Read Online Any Minute I Can Split by Judith Rossner - Free Book Online

Roger might materialize from nowhere and tell her he was ready to leave. Now as she sat in a suggestively shaped, round rubber chair, a man plopped down in back of her, grabbing her hair.
    â€œYou have magnificent hair,” he whispered in her ear. “I bet you’re pregnant. Sell me your hair.”
    â€œOh, no,” she said quickly. Her hair was the only thing about her that had Roger’s unqualified approval. It hadn’t been cut since she was twelve and came down to her waist, between auburn and chestnut in color, thick and silky in texture. On their first date they had gone to a party from which Roger had taken her at anextremely early hour with the words, “I’m taking you home now, I have an overwhelming urge to come in your hair.” To Howie she said, “I couldn’t do that. Why don’t you buy a wig?”
    â€œReal hair wigs are prohibitive,” he informed her. “And there’s no guarantee they come from pregnant women, I could be cheated easily.”
    â€œHow did you know I wasn’t just fat?” she asked.
    â€œAs a truffle is to the nose of a truffle hound,” he said solemnly, “so is a pregnant woman to my whole nervous system. Is your husband here?”
    She nodded.
    â€œAre you very close to him?”
    â€œI suppose so,” she said. “In a strange kind of positive-negative way.”
    â€œShow him to me,” Howie said. “Show me the lucky bastard.”
    The lucky bastard was in a far corner of the room, surrounded by the four beautiful wives of four other artists, with one or more of whom he would undoubtedly be in the sack before the evening was over since he had to be getting it someplace.
    She pointed out Roger to Howie.
    â€œThe stupid bastard,” Howie said. “How can he bother with those skinny broads?”
    â€œHe doesn’t like fat women,” Margaret explained. “For that matter he doesn’t seem to appreciate pregnant women, either.”
    â€œCome wiz me,” Howie whispered in her ear, “and I weel show you what iz it to be apprezhiated.”
    With a readiness astonishing to herself, for she had been married to Roger for more than five years and had been unquestioningly faithful to him in that time, she hoisted herself out of the rubber chair and followed Howie out of the loft to his apartment in Washington Square Village.
    â€œHow come you live here?” she asked him.
    â€œA specific response to specific needs,” he responded mysteriously as they rode up in the elevator.
    It was a good-sized apartment for a bachelor, furnishedbeautifully, but in a conventional—nay, super-bourgeois, manner that was somehow surprising in a person of Howie’s otherwise unconventional tastes. Soft blue wall-to-wall carpeting, a deep blue velvet sofa, colors of rose and gold in the drapes and chairs. There were no paintings but a large number of enlarged, well-framed photographs hung on the walls. Howie went into the kitchen to make drinks and as she inspected the photographs more closely she found them all to be of pregnant women: a pregnant Jackie Kennedy, a pregnant Colleen Dewhurst, a pregnant Jeanne d’Arc after the painting at the Metropolitan, a pregnant Happy Rockefeller, a pregnant Venus on the Half Shell, a pregnant Sophia Loren and several ladies of equal pregnancy if not equal renown.
    Howie came back with the drinks. “Let’s go into the bedroom,” he said. “That way you won’t have to get up again.”
    Obediently she followed him into the bedroom where a six-foot-high photograph of a pregnant Eleanor Roosevelt dominated an interior that was otherwise straight Marjorie Morningstar. Howie set down the drinks and carefully pulled back the yellow satin quilted bedspread, then beckoned to her to stretch out next to him.
    â€œA pregnant woman,” he said, running his hand along the mound that had barely begun to specify itself,