Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb Read Free Book Online

marital truth, is curved, not straight. It’s more easily reached through sidelong glances than the burning heartfelt stare. It responds to inference better than it does to blunt disclosure, and sometimes is happiest being tastefully buried in the backyard. Exhibit A: the few times I tried to suggest that it was normal to want to see the sister of a dear dead friend, and encouraged her, please, to talk to me about it, Lucy coldly, definitively changed the subject.

Chapter 7
    M Y WIFE ! M Y LIFE ! W E’D MET IN SOPHOMORE year in college. She had high cheekbones, a fresh-banana smell, burning self-confidence, and at the moment I first clapped eyes on her, was turning to confide a secret to a friend in class while her small, exceedingly shapely hand rose to cover her mouth. I was nineteen and determined that my women acquaintances understand that it was interesting to be as socially awkward as I was, and that as part of that interestingness, they go to bed with me. Lucy never did at the time, though she did allow herself to become the other half of a platonic couple (us), seen everywhere together, the exact nature of whose friendship remained a tantalizing mystery to all but their very best friends.
    The heart has its own road maps. For several years after college, while weaving in and out of our respective relationships, we stayed vaguely in touch, Lucy and I, and we did so not only out of the residual momentum of closeness that had first brought us together as undergrads, but because both of us, in a way, kept the other in some deep reserve space from which they functioned as both a comfort and a goad. I’ve often thought of Lucy in that period as something like those dreamy, mysterious planes that make up the Strategic Air Command. No one sees them; their exact whereabouts are a mystery, but the fact of them, even abstractly, gives (or used to) a certain undeniable comfort to worried minds.
    When we met again, I can’t remember who it was who called whom to set things up. What I do remember is that we went to several dinners together, and that from the start we experienced the slightly buzzy, overly loud self-conscious feeling between us as pleasure. Everything we said seemed not only funny, but effortlessly to signal both back in time and reach forward into the future as well. This sense of continuity felt like a unique accomplishment, and if there was real ease when we finally fell into each other’s arms, there was a touch of relief as well—relief at the thought that the entire humiliating audition of running to and fro in the world with your heart in a lockbox, praying for a loving soul to find the key, was over.
    We got married in a small church outside Monarch. The sun was in my eyes for most of the reception, held on the church lawn—a circumstance that may account for the fact that in many of the photos of the event I have the look of a man squinting as if in a certain disbelief at his own future. Rob, already in the first throes of fame, was my best man, and flew in for the event from a West Coast writers’ conference wearing his standard-issue bandanna, boots and vaguely Confucian scraggle-beard. Lucy and Ihad drawn up our own vows, and the ser vice proceeded smoothly. It was halfway through dinner that things began to take a turn. As I’d somewhat both dreaded and keenly anticipated, Rob (who had been drinking Scotch like tap water since his arrival) got to his feet, cleared his throat, and began clinking his fork against his glass for silence.
    “Ladies and gents,” he said, when the room finally fell quiet, “I’m here to give away Master Nick Framingham, to whom I’ve owed money, love and life for two decades now. Nick’s my oldest friend, aren’t you, Nick?”
    A scatter of indulgent laughter met these opening remarks. Feeling light-headed in my rented tux, I nodded warily. My parents, whose own relationship with Rob was one of alternating suspicion and warmth, did their best, by way of