A Wonderful Stroke of Luck by Ann Beattie

Author:Ann Beattie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

What the fuck!” Ben’s neighbor Steve said. “You’ve got one woman after another coming to visit, like they’re doing one-person interventions. Your stepmother just comes out with the news that your father hit her? I mean, it’s very sad, but is there anything women won’t say to you?”

“How would I know what they don’t say?” Ben asked. He’d wandered over to Steve’s house to get untethered from his computer for a while, hoping they could hang out. His own house always seemed emptier when someone visited, then drove away. Steve and Gin stayed away when they knew he had company. He’d heard Steve’s loud voice outside when he went out to get the mail the day after Elin left. Two men were loading a new gas stove into Steve’s house. They said they’d return later with an electrician. They’d already discovered there was the wrong kind of outlet in the wall behind the stove. Steve, as always, was reciting his “Nothing is easy” mantra. Ben’s story about Elin’s visit, though, effectively distracted him. They went into the kitchen and sat down.

“She just comes out with, Oh, she can understand not having any sexual attraction! Man, that was not a heart-to-heart I would have had with my mother, god rest her soul.”

“She wasn’t wrong that J.J. was interesting. I could tell that was who Elin wanted me to get together with. She was actually a very original thinker, even if she did decide to marry a loser.”

“And she has her new boyfriend debrief the old one, huh? Are you kidding me? Also, tell me one original thought the woman ever had. Do you remember even one? Their thoughts disappear when they do, I’ve discovered. I love Gin to pieces, but at the end of the day, I don’t know what she’s been talking to me about for hours.”

“She thought it might save the reefs to do transplants. Introducing plants that repelled certain bacteria that affected living coral. That idea’s started to catch on now, but she was the first one I heard it from.”

“Reefs? You remember that she talked about transplanting stuff into reefs? I mean, can pillow talk get any more exciting than that?”

He’d pretty quickly become friends with Steve and his wife, Ginny, though Steve was as skittish as a kicked dog who couldn’t resist wanting affection, at the same time he was poised to recoil. It was Ginny who’d sworn Ben to secrecy about Steve’s losing his previous job. Ben took it in stride that Steve had something invested in seeming paternal. That the imbalance of power always tilted Steve closer to the sky, when Ben’s end of the seesaw clunked on the ground.

They moved from the kitchen into Steve’s den, which made Ben feel old, and as if he was failing because he’d never smoked and didn’t drink during the day. Neither did Steve. It was all about staying fit, playing tennis, not dwelling too much on his only moderately successful career outside the city. Earlier in

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