Heart, You Bully, You Punk by Leah Hager Cohen

Author:Leah Hager Cohen [Cohen, Leah Hager]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593330593
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

20.

Wally peels at the aluminum foil and cuts his index finger, a red centimeter. He sucks it and goes back to the gift. It’s Sunday, 3:00 A.M. He’s just home from work and not tired. The light that lights the Alice portrait had been on when he walked in the door, as it usually is not, and it was because of this that he noticed the flat package on the mantel. It bore a yellow Post-it with Wally from Esker on it, and before taking it to the couch he made himself a cup of licorice tea, his regular post-Game, pre-bed ritual. Now, removing the rest of the silver skin from the gift without event, he finds a heavy brown envelope with a tie-shut flap, like interoffice envelopes from days of yore.

He pulls out a large, laminated pamphlet sort of thing: a guide to making paper airplanes. He feels inside the envelope again, but there’s nothing else. He rereads the card, if you can call it that: nothing much to deconstruct there. He’s not sure whether he feels disappointed or not. Paper airplanes. The pamphlet promises these are the best in the world. All right. He gets a piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven.

Three A.M., closer to three-thirty now. He sits at the cherry coffee table, tea near at hand, and folds. There are three varieties. He makes one of each, then hosts a little competition. The Phoenix goes farthest, but there’s something about the Nakamura Lock that feels best, the canniness with which it rides the current. The Balcony Bomber’s a definite third. Maybe it works better from a balcony.

Nuncio has been cast in a play at the Public. It’s not the lead, but it’s a major role in a new work by a prominent playwright. He’s taking a leave of absence starting next Friday. Wally learned this tonight, less than a week after Alice blew out of town again. It’s happened before, Nuncio leaving to do some theater project, but never for off-Broadway. In the past it’s been more ephemeral, some showcase or a staged reading or something barely pulled off in a loft space way downtown, or in Greenpoint or something, and he’s always come back to Game after a month or two or three, tops, glowing or bitchy or subdued for a time, and then back to normal, sweetly Nuncio again, with his preposterous tuxedo shirts and lightning wit, Wally’s first mate and Game’s front man.

“So this is it. You’re leaving me,” said Wally tonight, at the back table, after the restaurant was closed. He’d poured a shot of peppermint schnapps into his cocoa, something he and his high-school friends used to do on snow days in Grange Hill; that was back when parents kept liquor cabinets; he had a sudden, vibrant flash of sitting in a beige Naugahyde chair in Chris Petroni’s basement with Jimi Hendrix blaring on the eight-track and an endless game of Ping-Pong in the background.

Nuncio smiled. “We’ll see,” he said modestly, and Wally knew in that instant that Nuncio wouldn’t be back.

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