An Emergence of Green by Katherine V Forrest Read Free Book Online

its various hostilities. He and Carolyn had been united in their isolation and he had been utterly content. There was never a question whether he would accept the promotion to Los Angeles—a big promotion, district manager in the company’s largest sales region. They could buy a house again—even in L.A.—made possible by the company’s relocation bonus package. In his new tax bracket the write-off would surely be necessary. But Los Angeles seemed so much larger a city than Chicago, open and endless, and he did not like the unvarying brightness, the raw newness of the landscape, the alien feel of it. There was an unsettling within him, inchoate, indefinable, as if his life were edging slightly off center, as if he were losing his firm grip over some primary domain of his own interior landscape.
    The house in the San Fernando Valley was a zone of comfort; privacy was possible in this vast, flat, anonymous plain of sameness, these enclaves of three-bedroom homes plus swimming pool plus barbecue, each enclave boasting its own shopping mall and each with its wide main streets where traffic flowed swiftly past huge supermarkets and Taco Bells and Burger Kings. But still he watched Carolyn closely, in nebulous anxiety that the vibrations he felt from this bizarre city would change her.
    She immediately found a job—the job she currently held—so excited that she would not hear his protests that she faced a forty-minute, rush-hour commute to Glassell Park. When would it ever end, he thought in disgust, this irrational fixation women had about jobs where they did not have to type.

    Paul Blake locked his house and walked into his garage, dark suit coat over his arm, and climbed into his Buick for the drive downtown.
    On balance, he reflected, the change in Carolyn’s hours and the acceptance of the promotion without his consent were mere ripples on the surface of his marriage, but he must be careful. As the saying went, a bird must be held lightly, not tightly. But, he added grimly, not too lightly.
    She had surprised him. Still she was capable of surprising him. He had searched those green eyes for eight years trying to see and under-stand how to touch a depth of feeling—perhaps passion—that he had always sensed was just beyond his view, closed off from him, a privacy that did not involve him. Squeezing his eyes shut for an instant, he retreated from the glimpse of emptiness his life would be without her—that lurking depth of fear that was always in him, even after many untroubled years of marriage. He pulled out of his driveway in a screech of tires.

Chapter 8

    Carolyn opened the drapes to see Val Hunter lying at the edge of the pool on a dark blue inflated plastic raft, a bright green raft beside her. She had been swimming; her hair and T-shirt and shorts were dark with wetness. Carolyn slid the glass door back and stepped from the cool dimness of her house into a Valley afternoon that gripped her in its hot dry fist and blinded her with its brightness; as she walked from the shadow of the house into the sun her bare skin felt blistered.
    Val sat up, greeted her with a grin and a wave. “What could be safer than floating on a raft? Neal and I use these at the ocean.” She gestured. “The green one’s yours, Carrie. Good choice of bikini—green’s your primary color.”
    “You of all people I definitely consider a color expert.” She was pleased by the odd compliment but embarrassed by the pallor of her skin in comparison with Val Hunter’s burnished tan. She thought of Paul’s opinion of her bikini and asked mischievously, “Do you think my suit is frivolous?”
    Val was carrying the green raft to the shallow end of the pool. She cast a puzzled glance over her shoulder. “A bathing suit should be serious?”
    Smiling, Carolyn descended the three steps at the pool’s shallow end. Waist deep, she splashed water over her arms and chest, shuddering at the cold unpleasantness on her sun-heated skin. As her