American Appetites Read Free Page B

exactly want to do.” And in the heightened pace of their conversation, the very setting a distraction—a gaggle of mallards had set up a terrific squawking, greedy for more feed than was forthcoming, and not far away, on the bank, a young mother was scolding her weeping child—it was an easy matter to change the subject, as if he hadn’t heard. Yet it touched Ian deeply: that she had been hurt. That anything in his life could have enough significance to bear upon her at all.
    Sigrid was bareheaded, and her red-blond hair blew in the wind, strands of it across her face, her eyes, catching in her mouth, so that, in quick nervous gestures, she had to brush it repeatedly away. Her eyes behind the pink-tinted lenses of her schoolgirl glasses were lightly threaded with blood and damp, and Ian felt a corresponding dampness in his own, an immediate sympathy, as he’d felt his daughter Bianca’s pain when she hurt herself as a small child; and she was always hurting herself as a small child, falling and banging her knees, cutting the soft pink palms of her hands, bruising her forehead. My baby, my girl, he’d thought, how can I protect you, what on earth can I do for you, to keep you from being hurt? And it tore at his heart, to know that there was nothing.
    They talked together for perhaps twenty minutes, and Sigrid confided in him that she was having difficulties with her “fiancé”; she could not determine whether she loved him very much or whether she wanted to escape him, to make an absolute break and never see him again. Ian laughed, saying, “That seems rather extreme.” Sigrid said stiffly, “If you knew Fermi Sabri you’d understand.”
    Ian made no reply, thinking that Fermi Sabri was the last person he cared to know.
    She told him that Fermi had been born in Cairo and had emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty; he was “brilliant” but “erratic,” an engineer with an advanced degree in hydraulics from MIT. He loved her and wanted to marry her, wanted her to have his child (“a son, of course”) as proof of her love for him . “The night I went to your party, he’d said it was fine with him, he didn’t at all mind, but then, evidently, he followed me; I think he was actually watching the house from outside for a while, before he came in.” Seeing Ian’s look of distaste she added quickly, “It’s just that he feels so possessive of me. I mean protective. He means well.”
    â€œOh, as to that,” Ian said, laughing again, though without much mirth, “we all mean well.”
    They were walking in the direction of Sigrid’s car, at least Ian assumed it was her car, a foreign model, low-slung, sporty, lipstick-red but badly flecked with rust, its front bumper battered. It had the look of a car, Ian thought, not registered in its driver’s name.
    â€œI hope we will see each other again, before long, in Hazelton or elsewhere,” Ian said; and Sigrid said lightly, “Yes, I hope so too.” He opened her car door for her, then belatedly asked her for her address and telephone number, which he scribbled on a slip of paper, though this was information surely in Glynnis’s possession already. After she’d driven away he stood for a while in the parking lot staring at the mallards, snowy white geese, black swans, as they paddled on the pond in ceaseless circles, now slow and languorous, as if on display, now wild and frenzied, fighting one another for feed. If any thought came to him, he would not afterward remember what it was.
    HE HAD SOME difficulty finding 119 Tice, which was in an area of Poughkeepsie unknown to him, of run-down apartment buildings, row houses, taverns, railroad yards, rubble-strewn vacant lots—a neighborhood that, though largely black and Hispanic, reminded him of his boyhood neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut. And when he found 119 Tice he