Bay of Souls by Robert Stone Read Free Book Online

He went by her and took the Scotch bottle out of a cupboard.
    "You're late," she said.
    "I was detained."
    "Really?"
    He poured out half a water glass of whiskey and added water from the tap.
    "By Phyllis?" Kristin asked.
    "Sort of. You want a beer out of the fridge?"
    "Sure," she said. "What did little Phyllis want?"
    Michael got his wife the beer.
    "Just wanted me to line up her thesis committee. So I did."
    "Sometimes I wonder who's assisting who."
    "Assisting
whom
."
    She turned to him, put her beer down beside the smoked salmon and gave him the finger. Then she walked out of the room.
    Michael quietly addressed the silence she had left behind her.
    "Is there some rule," he asked, "by which every time I feel halfway human you get to throw a shit fit?"
    He could feel himself coming down hard. It was downright physiological, he thought, the collapse of elan, the sensation of your chin hitting the floor. He kept the image of her retreating figure in his mind's eye, her upright posture, her waggling braid, her small perfect ass in the light gray flannel tights. Though he dreaded it, something about her anger aroused him.
    He swallowed his drink. He was bored with pondering the etiology of his own hard-ons, his own insights, literary and otherwise. Bored with introspection. A man without a meaning was a paltry thing, and increasingly, since the day of the deer hunt, he had seen himself revealed as one.
    Perhaps, he thought, it was not boredom but fear. They were closely related. Behind the bland irritation, the true horrors. His son came in, pulling off a hockey shirt and tossing it in the laundry pile.
    "Mom's in a snit," the boy said.
    "Have some respect," Michael said, pouring another drink, "for your mother's feelings."
    "Huh?"
    "How can we call the rage of Iphigenia a snit?" he asked. And while the poor kid was dutifully trying to remember who Iphigenia was, Michael commanded him to do the laundry. "Don't just toss that dirty shirt in there. Stick it all in the machine. I'll get dinner."
    While Paul hauled the basket into the laundry room, Michael took his drink up to the master bedroom. His wife was not to be found.
    "Kris?"
    The door to the attic was slightly ajar but there was no light on in the stair that led up to it. He opened the door a little more, on darkness.
    "Kris?" he called up.
    "It's all right," she said. "I'm sorry."
    He found the light switch and snapped it but the bulb must have been broken; the stairway and the attic stayed dark. He climbed the first two steps.
    "You know," he said, "you must know there's nothing between me and Phyllis. I mean nothing."
    "I believe you," she said. "I'll come down. I'll come down in a minute."
    "I'm going to put your lovely salmon out."
    "Yes," she said. "Yes, go ahead."
    He stood in her darkness, wondering whether to put another foot on a higher stair.
    "Go ahead," she said. "I'll be down."
    Paul put the laundry through its wash cycles and Michael warmed the fish and finished making the tart sauce but there was no sign of Kristin. He put two plates on the kitchen table. By then he was well down the bottle of Scotch.
    Paul, hungry from hockey practice, finished his first serving quickly and helped himself to another from the stove.
    "Leave some for your mother."
    "Of course, Dad."
    Michael opened a beer to have with the smoked salmon. "You know what I think," he said to his son. "I think there's a vestigial reason why we like this kind of tart, rich stuff. Savory stuff."
    "Like a prehistoric impulse or something?"
    "That's right." He looked at the salmon in its yellow mustard sauce. "I think we used to like rotten meat. We must have cached it like bears. We're trying to get the taste back."
    Michael paused and put his fork down.
    "That's like so disgusting. Yarg. Cripes."
    "You dismiss my thesis?"
    Paul, who had enjoyed their banter since learning to talk, was discovering the difference between his father sober and his father drunk. He did not much care for the drunk