It was their third time playing the board game of Monopoly that week and Porn sensed that another ineluctable habit was being imposed onto her more from within than without. She often deliberately tossed the dice directly into his token when it was near her side of the board but mostly her rolling was with a lethargic rattling in her palm and the apathetic dropping of dice from her numb fingertips. Once she spilled the content of her glass, which then flooded over Marlborough and Vine Streets as well as Community Chest. She snowed her popcorn crumbs over two colors of property. He silently blamed her clumsiness on the vodka that she had mixed into her cola. From time to time he could see irascible facial expressions cutting through her guile of complacent concentration and close lipped smiles but he told himself it was just a bit of competitive strife or tipsiness even though he knew better. At the beginning of each game, for the brief period that it lasted, he felt for certain that she enjoyed playing and discussing life with him. He was right about the former. For her the beginning of the game brought the rush of accumulating play-money, gibbering her attempts at English to play the game, and having one monotony replace that of another. The game was one way of killing an hour or more of a given day as sedately as a hot bath. She hated cold weather to such extremes that, outside of her irregular attendance at the language school, the nearby grocery store a block or two away from this distant campus had become her only cultural attraction. She was waiting for spring but meanwhile her life was becoming as frigid as a housewife.
“It certainly is coming down,” he said as he heard hail beat against the windows. “You surely aren’t thinking about going out in this.”
“I never do,” she said.
“I mean you can if you want.”
“Yes, master.”
“You get to massage my feet for that comment, dearest. I especially like it when you go down on each toe the way you do; but, as a gentleman, I don’t force that on you.”
“No, master.”
“Do you like anything about the classes at all?”
“The students and the teacher are old, Nawin. There’s nothing to say.”
“How old?”