Rosalind by Judith Deborah

Author:Judith Deborah [Deborah, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Plimsoll Press

Chapter 8

We decided to celebrate our having declared ourselves to one another with a long weekend in the city. Our destination was the Four Seasons, where Rosalind said she had always wanted to stay.

We spent four days sleeping in, ordering room service breakfasts, having sex, washing the sex off each other, and going for long, directionless ambles around town. You could smell winter coming and the city was getting that hard, metallic tang in the air, so we bundled up. We’d pick a neighborhood and wander around until a restaurant struck our fancy, then settle into it for a lingering dinner.

I didn’t have anyone in the ICU at the time, which was why I was able to get away on such short notice. It also meant I was able to forgo my regular 6:00 am status updates prior to the nurses’ change of shift, which usually serve as my wake-up call. I’d divided my rounds among my colleagues on the cardiac service in any case, and Grace, who found my swift courtship of Rosalind “freakishly inspiring,” made it her business to fend off any would-be administrative or bureaucratic buzz-kills.

I’d forgotten what it’s like to do things just for the hell of it. We went to the Met late one afternoon, ticketless, on the off chance that we could get in, and scored a pair of nosebleed seats to Götterdämerung, at which we lasted forty minutes before fleeing back to our nest on Fifty-Seventh Street. We took the seven to Citi Field and watched five innings’ worth of the Mets being humiliated by the Cardinals. We poked around antique shops in the East Village, picking up a 1950s-era mailbox and a thick, soft blanket made of fake gray chinchilla. We bought a little vintage Wedgwood dish because the white silhouetted profile on the lid reminded me of Rosalind. We ran into Keith and Estes on the southeast corner of the Park and went with them to the St. Regis, where the three of us sat Rosalind down in the King Cole Bar and plied her with ridiculously expensive single malt.

But mostly we stayed in. At about noon on the Friday, for example, when I had thought we were going to try to get into the Minetta Tavern for lunch, I came out of the bathroom where I’d showered, shaved and dressed to find Rosalind still sprawled on top of the crumpled bedspread with the Times crossword. On her top half, she was wearing the two gray tank tops she had slept in; on the bottom, she had on a pair of light blue cotton underpants cut like short male boxers – a far cry from the silky filmy thing she’d worn that first time we were together, but they got me nonetheless. She was wearing reading glasses on the end of her nose, shiny black cat-eye things she’d picked up at Duane Reade. They made her eyes look huge.

“I thought you hated the Times,” I said. “And why aren’t you dressed? I want my porterhouse.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.