Sex and Death Read Online Free Page B

solitary loneliness to the kind he felt around other people. And this woman, Trish. Was she family to him now? Why did it feel like they were on a date?
    â€˜It’s just that my happiness, what I needed to do to get it, threatened your father,’ continued Trish.
    â€˜My father, threatened,’ George said. ‘But whatever could you mean?’
    â€˜Oh I like you . You’re nothing like him.’
    George took that in. It sounded fine, possibly true. He had no real way of knowing. He remembered his father’s new radio, which he had watched him build when he was a kid, and whose dial he twisted into static for hours and hours. He could make his dad laugh by pretending the static came from his mouth, lip-syncing it. He remembered how frightened his father had been in New York when he visited. George held his arm everywhere they went. It had irritated him terribly.
    What else? His father made him tomato soup once. His father slapped him while he was brushing his teeth, sending a spray of toothpaste across the mirror.
    George was probably supposed to splurge on memories now. He wasn’t sure he had the energy. Maybe the thing was to let the memories hurl back and cripple him, months or years from now. They needed time, wherever they were hiding, to build force, so that when they returned to smother him, he might never recover.
    After their walk, they stood in a cloud of charred smoke behind the restaurant. The ocean broke and swished somewhere over a dune. Trish arched her back and yawned.
    â€˜All of this death,’ she said.
    â€˜Horn-y,’ George shouted. He wasn’t, but still. Maybe if they stopped talking for a while they’d break this mood.
    Trish tried not to laugh.
    â€˜No, uh, funny you should say that. I was just thinking, it makes me want to . . .’ She smiled.
    How George wished that this was the beginning of a suicide pact, after a pleasant dinner at the beach with your dead father’s mistress. Just walk out together into the waves. But something told him that he knew what was coming instead.
    â€˜I’m going to comfort myself tonight, with or without you,’ Trish said. ‘Do you feel like scrubbing in?’
    George looked away. The time was, he would sleep with anyone, of any physical style. Any make, any model. Pretty much any year. If only he could do away with the transactional phase, when the barter chips came out, when the language of seduction was suddenly spoken, rather than sung, in such non-melodious tones. It was often a deal breaker. Often. Not always.
    After they’d had sex, which required one of them to leave the room to focus on the project alone, they washed up and had a drink. It felt good to sip some skank-ass, legacy whiskey from his father’s Pueblo coffee mugs. Now that they’d stared into each other’s cold depravity, they could relax.
    Trish circled around to the inevitable.
    â€˜So what’s up with Pattern?’
    Here we go.
    â€˜What’s she like? Are you guys in touch? Your father never would speak of her.’
    Probably due to the non-disclosure agreement she must have had him sign, George figured.
    â€˜You know,’ he said, pausing, as if his answer was more than ordinarily true, ‘she’s really nice, really kind. I think she’s misunderstood.’
    â€˜Did I misunderstand it when her company, in eighteen months, caused more erosion to the Great Barrier Reef than had been recorded in all of history?’
    â€˜She apologised for that.’
    â€˜I thought you were going to say she didn’t do it. Or that it didn’t happen that way.’
    â€˜No, she did do it, with great intention, I think. I bet at low tide she would have stood on the reef herself and smashed that fucking thing into crumbs for whatever fungal fuel they were mining. But, you know, she apologised. In a way, that’s much better than never having done it. She has authority now. Gravity.