Start Without Me by Joshua Max Feldman

Author:Joshua Max Feldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

He hit send, turned off the phone, went into the room after Laila.

A neatly made-up king-sized bed occupied most of the square room. The blinds were pulled down over a pair of picture windows, black-and-white photographs of Greek statuary lined the walls. On a shelf opposite the foot of the bed sat a cluster of colored glass sculptures, small and globular. “They call it the sculpture room, because of the . . .” Laila motioned toward the photos, didn’t bother to finish. As Adam walked in, she reached behind him, pulled the door closed. “So be honest. Is every family totally fucked, or is it just mine?”

Adam thought about it for a moment. “I’d say if you leave me out, my family is doing pretty well.”

She patted him on the chest. “You’re right, they’re wrong. Never forget that.” She frowned in an impressed way, patted him on the chest again. “You do Pilates?”

“Swim.”

“Your boyfriend’s a lucky man.”

He gave her a puzzled smirk before he remembered. “Oh, right. No, I don’t have a boyfriend. We broke up because . . . He kept fucking other dudes. He was super dishonest.”

“Sucks,” she told him. “Been there. He was good-looking, right? You can’t trust good-looking guys.”

She turned and crouched at a purple hard-shell suitcase on the floor beside the bed. “I wasn’t kidding about Leo and my mom,” she told him as she opened the suitcase. “When we sit down to eat, count how many times they talk to each other. Their marriage is such a sham,” she declared, fishing around inside the case with her hand. “Which is why it pisses me off about the photographer. Just the hypocrisy of it. We send these pictures to half of Massachusetts and—” She looked over at him. “Do me a solid and don’t touch those?” He’d drifted to the shelf of glass sculptures, had lifted a green one shaped roughly like an apple, and was peering through its opaque surface. “They’re probably the most expensive piece of artwork in the house.” He replaced it on the shelf. She pulled out a palm-sized chrome vaporizer, and switched the device on. A little curving infinity symbol lit up in red on its face. “Look, I don’t begrudge them their misery. If they want to live a lie, so be it. But this parading of ourselves as a symbol of twenty-first-century postracial harmony . . .” She took a long, contemplative hit from the vaporizer, exhaled out the corner of her mouth, and sat down on the bed, folding her legs underneath her. “I accept that we have to make sacrifices for my dad’s career. But spending every holiday in a fucking Potemkin village, it just gets depressing.” She took another hit, let the smoke drift between her lips. “It’s complicated, though,” she allowed, blowing the rest of the smoke from her mouth. She tossed the vaporizer on the comforter, stood, and went to a closet in the corner. “Leo isn’t well-known nationally, but walk through certain neighborhoods in Boston, he’s like DeNiro in Godfather II.

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