Early Work by Andrew Martin

Author:Andrew Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Part III

From Monday to Friday, Leslie and I spent our days out at Kenny’s. We quickly abandoned the pretense that we were only going there as often as necessary for the chores—I left to pick Leslie up before nine a.m., and dropped her off a half hour or so before the end of the workday. That first Monday was overcast, then storming, so we stayed in the house and played with the kitten, letting him race around the house as fast as he could manage with his three legs. Kiki, after her initial enthusiasm for him was greeted with a bloody swipe across the nose from a tiny claw, noted his comings and goings forlornly from a corner. We sat in the shadowy living room watching the rain crash in sheets against the big windows, listening to Kenny’s country records and reading. I’d finally found a book that held my interest—The Executioner’s Song, of all things. I knew that it was tied up in the joy of our lost weekending, but I loved that book like I’d loved The Call of the Wild as a kid, like I’d devoured The Swiss Family Robinson. I wanted to know every goddamn thing about these people, and thank Christ, the book was a thousand pages long. Leslie was reading Fools Crow by James Welch, “for some freaking balance” after Blood Meridian, but it seemed to be slow going. Whenever I cackled or exclaimed in surprise, she asked “What?” and I read her the line. Soon enough I was delivering paragraphs, then pages, and then we were alternating, taking breaks for beers when our throats got sore. We were both in love with Nicole Baker, so fucked-up and voracious, naïve but knowing. It seemed impossible that Mailer hadn’t made her up (and I guess a few other people have wondered about that, too). Leslie toyed with me off and on all afternoon, like a cat, but didn’t let me come until we were halfway out the door, when she finally sucked my cock in the foyer with what felt like one well-calibrated, continuous motion.

Some afternoons I tried to work, mostly moving commas around on three-year-old stories, while Leslie stared pointedly into her computer screen, not typing. She had abandoned the screenplay she’d supposedly been working on after the friends she was writing it for told her that their main potential backer—a young app developer—had been indicted for securities fraud. Now, she said, she was focused on fiction. (So focused that she currently seemed in danger of boring a hole in her laptop screen with her eyes.)

When it was sunny we took long walks around the property, and I recited half-remembered history that Kenny’d told me, much of it probably made-up, about the family that had lived and died there, their hopes and dreams and heights and weights. We absorbed splinters out on the dock, in our knees, hands, elsewhere. We fucked around in the water, fucked, once, in the wet, thick-pebbled dirt.

If I say I didn’t worry about it that much, Julia-wise, it was circumstance rather than carelessness.

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