Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [3]
It’s possible she’s holding her breath just to piss me off, to punish me for going to Prague.
She acted like I planned this. That’s what Charlotte never got. I’m a simple guy. I take life as it comes. When I mentioned going to Prague I was just talking, just filling the air with my words. She should know how it is. She’s fucking a film critic.
It was the last week in August. The leaves hung exhausted on the trees. I was still living over on Northeast Sandy. We met for dinner at the Kennedy School. The film critic was at the Sundance Film Festival. I told her the next time we met he had to be in town, for her to prove to me there was still hope for us.
“I don’t think there’s any real hope for us,” she said.
“Then why are you here?” I asked.
“I wonder that myself,” she said. She ordered a gin and tonic.
“That’s what he drinks, gin and tonic? Tanqueray and tonic?”
“Sometimes in the summer I’ve been known to order a gin and tonic,” she said. “Jesus.”
She lied. She was a liar.
She used to love me. Now she picked fights. Like about the gin and tonic. I buttered a piece of bread and put it in front of her. She folded her arms and looked out the window at the parking lot. A guy wearing a red plaid skirt pushed a shopping cart full of empty bottles. I could tell she was itching to get out of there. The back of my neck got hot, the way it did when she was pissing me off.
Suddenly, I said I had something to tell her. She looked back at me, but it was polite. She was so polite. I’d been fired from the pest control company out on Foster Road and was now working at a place that made clamps, couplings, screws, and knobs. They also made a really nice brass drawer pull. The week before, in the break room, one of the machinists was talking about quitting and moving to Prague, and then the HR chick, who’d never looked at this guy once, was practically in his lap. She said she’d always wanted to go to Prague.
“I’m going to Prague,” I said.
“Prague? What’s in Prague?”
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”
“You have?” Her green eyes were on me. She leaned forward on her pale forearms. I could smell her grapefruity perfume, something called Happy I’d given her one Christmas. This was where she should have said, Ray, you are so full of shit. This is where her master’s degree failed her, where all her books and snooty left-wing websites let her down.
Did I say she worked in R&D at Intel, designing stuff she wasn’t allowed to talk about? Something to do with microchips and biology. When I met her I didn’t know what R&D was. She used words like ebullient just to make me feel stupid. Who was the stupid one now? Yeah, I’m off to Prague. The only foreign place I’d ever been before was Ensenada.
“Is this work-related? Like when they sent you to Chely-abinsk?”
“Sure,” I said. “A business trip.”
I’d forgotten I told Charlotte I’d done a business trip to Chelyabinsk.
Last year Donnie, a guy at the knob company, had found a terrific and extremely hot Russian wife on the Internet. Her name was Olga but she liked to be called Bootsie. She was a great gal. Once Donnie surprised Tootsie with a subscription to Self and she fell to her knees and sobbed with gratitude. She wrapped her hands around his heels and laid her forehead on his shoes. She then gave him the best blowjob he’d ever had, after which she went into the kitchen and whipped up a roast.
Donnie had given me the name of the website where he got his wife and I thought, Why not? Charlotte didn’t love me anymore. She was off drinking gin and tonics with the film critic. So one night after work, after I’d had a few beers, I typed in Charlotte’s height, weight, hair, and eye color, and out came