangs from his fingers.