Vintage Attraction by Charles Blackstone

Author:Charles Blackstone [Blackstone, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9781480447547
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

10

In retrospect, I’d say that something besides the shame about spending part of the night passed out in my car worked to keep me from returning to the Biscuit Factory that morning. Something besides the anguish I felt for almost breaking my half of my not-even-month-old marriage covenant outside, or inside, a cheap hotel.

The taxi that the imperious Clipper bartender had shoved me into took me to Berkal’s place in Little Italy. There I passed a fraught few hours hardly asleep and not entirely awake on a standard-grad-student-issue green IKEA couch steeped in old whiskey. Once I made it back to Pilsen, I expected a hassle getting into the apartment. I recalled with a cringe as I walked that the bartender had relieved me of my keys. When I finally reached the building, the main entrance was unlocked. I climbed the stairs with heavy legs. Ironic that at a moment in my life when I had the most: a wife, a job, property, a dog, I couldn’t recall a time when I felt more like I had less.

Strangely, our loft door was also unlocked. I was about to go inside when I heard Ishiguro gamboling down the stairs. He breathed quickly and sneezed and bounced on his hind paws. His fore patted my dark hipster jeans. I couldn’t wait to get out of them. More than twenty-four hours of leg cinching was long enough to know they were better suited for a scrawny Italian kid than an aging Jew who really should have gone to the gym more than once a year just to visit the smoothie bar.

“What’s going on?” I asked the pug.

To catch his runaway breath, he pushed air through his nose. He sprang again and tapped my shin. Wide-eyed franticness beseeched me.

“Were you at the Laheys’?”

He moved around me, as though dodging the question, and we stepped inside. The disarray in the living room was something to which I’d become recently inured. Still, this morning’s aftermath caught my attention. There were more empty wine and cheap domestic beer bottles than Izzy could have drained on her own. She didn’t even like beer that much. An overflowing ashtray also sat on the coffee table. I didn’t even know we owned an ashtray. All the butts, as far as I could tell without digging into the cremains, were of the same brand: American Spirit. I surmised Izzy had hosted a raucous late-night gathering for a bistro bunch. It made little sense for them to come here. The front-of-house reprobates could have just as easily and happily drunk and smoked and commiserated the latest Yelp review-reported guest indignation post-shift at a dive bar. The sight of Izzy’s stockings and skirts and inside-out blouses strewn over the couch and the coffee table was both annoying and perplexing. What kind of evening would have called for costume changes?

Ishiguro followed me down the long hallway, to the back bedroom. The door was partially closed. The pug pressed ahead, through the crack, which widened the opening enough for me to enter.

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