Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

ignoring me.
    “I’m springing forth,” I said, “with a vengeance.”
    “Come upstairs with me,” Peter said, “please. Just to sleep, or whatever you want. It would be so nice. We could both use the company, it seems to me.”
    We climbed the stairs to the floor above the bar together and walked through the dark apartment to his bedroom. We lay together on his bed, fully clothed, kissing slowly with our arms around each other and our bodies pressed together. Peter kissed me probingly, as if he were asking me question after question, demanding answers from me, refusing to be deterred, exactly the way he had pursued me in the bar. When the room began to spin slowly, and then faster, I crawled down his body and unzipped his jeans, took his cock into my mouth, and sucked and licked and stroked it until he came all over my hand. Then I sat up, rapt with sudden cold horror, and said, “I have to go.”
    The next day, I remembered smeared lights jerking hazily out the cab window, then, when I got home, some difficulty finding the keys to my apartment door. I don’t remember crawling into our bed and falling asleep next to Anthony. I woke up the next morning in bed alone.

  walked into the kitchen, wearing my bathrobe, my hair going in a hundred unflattering directions, reeking of stale wine and guilt, my skull crackling with pain.
    “Hi,” Wendy said, not looking at me, taking a granola bar out of the box and putting the box back into the cupboard and the granola bar into her backpack. She already had her coat and hat on. “I’m so late. I overslept. Oh my God. I missed first period.”
    “Oh no,” I said. “Where’s Daddy?”
    “He had a morning radio thing. No one woke me up!”
    “Sorry, Wendy,” I said contritely. I began to make coffee, groping behind a mason jar of rice for a filter, standing at the sink while cold water ran from the faucet, forgetting momentarily what I was supposed to be doing with the glass carafe. “You want to go with me to Indrani’s after school today? I told her I’d help her clean up the party. She said she’d love to see you.”
    “No thanks,” she said. “I want to go over to Ariel’s after school, if that’s okay with you. Her mom will be there.”
    “Sure,” I said. “Will you have dinner there or come home?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll call you.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Let me know by six.”
    “Okay,” she said. “Bye, Mom,” and she was out the door.
    I wandered around the empty apartment with my coffee, looking into Anthony’s study, into Wendy’s room, irrationally searching for evidence of my own transgression, or at least some explanation for it. Anthony’s cramped study off the kitchen, formerly a walk-in pantry, was littered with newspapers and magazines. Wendy’s bedroom was a tangle of clothes. Crouched in his cage, her hamster, an animate wad of hair she’d named Melvin, ignored me. Neither room offered me anything of what I was looking for; the contents of both were at once dully familiar and wholly opaque in their unyielding, private loyalty to their proper occupants.
    I wandered to the living room window and stood looking down at our quiet, unremarkable stretch of West Eighteenth Street. Behind me, our rather scraggly but jaunty Christmas tree gave off a faint piney smell. I thought I could almost hear the tinsel moving in the air currents with a glassy rustle. It was 8:30; I had to be at my office by 9:45. At two o’clock, I would be free for two weeks. I always took a two-week vacation this time of year, even though it was famously the darkest, most suicidal time for therapy patients. This year, I had no particular plans besides staying home and reading a couple of long nineteenth-century novels and maybe, if I felt inspired and enterprising, painting a little. I rarely went anywhere during my winter breaks; I just needed a vacation from helping people around the holidays. The rest of the year, I had no problem