The Moment by Douglas Kennedy Read Free Book Online

for you, Thomas. Your first book, commissioned by a major publisher. It’s fantastic news. But I just don’t understand why you kept it all a secret.”
Again, I just shrugged, hating myself for playing the coward.
“Thomas, please, talk to me. I love you, and there is so much that is good between us.”
I let go of her hand.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. Ann was now looking at me, wide-eyed.
“Can’t do what?”
“This, us.”
“But I am not asking you to marry me.”
“Even though it’s what you want.”
“Yes, it is what I want . . . but only because I think you are a wonderful man.”
“You don’t know me.”
She stared at me as if I had slapped her face.
“How can you say that, how . . . ?”
“Because it’s the truth. Because you’d be much better off with a nicer guy who wants the little life that you . . .”
As soon as the words little life were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Because I could see the effect they had on Ann. It was as if I had punched her.
“ Little life ? Is that what you think I want for us?”
Of course, I knew that Ann wasn’t a reproduction of my mother. Just as I knew that she would never press me into the sort of domestic hell that so enraged my father (even if he was the co-architect of that hell). No matter how many reassurances she would give me about not pressuring me into an early marriage, the thing was . . . she had told me she loved me. She had told me I was the man with whom she wanted to spend her life. I simply couldn’t cope with such knowledge, such responsibility. So I said:
“I’m not ready for the sort of commitment you want or need.”
Again she reached for my hand. This time I wouldn’t let her take it. Again the hurt and bewilderment in her eyes was vast.
“Thomas, please, don’t push me away like this. Do your three, four months in Egypt. I’ll wait for you. It won’t change anything between us. And when you come back we can—”
“I’m not coming back.”
Her eyes filled up. She began to cry.
“I don’t understand,” she said quietly. “We’re . . .”
She paused for a moment, and then said the word I knew she’d say, the word I’d dreaded all along:
“. . . happy.”
A long silence followed as she waited for a response from me. But none was forthcoming.
Some months later, I woke up in a cheap hotel room in Cairo, very much alone, the solitude and sense of dislocation enormous. I found myself replaying that final conversation with Ann, over and over again in my head, wondering why I had so pushed her away. Of course, I knew the answer to that question. I tried to tell myself that it was better this way. After all, I had made the less conformist, more daring decision. I was a man without all those damnable ties that bind. I could float my way through life, have adventures, flings, even run off to the ends of the earth if I felt like it. And I was just in my early twenties, so why tie myself up with someone who would keep me tethered to a life that would limit the proverbial horizon?
But the question that so gnawed at me that night in that Cairo hotel room was: But did you actually love Ann Wentworth?
And the answer was: had I been open to the idea, the love would have followed. But as I had an abject terror of what it meant to love and be loved . . . best to detonate the relationship and kill off all possibilities of a future together.
So after that painful nuit blanche in Cairo, I decided to put all such difficult sentiments out of my head. I threw myself into my Egyptian travels with a vehemence that surprised even me. Every day I sought out the new, the strange, the extreme. This being Egypt I could find all of the above. I spent time in the City of the Dead—a vast ghetto made up of families so impecunious, so unable to find dwellings in a city of sixteen million citizens hemmed in by the desert, that they had to rent tombs in Cairo’s vast necropolis. I took a train down to Assyut—a