![]() ![]() ![]() For her appointment today she had dressed carefully, in the style affected by all the fashionable girls this year. As cool as the coffee cream when I took it out of the refrigerator first thing every morning. The bar on ground floor was as cool as the rest of the hotel, though, and Leah was cool too. In addition to the residue of lunch, I felt sheathed in a layer of dry sweat like a dirty undershirt gone wash-gray with age. except in the heart of the kitchen, where no amount of circulated air could compete with the radiant heat of a Turbo Ten-Loaf bread oven. Way up here they kept it air-conditioned, carefully chilled. “The Blue Shell on Twenty-one” read the embossed silver matchbooks the busboys placed on every table, referring not to avenue number but to floors above street level. I wondered how many highways it had to travel between here and its birthplace, how many miles of open sky before the delivery man lugged it up to the twenty-first floor of the posh hotel. The fresh dill for the soup had come on a truck that morning, in a crate, packed secure between baby carrots and dewy lettuces. It was six o’clock, just before dinnertime, and my clothes were still streaked with the dill-cream soup and Dijon dressing we had served at lunch. Leah met me in the bar at the Blue Shell. Once, I could part a woman’s legs and kiss the juncture like I was drinking from the mouth of a river, without seeing the skin of the inner thighs gone veined and livid, without smelling the salt scent and the blood mingled like copper and seawater. Once, I could look in the mirror and see the skin of my throat not withered, the hollows of bone not gone blue and bruised around my eyes. But why do some have to do it with such pleasure? Once, I could stand on the roof of the tallest skyscraper in the city and look out across the shimmering candyscape of nighttime lights without thinking of what went on down in the black canyons between the buildings: the grand melodramatic murders, the willful and deliberate hurt, the commonplace pettiness. Once, I thought I knew something about love.
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