Bay of Souls by Robert Stone Read Free Book Online Page A

game. He quietly cleared his place at table, emptied the rest of his second helping in the sink and prepared to do the dishes.
    Michael spent another hour at the table, tapering off the drink, brooding haphazardly, recalling his meeting with Lara. Then he remembered Kristin in the darkness upstairs. When he went up, Paul was at his computer. The door to the attic was firmly closed. Then he saw that Kristin had gone to bed. Her braid undone, she lay facing the wall. He went in and lay down beside her.
    "I swear this to you," he said. "I swear it. There is no woman in my life but you. No one. And if that is the trouble between us ... then there is none."
    She turned over to face him. "You wouldn't lie to me, Michael?"
    He put an arm around her.
    "How can you think I would risk what we have for a little kid like Phyllis? She's a baby. I mean really, Kris."
    Touching her cheek, he saw some question in the look she fixed on him. It made him understand what it suddenly seemed should have been obvious, that perhaps the trouble was not pretty Phyllis but something else, something Kristin herself might not understand. The thought frightened him.
    He got up and went to check on Paul, who had shut his computer off and propped his Tolkien by the table lamp and was saying his prayers. He quietly told the boy good night.
    "Night, Dad."
    Careful of her wounded leg, he and Kristin gently made love. It was great pleasure to have her long-boned, long-legged body under his hands. A strong body, possessed of surprising softnesses. She could be most avid, with a style of alternate yielding and resistance. There was a kind of physical pride to her; it was necessary to win her each time, convince her. Sometimes it made him think of logic, little syllogisms, discoveries, recognitions. But that night things did not go very well. He kept imagining Lara; Kristin held back as though she knew his mind.
     
    A few days later he had lunch at a burger joint in town with Norman Cevic.
    "Miz Purcell," said Norman, "oh my!"
    "So what's her story?"
    "She had a husband originally. They were hired together. They'd been living in France. Teaching there."
    "Her husband was French?"
    "Her old man was French and he was considered quite a catch for the poly sci department. He was Ridenhour's kind of guy. But somehow she lost him along the way."
    The late Dr. Nicholas Ridenhour had been a minor cold warrior of intensely right-wing views who maintained the university's political science department as a kind of woodsy clerico-fascist grand-dukedom. A wag had once declared that its members printed their own gold-based currency with Dr. Nick's picture on it.
    "Lost him?"
    "He got a better job back east. Solo."
    "A practical man," Michael observed.
    "Practical folks," said Cevic.
    "So her views are like her husband's."
    "Listen, man," Cevic said. "This is a dangerous woman. Really!"
    "Dangerous?"
    "Very smart girl this is. She has a following—a cultlike following—among some of the kids."
    "She's attractive," Michael said.
    "She's not attractive. She's about the hottest babe in the history of the state."
    "She looks crazy," Michael said. It had not occurred to him before.
    "She is. And she makes other people crazy."
    "Phyllis Strom wants her on her thesis committee."
    "Well, man," Norman said, "this is a struggle for a young mind. See if you can keep her from biting Phyllis on the throat."
    That afternoon he suffered a breakdown in communication with his second class, an expository writing workshop. Led by an extroverted young woman athlete, the group undertook to address the personal problems of the characters in one four-page fictional narrative. The personal needs and available life choices of these thin conceits were examined as though they were guests on the kind of television talk show whose participants murdered each other.
    "For Christ's sake," Michael told them. "You're supposed to be replicating life here. This is like a drawing class—the characters aren't