The Remedy for Love: A Novel by Bill Roorbach Read Free Book Online Page A

he asked, something to say.
    “Just quiet,” she said.
    They watched the firelight through the stove vents as the cabin darkened. The wind howled and whistled. Something landed on the roof with a startling thud, a branch, no doubt, a branch from one of the huge pine trees above. Slowly Eric’s shivering abated. He closed his eyes, felt his head nod, his neck go slack, his toes prickle and steam.

Eight
    DANIELLE WAS BACK in the kitchen corner, hacking away with her knife at his block of Parmesan, light of a kerosene lamp. She’d dressed in grimy jeans and an overly large black T-shirt, those beautiful thick wool socks. She was even thinner than he’d thought. “Who buys such stale cheese?” she said.
    “Well,” he said. “A lot of people. It’s not that it’s stale.”
    “And disposable razors? Aren’t disposable razors a waste of dwindling resources? I would have thought you’d be the guy with a little precious antique straight razor and, like, strop. And so much flour? What do you do with flour? Paper mâché?” No smile. The words kept coming, grew indistinct.
    Eric sat up with a start. His pants were thoroughly dry. How long had he been asleep? His socks were dry, too, almost crisp. He struggled into them, said, “All that stuff. I was going to make dinner for someone.” He yawned compulsively. “For Alison.” And yawned again.
    Danielle wasn’t there. “You talking to somebody?” she said from above. “It’s okay. That stove takes every stinking molecule of oxygen out of the air. And who is Alison? The one with the ring? Why would you make dinner for her, someone who treats you like that? And anyway, I never trusted a boy who cooks.”
    “I haven’t seen her in months, actually. But we talk. I just talked to her last week. A few weeks ago, I should say. Or so.” He yawned again. “We had a long talk. September, I think. We’re separated.”
    “So you said.”
    “We meet once a month. It’s a ritual.”
    She quoted something: “ ‘A ritual to keep me from despair.’ ”
    He laughed abruptly, said, “ ‘Paper mâché.’ ”
    But she was not to be deflected: “I don’t understand people who break up and then hang out. I’m more full of hate and monstrosity. I mean, if the relationship was any good. But what would I know about that? I’m with Jimmy. And we don’t break up, and we don’t separate. And September is more than a month ago, mister. Are you awake?”
    “We’d just have these meals.”
    “I swear you were snoring.”
    “You can’t trust a boy who cooks. Where does that come from?”
    “From boys who cook.”
    “Anyway,” Eric said. “She’d relax and I’d relax and we’d get over whatever argument and it would be just like it ever was, only maybe fonder, you know, absence and all of that.” A log collapsed in the fire, pushing hot coals against the very door. Eric opened it and tended things with her poker, so recently stuck in his ribcage. “Very nice, really. Maybe a way of acknowledging all we’ve been to one another.”
    “You mean you’d end up naked on the kitchen floor.”
    He felt himself flush, but because it wasn’t true, and then he lied: “On the couch, in point of fact.”
    “Breakup sex. And then she could go home immediately after and not feel like she owed you anything.”
    Eric said, “But not since September.”
    “Not since before September.”
    He craned to see Danielle in the loft, but her voice was disembodied—nothing to see up there, only the beams of the ceiling and the footboard of an old iron bed by lamplight, Danielle shuffling around, hard at work at something, dressing maybe, or making the bed.
    He said, “She had to go to work Monday mornings.”
    “You met on Sundays? Who designed that?”
    “It was in our separation agreement.”
    “How long has it really been?”
    “So that’s why I bought all this food.”
    “I’m this close to feeling sorry for you.”
    Eric said, “There’s such a term as ‘breakup