Traffic report on the radio, echo in the intro, “-affic,” “-affic,” after which the blather show returned behind a vortex of guitars. Norma pulled in to her complex. The young man at the guard house was new. She does not yet know his name but she knew his manner: a theatrical and ironic adherence to the letter of the law. On his first day she had stopped at the gate expectantly. Tap hands on gear shift. Open up, Jack. He leaned out of the shack. “As you know, madam, I can’t let you in until you hold your card up to the pad.” She frowned. “In that case wouldn’t it be the pad that’s letting me in?” That folded up his sense of things and also doubled it. “Wonderful, madam,” he said. “Wonderful.” She wondered if she’d sleep with him eventually. It had happened with the one before, and another one about a year earlier. She could probably forgo this one or would that be a denial of frenzy. That’s what Angela was chiefly composed of, had in fact always been. She had been that way at fifteen, scorching the mores of her high school. She had been that way at twenty, marrying twice in that calendar year. She had been that way at twenty-five, founding a company that blew up big, made her millions, made her furious. And now at thirty, what? How could she explain that she felt both pitiful and powerful, neither of which was true, that she started dozens of books a week but never finished a single one, that her foot hurt from she way she had tucked it under herself at lunch? She pulled forward so that her car was directly under the gate and stopped. “What are you doing, madam?” the guardhouse guy said. “You tell me,” she said, and meant it. Only those with an unusually high tolerance for confusion went forward in the world.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
No comments:
Post a Comment