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“Come on, Alice,” dad growled. “Show some spine. A diffident revolutionary is no good. I’m a commodities trader. If you don’t kill me, who will you?”
Wednesday passed in this way, then half of Thursday. Thursday at lunch I walked down to Times Square where there was a Belgian frites shop whose product I admired. Then I walked back to Pfizer wondering if flying off to meet some hardly-known person in a foreign country was really the ideal decision-making procedure. (I had booked my ticket online but still had four hours left to back out.) If it turned out that Natasha was everything I hoped and dreamed and was into, then what would she want with me? And if she wasn’t, then what would I want with her? And why even ask these age-old questions that must have had all the nutrition chewed out of them long ago? I fed the mayonnaise-limp frites into my teeth one by one, and when I returned to my cubicle I deliberately spilled a little leftover mayo into the cracks of my keyboard, just in order to make the corporate world a little more soiled and grimy, more in need of being replaced for a week by a trip, however ill-advised or well-considered, down to Ecuador.
“What uncle?” Vaneetha asked. “Which watch? Were you just now fired?”
“Um, yes. I was just now fired. From Pfizer. Wow. Pfired! So I’m pfucked!” But the p was silent so no one laughed but me. I looked at Vaneetha. “Don’t worry about my uncle. He doesn’t exist. So he’s fine.”
I chewed my toast, considering this, and between glances at Brigid looked all around the room with equal attentiveness, just so it wouldn’t seem like I was particularly fixated on her face (so sharp-boned and precise, but with a pleasant suggestion of former plumpness everywhere smudging it faintly with voluptuous life) and happily analogous body. Certainly she would make a welcome addition to any threesome.
“Is there a mosquito?” she asked. “Or what are you looking at everywhere?”
lol
“So where do you guys live in Israel? You live in the part of Israel that’s Israel or the part that’s not so much?”
Meanwhile rest assured that I have no intention of waging class warfare against you (dad), who are just one of many rightwing voters, therefore negligible as such. Whereas you are my one and only father and thus bulk correspondingly large to me in the father dept.
lol
I suppose I really ought to explain.
The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority ... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.
lol
My father has in all sired six children. I used to suspect that he had had so many just to show the catholicity of his tastes, to bolster his image as tolerant patriarch, to inform the world that his loins were rich in sons. There are in fact four boys, and he has given us progressively trendy names: Mark (twenty-six), Charles himself (pushing twenty), Sebastian (fifteen) and Valentine (nine). As against two girls. I sometimes wish I had been born female, if only to rectify this bias.
the 'pushing twenty' bit is small but does make me chuckle
'Good morning,' I said, putting the tray down beside Gloria's cracked smile. I drew the curtains back an inch or two. A gash of sunlight fell athwart the bed, causing a token shriek from the compromised Gloria, who was sitting up and well into her second round of toast. I watched her finish. She wiped her mouth with freckly knuckles, lay back with a grunt and lit a cigarette. Her breasts were exposed; they looked very white now. What did I feel for her? Ambiguous lust, genial condescension, and gratitude. It didn't seem enough.
Legless buskers cavorted outside Holland Park Underground. I bought some newspapers (Fleet Street's big two, in fact, the Sun and the Mirror), leftily dropped ten pence into the musicians' bowler hat and stood there reading the headlines, tapping my foot to a trilled-up version of 'Oh, You Beautiful Doll'. I was about to aim up to Notting Hill for a coffee at the Costa Brava when a hook-nosed queen with flat hair appeared from behind the curtains of the station photograph booth. He asked if I knew the time. I said what it was, referring him to the large clock attached to the wall opposite. He thanked me and inquired if I ever went down the Catacombs club in Earls Court.
leftily is so funny