Writers & Lovers by Lily King

Author:Lily King [King, Lily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2020-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

I meet Silas at the movie theater on Church Street. We choose seats close to the front. He’s wearing a striped wool hat that he keeps on the whole movie, and our bodies never touch. I’ve never been more aware of not touching someone in my life. Two and a half Merchant Ivory hours of not touching. Afterward we go back to his apartment in North Cambridge. It’s three flights of linoleum stairs up. He jiggles the lock, and inside it smells like his car plus tobacco and bacon. I follow him down a hallway, past two closed doors. Behind the second door a guy fake orgasms in falsetto, long and loud.

Silas pounds on the wall. ‘You wish, Doug.’ He waits for me at the end. ‘Sorry about that.’

We go into the kitchen. He pulls two bottles of beer out of the fridge and opens them by hooking the cap beneath a drawer pull. The caps fall into his open hand, and he drops them into the trash. We sit at a sticky little table in the corner. The two chairs are close together, and he doesn’t move them apart. There’s a newspaper and a pen on the table. Someone has been doing the crossword. He picks up the pen and slides the paper closer, and I hope we don’t have to finish the crossword. I don’t like them. I don’t like any word puzzles or Scrabble or any of the other word games writers are supposed to like. But he flips the paper over to a photo of Ken Starr and gives him long hair that looks like eels, then puts the pen down abruptly.

We talk and tear the labels off our bottles. He asks what Muriel said about my book, and I have to say I haven’t heard from her. I think he can tell this makes me miserable, so he tells me that his roommate Doug is in love with a lesbian who sometimes spends the night but nothing happens and that Jim and Joan, his other roommates, have the master bedroom but have to put all of Joan’s stuff in the basement anytime Jim’s father, a Baptist minister, visits from Savannah.

‘What are your parents like?’ I ask.

He picks up the pen again. ‘Unhappy.’ He laughs. ‘I tried to say something else, but there’s no other word for it. They should have split up a long time ago. I think they were going to.’

‘Before your sister died?’

‘Yeah. And now they’re a hobbled mess.’ He draws a sort of hunched Quasimodo figure with two heads, a hump, and a bunch of clubbed feet. He hands me the pen. ‘What about your father? Are you close?’

My father isn’t second-date material. ‘We were once. But he’s not a nice man.’ I draw my father in profile, the thick brosse of white hair sticking straight up, the long straight nose with the tiny tip, the mouth wide open and yelling at me for being a quitter. Silas takes the pen and

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