A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [1]
“I find it tiring,” he’d said. “This way, we can both look where we want.”
“Where will you look?”
He smiled. “You can see my options.”
“Where do you usually look? When people are on the couch.”
“Around the room,” Coz said. “At the ceiling. Into space.”
“Do you ever sleep?”
“No.”
Sasha usually looked at the window, which faced the street, and tonight, as she continued her story, was rippled with rain. She’d glimpsed the wallet, tender and overripe as a peach. She’d plucked it from the woman’s bag and slipped it into her own small handbag, which she’d zipped shut before the sound of peeing had stopped. She’d flicked open the bathroom door and floated back through the lobby to the bar. She and the wallet’s owner had never seen each other.
Prewallet, Sasha had been in the grip of a dire evening: lame date (yet another) brooding behind dark bangs, sometimes glancing at the flat-screen TV, where a Jets game seemed to interest him more than Sasha’s admittedly overhandled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss, who was famous for founding the Sow’s Ear record label and who also (Sasha happened to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee—as an aphrodisiac, she suspected—and sprayed pesticide in his armpits.
Postwallet, however, the scene tingled with mirthful possibility. Sasha felt the waiters eyeing her as she sidled back to the table holding her handbag with its secret weight. She sat down and took a sip of her Melon Madness Martini and cocked her head at Alex. She smiled her yes/no smile. “Hello,” she said.
The yes/no smile was amazingly effective.
“You’re happy,” Alex said.
“I’m always happy,” Sasha said. “Sometimes I just forget.”
Alex had paid the bill while she was in the bathroom—clear proof that he’d been on the verge of aborting their date. Now he studied her. “You feel like going somewhere else?”
They stood. Alex wore black cords and a white button-up shirt. He was a legal secretary. On e-mail he’d been fanciful, almost goofy, but in person he seemed simultaneously anxious and bored. She could tell that he was in excellent shape, not from going to the gym but from being young enough that his body was still imprinted with whatever sports he’d played in high school and college. Sasha, who was thirty-five, had passed that point. Still, not even Coz knew her real age. The closest anyone had come to guessing it was thirty-one, and most put her in her twenties. She worked out daily and avoided the sun. Her online profiles all listed her as twenty-eight.
As she followed Alex from the bar, she couldn’t resist unzipping her purse and touching the fat green wallet just for a second, for the contraction it made her feel around her heart.
“You’re aware of how the theft makes you feel,” Coz said. “To the point where you remind yourself of it to improve your mood. But do you think about how it makes the other person feel?”
Sasha tipped back her head to look at him. She made a point of doing this now and then, just to remind Coz that she wasn’t an idiot—she knew the question had a right answer. She and Coz were collaborators, writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well. She would stop stealing from people and start caring again about the things that had once guided her: music; the network of friends she’d made when she first came to New York; a set of goals she’d scrawled on a big sheet of newsprint and taped to the walls of her early apartments:
Find a band to manage
Understand the news
Study Japanese
Practice the harp
“I don’t think about the people,” Sasha said.
“But it isn’t that you lack empathy,” Coz said. “We know that, because of the plumber.”
Sasha sighed. She’d told Coz the plumber story about a month ago, and he’d found a way to bring it up at almost every session since. The plumber was an old man, sent by Sasha’s landlord