Deborah Eisenberg
Your Duck Is My Duck
WAY BACK—OH, NOT ALL that long ago, actually, just a couple of years, but back before I’d gotten a glimpse of the gears and levers and pulleys that dredge the future up from the earth’s core to its surface—I was going to a lot of parties.
And at one of these parties there was a couple, Ray and Christa, who hung out with various people I sort of knew, or, anyhow, whose names I knew. We’d never had much of a conversation, just hey there, kind of thing, but I’d seen them at parties over the years and at that particular party they seemed to forget that we weren’t actually friends ourselves.
Ray and Christa had a lot of money, a serious quantity, and they were also both very good-looking, so they could live the way they felt like living. Sometimes they split up, and one of them, usually Ray, was with someone else for a while, always a splashy, public business that made their entourage scatter like flummoxed chickens, but inevitably they got back together, and afterwards, you couldn’t detect a scar.
