Tengu Read Free Page A

meeting, or a funeral.
    Eva felt
breathless as she waited in the deserted lobby for the elevator to take her to
the twenty-seventh floor. She began to bite at her pearl-pink nails, and then
stopped herself. She hadn’t bitten her nails since she was an overweight young
student in New York, plain and agonizingly shy, and hopelessly infatuated with
an overbearing slob of a business administration senior called Hank Pretty. Her
life in those days had been haunted by slipping grades, headaches, and the
vision of spending the rest of her years with a man whose body stank of sweat
and whose mind had about as much charm and order as the morning after Mardi Gras .
    Eva and Hank
had fought. Hank had hit her. She had spat red blood into the rose-colored
washbasin, and the whole world had seemed to be coming to a close.
    She hadn’t
attempted suicide, though. Eva had never been the suicidal type. These days,
she put on weight when she was anxious, eating too many taco chips and
guacamole, and she smoked, too. But she had the painful strength to make
appointments with her fears and face up to them, as if her fears were imaginary
doctors with bad news about her smear, or phantom dentists with bicuspids to
pull.
    She sometimes
wished she had no strength at all, and could readily sacrifice herself to
Gerard’s faithlessness without a struggle. But she couldn’t, and wouldn’t. She
was too much like her father.
    Ornery.
    The elevator
bell softly chimed the arrival of the twenty-seventh floor. The doors rumbled
open and Eva stepped out. On the wall in front of the elevator bank was a
brushed-aluminum sign with the inscription
    CROWLEY TOBACCO
IMPORTS, INC. LOS ANGELES–CHICAGO–MIAMI.
    She stood and
looked at it for a moment, because she remembered the day it had first been
screwed in-to place. Then she walked evenly along the corridor toward the
tinted glass doors of the office itself.
    It was a few
seconds before eight o’clock. Gerard had always started work early. When they
had first married, nineteen years ago, she had hardly ever seen him in the
mornings. He had been out of bed and jogging along Lexington Road well before
six, and she had only woken up at seven o’clock when the door of his Riviera
slammed and the engine whistled into life. The kitchen would be left like the
mess deck of the Marie Celeste–half-eaten crispbread, spilled milk, letters
ripped open and left on the table–and there would never be any husband around
to prove who had done it.
    In later years,
though, Eva had woken up earlier. Some mornings Gerard had opened his eyes, and
she had been lying there watching him. He had mistaken her steady gaze for
affection, even for adoration. In fact, she had been considering the empty and
ungraspable nature of their marriage, and wondering who he really was.
    She loved him.
She had always known that. She wanted to stay married to him. But she had never
been able to decide whether he loved her in return or simply used her as a
hostess, and mother, and occasional bed partner. He always called her “Evie,”
and for three of their nineteen years she had protested about it. Then she had
given up.
    She opened the
office door. There were decorative plants and white vinyl chairs, and a wide
teak desk. There was nobody around. Eva waited for a moment, and then crossed
the reception area to the door marked GERARD F. CROWLEY, PRESIDENT. She felt
peculiarly numb, and her hesitation in front of the door seemed to last for
whole minutes.
    Here I am, she
thought. I’ve seen him so tired that he was weeping. I’ve seen him laugh. I’ve
seen him sick, and I’ve seen him happy. I’ve seen every detail of his naked
body. The pattern of moles on his thigh. The curl of his pubic hair. I’ve borne him twins. And yet
I’m standing in front of his office door, almost too frightened to knock.
    She knocked.
    There was a
pause. Then his voice asked, “Who is that?”
    In a dry, tight
falsetto, she said, “It’s me.”
    “Evie?”