Read Online Women and Children First by Francine Prose - Free Book Online

menus, all shopped and cooked like some semipro catering crew. Suzanne and Valerie had always liked cooking and eating, but last week Suzanne told Valerie she was going to strangle the next person who said “radicchio.”
    As Valerie caught Suzanne’s eye, it occurred to her that everyone was saying, “Eat! There’s steamers and corn!” but no one was saying a word about lobster despite the humongous red ones sitting right there on their plates. Suzanne put her hands over her lobster, as if to protect it from Valerie, and Valerie knew she wasn’t mad about her showing up too early.
    Valerie was always telling Suzanne she was too paranoid about the other people in the house. Suzanne’s problem was that she made the least money of anyone—though not little enough to seem brave, like Valerie—and that her boyfriend Roy made the most. Roy wore the three-piece suits, the ponytail and potbelly of a rich California dope lawyer. He was bisexual, he liked to talk about his leather-bar night life. Especially when someone new—someone innocent and shockable—was around, Roy could get pretty graphic. He said he didn’t worry about AIDS, every six months he went to Rumania and had his blood changed. Sometimes he would say this right in front of Suzanne, and Valerie would thank God that she wasn’t leading Suzanne’s life.
    Not that Valerie felt she was leading her own life, exactly. Lately she had the sense she was stuck in some pre-life, some in-between life, waiting for her serious life to start. For now, all that mattered was keeping interested. Lobsters were very low on her interest list, but she had to focus on them for a while before she could make herself look at Nasir, who was way at the top of the list. Nasir waited till she looked at him, then cracked the claw off his lobster, held it out to her, and at the same time motioned toward the seat next to his.
    At that table, that art director’s gourmet dream of perfect red lobsters on perfect sea-green glass plates, Nasir’s ripping into that lobster seemed really kind of primitive and nasty. But Nasir could get away with it because he was so beautiful and graceful, and was basically a nice guy. Also, Valerie noticed, he held the lobster body so the juice dripped on the plate.
    Everyone got quiet and waited to see what Valerie would do. For weeks she and Nasir had circled each other; it gave the atmosphere an erotic charge and was part of what people found entertaining. Valerie would have liked to sit next to Nasir. She was so drawn to him it scared her. One problem was Nasir’s girlfriend, Iris, sitting across from him. But that wasn’t it, exactly. No one liked Iris, and Nasir cheated on her constantly; last winter he and Suzanne were involved for about two weeks.
    Nasir was Pakistani, British-educated, with a terrible and romantic history of loved ones disappeared into Zia’s jails. Unlike everyone else in the house, all of whom were their professions, Nasir shot commercials for a living but was actually something else—a Marxist who dreamed of making political documentaries. So he too was more like the people these people used to know, and maybe that was part of the kinship Valerie felt with him. Also, they shared a similar manic edge. He was the only one she could have taken to the state park, the only one who would have seen what she saw in that Cantonese restaurant extravaganza of red and gold.
    The last commercial Nasir shot was for a manufacturer of remote control lamps. Last weekend, Nasir brought twenty lamps out to the house and put them around the living room, and they all took turns standing in the center of the pitch black room making twenty lights dance on and off with the remote control wand. Nasir was always surprising them, turning out to know card tricks, to play stride piano and an amazing game of soccer. He had very large brown eyes, and the power of his attention was such that now, as Valerie laughed and shrugged off his lobster offer, she