Stolen Pleasures by Gina Berriault Read Free Book Online Page A

laughed loudly and caved in. The hostess helped him on with his overcoat, and Claudia, her arm across his back, with the host on his other side, took him down the five slow flights in the elevator and along the street.

    As she drove homeward she remembered with remorse their quarrel early in the evening. She hadn’t wanted to go to the party. “So they don’t know who the hell Camus is,” he had said, tugging the words up from his throat as he tugged unnecessarily at his socks. “Why don’t you get down to the human level?” They both had got down to the human level tonight, and now he was deeply asleep, his chin sunk into his muffler, his long legs falling away from each other, his hands in his overcoat pockets where, in one, he had slipped the doctor’s note with the name of a neurosurgeon. The doctor had given him no sedative, but his sleep was as heavy as doped sleep.
    On the bridge they were almost alone, behind them the headlights of two cars and far ahead of them, with the distance widening, the red taillights of one, and her fear of his sleep as a prelude to death changed the scene of the dark bay and the jeweled, misty cities ringing the bay, changed the familiar scene into the very strange, as if, were he to open his eyes, that would be his last sight of it. She felt, then, almost ashamedly, that affinity with Camus again, and although Camus was dead, the adoration that had taken her to Paris seven years ago was revived in her memory. She had gone there alone and lived there for three months, the sojourn made possible by a small inheritance from an aunt, but the money had run out before the destined meeting could take place. It was true she hadn’t made much of an effort to meet people who knew him. How was she to do that? She had hoped that just by wandering the street where he might wander, a chance meeting would come about and he would see at first glance how far she had come to be with him. Yet in that
time she had felt her pursuit was as embarrassingly obvious as that of a friend of hers who, enamored of Koestler, had managed a front seat at a lecture, and with her transfixed gaze had caused him to stumble a time or two over his words, and, later, had accosted him in the hall and proved how deep into his work she was by criticizing some points of his lecture in which he had seemed untrue to his own self. Nothing had come of her own obsessive time in Paris, and in despair—what was her life to be?—she had returned to New York. But she had refused to board the plane to San Francisco. In the waiting lounge a terrible prophetic sense had come over her: all the persons waiting to board that plane—the chic, elderly woman in black, the young mother with her small son in his navy coat and cap, the rest, all were to die that day. She had not yet left the lounge, she was still on the bench, unable to rise, unable to return to Camus and unable to return to her husband, when the plane crashed as it was taking off. She had gone back to the hotel and cried all day in her room, shaking with fear of her prophetic sense that, if she were to heed it again, would show her in old age, all beauty gone, all curiosity for life gone, all hope for a great passion gone.
    On the long curving road down through the hills and into the town, only the low white fence between the car and the dropoff into space, her sleeping husband beside her, she felt again on the verge of something more. If she had found another existence, those seven years ago, her husband would have found another wife and gone on living; now, another existence for her would be the result of his dying. The sense of crisis was followed by guilt that came on as an awful weariness, and when she roused him and was helping him from the car, she felt in her body the same weight that was in his.

    She pulled off his shoes and his socks while he sat on the bed, and he was asleep on his back a moment after she had covered him to his