Free The Silver Age by Nicholson Gunn

featuring tweedy sportsmen in fly-fishing gear, a
Life magazine from the 1940s, its cover dominated by a blonde model’s head and
satin-clad shoulders, next to the caption “War and Fashions.” Now he was sure
of it – the way she was looking into his eyes and nowhere else, her own eyes
seeming not even to blink. The way she smiled when he spoke and then tossed her
hair, still smiling, her unblinking eyes wider than ever now. Then her phone
blooped, killing the moment with an incoming text message. She snatched the
device up off the coffee table, read it with an irritated sigh, shaking her
head, then thumbed out a curt response, pressed send.
    “So where were we?” she asked, refocussing.
    “You were just telling me about your new book of
photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue.”
    “Right, so the thing I found so amazing was…”
    Her phone blooped again, the LCD screen lighting up in
the same instant, its colour a harsh, alien blue. This time, she gave the
message only a cursory look, her brow furrowing, then set the phone back down
without bothering to reply. But it blooped again, a few moments later, and then
again, before she’d even finished reading the third message.
    “Everything okay?” Stephan asked, tamping down his
annoyance. “Did you forget to file this week’s column? Breaking news in the
lifestyle sector?”
    She shook her head, looking down. “I wish,” she said,
turning off the phone and putting it away in her purse, her head bowed. Was she
upset? She seemed actually to be ruffled, he realized with surprise.
    “Seriously, everything okay?”
    “Yes, everything’s fine.” She shook her head. “I was seeing
somebody, but we broke up. He doesn’t seem to have fully grasped that,
however.”
    Stephan’s mind raced, calibrating the significance of
this fresh intelligence. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, finally.
    “Don’t be. He had it coming.”
    “What happened?”
    “I don’t mean to be coy, but I’m not terribly keen to get
into the details of my unfortunate love life just now.”
    “Fair enough.”
    “Honestly, it was any number of things – his tiresome
railings about American politics, his overly practiced cunnilingus technique –
but I’ll tell you what. The last straw was that I was over at his place a few
nights ago and happened to discover his complete collection of Murphy Brown
DVDs, hidden away in a secret corner of his entertainment unit. You know Murphy
Brown, that early nineties TV sit-com starring Candice Bergen?”
    “Murphy Brown, yeah, that’s… somehow vaguely disturbing.”
He paused, mulled. “On the other hand, it’s not as if he was a racist cop or
something. Are you sure you weren’t too hard on him?”
    She fixed him with a stern look, and he saw that he’d
offended her. Then she cracked up.
    “Let me explain,” she said, gasping.
    “I’m all ears.”
    “Okay, so this guy thought he was the ultimate
connoisseur of everything, right? If we went out for dinner, he’d insist on ordering
some very special bottle of French wine to go with the meal. If he bought a
messenger bag, it had to be a limited edition one crafted from the recycled
cowlings of Communist-era Slovakian produce trucks.”
    “Wait a minute, I think I know that guy. Actually I know
five of that guy.”
    “They’re everywhere these days, but here’s the thing –
when I saw those tapes something I’d half realized all along suddenly hit me
full on. Deep down he was just a simple fellow from the suburbs who’d built up
this whole fake persona for himself, because he wanted people to think he was
cool or whatever, and not because he actually liked any of the stuff he claimed
to be into. Finding those DVDs, it was like stumbling onto his secret
bestiality porn stash. It was… hideous, actually.”
    “Maybe he was just afraid of what you’d think if you
found out who he really was.”
    “Maybe he was. But he might have had more luck in the
long run if he’d been