Fiction: One Lazy Day(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

One lazy night, after they’d lazed in bed all day and taken their properly cooked but previously frozen lasagna and a ring of shrimp with cocktail sauce into the den to dine while watching Happy Christmas, Paula asked whether Billy preferred traveling or staying at home. They’d already spent three years locked down at home, and this plague kept returning just when everyone began to act as if it were gone.
    “I prefer to stay at home, of course,” he answered, “for I never want to board an airplane again.” He regretted immediately having said so, for he had known with surety that her question meant Paula needed to fly somewhere far, far away.
    “I knew you’d say that, old man. Not only are you an old man, but you are a cheap one.”
    “Right you are, Paulina! Even the cheap hotel and motel rooms in Wyoming cost too much, so I bet you have not researched, recently, the prices of lodgings in Paris or in Venice.”
    “In fact, I have not. But I want to go on one of those cruises of islands in the Caribbean, on one of those enormous vessels like a floating city.”
    “You jest! You mean those incubation tanks for the plague, viruses and cancers? I know you don’t want to spend a week of vacation with a thousand strangers staying drunk and shouting and playing their hideous music at all hours of the day—”

“Sounds kinda fun!”

    “Sounds kinda fun!”
    “…being hustled like herds of pigs off the ship for an hour at each port and then back on again. You know they care nothing for folks whose dining times are as idiosyncratic as ours.”
    “Yes, you are correct, for once. But I do dream about floating around on a boat, diving overboard into a warm sea to swim with dolphins, and staying a week or two in one of those resort hotels where the boys bring you drinks nonstop while my toes nestle into the sand.”
    Billy said he fantasized about long rides on those old-fashioned trains of forty years ago. He asked, “Did you ever do that?”
    “I went with my folks one time, when I was but a wee, wee lassie, from Vienna to Istanbul. It was interminable and horrifying.”
    “Okay, you win. I don’t want to talk about it. Horrifying, really? How could Constantinople—”
    “You said you wouldn’t talk about it,” Paula retorted.
    “But may I talk about any old train? Dining car? North by Northwest?”
    “I know they say it’s all about the journey, but I’d rather get to my destination real quick, get to the local cuisine, the fried shrimps.”
    “You go on ahead. I’ll stay home and re-read my old books.”
    “But you do that every day anyway!”
    “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Billy stood firm. He knew she’d outbully him and win, soon enough.
    “New cultures show us how our way isn’t the only way, or even the best way.”
    “True, but I’ve already met a bunch of new cultures, and you know that any other ‘new’ cultures will smile and welcome us and show how well they’ve perfected our culture of buying, selling, and dog eating dog and offering unbelievable deals on spa days. In old books, I can learn about ‘new’ cultures back in the old days before they corrupted themselves.”
    “El Cheapo, travel is practically free on buses, strassenbahns, railways underground, the Metro, Europass. No need for a car.”
    “You are, my bride, supremely right about all of that. Travel is for the young, the wealthy and the healthy. But you and I have done that already, Aphrodite be praised, and I feel no need ever to do it again. Last time I boarded a plane, I had to remove my shoes, and nobody even offered me a chair. I had to plomp down onto the floor, and once the experts had determined my tiny loafers contained zero explosive, I had to try to clamber as best I could back up onto my feet, no help from these ‘security’ goons, and, of course, no apology for the unnecessary public humiliation, the loss of dignity. Never will I even think about a plane ticket again.”

“That’s just awful”

    “Well, I don’t blame you. That’s just awful. You never told me that story before.”
    “But I was saying, I’ve seen the world, and happily, when I was young enough to enjoy it thoroughly. I marched across German fields and over mountains and through animal parks and had the time of my life, trying authentic, potent beers and authentic women with hairy legs and pits, Lilith bless ’em all for the patience with which they guided me through various arts of pleasure and passion and restraint, but who has strength for all that, now? I mean, I can’t even do the preliminary planning. I got to where it takes so long to get a passport and then I can’t get a railpass or reserve a rimm, a zimmer, without a fucking cell phone and without entering all my bank info online for all the world to see, that I was actually glad for the global pandemic plague and lockdown that forced me to stay off those smoke-free claustrophobic planes with that weird recycled, recirculated air.”
    “My turn, yet, babe?”
    “How long did I go on for? I am parched! Sorry, girl.”
    “In actual reality, Dr. Einstein, planes tend to fly above pollution and to take in pure, fresh, beautiful air lit by the sun.”
    To which Billy insisted, “Well, maybe, but I still can’t smoke on a plane, and planes are way too heavy to stay aloft, and—”
    Here he opted not to let a snort of her derision interrupt his flow, continuing, “and I just don’t want to listen to some ugly nine-week-old fat bitch scream for seven hours straight or hear some wealthy, shiny plump man thirty years my junior with hair in the weird style du jour explaining hedge funds on and on or zero-point financing or zero-point anything. You’re rendered unfit for vacation before it’s even begun.”
    “So you understand just how I feel listening to you make zero point.”
    “My point is: let me stay home and read some of the same books I’ve been reading over the tedious, long course of my whole life!”
    Paula fairly shrieked, “But why would anybody want to do that?” But she knew why. “I don’t even like to read once. I’m not gonna plow through the same shit again.”
    “Then I could never explain it to you. So I’ll try.”
    “For you must.”
    “I must! If you’re 13 and you read a book that you fall in love with, you will read it again, but it won’t be ‘the same shit again,’ because you won’t be the same reader the next time you come to it, so it won’t be the same book. You will understand more of the world, more of human nature, than you did the first time, and so the book will have more to show your bigger, better brain. I loved The Sun Also Rises when I was 13, and I totally missed the whole main point about why Jake and Lady Brett can never be together and can never be apart.”
    “Huh. Have I read that? Sounds like an utter bummer.”
    Billy knew she had read it. He was fairly certain she had re-read it.
    He exulted, “Oh, boy, but Hamlet, Paula! I know you’ve read that.”

“I read the Cliff Notes”

    “I read the Cliff Notes. And I saw the movie with Mel Gibson.”
    “Oh, well,” Billy sighed. “That’s how you are. But I read it many times before Cheney became vice-president and shot his friend in the face. I never understood the play before Cheney showed me how dark the world and its rulers and that old play really were. My point, as you can see and you don’t care, is that a book actually changes, and so it’ll take you to a different place every time you pick one up. Not only do books change, but they change the world, so you see it differently than you did when you were 20, 30, 40.”
    “Okay, that’s books. That’s way more than enough about books. You know I like books. I like Nora Roberts. But nobody reads anymore. It’s my turn, now. Let’s talk about wine. Vino. The ones you can’t get in Safeway, Kroger, Albertson’s, C Town up in New Haven. When I had my first Veuve Clicquot, it musta been like when you read Hamlet when you were 30.”
    So Billy asked, “How did it change your world? What went through your mind?”
    “The bubbly did! Hahaha! Oh, Bill, I’m feeling it again right now just as I did that night, that New Year’s Eve with my cool aunt and uncle in Richmond. It wasn’t the first glass, though the first glass was noticeably different from the cheap shit I’d been drinking since 14.”
    “2014?”
    “No. Fourteen. Years old. Dipshit.”
    “I know,” Billy said.
    “After the second glass, though, the wine and my head and the room, the bread and butter, the fire in the fireplace, the chatter from the people, the overhead lights and the candles on the tables, we were all swirling, so softly at first, so slowly, but we were dancing, all of us and everything together, and everything in the room grew warmer and burst gradually into its component atoms, golden champagne, golden bubbly elements floating, and I was dancing in them, between them. I had to sit down.”
    Silence reigned awhile.
    Billy took over. “It makes perfect sense, my love! It’s that second measure, or maybe the third, that sends the blissful sweet vibration, just before you get too intoxicated, but you love everybody and you want to love everybody—you know what I mean—and you wanna dance with everybody, coz suddenly you find all your suspicions and fears are warrantless, and life is beautiful, and we’re all in the mood for love.”
    “I didn’t say any of that, asshat,” Paula scoffed. “But yeah. Something like that. Not all of that. I was only gonna add that I was there in the ’80s when we repealed those laws about red wine with beef and white wine with fish and chicken. We declared that wine and food paired any way you want ’em to.”
    “So,” said Billy, “You splurged, and your cool Virginia aunt and uncle splurged, and that is so cool, baby, but.”
    “I didn’t know how to pronounce Veuve Clicquot, but I kept pronouncing it in my tipsy head and giggling nonstop about it.”

“We don’t have to fly to France about it”

    “But we can splurge and stay at home. We don’t have to fly to France about it.”
    “But you’re only gonna discover what’s good in Tuscany or in Paris.”
    “But we can drink cheap wine at home, and put on a movie and fire up a joint if we want, and we don’t have to calculate a tip, and you don’t have to wear a bra.”
    Paula yawned and said, “I allow you do make some fine points, but still: Paris. Venice. A full bota bag on the Costa Brava.
    “Yes. Sweet.” Billy conceded defeat, but continued anyway, so as not to lose the speech he’d held inside, not that it would give him the victory today, but because it would serve his precious wife well if she suffered a financial setback after his demise. She wouldn’t miss him for long, but she might miss his dough.
    “The pinto! The humble pinto bean! The music of the pinkle tinkle tink when you pour a newly opened bag, just hundreds of the freckled fellows, into your favorite huge pot. It’s a ritual that becomes more valuable to the well-being of your soul after you’ve practiced it a few hundred times, knowing that combining pintos with rice produces more protein than does a hunk of whatever steak.”
    He’d heard this alleged fact from a nurse friend and had chosen to believe it rather than to verify its accuracy, and anyway, Paula was listening to him now, for some reason.
    “Sometimes I had beans and rice and salsa, for flavor. Sometimes pintos, but no rice. Pintos are the best value in the grocery store for the last of the money.”
    Paula chimed in: “No, the box of brownie mix is still the best.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you can fill up every night for a week on a pan of brownies, and besides, it’s dessert. And it’s chocolate, so it satisfies your craving for sex, and it nourishes your failing hope.”

“I can certainly dig that”

    “I can certainly dig that,” Billy said. “I dig that you’ve thought it through much farther than I have.”
    “Or anybody, really.”
    “Or anybody. Yes, baby.”
    “Even if you do give them a chance to dry out,” she carried on, “you can just pour a little milk on ’em and pop ’em in the microwave. Hot brownies—OMFG! Like cake and pudding. Anyways, sorry. You were saying something about beans?”

Copyright © 2023 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.