Spirit Lost by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online

God, John, you’d gone to the top.”
    “Yeah, but you’re a lawyer . What you do has significance. You help people. You make a difference to their lives.” John stopped in his tracks and shook his head. “No,” he said, “that’s not all I mean. Not just that.”
    “Sounds like you in your liberal college days.” Mark smiled, stopping next to his friend. The women were far back now, sitting in the sand, huddled next to each other with the collars turned up on their coats.
    “It’s not the other people,” John said. “Or not just that. I mean it’s great that you help those people. But what I’m trying to get at is that you like what you do. You are what you do. You are satisfied by what you do. And I’m not. I can do it, I can make money by it, but it doesn’t satisfy me. Fulfill me, to use a corny term. I look at Willy sometimes …” John turned to gaze back at his wife. “That damned embroidery stuff of hers, well, it doesn’t matter one way or the other in the world, in the course of the world, does it? Yet it makes her so content . And people are so impressed with her work, they just go crazy over it. The things people say to her, write to her—hell, one woman called her a visionary . Willy a visionary.” John went quiet. He began to walk again, and Mark walked along beside him for a while.
    “I’m not sure you know just what it is you want,” Mark said after a while.
    “I know,” John replied. “I’m not making myself clear. I’m not clear on it myself. I think it is that I want to be an artist. I want fame and praise for what I can do , for the way I interpret the world. And I want that—that fucking happiness Willy has, from doing my art. That sense of tapping the juices of the world. A feeling that I’m special. That’s what I want. I think.”
    “I hope you get it,” Mark said. “You’ve invested a lot in this move.”
    John didn’t answer. The two men walked on some more, then turned around to walk back to the women. The beach was empty except for the four friends. Gulls soared overhead, calling to one another. The light was fading in the sky in long streaks, as if the color and clouds were being pulled from the picture by an invisible hand. Everything was shimmering with a muted silver light. Mark was struck by the beauty of this bleak November day, and also a little intimidated by it. This Nantucket shoreline, stripped of sunshine and people, the familiar, now was so raw, so vast.
    “I want something special ,” John said to Mark. “I want to be special.”
    “You’re special to a lot of us,” Mark said, cuffing his friend on the shoulder, smiling.
    John shook his head in despair at explaining but returned the smile.

    By nightfall it was raining, and the wind had come up. The four friends sat in the high-ceilinged dining room and ate Thanksgiving-dinner leftovers by candlelight. They lit a fire in the living room fireplace and played a game of Pente, the women against the men.
    “I love these little stones,” Willy said, fingering her deep blue pebble-sized playing pieces. “They’re like jewels.”
    “Mmm, I know,” Anne agreed. “This is a beautiful game. And it seems so ancient. I can believe it really is ancient.”
    Mark was leaning an elbow on the coffee table, studying the game, pondering his next move.
    “What is that warning I get to say?” John asked. “We’ve got one move, partner, or something like that?”
    “Something like that,” Willy said.
    “Well, I’m saying it,” John said.
    The wind howled and threw itself against the windows. Now and then the wind made screaming noises, and the windows shook as if someone were trying to get in.
    “Some night,” Mark said, placing a stone on the board.
    “The fire’s wonderful,” Anne said.
    “I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” John said, smiling. “It cost us enough. We had the movers bring a cord of firewood over on the ferry—there’s no timber on Nantucket Island, no trees tall