The Virgin Spy by Krista Bridge

Author:Krista Bridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9781926706948
Publisher: D & M Publishers
Published: 2009-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

A MATTER of FIRSTS

Your father’s New York mistress was the one you met. The exotic one. She used to say, “‘Balls,’ said the queen. ‘If I had two, I’d be king.’” That was her expression, whether something irritated her, like losing her keys, or whether there was a pleasant surprise, like one last piece of birthday cake in the refrigerator. Balls, said the queen. Your father tried to correct her usage. The phrase had exasperation in it, he claimed, and was appropriate only as a response to something negative. She said, “Perhaps you’re right,” and smiled, but you could tell she was not the type to capitulate in action.

Of course, it was not open to you that she was your father’s mistress, although you clearly knew, and they knew it. Your father often went to medical conferences in New York, and he couldn’t tolerate hotels, their bedsheets gave him a rash, so he stayed with her—Ella, an old friend from medical school. This is what he told you and your mother, although there was an impish smirk about him when he said so, a conspiratorial wink, as if such patent untruths, and the acceptance of them, were in keeping with the true spirit of family. Three times when you were thirteen he took you with him to New York because your mother had to look after your grandfather, who was in and out of the hospital. Around you, they acted stiff and professional, no sly looks or illicit touches. Of course, the minute you saw her, you knew she was no doctor. It was the body that halted your gaze. Unexpected: its creamy fatness, so graceful, so much itself, that it challenged thinness everywhere. A fatness impossible to reduce with euphemisms. A soothing romantic welcome. This body rolled out of itself. Said, I am the way to be.

She lived in the Bronx on a quiet dead-end street lined with trees in an old brick house with high ceilings and a rickety wooden porch in the back. The air smelled like freshly cut grass and homemade shepherd’s pie. On the other streets in her neighbourhood, the air smelled like fried food and smoke, traces of cumin and paprika drifting by on the breeze. You could hardly see to the sky. Everywhere you looked were apartment buildings with fire escapes zigzagging down the crumbling brick. Groups of teenagers lounged on front stoops, yelling at each other in languages you didn’t understand. Your father wouldn’t even let you walk off Ella’s street alone. Her house was big enough for a family of eight, but she lived there by herself. She had bought it with her first husband, who had left at her request two years later, gladly signing the house over to her because he hated the way it felt empty no matter how much furniture they bought, the way their voices echoed in the large square rooms. He said that people start off with a backyard vegetable garden, not an acreage of farm: a marriage needed a small, fertile space in which to grow.

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