The Biology of Luck Read Free

cigarettes over the railing into the breaking surf. She vividly recalls watching the waves extinguish the tobacco embers. She does not remember the sex. It amazes her that after so many lovers, virgins and aspiring Casanovas and even one guy who had ruler markings tattooed along the upper ridge of his penis, she can’t conjure up any specific moment of arousal or intimacy. Maybe they are all the same. Like cab rides. Like funerals. Maybe, when you get right down to it, intercourse is the great Marxist equalizer.
    Her anger has evaporated. It’s not like her to be angry—even these days when she feels she’s being pulled at from all directions, when it seems like every man in her life wants to plant a proprietary flag on her like some newly discovered continent—and all it takes is the sound of the teakettle purring on the gas range to restore her sense of equanimity. God bless Eucalyptus. The girl is nuts, but she is the ideal roommate. Starshine shuts the window, pulls her heavy purple bathrobe over her tattered sleeping T-shirt, and tiptoes bleary eyed into the kitchen.
    Starshine’s roommate is seated at the counter, diligently shaping a contraband ivory horn with a cauterized sail needle. The girl makes scrimshaw for the black market. The countertop bears six months of jackknife scars and lampblack stains. Her sometime boyfriend works for an international sheet metal dealership and smuggles the horns through customs. It’s a strange arrangement, sex for tusks, but although poaching strikes Starshine as morally repugnant when she thinks about it, she’d decided not to think about it. She has come to view her roommate’s hobby as an exotic form of needlepoint.
    â€œGood morning, darling,” says Eucalyptus. “You alone?”
    â€œBut not lonely.”
    Eucalyptus grins. “You’ve been saving that line up, haven’t you?”
    Starshine pours the hot water into two earthenware mugs, slides one across the table and sinks into a wicker chair. The morning
Times
is already neatly folded at her place setting, unmussed, only the large gaps where Eucalyptus has clipped celebrity obituaries revealing thatit has been devoured from cover to cover. Starshine’s roommate boasts a morbid streak. She is trying to learn history through death notices.
    â€œAny important bigwigs kick it?” Starshine asks.
    â€œNot really. There was another former President of General Motors, though. That’s the second this month. It kind of makes you wonder ….”
    â€œConspiracy?”
    â€œHe was ninety-eight years old.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œAnd diabetic.”
    â€œPoor fellow.”
    Eucalyptus shrugs. “Win some, lose some. Say, why no man
du jour?”
    â€œI’m taking a vow of celibacy.”
    â€œBullshit.”
    â€œThen practicing for the convent.”
    â€œDouble bullshit.”
    â€œI think I’m in over my head.”
    Eucalyptus carefully places her ongoing masterpiece, a miniature schooner, into her lacquered workbox. She breathes into her glasses and wipes them on her blouse, then replaces them and smiles knowingly at Starshine. “It’s easier to start sleeping with a guy than to stop, isn’t it?”
    â€œDamn straight,” Starshine agrees. “So who wants to stop?” But she has to stop, and she knows it. Starshine raises three fingers in a Girl Scout pledge, although she has never been a Girl Scout—could never belong to any organization so rigidly structured. “I’m placing a moratorium on men. At least new men.”
    Two men are already planning their lives around her and juggling them is anxiety enough. How in God’s name could I handle a third? she thinks. Yet the truth of the matter is that she’s still lonely, that nine years as the swan haven’t made up for twenty as an ugly duckling, and that if she can’t conceive of a future without either of her principal