Golden States by Michael Cunningham

Author:Michael Cunningham [Cunningham, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2014-09-12T14:00:00+00:00

They all played crazy eights at the dinner table. David, remembering his promise to himself, managed not to fight with Lizzie even though he knew she was cheating. As they played David noticed Rob’s wrists, which were thinner than you’d expect, covered with fine reddish hairs that curled slightly in a uniform sickle shape. Rob’s fingers picking up the cards were long and graceful, with tufts of paler hair at the knuckles. David’s own hands were pink and stubby. Whenever anybody said something funny David smiled hugely, with his upper lip raised, showing his gums.

Once, after losing three hands in a row, Lizzie said to him, “Why are you smiling like a monkey?”

“Why do you smell like a fish?” he asked her, and decided the truce had been a stupid idea. You couldn’t be nice to someone like Lizzie.

After they got tired of playing cards they went into the living room to watch TV. Lizzie was told she could stay up until the end of “Dynasty” and no longer. She plopped poutily down on the sofa next to Rob, not daring to press the issue because “Dynasty” already ran a half hour later than her usual bedtime. David slotted himself in quickly on Rob’s other side, and noticed for the first time a deeper smell of Rob’s, under his cologne, something like pencil shavings when you empty the sharpener.

Janet and Mom sat in the two orange chairs. Janet had brought out the last of her dinner wine, and Rob was drinking another Old Bushmill’s. Occasionally he passed it over to David in silence, as if they had a private understanding, and David took big, chancy sips. Everything felt so solid and fine; he was so happy just to be sitting on the sofa taking swallows of Rob’s drink.

After the program ended, Lizzie was maneuvered upstairs into bed. David thought she would kiss Rob good-night but she was humiliated at being the first to go and didn’t speak to him at all. She just trudged noisily upstairs. David knew so well the regret she felt afterward he could almost feel it, dripping through the ceiling like a leak.

He himself didn’t have to go to bed for another hour, and he sat luxuriating in his one undeniable, irrevokable privilege. He was older than Lizzie, and always would be. There was nothing she could do to catch up. He accepted another sip of Rob’s drink as the news woman, the one whose hair came to a single perfect hook on one side of her head, appeared on the screen and said in her urgent, honest voice, “Good evening. President Reagan announced at a press conference today that he would seek to increase the defense department budget by ten billion dollars in 1985. More on this and other stories at eleven.”

“Asshole,” Janet said.

“You mean Reagan, or that woman?” Mom asked.

“Oh, both of them. I don’t think the world has ever had so many assholes in it as it does right now.”

The newswoman had been replaced by a commercial, the old ladies who liked to squeeze the toilet paper.

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