Michael Cunningham

The address books Englehart’s stocked were second-rate. Their covers were simulated leather, their bindings indifferently glued. Mary stood frowning over one of the books, bound in oxblood plastic, emblazoned with the golden word Addresses, the final s of which had already begun to chip. It was such a flimsy thing, so beneath her, that she felt foolish even looking at it. She glanced around, saw that no one was watching, and almost before she knew she would do it she slipped the address book into her bag. Her forehead burned. Calmly, walking as herself, in heels and pearl earrings, she left the store with the tacky little address book hidden in her bag, its price tag still attached. The tag, when she looked at it, said that the book had cost ninety-nine cents.

The obviousness was part of what he loved. He was banging his partner’s secretary in a motel room on his lunch hour. It was a tryst right out of the funny papers, and he felt as if he’d joined a club, a national fraternity with its own rites and history. He enjoyed not only the sex itself but the whole business of parking his Buick around the back, of picking up the key from a smirking old desk clerk with crusty eyes and a half-dozen long hairs cemented to his bald head. He loved the daytime crackle of the neon sign (red Vacancy, three pink arrows); he loved the two pictures of blue daisies, identical, screwed to the wall over each double bed. He loved the fact that, at the age of forty-six, he got a hard-on every time he heard Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdinck on the radio. They were like his brothers, singing their songs of desire and loss out into a world big enough to contain every surprise.

Zoe had felt all right for so long. She’d known about the virus. She’d imagined that she felt it inside her, a low sizzle of wires, little misfirings that flared somewhere between the skin and the bone. But she’d never felt sick, and it had been almost three years. She’d let herself imagine that she’d received the disease but was not harmed by it, the way a radio would safely receive transmissions from a broadcaster who demanded wider systems of persecution, better compensation for the rich, harsher penalties for everyone else. A radio could carry vicious messages and not suffer damage. Over the years Zoe had drifted into the idea of her body as a radio, glowing and humming but intact.