Monkey Business by Carleton Eastlake

Author:Carleton Eastlake [Eastlake, Carleton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Satire, City Life
ISBN: 9781636280172
Google: 8FiYzgEACAAJ
Amazon: 163628017X
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2022-05-02T18:30:00+00:00

PART THREE

Patiently ever, through the eternal night!

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

If she’d promised we’d see each other the next weekend, or even the next month I would have been all right. In the meantime, to keep the denizens of the subbasements of my brain from mutinying, I would have fed them elaborate daydreams that she was still with me. While waking myself up in the shower after a lonely night, I would have sent my monkey brain cheerful pictures of the shower’s cascading water wetting her hair when she inched open the glass door to ask what I wanted for breakfast before she called in our order to room service. On my drive to the studio I would have actually put down the top, the better to imagine she was drying her hair in the airstream while the young P!nk played on the radio, and then once I got the door closed to the noisome world, she’d have perched alertly on the edge of the sofa in my already decaying office at the not-quite-studio to attend with amused interest while I explained why the production designer was upset with this week’s budget (production designers are always upset with the budget).

I know because after a tortured Sunday night, I tried all that Monday morning, using my authorial powers to create a running commentary in my mind that had her more wedded to me than a typical wife.

But Nicole hadn’t promised a day she’d call, and I hadn’t asked because I was afraid of the answer and in any event, having read her list, suspected indeterminacy was part of the test.

With way too much reality boiling through me, my attempts at the happy fantasy that she was with me failed and I began to analyze and project and reason with myself why she’d inevitably see me again soon, then began strategizing how best to persuade her to call immediately, and . . . yes, all this calculating was worse than simply hallucinating she was already with me.

In any event, I’m just repeating to you the lies I told myself then. The truth is, no matter how long or short a pause she might have promised, I’d have been just as crazy.

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