And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida Read Free Book Online Page A

"Then you'll believe me?"
    "Yeah," I say.

    "Tice," I hear him yell. He puts the phone down and I hear his voice from a few feet away. "Hey Tice, get over here."

    I hang up.

    Tom calls me and tells me he wants his lamp back. He brought it over one night so we could both read in bed. On another night, when stripping down for sex, he threw his T-shirt over it. The shirt was purple and our bodies looked like we were in a greenhouse.

    "I'll leave it downstairs with the doorman," I say. "Fine," he says. "I'll be over to get it in ten minutes." I hang up and unplug the lamp. The elevator is being held on the tenth floor and I don't want to wait, so I take the stairs. Just when I'm running down the final flight, I see Tom enter the lobby. The liar, he must have called from the pay phone outside. He walks toward me, grabs the lamp out of my hands with such force I stumble backward.
    Without saying a word, he leaves. The lamp's cord drags behind him like a leash.

    It's Tuesday, which means it's plant-watering day. I rejoice in having remembered this: it's a sign that things are back in order, on schedule. I dump out the contents of the wastebasket in the bathroom. I notice that my roommate is an excessive flosser. I fill the wastebasket with water from the kitchen sink. Above the faucet is a note from Susan:
    Please heed my wishes And do the dishes!!

    We have three plants. I start watering the one in my bedroom, the squat one with curving leaves, like extended tongues. I can't remember how much water it needs and so I pour and pour until I see it's leaking out of the bottom. I mop up the spill with a clean, unmatched sock.

    The fly strips I've bought hang in spirals, like DNA, from a ceiling lamp's cord in the kitchen, from a curtain rod in the dining room, and from a nail in the hallway. No flies have been caught.

    The red-faced guy, the representative of the world, asks if I want to get some dinner in the neighborhood. He lives four blocks away. He's recently moved from the Lower East Side and, before that, Texas, because his life in both places was too stressful, too full of bad people and ghosts.

    "Ghosts?" I asked. "Of the female form."

    We've said we'll get dinner at eight thirty, that he'll call before and we'll decide on a place. It's eight forty-five and my roommate knocks on my door and says she forgot to tell me, but he called over an hour before, when she was on the other line.

    I call him back but the phone rings and rings. I call him back at nine and the phone's busy.

    I'm restless and, for the first time in a long while, hungry, so I walk over to his apartment and ring the bell. I'm relieved to hear his footsteps. He opens the door and he looks at me with suspicious eyes. "What?" he says.

    "Excuse me?" I say.

    He flings open the door. "Look around, feel free to. I don't know what exactly you were hoping to catch me doing here."

    "Nothing," I say, and explain that I didn't get the message he'd called. As I'm talking, I feel my own face reddening to the point that I imagine it matching his. Maybe it's catching.
    Maybe people with suspicions have red faces. Maybe we're meant to be together, me and this long-haired man, and have red-faced children.

    "Do you still want to get dinner?" I ask.

    "Sure," he says. He goes inside and gets his scarf and coat. He stands on the threshold before stepping out into the hallway where I'm waiting. "Sorry," he says.

    Before I can say anything he pulls something out of his pocket.

    "It's pepper spray," he says and places a red-leather-encased bottle, with a key chain, in my hand.

    "Thanks," I say.

    "I don't know if it would have been of help—" "Thanks," I say again, cutting him off.
    "It's not the most romantic of gifts," he says.

    I lean in and inhale as I kiss him. I want to stick whatever soap he uses up my nose.

    We walk a few blocks to an Italian restaurant, where the waiters know him. "You're early tonight," two of them say.

    "I usually come here at eleven or