Guilty Beauty

Oh this is exhausting, she said. Everywhere we go the air is clean and it is beautiful all around me. I can’t think about work, and then I only begin to resent you for dragging me here and showing me what I’ve been missing. Even when they later make love by the fire, and went swimming off the dock naked and felt it all around them, and looked up at the Milky Way on their back, she said, – No, this is ridiculous. The next day he took her out in a boat and they climbed up a shelf of rock and saw an elk in the bushes and then a startled garter snake slithered and then a bald eagle soared by, and she said, – You’ve got to be kidding me. I want to go home. This is just distracting and depressing. – Give me one more night, he told her. And that night he went out and bought a twelve pack of Lucky Lager and he went over to his friend’s house and bought a gram of cocaine and a quarter ounce of pot. It rained that night and they stayed in and played gin rummy with a deck missing a card and drank five Luckies each. He made rocks of crack from the cocaine by heating it up with baking soda and they smoked those and lots of pot and then went out for a walk in the rain. Her head felt light and buzzing and everything seemed terrifying and dangerous, and they ate pizzas from the oven and laughed talked about popular movies and watched a classic porn film called Sensations and fucked twice. – So this is what you do, she said, and he nodded. He knew she meant that this is what a person does in Canada to make that guilty beauty go away. – But you don’t want to stay here more than a few weeks.