Pike's Folly by Mike Heppner Read Free Book Online

but it was Bloomsday, and every year the bar undertook a daylong reading of
Ulysses
in the back room—some of those transformations were already in place. She’d taken to wearing her sandy blond hair long, her bangs trimmed in the front. If she was beautiful, she preferred not to think of herself as such.
Striking,
perhaps, or
disarming,
both of which qualified her looks in terms that she could understand. At bars, she displayed proof of her education the way some women flashed the pepper spray on their key chain: both as a warning and, to the right man, a challenge. If you didn’t “get it,” you didn’t
get
it. Wherever she went, she carried a tattered copy of
The Golden Notebook
in the pocket of her blood-red sweater-coat. This, like everything else, was a test. The man she was looking for had to be smart, older (Heath was twenty-six), left wing and politically active, an artist, kind of cute, pot-friendly, acid-friendly, vegan-friendly but not militant about it. Heath was all of these things.
    Best of all, he wasn’t a Rhode Islander. Allison was tired of guys from Cranston, Warwick, East Providence. Heath had a vibe that set him apart from those losers. He’d left home, moved on with his life. He hardly even talked about his parents, who were both still down in North Carolina, where he’d grown up. Allison couldn’t imagine making such a clean break from her past. Her family had always been a tight-knit crew, and not even her parents’ divorce three years ago had done much to change that. Allison’s mother, Renee, had since moved to an expensive flat in London, where Allison had spent recent summers. Her parents continued to get along, though seeing each other only occasionally. Renee, who’d turned into a bit of a fag hag in Europe, still called long-distance every few weeks, trying to fix Gregg up with one of the many pretty boys in her coterie. It was no big deal; these were modern times, and there was nothing anyone could do about it anyway.
    Not surprisingly, the person most affected by the divorce was Allison. She’d begun to suspect something about herself recently that she could hardly believe, given that it contradicted everything she’d always regarded as fair and decent and open-minded. The truth was, she
didn’t like
gay men. Being charitable, they made her uncomfortable; that’s how she sold it to herself, by easing into the semantics of her own prejudice as a swimmer might enter cold water an inch at a time. Phrasing it thus, she acknowledged the problem was her own—the fact that all of the gay men she’d encountered in college had seemed like such stereotypes was a reflection of her own personal shortcomings, and not any fault of the men themselves.
    â€œWhat should I wear tonight?” Heath asked, his arms around her waist while he nuzzled her in the kitchen.
    The coffee was ready; Allison lifted the carafe and poured herself a cup. “Wear whatever you want. My father doesn’t care. He’ll probably wear a suit, but that’s just his personality.”
    â€œThen I’ll wear a suit.”
    â€œDon’t.”
She glared at him. “If you wear a suit, you have to get a haircut. That’s the rule.”
    Climbing down from the stool, she took her coffee into the other room and said, peering out the high basement windows, “Maybe we should stay at my house tonight. We’ll probably be too drunk to drive back after dinner.”
    â€œIs your dad a big drinker?” Heath asked, helping himself to the half-cup of coffee she’d left for him in the carafe.
    â€œNo, but
we
are.” Taking off her shirt, she went to the closet and browsed through the three or four outfits she kept at his place. “Let’s bring some pot, too. I want to get stoned.”
    An hour later, they’d both showered, dressed and walked up the broken cement steps to the parking lot behind the apartment.