Sweet Talk Read Online Free PDF Page A

women. Once I found half a ham sandwich with red marks that could have been lipstick. Or maybe catsup. This time I found five slender cigarette butts.
    “Who smokes floral-embossed cigarettes?” I said. He had just come out of the shower, and droplets of water gleamed among the black hairs of his chest like tiny knife points. “Who’s the heart-attack candidate you invite over when I’m out?” I held the buttsbeneath his nose like a small bouquet. He slapped them to the floor and we stopped speaking for three days. We moved through the apartment without touching, lay stiffly in separate furrows of the bed, desire blooming and withering between us like the invisible petals of a night-blooming cereus.
    We finally made up while watching a chess tournament on television. Even though we wouldn’t speak or make eye contact, we were sitting in front of the sofa moving pieces around a chess board as an announcer explained World Championship strategy to the viewing audience. Our shoulders touched but we pretended not to notice. Our knees touched, and our elbows. Then we both reached for the black bishop and our hands touched. We made love on the carpet and kept our eyes open so that we could look at each other defiantly.
    We were living in California and had six university degrees between us and no employment. We lived on food stamps, job interviews, and games.
    “How many children did George Washington, the father of our country, have?”
    “No white ones but lots of black ones.”
    “How much did he make when he was commander of the Revolutionary Army?”
    “He made a big to-do about refusing a salary but later presented the first Congress with a bill for a half million dollars.”
    “Who was the last slave-owning president?”
    “Ulysses S. Grant.”
    We had always been good students.
    It was a smoggy summer. I spent long hours in air-conditioned supermarkets, touching the cool cans, feeling the cold plastic stretched across packages of meat. Sam left the apartment for whole afternoons and evenings. He was in his car somewhere, opening it up on the freeway, or maybe just spending time with someone I didn’t know. We were mysterious with each other about our absences. In August we decided to move east, where a friend said he could get us both jobs at an unaccredited community college. In the meantime, I had invented a lover. He was rich and wanted to take me to an Alpine hotel, where mauve flowers cascaded over the stone walls of a terrace. Sometimes we drank white wine and watched the icy peaks of mountains shimmer gold in the sunset. Sometimes we returned to our room carrying tiny ceramic mugs of schnapps that had been given to us, in the German fashion, as we paid for an expensive meal.
    In the second week of August, I found a pair of red lace panties at the bottom of the kitchen trash.
    I decided to tell Sam I had a lover. I made my lover into a tall, blue-eyed blond, a tennis player on the circuit, a Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford who had offers from the movies. It was the tall blond part that needled Sam, who was dark and stocky.
    “Did you pick him up at the beach?” Sam said.
    “Stop it,” I said, knowing that was a sure way to get him to ask more questions.
    We were wrapping cups and saucers in newspaper and nesting them in the slots of packing boxes. “He was taller than you,” I said, “but not as handsome.”
    Sam held a blue-and-white Dresden cup, my favorite wedding present, in front of my eyes. “You slut,” he said, and let the cup drop to the floor.
    “Very articulate,” I said. “Some professor. The man of reason gets into an argument and he talks with broken cups. Thank you, Alexander Dope.”
    That afternoon I failed the California driver’s test again. I made four right turns and drove over three of the four curbs. The highway patrolman pointed out that if I made one more mistake I was finished. While daydreaming, I drove through a red light.
    On the way back to the apartment complex, Sam