Free Sex and Death by Sarah Hall Page A

haven’t found the right person because the right person doesn’t exist. You want to be happy, forget the big, pink abstractions. Find someone whose daily presence is not intolerable to you.’
    â€˜Do you put that on your anniversary cards?’ asked the man she was with. ‘ To my husband, whose daily presence is not intolerable to me .’ Tom was this person’s name. He was a photo editor with whom she had slept during a festival in Los Angeles three weeks before. The specifics of their tussle were lost to Cora, who’d been close to quadriplegia from negronis. But the experience left in her memory traces of something exciting. So now she was sitting in a dark saloon in the meat-packing district with Tom’s thin knee between her thighs. Downstairs was the neighbourhood’s last establishment that still packed meat. The room smelled authentically of blood.
    â€˜Is he an artist?’
    â€˜He’s a non-depleting human presence. It’s a talent they should give MacArthurs for. He doesn’t argue for the pleasure of it. I like the way his breath smells. We laugh at the same things, and I am never lonely. The only issues, and I actually think they are relatively minor, are that I’m not in love with him, and I’m not especially interested in having sex with him ever again.’
    Tom’s tongue was now scouting Cora’s molars. His stiff thumb toured her breast.
    Outside, a blue static of falling snow haloed the streetlamps. A serious storm was in the works. Haste in Tom’s bed would be necessary if she wanted to find a taxi home.
    â€˜How about we get out of here?’ Cora said. She took her phone from her pocket to check the time. The phone, she saw, was on an open call to her husband. It had been that way for forty-six minutes. Cora hung it up.
    â€˜I’m very sorry,’ she said to Tom. ‘I have to go.’
    Cora left him on the corner. When she was out of earshot, she called her husband, whose name was Rodney. The phone had been in the deepest pocket of her thick, wool coat. The bar had been a poultry house of background noise. It was reasonable to suppose that her husband had not heard a thing.
    â€˜Hey there,’ Rodney said with perfect affability. ‘How was your night?’
    â€˜Rife with jargon and profane young women.’ Cora was a photographer. A launch party for a fashion magazine was where she had professed to be. ‘But a big, dumb paycheck may come out of it somewhere down the line. Anyway, I’m getting in a cab now. Do we need anything from the world?’
    â€˜I just ate our last ginger snap.’
    â€˜Ginger snaps: check,’ said Cora. Relief warmed her thorax. She could not get home soon enough. ‘Anything else?’
    â€˜Actually, yeah,’ said Rodney. ‘Who was that guy you were talking to?’
    Abasements were made. A divorce was proposed and rejected. In the weeks after the telephone call, fits of tearful self-recrimination seized Cora at restaurants, in the grocery store, in the small hours of the night.
    Through all of this, Rodney was impossibly forgiving. He was not only her absolver but a spirited attorney for Cora’s defence. ‘Of course, it sucks and it’s painful, but strictly speaking, I can’t really say you did anything wrong, when we’re down to what, about three IOOs a year.’ The acronym came from Rodney’s computer work. It stood for input/output operation, a piece of householdvocabulary that, in its transition into standard usage, had ceased to be waggish and become merely apt.
    â€˜Anyway,’ Rodney went on, ‘we did say that if either of us wanted to be extracurricular, we would talk about it and deal with it. You just happen to have acted first.’
    Cora could not recall having had that conversation. She wondered, with a touch of vertigo, whether Rodney was making it up. ‘But I didn’t tell you,’ she said.