A Natural Woman by Donald Bowie

Author:Donald Bowie [Bowie, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary Romance
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

18

Mark’s car was a new BMW, AND HE DROVE it the way an alleycat crosses the street. Around it, the unpredictable taxis and sighing buses all seemed to be moving in slow motion, a kind of wavy underwater life that scattered in the car’s wake.

As he drove, Abigail rested her eyes on Mark’s denim-clad leg. She had always thought that Levis, when wrapped around the legs of a cute guy, were the only truly lush thing that the arid West had ever produced. Forget about California oranges. Mark’s jeans were joined just above his ankles by a pair of lizard cowboy boots with pointed toes. They were a Columbus Avenue version of the boots that give truckers their cockiness; they were male ranginess worked in leather. Together with the worn jeans, they went to Abigail’s head, making her forget herself—almost.

“I wonder how all the young nurses stand it,” she said. “Having you to look at all the time. I think if I were old and sick in the hospital, I’d enjoy hearing the trays being dropped while you were making your rounds. It’d give me a sense of life going on, or at least desire. Which is what makes life go on, the way gasoline makes this car run. Wouldn’t it be something if the Arabs controlled the flow of our vital juices?”

“I’m afraid the nurses are too busy with their thermometers and bedpans to notice me,” Mark said. “And as for the Arabs, they’ve found out that oil isn’t enough, haven’t they? They seem to be channeling all their oil and all their vital juices into that crazy religion of theirs.”

“I know,” Abigail said. “God really gets it on all sides. All these people claiming Him for their own with their tribalism and their repressed sexual energy and their morbid fear of the unknown…”

The BMW passed a Hungarian church.

“So many people came to this country looking for religious freedom,” she went on. “Now they’re all fleeing communism. But I wonder if life in the Soviet Union, and Poland, and Afghanistan, and Cuba isn’t closer to what the human condition has always been than what we’ve got here. Here we pile up things all around us, so we can’t see over them, to the other side.

“But I’m glad in a way that I’ve always been so American,” she continued. “Naive and materialistic. I like this car. And I like this stereo you put in it. How many watts did you say it was?”

“Around a hundred and twenty.”

“Wouldn’t it be fun to drive around the Kremlin with this stereo turned up full blast? Aretha Franklin singing “Respect” at a full hundred and twenty watts. That’d get ’em back to the bargaining table. God. It’d be enough to collapse Lenin’s tomb…you know, the antiques shop I work in used to be called ‘the furnished Grant’s Tomb.’”

“It was?”

“Yup. Because my boss had a real eye for Victorian gloom. I think the Victorians felt that when you sit down you should have the weight of the world in the arms of your chairs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.