GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

looked at her appraisingly. In a grave voice he said, “Maybe I’ll tell you when I believe I can trust you.”

It was thrilling. She had never been with a criminal before. And a counterfeiter wasn’t a killer or anything. What was the term for it—victimless crime? She was involved with a man on the lam from the law who read Rick Chaeff books and treated her like a queen. Flannery cooked dazzling meals for Flora. He told her stories of his life and exploits in places like Samarqand and Aleppo. This man knew things. Strange, marvelous bits of trivia spilled out of him in a continuous entertaining flow. “Did you know the woodcock shits before it flies, so when you cook the bird you can eat all of it—the guts, everything.” “Historians say the first bread was probably made by accident about eight thousand years ago.” His conversation was peppered with wonderfully appropriate proverbs that made her laugh out loud. “When luck gets tired, it’ll even sit down on a dumb cow.” And sometimes his insights about life made her look at her life with startlingly new perspective.

While making a shopping list one morning, Flora began daydreaming about Kyle Pegg and unconsciously wrote the word fireplace on the piece of paper. Because that’s what her newest lover was for her—a large, crackling fireplace that you wanted to sit by and watch for hours. It radiated warmth and comfort, but don’t ever forget the fire inside. Kyle was a criminal but that made him even more appealing to her.

Flora’s criminal stopped now at the rear of the crowd to survey the faces and postures of the mourners who had gathered to pay their last respects to Leni Salomon. There was her husband. Flannery knew Michael Salomon because he had studied the man for some time to see if he could use him in any way. He was a handsome fellow, but those good looks were really his only high point. From certain angles he vaguely resembled Simon Haden. It made sense that Leni had slept with both men.

Michael was a dentist and an oral surgeon. Leni made false teeth. They met when he visited her office one day to supervise work on a very complicated bridge for a child who had lost most of his teeth in a horrendous accident. Leni made the bridge and it was perfect, more than perfect. Sitting at her workbench, she held it out to the handsome dentist on her open palm and said, “Here you go—false teeth for mice.” They started dating. He was able to convince her that he was more interesting than he really was. Months later when he proposed marriage she said yes because something about him made her feel safe and protected. He secretly loved the fact she was both fine-looking and lame. There was something poignant about that, a kind of cosmic balance. He was fluent in English which was a real plus because she loved speaking that language. He owned a Laverda motorcycle for a while and looked heroic on it. She liked to ride with him, her cheek pressed to his back, arms wrapped tightly around his waist. Michael treated her like a lady and his absolute equal. They lived well. She owned two horses. He made a lot of money even though he was only an average oral surgeon. But he had trained in America which gave him a certain prestige with the Viennese. Both of them liked grilled salmon, ambient music, and contemporary fiction. He was a bore; she was a bit of a scold and at times a malcontent. They got along if they weren’t around each other too much.

Now Leni was dead and he was bereft. How could this happen? Dentists plan. They map things out before they begin. He’d had the rest of their life together altogether in his head. Next year he would try and convince her to have a child. He wanted to build a house on a lake and fish there with his son.

Flannery watched all this chaos, loss, and confusion twirl around now in Michael Salomon’s eyes, like a car careening on black ice, that great phrase for those insidious patches of hidden ice that catch drivers unaware in winter and from one second to the next send their cars flying off the road or into deadly spins. Dr. Salomon had been on black ice since hearing that his wife was dead. The horror was not only the total loss of control but the fact he could not get off this ice. Every way he turned in his life now there was only more confusion, more facets of loss. He had genuinely loved her, he had, but she had been just one element of his busy successful life. Only when she was gone did he realize what weight and importance Leni had carried.

Now Michael looked from her coffin to the ground, the damp brown-black earth that would first hold his wife’s small body, then her bare bones, then whatever was left—a few teeth, a rotted shoe curled like a potato chip by dampness, and whatever crumbling faded cloth that managed to survive the long journey beneath the earth down the years.

It was at that moment, this obscene moment between recognition and closure for Michael Salomon, when Leni’s ghost appeared to him and all the people attending her burial that morning, including John Flannery.

Forty-one people had come. Some of them had known the deceased woman well, some barely at all. Some had been invited to the ceremony; some had heard about it from others or read the public announcement in the newspapers. Two of her former boyfriends were there. One of them still vaguely loved her. An old university classmate showed up who had hated Leni and vice versa. The only reason why this woman came was to gloat. A couple of children came; one because he was the dead woman’s nephew, the other because her parents could not