A GOOD DAY

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Yesterday, the first of the month, will go down to posterity in the annals of her history as the greatest day since that Saturday late in the summer of her fifteenth year when she first experienced carnal ecstasy and learned to truly read philosophy, both milestones achieved within hours of one another. Fifteen years again had passed between then and yesterday, when she woke with a sight headache and sprung out of bed for a walk, stopping for coffee and a hardboiled egg and then leaning on a tree along the cold river’s edge, among other remedies. She had plans to see her boyfriend but instead called him and begged off. The late morning and entire afternoon was spent in the movies, alternating between a louche comedy and a lugubrious historical epic, one and then the other and then back to the first and then back to the second, all on the same ticket, a circumstance enabled by a flirtation with the usher. He appeared to be no more than eighteen. He was taller even than her brother, who was six-and-a-half feet. Toward the end of her second viewing of the drama, he came and sat with her for a moment, and, noticing that his leg was juddering, she placed a hand on it to steady it, and he placed his hand on top of hers, and a current went through her. The two of them repaired to the projection room where they breathed heavily and groped one another, clothes not coming off at all but various fasteners unfastened in the hopes that they might. She called her boyfriend on the way back from the theater, more certain than ever that she loved him and would, one day soon, become his wife. He did not answer. She left a message. Dinner was a pear and a ham sandwich consumed against the salmon-pink magnificence of dusk. When her boyfriend called back, she did not answer. The light changed. She accepted the coming darkness with relief, and the cheer she forced upon her own heart forestalled any thought of gloom. More time than usual was spent in front of the mirror, watching herself caress her own cheek. She ended the day as she began it: clever, doomed, back in bed.