The Book of Getting Even by Benjamin Taylor

Author:Benjamin Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781586421564
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2008-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

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“I’d like to own that sign. I’d like to have it in my kitchen.” Gabriel placed his order. “A number two, please, but with extra sauce and scallions and no cheese. Better yet, could I have the sauce that goes on number eight instead of the number-two sauce?”

“You always order something that’s not on the menu. Gabriel, are you like that in bed? Give me a Tab, please,” she said to the waitress, “and just the way it comes from the bottling plant will be fine.”

Gabriel ate his customized taco. Marghie sipped her Tab. “Lustig gets on my nerves,” he said. “Every time you try to tell him something, he says, ‘I know.’ I cannot utter any declarative sentence without Lustig saying he knows. So I told him I wear briefs not boxers, just to see what would happen.”

“You did not.”

“Okay, okay.” He chewed a while. Delicious taco. “How’s lover boy?”

“I’ll thank you to call him by his Christian name.”

“We can agree that he’s that, anyhow. How’s Peter?”

“Writes me several times a day. Calls every night.”

“How come you two don’t see each other more often?”

“We’ve got our arrangement. He comes here once in a while. I go there once in a very great while. He’s busy, you know. He’s writing the definitive study of the Cliff Dwellers—”

“Wonder how he came up with them.”

“—and needs absolute concentration.”

Gabriel chewed heartily, looked reflective. She couldn’t make out whether he was thinking about Peter or about what he was eating. He said, “I’ve been doing a little—”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full. You take too-big bites.”

He chewed, swallowed. “A little dating myself.”

“You? Tell all.”

“First was Scott. Jewish boy from Toronto, every hair in place, perfect clothes, and so we got to talking and he steered the conversation to his favorite topic, housework. I’d think we were safely on to something else, but no, we’d suddenly be back to the perils of mold and like that. I got to know him pretty well over the course of a weekend, well enough to know he was in the grip of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. We came to grief when I said so. Next was Skip. Said his real name was Eugene, but nobody calls him that except the police. Then there was this other one. Real nice, a Russian Jew—uncircumcised, what do you think of that?—who told me about all of his erotic adventures in the Soviet Union. Said he’d had sex for first time under Khrushchev. Then there was this redhead, big freckles all over him, cornflower-blue eyes, something to see.”

“I do like redheads.”

“Me too. His name was Blair or Todd or one of those names. Anyhow, he told me that the day their father died he and his little brother had sex. Said it happened just like that, without a word between them. And that it had happened only that once, and that they’d never in all these years talked about it, but that his brother was the only one he’d ever love.

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