Page 34 - Vol. VII #1

After breakfast at Pamela’s, home of the famous Morning After Breakfast, they walked back down Forbes towards Carl’s apartment. Carl had written the hyphen in between morning and after on his menu. He prided himself on being smart, despite dropping out of Pitt years ago when he was making so much money dealing that he didn’t see the point.
The sun hovered, a perfect orange ball in the blue cloudless March sky. They were swaying, hand in hand, like teenagers. “So, when are we getting mar- ried?” Carl asked.
“Are you asking me something?” Veronica wanted to pull her hand away, but she did not. “Or are those the pancakes talking? Or the eight cups of coffee?”
“That coffee is like water,” he said. “It’s the bacon talk- ing. The meat talking. I love you, babe, and the hair of the dog that bit me stands up on the back of my neck when I’m around you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” She shook her hand free and danced a circle around him, then skipped ahead up the street.
“We don’t get many days like this in Pittsburgh!” he shouted. “Let’s get married!”
“Ask me on a cloudy day,” Veronica said. She felt both the natural intoxication and the shadow of his words. “A gray cloudy day in February when all the leaves are gone, even the brown crackly ones on the ground. The earth is scoured, and our souls are grease in the grease trap. Ask me then.” They’d been together only six months.
“Okay, but in the meantime, let’s go back to my apart- ment and fuck and sleep away the afternoon with the drapes open.”
“You’ve lived your whole life in the ‘meantime,’” she said, half playful, half not.
“That’s what I’m saying,” he emphasized each word, as if the mike wasn’t working but he had to keep talk- ing. “I’m tired of that. Too many lost security deposits. Too many security withdrawals.”
“If you think I’m a security thing...” She felt sticky syrup on the hand that had been holding his. His syrup rubbing off. She had eaten carefully—two eggs over easy, toast. Her left hand was not sticky. She waved it in the air. A hand without a ring. A hand with an eye in
the palm that could see things she did not want to see.
Carl, thirty-two, had lived through a series of half- baked relationships. Stuff from half a dozen ex-girl- friends cluttered his apartment. He couldn’t remem- ber who it all belonged to. Veronica, twenty-five, divorced, didn’t want to be added to his list. She took everything home after each night she spent there.
~
The TV was Larry’s. Larry, Carl’s old girlfriend Deb- bie’s boyfriend before him. Larry left the TV with Debbie, and she left it with Carl. Veronica never turned it on.
Larry had become a successful chiropractor in Ari- zona where he manipulated the spines of retirees
and slept with a series of assistants even younger than Debbie and somehow never got sued, according to Larry. He occasionally called Carl to ask about Deb- bie and Carl didn’t seem to mind—maybe they both still half-loved her, mooning together over the phone while Veronica stewed. Debbie still lived in Pitts- burgh, and they occasionally ran into her at a movie or concert or even, once, at Pamela’s.
“Every morning was a morning-after with her,” Carl said, laughing like it was a wistful little joke. His time with Debbie had been a vicious blur of alcohol and drugs, even though he had a pretty high threshold for such things. Though he had finally given up the drug trade, his own steps toward sobriety were vague lurches quickly forgotten after a hearty morning- after breakfast at Pamela’s.
Veronica didn’t want to be his crutch as he hobbled toward getting clean. After the stifling disaster of
her marriage, she didn’t want to step down to the bunny hills and play it safe and go home without
one bruise or decent fall. She and Carl were in a bar relationship—a loud, smoky bar. He was laying off hard drugs, at least when they were together—just pot and drinking, and plenty of both. Veronica felt like either one of them might hop off the teeter totter at any point and send the other landing with a jolt, pain running up the spine and around to the heart. Carl was a man of no prospects beyond his striking good looks and wicked sense of humor, but some nights Veronica thought that was what she wanted, and, alone in bed, or with Carl, she imagined solidify- ing the bonds, constructing a pattern that would lead Carl to her, and her to Carl. She tried to scrub away all
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Morning-After Breakfast
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