Like Life Read Free

edge of a childhood she’d never quite had or couldn’t quite remember float back to her, cleansing and restoring. She bathed in Lysol, capfuls under the running tap. She moved her other furniture—the large red, black, and brown pieces—out onto the sidewalk and watched the city haul them away on Mondays, until her room was spare and milky as a bone.
    “You’ve redecorated,” said Number One.
    “Do you really love me?” said Number Two. He never looked around. He stepped toward her, slowly, wanting to know only this.
    IN THE PARK , after a Lysol bath, she sat on the paint-flaked slats of a bench and read.
Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?… He who has clean hands
 … There was much casting of lots for raiment. In the other book there was a shark that kept circling.
    The same eleven-year-old girl, lips waxed a greenish peach, came by to spit on her.
    “What?”
said Mary, aghast.
    “Nothin’,” said the girl. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she mocked, and her shoulders moved around as children’s do when they play dress-up, a bad imitation of a movie star. She had a cheap shoulder bag with a long strap, and she hoisted it up over her head and arranged it in a diagonal across her chest.
    Mary stood and walked away with what might have been indignation in someone else but in her was a horrified scurry. They could see! Everyone could see what she was, what she was doing! She wasn’t fooling a soul. What she needed was plans. At a time like this, plans could save a person. They could organize time and space for a while, like little sculptures. At home Mary made soup and ate it, staring at the radiator. She would plan a trip! She would travel to some place far away, some place unlittered and pure.
    She bought guidebooks about Canada: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island. She stayed in her room, away from spitters, alternately flipped and perused the pages of her books, her head filling like a suitcase with the names of hotels and local monuments and exchange rates and historical episodes, a fearful excitement building in her to an exhaustion, travel moving up through her like a blood, until she felt she had already been to Canada, already been traveling there for months, and now had to fall back, alone, on her bed and rest.
    MARY WENT to Number One’s office to return some of the fliers and to tell him she was going away. It smelled of cigarettes and cigars, a public place, like a train. He closed the door.
    “I’m worried about you. You seem distant. And you’re always dressed in white. What’s going on?”
    “I’m saving myself for marriage,” she said. “Not yours.”
    Number One looked at her. He had been about to say “Mine?” but there wasn’t enough room for both of them there, like two men on a base. They were arriving at punch lines together these days. They had begun to do imitations of each other, that most violent and satisfying end to love.
    “I’m sorry I haven’t been in to work,” said Mary. “But I’ve decided I have to go away for a while. I’m going to Canada. You’ll be able to return to your other life.”
    “What other life? The one where I walk the streets at two in the morning dressed as Himmler? That one?” On his desk was a news clipping about a representative from Nebraska who’d been having affairs far away from home. The headline read: RUNNING FOR PUBLIC ORIFICE : WHO SHOULD CAST THE FIRST STONE ? The dark at the edge of Mary’s vision grew inward, then back out again. She grabbed the arm of a chair and sat down.
    “My life is very strange,” said Mary.
    One looked at her steadily. She looked tired and lost. “You know,” he said, “you’re not the only woman who has ever been involved with a married—a man with marital entanglements.” He usually called their romance a
situation.
Or sometimes, to entertain,
grownuppery.
All the words caused Mary to feel faint.
    “Not the only woman?” said Mary. “And here I thought I was