The Ultimate Good Luck

7

THE ITALIAN GIRL’S perfume smelled in the bed. He had no recollection from the night before, but it was all over the sheets and on the pillows and the blankets. It had been on the underwear he had flushed in the toilet. A sweet, lemony smell with sweat. It gave the filthy little bedroom a floating, locationless feeling.

He took a drink of whisky and lay out on the bed in a nausea, waiting for the pills to buckle onto the cramps. The cramps were like animal pains, great slow fissures in his gut that were almost too dramatic to be real pain, and you could suffer them out to the point of amusement, the way a horse would when it got a pain but couldn’t recognize it for what a pain was, and liked it.

He had had his picture made two days ago in the park. He could see it if he moved toward the bed table, himself in a white sombrero and a red serape beside the posing pony. He wanted to give it to Rae, but it seemed to fix time in a way he didn’t appreciate, put stress on his features he might not like in twenty years, if whatever was happening turned out bad. There was a picture taken nearly that long ago that showed him standing alone on the sand beach on Mackinac Island, staring gloomily into the camera as though into a dark thundercloud that threatened to ruin his day. Rae said he looked saturnine and didn’t like the pose. But the truth was that he had just fucked a big Finnish girl from Ludington, whom he’d met on the boat from St. Ignace, and who had wide Finnish blue eyes and dusty skin and was older than he was. And he was, he thought, in the best spirits of his life, and had gone back in fact, the very next moment, and found the girl and fucked her again. But in his mind, over time, he had defeated the facts, become convinced that he was sour and out of sorts, and he didn’t like to look at the picture and kept it in his footlocker where he never saw it.

Time changed things, he thought, lying on the cool sheets with the Italian girl’s cheap scent on him, and nothing more than the truth. He hoped in twenty years it would change the way he felt about this very moment, and that if he wasn’t dead, he wanted to be able to think a good thought about it, and the picture, straining at the camera beside the pony, made him sure he wouldn’t, as though the picture could trick you in some way you’d be sorry about. Being happy, he thought, and a pain flowered inside his gut, then subsided in a haywire spiral that the whisky controlled, being happy created problems, and not the least of them was being able to stand being happy.