Dead Cat Bounce Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    She, on the other hand, altered her regal pace for no man. It fell to her to take the garbage out when her financier was out of town, and it seemed that every time she did so, she went out of her way to find Tuco. He was in the habit of leaving his apartment door open, with just a screen between him and the common spaces when he was home, and she would rap on thedoor, call out his name, offer her comments on the repaint that he was doing on his living space. Each time it happened, Tuco would wonder, afterward, what it was he had been supposed to do, what cues he had missed, what it was that she really wanted from him. Tuco had always been intrigued by the ways in which people affiliated, how they attached themselves to this group or that, and in particular, how they paired themselves off into couples. Whether they got married or just lived together, whether they were straight, gay, or some combination of the two, their behaviors seemed, to him, remarkably uniform. The first phase of a relationship was love, or failing that, at least a period of unwarranted optimism during which they tried hard to ignore the other person’s flaws, because they had their own, after all. Didn’t they? But that initial promise rarely lasted. You could watch it decay, if you were around them long enough. This one liked Leno, the other preferred Letterman. He wanted a new Acura, she would rather spend the money on plastic surgery and European holidays. The contest of wills signaled the end of the first phase, and the beginning of the struggle for supremacy that would last, generally, until there was a clear winner. And a clear loser. If the couple stayed together after that, you could always tell which was which. The winner became a bit louder, a bit more confident of their opinions, while the loser, by degrees, surrendered their capacity for independent thought, their personality withered, faded away until they became a poor and dog-eared carbon copy of their dominant partner, to whom they began to look for opinions, ideas, desires, and ultimately, permission to be.
    When he pressed himself for examples of what he thought a healthy relationship might look like, he could not think of any. It was discouraging, because he wanted to fall in love,he wanted that mad infatuation, that ecstatic high, but he could not abide the thought of the battle for control that seemed inevitably to follow. He emphatically did not want to be responsible for some other person’s life, he could barely manage to be responsible for his own. On the other hand, he didn’t know how much of himself he was willing to surrender in order to gain someone else’s conditional approval.
    In the first week of the fourth month of his tenure as superintendant, she had come to him with a problem. Her financier was in Singapore, and therefore unavailable. The thingy in the tank part of the toilet must be broken, because the water would not stop running. She didn’t like to bother anybody, normally she would wait, but the noise was making her nuts, she couldn’t sleep. Did he know anybody? Or could he, by chance, fix it for her himself? He would be such a lifesaver….
    She was a white girl. Technically she was no longer a girl, but she had flawless skin, and she spoke in a junior-high-school voice which fostered the impression, so that’s how he thought of her. Five foot four or so, with breasts that seemed a bit large for her thin frame. There was something about her lips, too, they may not have been precisely what God had given her, but Tuco didn’t really know much about such things, and she looked fine, either way. “Yeah, I can probably fix it,” he said. He had a closet full of repair parts, left over from the previous administration. “Would you like me to come have a look?”
    â€œOh, that would be great,” she said. She started in on him during the elevator ride upstairs. “So, Tuco,” she said. “Tell