Reproduction is the Flaw of Love by Lauren Grodstein

Author:Lauren Grodstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780440335054
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Tourism

Before piling back into the car toward Manhattan, Miller asked Blair if she’d ever had Kurdish takeout. He acted dismayed when she said she hadn’t. “Kurdish?” she said in disbelief.

“Oh, you really should.” So: plans, cunningly arrived at. He coughed as he asked her to come by for dinner. Grant and Rachel pretended not to hear the machinations. Blair looked down, looked up, agreed.

And came over the next Thursday. Miller spent the two hours before her arrival checking over his apartment and seeing things he’d never noticed before: knee-high chips in the gray paint on the walls, a mud-colored stain on the beige carpet, near the Salvation Army couch, and a funky, sweaty smell emanating from the futon. He changed the futon’s sheets, cursed, wondered if Dial-A-Mattress could guarantee delivery in an hour, cursed again when he found that they could not. He tried to soak up the mud-colored stain with some old T-shirts dipped in Lysol. He stared fixedly at the chips in the paint and considered what on earth could have been their cause.

He bought a six-pack of Negra Modelo. He showered and tried to paste down his hair into something resembling neatness. He tried on one of Grant’s old button-down shirts, took it off, and put it back on. He wore clean jeans. He stayed barefoot, because Debra Fox once told him that he had very attractive feet.

Blair arrived five minutes early.

“So this is where you live.” She kissed him on the cheek. She was prettier than he had remembered, and smaller, barely five three, slim and strong like a cord of wood. Her blond hair, free of that horrible cap, swept gently behind her ears. She was wearing a black cotton dress.

“This is where I live.” Miller stepped back to let her in. “Ever been to Queens before?”

“The airports.” She walked around his apartment, seemed to inspect it the way Miller had. “And the U.S. Open.”

“Well, welcome.” Miller was proud to introduce her to someplace she hadn’t been before. Queens, he felt, was a different kind of wonderland, one everybody should try at least once.

“Glad to be here,” Blair said. “Are we really eating Kurdish?”

“Here’s the menu.” Miller passed her a xeroxed menu from a kitchen drawer. They both looked at it together in what Miller hoped was companionable silence, pondering sheikh babani and kubay sawar. “That’s a good one,” Miller said, pointing to the babani. “It’s eggplant.”

They got straight to it, rather than mumble through forced conversation, ordering the babani, plus spicy spinach and cracked-wheat dumplings and bread. “I brought beer.” Blair pulled a six-pack of Corona out of her knapsack. “I’ll put it in the fridge. Oh, you already have Negra Modelo! Well, okay. No such thing as too much beer.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t been to Queens for anything but the airport,” Miller said to Blair’s back, watching her ass as she leaned into the refrigerator.

“Not a lot of time spent exploring, I’m afraid.” She closed the refrigerator door with her hip, holding a Corona in each hand.

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