She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me Read Free Page A

a place that shouldn’t be jabbed. It’s tender in there.
    With women, their business with mascara and Q-tips, they know how. I don’t. I have sad eyes because I still love, am in love with, my former wife. This is an appetite that does not nourish.
    Divorce carried all sorts of unexpected problems into my life. For example, I knew all about the famous San Francisco house fleas, but the mosquitoes surprised me. I left a couple of beer cans outside. The drought ended, it rained and rained, it dripped some more, which gave meteorology an idea—the clouds opened up, rainwater slopping into the beer cans left outside Poorman’s Cottage on Potrero Hill. I doubt if there was much remaining flavor to the beer, but then the sun came back and—what do you know?—in those beer cans, unbeknownst to their proprietor, swam squiggles of anxious life, invisible mosquito larvae. And then what do you further know? The anxious squiggles ripened into humming, buzzing nocturnal biters. And just when I had finally accepted the high-pitched, nearly inaudible fleas, which after all can be controlled by regular vacuuming (Hispanic old lady, silent but mechanically adept except for changing the dust bag).
    No fun to be bereft and hurt in the soul, plus itching lumps on the knuckles that clutch the sheet over the head in desperation insomnia.
    To manage the mosquitoes I had to empty the yard of beer cans so that future mosquito generations would have no place to brood and breed, swim and prosper, before taking off on their whining nighttime missions around my ears and knuckles. Otherwise my cottage on Potrero Hill might turn into New Jersey, the Garden State, where I had recently pursued a father to remind him of his responsibilities concerning child support. (I told him I had friends whose names ended in vowels and we would always know where he slept. He told me to buzz off, like a mosquito. But then he thought seriously about the trouble I was taking with him, noticed the broken capillaries in my eyes, and wrote a check that cleared.)
    â€œI come better with my chocolate bunny when I don’t have to pay for the kids I left behind,” said the depressed deadbeat.
    â€œWhyncha learn to come without you need foreplay involving the cash flow or afterthoughts?” suggested Dan Kasdan.
    â€œSay what?”
    â€œYou said chocolate bunny,” I said. I wanted to put him at his ease by letting him know I listened. “That’s cute.”
    He seemed to recognize me not only as a person with close personal ties with the driver’s license bureau and Social Security Administration, so I could always track him down, but also as a fellow sufferer, a kindred spirit, a human being. “I need money,” he said. “My chocolate bunny craves security. You and me, if we’re not good-looking, we got to offer the ladies something.”
    â€œTry getting rich and famous,” I suggested. “How about tall and handsome?”
    He considered those possibilities, decided it was too much trouble and he wasn’t cut out to be a star, all that public exposure, People magazine, the adulation of the multitudes—not for him. “My chocolate bunny likes presents,” he said.
    â€œYour chocolate bunny?” When people keep repeating something, I’ve learned they want to be taken up on it. “So she’s a black girl.”
    The deadbeat beamed triumphantly, as if I weren’t cut out to understand anything important, never would, only getting my way in business with reddened eyes and threats of violence. “It’s a cute saying between us,” he explained. “I met her on Easter at the parade, she was wearing like a bonnet, have you heard of romance, Mr. Kasdan?”
    â€œI’m more into tangible when I’m on the job.”
    â€œNothing more tangible than Linda, let me tell you.”
    I just stared. I don’t mind sarcasm or correction from the mark, so