Further Out Than You Thought Read Online Free PDF

like the good stuff. Might as well put the smoke to use. She took a deep breath and dropped her bag, went into the bathroom and started the bath.
    When she’d first started stripping, Leo had drawn baths for her, warmed her towels in the oven and rubbed her dry. It had made her feel like a baby, loved for merely existing. Those were the nights she’d bought red wine and steaks, which he’d fried up with green onions. Those were the nights they’d feasted.
    Sitting on the edge of the sofa, Leo exhaled, filling the room with more of the skunky-sweet smoke. His white Lhasa Apso, Fifi, was curled up beside him, snoring. Leo was wearing his white caftan, open at the neck, without anything on underneath. It was what he always wore these days, except when he was on the street corner dressed as a soldier from the Revolutionary War.
    â€œI told you,” said Leo, pointing at the television as if identifying the culprit. “Did I not tell you this would happen? Man, you could feel it. The unrest, the tension.” He tugged at his beard. She stood a minute, taking him in.
    He was as beautiful as he’d been when they met, maybe even more so, because he was freer. In their time together it was almost as if he’d become more himself. A riotous mane of curls, his brown hair was streaked with sun-bleached strands, as though he’d spent the day at the beach instead of on his street corner. His Mediterranean skin glowed in the TV light, the muscles in his neck and face flared with elation, and his hazel eyes were bright. She was struck by how like a child he was, bursting with life, even at this hour of the night. It made her realize how much her feet hurt. She slid off her shoes.
    â€œEvery generation needs a new revolution. Jefferson said that.”
    The wall behind him was covered with note cards. These were new, another scheme.
    Gwen handed him the residual check along with the collection notices. He tossed the latter, still sealed, with their bold Final Notice warnings, into a waste bin in the corner of the room and tore the envelope with the check open. “Sixty-two fifty, not bad.”
    It wouldn’t begin to cover what he owed in back rent, but at least it was something.
    Gwen turned on the kitchen light and the cockroaches scattered. The sink was full of dishes. On the stove was a pot of bay leaf soup with garlic and eggs—Leo’s daily fare, because at pennies a bowl it was what he could afford. In another pot was fettuccini Alfredo, a splurge—what he’d bought with the grocery money she’d given him.
    She opened the cupboard, and more roaches scurried for the dark. One was longer than the rest, and it moved slower. Gwen saw the egg sac at the end of its body as she watched it flicker into a crevice. She took a mason jar and rinsed it as best she could in the full sink. In the refrigerator she found the water filter and poured the few drops that were left. She’d have to fill it. She’d have to wait.
    On the counter sat the DustBuster, full of roaches. Live roaches. They were crawling its plastic sides, tracking it with their sticky black turds as they searched for escape. It was Leo’s Relocation Program. He’d vacuum the roaches into the DustBuster, and when it was full he’d dump them, still alive, into the trash bin at the back of the Cornell. “Switch two letters in ‘pest’ and it becomes ‘pets,’” he’d said just that morning. He refused to kill a single roach. For his compassion, Gwen loved and hated him.
    She watched him pace the living room, pace the aisles of carpet foxed with dog piss, between the waist-high stacks of books and notebooks and newspapers, between the towers of his record collection and videocassettes. On the antique coffee table, the table he’d grown up with, his childhood drawings inked on its underside, there was the Ziploc bag of pot, the eye-shaped ashtray Gwen had made of clay, the