The Future for Curious People: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

I don’t know how they come up with all that money. I told my parents and my father was like, wow, you should invite them to the cabin.” Madge’s parents own a ski-in, ski-out cabin in Colorado I’ve yet to be invited to.
    “Like I want to hear about Bart and Amy right now.” I’ve already heard all of this from Bart. Their future entails tennis whites and healthy grandchildren, plus a thick head of white hair for Bart. Before I met Madge, Bart met Amy and now my Bart is gone. I love Bart and I always will, but sometimes I worry he’s turned into a gossip who sometimes wears various kinds of facial hair—with irony. I shake my head. “I proposed to you. Doesn’t that mean something?”
    “Don’t get all heated up,” Madge says.
    “Don’t get all heated up?” I squeeze my head with both hands. “I asked you to marry me, and you want to look into it first? Look into it first?” Everything’s sinking in.
    “You’re the one with a father who isn’t your biological father because your biological father was a married man at the time he and your mom—”
    “I don’t want to drag Mart Thigpen into this.” This is no secret. At age eleven, my mother sat me down and told me that my real father was not Aldo Burkes, the father I’d known all my life, but this other man named Mart Thigpen. A married man. A married man who was a connoisseur of thighs, who had sex with many women, including my mother, but always went back to his wife, which meant he left my mother high and dry! “High and dry, Godfrey!” she said, and I imagined her on a hill in the desert in a boat. She warned me that I was doomed to become a man like Mart Thigpen—a man I’ve never met. I’m his son, his animal son, and that I had to fight against it.
    My mother now rescues bunnies that people drop off at animal shelters. She has a yard full of hutches hand built by the Amish. Her saving once-loved pet bunnies that have been abandoned is an obvious metaphor for Gloria Burkes saving Gloria Burkeses.
    “You bring up your dark fear of your animal nature all the time!” Madge says.
    This is true, if overstated a little. I do have this fear that I might become an alcoholic who might even do cocaine in a public restroom, which is one small detail that my mother told me about Mart Thigpen. Lord God, how many years did I have a fear of public restrooms because of my weak predilection for cocaine? How many months did I spend as a sophomore in high school, practicing rolling single dollar bills my mom gave me for morning milk into sniffable straws because I figured I should prepare for the inevitable! “Is that why you’re afraid to say yes? Because you’re afraid of what I might become?”
    Madge smiles. “Oh, Godfrey. How many times do I have to tell you that I’m not afraid that you’re going to turn into a wildly lustful seducer of women? You’re no animal. You’re no Mart Thigpen.”
    “Thanks,” I say. I know Madge is mocking me, but truth is, I can trust Madge’s opinion which is important because I can’t trust my own—half Thigpen that I am. “This is about you and me. Marriage is a leap of faith. Don’t you believe in leaps of faith?” I ask.
    Madge shakes her head. “I love you. You know that.”
    “And I love you, too, Madge.” Here are more things I love about Madge: the way she talks with her hands as if carving air and laughs so hard she snorts and believes in helping others hence her job at the downtown clinic and how she knows all the lyrics to the Kinks and talked me out of a bad tattoo.
    “We love each other,” she says. “We can survive taking our time.”
    “You’re not going to put the ring on, are you? This is conditional. That’s what you’re saying. I do it your way or it doesn’t happen.” I swing my arms around angrily and the mittens come flapping after them. I try to pull the mittens off, but the clips seem permanently clenched. I use the voice I usually reserve for customer service