Emily came home at 5 a.m. when George was just getting up. Her waifish frame appeared rather unexpectedly in the doorway’s morning cold. She had purchased more cigarettes on the way back. George wanted to throw them out of the window again, but Emily was stalking the apartment with an annoying, regal air. He imagined she would have commanded the fire pokers to behead him if he so much as touched her Marlboro Lights.
“Did you stay here all night?” she asked.
“Usually.”
“The people you find at bars, you know, aren’t all bad.”
George wondered who she met. He followed her to the kitchen.
“Did you want me to make you any breakfast? What are you doing today?” Emily opened the fridge and poured herself some water, mixing it with Vitamin C powder, forgetting what she asked the moment she asked it.
“Read some.”
“I’m sorry?”
George intended to lock himself in the study today with the radio station on MoneyTalk and graph every damn share he owned. He could not afford another RTJ tragedy.
“Some oatmeal then? It’s cold today.”
As he would be spending the entire day indoors, this hardly mattered, but he took his place at the table, on a chilly metal chair, watching the shadows of airborne leaves dance across the wood and frost skate across his trousers.
Emily clicked on the stove. She turned on the faucet and let water run, passing her hand quickly through it like a mountaineer by a stream sifting for gold.
“Do you know I’ve never been in that bar before? It’s been there for six years and I’ve never been there before.” Emily twisted her hair behind her head before stooping for a saucepan.
George watched more leaves skitter across the table. He reached out and caught one with his thumb and forefinger. A shadow; but it passed to his hand and played in his palm like the wings of Tinkerbell.
Emily was sowing raisins and almonds in the saucepan. She looked contemplative. No, she looked pleasantly rattled; she only presented a thoughtful demeanor to steady her hands.
“What did you have?” George asked.
“What… of the drinks?”
“I go to a bar to drink.” George let go of the shadow flailing to join the other leaves in their flight.
“No, no dear George. You should be buying others drinks. Women drinks.”
“Did someone buy you a drink?”
Emily laughed. Her eyes turned green, and George involuntarily shuddered again. She was chronically shudder inducing. “They bought me Manhattan, love. They bought me the entire fucking island and all the waters around it.”
Yes. What very, very green eyes.
“Your stocks can all crash and burn because I have the island,” she said happily. She twisted around and danced like a balloon banner on a used car lot.
“Is this a re-enactment of the entitlement?” George asked grumpily.
“You mean, did I dance drunkenly on the bar? You know I never dance when I’m drunk.”
George had never seen Emily drunk.
“I was sitting like a statue,” Emily continued, “looking like a Venus.” Emily turned her face for a moment, parted her lips, elongated her neck, widened her eyes and turned to wax. George started, scrapping his chair noisily against the floor.
“Don’t do that! You do that often enough and your face will freeze like that forever,” George said.
“That’s not so terrible is it? I’m so beautiful still.”
George stayed silent, because a man should never argue the contrary; she was right anyway though it disturbed him to notice. “What the devil will you do with the island Manhattan?” he asked.
“After I finish making your oatmeal, I suppose I’ll lie down and smile. But just watch sir George. The next time you crave turkey-cranberry sandwiches, you’ll encounter a billboard a mile-high,” Emily shot up on tiptoe, her fingers-tips sparking with contact with the ceiling, “plastered with Emily in Chanel.”
George had a sudden vision of Emily sipping a martini and sprouting up like Alice in Wonderland when Alice made the mistake of snacking in the white rabbit’s house.
Emily reached over the smoking saucepan and clicked off the heat. She served his oatmeal as elegantly as anything before lighting another cigarette and leaving the kitchen. The oatmeal was fairly scanty in the way of raisins and almonds… as if the chef was unfamiliar with any particular ingredient in stomach-filling quantities. Which, of course, was the case. She certainly didn’t enjoy eating like other mammals. “Isn’t it ironic:” George whispered at Emily’s protruding vertebra, “ Her majestic billboard will weigh ten tons, and she is on the verge of disappearing.”
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