Amor and Psycho: Stories Read Online Free Page A

dinner plates shimmered violently on the tablecloth and the room turned gray-green. Mrs. Brazir uncorked the vial of perfume she wore around her neck and held the opening against one finger. She looked at her finger and said, “Please don’t touch anything.” Mr. Brazir never stopped laughing.
    Karim and I left them there and went for a walk to the beach in the dark. The sand where I lay felt muddy and damp. He pulled up my skirt and rode my body vigorously, his handsome face straining outward, toward the ocean. Just before he came, he slapped my face, and on the way back to the house he said, “I love you.”
    The next morning, Mrs. Brazir did not rise, and Mr. Brazir scurried off with a glass of ginger ale for her. They hid out, I guess, until Karim took me away. At the ferry, which reeked of diesel and the exhaust of twenty growling cars lined up to board, he kissed me sloppily with his tongue. When I stood at the rail to wave good-bye, my face was still wet. Later I understood that I’d reached the end of my usefulness, like the charming fish called Him we’d murdered and eaten. Karim might have been licking his plate before handing it to a waiter.

THE SNAKE
    Dr. Drema moved twenty-five times before she turned forty-eight. She felt like a different person whenever she lived somewhere new. In all, she’d had consulting rooms in thirteen different cities in the United States and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
    It was always sad to shuck an old self. But Dr. Drema grew spiritually from shucking. She gained freshness and vitality, like a snake sliding out of its old skin.
Shpilkes
, her mother called it—ants in the pants. Moving so often had left Dr. Drema’s material life in disarray. She kept storage units in several cities on the East and West coasts of the United States (as well as a small house in San Miguel de Allende, which she owned outright), for indispensable articles that she could no longer visualize or name. Someday, when she became less busy, she would sort through these articles or let them go. In the meantime, she paid rents on her storage units, but paid themonly after receiving final notice that her possessions would be sold or thrown away. Paying rents late was Dr. Drema’s acknowledgment of how conflicted she was about holding on to her past identities. Wouldn’t it be better simply to graze across the unspoiled range of one life, like a Neolithic buffalo?
    Dr. Drema had no trouble attracting new, necessary patients. For those who remained loyal—those really lost at sea—she held appointments by telephone. In any large or even medium-size city in the western hemisphere, hundreds, thousands of people—and their adolescent children—suffer from anxiety, depression, compulsions, addictions. Such people found Dr. Drema personable, brilliant and charismatic. She belonged to all the important professional organizations. Like buffalo on the range, she roamed free.
    SHE ’ D SEIZED the occasion of her forty-eighth birthday to reinvent herself. On a whim, at a bargain price and with an exceptional interest rate, she moved into the old Customs House in a small New England town at the confluence of a river and an ocean, took a young lover and shaved off eight years. An unpleasant period had just passed, which she wanted expunged from her record—the failed relationship, the car accident, the gallbladder, the chronic fatigue. What had happened to the part of life when every year marked an improving, a flowering out? She gazed through her new salt-speckled windows and said the number forty in her head over and over until it became
her
number—in the same waythat she associated candles with the number eight and Tuesdays with the color blue.
Forty, forty, forty
. She said the number until she became the thing. The lie lay near the very core of her identity and intensified ordinary transactions—filling out forms, listening to patients, talking to strangers.
    DR. DREMA ’ S CUSTOMS HOUSE