The Biology of Luck Read Free Page B

pick up a box of cornflakes, at least not until seven when the beefy Pakistani proprietress replaces her son behind the counter and she no longer has to fear another marriage proposal. All she can do for the moment is sit, bake, freeze, shiver, be. It is all so simple.
    â€œSo what’s on tap for today?” asks Eucalyptus.
    â€œThe usual,” answers Starshine. “Breakfast with Colby, lunch at Jack’s. And lots and lots of canvassing.”
    â€œSo much for the convent.”
    â€œOh, and dinner with Larry Bloom.”
    â€œThat should be a blast.”
    Although Eucalyptus has not actually met Larry, she has seenhim at the helm of his tour bus and formed her judgments. Starshine knows that her own descriptions and anecdotes haven’t helped his cause. This makes her feel marginally guilty, but only marginally so, because the jury is still out on her dinner companion. He’s a bit too pliable, a bit too attached to her for comfort. He’s given her too many of the cheap key-chains and coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets he receives gratis from tourist traps. Theirs is one of those New York friendships, struck up over a mutual interest in the history of landfills (years before when Starshine, for several months, developed a fascination with the changing contours of the Manhattan shoreline), that might easily fade away into acquaintanceship and unease. Only it hasn’t faded, somehow, maybe because Larry’s the one man in whom she has no romantic interest. He has become her sounding board, her authority on the coupling habits of the male subspecies. And tonight, of all nights, she is feeling like she needs any insight she can get.
    But Starshine is a pushover, not an idiot. She prides herself on the distinction. She realizes that Larry has his own hopes, his own muted expectations. Someone famous and dead once said that “all exercises have objects” and there’s a reason this guy endures her tales of romance and confusion. He’s addicted to them like a housewife hooked on daytime soaps. But that’s his business, not hers. It doesn’t make her a bad person, does it? She’d fix him up, if she could, but she doesn’t know the sort of women who date the Larry Blooms over the world, and she imagines he must have other opportunities. Some woman—but decidedly not Starshine Hart—will see his inner beauty. And yet sometimes, against her visceral instincts, she wonders what it would be like to bestow herself on the hapless guy (bestow is a funny word, somehow the only one that seems appropriate to the circumstances), to purge her life of Jack Bascomb and Colby Parker and all the rest and to bestow complete happiness on someone who might bask for the rest of his life in the glow of his own gratitude. Like Scarlett O’Hara’s first marriage in
Gone with the Wind.
How much would it really matter? It’s all nonsense, of course. Shit, stuff, and nonsense. Somebody else’s pipe dream.
    â€œYou know,” says Starshine, “if we were famous, life would be much easier.”
    â€œUh-huh,” Eucalyptus replies indifferently. “If we were famous, we’d still end up dead.”
    â€œWell, if I were famous, honey, you’d run down to the corner store and pick up a box of cereal for me.”
    â€œYep,” agrees Eucalyptus, holding a jeweler’s glass in front of her ivory schooner to admire her handiwork. “But you’re not.”
    â€œNot yet.”
    Soon enough, though, thinks Starshine. Eventually. Maybe. She’s not even thirty. There’s plenty of time left for fame and fortune. She’ll be brave in the interim. She’ll weather the Don Juan of Karachi and purchase her own breakfast. But first, she’ll paint her toenails. Green. Bright, bright green.
MORNINGSIDE
    No noteworthy disaster has ever occurred in Morningside Heights. Guarded at either end by those two distinctive barbicans of