Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good by John Gould Read Free Book Online

ought to flee but he can’t seem to do it. He’s been pinned, somehow, nailed to the here and now. He exerts himself to appear unimpressed by the place, to appear, as his dad would put it, swave and deboner. The name? McKay. Matt McKay. The supermodel at the front desk gives him his choice of the last two rooms. Would he prefer the Deluxe, or the even deluxer Exclusive? Much in the manner of a doomed beggar blowing his last few bucks on a bottle of the good stuff, Matt goes Exclusive. Why? Why not? “No, it’s just me tonight, Cheryl.” He grins rakishly, inducing Cheryl to crease ever-so-slightly the confectionery glaze of her lipstick. The moment is lost, though, when she’s obliged to give his non-platinum, nongold credit card a withering glance. If she only knew.
    Five minutes later Matt steps into an elevator, and is joined there by a woman who smiles more toothily than she really needs to at Matt’s goofy “Goiiiiiing up!” Matt grins back. He feels even better now, or at least he feels different: his flesh has turned from baggage to buoy. He takes in the woman’s round, curiously symmetrical face, her lobe-length eggplant hair. Big brown eyes, almost buggy—she won’t quit looking surprised. Pretty? Or what they used to call handsome. She’d have been possessed of a tomboy beauty as a kid, which the boys around her would have mistaken for homeliness until it was way too late. She isn’t as much of a sore thumb here as is Matt (the cords, the crumpled collar shirt), but she doesn’t look quite at home either. Her outfit’s smart but not hoity-toity—more along the lines of Holiday Inn, say. She isn’t Matt’s age, maybe Mariko’s? Even younger. She’s bustier than Mariko, and tushier too. Venus of Whatever, the goddess Mariko’s into these days, she’s one of those. She’s short enough—not much taller than tiny Mariko—that Matt can regard his own face over top of hers in the mirrored wall, the two faces stacked as though on a totem pole.
    Is he really that
lean?
It’s as though his vertical hold has slipped, elongating him, stretching him like gum on a lifted shoe; it’s as though he’s been sick six months rather than six hours. His is an El Greco face (this thought has struck him many times since his Europe tour with Zane, so many galleries), all beak and cheekbone and deep, doleful eye. Apostle What’s-His-Puss tallying his sins. Beautiful?
    The woman says, “Are you with one of the groups?”
    “Nope,” says Matt. “Solo.”
    “I see.”
    “I
applied
to a group. I applied to all of them, actually. Ectomorphs for Christ. Quitters Anonymous. No go.”
    Again with the laugh. Is that how you know somebody’s into you, they over-laugh at your jokes? In the old days Mariko laughed till she snorted, which made her laugh till she peed.
    Strange day today. A day of strangers. Could you make a new life this way, tell a lie and live it, let it be true? “Manifesting,” Mariko calls it—she uses it to find parking spots. You concentrate long and hard enough on something and it just happens. “What about you?” he says.
    “Actually,” says the woman, “I’m … yes, I’m with one of the conferences. Astronomy? Quantum stuff, you know, quarks and photons, the whole … Sorry.”
    “No, that’s okay. So like, the Big Bang and all that?”
    Not the swavest of pickup lines but look, the woman’s smiling in such a way—lowering her head, leaning in just a little—that Matt finds himself reaching out to steady her, a gesture that turns into a fleeting caress. He cups her shoulder the way a smart shopper might cup a cantaloupe, in search of just the right give.
    “Oh,” she says, as though he’s said something she should have thought of herself.
    Five minutes after that—or maybe it’s fifteen, twenty—Matt’s braced behind her, pants around his ankles, as she bends over his unmussed bed up on the eighth floor. She’s got her skirt hoisted to her hips. The position was her