Read Online Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem - Free Book Online

yeah.” She seemed to grow immensely sad.
    They stood together contemplating the privileges of their special relationship, its utter and proven vacancy.
    “It's like when you start a book and then you realize you read it before,” he said. “You can't really remember anything ahead, only you know each line as it comes to you.”
    “No surprises to be found, you mean?” She pointed at herself.
    “Just a weird kind of pre—” He searched for the word he meant. Pre
formatting
? Pre
cognition
? Pre-
exhaustion
?
    “More like a stopped car on the highway slowing down traffic,” she said, seemingly uninterested in his ending the unfinished word. “Not a gaudy crash or anything. Just a cop waving you along, saying
Nothing to see here
.”
    “Doran,” he said.
    “Vivian.”
    “I remember. You visiting your friends again?”
    “Yup. And before you ask I have no idea whose party this is or what I'm doing here.”
    “Probably you were looking for me.”
    “I've got a boyfriend,” she said. The line that was always awkward, in anyone's language. Then, before he could respond, she added: “I'm only joking.”
    “Oh.”
    “Just didn't want you thinking of me as Ben and Malorie's, oh, sort of
party accessory
. The extra girl, the floater.”
    “No, never the extra girl. The girl I don't know from anywhere, that's you.”
    “Funny to meet the girl you don't know, twice,” she said. “When there are probably literally thousands of people you do know or anyway could establish a connection with who you never even meet once.”
    “I'm tempted to say small world.”
    “Either that or we're very large people.”
    “But maybe we're evidence of the opposite, I'm thinking now. Large
world
.”
    “We're not evidence of anything,” said Vivian Relf. She shook his hand again. “Enjoy the party.”
             
    T HE NEXT time
was
on an airplane, a coast-to-coast flight. Doran sat in first class. Vivian Relf trundled past him, headed deep into the tail, carry-on hugged to her chest. She didn't spot him.
    He mused on sending back champagne with the stewardess, as in a cocktail lounge—
From the man in 3A
. There was probably a really solid reason they didn't allow that. A hundred solid reasons. He didn't dwell on Vivian Relf, watched a movie instead. Barbarian hordes were vanquished in waves of slaughter, twenty thousand feet above the plain.
    They spoke at the baggage carousel. She didn't seem overly surprised to see him there.
    “As unrelated baggage mysteriously commingles in the dark belly of an airplane only to be redistributed to its proper possessor in the glare of daylight on the whirring metal belt, so you repeatedly graze my awareness in shunting through the dimmed portals of my life,” he said. “Doran Close.”
    “Vivian Relf,” she said, shaking his hand. “But I suspect you knew that.”
    “Then you've gathered that I'm obsessed with you.”
    “No, it's that nobody ever forgets my name. It's one of those that sticks in your head.”
    “Ah.”
    She stared at him oddly, waiting. He spotted, beneath her sleeve, the unmistakable laminated wristlet of a hospital stay, imprinted RELF , VIVIAN , RM 315 .
    “I'd propose we share a cab but friends are waiting to pick me up in the white zone.” He jerked his thumb at the curb.
    “The odds are we're anyway pointed in incompatible directions.”
    “Ah, if I've learned anything at all in this life it's not to monkey with the odds.”
    There was a commotion. Some sort of clog at the mouth where baggage was disgorged. An impatient commuter clambered up to straddle the chugging belt. He rolled up suit sleeves and tugged the jammed suitcases out of the chute. The backlog tumbled loose, a miniature avalanche. Doran's suitcase was among those freed. Vivian Relf still waited, peering into the hole as though at a distant horizon. Doran, feeling giddy, left her there.
    All that week, between appointments with art collectors and gallerists, he spied for her in