Much to Your Chagrin by Suzanne Guillette

Author:Suzanne Guillette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

WITH SEPTEMBER COMES the resuming of your regular Tuesday evening hustle, finishing up at work at five of five, so you can walk from your office in midtown to Elaine’s office on the Upper West Side. She has been away on vacation, and now you are on your way to tell her about your summer, wondering how you can possibly spill all that it is you have to spill in less than fifty minutes. Your route strings together like a puzzle, turning up Fifth Avenue when you have a walk signal, walking as far and long as you can until you hit Central Park, another stop sign, or an immobilizing cluster of after-work crowds. You could have taken the subway, but walking brings you peace, a breather from another uneventful day in the office, where you can look past carefully planned storefront displays and over the traffic to the between-building slivers of sky. You rationalize it’s a necessary corridor, moving from routine work-you mind-set to the internal, questioning-you. Besides, somewhere in the middle of your forty-five-minute stroll, you will take note of panhandlers with open faces and sad stories, petitioners asking you to save the children, a woman laughing on her phone—reinforcing that the nature of it all is simple: Keep moving. You can’t be late.

This morning, on the phone with Paula, she asked a very Paula question. Paula has recently returned from her summer in London, and you are happy to have her presence back in the city, even if you have both been too busy to actually get together. This morning, you were going on and on about moving into your new apartment with Jack’s help, how you discovered a built-in closet and bookshelf you hadn’t even noticed when you went to look at the place. You were telling her about the drive from the Bronx to Brooklyn, how Jack had followed your car, driving the sketchy van with an expired sticker. Filled with relief at having the move half over, you were staring at him in your rearview as you both waited in traffic to get on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It wasn’t enough to see each other. You heard your phone buzz and opened it to find a text message from Jack. “You’re the best,” he wrote. You wrote back, “So are you.” The next one was, “I can’t wait to hold you.” And you went back and forth, grinning at each other, even as the cars inched along, until he finally wrote, “There is something really wrong with us”—with an e-smiley face tacked onto the end, of course. In the middle of telling Paula this, she abruptly said, “Can I ask you something? What makes you feel beautiful?”

The last time Paula interrupted you with a non sequitur was when she called you from London. As one does when one rambles, you’d started talking about whether or not the new HPV vaccine promotes promiscuity in teen girls, its target market. A frequent cause of cervical cancer, HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, which, incidentally, is estimated to affect one in four women.

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