Augusta Played Read Online Free

movements determined theirs. Gus got the giggles; she tried to hide it, but she could feel her face breaking out in smiles like a rash. Then Norman wished she’d hurry up and choose so they could get the hell out, it was too close in the store, and the clerk was too deferential, deference dripped from him like perspiration. Eventually Gus chose a cultured pearl. Norman slipped it onto her finger later, during lunch in the deli, the spot of beauty slamming the eye down toward the nail, which had been chewed to the quick. A flutist should not bite her nails: Norman said this to her. She looked up. “I don’t bite all of them,” she said, taken aback. “Just this one.”
    And that made it all right?
    â€œOf course,” she said. “I call it containing tension. What would you call it?”
    Instead of answering, Norman ordered Hungarian goulash and a root beer. Gus was too excited to eat. She had met Norman two weeks and three days ago (“I can tell you how to get to Carnegie Hall,” he had said, coming up to her on the street. “Practice, practice! Well,” he had gone on, not stopping for an answer, “what else could I say that would let you know I know what you’re all about and am not just some nut from nowhere?”), and now she was engaged to him. She had not had time to decide what she thought about this. She felt slightly out of breath, as if she had been running although she hadn’t, and her face was always just a little bit flushed these days, her eyes opened a little wider than usual, as if she were on the verge of an adventure. That was how she felt—adventurous, exhilarated, overflowing with capability and a little frightened at the same time.
    The delicatessen wasn’t kosher; it was run by a mesomorphic Berliner with a ruminative turn of mind. The Berliner wore a large tablecloth tucked into his belt, and used it as a napkin when serving hot dishes, as a towel to dry his hands, and, if he thought he was unobserved, as a handkerchief. The broad tip of his nose was bristly. His eyes were small but candid; when he spoke about his wife, they became expressive. His wife, the Berliner told them, was responsible for the mural, five feet high and winding around all four walls of the establishment, which depicted in somewhat sketchy fashion a winter scene of unspecific locale, including reindeer and a profusion of holly berries, anachronistic in late summer. The low ceiling to the landscape lent it a comic-strip character, although it was evidently meant to be taken seriously. The Berliner certainly took it seriously. He explained to Norman and Augusta that his wife had studied in Munich. Studied what? Gus wondered. To avoid having to praise the painting, Gus asked the Berliner if he and his wife missed Deutsch-land, and how they came to be on the Upper West Side, instead of in Yorktown, for example.
    But Gus supposed that from one point of view, an omniscient point of view, all places would be equally peculiar. It was like that spurious mathematical case for creation: since the odds against the existence of this particular world were astronomically high—to be precise, infinite—the theory of probability, so this argument went, favored a belief in the existence of God. But the odds were exactly the same with respect to any instance of the particular, and it wasn’t the theory of probability which favored a belief in the existence of God; it was just people, who had always been on the side of religion, with or without the theory of probability.
    Nevertheless, whatever the odds against it might be, here she was, herself, at a table with a groom-to-be named Norman Gold in a deserted restaurant with wooden floor (the delicatessen was too new to have caught on yet with the students in the neighborhood), and so completely mesmerized by the moment that it was as though nothing had existed before or would follow. She wheeled the ring around her finger.