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

sex’?”
    “Such a term, yes, very mainstream. They talk about it on
Oprah
. You should try it sometime. The term, I mean. The sex you’ve done. And where have you been? You don’t have a TV, I bet. Do you even know who Oprah is? You never heard of breakup sex? You buy dinner for someone who isn’t going to show up?”
    His cozy little tent crushed under them in firelight on the pond after biking all day. He said, “I wish you’d be nicer. I’m feeling pretty tender.”
    “You mean pretty asleep,” she said tenderly. And then she was climbing down the ladder from the loft. She came to him, right to his chair, same shining blue jeans, a different woman, Rasta cap pulled down hard around her face. She said, “Sorry. Honestly. You were nice to me today.”
    He couldn’t get off his trajectory: “Alison needs support that I apparently didn’t give her. Which I don’t even know what that means.”
    Danielle snorted: anyone knew what that meant. She said, “And then there’s her secret boyfriend. He told her she had to stop seeing you. An ultimatum. Because he knew how much she still loved you. She’d come home to you all flustered and fucked by someone who knew something about her that you didn’t and who she needed to keep just jealous enough to commit, to drop his other girlfriends, like four of them—just what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do, and just what she’d told herself she didn’t want, some fresh marriage when she’d finally got free. Her therapist is all over her. She’ll dump this guy in another couple of months, you know—but the connection with you, it’s, like,
snap,
and that was the unspoken plan, the work of her sub-brain, back in September though from your face it’s more like July. So for you, of course, it’s: Now what?”
    She put one of his logs in the fire. This took some arranging. The firebox was already pretty full, roaring nicely. The wind had died down. The window was black dark.
    He said, “You’d make a good summation in court.”
    “Well, don’t expect me to swoon over your rock-hard cheese and packets of whatever. Yeast?”
    “I was going to make pizza. For Alison.”
    “At home. Which is where you should be, liar, eating by yourself.” She limped to the butcher’s block, hacked some more at the cheese. And then she said, “You need to walk out, now. This isn’t Mount Everest. You’ll make it. You’re all warmed up.”
    “I won’t make it. Please.”
    “You can take the old coat. It’s like a tent. You could live in it.”
    “Then you wouldn’t have a coat. And coat or no, it’s dark out there, it’s snowed deep, Danielle. Please. I’ll make dinner for you, a boy who makes you dinner. I won’t drink any wine—you either, no drunken incidents. I’ll sleep on your couch there. I’ll leave at dawn. I just can’t leave now. I will die if I leave now. And I mean that literally.”
    “Oh, tell me about it. You really couldn’t break into the vet’s?”
    “I crushed my shoulder on that fucking door. I ninja-kicked it over and over again. I ran at it like a linebacker. More than once. I really tried. She’s got like
security
doors.”
    Danielle’s posture spoke plainly: she didn’t believe him. “You’d do great in Afghanistan.”
    He must have grinned.
    Because she was suddenly defensive: “It snows there, too, you know. It snows a lot there, though you think it’s a desert. That’s where Jimmy has been.”
    Jimmy. Eric hugged himself. The shoulder really was sore. He said, “In fact, I
was
there. In a manner of speaking. At least in the Persian Gulf. Off Iraq. Between wars. Navy. Fairly luxurious by Army Ranger standards, I realize. Just basically standing on a ship.”
    “Navy?” She looked him over critically, not entirely unmoved (judging by her posture, once again, all his years of sorting jurors). Yes, Navy: Navy ROTC at Amherst, then law school, all paid for by the military, then five years in, the minimum, two as a