Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb Read Free Book Online Page B

to my original nourishing sense of myself. She was from a time when the wide-open frame of possibilities was not yet filled in with the deadening actuarial facts of adulthood. After thedeath of Rob, the choice became even starker. My heart might have ached to see Lucy at a disadvantage, but my soul had its own requirements, and among them was that I somehow, at any cost, keep a live connection with the only touchstone of those days that was left.

Chapter 8
    “Y OU’RE STARING AGAIN,” SHE SAID .
    “Am I?”
    “You’re doing that…thing again.”
    “I’m sorry, darling.”
    “How can you just sit there and stare out the window while I’m talking to you? Don’t you know how that makes me feel?”
    “You’re right.” I lowered my gaze, smiling on reflex, and noticed, with a shock, that she was wearing the enhancement of light makeup. On top of that, she’d prepared an extra-special lunch of my favorite cold cuts. Every few weeks, out of the swamp of our complacency, moments like these would arise in which one of us—usually Lucy, I admit—would make an effort to somehow reinvigorate our marriage. The boys were away on a playdate. She was shaking her head.
    “I’m sorry,” I repeated.
    “Is it the usual?” she asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I think you know.”
    “Not at all. No, I was just thinking about…”
    “Let me guess.”
    There was a pause. “So what if I was?” I said.
    “Rob?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    When her voice next came, it was unnaturally calm and tender. “Is it nice where you are, Nick?” she asked. “Is it warm and friendly? Is that why you spend all your time there?”
    “Lucy—”
    “Because it has been,” she went on, her voice sharpening, “six months since the man died, and that’s enough, don’t you think? I mean, that’s really enough. I married a husband, not a tombstone, for crying out loud!” and with that, before I could say anything else, she got to her feet, spun on her heel and strode quickly away, leaving me the bitter consolation of marveling at how her slim, lovely body excited absolutely no interest in me at all.
    That same night, after eating dinner amid the weirdly particular new zone heating of my life (in which torrid warmth flowed from the four-foot-high band of our children, and a foot higher, persistent chill reigned), I gave into temptation, climbed the stairs to the attic and drew down Rob’s precious old annotated copy of The Dancing Wu Li Masters, studying his exclamation points and excited marginalia. I took out his old deck of Bicycle cards whose fans, cuts and shuffles he’d always claimed had informed his understanding of how to write, and riffled themslowly, remembering. I was in the grip of something, and incapable, it seemed, of resisting it. The next day, still in a nostalgic trance, I went to the town library after work and peered into our high school yearbook. High school yearbooks are always dress rehearsals of adult life, and as such invariably freighted with pathos of a sort. Ours, called The Sundowner , was no different.
    Sitting in the cramped carrel, smiling fondly to myself and feeling only slightly foolish, I paged slowly through the old book, rowing my eyes over the small color head shots set in neat mortuary lines. As the individual frames flickered past my vision, it was nearly as if I were watching an old film, and then presently, my eyes moving faster, as if I were launched past the images themselves and suddenly into a deep, still focus on the past. At the far end of the corridor of the book, I beheld a day of afternoon sunshine and loosely stacked end-of-summer clouds. Below those clouds was a covert of curling brush, insulated from sight and sound. And in the dirt of that covert my twelve-year-old self squatted, grinning. As was nearly always the case in the warm summer days of childhood, Rob was next to me, sprawled on some fallen leaves, wearing a T-shirt and scuffed jeans that terminated in a pair of red