Stolen Pleasures by Gina Berriault Read Free Book Online Page B

chin. His sleep dragged on her body as she undressed and slipped her nightgown on. It forced her down beside him punitively, and she lay toward him, her hand on his bare chest, persuading him with her hand, with her heart, to stay alive. Dear Gerald, sweet Gerald, stay alive.
    All Sunday Gerald slept, wakened every few hours by Claudia, who was afraid he had lapsed into a coma, and she brought him milk and toast and fruit as an excuse for waking him. After poking around a bit that Sunday evening, trying to recall the sensations, the thoughts preceding the seizure, reading the papers, showering, he returned to bed at ten o’clock and slept until noon of the next day, when she wakened him by stroking the smooth, veined underside of his arm that was bent on the pillow, a half-frame for his pale, unshaven face. She told him that the neurosurgeon could give him an appointment no sooner than Friday of that week, and this information liberated his eyes from the startled frown. If the specialist was in no hurry to see him, then nothing much could be wrong. He flung off the covers, his legs kicking and pushing out into air, and sat up. “I’ll get up, I’ll get up,” he said.
    Always he was already up and about at this hour, carving his fine wood sculptures or roaming the forest trails or the beaches, doing what he liked to do before he walked down the hill and caught the bus to the city and worked at his desk until midnight on the next day’s paper. Up he got, and the moment he was on his feet again she felt again the inertia that came of her acceptance of the way her life was. The fact that he was up again, ready to return to
work without having missed a day, deprived her of this crisis in her life, this crucial point of change, and, alarmed by her reaction, she embraced him from behind, pressing her face against his back, kissing him so many times over his back that he had to bend forward with the pleasure of conforming to her love.
    Claudia was in the tub when he left, and she imagined how he looked going down the hill, under the arcade of trees, a bareheaded, strong-bodied man of thirty-six, going to work at the hour when most men were about to return home. At that moment, imagining him disappearing, she felt the emptiness of the house, and in that empty house felt her own potential for life. She was aware of herself as another person might become aware of her as so much more than was supposed. And, the next moment, afraid that a prowler was in the house, she climbed from the tub, shot the bolt on the bathroom door, and toweled herself in a fumbling hurry. After listening for a long minute for footsteps in the empty house, she unlocked the door and, holding her kimono closed, went barefoot through the rooms, knowing as she searched that there was no one in the house but herself.
    Some nights she ate supper at home, alone, reading at the table, and some nights she went down into the town to one of the restaurants along the water’s edge, went down with the ease of a resident in a tourists’ mecca and was gazed at with curiosity—an attractive young woman dining alone. And some nights she went out later in the evening, tired of reading, restless, to the bookstore that stayed open until midnight, to sit at a little round table and drink coffee and read some more, the literary periodicals from England and France. The years her husband had worked days, she had held
a few jobs. She had been a receptionist in a theatrical agency, a salesgirl in the high fashion section of a department store. But the artificiality, the anxiety of everyone, along with the obviousness of her own person when she was by nature seclusive, brought on desperate nights, and she had quit; yet she had chosen not to work in lackluster places. She wanted only to read. The only persons besides Gerald whom she could converse with were the celebrated writers and some obscure ones whose work she came upon unguided. It was always like a