Middle Age by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

begged him to come back; I drove him away again; I hated what I was doing, my work, I destroyed most of it, I lost all faith in myself; I even threw out most of my clothes. I returned to Bangor, I got a job. It was my duty, I believed, to visit my mother, even if she didn’t know who I was, or care. When there’s someone very sick, you can measure yourself against that person, and take comfort that you’re not so bad.
    That’s sanity —that thrill of relief. Even with the sorrow, relief. But this confirmed my resolve not to risk mental breakdown. ‘Art’ isn’t worth it.
    And there was another side of me: I’d worked in bookstores, and I love books. I love the look and smell of books, the culture of books. There’s a romance, too, in sanity, isn’t there? I like the kind of people who come into bookstores. Thank God, I thought, I’d given up on the other—that craziness. I came into a little money and I borrowed money and I took over the mortgage on Salthill’s ‘quaint’ little bookstore and I’ve been happy here.”
    Marina laughed. She was stubborn, and just slightly angry. “I am happy.”
    But was Adam impressed? In his droll, blunt way evidently not.
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    J C O
    He said, “Maybe you’ve embraced failure too quickly.”
    Marina was stung. Failure!
    “I’ll give you another chance, Marina. A choice. A way back into the life you abandoned.”
    I   that Adam proposed to Marina Troy that he make a gift to her. Make a gift was the expression he used. He would sign over to her the ownership of a forty-acre property in the Pocono Mountains, in Pennsylvania, approximately one hundred miles west of the hill upon which they were standing. An old lodge, but in good condition; of fieldstone and half-timbering; seven miles from a small town called Damascus Crossing, and about thirty miles from the city of East Stroudsburg, on the Delaware River. Marina listened to this, without fully comprehending. Adam was pointing westward, and Marina turned to see a sequence of hazing receding hills, a horizon of trees that must have been only a few miles away but seemed distant. “Don’t look so alarmed, Marina,” Adam said, bemused, as if this were the crux of Marina’s alarm, “—the place has been winterized, insulated. It’s furnished, more or less. There’s a deep spring well, the purest water I’ve ever tasted. You could live alone there, Marina, undisturbed, and undistracted by any of us in Salthill. You could do the work for which you were born.” Adam spoke excitedly, sincerely; Marina had never heard him, or any of her adult acquaintances, speak in such a way.
    This man does love me. But on a spiritual plane. Not human . Tears sprang into her eyes, she was so deeply moved; yet of course it was impossible, an absurd proposition. “But Adam, what of the bookstore? I couldn’t—”
    “What of the bookstore? It will be there when you return, if you want it. If you return. Say you’re gone a year: we’ll hire a full-time manager. There’s your current assistant who seems very capable. And of course I’d be in town to oversee things.” Adam let his hand fall, and clamp, upon Marina’s shoulder; the weight of this hand, and its heat, nearly made her stagger.
    Marina continued to protest, and Adam continued to make plans. “Your Pearl Street house, you can rent it for a high price. I happen to know about Salthill real estate, and it’s as inflated as properties in Westchester County.
    Your droll little place, the size of a dollhouse, would be snapped up within twenty-four hours, and with your rental money you’d have more than enough to support yourself.” Marina stared at her friend’s face that seemed now to be glowing, glaring more fiercely. And his hand on her shoulder, so Middle Age: A Romance
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    warm. I can’t. Can’t breathe . Long Marina had yearned to be touched by Adam Berendt, yet this touch was strange to her,