The False Friend by Myla Goldberg Read Free Book Online Page A

an annual Midwestern audit forum, providing Huck a weekend for prog rock, late-night poker, and back-to-back Jim Jarmusch screenings during which it was understood he would smoke in the living room, subsist on pizza and Hostess snack cakes, and be unreachable by phone before noon. The number of his co-conspirators for this yearly ritual had dwindled as friends who once crashed on the couch became fathers who partook for part of one evening, then retreated along the city’s commuter line to the suburbs where people like them could afford houses. Huck had always assumed that one day he and Celia would join them. Whenthey had bought their apartment, he had imagined Celia pregnant inside it, had privately staked out the best corner for a crib. He figured they would get by until a baby turned two, at which point they’d start scouting FOR SALE signs in their married friends’ neighborhoods. Given the Chicago market, a one-bedroom had seemed like a good short-term proposition. That had been four years ago.
    Huck was clutching the phone as though it held some trace of Celia’s voice in reserve. Bella had fallen asleep on the couch and was snoring softly, her flank warm against Huck’s thigh. Were Celia here, they would be watching something noir and French on DVD and ogling Simone Signoret. Huck glanced at his guitar, but his solitude and slight stonedness—the usual preconditions for playing—were tonight undercut by a restlessness that even hydroponically grown Kush could not fix. Huck eased himself away from Bella to avoid waking her. When he stood, the couch gave a halfhearted creak, as if feigning distress at his departure. The couch was the first thing he and Celia had bought for the apartment. It was a flea-market find they’d shamelessly purchased despite a price tag well beyond their agreed-upon couch budget, and Huck wasn’t sure when the creak had started, but it made him hate the couch a little each time. Some WD-40 to the springs would do the trick. This thought had been traveling with the sound, along with the word
Later
, for a long while.
    They had met their senior year. Huck had been at a group reading to hear a friend, had been among maybe twenty people undergoing an evening of student poetry. One reader had blended with the next until Celia appeared at the podium. Listeningto her had been like spying on someone who thinks she is alone. Huck didn’t remember much about the poem itself, which had something to do with a covered bridge, but the stark sincerity with which Celia read it had caused him to turn away as if he’d been staring at too bright a light. Afterward, when he asked her out, she had smiled like she’d been offered elk or ostrich, something she’d never eaten because she’d never before thought of it as food. According to her calendar, his earliest, best chance was to meet her at Pierce Dining Hall during the forty-five minutes she allotted for dinner between classes and committee meetings. Pursuing someone with so little time turned each yes into a prize. Their first date occurred on the heels of a petition drive. Celia agreed to either food or film, but not both because she’d needed to get up early the next morning for tai chi class. During Huck’s first month of courtship, each of his timely appearances at the dining hall met with the same bemused smile; each request for Celia’s company was answered by the same crowded appointment book, until one institutional meal, about five weeks in, she pointed to a blocked-out portion of her Saturday afternoon and said, “How about then?” That was when Huck became regular company on Celia’s weekend drives and happily abandoned the notion that he was the pursuer and she the pursued.
    He loved the way his name sounded in her mouth, its sonic semblance to that other word sometimes enough to give him an erection. A chunk of his life had been spent explaining that his parents had never actually read Mark Twain. His mother was a fan of Audrey