Those Who Knew: A Novel by Idra Novey

Author:Idra Novey [Novey, Idra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Women, Literary, Political
ISBN: 9780525560449
Google: XIFLDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2018-11-05T22:00:00+00:00

* * *

On the train to the party for Freddy, Lena tried to get through the essay she’d been assigned for Monday. The author kept referring to “the strange masks” of humanity in other cultures. She assumed the author was using the phrase ironically. Even in this most dominant of countries, she didn’t think a widely read author in the twenty-first century could still earnestly refer to the humanity of other cultures as masked and strange. Unless, perhaps, they still did.

She turned the essay over on her lap and leaned her head against the train window behind her. On weekend afternoons, she rarely went anywhere without Cosmo, and the oddness of being in transit alone on a Saturday had slowed her thoughts down, condensing them into a heavy haze. As the train tunneled below the city, she felt wistful for the teetering diesel buses of her island. She missed the shared cabs and random intimacy of cramming into the backseat with two strangers, taking in the ocean together after every few turns in the road.

She felt trapped traveling everywhere in this city underground, watching nothing but a smear of darkness and graffiti outside the grimy windows of the train.

Her longing only increased when she reached the building where the party was taking place and heard one of her favorite bands from the island playing inside. The door was unlocked and Freddy’s spectacular booming laugh floated up from the back patio. The barbecue had begun at two with the idea of hanging out all afternoon before heading to the play, but Lena hadn’t wanted to leave Cosmo for that many hours in a row. She’d finally found a babysitter they both liked, a younger sister of one of her classmates. The girl had been their salvation during the weeks when Cosmo got one virus after another. Lena hadn’t been able to stay on top of her assignments. At night, Cosmo kept calling for her and vomiting on the bed. In her Friday seminar, during a discussion on the cognitive benefits of word problems, she’d had to hold her eyelids up with her thumbs to stay awake.

As she stepped alone into the apartment, it struck her how deeply bewildering and lonely those nights had been, continually checking Cosmo’s temperature, changing his pajamas, lying awake beside him, terrified that she wasn’t doing enough. Arriving this late to the party, all the drunk, joking voices drifting up from the back patio sounded imposing and intimidating. In the first doorway, she spotted a desk chair draped with coats and purses in what looked like a home office. But once she stepped inside to leave her bag, she realized the room was much deeper than it looked from the hall and it wasn’t empty of people, as she’d assumed. At the back, there was a black futon with a woman seated on it, straddling the lap of a man who had his fingers in her hair.

Lena apologized and started to back out of the room

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