At the Bottom of Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

about it like an exotic dish he’d once eaten on vacation, something everyone should try before they die.
    Anyway, a few days after the skating Anna left me a message (she always left me a couple of messages a week, asking if I could babysit an extra night or stay after to tutor Teddy), saying that she wondered if we could grab coffee sometime to talk about Nicholas. He’d gotten in a fight at school, apparently, and this wasn’t new, but this latest one was especially bad. There were a couple of kids in his class who called him “the Dick,” poured Pixy Stix in his hair, and he was incapable of backing down or shutting up—he was the kind of kid who’d keep shouting even as the teacher dragged him away with a bloody nose (he was also the kind of kid whose nose bled if you tapped it). She worried, she said, that with everything going on with his dad he’d keep acting out more and more and she was just about out of ideas. She wasn’t working Wednesday afternoon, if there was any way she could steal me for an hour.
    We met at a coffee shop on Wisconsin just after four, when it was already almost dark. It had been raining so long that thesun seemed possibly to have gone out altogether. I’d spent the day researching law schools, which had meant mostly writing emails and watching old episodes of
Family Ties
on YouTube. There were only a few other people with us in the café, which had kids’ crayon drawings all over the walls and butcher-paper tablecloths. A classical radio station that sounded like falling asleep was playing, and in the corner a woman was breast-feeding with a kind of amazing lack of self-consciousness. The one waiter drifted around grumpily, forgetting to bring sugar, checking his phone. We didn’t talk about Nicholas at first—instead we talked about a friend of hers at work who’d started beekeeping, a new Spanish restaurant in Friendship Heights. We both had big ceramic mugs of weak coffee and we made a show, to the waiter’s indifference, of deciding whether we wanted something sweet. Finally we settled on sharing a slice of German chocolate cake, which I ended up eating most of and she ended up pretending to have eaten most of.
    “It’s so nice talking to someone who actually
knows
the boys. I get almost greedy about it. Would you tell me if I was too much?”
    “You’re not too much.”
    “Well, you’re sweet. How have you been?”
    Something about Anna made me able to talk about Claire without sounding, I think, like someone who lies in bed at night with his heart pounding, wondering what went wrong—instead I could say things like, “Well, I think I’m about done licking my wounds,” as if I were describing the aftermath of a tough game of cricket.
    “Whoever does end up with you is going to be seriously lucky,” she said.
    “Oh, I don’t know about that.”
    “I’m serious! You’re a total catch.”
    Too-frank compliments can have an effect on a conversation like too-frank insults. We hadn’t said much for a minute when the waiter brought the check, and when we finally started to stand up she said, “I love these afternoons whenthey both have lessons,” and that, if I had to pick a moment, was when it was decided. In the corner the woman was still breast-feeding, this white veiny watermelon hanging out, and that may have had something to do with the mood too. I pretended I was walking up the block with her because I felt like getting some fresh air (the rain had picked up again); she pretended this sounded reasonable. Within fifteen minutes we were together on her large white bed, my jeans were around my ankles before my shoes were off, my coat was on the floor in the corner of the room, the lights were on, we were making the noises that people make, she was whispering the things that people whisper. I was distracting myself by trying to make words out of the letters in
middle-aged mistress
.
    This
, I thought, tugging a bra strap here, feeling myself yanked and