Crazy in Love by Luanne Rice Read Free Book Online Page A

through the class. With Nick taking fast notes while gobbling his dinner, I would turn off the lecture and think about our life. Even with Nick’s busy pace we were managing to have dinner together every night. All it took was a certain amount of creativity and flexibility. How smug I had been! I had sat there, wondering how many wives could plan such portable meals, so delicious that their husbands wouldn’t even notice the entire dinner had fit into two small plastic containers.
    I conjure the business trips I’ve gone on with Nick by remembering sirloin steak at Morton’s in Chicago (a leverage buyout of Frankenthaler, Weiss); the tandoori chicken at London’s Bombay Brasserie (negotiations with a prospective White Knight for the ailing Rosco Corporation); turbot
grillé
at Hôtel des Indes in The Hague (meetings on the purchase-and-sale agreement of a four-billion-dollar transaction involving sixteen countries); Lobster Savannah at Locke-Ober’s (a hostile tender offer for shares of Boston Chemical); ravioli
de ris de veau
at Jamin in Paris (meeting to quell the general panic that hit the firm’s clients after the Socialists came into power).
    I can remember vacations, periods when we had unlimited time together, without thinking of a single meal. When I think of our free time, I think of the clarity of that day’s light, the species of birds we counted, the Rembrandts we gazed at, the hills we scrambled. But for a running account of our marriage, I think of the dinners.
    I lay in bed beside Nick, listening to a movie playing in the next room. I could hear the voices perfectly. The story was about a farming family in Nebraska in the thirties. The father had just been shot by bandits. I lay awake, crying for the mother and children. Then I realized: I feel as though Nick’s abandoned me. He’s left me to keep our little vigil on my own. Our good-marriage vigil.

3
    IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS, NO STORY absorbed me the way Mona Tuchman’s had. I thought of her often. I related to her: as a woman in love who had sabotaged her own marriage. It was a matter of degree. Mona had alienated Dick and her children by an act of attempted murder. Surely they must feel they no longer knew her. But Nick: he knew me. When had I wanted anything but sheer closeness? If I was willing to make the trip into New York to have dinner with him, why should he mind? I felt as though I were pushing too hard, and that that delicious, almost unbearable closeness I had had with Nick, that I had lived by since our marriage, seemed in deep jeopardy.
    One morning I stood in my yard, waving goodbye to him as he flew away. Although the weather was clear and fair, I walked next door to visit my mother. I felt sad; I wanted distraction. Honora stood in her driveway, cutting yellow daylilies with garden shears. She wore lightweight white trousers, a navy blue blouse, and, although the sun hadn’t risen enough to evaporate dew from the flowers’ leaves and petals, a straw sunhat.
    “Good morning, sweetie,” she said, kissing me. “The boys have a nice day to fly. Winds will be light, out of the northwest, and the visibility should be about fifteen miles.”
    “Oh, good,” I said.
    “Your grandmother is still asleep.”
    “You’re kidding!” I said, feeling alarmed. I had never known Pem to sleep past dawn. “Are you sure she’s still . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say “alive.”
    “I checked, and she was fine half an hour ago. She’s been sleeping late recently.” She preceded me into the house and began arranging the lilies in a tall glass vase. “I have to admit it’s good to have some time without her.”
    “It must be,” I said. The year before, Clare and I had tentatively suggested that maybe Pem should go to a rest home, and we had been relieved when Honora had said absolutely not. Knowing it was not a possibility, I felt fearless raising the subject. “Do you think it would be better if she were in a home?”
    “No, of