Read Online When Tito Loved Clara by Jon Michaud - Free Book Online Page B

solace in the quotidian on such a non-quotidian day.
    Clara took pride in setting an attractive table. One of the first things she'd done after moving out of her mother's apartment was to buy herself a set of new dishes at Fishs Eddy. While Guillermowas still very much in the age of paper and plastic, she and Thomas regularly unfurled linen napkins into their laps, ate off their wedding china, and drank from Tyrone Crystal tumblers. She saw no point in owning these beautiful things if she wasn't going to use them. Would you buy a new car and not drive it? Would you get a new plasma television and not watch it? She'd eaten from chipped plates with bent-tined forks and pitted spoons all of her youth and she associated those indignities with where she had come from, not with where she wanted to be. Putting out her gilt-rimmed dishes every night and setting a soup spoon and dessert fork for a meal that would feature neither soup nor dessert was a daily affirmation for her. Some people leaned on Bible passages, others their bank balances: Clara had the flatware from her wedding registry.
    Once the tablecloth had been changed, the napkins folded, and the places set, she crossed her ams and admired the result, quickly noticing that something was still missing—a centerpiece. In the living room, there was a vase of week-old flowers, a thank-you gift from her firm's Westlaw rep for renewing their contract. A small bouquet could probably be salvaged from them, but when she went into the living room, she discovered that the flowers were gone. Had Thomas thrown them out? Such attentive housekeeping would have been unlike him.
    She walked through the kitchen to the back door and out onto the patio, where her husband stood at the grill listening to a ball game on an ancient transistor radio and drinking a bottle of beer. The radio, a shiny chrome-and-plastic tablet with its rapier-like antenna, was a relic from Thomas's adolescence, one of several out-of-date contraptions he self-consciously cherished in a kind of sentimental rebuttal to his digital-age profession. Up in his study, there was an Olympia manual typewriter so ancient that the lowercase
l
had to be used for the number 1. From time to time Thomas rolled a sheet of paper into the thing to write a letter, an actual old-fashioned letter placed in an envelope and sent through the mail to his mother inD.C. or to one of his college friends, all of whom seemed to have made their careers in technology startups in Boston or Silicon Valley. The cackle of the keys on the platen always sounded to her like the chatter of a diabolical monster, but Thomas took inordinate pride in still using the machine. He was similarly attached to the Raleigh ten-speed that hung from hooks in their garage. Like a marine with his rifle, Thomas could disassemble and reassemble the thing blindfolded. Clara had once floated the idea of buying him a new bike—a Trek or Cannondale—but he'd shot her down. “What's wrong with my old one?” he'd asked. Back when they were dating, she had found his attachment to these objects endearing (she'd received more than a few typewritten letters from Thomas during their library-school courtship), but now that they were married, she had to admit, it bugged her. There was intransigence in it—an unwillingness to move forward, a trait, she believed, that was hampering him from finding another job, almost as if he were rhetorically still asking himself, What was wrong with my old job?
    â€œHi,” she said, kissing him. He smelled of charcoal smoke and beer, and his eyes were a little swimmy, either from the smoke or the beer or both.
    â€œHello,” he said, and smiled a weird smile at her.
    â€œEverything OK?” she asked.
    â€œSure,” he said.
    â€œWhat's cooking?”
    â€œFish,” he said. “Salmon. I figured we'd have something light after going to Church's for lunch.”
    â€œSounds good,” she nodded. “By