The Wonders of the Invisible World Read Free Page A

he would be—forty-seven plus thirteen—he would be sixty. Past the point where he could get another twenty-nine-year-old, unless she was supremely stupid, and probably fat as well. Not the kind of security one might desire, but nevertheless. I put the pad back, leaving the sheet with my calculations. On the off chance he might ask what they were.
    I waited half an hour (did dishes, cleaned the top of the stove, scrubbed the downstairs toilet, put the dishes away,scoured pot marks out of the kitchen sink), then went up and knocked on his door. Loud saxophone jazz. He called, “Yo.”
    “Sorry to interrupt,” I said to his door. “I have to go back to Grand Union. I forgot the stupid mint for the chicken.”
    He opened the door. No smell of smoke. “You forgot
what
?”
    “Mint,” I said. “They call for mint.”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Don’t they carry mint at Webster’s?”
    “I doubt it,” I said. I’d forgotten about goddamn Webster’s. Actually they were pretty well stocked if you didn’t mind paying their prices.
    “Well, hell,” he said, “just leave it out. You don’t want to go all the way back to Oneonta. How much do they call for?”
    “Tablespoon,” I said. It was a teaspoon.
    “Bag it,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”
    “It really won’t,” I said. “It’s going to taste blah.”
    He sighed. “Christ. Well, look. Why don’t you just fix something else? Roast the chicken like you would anyway, and we’ll eat the bread as
bread,
you know?”
    “But you like the other so much,” I said, feeling vile.
    “Paula,” he said. “It’s truly decadent to drive forty miles round trip for a tablespoon of mint, for Christ’s sake. You’re putting wear and tear on the car, you’re burning up fossil fuels …”
    I tried to think: if my motives had been pure, would I be justified in thinking he was being a prick? And: would it seem more suspicious to fight him on this or to acquiesce? More suspicious to fight, I decided.
    “I don’t know,” I said, “I guess you’re right. Look, what I’ll do is, I’ll run down to Webster’s and if they
don’t
have mint I’ll figure out something else for dinner, okay? You sure you won’t be disappointed?”
    “
Au contraire.
I will admire your resourcefulness in the face of domestic crisis.” He reached around and patted my ass.
    •   •   •
    I threw my sketchbook in the backseat—that would be my alibi—and drove to Webster’s, where I bought a jar of dried mint and a pack of Care Free peppermint gum. I’d chewed all five sticks by the time I got to the liquor store in Oneonta. They didn’t have pints of Rémy, so I had to buy the next size up, which I really couldn’t afford. Then on the way back I remembered: fossil fuels. Steven wasn’t so anal that he’d know the odometer reading, but he might know how much gas there was. I calculated forty miles at, say, twenty-five miles per gallon. I stopped at Cumberland Farms and put in two dollars’ worth. Back at the house, just in case, I pushed the little button on the trip odometer to make all zeroes come up. Let him wonder.
    I was smart to leave the bottle in the car: Steven stood there in the kitchen, the orange juice carton (no glass) in his hand. “Where the hell have you been?” he said, putting the carton back in the refrigerator. “Alice Porter called and I got stuck on the phone for an hour.” An hour meant five minutes.
    “So you shouldn’t have picked it up,” I said. “Why the good Lord made answering machines.”
    “I was expecting it to be Martin,” he said. “Our auteur has made still more changes in her text, and he had to be sure they didn’t affect the pictures. This woman thinks she’s Flaubert. I mean, this has been going on and on and on. I told Martin, this is the end of it.
Fini.
”
    “Are they going to make you change anything?” I said.
    “No, it’s just stuff like where she had the wolf with his tail ‘held high,’ it’s