to be a laugh, though it's not foobng anyone. "Why's that?" I say. "I need to go jimmy, lel's not get started on this right now." "Started on what?" I say. "I need to go," she says. "Call me tomorrow," I say. Then I hear Claire's buzzer, as though Peter is standing down there with grinding teclh, leaning furiously on the poor little button. "I need to go," Claire whispers. The buzzer screeches again. I sit listenillg to the clicks and then l.hc dial tone and the phone is still to my car and I consider giving Peter a minute or two to get up the six llights and tJ1en calling back and he'd see my name on ilic Caller ID and he'd fall to ills knees in tears and she wouldn't know what to do and it seems like it would serve iliem both righL I think how my love lor Claire is like when you're driving on a highway alone, some long and necessary drive, il's not like you're going to the beach, and you're sick of ilic radio and all the san1e songs, so you're looking out the window at the horizon, which, for once, isn't obscured by tJ1c tree line and the sun is going down behind Lhis huge gray cloud, shooting down shafts of light on the land ahead and you're trying to figure out what the cloud looks like, trying to iliink, maybe that looks like a man iliere with two arms thntst up in l.he air, the middle part is ills head, but of course it doesn't look like a man and you know, though you don't admit it to yourself, that it doesn't really look like anything, but still, you try like hell to think of something it could took like, try and force the connection iliat isn't iliere. I 路wake up ilie next morning, to the Sinm10ns's crac;hing television across the way. It's early but I haven't worked since my mother died a little over a year ago and I inherited fifty thousand dollars. My dad wrote me the check and said, "Now you should invest this. Then youth have something to fall back on." Instead, I quit my job and made some long shot investments. I bought a car and then moved from Dupont Circle to iliis new place. I hit on a technology stock that returned forty-eight thousand on a three 94
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