Give Me Your Heart by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

with blood that would never flag, even as she was breathless and panting in Leonard’s arms declaring she
loved him.
    Since the discovery weeks ago in November, he’d looked for other photos. Not in the photo album Valerie maintained with seeming sincerity and wifely pride but in Valerie’s drawers,
closets. In the most remote regions of the large house, where things were stored away in boxes. Shrewdly thinking that because he hadn’t found anything did not mean there was nothing to be
found.
    “Len Chase!”
    A bright female voice, a Salthill Landing neighbor leaning over his seat. (Where was he? On the Amtrak? Headed home? Judging by the murky haze above the river, early evening, had to be headed
home.) Leonard’s laptop was open before him and his fingers were poised over the flat keyboard, but he’d been staring out the window for some minutes without moving. “. . .
thought that was you, Len, and how is Valerie? Haven’t seen you since, has it been Christmas, or . . .”
    Leonard smiled politely at the woman. His open laptop, his document bag and overcoat on the seat beside him—these were clear signals he didn’t want to be interrupted, which the woman
surely knew, but she had come to an age when she’d decided not to see such signals in cheerful denial of their meaning: Please leave me alone, you are not of interest to me, not as a
woman, not as an individual, you are nothing but a minor annoyance. Melanie Roberts was Valerie’s age, and her frosted hair was razor-cut in Valerie’s style. Very likely Melanie was
a rich man’s daughter as well as a rich man’s wife, but the advantage she’d held as a younger woman had mysteriously faded, even so. Melanie seemed to think that her neighbor
Leonard Chase might wish to know that she’d had lunch with friends in the city and gone to see the Rauschenberg exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum and then she’d dropped by to visit her
niece at Barnard. Melanie was watching Leonard with sparkly expectant eyes in which dwelled some uneasiness, a fear of seeing in Leonard’s face exactly what he was thinking. He had to
concede, he saw in Melanie Roberts’s face that he might still be perceived as an attractive man; in his seated position he appeared moderately tall, with a head of moderately thick hair,
graying, but attractively graying; his skin tone was slightly sallow, but perhaps that was just the flickering Amtrak lighting; his face was dented in odd places, and loosely jowly in others; his
nostrils looked enlarged, like pits opening into his skull; his eyes behind wire-rimmed bifocal glasses were shadowed and smudged; yet he would seem to this yearning woman more attractive than
paunchy near-bald Sam Roberts, as others’ spouses invariably seem more attractive, since more mysterious, than our own. For intimacy is the enemy of romance. The dailiness of marriage is the
enemy of immortality. Who would wish to be immortal if it’s a matter of reliving just the past week?
    Melanie Roberts’s smile was fading. Amid her chatter, Leonard must have interrupted. “. . . hear you, Len? It’s so noisy in this . . .”
    The car was swaying drunkenly. The lights flickered. With a nervous laugh Melanie gripped the back of the seat to steady herself. Another eight minutes to Salthill Landing—why was the
woman hanging over his seat! He yearned to be touched, his numbed body caressed in love, so desperately he yearned for this touch that would be the awakening from a curse, but he shrank from
intimacy with this woman who was his neighbor in Salthill Landing. On his open laptop screen was a column of e-mail messages he hadn’t answered, in fact hadn’t read, as he hadn’t
for most of that day returned phone messages, for a terrible gravity pulled his mind elsewhere. The first husband. You cannot be first. Melanie was saying brightly that she would call
Valerie and maybe this weekend they could go out together to dinner, that new seafood restaurant in