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Then came Cindy. The camera made her coarse and heavy of face, her skin glue
white, her eyes dark, sunken holes. She looked like an inmate in a fluorescent
nightmare. "How did they do that? John Lye looks great."
"It's the lighting. They're trying to portray you as evil and callous."
She was seen in her initial anger. When she said Bob was gentle, Lye smiled
ironically. Rather than show her weeping, they cut to a shot of Bob standing
on the examining table, glaring at the camera with what Cindy knew was almost
total confusion.
"The wolf lady says she found the animal on a street comer right here in
Manhattan. Who knows where she actually got it? Given its tremendous size,
experts at the Zoological Society theorize that it may be a wild wolf from the
Soviet Union."
Then they went on to other stories. Cindy was amazed. She had come across
looking like an ogre, vicious, hateful, uncaring. She wanted to throw
something through the TV. If she'd been able to get her hands on Rivera, she
would have turned him inside out.
Monica handed her the check. "Thanks," she said. She knew it would be gone
tomorrow noon. Four thousand rent, five hundred to her loudest creditors, five
hundred for food to keep her and Kevin for the next few weeks. Rent or no
rent, she'd probably get evicted anyway.
After the news Monica went home, pleading exhaustion. Soon Kevin nodded off on
the couch. She tried to smooth his fists, to somehow make the terror leave his
exhausted body. She kissed him. Now came the time she had really been
dreading.
The apartment was empty and there was no one to help her.
Her mind went to thoughts of Bob, out there alone, disfigured, confused,
chased.
"God make him come home." Her voice filled the room with brief, helpless
sound.
Seeing herself in the mirror, a slumped shadow, she felt very small. She had
been yelling at people, making demands, cursing, for hours and hours in fact,
ever since Bob had his problem. What good had it done?
She went into her bedroom and threw herself down on their bed. Her mind kept
running images of him hurrying along streets, him hit by a car, him shot. She
saw that big, furry head, those eyes, and she thought she was going to be sick
to her stomach. "Where is he? Bob, where are you!"
She turned over on her back, stared at the ceiling. Obviously she had been too
hard on him, making demands that he couldn't possibly meet. Bob was a poet.
His business ability was nil; he couldn't even remember to put bus fare in his
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pocket when he went out. Anybody could sell him anything. When he was a broker
he was always getting stuck with the customers the other brokers didn't want
to bother with, the idiots, the dead-beats, the complainers. He would be
ceaselessly patient with them, and was always ready to overlook their faults.
Naturally he didn't make a penny brokering. But he spent anyway. Bob didn't
understand the concept of credit. He looked upon loans as presents from banks
grateful for his custom. Checks were simply a means to an end, usually a means
to getting rid of creditors for a few more days until the checks bounced and
it was time to write new ones.
She turned on the light. There was a copy of Travel and Leisure at her
bedside, and a library book she had been enjoying enormously, Doris Grumbach's
The
Ladies.
She stretched. "Oh, Bob." She did not miss him physically, although they were
often intimate.
Love was more central to their relationship than sex. She seduced Bob whenever
the mood struck her. It was always easy. She wanted to do it now.
What a good talker he was. His wit was dry, sardonic, and he had brought a
wonderful deadpan humor from Texas. His lies could be completely convincing,
and if you believed them, you were in peril of the surreal. Once he had made a
brilliant case for eggs separating back out of brownies if they were cooked
too fast, and had gone so far as to slip an egg into a pan of brownies she was
baking. She had found it, perfectly poached, in the middle of the pan and had
told the story in all seriousness for years. People were polite. They
generally didn't comment, thinking that she was perhaps a little odd.
She laughed aloud, remembering how many times she'd told that story. Monica
had finally stopped her and made her think. "It's scientifically impossible,
Cyn.
The physics just aren't there. It can't happen."
"But it did happen. I saw the egg oh, my God, Bob, you creep!"
Her heart raced when she heard gentle tapping at the bedroom window. "Bob!"
But no, it was not him, miraculously having climbed the six stories of sheer
wall.
A
thin rain had started, and she watched it blowing in clouds around the
streetlight. It was very late, and no cars passed. A man hurried along, the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]