Little Casino by Gilbert Sorrentino Page A

smiles. They’ve been in this apartment for six months, and some of their books and records and clothes and dishes have not yet been unpacked, a bad sign, perhaps, if you believe in signs. She walks toward the bathroom, her slip immaculately flowing, that’s the word, from her hand. What whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor? “What whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor?” he says, and she looks over her shoulder at him and shakes her white slip. He sits on the couch, waiting for her to finish her shower, drinking Scotch and smoking. There’s plenty of Scotch left. Once, she threw what he remembers as a pale-blue dress on the battered studio couch and pulled her slip off over her head in a perfect sexual silence. He’d never seen her even partially undressed, and now, here she was. The radio was playing softly, some WBAI Mozart chestnut, the January wind battering the drafty old frame house. She opened the lingerie box and removed white things: soft luster, lace. He sat back and watched her. Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine, and so? He touched a small, pale scar on his thigh, a souvenir of a scratch her cat had given him the first night they’d slept together. Some years before, he’d had a dream in which he’d pushed a woman out of the bed and she fell on the floor, her nightgown up around her waist. “What a fucking jerk,” the woman laughed, “I might have known.” One of the cartons had the letter “K” for “kitchen” on its side, or for “strikeout.” “Strikeout?” she’d said. When he went out to buy cigarettes and cash his ridiculous paycheck he expected her to be asleep when he returned, but she was ironing his shirts in black cotton underpants and a torn Sarah Lawrence T-shirt. She had his worn rubber zoris on. He held up the two bottles of cheap Bordeaux he’d also bought, and she lifted the iron in a toast to penury. He would have preferred it had she been wearing the pale-blue dress that she’d worn the night they first made love in his new apartment. Or was that another night? Or was it a pale-blue blouse or slip? It’s draped carelessly over the back of a kitchen chair, and she reaches for it and says that she had better get home before the shabby cheap son of a bitch who shares the rent with her steals her television set. They spent most of the early morning lying on the couch in somebody else’s apartment, listening to unfamiliar records. “One of these days I’ll get a place,” he says. “Uh-huh,” she says. The snow falls at a sharp angle past the window and into the early morning silence of Avenue A. She keeps a change of clothes in a plastic Key Food bag. After they dress, he looks at his watch and discovers that it’s only 8:30. For some reason, this day reminds him of their wedding day. He is pleased that she’s wearing a white brassiere, and he tells her so. Actually, he says, “Hotcha! Wotta pair!” and leers at her. She’s irritated and hurt by this and they begin to quarrel and she packs her few things together and leaves. He watches her walk across the snowy park and then he opens the window and throws his wristwatch out onto the avenue, the fucking idiot. He poured her a glass of cheap Bordeaux and they ate Chinese food, smiling at each other in the new daze of new love. When he came back with the wine she was wearing white ankle-strap heels, the very shoes she’d worn the day they got married. “Aha, fuck-me shoes, she hinted,” he said. She hit him with a pillow on which was embroidered Handsome Is As Handsome Does. She sat across from him in the early September light that touched her sweet, sad face, and he began to laugh from sheerest love, O love. She sits back in the bleached-out Adirondack chair in a white T-shirt and pleated white shorts, her feet bare, and he gets up and kneels in front of her and puts his face between her thighs. She strokes his hair, soon they’ll be married, or so he thinks. He