So Long at the Fair by Christina Schwarz

Author:Christina Schwarz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385526593
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

eleven

Kaiser had stayed in his car, using the Camaro as a shell to protect himself from the forces of Heidi-dom.

When she stepped out, squinting against the glare, he felt a sort of cocktail made of equal parts regret, longing, and fury slide from his throat to his bowels. The usual. He trusted that, over time, it would diminish to a trickle and eventually subside altogether. Emotions had only so much oomph, after all. Someday, impossible as it now seemed, this woman he’d been mixed up with for thirteen years, inhaling her very exhalations as they lay in bed, aware of and unembarrassed by her bodily secretions, would be a perfect stranger to him. Already she’d replaced her almost blowsy ponytail with straight, flat hair. All twenty nails, indifferently kept in his time, had obviously been recently manicured, the toes and fingers polished in complementary pinks. Heidi’s favorite summer outfit had for years been one of his shirts, worn open over a bikini top and a pair of very short cutoffs; she was tall and broad-shouldered enough to escape drowning and instead appear graceful and fluid, but she’d abandoned that casual look when she’d left him and replaced it with de rigueur capris and the sort of form-fitting silk-blend T-shirts that turned out to cost a hundred dollars. He’d seen them in the catalogs addressed to her that through some trick of mail order lists occasionally appeared in slippery heaps underneath his apartment mailbox.

He pretended to be engrossed in his car’s manual, made her come over and tap on the window with one of her pink nails.

“Mark!” Her voice was impatient. Impatience, exasperation: the only emotions he could count on being able to get out of her anymore.

He smiled up at her. His smile used to disarm her, but now it made her scowl. He let it collapse, touched the automatic window button. “What’s up?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’s up’? Anthony said you wanted to talk to me.”

“You mean Marlin.”

“For Christ’s sake, Mark, turn the damn car off. The exhaust is going to kill us.”

He did as she asked, opened the car door, and stepped out. He didn’t really have anything specific to say to her. He’d just wanted to get her to come to him, an impulse that felt now, as he stood beside his burning car, pathetic.

“Listen,” she said, “Alex wants me to invite you in for a drink. I told him you’d be busy, but I said I’d ask, so I’m asking.”

You could trust her to follow through with little promises; it was big ones like ’til death do us part that gave her trouble. Kaiser smiled at his own private witticism. Obviously, she didn’t want him to come in. Obviously, the sensitive, thoughtful response would be: Hey, some other time; I’ll take a rain check. But Kaiser felt a perverse compulsion to get a rise out of her. Maybe he couldn’t make her happy, but he could still irritate her. He made a show of studying his watch.

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