Particles and Luck by Louis B. Jones

Author:Louis B. Jones [Jones, Louis B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81557-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

10

Maybe You’re Not Unscrupulous

My wife,” Roger tells Mark.

“Roger, could you come over here?” Her wrist pushes her hair back.

“Hey, Dot. Sweetie, this is my good buddy Mark.”

“Could you come over here for a minute?”

Mark can’t make her out. Standing where she covers the radiance of Roger’s kitchen door, she cleaves the light as she shifts her weight from one foot to the other. Her jeans are tight. They’ve been freshly ironed, a crease traveling down the front of each leg. Her hair is polished to a commercial sheen by shampoo and conditioner and blow-drying. In her arms she holds a platter and a carton of milk, objects of desire to the two children, who stagger toward the light to be near her. Jason strains upward whining, “Mine.”

Roger tells Mark, “Just a second,” and he sets down his wine bottle as a crutch to crawl up to a standing position. She withdraws further as he approaches, and again she bangs her hair with the back of her wrist, bowing her head and revealing the bright bulb in the kitchen doorway behind her. As in an eclipse, her figure is exceeded by spokes of light in the charcoal’s smoke.

“You found us,” says Roger. His hands lift and then drop.

“Roger, what is this?” she whispers, her fingers flicking discreetly toward Mark. Mark himself, reclining on his elbow in the dirt, raises his beer to salute her and takes a drink, newly loyal to Roger.

“Oh, honey, now don’t be like that. Wait’ll you hear.” He reaches and almost touches her.

“You can’t keep doing things.” Her children plead for Jell-O, and she juggles her armload to free one hand and set it on the surface of the turbulence below.

“Come on, Dot, don’t you want to meet my friend?”

“Your friend looks like a real gem.” They think Mark can’t hear.

“He’s a physicist,” Roger protests. “He’s a physicist.”

She sighs so quickly it’s like a laugh, and she turns aside in frustration: the golden kitchen light dawns across a perfectly beautiful profile. It has always seemed to Mark that there’s an elite class of people so beautiful that they’re interchangeable, women for whom a man must be merely a rectangular dark presence at the elbow lacking particularity, and that such people keep getting married and divorced a lot, because they don’t really notice each other very specifically, as if beauty were an analgesic radiance on the skin, a blinding dilation of the pupil. She tells Roger seriously, “You know Cobblestone management is really looking at you.”

“Wait’ll you hear. See, tonight is the deadline for this asshole.” He gestures out at the dark wilderness. “They’re doing a thing called ‘adverse possession.’ Do you know what that is?”

“Why aren’t you using the barbeque? People can see you.”

“Hey, join us. I see you got some Jell-O.”

“Actually, I was going to leave the kids with you. I’m going to a friend’s house to study.” With a lifting gesture, she implies the existence of the textbook now visible under her platter of Jell-O.

“You’re going to study?” He crouches to see the book.

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