The Unbinding Read Online Free PDF Page B

sudden interest in criminology means that they’ve given up on finding love. Or more specifically, on giving love. I’ve run into two or three cases of this syndrome. The last was a late-night Active Angel caller who’d gone from stripper to arson investigator and kept me on the line for ninety minutes as she talked herself out of poisoning a pit bull that her new boyfriend insisted share their bed. Along the way I got her whole biography. It started with lots of church and wholesome team sports, took the usual downturn when she reached drinking age, and gravely worsened when she moved to Florida, where—I’ve learned from our trademarked LifeSit maps, which measure things like level of sedative use and divorces within six months of marriage—the misery and mischief clusters once it escapes the small towns and medium-size cities. Those are zip codes I hope I never get mail in, seascapes I never want to see. Lean criminologists in string bikinis, starving pit bulls tied to stakes, Christians-only swingers parties. Florida is the rain forest of human behavior, with ten thousand times the rare species of other environments. Hawaii and San Diego are dicey, too.
    I swiveled on my stool to check for ballplayers and saw, in a gloomy corner booth, alone with a Sunday paper and a dark beer, my pal Rob from the gym. Had he been there all along? I waved. He folded his paper, nodded, stood. There were bike clips on his trouser cuffs and a vee of what looked like freshly salon-tanned skin beneath the open collar of his polo shirt. I’d never estimated his age before, but I pegged it now as forty-six. A silvery, predatory forty-six that can finally afford what it longed for at eighteen but knows that it doesn’t have forever to get it.
    Jesse and Rob traded smiles as he walked over, and, before either one had said a word, I sensed a jagged mutual attraction, all lust and resentment and moral distaste, that I wanted nothing to do with. The genie in Rob called forth by Jesse’s legs was not, I sensed, on good terms with the rest of him, perhaps because Rob had kept it bound so long. I expected that it would fight fiercely to have its way with him. And Jesse would take its side for her own purposes. Maybe to keep her closet full of boots.
    In the ensuing small talk I made a point of mentioning Sabrina, exaggerating my hopes for our first date in order to signal to Rob and Jesse that my interests lay elsewhere, outside the bar, and they should consider themselves alone together. I think they appreciated this gesture, particularly Rob, who encouraged me to draw it out.
    “What’s this girl’s background?” he asked me. “What’s she about?” That’s when I realized something odd. Jesse, just moments before, had called me Cass, and Rob hadn’t flinched. Nor had he called me Kent yet. Either he had a keen sense of discretion or he hadn’t been listening when we met last Friday. He had an intriguing manner, Rob. Focused but not curious.
    “Powerful lawyer’s daughter. Educated. Lightly educated, but enough. Not bookish or driven, maybe, but aware. Cultural, too. Aspires to be, at least. Flirtatious but deeply gun-shy about relationships. On the edge of a breakdown that never quite arrives.”
    “And that’s the part that interests you, no doubt.” Jesse said this, but it came from Rob—her verbal translation of his arched left eyebrow.
    “She claims she’s divorced, but I checked and it’s not true. She thinks that it makes her sound more worldly, maybe.”
    “So how did you woo this psycho?” Jesse said.
    “By radiating bored contempt.” It was one of those jokes that disguises a conviction. A conviction you’d find repulsive in someone else.
    “So all you did was stand there? She came to you? ‘Hello, there. Take me. But first let me tell you what damaged goods I am.’ And that’s appealing to the new Cass, all spiffy and poised and cocktail-hour cool?”
    “It’s a special occasion,” I said. “I died