Free The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards by Robert Boswell Page A

don’t guess they’re a band anymore.”
    “I hate them,” she said. “They’re so insipid. I quit going by that name when that band came out. That, and the last boy who called me Sting stepped on my heart.”
    “I have to go,” the Chin said, gathering together his paper and lunch bag. “But you’ll have to tell me how he did that, how he broke your heart.”
    “I didn’t say he broke it. He stepped on it.”
    “Durable heart. I like that.” His smile was full of self-appreciation. “See ya,” he said. “I’ll be looking for ya.”
    She gave him only a twist of her head to indicate good-bye. Already, she could hear herself tell Brian that he, Brian, had stepped on her heart, which he had, after all. He would know that already if his wife hadn’t intentionally gotten pregnant. Blinding him. The idea of a baby, of becoming a father again, blinded him. Monica had meant to tell the Chin that her ex-husband stuttered, that she liked men who stuttered but she didn’t like facial tics.
    One time Sally’s father had said to her, “What you don’t know would sink a ship,” which had made her think love was dependent on what you didn’t know—a kind of blindness. Myopia, glaucoma, amblyopia, heterotropia, esotropia—she’d written a poem about it, eons ago, back when she had loved Sally’s father and been seeing a guy named Eddie, not sleeping with him, just seeing him. Eddie had been to Nicaragua right when it was interesting to go. He had been desperate to screw her, which was why she had not let him. She had seen himtwice a week for almost a year. Just petting, a little hand play.
    Petting, what a funny word. She took her notebook out and wrote down the word
petting
and then made a list of the things that one might pet, starting with dogs and then describing the places on her own body that men liked to touch.
    Her last house of the day was Mrs. Nighetti, whose apartment was as cluttered as Mr. Chub’s was empty. Photographs of her nine sons lined the mantel of her fireplace, black-and-white photographs of beautiful young men.
    “And only Vincent makes his mother happy with a grandchild,” she told Monica, as she did every week. “Nine of them. Boys the girls go silly over. My phone never stopped ringing. Now their papa’s dead, the phone is quiet, and what do I have to show? Only Vincent makes his mother happy with a grandchild, a girl, no less, Carlotta, which you may not know, but Carlotta is my name. Names her after his mother, my Vincent.”
    She did not look like a woman who had borne and raised nine sons, did not really look old, except for the bags beneath her eyes. She was confined to a wheelchair or Monica doubted she would permit someone to clean her apartment.
    “Do you have any new pictures?” Monica asked her.
    Mrs. Nighetti, from her wheelchair, showed Monica her palms. “You’d think that wife of his would know I want new pictures of my Carlotta every week, but she’s too busy getting famous. ‘I’m going to be a famous model,’ she tells Vincent. To hear her talk, the baby set her back years.” Mrs. Nighetti waved her hands as if to push away the very idea. “But I may have some old ones you haven’t seen.”
    Of the three hours Monica put in weekly at Mrs. Nighetti’s, half would be spent in conversation, often over cups of hot tea. She handed Monica a photograph.
    “Here’s my girl sitting in the lap of Miss Famous.”
    Miss Famous
. Monica liked that. She felt sort of famous herself, a private sort of fame. A secret celebrity. It was the one real thing she knew, while the rest of the world was ignorant. She recalled, for an instant, the trip her senior class had made to Disneyland, how she had liked to pause behind people while their relatives snapped photos. All over the country, she appeared in pictures, the mystery woman in dark glasses at the border of the photos.
    “Now tell me,” Mrs. Nighetti said. “This Brian, has he come to his senses yet? Has he come