Free Reversible Error by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page A

car again."
    Marlene's bed sat on a high sleeping platform at one end of her loft, and from this vantage, at six-thirty on a workday morning, she watched the naked Karp drink water from her sink. He chugged a glass down, then filled another. Karp drank a lot of water, like a horse. It was the only healthy aspect of his diet, which consisted otherwise of junk food from cancer wagons and takeout windows-soggy pizza, elderly gray hot dogs, orange-colored knishes heavy as cinderblock, souvlaki oozing toxic oils, lukewarm eggrolls packed with substances mysterious as the East. Karp ate these in combinations and in quantities that would gag a wolverine, and washed it down with colorful, bubbled sugar-water.
    Marlene had vaguely considered a campaign to change his diet into one that would enable him to survive into the coming decade. This was but one of the many such campaigns she had planned for after the Big Day. Karp, though a fountain of many virtues, could stand considerable improvement.
    Once they learned about the baby, and Karp began to spend most of his time with Marlene, she had attempted to get her kitchen act together. She was a reasonably proficient cook, but like Karp, was no slave to the four basic food groups. Marlene subsisted largely on chocolate bars and yogurt.
    Since she had started eating for two and began an effort to reform, Marlene had cooked a number of what she considered decent meals. Karp responded with enthusiasm, but he would have responded with equal enthusiasm to raw vulture, as long as there was enough of it.
    More recently, she had been too exhausted to spend time in the kitchen, and on most evenings it seemed easier to take-out from one of the many grease joints, Italian, Chinese, or Greek, that perfumed the streets of lower Manhattan.
    She watched Karp top off his tank and walk to the toilet. The diet hadn't affected his body yet, she thought approvingly. As large as he was, he was graceful and precise in motion, grounded and radiating contained power when at rest. The morning light flooding out through the big east windows of the loft lit up the hanging dust around his body like an aura.
    The legs were long and smooth, the arms suspended from wide square shoulders down to those enormous hands, with their bony spatulate fingers. The scars-the Dr. Frankenstein mass of ladders from the knee operations and the smaller ragged ones in the shoulder where he had taken a couple of assassin's bullets-added somehow to the appeal. Scars: a real man!
    What a nice butt he has, thought Marlene, scrooching around in the bed to get a better look. And how nice that he's retained that jockish habit of walking around naked all the time. How dull to be married to some lard-ass in a plaid robe. We like each other's asses, she mused; is that a really solid basis for a life relationship? Because although she knew his body nearly as well as she knew her own, her knowledge of what went on within that high and narrow skull remained vague and confused.
    The light moved slowly across the floor of Marlene's loft. The big skylight in the center of its patterned tin ceiling was beginning to glow as well, like milk glass. The loft was one huge room, a hundred feet long by thirty-three, divided by portable screens into a living area, a kitchen, a dining area, and then the Limbo, a dusty zone occupied by athletic equipment- Karp's rowing machine, Marlene's body and speed bags-assorted junk, and the huge motors that ran the building's freight lift. Under the west windows, at the far end, Marlene had set up a little office, and about a hundred potted plants, ranging from African violets to giant ficus trees.
    The place was entirely Marlene's creation, and waking up in it always gave her a little charge. The summer she had moved in she had taken on the herculean task of cleaning out the remnants of a defunct electroplater, heaving great tangles of wire and scrap down the freight shaft, scraping, sanding, painting, until it was as she