The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards Read Online Free PDF Page B

while you’ll be in warm, warm Florida.”
    The door is open, which lets in the smell of the outside world: grass and trees and the soft, soporific southern air. The night is fully dark now, and she is tired.
    He says, “Hot and cold don’t mix?”
    “They become something terribly bland,” she says, “or a tornado.”
    He places his hands on her hips. She leans in and lets him kiss her. It carries a tiny charge. She glances at Ellen, who is slow dancing with the dark little man.
    “Did you know about those two?” she asks.
    Andrew nods. “Elle tells me everything.”
    Greta’s understanding of the night is shifting. She can almost feel the movement. She doesn’t know what to think, except she doesn’t want to be alone with Ellen and her strange partner. She initiates a second kiss and lets Andrew press his body against hers.
    “I could be persuaded to stay.” He wags the hand with the cast. “This doesn’t prevent me from doing anything.”
    “What do you know that I don’t?” she asks. “You can start with that guy’s name.”
    “It’s Stan. He’s in the process of leaving his wife. She was at the party. Maybe tonight was it, you know, the parting.”
    “That girl who was the bartender—”
    “Stan’s daughter.”
    “Jesus,”
Greta says. “I thought Ellen was after you.”
    “Me?” Andrew makes a face. “Didn’t you wonder why Penny left her own party to come here? The wife is her best friend.”
    This talk makes her dizzy. She clings to him while she works to fit the pieces together. Penny hired Stan’s daughter to tend the bar, which was meant to stop him from attending to his mistress. Greta understands that she misjudged Penny. She left the party to stop Stan from seeing Ellen, to shame him. The night makes sense, just not the kind of sense she expected. It’s Penny and the little man’s wife who are friends, not she and Ellen.
    “I’m trying like hell to get your attention,” Andrew says. “What do I need to do?”
    “Love me,” she answers. “Give up Florida and move to Chicago. Buy snow boots and earmuffs. Live for me and me alone.”
    “Hmm,” he says.
    “You asked.”
    “What the hell. Let’s do it.”
    She expects him to laugh but he doesn’t. “You’re almost serious.”
    “I turn fifty next month.” He looks at his watch as if it keeps track of his age. “I was married once, but that was done with years ago. And you look like…”
    “I’m the wild friend from out of town.”
    “When I jumped out the window, it was at my daughter’s house,” he says. “She has a drug problem. I had to let her know what she was doing to all of us.”
    “A stunt,” Greta says, and it sounds like self-accusation. She realizes why Ellen said she was no stranger to stunts. All those things she invented to prolong their friendship. She mentioned a boy—one of the tree men—who began appearing on her street, staring from his bicycle at their house. She had the vanity to think he was there to catch a glimpse of her, but she discovered a canceled check to
A.Jack
written in Duncan’s nearly illegible hand. Duncan was using him to do the chores he could no longer do himself. The kid had built the ramps she had yet to remove.
    Then Greta used the boy, too. She’d only told Ellen that she kissed him, but that was bad enough. There was the real stunt, telling such a lie.
    “I left my husband when he was dying,” she tells Andrew. “I left him because he had chosen
not
to die, and I couldn’t face it. When there seemed no end to it, I couldn’t continue.”
    Andrew nods without comment. He has no interest in judging her. He behaves as if the person she’s describing no longer exists, as if by admitting her bad behavior she erases it. She knows this is not true. All of the people she has been do not merely trail her like a wedding train but envelop her like the layers of an elaborate gown she can never entirely shed.
    The player changes discs. Motown is back. Marvin Gaye