The Gods of Greenwich by Norb Vonnegut Page A

Their shapes were easy to distinguish, their markings no problem for her particular case of prosopagnosia.
    Through the years she developed many tools to identify her husband, who lacked the multicolored stripes of Gila monsters or the red-and-green webbing of Tokay Geckos. She depended on his voice. His scent. His square jaw and cockeyed smile. The faint cleft in his chin helped, but Emi used one other no-fail trick to identify her James.
    *   *   *
    Emi spotted the two-star pin on Cusack’s lapel, and her smile widened enough for the world to forget Mona Lisa. She hopped straight up and wrapped her long legs around Cusack’s lean torso and the two dozen roses. She squeezed with all her might, oblivious to the thorns digging into her thighs and his chest.
    Cusack carried his wife into the condominium. He lurched this way and that, padding through their foyer on the Oriental rugs from Turkey. Her clogs dropped to the floor as he struggled to keep his balance. She had morphed into a giant octopus, all arms and eight-foot legs, suction cups everywhere. She gripped and groped, consuming her husband from all directions at once.
    “What’s this all about?” asked Cusack, surprised by her fervor.
    Emi smothered the words as her husband spoke. She kissed him once, twice, the second time sloppier than the first, and pulled back. She inspected his face, gently caressing his cheeks and chin with the deft touch of a lover who had been there before. She finally relaxed her thighs and slid to the floor.
    “Yikes,” he teased, “let me know when the coast is clear.”
    “The roses are beautiful.” Emi took them from Cusack, and the two walked into their kitchen appointed with granite counters, imported tiles, and the other accoutrements of a bloated mortgage. “What’s the occasion?”
    “Who said they’re for you?” Cusack asked with an impish smile. Then he added, “I have some news.”
    “Me, too,” Emi replied. She glowed. Her blue eyes twinkled, more breathtaking than all the stars of New England.
    In that instant Cusack decided Emi’s ivory-snow complexion had never looked so pure. There were no worry lines on her forehead or subtle crow’s-feet extending from the corners of her eyes. None of the body’s evil tricks that surface in the thirties, gain momentum in the forties, and raise all-out hell during the fifties. Even as Emi arranged the roses in a vase, cutting here and fluffing there, she radiated the unusual blend of peace and energy.
    “You first,” Cusack said, parentheses framing the corners of his mouth. He grabbed an Australian cabernet from their sleek galley kitchen, poured one glass, and started to pour the second.
    “None for me,” Emi interrupted. No more than an ounce of the Wolf Blass had splashed into her glass.
    Cusack’s brown eyebrows arched with surprise. Emi never drank to excess. Nor did she go without. She always nursed a glass of wine when they unwound together in the evenings. “So what’s your news, Em?”
    “I just told you.”
    “Boy gawd, girl,” he teased in the Somerville dialect of his youth. “You don’t make it easy.”
    Emi said nothing. She burrowed into his eyes with her sapphires. She sparkled from ear to ear, happy and cryptic all at once. “I just told you.”
    Cusack blinked once, then again. He sipped his cabernet and studied the second wineglass, mostly empty. All of a sudden, he got it.
    “Hah,” Cusack cheered. “You’re pregnant.”
    Emi nodded yes, her face as soft and serene as a mountain lake on a still summer night.
    “How long?” he asked, placing his glass on the counter and hugging Emi again.
    “Six weeks. Seven tops.”
    Cusack kissed her on the lips. She tasted like a cross between red lipstick and something sweet. He tasted like cabernet.
    “Did you win the lottery?” she asked.
    “No. And what makes you think I bought a ticket?”
    “There’s scratch-off goop under your fingernails from one of those games.” Emi cocked her