Peaceable Kingdom by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online

dark-skinned, probably gypsy. Two braids hung to her waist. She wore a faded floor-length skirt and a kid’s long-sleeved striped polo shirt. A curly-haired child clung to her skirt. Susanna recalled an older child they’d passed playing in the doorway. The woman puffed angrily on her cigarette as she chattered to the barmaids in Italian. She kept pacing and turning sharply with little disdainful shakes of her hip.
    “I love the gypsies,” Gabor said. “They are tough people, believe me. After we fail, Greenpeace, conferences, all this blah-blah, everything failed, poisoned, civilization bye-bye, the gypsies will still be here when all of us are finito .”
    “Not cauliflowers?” said Susanna.
    “Please?” Gabor said.
    “The raki is something,” she said. Even Maritsa, she noticed, was starting to look a bit green.
    “One more. And espresso,” said Gabor. “Then we will have the right dose.”
    After that round Susanna knew it had been a drastic mistake. The world around her got painfully loud, then syrupy and slow. All at once she was aware of the gypsy woman watching her. She felt as if she were watching herself, and she thought distinctly: “I am having a hallucination.”
    The vision couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but in that time she saw the end of the world, empty canyons of buildings in a depopulated city, like some post-nuclear Hollywood set, except that it was Milan, deserted but for the gypsy woman and her children, sashaying idly in and out of empty restaurants and shops, bored and petulant, neither happy nor sad that all this was now theirs. Susanna watched for a while and then it rushed away, and she felt herself rising over Milan, over Italy, then above the earth, not the familiar earth, pockmarked, green and blue. This was a new earth, a bald earth, shining in the black sky, white and brilliant and polished, like a ping-pong ball lit from within.
    The next thing Susanna knew, she was in her hotel bed looking up at Jerry. For a moment she saw his face as an Archimboldo: cauliflower skin, carrot nose, green-bean eyeglass frames. He said, “Raki and espresso. Dynamite combination.”
    “Gabor?” she said.
    “He was abject,” said Jerry. “I gather it was quite a scene, him carrying you cave-man style through the lobby.” Jerry was smiling at her. His voice was nasal with false urgency, like a forties newsreel announcer.
    “I think I’m sick,” said Susanna. “I was hallucinating.”
    Jerry said, “Raki isn’t Dr Pepper.”
    Susanna said, “Jerry, the weirdest thing. I had a vision, a hallucination. But before that there was a moment…it was like sometimes we’d be in cathedrals with those machines you plug a hundred lire in to light up the frescoes for a minute. Always, just before the minute was up, I’d see something in the paintings. But when the light went out I would lose it and forget what it was. Well, there was a gypsy woman in the café, and just before I felt so strange, I looked at her and thought, She looks exactly like me. We could be twins and she knows it. Of course it was ridiculous. We looked nothing alike.”
    Jerry stretched out beside her and gazed down into her face. How old he looks, she thought guiltily, how unhappy and exhausted. Everything showed in his face, everything they both knew now, that they could not go on together, their marriage would have to end and she would have to leave him to face the death of the planet without her. She knew that Jerry was seeing in her the heartlessness of the young: unlike him, she still had time to fix some part of the world, and if it was ending, she still had the strength to enjoy what was left. And who was Jerry, really, to make her feel guilty about it?
    “You don’t look anything like a gypsy,” said Jerry. “You look like Tinker Bell.”
    Tears came to Susanna’s eyes. “I know that,” she said, not because it was true but to fill the silence in which she might otherwise have to face the fact