A Marriage Made at Woodstock Read Free Page A

get up. Here’s some coffee.” Chandra stretched out her arms, a crucifixion figure, as she did every morning. Frederick had seen the symbolism in it. Not yet ten o’clock and already nailed to the cross for her sacrifices to humanity.
    â€œWhat time is it?” she asked. She yawned as she reached a hand out in search of the cup.
    â€œA little later than you wanted to get up,” Frederick admitted.
    â€œGod, this tastes good,” Chandra said, and he knew she meant it. He had given up on her taste buds years ago. Just as he had given up on the stray cats. “So what time is it, really?” she asked. With a quick flash of her wrist, one slender hand rose up and, with fingers acting like a comb, she swept them through her hair.
    â€œAbout nine thirty,” he said, though by now it was almost nine forty. He tried to sound frivolous, as though time were a thing to be courted, perhaps, but never obeyed.
    â€œNine thirty!” Chandra said. “Jesus Christ, I’ll be late for the boycott!” She was suddenly sitting up in bed. With over twenty years of practice, he had still not grown used to how quickly she could switch like that, from being stretched out to sitting up suddenly with a new idea, from being pacifist to wishing anticonservationists would get ambushed in back alleys.
    â€œDamn it, Freddy, I asked you,” Chandra said. She flashed past him to the bathroom, and he followed. “I suppose you had your nose in that computer’s face again.” She was adjusting the knobs for her shower. “You can be pretty thoughtless sometimes,” she said. He leaned against the wall.
    â€œWhat boycott?” he asked.
    â€œThe National Veal Boycott, is all,” Chandra said. “True, there’s no software offered on the subject, but out there, in the hard wear of the world, some important things are taking place.”
    â€œIt’s not even ten o’clock,” Frederick said, “and already you’ve come up with a computer pun.”
    â€œI don’t ask you to join me,” Chandra said, and flopped a thick bath towel onto the floor beside the shower stall. “But I do ask you to wake me up.”
    â€œI’ve never understood your aversion to clocks,” said Frederick, bringing up a point he’d mentioned more than once. “Almost everyone, including me, has to wake up to an alarm. That’s what you call a rude awakening. But you get a gentle nudge in the side and a cup of coffee.” He watched as she unbuttoned the top of her pajamas and tossed it past him. It landed with a soft swish in the hallway. Her small breasts bounced as she bent to remove the bottoms.
    â€œPut my pajamas in the hamper, would you please?” The bottoms flew past his head.
    â€œ Excellent coffee, I might add,” he said. He watched as she pulled her hair up into a quick ponytail, most of it still brownish-blond with youth, but some strands now gray. It was, Frederick realized, as if an old abacus, that first computer, was busy at work, counting one hair at a time, numbering the days, marking the years. It was all a means of keeping track, wasn’t it? Updating humans. Jesus, but the years were swift bastards.
    â€œOne of these days your little country with the secretive coffee beans may need our help,” Chandra was saying. “And it’ll be people like Sukie and me who fight to keep it going so that people like you can keep making excellent coffee.”
    â€œThat little country happens to be a thriving democracy,” Frederick said, and was thankful that the Ivory Coast was the only African country to offer beans to the Western world. Otherwise, Chandra might be right. Frederick could tune in to CNN some heartless morning to learn that half the beans of his prized blend was now in the hands of some upstart military regime. “They have a president now and can get along quite nicely without any help from you and