Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (reading books for 7 year olds .TXT) 📕

have to get back to the hotel, and Silver and Cornelia wince with annoyance. They agree that Silver will begin her cure in a day’s time, and then they embrace.

“I think you are absolutely beautiful,” says Cornelia to Silver.

“You are exactly what I have been looking for,” says Silver to Cornelia.

Silver and I ride back to our hotel in silence and arrive there at dusk, just in time to view the underlings of the fashion shoot trudging up from the beach lugging equipment and screens with the weary air of peons returning from the fields. I pay the entire taxi fare without a murmur and run to find Basia. She is lolling under the mosquito net in our bungalow, watching MTV broadcast from Kuala Lumpur and finishing the last of the forbidden M&Ms from the minibar. She is so happy to see me that she forgets her twelve-year-old’s dignity and jumps up and hugs me like a much younger child. “I thought you’d never come back!” she tells me. “I thought I was going to be stuck watching ‘An Evening with Aerosmith’!”

Her mouth drops open when I describe Silver’s quest. “Oh God, Mom—you mean she’s going around looking for places to get her ass washed out?”

“Don’t use crude words to show off,” I say coldly. “And it’s her colon, really.”

“It’s still her butt. Remember that joke: Are there rings around Uranus? Is there intelligent life on Uranus?”

We look at each other and snicker. Then I tell her about the man who swallowed the heads of toy soldiers and we collapse on the bed and sob with laughter. We’re still laughing on our way to dinner. Outside the dining room, Basia stops to inspect the spirit house as she always does, touching with the tip of one finger the minute plastic figures set inside it and the fresh offerings of fruit and flowers around them. On our first night at the hotel she read aloud to me from the guidebook a passage explaining that these tiny houses are set up for wandering guardian spirits. In the light of the candles set on the miniature carved veranda, Basia half resembles a little girl looking over her dolls, and half—with her flimsy dress, tumbled hair, and glowing sunburn—a nymphet in a romantic soft-porn photo. A familiar wave of emotion sweeps over me, an even mixture of tenderness, envy, and general terror of the future. At the same time, I wonder how I could have left this angel even for an hour for such a poor substitute as Silver. It occurs to me, as it often does, that I am supposed to be setting an example for Basia. And what a cockup I make of it, sometimes.

Basia turns away from the little house and looks over at the lamp-lit diners at the restaurant tables. “I’m still thinking about those toy soldiers,” she says in a dreamy voice. “I wonder what Silver will find.” A pause and a giggle. “I wonder what you would find.”

Next day, I keep to myself, as one is entitled to do in a hotel that has a library. When Simon calls from Hunan, before breakfast, I don’t say a word about my daylong excursion but instead wax lyrical on the joys of solitude until, through the crackling Chinese static, he asks me suspiciously what I’ve been up to. “Just the usual sex with hotel waiters,” I tell him.

From my lounge chair in the shade beside the pool, I observe Silver’s movements on the last day before her retreat. After bidding me a cheerful good morning, she breakfasts garrulously with the assistant manager, who dreams of opening a luxury hotel in Rangoon; she meditates on the rocks by the bay; and by late afternoon she is one of three torsos emerging from the water at the far end of the pool, drinking cocktails with the black male model and one of the stylists from the shoot. When she sees me watching, she holds up her glass. “The last gin-and-tonic!” she calls. “Vive la folie!”

I don’t see Silver again. She goes off to Cornelia and a cleaner life without saying good-bye. Once or twice, she drifts through my thoughts in her white sarong with her cocky grin. But almost immediately I banish her, and for the last part of my vacation I set about being indolent and uninteresting.

Still, it happens that on the day before I leave I find myself in the library, deep in conversation with a woman I have just met. She is younger than I am, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and English: blond, with a pudgy, tanned body packed into a girlish bikini; entertainingly foulmouthed, with a Geordie accent. She came to the hotel a couple of days ago, with a tall Jordanian husband covered in gold chains; two blond, black-eyed toddlers; and a pair of male attendants in white robes and Arab headdresses, who carried suitcases and looked after the children, even changing diapers. Leaning on a table covered with weeks-old foreign papers in the dim, low-ceilinged library, she looks at me and says, “I envy you, being practically alone on holiday. Sometimes I get so fucking sick of the lot of them—”

Mice scurry in the palm thatch on the roof. The Oxford English Dictionary looms behind us, in its glass case, locked away against the ravages of suntan oil and salt air. Across the room, Basia, reading MAD magazine in a varnished planter’s chair, has stopped turning the pages. In the woman’s surly blue eyes I can see skeins of experience poised to unwind, and the password trembles on my lips.

The Visit

As we agreed, you are waiting for me in Piazza Crimea on the corner between the taxi stand and the bus stop, at the hour of the afternoon that always scares me to death. Two-thirty, the time when the butcher’s shop and the pharmacy in the piazza are shuttered in steel, and the good burghers of Turin are digesting their agnellotti in