The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [40]
Javier seems to consider this, then borrows her coffee again, slurping carefully this time from the top.
“We’ve almost finished this year’s trendbook,” he says. “Once you read it you’ll understand.”
“ ‘We?’ You mean you and Chas?”
“I mean all of us. Me and Chas and you and James T. Couch. We all contribute with our reports. But I guess mostly it does come down to me and Chas,” he confesses with a hint of pride. “This year’s book’ll be something else, I’m pretty sure. More ambitious than anything we’ve tried before.”
“Wow. So how do you split up the writing?”
“We talk, and then Chas writes it up.”
She knows she shouldn’t, but she can’t help herself. “So when you say ‘we,’ you really mean Chas.”
He clears his throat, forces a troubled smile. “Well, I’m no writer. But the main ideas are really all mine this time.”
“The Light Age,” she says. “Postirony.”
His smile becomes assured, and he regards her intensely over the top of his sunglasses. “Total imaginative freedom,” he says. “Total fidelity of outer fashion to inner self.”
As she looks into his hazel eyes, the greenery behind him blurs into a forest, a river, the primitive community of her now all-too-frequent daydreams. She looks away, shaking her head to clear it of this foolishness. Over by the statue the savage girl works placidly on her bone.
“Where do you think she got that?” she asks. “Can you get bones that big in pet stores?”
“Why? You think people would go for them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It seems to make her happy.”
They watch her rub the cloth along the cleft knob at the bone’s end, inches from her eyes.
“Javier,” she begins, tentatively. “A couple weeks ago you told me you thought people were becoming more superstitious.”
“Sure. It’s everywhere. Don’t you see it?”
“Like where?”
“Like everywhere. Like the way my bank manager looked out the window at the sky when he talked about deregulations of capital flow. Like the way at Ed Cabaj’s party a woman kissed the Band-Aid she wrapped around the index finger of her boyfriend after he had an accident with a corkscrew in the kitchen. . . .”
“Are you superstitious, Javier?” she asks.
“Totally. You?”
“No. I wish I was, I think,” she says softly. “I think I do need a little magic in my life.”
He studies her for a minute. “I’ll show you how.”
“How to be superstitious?”
“Right.”
She laughs. “You can’t just show someone how, Javier. It isn’t like rollerblading.”
“Sure it is.”
Without warning he takes her hand. She barely has time to grab her handbag before he’s pulling her across the park. Reaching the sidewalk, he stops abruptly, and they teeter there as though over a precipice.
“Wait. Be careful. Don’t step on a crack.”
“Why not?”
“Jeez, don’t you know anything? You’ll break your mother’s back.”
She thinks about this. “Tempting,” she says.
They walk for a time like extreme picnickers in a minefield, eyes glued to the terrors underfoot. After a while he declares them free from danger, and they move on to other challenges. They stop in at a drugstore and buy half a dozen pocket mirrors not to drop and an umbrella not to open indoors, and the minute they emerge, it begins to rain. They head up Roselli into the hotel district, on the lookout for ladders not to pass under, sneezers to bless, evil eyes to avoid, heads-up pennies in the gutter.
At dusk they wander into a reader-adviser’s parlor and offer their palms to an old woman after crossing her own with green. She has a sleepy eye and cracked plum lipstick and claims to be a Gypsy but looks more like a Slav. She tells Ursula that there is a good man in her life and a bad woman in her life. She asks her if this is true, and Ursula nods, uncertain. She then tells Javier there is a good woman in his life and a bad man. She asks him if this is true, and he doesn’t contradict her. They hurry out of the parlor and break into a run. Once they have put enough distance between themselves and the old Slav, they duck into a Turkish fast-food place popular with the cabbies, where they eat kabobs and read each other