After the Plague by T. C. Boyle Read Free Book Online

playing out the charade, pretending to fumble through his pockets for a pen, when Arminbroke the silence. “Why don’t you just fock off,” he said, and the veins stood out in his neck.
    â€œOh, she’ll be so thrilled,” Jason went on, his voice pinched to a squeal. “She’s so adorable, only six years old, and, oh, my God, she’s not going to believe this—”
    Armin rose to his feet. Zinny clutched at the edge of the table with bloodless fingers, her eyes narrow and hard. The waiter—the one Jason had been riding all night—started toward them, crying out, “Is everything all right?” as if the phrase had any meaning.
    And then Jason’s voice changed, just like that. “Fuck you too, Jack, and your scrawny fucking bald-headed squeeze.”
    Armin worked out, you could see that, and Paula doubted he’d ever pressed a cigarette to his lips, let alone a joint, but still Jason managed to hold his own—at least until the kitchen staff separated them. There was some breakage, a couple of chairs overturned, a whole lot of noise and cursing and threatening, most of it from Jason. Every face in the restaurant was drained of color by the time the kitchen staff came to the rescue, and somebody went to the phone and called the police, but Jason blustered his way out the door and disappeared before they arrived. And Paula? She just melted away and kept on melting until she found herself behind the wheel of the car, cruising slowly down the darkened streets, looking for Jason.
    She never did find him.
    When he called the next morning he was all sweetness and apology. He whispered, moaned, sang to her, his voice a continuous soothing current insinuating itself through the line and into her head and right on down through her veins and arteries to the unresisting core of her. “Listen, Paula, I didn’t mean for things to get out of hand,” he whispered, “you’ve got to believe me. I just didn’t think you had to hide from anybody, that’s all.”
    She listened, her mind gone numb, and let his words saturate her. It was the day before the event, and she wasn’t going to let anything distract her. But then, as he went on, pouring himselfinto the phone with his penitential, self-pitying tones as if he were the one who’d been embarrassed and humiliated, she felt the outrage coming up in her: didn’t he understand, didn’t he know what it meant to stare into the face of your own defeat? And over a plate of pasta, no less? She cut him off in the middle of a long digression about some surfing legend of the fifties and all the adversity he’d had to face from a host of competitors, a blood-sucking wife and a fearsome backwash off Newport Beach.
    â€œWhat did you think,” she demanded, “that you were protecting me or something? Is that it? Because if that’s what you think, let me tell you I don’t need you or anybody else to stand up for me—”
    â€œPaula,” he said, his voice creeping out at her over the wire, “Paula, I’m on your side, remember? I love what you’re doing. I want to help you.” He paused. “And yes, I want to protect you too.”
    â€œI don’t need it.”
    â€œYes, you do. You don’t think you do but you do. Don’t you see: I was trying to psych her.”
    â€œPsych her? At the Pasta Bowl?”
    His voice was soft, so soft she could barely hear him: “Yeah.” And then, even softer: “I did it for you.”
    It was Saturday, seventy-eight degrees, sun beaming down unmolested, the tourists out in force. The shop had been buzzing since ten, nothing major—cords, tube socks, T-shirts, a couple of illustrated guides to South Coast hot spots that nobody who knew anything needed a book to find—but Jason had been at the cash register right through lunch and on into the four-thirty breathing spell when the tourist