A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [6]
“Can I put some of these in?” He was holding up a packet of bath salts Sasha had taken from her best friend, Lizzie, a couple of years ago, before they’d stopped speaking. The salts were still in their polka-dot wrapping. They’d been deep in the middle of the pile, which had collapsed a little from the extraction. How had Alex even seen them?
Sasha hesitated. She and Coz had talked at length about why she kept the stolen objects separate from the rest of her life: because using them would imply greed or self-interest; because leaving them untouched made it seem as if she might one day give them back; because piling them in a heap kept their power from leaking away.
“I guess,” she said. “I guess you can.” She was aware of having made a move in the story she and Coz were writing, taken a symbolic step. But toward the happy ending, or away from it?
She felt Alex’s hand on the back of her head, stroking her hair. “You like it hot?” he asked. “Or medium.”
“Hot,” she said. “Really, really hot.”
“Me too.” He went back to the tub and fiddled with the knobs and shook in some of the salts, and the room instantly filled with a steamy plantlike odor that was deeply familiar to Sasha: the smell of Lizzie’s bathroom, from the days when Sasha used to shower there after she and Lizzie went running together in Central Park.
“Where are your towels?” Alex called.
She kept them folded in a basket in the bathroom. Alex went to get them, then shut the bathroom door. Sasha heard him starting to pee. She knelt on the floor and slipped his wallet from his pants pocket and opened it, her heart firing with a sudden pressure. It was a plain black wallet, worn to gray along the edges. Rapidly she flicked through its contents: a debit card, a work ID, a gym card. In a side pocket, a faded picture of two boys and a girl in braces, squinting on a beach. A sports team in yellow uniforms, heads so small she couldn’t tell if one of them belonged to Alex. From among these dog-eared photos, a scrap of binder paper dropped into Sasha’s lap. It looked very old, the edges torn, the pale blue lines rubbed almost away. Sasha unfolded it and saw written, in blunt pencil, I BELIEVE IN YOU. She froze, staring at the words. They seemed to tunnel toward her from their meager scrap, bringing a flush of embarrassment for Alex, who’d kept this disintegrating tribute in his disintegrating wallet, and then shame at herself for having looked at it. She was faintly aware of the sink taps being turned on, and of the need to move quickly. Hastily, mechanically, she reassembled the wallet, keeping the slip of paper in her hand. I’m just going to hold this, she was aware of telling herself as she tucked the wallet back into Alex’s pocket. I’ll put it back later; he probably doesn’t remember it’s in there; I’ll actually be doing him a favor by getting it out of the way before someone finds it. I’ll say, Hey, I noticed this on the rug, is it yours? And he’ll say, That? I’ve never seen it before—it must be yours, Sasha. And maybe that’s true. Maybe someone gave it to me years ago, and I forgot.
“And did you? Put it back?” Coz asked.
“I didn’t have a chance. He came out of the bathroom.”
“And what about later? After the bath. Or the next time you saw him.”
“After the bath he put on his pants and left. I haven’t talked to him since.”
There was a pause, during which Sasha was keenly aware of Coz behind her, waiting. She wanted badly to please him, to say something like It was a turning point; everything feels different now, or I called Lizzie and we made up finally, or I’ve picked up the harp again, or just I’m changing I’m changing I’m changing: I’ve changed! Redemption, transformation—God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn’t everyone?
“Please,” she told Coz. “Don’t ask me how I feel.”
“All right,” he said quietly.
They sat in silence, the longest silence that ever had passed between them. Sasha looked at the windowpane,