A Certain Age Read Online Free Page B

stroking his hair. He was wearing an expensive, strong-smelling cologne, which simultaneously repelled and lured her. The odor must have appealed to some instinctive olfactory sense, the way an otherwise intelligent, sensitive lapdog might be thrown into a feral frenzy on being shown the rotten corpse of a rabbit or taken to the country and introduced to a pile of aged cow manure for the first time. A small part of her wondered what she was doing, but none of it seemed real. This had nothing to do with her. Or at most she was discharging the duties of a nurse, one who cared in a catholic sense for all her patients, but none in particular. "Poor John," she repeated, a phrase he seemed to like.
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    3
    It Couldn't have been much later than seven a.m., but she wasn't certain—there was no bedside clock and she didn't wear a wrist-watch. She had been up for hours, lying in bed, her head aching, trying to muster the strength to use the toilet downstairs. Finally she gave up and went next door. To her horror, the blue-tinted water in the toilet bowl did not vanish when she flushed but slowly rose higher and higher. She searched frantically for the plunger. Moments before the water should have reached the top and begun to spill onto the floor, to her relief, it stopped.
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    She waited a bit; though the water didn't go down, it didn't seem to rise either. Perhaps it would drain, slowly, of its own accord. Finally she put on her bathing suit, grabbed a Madras windbreaker and went downstairs, where she made a cup of tea in the empty kitchen and headed to the beach. The washed-up detritus—friable cuttle, the amorphous glistening silicon blobs of jellyfish, green-black rubbery strands of seaweed—made her think of the contents of her own head, arbitrary and disconnected, more similar to protozoan shapes than to words.
    "Florence!" She turned around. Darryl Lever was scuttling toward her, dressed in an old-fashioned-style bathing suit, like a circus strong man. "Wait up, Florence!"
    There was no getting around it: it didn't matter how much time went by, whenever she saw him she felt like smacking him. It wasn't that he wasn't attractive—he was, so much so that she had once too eagerly slept with him. His hair was dark and curly, his blue eyes thickly fringed with black lashes—he might have been a Greek kouros. Except that his expression instantly changed from one of archaic repose to that of a baby who had had its nipple yanked unexpectedly from its mouth—and he seemed to blame her. It wasn't her fault that he had no money, or worse: that he had no interest in it. He was cute, he was a good lay, by now he should have met somebody else and gotten over her. But he was obviously pleased to see her; maybe this time he would forget to sulk.
    He reached up to gently wipe some sand from her face. His small hands, nails buffed and polished, were soft to the touch, as if he moisturized them nightly in cream. His touch made her feel shivery—but what was the use? One simply had to be objective about such things and disconnect the body from the mind.
    The fog was rolling in up the beach, cold and not particularly refreshing: perhaps there was so much garbage in the ocean that the fog was a mere methane or organic by-product from the damp foam cups, used condoms and chicken bones that had congealed together in a natural island of man-made artifacts.
    "Hey, Darryl, what have you been up to?" She had known him
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    since she came to New York, but it had been years since their brief affair.
    "I'm here for the weekend, even though this place makes me sick." He suddenly began to cough. She wondered if it was catching.
    "Maybe we better go back," she said, looking ahead at the diminished view of the beach, a curving sliver of toast-brown that wound into a cloud of fishy-gray mist. She clutched her arms around her chest.
    "Why?" he said. "Are you cold? Do you want me to go get a warmer jacket for you? A sweater?" She shook her head. "It's