Read Online Emma's Table by Philip Galanes - Free Book Online

shrinking the world to a table for two. It was as if she were looking out through the wrong end of Emma’s telescope. Cassy had no use for crowds or fans; she couldn’t care less for money or fame. Nothing interested her really—except the prospect of a lover’s touch.
    She’d made a career of finding it.
    Cassy searched for lovers high and low, in nearly every place she went. She hunted straight through her waking life.She’d be the first to admit she hadn’t gotten very far—only tricking herself again and again, confusing heat for the genuine article. Still, she took her job every bit as seriously as Emma had taken her own.
    Cassy hoped for the best, and settled for much, much less.
    Case in point, she thought, taking one last look around the stuffy bedroom. She shook her head. How could she ever have thought she’d find what she was looking for here? She steeled herself hard and pulled the bedroom door open, marching past the threshold and closing the door behind her.
    â€œThere!” she exclaimed, sounding triumphant, but her eyes were squinting near to blindness, her shoulders hunched up around her ears. She walked down a short hallway, past the foyer, and into a perfectly ordinary living room, in what looked to be a smallish one-bedroom apartment—somewhere in the city of New York, she hoped.
    She had no memory of setting foot in this place.
    She picked up a glossy magazine from the low coffee table, a generic beauty smiling up at her. “Do You Really Want Him Back?” the headline blared. She turned it sideways and read the address off the paper mailing label:
    Karen Donaldson
    22 Leroy Street, Apt. 4F
    New York, NY 10014
    Cassy exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath.
    Only downtown, she thought—not so far from her own apartment, up near Lincoln Center. It wasn’t so good, of course, that she had no idea who this Karen Donaldson was, or the man in bed with her, for that matter, but Cassy wasprepared to take things one step at a time. She knew there was no alternative really, practiced as she was in these disconcerting wake-ups, somewhere far from home.
    Even so, she never laid her loneliness down for long.
    She could convince herself in an instant—he might be the one!—all on the strength of a stranger’s glance. But strangers, she found, after a night or two more, were rarely what they seemed to be. And even with the ones who showed a hint of promise, Cassy backtracked just as fast, turning the smallest imperfection into a man’s fatal flaw.
    What’s your problem? she wondered.
    Cassy was terrified—and not of the men, who generally turned out to be harmless enough. What she feared were the imperfections beneath her own lovely shell—those ugly marks that would drive anyone away.
    Who could ever deal with those?
    Â 
    Time to leave, she thought.
    Cassy gazed down to her wristwatch, but it wasn’t there. She hoped it wasn’t gone for good. She noticed then, as if for the first time, how naked she was—like Eve in the Garden. She didn’t try to hide it either—no fig leaf for her. Cassy marched to the mirror that hung above the sofa and took a long, hard look, daring herself to see a picture of debauchery, a haggard face and worn, gray skin—but somehow she looked just as beautiful as ever: long and lean, with shiny brown hair that hung straight to her shoulders and features as crisp as a lemon-lime soda. Not even a smear of dried fluid, all crusty at the top of her thigh, detracted much from the overall effect.
    Lubricant, she hoped.
    Cassy needed to know what time it was.
    She was supposed to be at her mother’s apartment by six thirty, and she had to go home still, had to shower yet and change. She walked to the DVD player in the corner: “17:06,” it flashed, in a blue fluorescent light—five o’clock in the afternoon.
    That can’t be right, she thought. But deep in her