Big Swiss(12)

“Fine,” Greta said.

“How’s your love life?” Om asked. “Are you dating?”

Greta shook her head.

“You’ll meet someone next month,” Om said.

“Really? Why’s that?”

“You know,” Om said. “January.”

“New Year’s Eve?”

“Yes, and the mad rush to pair up before winter,” Om said. “You’ll see.”



* * *



GRETA WASN’T READY TO PAIR UP, but she wouldn’t have minded getting a piece. Everyone in town seemed to take turns with one another, as if stranded on a private fuck island, and Greta had never seen so many unusual and unlikely couples. Old with young, rich with poor, drunk with sober, beautiful with grotesque. She’d heard Hudson described as a college town without a college, or summer camp for adults, but it seemed more like a small community of expats. Everyone behaved as if they’d been banished from their native country, or had simply withdrawn allegiance, or were on the lam, and now that they were all living abroad, they bonded with people they never would’ve ended up with back home.

At any rate, Greta would’ve taken a turn or two, but the only ones who showed interest were either too broken, not broken enough, geriatric, unemployable, or overly dependent on little blue pills, cocaine, their own feelings and biographies, or the words “toxic,” “binary,” “identity,” and “intersectionality.”

Several months ago, however, she’d developed an inappropriate crush on someone half her age. They’d met on her very first day in Hudson. She’d arrived on a Friday, along with a hundred other drips and hipsters visiting from the city. An impatient tour of Hudson ensued, with Sabine speeding up rather than slowing down as they approached intersections and pedestrians, and pointing out the prisons—there were three—and where all the saloons and brothels used to be. The brothels were long gone, of course, but Hudson was still crawling with drunks and sluts, and had been since 1785.

“What kind of sluts?” Greta asked.

“All stripes,” Sabine said. “Sluts for nature, sluts for antiques, sluts for astrology. River sluts, real estate sluts, regular sluts. In general, I’d say there’s not a lot of shame in this town.”

“Uh-oh,” said Greta.

“I’m not saying people don’t feel shame—they do,” said Sabine. “It’s more like people don’t shame each other. Unless you do something extremely fucked-up, of course, like rob an old lady or rape somebody. Otherwise, you can get away with a lot. I think that’s why people never leave. Although that’s changing now.”

Sabine drove up alleys with names like Prison and Rope. She preferred Hudson’s backside, she said, but toward the end of the hour she coasted down the main drag, Warren Street, so that Greta could get a look at Hudson’s face. A formerly fucked-up face, Sabine insisted, once abandoned and forgotten, now carefully made up and lined with shops selling objects nobody needed. In fact, Sabine’s car felt like a giant, moving display case, and Greta felt like a rare object pinned to the passenger seat.

“Why are they staring at us?” asked Greta.

“I know these people,” Sabine explained, and honked at a lady with a dog. “They’re just wondering who you are and why you’re in my car.”

As they approached the next intersection, an old man stepped into the street and tried hailing them like a taxi. He looked disheveled and near death, but he had a sharp whistle. Sabine ignored him completely and rolled through a stop sign.

“That man seemed desperate for your attention,” Greta said. “I think he’s waiting for you to pull over.”

“That’s my father,” Sabine said, and stepped on the gas. “He just wants a cigarette.”

She sped through a mostly empty parking lot diagonally, only taking her foot off the gas for a series of speed bumps, and then continued to drive as if the cops were chasing them all the way home. In the driveway, she turned off the engine and opened the door but didn’t get out.

“If you’re expecting Pottery Barn rustic,” she’d said, “you might be disappointed. This house was built in 1737. Just to give you some perspective, George Washington was in kindergarten.”

“Totally fine,” said Greta. “I hate Pottery Barn.”

One side of the house was tall and brick. The other side, short and wooden. It looked old, but not 280.

“Are you a horse person?” Sabine asked suddenly.

Greta shrugged. “Of course.”

Anyone could see that Greta was not a horse person. Her hair wasn’t long enough and neither were her teeth, and as a child, she hadn’t been mistreated by other children. She’d been mistreated by horses, though. When she was thirteen, a horse had stepped on her foot, breaking it in several places, ostensibly because she’d tried to mount it on an incline. She hadn’t been taken to the doctor, and her foot still looked fucked-up all these years later.

“I don’t have horses,” Sabine said. “I’m getting donkeys. Mini-donkeys. They come up to your waist.”

Greta looked toward the field, expecting to see a herd of mini-donkeys running in circles, bucking, braying, or whatever it was donkeys did, but all she saw was a few dead apple trees. A stiff breeze was blowing leaves around the yard, along with a large, crumpled paper bag.