Day Out of Days Read Online Free Page A

cover; muscular arms crossed over his chest, with a leopard-skin cape, thick gold necklaces, and a gold-leaf skullcap with two shining falcons on the crown, staring stoically out. I am flipping through the glossy pages when I feel a tall presence beside me and a high-pitched female voice saying my name with a question mark behind it: “Stuart?” I turn to see the same skinny woman in her cloth coat but without the suitcase.
    “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asks. I stare into her green eyes searching for something to recognize, but the same tinge of melancholy is all I find. “Nineteen sixty-five,” she says with a little sigh. “Tenth Street and Second Avenue? St. Mark’s Church.”
    “I’m drawing a blank,” I confess. “I’ve been driving for days. What seems like days, anyway.”
    She laughs nervously, half embarrassed, then stares at the carpet. “We lived together for a while. Don’t you remember? We’d get up every morning and sit on the edge of my mattress eating bowls of wheat germ with brown honey all over it.”
    “Oh,” I say, and keep staring into her with mounting desperation, wondering if maybe I’ve snapped some fragile synapse in my brain from too much driving. The final breakdown of road madness. Right here in Indianapolis. Then she does an amazing thing. She whips off the blue bandana and shakes out a mane of red hair that topples almost to her waist. Now it all comes back. “Oh—it’s you,” I say, still unable to attach a name.
    “Who?” She giggles. “You don’t remember me at all, do you?”
    “Of course I do.”
    “You’re just saying that.”
    “No—”
    “Then what’s my name? Come on, it wasn’t that long ago.”
    “Nineteen sixty-five,” I say.
    “Or six—”
    “No, it couldn’t have been.”
    “Maybe sixty-eight. That was it.”
    “That’s still forty years ago!”
    “No!” She laughs.
    “Add it up.”
    “Yeah, I guess it was, wasn’t it?”
    “Beth, right?” I blurt out.
    “No, see? You don’t remember.”
    “Betty?”
    “Close.”
    “What then? This is wearing me out.”
    “Becky!” she announces with a beaming smile and her arms wide open as if I’m going to jump up and embrace her.
    “Sure—Becky. That’s right. Becky—Of course.”
    “What’s my last name?”
    “Oh, please—I can’t keep up with this. I’m really wiped out—”
    “Thane,” she continues.
    “Thane?”
    “Thane. Becky Marie Thane.”
    “Right,” I say.
    “You really don’t have any recollection at all, do you?” she says in almost a whisper, then stifles a little chuckle. She crosses her long arms and holds her shoulders softly as though filling the blank of affection she wishes were coming from me. “I was so in love with you, Stuart,” she sighs, and her eyes drift back down to the pink wall-to-wall carpeting with pizza stains and splashed Pepsi. The violent sounds of the surveillance loop keep mercilessly repeating. I notice the girl behind the desk giving us a sideways glance, then return to the bright green glow of the computer screen. There is no escape. Becky Marie Thane lets her long arms fall to her sides in surrender, the blue bandana dangling from her right hand. I return the
National Geographic
to the glass table and then I do suddenly get a picture of that time, some fleetingmemory of a morning facing a New York window with a bowl clenched between my naked knees, and I say, just to be saying something, “Your hair is even redder than I remember,” which make her burst out laughing, suddenly happy that I haven’t abandoned the game.
    “It’s not real,” she says.
    “What?” I say, thinking she’s referring to something metaphysical.
    “The color. Lady Clairol. Out of a bottle.”
    “Oh—Well, it looks great.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Very … festive.”
    “Festive?” She giggles and fluffs the back of her head like a movie star. Then she gets embarrassed again and twists herself from side to side.
    “So, how old were