My Escapee: Stories

Sink Home

53 Sink Home / The first time Mira sees Hugh, he is trying to thread his body through an unstrung tennis racket. She’s on one side of a crowded room and he’s on the other, but there is a little gap in the crush of people and she watches him twisting his compact body sideways, hoisting up his pants leg, and stretching out a bare foot. They’re at a party hosted by a Brazilian named Flavio. Flavio is her husband’s friend,but her husband is at home with the flu.This evening she has learned that there are certain people around whom she should be quiet because they will only agree with everything she says.Having been agreed with,she’ll begin to make increasingly outrageous statements and to adopt a wry, scouring personality not at all her own, and they’ll just stand there and let her.They’ll let her defame herself, just as they’d let her strip naked if she started to.After an hour of this, Mira decides to be very demure with the next person she meets. Who turns out to be Hugh.Who is struggling, failing to thread his body through the racket. A few people hoot. She crosses the room and offers her arm as a prop for him to use while he puts his socks and shoes back on. Sink Home 54 / “Did someone dare you to do that?” she asks. “What?” he says. She takes a sip of beer and realizes that she’s a little drunk, a realization that coincides with finding the proper person to be a little drunk around. Her cells, she decides, are like grains of rice, and the alcohol is the water in which they’ve been simmering, and now they are perfectly fluffed. “Have you ever done that before?” “Not successfully.”He pauses in the midst of pulling on his canvas shoe. “Want to see me smoke a cigarette really elegantly with my toes?” She shakes her head.Gilberto Gil is playing on the stereo. Mira loves how Brazilian Portuguese sounds, especially when sung. Listening to the music is like watching a box of chocolates melt. People begin dancing awkwardly, for most of them are whiteVirginians, but Flavio stations himself in the middle of the room and gyrates like a sprinkler feeding a small lawn. They exchange names, and then Hugh pulls on her hand and keeps pulling until it can be called dancing. He has small damp hands, hands she would normally shake off. When she arrives home later that night the house is dark, but she knows that her husband isn’t asleep. Daniel can never sleep when he’s sick. His wakefulness is a hard-bristled brush probing down a length of pipe for the stoppage, the matter. Probing for her. She tosses her coat over a chair and switches on the lamp that stands next to it.The lightbulb pops, a delicate , terminal sound. It’s then she feels her resolve leave her. Her resolve to do what? Be the high-spirited, generously idio- Sink Home / 55 syncratic person she’d been at the party?The furniture in the room, the insensate couch, the silent piano, knows she isn’t like that. The pictures on the walls know too, having been hung by a woman who more closely resembles someone indecisive , often mournful. And hung again. And again. Never in quite the right place. Holes from the artworks’ first and second hangings strafe the walls like machine gun scars. Ruining, almost ruining the effect of the third or fourth hanging, the grindingly-decided-upon final position. In the bathroom, she tucks her hair behind her ears, revealing eyes that gleam like oil. She places twoAdvils in her mouth and bends to drink from the tap.The pills fall from the back of her tongue to the side of her mouth, a caustic flash. She gulps the water, straightens. Daniel calls out to her. Today she is on her fifth excursion with Hugh. Not date, because he knows she’s married.They are just friends, they have both said so. Mira’s promised to invite him to dinner to meet her husband, but she keeps putting it off. Her husband’s a surgery resident and is at the hospital all the time, so it’s natural that she and Hugh do things alone.Today, a mild...