Baby Geisha Read Online Free PDF Page B

through daily existence as a lonely matron. She wondered what she still had in common with non-journalists. Maybe this rainforest expert would show her.
    â€œAre there more tucanes here?” Joanne asked, pronouncing toucans like he did, in flirty Spanish plural.
    â€œ Sí ,” said the man, handing her a flashlight. “ Soy Raphael. Mucho gusto .”
    The chestnut-mandibled, a showy toucan with a brown-striped beak, gave Joanne and Raphael, the myopic birder, a happy send-off onto the trails. Raphael took Joanne for a flashlight tour of the bushes to look for serpentes and insectos . Joanne preferred the hand-sized luna moths that flew erratically towards her light beam, and the strawberry dart frogs that looked like single red-painted fingernails. Also impressive were these walnut-sized seedpods ravaged with teeth marks.
    â€œThey’re the monkey’s favorite meal,” Raphael said, winking at Joanne as if monkey food was his big turn-on.
    That would have been the makeout cue, but Joanne exuded a bitter DEET sweat, her hair was plastered to her neck from humidity, and she didn’t feel vampish at all covered in mosquito bites. Joanne was so far from feeling sexy that this night-walk was quickly growing tedious.
    â€œLook!” Raphael shout-whispered. He pointed his light at a walking stick, a foot-long insect twig look-alike. It crawled off
along the teak-planked footpath. The walking stick became oddly phallic in Joanne’s mind, perhaps because it was the first long object they’d seen.
    â€œWant to see my hammock?” she asked. Raphael nodded. They rushed back to her hut where Raphael turned off his flashlight. She fucked him quickly, not in the hammock but in her bed. At least they were lying down. She didn’t feel like sharing her hammock. Joanne asked Raphael to leave as he was buttoning his pants.
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    Waking up feeling jaded, Joanne groggily stared at a pair of charming parrot portraits striped by sunlight leaking through the slatted window blinds. Raphael’s penis was burned on her mind, small, warm, and flaccid like a freshly killed snake. New York has ruined me , she thought. I’m impossible to impress . So what if Raphael’s penis looked more like a deceased baby boa than a live daddy? Dragging herself to the breakfast bar, she sat, jet-lagged, with her glass of juice. The marañón at the juice bar, also known as cashew apple, excited her more than Raphael. Finding love is more important than exotic tropical fruit , she told herself. Maybe her sisters were right. I’m going to ask the sloth what’s wrong with me .
    The clinic, two huts over, had six two-toed sloths and two three-toed sloths that slept tangled in branches inside a giant stilted A-frame. Joanne entered through a screen door into a mini-forest of furballs. She was only vaguely aware of their sluggish presence. She hoped Raphael wasn’t there. A lady in khaki came in from another room to greet her.
    â€œI’m Nancy,” she said. “Head sloth nurse.”
    Joanne introduced herself and her agenda. Nancy took a step back at Joanne’s boisterous demand to hold a sloth pronto.
    â€œThat might be tricky,” Nancy whispered. “They sleep all day.”
    â€œWhat about the therapy?” Joanne asked. She pictured a sloth
with a clipboard, taking notes while his patient, reclining on a couch, expressed his emotions.
    â€œPeople pet the sloths to rejuvenate,” Nancy said. “Come back at sunset.”
    A sloth clinic, Joanne realized, was badly suited to her impatient nature. She hated waiting around. Even in her sleep, Joanne was either on the way, or paused briefly to observe, annotate, and resume. Her dreams were as tidily packed as her suitcases. A dozen little stories in each dream, like balled pairs of socks, ready for Joanne to flip through and meld into jaunty magazine articles. Waiting around was wasting time. Wasting time implied