“How long have you been living here?”
“Oh, Jesus — you know how long I’ve been living here.”
“I shouldn’t have come.”
“What is it, Angela? Why don’t you talk to me?”
“I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”
“Why can’t you? What’s wrong with talking about it?”
“Because there’s no point in it now. And there probably wasn’t a point in it when I did what I’d done in the first place. At the beginning. That’s what I’ve learned. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing like that matters now. You believe me, don’t you?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“You can’t understand what you know nothing about.”
“That’s an awfully big thing to say. Try telling it some other way. I just threw another woman out of here.”
“I didn’t mean it to be cruel. That’s one thing. And the other thing is that what you did to her, you had to do.”
“And you know I had to do it.”
“Now who’s being cruel?”
“Come here. Sit down next to me.” He gestured toward the bed, patted it with the palm of his hand.
She didn’t move from the chair but her foot kept on wagging at him.
“I’m all right where I am,” she said. It was under a whisper.
“Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t.”
He sounded confident again, he knew that, but he knew too that there was a look of hard-up desire written all over his face, and that it kept her where she was, away from him and still in the room, but away from him.
The flames inside working their way out finally reached the surface and scorched him. He was suffering because of it, and he had to do something right away, move around, get out of bed and move around the room to take away the discomfort because it was really hurting him and he was going to get eaten up by the flames.
Pohl tugged at the bed sheets, pulled them out from under the blanket while keeping part of them wrapped around his waist to protect him from showing his weakness, then tried to drag himself out of bed, out of the twisted up mess he’d made of his bed, the thing he’d got himself tangled up in now, and the whole mess he’d made of his life and the time spent waiting for Angela Mason. She was something he really wanted and if she’d only work along with him it might go somewhere, but it wasn’t going to go anywhere, she wasn’t going to go anywhere with him, and nothing could make her do that since she herself wasn’t made for doing it.
He wanted to blame her, it would’ve been an easy thing to do, but he couldn’t blame her for something she hadn’t done to him. He wanted to hate her, and that would’ve been just as easy to do as blaming her for what had happened because he could hate her for everything she’d put him through, but the truth was that he hated himself and blamed himself for wanting her so much that the flames he felt now were busy taking away the best part of him and leaving him with nothing.
He tripped over the bed sheets and fell backward but caught himself by taking hold of the dresser. The sheets still covered him up and there was nothing to be ashamed of and he was standing on his own two feet, so his eyes focused on Angela gathering her clothes from the floor in front of the doorway and getting into them item by item, and while it might’ve been a pleasure under other circumstances to watch her getting dressed, the situation wasn’t at all what he’d wanted or hoped it would be, she didn’t once look up to see what he was doing or how he felt about what she was doing, she was busy getting ready to leave him.
They might’ve said good-bye, Burt Pohl couldn’t remember whether or not they’d said anything, it was such a long time ago, it seemed like forever, but he stood at the window anyway and looked out at the street and saw Angela Mason walking barefoot along Fourteenth Street away from the apartment building and the battered red car and out of his life with the air of a woman who knew who she was and where she was going.
About the Author
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Mark Fishman has lived and worked in Paris since 1995. His short stories have appeared in a number of literary reviews such as the Carolina Quarterly, the Chicago Review, the Mississippi Review, The Literary Review, and Glimmer Train. No. 22 Pleasure City is Mark’s second novel. His first, The Magic Dogs of San Vicente, was published by Guernica Editions in 2016.
Copyright
Copyright © 2018, Mark Fishman and Guernica Editions Inc.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
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First edition.
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2017960395
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fishman, Mark, 1954-, author
No. 22 pleasure city / Mark Fishman. -- First edition.
(Guernica world editions ; 3)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77183-309-7 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-310-3 (EPUB).
--ISBN 978-1-77183-311-0 (Kindle).
I. Title. II. Title: Number 22 pleasure city. III. Title: Number twenty-two pleasure city.
PS3606.I835N6 2018813’.6C2017-907298-6C2017-907299-4