If the River Was Whiskey Read Online Free PDF

Helmut, in a blinding white jumpsuit and toque, studiously polishing the tile walls. “I know what you mean,” I said.
    We dated for a month—museums, drives in the country, French and German restaurants, ice-cream emporia, fern bars—before we kissed. And when we kissed, after a showing of
David and Lisa
at a revival house all the way up in Rhinebeck and on a night so cold no run-of-the-mill bacterium or commonplace virus could have survived it, it was the merest brushing of the lips. She was wearing a big-shouldered coat of synthetic fur and a knit hat pulled down over her brow and she hugged my arm as we stepped out of the theater and into the blast of the night. “God,” she said, “did you see him when he screamed ‘You touched me!’? Wasn’t that priceless?” Her eyes were big and she seemed weirdly excited. “Sure,” I said, “yeah, it was great,”and then she pulled me close and kissed me. I felt the soft flicker of her lips against mine. “I love you,” she said, “I think.”
    A month of dating and one dry fluttering kiss. At this point you might begin to wonder about me, but really, I didn’t mind. As I say, I was willing to wait—I had the patience of Sisyphus—and it was enough just to be with her. Why rush things? I thought. This is good, this is charming, like the slow sweet unfolding of the romance in a Frank Capra movie, where sweetness and light always prevail. Sure, she had her idiosyncrasies, but who didn’t? Frankly, I’d never been comfortable with the three-drinks-dinner-and-bed sort of thing, the girls who come on like they’ve been in prison for six years and just got out in time to put on their makeup and jump into the passenger seat of your car. Breda—that was her name, Breda Drumhill, and the very sound and syllabification of it made me melt—was different.
    Finally, two weeks after the trek to Rhinebeck, she invited me to her apartment. Cocktails, she said. Dinner. A quiet evening in front of the tube.
    She lived in Croton, on the ground floor of a restored Victorian, half a mile from the Harmon station, where she caught the train each morning for Manhattan and her job as an editor of
Anthropology Today.
She’d held the job since graduating from Barnard six years earlier (with a double major in Rhetoric and Alien Cultures), and it suited her temperament perfectly. Field anthropologists living among the River Dayak of Borneo or the Kurds of Kurdistan would send her rough and grammatically tortured accounts of their observations and she would whip them into shape for popular consumption. Naturally, filth and exotic disease, as well as outlandish customs and revolting habits, played a leading role in her rewrites. Every other day or so she’d call me from work and in a voice that could barely contain its joy give me the details of some new and horrific disease she’d discovered.
    She met me at the door in a silk kimono that featured a plunging neckline and a pair of dragons with intertwined tails. Her hair was pinned up as if she’d just stepped out of the bath and she smelled of Noxzema and pHisoHex. She pecked my cheek, took the bottle of Vouvray I held out in offering, and led me into the front room. “Chagas’ disease,” she said, grinning wide to show off her perfect, outsized teeth.
    “Chagas’ disease?” I echoed, not quite knowing what to do with myself. The room was as spare as a monk’s cell. Two chairs, a loveseat, and a coffee table, in glass, chrome, and hard black plastic. No plants (“God knows what sort of insects might live on them—and the
dirt
, the dirt has got to be crawling with bacteria, not to mention spiders and worms and things”) and no rug (“A breeding ground for fleas and ticks and chiggers”).
    Still grinning, she steered me to the hard black plastic loveseat and sat down beside me, the Vouvray cradled in her lap. “South America,” she whispered, her eyes leaping with excitement. “In the jungle. These bugs—assassin bugs,