Anna From Away by D. R. Macdonald Read Free Book Online

catching up, tension dissolve: but it was all voice, little was given by either of them, nothing new. She could feel Alicia Snow infusing whatever he said. They might have been distant relations touching base, no intimacy exchanged, no troubling information, no tender subjects broached, just a mutual, courteous coolness that depressed her deeply after she hung up.
    Had Chet accepted that she was gone, separate from him now? It had hurt to think that he was carrying on smoothly with his own life, with a young woman, that Anna’s absence might not matter anymore at all. When she was ill or down, he had taken care of her, he was good at that, he brought her medicine in bed, favourite food when she was hungry, lemon tea, the
New York Times
on Sunday. He fixed her broken things, if he could. She thought he did so because she mattered to him. Her mistake was believing that she mattered more than any other woman ever could, and so the infidelities she got wind of did not hurt her much, they were no deeper than her own, they burned out quickly before anyone’s house caught fire.
    All this of course was before Alicia Snow, the girl (as Anna preferred to think of her) Chet met at a health club where he was fighting off middle age. After a few weeks of flirtation (She’s fun to talk to, he said, that’s all), Alicia persuaded him to join her on a caving venture, she was a spelunker and loved those labyrinthine, slithering, squeezing, ill-lit explorations underground. Chet, however, was violently claustrophobic, he could have a panic attack trying to get free of a turtleneck sweater. But he saw this as a test, he told Anna, he could not beg out of it, and by then Anna knew he was willing to do nearly anything to get closer to Alicia Snow.
    So she led him into the caves where passageways grew narrower and more constricted, and Chet’s heart rate rose, although he didn’t let on. Alicia knew these caves and he found that he liked putting himself in her hands until they reached a short tunnel-like passage so tight that she said, casually, We’ll have to remove our clothes to get through this one, the tolerances are critical. She unbuttoned her shirt in a businesslike way while Chet crouched there, stunned at the prospect yet excited by the bizarre setting of her striptease. Later, he recounted this to Anna in detail (why not? no harm), read to her a rapturous passage he’d written about Alicia’s nude body in the niggardly light as she squirmed her way into the rocks, and then, naked himself, dizzy, his following her, faint with terror and desire. It was primal, mystical, he confessed (he was prone to confession, he found it liberating), and it sealed something terribly important between them, him and Alicia, and he (as a writer, Anna) was proud he finally had the language to embrace it on the page. I’m not sure that’s where you’re embracing it, Anna said, and the symbolism is rather strained.
    But now, here where she had placed herself at great remove, her sarcasm seemed threadbare, hardly adequate a response to what he’d been clearly telling her: she should have said something straight and honest to him—Chet, admit it, you’re helplessly infatuated with this woman, don’t make her sound like nothing but a muse. But she hadn’t wanted to admit herself how serious the situation was.
    Once inside the house, surrounded by her sketches and drawings, her slowly growing montage of this place, the urge passed, if she phoned Chet again, she would sound indeed as he’d predicted—lonely, and over her head. She could not explain the dog to him even if she wanted to, not anymore, it was a story she might share with a lover. Anna and Chet. Even now his name had a tangled resonance. Man and wife so long, too long, if loosely, over twenty years. She could not blame him terribly for falling in love with a young woman. Who wouldn’t want to relive that kind of emotion? But he squandered on that affair all the passion and attention