Crow Fair Read Online Free Page B

and thought she was starting to come around, recklessly bending over to pick up Karel’s toys in my presence. Monika noticed this once and started braying with sardonic and distinctly Slavic laughter. The time had come for me to take the bull by the horns. I followed Lydia to her car and told her that any fool could see how beautiful she was and I was no fool. She started but failed to reply. “You—you—you—” She got into her car and roared off. I thought it best to maintain a sphinxlike expression on my way back into the house. Monika smiled at me as I entered. “Turn you down?”
    “Seems to be running okay. I can’t think why she thought the ignition was going out.”
    Gales of laughter. “Oh, good one. Stick to your weapons.”
    The moment blew over, with the usual residue, but in the end I was furious with Lydia for having wiggled around the house on the assumption that I wouldn’t notice. Entrapment, pure and simple. Another few steps down that trail, and Lydia could have owned my law firm. These youngsters look right through you, unless their gaze falls on something they might need. I should have held my wallet aloft with one hand while pointing at my crotch with the other, but I simply lacked the nerve. So (a) babysitter leaves, and (b) here comes Bob. The convenience and economy of this arrangement appealed even to Monika, who allowed that he was “not a bad chicken egg after all.”
    Obviously, we made several forays into marriage counseling, during which we turned each of our counselors into helpless referees. I always felt that these sessions were nothing more than attempts by each side to win over the counselor, with charm, cajoling, whatever it took. In the end, Monika decided thateverything that had led to the idea of counseling—Freud, Jung, Judeo-Christianity—was spiritually bankrupt. Therefore, she was going to look back thousands of years and seek the help of a shaman, now resident in Missoula. This shaman, she explained, had the benefit of ten thousand years of human spiritual experience, as opposed to the Johnny-come-latelies of psychoanalysis, and she intended to partake of that knowledge. I listened thoughtfully and replied that it sounded promising so long as she didn’t fuck the shaman.
    Thus began our decidedly parallel lives: Monika and her shaman and her architecture, me and my law practice, Bob and Karel. Monika came home in the evening with long rolls of paper under her arm, and I with my briefcase, containing few briefs in these straitened times, to the happy home of Bob and Karel. When Bob left for the night, I held Karel’s rigid little body as he wailed and reached frantically in the direction of Bob’s departure. “Give him something to eat,” Monika remarked on her way into the bedroom.
    One afternoon, Monika and I had a rather sharp exchange in the presence of Bob and Karel. I asked innocently if it was absolutely necessary for her to keep using her boarding pass as a bookmark.
    Monika said, “None of your business.”
    “I suppose it helps to remind you of that shithole where you grew up.”
    “It reminds me that they still have airplanes that go back there.”
    “Everyone wants to go to Yugoslavia,” I said, “where shooting your neighbor is the national sport.”
    “Oh, you’re awful. You’re just so awful. My God, how truly awful you are.”
    Karel started to cry, and Bob took him outside. Soon I could see the chains of the swing flashing back and forth and hear Karel’s delighted cries.
    Monika had recently undergone an abrupt sartorial change from dark Euro-style clothing to Rocky Mountain chic: hiking boots, painter pants, bright yellow down jacket, and a wool cap with strings hanging down the sides. Now screwing a mountaineer, I thought ungenerously. Her exhaustion, I assumed, owed more to her shagging the mountain man than to anything she was doing in the world of architecture.
    It should come as no surprise to anybody that the day came when Monika