The Unbinding Read Free Page B

battery. They
crank.
A guy turns their key, he can really draw some
volts.
”
    “Maybe we’ll have to wait till we’re in heaven. There aren’t a lot of them left, that I can see. Maybe it’s men’s fault for letting them go to school.”
    We shared our first full laugh as buddies then, though it wasn’t a laugh I was proud of, or quite understood. Still, at the very beginning of a friendship, even fumbled attempts at humor should be honored.
    “You in a relationship now?” Rob asked.
    “I’m trying to be.”
    “That’s sort of the air you give off. Good luck,” he said. “Anyone special?”
    “That’s always the hope.”
    The movie Rob recommended was out that night, so I went back for it on Saturday morning on my way home from the Costco. The DVD was resting on a box full of lightbulbs and dryer sheets and Metamucil. While I was unloading my Ranger it must have fallen, though, because when I reached the door of my apartment, I heard a woman’s voice behind me say, “If this is your disk, you have stupendous taste. I saw it last week with my film group. Stunning shit.”
    It was Sabrina, but dressed for the wrong season—in pink velour tracksuit pants and a green halter top. Her nipples were perked out like little thimbles, and her pants rode up tight and graphic in the crotch. A real anatomy lesson, and not a welcome one. Women these days have no padding on their frames, and when they thrust their hungry bones at me I like a little cloth to soften the onslaught. Still, Sabrina’s mouth made up for everything. Her smile was like the flap on a white envelope: that clean, that even, and that wide. And glistening, like the flap had just been licked.
    (Is anyone reading this? Write me if you are. It’s [email protected] .)
    We stood around in my doorway for a while and jabbered about the amazing movie coincidence. (I didn’t let on that Rob had recommended it, pretending I’d heard about it from a professor during my “student days in the Bay Area.” It was a bit of pure inspired BS that I fear I’ll have to back up now with more BS, like maybe a Photoshopped snapshot on my fridge showing me standing under the Golden Gate Bridge.) When Sabrina used the term “seventies German cinema,” it put me on my guard. I’d slept with a girl in New York who’d spoken that way, and I’d found her unpleasantly stern and strict in bed, with too many rules about what parts went where and in what particular order and for how long. Her name was Amy , and she wrote short stories about her disappointments with men like me, who were the only men she liked, unfortunately.
    Things got even scarier for me when Sabrina revealed that she grew up in Arkansas, the daughter of an influential lawyer who’d served as “chief counsel to Mrs. Bill” and now “represented some other high-end evildoer .” I don’t know what sort of records such men have access to, but after they booted me out of Cass Academy and before I landed at AidSat, in my stupid years, I kicked around with a crew of Saint Paul meth heads who smuggled damaged used cars down from Ontario and sold them to migrant grape pickers in Fresno. I did a lot of things like that. If Sabrina’s father got to checking, some murky old stuff might come out about “Kent Selkirk,” and I’d be good and screwed—not only with her but at my job. AidSat’s a high-morality operation, and their puzzling failure to thoroughly probe my résumé was the act of grace that saved my life. (I don’t know why I just admitted that. There’s something about this machine I’m typing on that makes me feel that I can tell it anything, especially after midnight, with the lights out.)
    I invited Sabrina inside, but she begged off, saying she had an appointment with a sick friend whom she cleaned house for and read to every Saturday. From the way she called this friend “they,” not he or she, I guessed it was a man. She must have sensed my discomfort, since she explained