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

twelve," the representative of the world explains. "Every night, I almost forget to eat. It's the only place around here open late."

    "How can you forget to eat?" I say.

    I hardly remember anything I've eaten since the man and the park and the gun, except the chow fun at the Chinese restaurant, the pizza I ate with my student, and vanilla yogurt I've spooned into my mouth while standing in front of the open refrigerator.

    "I think I need a stable force in my life," he says. "You?" I say. My napkin drops to the floor.
    "It's been a while, but I think it's time I settled down."

    "You mean buy a house? Get a dog?" I say, and smile. His eyes are the same pale blue as my mother's.

    "No, just …"

    I stare at his ear; he has a hole but no earring.

    "Just this," he says, and looks at me. "This is good."

    We go back to his apartment. It's a basic apartment: living room, small kitchen, bedroom. "There are two different floor plans in this building," he tells me. "Floor plan A and floor plan B."

    "Which is this?" I ask. "B."
    I sit on his futon couch and he sits in his desk chair. From a shelf above the desk he hands me a book with an essay he praised over dinner. I read the first page. It's about the word "jejune."

    "I like it," I say.

    He hands me a ketchup bottle that was given to him by an artist he admires. I hold it, examine it, and hand it back. "Heinz," I say. "That's the best."

    "Hmm," says the red-faced guy. He's looking for something else in his desk drawers.

    I talk generic talk to fill the silent space between us. I tell him how I went to a restaurant downtown a few weeks before where there were Heinz bottles on the table, but the ketchup didn't taste like Heinz. I asked the waiter and he said they just pumped generic ketchup into the Heinz bottles.

    The representative of the world is on his knees, searching through the bottom drawer of a file cabinet.

    "He told me I had good taste buds," I say.

    "Look at this," he says. He hands me a photo of Jackson Pollock. "That was taken a few days before he died."

    "Wow," I say.

    Then he shows me a picture of his siblings: three brothers who look like him, and a sister who doesn't.

    I point to the sister. "She lives in England, right?" "Yeah," he says. "She works at the Tate."
    "You already told me that," I say. But then I feel bad, so I ask, "Where was it taken?" "At a family reunion in Ohio. That's where my grandparents live."
    "Ohio," I say. "Home of more presidents than any other state." "What do you mean?"
    "Eight presidents came from Ohio." "Really?" he says. "Interesting."
    I'm saddened that I've used this information I've learned from one man to impress another. For a brief moment I wish I were with Tom, his green-tinged hair in my eyes and his large mouth encasing my entire ear.

    The representative of the world claps his hands as if to say, Well, enough of that. "Ready for bed?" he asks.

    "Sure," I say.

    I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I'm tempted to check the medicine cabinet, but don't; the walls are so thin I'm afraid he'll hear the creak. I come out into the bedroom, smile. On his way into the bathroom, he eases past me, careful not to touch.

    Above his bed hangs a cross. The last time I slept beneath a cross was in Portugal, where I stayed in a youth hostel that had been a monastery. I'd always wanted to see the architecture in Lisbon—the sister city to San Francisco, some said. My senior year of college I finally got there with the money I made selling my eggs.

    Week after week, the ad had run in the campus paper: "Infertile New York couple seeking healthy female student to donate eggs." When the price went up, I answered the ad.

    The couple wanted to see me in person. I took an early-morning train to New York. The agreed-upon meeting spot was the docked ship, the U.S.S. Intrepid , off the West Side Highway—they didn't want me to know where they lived. The woman was thirty, the man in his twenties. They held hands tentatively, as