Alex & Zee , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Cordelia Strube

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

197 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

This is the story of Zee, an aimless ex-lawyer who has turned his inability to make a decision into a fine art, and his wife, Alex, a practical and hard-working social worker who feels her biological clock ticking loudly. Reverberating with the emotional crises of the urban adult, Alex & Zee is an offbeat portrait of contemporary relationships, full of wickedly astute observations of city life and its multifarious life forms. Grimly hilarious at every turn, this is a terrific debut novel.

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	17 novembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781770909502
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

ALEX & ZEE
a Novel
CORDELIA STRUBE

For Dorkhead

Contents
DECEMBER
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
JUNE
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
About the Author
Copyright

DECEMBER

One
Zee doesn’t want to go home. Sitting very straight on the park bench he feels like that statue of Lincoln: solid, all-seeing, immovable.
He doesn’t want to go home because Alex will be there and she’ll want to know what he did today. She’ll want to know when he is going to do something with his life. She’ll want to know why a forty-three-year-old man sits around a park all day watching pigeons shit; she’ll want to know how much longer he plans to sit around with his “thumb up his ass contemplating the meaning of life.”
Abruptly, a wino, reeking of alcohol, flops down on the bench beside Zee and stares at him, bleary-eyed. “Can you spare a buck?” he asks. Zee feels around in his pocket for change and hands some to the wino, who examines it before shoving it in his pocket. “It’s cold as a witch’s tit,” he says. Zee nods in agreement. The wino leans towards him, squinting. “Colder than a witch’s aassss.” He stares at Zee to see if his words are having any effect. “Colder than a witch’s pussseee,” he adds, then chuckles and picks his nose. Zee has a feeling that the wino isn’t concerned with the meaning of life. He suspects that the wino understands that if he dies it won’t make any difference, and this doesn’t bother him. The wino doesn’t feel he has to leave a “mark on the world.” Alex wants to leave a mark on the world. A big bruise.
A man with a navy wool tuque pulled low over his forehead walks by, slapping himself on the head repeatedly. “I’m going to get you,” he says. “No fucking way, man.” He slaps himself. “I am. I’m going to sneak into your bedroom, and I’m going to . . . No fucking way, man.” He slaps himself again. “You think I’m kidding. I’m going to kill you.” The wino looks at the man, then at Zee, and circles his index finger at his temple. Zee nods in agreement, although lately he has felt the urge to slap himself on the head but has resisted, aware that this would mean that he is losing his mind. Bird poop splatters on the bench between them. The wino points at it and snorts. Zee stands up, stretches and starts across the park. “Ciao, amigo,” the wino calls after him. Without looking back, Zee waves.
Above the floor of Dini’s bar is a neon-tubed, large-breasted woman holding her arms out in welcome. How appropriate, Zee thinks, just like a woman, alcohol will lure him inside, promising good times, only to make his life a living hell later. But alcohol, unlike a woman, is predictable. He knows exactly how many drinks it will take to dull the pain and how long it will take to recover. With Alex, he never recovers but lives with the constant memory of the pain, dreading its recurrence. Pushing open the door to Dini’s, he remembers when he lived alone—how happy he was. He smoked when he wanted, drank when he wanted, slept when he wanted, watched TV when he wanted.
Now it’s a cold war.
He sits at the bar and orders a beer. The beeping and buzzing of the video games against the wall remind him of the killer bees. What’s happened to the killer bees, they must have crossed the Mexican border by now.
Alex wants a baby so that it can be swarmed by killer bees.
Watching teenagers in torn, pre-faded jeans bounce around the screens, he wonders why it is that people don’t have the patience to fade their own jeans anymore. Used to be faded jeans contained lives. He tries to picture the teenagers older, sitting in suits behind desks. How can they bear the weight of the knowledge that soon they’re going to have to figure out how to be adults? He feels he should warn them that it’s not something you figure out once. You have to maintain it, the facade, forever. It exhausts him just thinking about it. Today, he decides, he will stop trying to be anything. He’s always tried to be something, always felt that if he could only figure out how to be something he’d feel fulfilled. He used to sit on the toilet, studying the “Career Without College/Training at Home” matchbooks, trying to determine if he’d feel fulfilled if he learned how to fix air conditioners and refrigerators. Today, he understands that the key is to X the if . Don’t try to be anything, people will look at you strangely for a while, but eventually they’ll ignore you as if you had no legs or a hump. Maybe he should tell the teenagers about X-ing the if . They probably wouldn’t believe him.
A little, round man in a worn satin baseball jacket, sitting at the opposite end of the bar, waves at Zee. Zee waves back. The little man shakes his head several times. “Hockey isn’t what it used to be,” he says. Zee nods and stares at the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar. “Now they hit each other with sticks,” the little man adds. “They have to wear so much padding it’s a miracle they can skate at all.” He shakes his head again. “No, it’s not like it used to be. I don’t watch much anymore, can’t. It’s too bad they’re always hitting each other with sticks.” Zee nods, thinking that there are more crazy people around than there used to be. The little man wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “I guess that’s what the public wants.” He shrugs. “It’s not like it used to be. Too bad.” Zee nods, running his fingers over the bar. The wood grain of the counter reminds him of the relief patterns on the maps in grade-eight geography. Things were better in grade eight, he thinks. He knew everything. His classmates strained their necks and eyeballs to glimpse his answers on multiple-choice tests. He’d fill in the wrong answers then change them at the last minute. Why? Why bother?
A man in a turquoise shirt with sweat stains around the armpits pulls up a stool beside Zee. “Anybody like riddles around here?” he asks. “I’ve got a riddle.” He wipes sweat off his forehead with his hand and looks at it as if he can’t believe he’s actually sweating. “What politician has a face like a shoe?” Zee’s having difficulty absorbing the question. “Come on. Guess,” the man insists. Zee shrugs. The man leans into him. “Our great leader,” he declares. “Get it? Heel, as in swine.”
Lately, Alex has been telling Zee that he’s the best person she’s ever known and that he mustn’t give up but must learn to take pleasure from the little things because life sucks, that’s the way it is, he can’t expect it to be easy. Alex understands that living is hard work, that planning and constant surveillance are required. Sometimes he wants to put a pillow over her face. Not to suffocate her, but to stop her working it out, summing it up. Stop! Just stop! Can’t you stop?
Maybe he should go home and have a bath. Baths are good, he feels suspended, weightless. In his next life he wants to be a whale. Except they’re all dying in toxic seas. The sweaty man leans into him. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” Zee lies. He doesn’t want to encourage discussion because he has a feeling the sweaty man is about to tell him he was a Roman Emperor in a past life.
“You know how you tell if someone’s been reincarnated?” the sweaty man asks, tilting his head back and looking at Zee down his nose. Zee shakes his head.
“If they’re smart.” The sweaty man wipes his forehead. “Stupid people are on their first life, that’s why they’re stupid. Smart people have done it all before so they know better. Every time something shitty happens to you in this life you have to go, ‘okay, what am I supposed to learn from this?’” The sweaty man karate chops the bar for emphasis. “Everything’s a lesson, and your soul chooses lives depending on what it needs to learn. For example, I could be really depressed right now, but instead I’m going, ‘okay what can I learn from this?’”
“What have you learned?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet. That’s part of the process. You have to go through the process.”
Zee looks over the sweaty man’s shoulder at the little man in the satin baseball jacket. The little man grins and waves. Zee waves back and orders another beer. The bartender, without taking his eyes from the TV above the bar, pulls a beer from the fridge and opens it. “This one’s on me,” the sweaty man interjects. “Have a scotch, would you like a scotch?”
“Thanks.”
The bartender pours two scotches, notes it on the tab, and stares back at the TV screen where a woman is being submerged in water. Her hair spreads out in tendrils around her, her eyes bulge, her lips pucker as she blows bubbles. “When’s your birthday?” the sweaty man asks.
“June 12th.”
“Gemini, oh boy.” He clucks his tongue. “I had a lover who was Gemini. Dangerous waters. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t regret any of it.” Only now does Zee realize that the sweaty man reminds him of a hedgehog, the kind in English storybooks. “I’m Sagittarian,” the sweaty man continues. “You and I actually complement each other.”
Feeling the scotch, Zee is thinking about the single hair growing from the tiny mole on Alex’s chin. Once he caught her clipping it with nail scissors. Embarrassed, she tried to look as if she were tidying the medicine cabinet. He couldn’t understand why she’d be embarrassed about clipping a hair on her face. He clips his nose hairs all the time.
He tries to remember when he stopped looking forward to seeing her. He always used to look forward to seeing her. They’d share the d