Otherwise Engaged Read Online Free PDF Page A

upstairs, who gardens in a half-slip and a Chanel jacket, hair in curlers, fully made-up.
    It’s cursed, this place. Gabrielle cursed it, you can’t blame her. Four years together and no proposal. Then I come along and, eighteen months later, bam. Not that it was that easy, but you could see how it looked to her. Like you played all your nickels, and the next person to sit down hits.
    I remember the first time I saw Michael’s flat. Bare rooms, dust balls, nail holes peppering the blank walls. Being a straight man, he had done nothing after she left except buy a new VCR and connect it to the wide-screen TV, which, his being a straight man, was the one thing he wouldn’t part with.
    Before she left, Gabrielle lingered for nine months, still living here and calling France every day to have long, tearful conversations with her three sisters, one of whom thought she should poison Michael, two who thought she could do better. Her mother felt that if he didn’t own his own home by now he never would, and perhaps higher ground was indicated.
    At the end of nine months Gabrielle touched him for first and last month’s rent and a new Sealy Posturepedic, rolled everything up in the Oriental rugs, and sledded out like the Grinch. Luckily she’d found a reasonably priced south-of-Market indoor/outdoor loft space from which to date new, younger men and from which to phone Michael and threaten to kill him every five minutes. As Michael and I lay together in the dark trying to get used to each othernaked, she called to whisper about homicide, but I knew she wouldn’t. She was the gum on your shoe type, not the ha ha you’re dead type.
    She had long curly hair the color of redwood, and the thinnest waist I have ever seen. Green eyes, high Parisian accent, the entire catastrophe. I met her once at Juice World, when Michael and I were just friends. It was clear from her benign expression that she didn’t consider me a threat. She looked at me like a fly on the other side of the glass. I have short brown hair and no waist; I go straight down from the armpits.
    When they first broke up I felt sorry for her (this was when I felt sorry for anyone who couldn’t be with Michael) and then she called me twenty times in a row one night at my apartment and hung up, and then I didn’t anymore. I admire her stamina is how I feel now.
    A few weeks later she called Michael to tell him that she had seen me again on Union Street, and that she was much prettier than I was. That may be true, I thought, and it may not be true. But today I threw out your shampoo.
    Soon after she left, I moved in.
    At length, I came across her markers. Unlike the lone forgotten packing crate, there was clearly a method at work. Velvet evening bags, toothbrushes, Velcro ankle weights, a pink tampon case. Photographs of her blowing kisses into the camera; she was extremely photogenic, had once made the back cover of French
Vogue
. Sun hats, vegan cookbooks, a volume of Kahlil Gibran, in which she had highlighted key passages in yellow marker. A small clay cherub, which I smashed with a hammer. Then I prowled around like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
, looking for something else of hers to break.
    There is some progress. I no longer feel as if she is going to burst into the bedroom and spray us with gunfire.
    This place is like a way station. I try to have the detached air that one has waiting for trains.
    I don’t know anyone who got someone fresh.
    We’re not speaking. Lines were drawn swiftly and wordlessly. He has the kitchen and the back office. I have the front of the flat, including the living room. I’ve set up an embassy in the bedroom.
    Michael doesn’t feel we need a professional photographer for the wedding. He feels snapshots taken by his friend who directs industrial videos are the way to go. Capture the moment, is how he put it. I would like someone named Kale from the SF Design Center who charges three thousand dollars. Capture the wedding, is how I put