Come Closer by Sara Gran Read Free Book Online

Linda in her cottage, in the brown room that wasn’t airy at all, sitting on the brown velvet sofa. I saw it as clearly as a movie rolling before my eyes. She sat on the sofa doing nothing, waiting for her husband to come home. He was due home hours ago. The boredom was excruciating. She looked around the room. What had she been thinking, with the brown? It could drive a person crazy, this room. She would have liked to go out but he wouldn’t be happy if he came home and she wasn’t there. Then the movie stopped and a new film started; I saw Linda again, ten years younger, in a cozy, cluttered white-walled apartment with two other young women. They were laughing and drinking wine—I couldn’t make out all the words, but it was the kind of bonding /complaining conversation that young women have when they talk about men. They had all wanted to marry rich. Linda had.
    The entire episode had taken only a second. Linda had no idea. Now I knew just the right thing to say.
    “Did you see the paper today?” I asked. Linda shook her head. “The Marsha Merkon case finally closed. You know, the model, I mean former model, who was married to the head of Bluechip Securities.”
    “Oh really?” Linda turned around and looked at me with great interest—the first time, I think, she ever looked at me at all. This was one of those big divorce cases with enough money and lurid accusations involved to make tabloid headlines on slow news days. I knew that Linda would have been following the case.
    “Yep. She got twenty million. And you know she’s not even fifty. Now she’s got twenty million dollars and her whole life ahead of her. You know what she said?”
    “What?” Linda asked.
    “That she would have divorced him no matter what, even if she hadn’t gotten anything. That she felt younger than she had in ten years.”
    “Huh,” she said. She was smiling now, her eyes almost as bright as they had been back in that shabby little apartment with her girlfriends. “You know I met her a few times, at parties. She wasn’t at all like the papers made her out to be. She was a very nice woman. In fact, we talked about having lunch sometime.”
    “Well, this is probably a good time to call her,” I said. “You can take her out to celebrate.”
    “Or she can take me out, with her twenty million,” Linda said, laughing.
    The next evening, paying for two steaks, touching the butcher’s hand, I saw a clean, warm house where he lived with his wife and two young sons. The man who sold me my morning coffee, I saw a few days later, hated me. He hated all of us, going to our easy jobs in cushy offices while he got up at three in the morning to serve us our precious fucking coffee.
    This new vision waxed and waned over the rest of the summer, and I was never sure what to make of it. More often than not, I ignored the snapshots that burst to life before my closed eyes, I dismissed them as fantasy—I had always daydreamed a lot.
    I didn’t tell Ed about it. He was a devout agnostic, and believed anything that smacked of metaphysics or the supernatural was mumbo jumbo.

     
    THE GERMAN shepherd continued to ignore me. Every night he sat outside the train station, waiting, and didn’t recognize me when I arrived. Ed knew the dog too, and reported that when he came home each night, two or three hours after me, the dog was still waiting. Ed would stop and pet the big fellow and he recognized Ed as he always had—it was only me whom he didn’t know anymore.

 
    “ W HERE HAVE YOU been?” It was James Cronin. A Monday afternoon at Fields & Carmine. James had the desk next to mine and we had never gotten along. With James everything was a competition; now he wanted to start about who took a shorter lunch.
    “The coffee shop,” I told him, “getting a hamburger.”
    “For two hours?” James asked, raising his eyebrows.
    I rolled my eyes at him. “What two hours? I left at one and now it‘s—” I looked at my watch. Three