Nothing Real Volume 1 by Claire Needell Read Free Book Online Page B

move cross-country had lifted her not from one place to another, but from everywhere.
    â€œLet’s go back to my place,” Val suggests meaningfully. “My roommate’s gone until tomorrow, back to Connecticut.” He says this in a funny voice, coming down hard on the second, usually silent c.
    His room is empty but for the futon on the floor, piles of books strewn everywhere, and a grayish-blue towel that, she is afraid, is the source of a musty smell, like something recovered after weeks underground. His books aren’t her books, she notices with surprise. No Riverside Shakespeare , no Intro to Critical Theory , not even Nietzsche. He has instead Politics and Markets , Democracy in America , and, most surprising, several thick books with German titles. She decides not to ask about the German. It is too depressing, the old topic, Val’s genius. Somehow, with the booze and the paunch gone, the fact of his genius itself has gained a kind of squalor in Nancy’s mind. Knowledge seems to gather around him like the musty old towel, a form of detritus.
    Val puts on a record, real vinyl on a turntable. It’s folk music, something Appalachian, a song celebrating the eating of muskrat. She raises her eyebrows.
    â€œHave you heard this?” Val asks as though everyone has been listening to it these days. “The Watson Family? Serious fiddle music.” He taps his foot and flaps his arms. His biceps extend now just below the sleeve of his T-shirt. “These guys are unfuckingbelievable.”
    He hears something she never will: virtuosity on the fiddle, the texture and beauty of it, carrying some fiddle-specific message. It is as though he were another species completely, hearing on another frequency, with capabilities as foreign to her as that of, say, an electric eel. As she listens to the amusical vibrations of the fiddler, she can think only of dirt, the black earth of the song. She should tell him this and make him love her for it, for her way with language—for her poetic need to see and feel everything colliding with its own name, substance and description clashing within syllables, her mind carried on the waves of these collisions. But she can’t speak. And she fears, suddenly, that what she thinks is a cliché. Of course folk music would sound like dirt. It is a joke her own mind is playing at her expense. She is showing herself her own stupidity, setting herself up for Val’s judgment. She is certain of his ancient boredom with what she has to say. It was how he became a drunk and got fat in the first place: pervasive boredom.
    Everything in the room suddenly has an odor and a reflection. She feels she is looking into a mirror and sees everything reflected except herself. Val is enjoying himself, rippling through the music and through time, while she sits on the side of his futon, outside of both, too far to reach over and kiss him and begin the fucking that she knows will be the end of them. She waits there for him to kiss her, to feel the artificiality, the semblance of affection on her lips. Love has a smell and a taste to it that her body does not exude. She can’t fool him, but suddenly knows she does not want to. Let him have her. He deserves her. She wants to throw herself at him, like throwing herselfunder a bus, or the body as a bomb. Let him have her. He’s why she’s lost herself anyway, and he deserves the shell of her now.
    Back when she wanted him, he’d turned on the TV and took out the tall, blue bong, and smoked himself into oblivion. Her yearning filled the room, and he’d turned from her—to Kim Craft, to Lancaster and the garish pseudocommentary of a woman writhing on satiny sheets with an ass no one of either sex could look away from.
    She knows he will feel her numbness when he enters her, that the sex will be mechanical, that she cannot be moved. She wants him to want her, though, to move toward her, so she can give him this