Nell by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online Page A

year she would manage to make him happy again. This year would be different.
    “Shall I bring us up a little nightcap?” she asked, smiling.
    “What?” Marlow asked, looking surprised. He continued to button his blue striped pajamas. “Oh, yeah. That would be nice.”
    Returning with the brandy and soda in snifters, Nell said, “Marlow, here. Let’s drink to this new year. I want it to be different for us.”
    Marlow studied Nell, gave her the critical searching look that he often gave actors when considering them for a part. “Nell,” he said, “there’s something I have to tell you. I want to start the new year off differently, too. I want a divorce. I’m in love with Charlotte, and I want to marry her.”
    Charlotte was Nell’s best friend, had been her best friend for the four years they had lived in Arlington. Nell sat down on the bed with a plop that caused her drink to spill over the side of the snifter and onto her lace nightgown.
    “You’re kidding,” she said. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
    “I’m not kidding,” Marlow said.
    Nell, hurt, struck back. She laughed, shaking her head as she did. “You and yourego, Marlow, really. Ever since I’ve known you you’ve been so concerned about being unique , and here you are having an affair with my best friend. God, you’ve just waltzed us right into a perfect cliché . My best friend. God. What’s happened, are you getting too old to attract the little students?”
    Marlow slapped Nell across the mouth. He had never come close to striking her before. It had been years, since she was a child, that she had been struck, and Nell felt an explosion of anger within her at the blow.
    “Go on to Charlotte,” she said. “I don’t want you. I’ve never wanted you.” She glared at Marlow, defiant, hurt, mad, not caring that he might hit her again, not caring that she did not know if her words were true.
    Marlow sat down on the bed next to her then, sat there quietly in a sort of slump. Then he said, “You know, I’ve always suspected that. And if it’s true, Nell, then you and I have led a pretty sad life.”
    Was it true? Nell didn’t know, didn’t think she would ever know. Oh, what a thing to say to the man she had been married to for eight years! And if he was right, if that were true, then how sad their life had been. In the dark depths of that New Year’s morning, they just sat there on their bed side by side for a while, unable to go on from that moment of truth. Their house spread all around them, full of sleeping children, the world spread all around them, and they sat there together, silent in a pool of light from the bedroom ceiling.
    Nell looked at Marlow. How could she not love him? He was her husband, the father of her children, a man with a sense of humor, a talented man, a man as good as any, she supposed. She did care for him. She had long ago stopped worshiping him and learned to care for him. But the best she could summon up for him now was the kind of love that made her hope he would be truly happy with Charlotte. Yet she did not say this to him, for she knew it would be an even greater proof of her failure to love him as a wife.
    They sat there side by side on the bed, which was spread with a quilt hand-sewn by Marlow’s mother, and drank their brandy and sodas and had nothing else to say to each other. Finally they crawled into bed together and lay there, side by side, husband and wife, not touching, never to touch again—they lay there until they fell asleep.
    Marlow fell asleep first. Within fifteen minutes he was snoring deeply, his body and mind safely sunk in the depths of sleep. He was not aware of Nell, who lay very still but felt her thoughts scrambling frantically at the heights of her consciousness. Marlow wanted a divorce . What did that mean? She could pretty much guess what it would mean in practical terms: the mess and bother of legalities; the anguish of breaking the news to the children and the work of