Read Online A History of Money: A Novel by Alan Pauls, Ellie Robins - Free Book Online Page A

white and extreme close-up in the artistic photography of the day, looking like a beach or a lunar landscape—is stretching and beginning to bulge as steadily as her husband’s nightly returns to the apartment on Ortega y Gasset grow later. The night she realizes, the telephone is silent, the cleanerat the office tells her that everyone has left, the meal is cold and already inedible, the cinema plans aborted. One night he doesn’t show up until twenty past four in the morning. When he appears, with a long day’s stubble and a halo of cigarette smoke strong enough to knock her flat, he says he got into an accident in the street: he left the office and was crossing the street when some idiot drove right over him. He didn’t get out of the police station at Suipacha and Arenales until half an hour ago. She doesn’t know what to think. She doesn’t know him. She only knows about him, and about the clumsy but comforting force of his Germanic lunges, about everything in him that exasperates and disappoints her, about the collection of flaws that define him, and everything that she will dedicate herself to criticizing for the forty years she spends without him, free of him. She can picture the altercation in the street, although she knows from experience that if it really happened, it wasn’t because of an abuse of his pedestrian’s right of way, unless by right of way her husband understands what he obviously does understand—the right to cross the road when and where he likes, preferably wherever the traffic is densest, when the cars have a green light and no pedestrian with half a brain would think to cross, let alone as defiantly and arrogantly as a true artist of danger.
    She thinks he has a lover. His mother is young and beautiful; she’s as voracious as every woman on the run and has the rancor of an aristocratic lady in exile, forced to dress in secondhand clothes and eat reheated food. The ideal candidate to be tied down with a child by the first scoundrel to seduce her while he swans around elsewhere. It happens to all of them. Why should she be the exception? His mother never even mentions it. Every time she feels the urge to ask, she has the sensation of treading on very fragile ground, like a carpet made of glass. It’s as though she’d been born without skin. She’s frightened by her clothes every time they brush againsther, of the noise her throat makes when she swallows, and of the tremulous half-moons of light that the sun projects onto the ceiling when it breaks through the crown of the banana palm whose branches overrun the balcony. Some mornings she wakes up and doesn’t even have the courage to open her eyes. But the thing that terrifies her most is giving him a reason to get rid of her—and she thinks anything could be a reason. One night she goes to bed alone. Every minute she passes without him is a minute lost in the torture of waiting for him, sinks her a meter further into a dark morass that won’t kill her but does poison her with hatred. At ten past six in the morning, she hears a key scratching at the door. She shifts onto her side in the bed, turning her back to him, and pretends to sleep. She doesn’t want to speak to him, doesn’t want to see him. Only to
sense
him, as though she were hidden behind a door with a knife under her clothes, waiting for the perfect moment to sink it into his chest. He doesn’t make any pretenses. He doesn’t even try to be quiet so as not to wake her. He takes off his clothes—a cufflink jangles against the bronze base of the bedside lamp—showers with the door open, gets dressed, goes out again. She doesn’t go back to sleep. She will never forget the sound of those keys.
    In the middle of the morning, her mother comes to visit. She brings new clothes for the baby, another of the ensembles covered in belts, ruffles, and bows that she buys compulsively, enchanted by the idea—an accurate one, incidentally, which makes it even more depressing to