Interesting Women by Andrea Lee

Author:Andrea Lee [Lee, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Next day, I keep to myself, as one is entitled to do in a hotel that has a library. When Simon calls from Hunan, before breakfast, I don’t say a word about my daylong excursion but instead wax lyrical on the joys of solitude until, through the crackling Chinese static, he asks me suspiciously what I’ve been up to. “Just the usual sex with hotel waiters,” I tell him.

From my lounge chair in the shade beside the pool, I observe Silver’s movements on the last day before her retreat. After bidding me a cheerful good morning, she breakfasts garrulously with the assistant manager, who dreams of opening a luxury hotel in Rangoon; she meditates on the rocks by the bay; and by late afternoon she is one of three torsos emerging from the water at the far end of the pool, drinking cocktails with the black male model and one of the stylists from the shoot. When she sees me watching, she holds up her glass. “The last gin-and-tonic!” she calls. “Vive la folie!”

I don’t see Silver again. She goes off to Cornelia and a cleaner life without saying good-bye. Once or twice, she drifts through my thoughts in her white sarong with her cocky grin. But almost immediately I banish her, and for the last part of my vacation I set about being indolent and uninteresting.

Still, it happens that on the day before I leave I find myself in the library, deep in conversation with a woman I have just met. She is younger than I am, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and English: blond, with a pudgy, tanned body packed into a girlish bikini; entertainingly foulmouthed, with a Geordie accent. She came to the hotel a couple of days ago, with a tall Jordanian husband covered in gold chains; two blond, black-eyed toddlers; and a pair of male attendants in white robes and Arab headdresses, who carried suitcases and looked after the children, even changing diapers. Leaning on a table covered with weeks-old foreign papers in the dim, low-ceilinged library, she looks at me and says, “I envy you, being practically alone on holiday. Sometimes I get so fucking sick of the lot of them—”

Mice scurry in the palm thatch on the roof. The Oxford English Dictionary looms behind us, in its glass case, locked away against the ravages of suntan oil and salt air. Across the room, Basia, reading MAD magazine in a varnished planter’s chair, has stopped turning the pages. In the woman’s surly blue eyes I can see skeins of experience poised to unwind, and the password trembles on my lips.

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.