Free The Biology of Luck by Jacob M. Appel Page A

Anglo-Saxon perfection, Cary Grant and Gregory Peck and Henry Fonda rolled into one. The woman, no less stunning, flaunts a decidedly less-refined appeal. Her leather skirt cuts off at mid-thigh and the color of her aureoles is visible through her sheer cotton top. The two are bickering in hushed tones. The woman’s eyes are red andswollen. Larry suppresses the urge to lash out at them, to tell them how spoiled they are, to remind them of all they have to be thankful for. He’d give anything to kill his morning break with a girl like that. Anything. But his lot is to play court jester to Ziggy Borasch. It is all so fucking unfair.
    Borasch reaches for Larry’s cup and takes a sip of his coffee. His hands tremble in seismic jolts. “I can’t drink this glue with milk,” he says, scowling. “Anyway, do you want to hear my latest failure?”
    â€œGo ahead.”
    Borasch flips through the pages of his notebook. The piano melds the final chords of
Build Me Up, Buttercup
into
Hey Jude
.
    â€œâ€˜Some people peel like an apple, down to a solid core,” reads Borasch, “while others peel like an onion, losing layer upon layer until nothing remains.’ Passable, don’t you think? There’s something distinctively American in that. I feel like I’m getting closer and closer by day.”
    â€œI like it,” Larry agrees. “It has potential. On another subject, we had a minor calamity this morning at Grant’s Tomb. A food fight, if you can believe it.”
    â€œI can believe anything. Or almost anything. The only thing that I have trouble believing, man, is the pandemic ignorance of humanity. It never ceases to amaze me. Try this on for size. I was at the movies yesterday, maybe the day before, and on the way out this absolute cretin is raving to his girlfriend about how the license plate of the get-away car in the flick is the same as his childhood phone number. The first two letters even match the old exchange code. ‘What a coincidence!’ he keeps saying. ‘What a coincidence!” And all the time he’s grinning like he just hit the mother lode. Like he’s won the lottery or the Cold War. So I walk up to him, as calm as I can manage, to set him straight. I politely remind him of all the other movies he’s seen in his lifetime, hundreds, thousands for all I know, in which the license plate
didn’t
match anything at all. And then I point out all the numbers that
this
license plate didn’t match his social security number, his mother’s birthday, his own goddammed licenseplate. And you do know what the guy does? Right there in the middle of the Movieplex? He spits on my shoe.”
    Larry stretches to glance surreptitiously at his watch. He still has an hour before the Dutch contingent returns from their trip to Liberty Island, but he isn’t in the mood for one of Borasch’s tirades. He’d like to talk about Stroop & Stone, about Starshine, about the drowning girl, but he knows that Borasch’s own agenda, as always, will take precedence. Larry is preparing to excuse himself when he catches sight of the handsome man struggling with his date. The woman, for some reason or another, has taken hold of the man’s wallet and he is squeezing her wrist, bending her slender arm back at the elbow, in an attempt to break the grip. The woman’s eyes have contracted into narrow slits. Her words are drowned out by Borasch’s soap-boxing, by the speciously optimistic chorus of
Leaving on a Jet Plane
playing in the background, but Larry understands, without hearing, that she is pleading against her inevitable extinction. Maybe she is a girlfriend; more likely she is a mistress, an expendable part of uber-WASP’s harem, his flock of willing females that at least partially explains Larry’s own romantic difficulties. Distributed equally, there are enough pretty women to go around. But who wants to share the