ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 52
up two seconds after you get off, haul ass into the shower and then eat your
goddamn continental breakfast while reading your goddamn newspaper."
The tiny sound of sirens began to expand and filter through the window.
Somewhere a toy fire engine raced to a toy fire that was at that moment
possibly burning tiny people.
"Listen Anna, why don't you take the day off? Call in sick and we11 go
to the park. Look, we'll take that bottle of blush we've got chilling and just
lie in the grass and get drunk. We'll pretend we're spending the afternoon
in Paris and I'll tell you wonderful things about your eyes."
She wondered, after the remark about her breakfast, ifhe were merely
hastily trying to glue together the shards which he had smashed a perfect
morning into, perhaps for fear of having her cold white back as a sleeping
companion when they went to bed. She couldn't believe, let alone understand, why he had made that remark. She felt slighted. He had the nerve
to actually try to persuade her to miss work just to drink cheap wine and
dream away the day! How did he expect the rent to be paid? How did he
expect to eat? His wandering around the streets all day after sleeping in late,
peddling his talents to uninterested people, sure didn't put food on the table
or keep them in cocaine.
And to ask who she was, as ifhe had forgotten her name amid a catalog
of other names of other women he had fucked.
Yesterday he had said something about the cockroaches on the
kitchen's cracked linoleum floor playing violins in a symphony, accompanying the sound of the rain falling on the sidewalks outside. And a couple of
days ago he had mentioned seeing a field of sunflowers in a dream that
chained itself mercilessly to his eyes. How it translated the quiet deception
of spring into voices telling of spider-faced women standing, blossoms in
their long, black hair, beneath the chestnut tree. Strange! And one night last
week he had been listening to Beethoven's sixth, after they had done their
second quarter gram of coke that evening, when he suddenly smashed the
record into a thousand bits, tears streaming down his face. It's not that she
really liked the record, but it seemed like such a histrionic thing to do.
And now today, he had insulted her breakfast.
She didn't feel she had to stand for this bullshit. She looked at the wall
clock and seeing it was 7:25 slipped on her black patent leather pumps and
drank a last gulp of coffee. She reached into the drawer by the sink and
removed a small bag of white powder: a quarter gram of cocaine. She was
having lunch with the bank's manager that day at a trendy Japanese restaurant to discuss a raise and possible promotion. There was no way she was
going in cold. And there was definitely no way she was going to miss it for
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