Everyone but You by Sandra Novack Read Free Book Online Page B

I’m thinking work never looked so good.”
    “Oh, stop it,” Raulp tells her. “You know I hated my job. And what about you? You can’t like the bookstore much. What happened to saying you’d act again? There’s still the community theater. It’s not Broadway, but it’s something.”
    Sylvia lets out an irritable laugh. “I couldn’t live with success.I love the bourgeois thing. I mean, it’s not Broadway either, but, hey, it has its charm; marriage is still America.”
    “Sometimes I think you just don’t care about anything anymore.”
    Sylvia says nothing. After the baby, she did take on theater roles, one of which resulted in a brief write-up in the paper. She also took up some gigs, early on, one-liners in TV ads for cough medicine, and hay-fever relief.
    Thinking about this all, Sylvia breaks into an involuntary grimace. “I gave up trying, is that it? Well, let me recap for you, since your memory is so very clearly going to pot. We were young. Then I got pregnant, with your help, I might add. Then the baby died. Then we were broke and had bills. Then we grew up and I didn’t think as much about art anymore. I thought about things like getting a car, and cable. I’ve always thought it was something of a virtue to be happy with what I have, and it turns out I like pricing books. And anyway, has it occurred to you that with all your newly found inspiration we haven’t had sex in about three solid weeks?”
    Raulp turns his back to her. “Fine,” he says. “You’re upset and I’m sorry.”
    “
You’re
sorry.”
    “We won’t talk about it.”
    “Fine,” she says. “Let’s not.”
    “Do you want to have sex?” he asks. “Because we can have sex.”
    “Jesus, not now. Now I don’t even want to be in bed with you.”
    She stares out their bedroom window absently, wishes for sleep. After an hour passes, Raulp begins to snore. Sylvia gets out of bed, puts on a robe, and goes down to Ralph’s studio. It isan act of desperation, she realizes, this snooping around. She rummages through the sketches of Reese that he’s laid out across a worktable. She studies the softened lines of Reese’s nose and chin, the tentative touch of Raulp’s hand as it shaped the curve of Reese’s cheeks and chest. In one sketch, Reese sits on the love seat, her gaze diverted in an embarrassed but nuanced way. In another, Reese leans forward, intently holding Raulp’s gaze. There’s something in this pose that reminds her of the painting Raulp had done of Sylvia so many years before. “Expectant yearning,” he had joked that evening when the chill hit Sylvia’s skin. “A precursor to sex,” she told him, and it was.
    S YLVIA WORKS at Riverdale Ink, pricing books on bird watching and art and folk remedies for things like rheumatoid arthritis. The owner, Mr. Lesser, is a shy, eighty-year-old man, and every day when Sylvia arrives to work he says, without fail, “Good morning, Sylvia. I’ll be on call.” Then he nods and shuffles into the back office, where he spends the rest of the day devouring romance novels. Like an old married couple, she and Mr. Lesser have fallen into a predictable routine. Her entire job, really, is pleasingly monotonous. She
likes
the old-fashioned wooden signs hanging over the aisles that read Health Care, Psychology, The Occult. She
likes
the neatly stacked books, alphabetized according to subject and author. And how else but with a job like this could she become so dangerously knowledgeable about so many things? Where could she learn about tattooing, invertebrate zoology, entropy? Theories of the universe? She’d once gone on a quantum mechanics kick, explaining to Raulp over dinner the intricacies of physics, but she had to quit when, eventually, after about three minutes, she confusedherself. But that was life, there you go, the accumulation of useless and sometimes dangerous knowledge, pounds of it, in fact.
    During the day’s usual afternoon lull, Sylvia sits perched on a