Cadillac Couches by Sophie B. Watson Read Free Book Online Page A

Drinking whisky around the fire. Cooking tomatoes in a can. I was a late bloomer in the nature revelations, but it was heady stuff to discover at twenty.
    From what I can make out, some people marry their big heavies, some lose them and move on, and some are forever haunted by them. I wanted to have it again. That kind of love. But deep down, I was pretty convinced it would never be that big again, and so I had become the curator of a dusty, rundown love museum with the same damn permanent exhibition.
    I used to blame my fractured relationship with Sullivan for causing my Nerve Problem. I thought he had broken through my pain threshold when he left me for good. Like my pain was somehow worse than the rest of the world’s heartbreak. I probably should never have read Love in the Time of Cholera . The guy in that story loves this girl from when they’re teenagers until their eighties, even though the woman marries someone else and the guy lives in a brothel for twenty years. That book infected me with the notion that you could and maybe should love someone your whole life even if you weren’t together, especially if you weren’t together, and that equalled Pure, True Love.
    That evening, Isobel said, “Let’s get out of town . . . I want to put some miles between me and Finn.”
    I, drunk on cheap red wine and a belly full of smoked oysters, proclaimed from my wobbly perch on top of the Cadillac couch: “I want to have Hawksley’s babies! Let’s go see his concert in Montreal. The gig on the mountain. We can meet . . . He can see with his own eyes how wonderful I am.”
    â€œGo, sister, go,” was Izzie’s battle cry. We were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
    I knew it was a good idea to hit the road. I’d been getting a little overly vigilant on checking the light switches and unplugging the appliances again. When that happened, I needed to squash the habit cold turkey. Get me away from the goddamn oven! It’s definitely off. Off. And the couch; enough already. The more my left eye twitched, the more I knew running from the Problem was the answer because compulsiveness was often only the goofy precursor to something much harder to cope with.
    The next day I had to pick up Rosimund from the mechanics—my 1972 pink Volkswagen Beetle was in for a tuneup (which was coincidentally perfect timing for our road-trip plan). I took the Number 7. The overwhelming silence of public transportation really gets to me sometimes, all those people, side by side, not talking. I automatically tried to sit as near to the exit as possible. I thought I was fine. At the next stop a big guy got on board and sat right beside me, practically on top of me. He didn’t smell great. I tried not to think about how I couldn’t just get off the bus whenever I wanted, and how I was going to the north side of town, which was pretty far away and I wouldn’t be able to just run home. I tried to calm myself by imagining the drive home, having a smoke, and not having that horrendous muffler sounding like a dying buffalo. I worried about getting anxious, having an attack on the bus. That made me anxious, just having it in my mind, and once the thoughts started like that it was too late . . . 
    It was so unnatural the way people just sat there mutely, desperately avoiding eye contact.
    The silence was strangling me.
    The longer I dwelled on it, the more the pressure kept building.
    Weirdly, I wanted to scream.
    How crazy would that be? Maybe people would join in. Maybe not. Random screaming passenger. The pressure of stopping myself, restraining myself made me panicky.
    I wasn’t breathing right.
    Oh no, here it comes again.
    I was dizzy.
    I was sweating.
    I couldn’t stop blinking, trying to hold it all together and somehow push back the wave of adrenalin flooding my veins. My heart was beating so horribly fast I thought surely I was going to break. This