Sunday's on the Phone to Monday by Christine Reilly Read Free Book Online

none of that mattered. He felt bad for the old Claudio to whom it mattered—the Claudio who didn’t share this pure and nesting love, who took up too much of his own time.
    You have a nose bleed, Mathilde noticed about Claudio, who’d taken almost three times her amount of ’shrooms, poor thing, holding his hand. With his other hand, Claudio opened a half-eaten bag of chips. Instead of eating the chips, he opened and closed the chip clip like jaws.
    Do I? Claudio’s eyes welled. He slid the dimmer as they waddled into his bedroom. Rest. Mathilde closed her eyes, but Claudio distracted her. Then he oriented her, slipping a fun-size pill in her hand. Something to help her get to sleep. She wanted to take care of him, but instead he just kept taking care of her.
    Who is more broken, asked Mathilde, me or you?
    Claudio wiped Mathilde’s nose, dusted with peppery freckles. Her eyelashes were like brooms. Every time he looked at her, Claudio noticed something different. Both of us, said Claudio.

the wedding day
(and the next day)
summer 1989
    C laudio and Mathilde fell in love easily, and perhaps this was a result of keenness, greenness, a furious thirst. Naturally, their early, sweet-as-pie love was not the same kind they developed later in life. Within a year of dating, Claudio proposed, and Mathilde said of course . The fiancé and fiancée spent their evening cooking pasta, drinking Sancerre, and listening to a Ravi Shankar record. Mathilde asked what he was afraid of.
    Vultures.
    Mathilde said, in her therapist’s voice, they live in the desert.
    Scavengers just creep me out. Even if there’s an apocalypse sometime soon, even after you think every animal, plant, and germ in the world is obliterated, I guarantee you that there’s a vulture hiding somewhere under some rock, waiting to get rich off the foulest circumstances. He’ll be alive, watching the end of the world, and you know what he’ll think? He’ll think, my lucky day . He’ll fly over the entire world and find who’d been the wealthiest guy and just pick at his Swiss watch. And he’ll decide that he’s not hungry anymore.
    Mathilde looked at her husband. Mr. Simone. She would be his Mrs. (He’d decided she was wife material, and how could he know? Mathilde didn’t even know yet!) She couldn’t get her mind past the everyone is obliterated part. - Everyone will die . Everyone,already, is dying of something. - But how could Mathilde be dying? She’d hardly had a life at all yet.
    Vultures always think they need more. Claudio fixated on his fear. They don’t even remember what they have.
    Mathilde didn’t want to make a big deal out of her wedding. So Claudio and Mathilde synchronized it to take place the afternoon of the last production of her play, a small production of A Streetcar Named Desire, set in a cramped, boggy theater in Hell’s Kitchen. Mathilde played the female lead, Blanche DuBois. In the play, Blanche is raped by her sister Stella’s husband, Stanley. The play’s run lasted for thirty-two productions. The afternoon of the thirty-second, Claudio and Mathilde eloped at City Hall with Sawyer and Zane as witnesses. Mathilde wore a short brown Halston dress that she’d pulled out of her mother’s closet the day before. It was June. The sun was stiff and saffron, pushing across the sky.
    Mathilde and Claudio combined the cast party with their wedding ceremony. After, the new Mr. and Mrs. Simone went dancing until 4:00 a.m. at a burlesque-style nightclub and then to an after-hours nightclub, where they saw Patrick Swayze and where Mathilde accidentally tore her dress in half while doing lines out of the palm of her hand in the bathroom. Finally, they went to a diner facing the East River and ordered large plates of spaghetti and meatballs and talked about Cold War Soviet defectors. Mathilde kept calling Baryshnikov Misha, like she knew him.