Nicotine
Page 29
All those sporty young women who used to be so nice! They treat him with disdain now. They ignore him. So he doesn’t know whether his plan for the retaking of Nicotine can work.
Kestrel is their leading personality, and when he gets there she has a shift, just as Anka said she would. He asks her straight-out what she thinks of him. She responds by asking how things are going with Penny.
“Great,” he says. “Why?”
Kestrel looks sad.
“I said great. She’s wonderful. We’re perfect together. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on. What is it?”
“I’m sorry.” She turns back to the espresso machine and wipes her eyes.
“Please tell me. I came here to find out what my rating is with you guys.”
“I believed that you were asexual,” she says. “I guess it took a new kid on the block to see the obvious truth.”
“Kestrel.”
“I was so blind. And now you’re a couple. You blew off Jazz for her. I mean, Jazz! You must be so in love.” Her tone is tragic. She turns away to clean dried froth off the milk steamer attachment with a rag, rather too vigorously.
“We’re not a couple,” he assures her. “I was always polyamorous, and I still am. I’m just picky, and slow on the uptake. I never notice when women have crushes on me. It really helps to tell me flat out. Seriously. I’m grateful.”
She turns, and her look brightens. “You want some Cake Zero?” she asks. “It’s free.” (The name is by analogy to Coke Zero, because when a recipe is free of that many allergens, it’s easier just to say what’s in it.)
He points at the millet-butternut-safflower variety and says, “This one looks good. You know, Kestrel, there’s one kind of sexual freedom, which is doing whatever you want with whoever wants to. But there’s also another kind, which is feeling relaxed enough to do anything at all. Sometimes I think I don’t need a lot of—you know—housemates looking over my shoulder?”
She cuts him an extra-large piece and lets it fall on a plate with trembling hands. She takes a deep breath and says, “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
“What?”
“Matt moved out. He took his shit and left like five days ago.”
“That’s interesting.”
“I’d see a lot more of you if you lived here like you used to. Everybody knows you built this house. You should occupy it.”
“Hmm,” he says. “And you don’t think I sold out the climate march?”
She lowers her voice. “You know why the climate march was such a massive fail? The fucking Freedom Tower, that’s why. And that was Sunshine’s idea.”
“He’s a dork,” he says through a mouthful of cake.
“I think he’s a cop.”
He nods, busy eating.
He gathers his strength. He walks upstairs—past the steamy yoga studio full of women high on the placebo effects of folic acid, past the legal aid office, where Rufus is revealing his identity to a law student who thinks he qualifies for the GI Bill, past the Internet radio station dispensing nutrition advice from an MP3 recorded in Tulsa in 1999, past the workshop full of puppeteers in various stages of blissful self-delusion. In their midst stands Stevie, dressed as a jubilant gray prophylactic. It’s a dolphin costume that’s not quite working yet, but there’s still time until the oceans summit.
He kicks in the door of the elegant apartment on the roof, and he and Penny move in.
PENNY DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT IT for several hours, because she has meetings. As soon as she hears Rob’s message, she calls him back.
“Yay!” she says. “I never thought I’d get to move into Nicotine!”
“I wouldn’t call this Nicotine exactly,” he says. “It’s so pretty and sparkly. The furniture is all beech and birch and white suede and cashmere on random-width pine flooring, and this rug I’m lying on, it’s so soft, I can’t even describe it. You know I fucking hate Matt, but the first thing I did when I got in here was take off my shoes.”
“It’s not surprising. He’s a designer.”
“Well, my work is done. There’s nothing I need to do on this apartment except try not to get it dirty.”
“How are the appliances?”
“You’re the expert. I don’t know what half of them are.”
“That’s so great. You know what you could do? Landscape the backyard and open up the back door. The kids could play back there instead of spending all their time in the store. It would have access to the garage. You could teach them to fix bikes!”
“Like a sheltered workshop, but with toddlers.”
“Okay, maybe not. I was just thinking you could expand and employ somebody. The unemployed or whoever. Maybe you could get it subsidized?”
“There’s a reason anarchist work is unpaid. Wages are for getting people to do stuff they don’t like doing. That’s why the minute a guy becomes your employee, he starts hating you. You know the IWW slogan? ‘The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.’ If somebody wants to fix bikes, they can borrow my tools and I’ll show them stuff. I work with those people all the time. But I’m not going to bribe anybody to pretend to like doing what I do.”
“I’m sensing that your economic ideal is long-term sustainability rather than growth.”
“Yard work is unskilled. I’ll go home and get our stuff, and tomorrow I’ll found a collective to clean up the backyard so we can sit out there.”
WHEN PENNY IS DONE TALKING to Rob, she calls Matt (on his cell, in what she assumes is Bayonne) to say she’s taking her quarter of the Baker Center. “Because it’s my fair share,” she explains.
“Like I need that kind of penny-ante distraction in my life,” he says. He is sitting in the lobby of an office building in Honolulu, waiting to be escorted upstairs. “Take the whole house. See if I give a rat’s ass.”
“All right! I will!” she says.
“You’re welcome!”
Matt puts the phone in his pocket and types an e-mail on his laptop:
Hotness. Hope you’re well. I just gifted your house to Penny and her boyfriend He-Man. Even Steven? Question: Spear fishing on East Asian partner’s humble oceangoing yacht, weekend after next. Skill in harpooning sea turtles in the eye from 4-5 feet away de rigueur in these circles but not a strict requirement. We’ll talk. The pros he hires are not brilliant conversationalists. Birth control is on the house.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, JAZZ REPLIES to him.
I wrote some poems about ex-lovers like I sometimes do. Meaning you and Rob. I’m reading them Friday at 9 in that pinkish yurt you may have noticed when you came to visit. Sorry will be there. If you can sit still through that, we’re cool. P.S. You’ll need a real flashlight. It’s the new moon. No phone is bright enough.
MATT WRITES BACK,
I’ll be there. I won’t be bored. Thank you. I’m already less bored. You know I was crazy about you. Literally insane. I might put some serious effort into making it tolerable for you to be around me. I’m not sure how yet, but I believe in my heart it can be done.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NELL ZINK grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her books include The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, and Private Novelist, and her writing has appeared in n+1. She lives near Berlin, Germany.
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ALSO BY NELL ZINK
The Wallcreeper
Mislaid
Private Novelist
CREDITS
Cover design and illustration © Liana Finck
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
NICOTINE. Copyright © 2
016 by Nell Zink. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-244170-6
EPub Edition October 2016 ISBN 9780062441720
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