Free Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb Page A

twice a year I whisper the phrase ‘managed care’ in her ear and she doesn’t talk to me for a month. Lemme guess, she was blotto.”
    “Uh, yes she was, I’m afraid.”
    She shook her head to herself and sighed. “It’s hard to get her to stop the one thing left that gives her any pleasure. I really do appreciate you going, Nick. You always were the little gentleman”—she picked up an antique iron and blew dust off it—“and I’m sure it meant a lot. Do you think this thing is worth something?”
    Looking at her, delighted with the quick pivots of her conversation—her speech rhythms were clearly those of someone who’d spent years away from Monarch—I told her that there was a new antiques store in town, and maybe she could get it evaluated there. She said nothing, and into that silence I suddenly found myself talking rapidly, for some reason. I could feel the cursive shapes my lips and mouth made as I gave a little speech about how the town had changed, and how the people had changed with it, and about the new crop of parents, of which I was one. I could hear myself babbling on robotically about the real but difficult satisfactions of home life, and how, though for a while things had been rocky between Lucy and me, we seemed to have found our own real if somewhat fragile peace. I liked that peace, I said, lying. Belinda wasn’t speaking back. She seemed instead to be wholly absorbed in staring at her iron. Finally she put the iron down.
    “Come here,” she said, and when I took a step forward, still talking, she bent over and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were covered with a faintly waxy paste that tastedof synthetic fruit, but behind that was a deep, roused plumpness that dropped through my body in a hot curtain. The arches of my feet curled.
    “Relax,” she said softly.
    I was too flustered to speak for a moment.
    “You’re with an old friend who knows you very well. I don’t need the blow-by-blow of the last ten years. It means a lot that you came to see me today, Nicky. It’s important for me and I thank you for it.”
    I looked at her, feeling static and suddenly expanded within at the same time. It was one of those bell-timbre moments. I think I began smiling stupidly.
    “You’re welcome,” I said.
    She laughed at me, but gently, and in a way that was so familiar to me it was like a touch upon the foundations of my own soul. Even the silence that followed seemed familiar. During that special high school summer twenty years earlier, we’d been apprentice dharma bums together, transported by the dreamy mumblings of Carlos Castaneda to a place where we found the quiet itself a fraught, richly communicating thing. If we listened carefully enough, we were certain that the distances had a hiss; that trees sighed, even on windless days; that clouds breathed their way backward across the sky. In that bell jar of sacred silence, we slowly took off each other’s clothes, and fucked votively, struck dumb with reverence for the way quiet seemed naturally to gather around our moving bodies. I couldn’t help smiling as I remembered the innocence of that summer, and the way we dressed throbbing desire in high-toned sentiments. Later, after college, it would all become much easier. I lifted my eyes and looked at her. A wall of ancientfeeling stood between us in the dusty air of the shed. She leaned forward through the wall and threaded her fingers into mine.
    “This is nice,” she said quietly.
    “Yes it is.”
    We looked away from each other, both embarrassed, I think, by the sudden surge of feeling, and then she gently unlaced her hand from mine, and we continued to move through the things, but more quietly, she sorting what she didn’t want into one pile of junk, and taking those few pieces—an antique sconce, some candlesticks, a beautiful pewter serving set—she did. After about half an hour, we were done.
    “So hey,” I said impulsively as she pulled the squealing garage door back