The Winter Girl by Matt Marinovich Read Free Book Online Page A

or speaking in tongues. It’s like you’ve somehow burst to the surface on someone’s shoulders and been given a few moments to see everything you’ve been missing.
    I felt like I should write a note and leave it on their driveway, thanking them for taking the time to wrap that enormous, perfect tree in so many goddamn perfect lights.
    When we got to our own driveway, heard the cold splash of gravel against the tires, Elise started to cry. It all came out then, the whole tangle of everything she’d kept bottled up. The way her father had touched her when she was young. How much more she wanted to be in life than a speech therapist. How she probably couldn’t even do that now. For a moment, I didn’t think it would come around to me, but it sure did. I couldn’t make a living. I couldn’t understand her. I had cost her the baby by making her wait until she was too old. And now it had been my moronic idea to go into that house. We’d probably end up broke and in jail. Then she confessed one more thing that stuck with me for days. An ex-boyfriend from college had found her on Facebook and they’d been e-mailing. It wasn’t serious yet, but she found herself thinking of him more than me lately.
    “Who?” I shouted.
    “Curt,” she said.
    “Kurt Weidenfeld?”
    “Curt Page.”
    “You’re fucking kidding me,” I said, wishing her face would suddenly twist into a smile and we’d still have one last chance to be a couple again. But she wasn’t lying. Even Kurt Weidenfeld wouldn’t have been as bad. Curt Page was a pompous, beady-eyed prick with an overgrown mullet and an earring who we’d briefly shared a loft with in South Williamsburg. He was a copy editor for some long-extinct tech magazine, and he was constantly pestering people to read his unfinished novel. He had opinions with a capital
O
and exhaled deeply after each statement he’d make, as if his words were so decked out with brilliance that they might stall before they reached the listener unless he gave them that long, extra puff of air.
    One of his opinions was that everyone should be allowed to carry a concealed weapon. There was a .357 he proudly showed us, that he kept under his bed, and an old, lovingly polished Smith & Wesson that had once belonged to his late father. Once our other roommates found that out, we had a house meeting and he was kicked out. It did cross my mind that Curt might blow us all away before he hit the highway, but in the morning, the only ominous thing he left was a handwritten note for Elise, profoundly thanking her for encouraging him to continue with his novel. He promised to keep in touch and then, in his uniquely condescending way, told her that she’d realize, sooner or later, that they were meant for each other. Even though he’d split, I could hear the long exhale after that one.
    “He’s on the road again,” Elise said, as if this zero was channeling Jack Kerouac.
    “Curt Page is on the road. Does the media know about this?”
    Elise laughed at that, and for a moment I thought she’d give in, the way all couples do when they still love each other.
    “He’s going through a painful divorce,” she said. There was too much sympathy in her voice. I thought that asking for any more information about Curt would be like waving the white flag in some way. Admitting that he’d become the most minor issue in our troubled marriage.
    “I didn’t know he’d even gotten married.”
    I climbed out of the car and slammed the door. I think we would have gotten into an argument that would have finally finished us off for good, but it never happened. It never happened because I noticed something troubling directly in front of me. Through the scrub pine I could see the light in the window of our neighbor’s house, and then, about fifty feet away, the headlights of a parked pickup truck, streaming in a thicket of nearby branches, its exhaust whipped away by a gust of cold wind, then coiling again.
    —
    L ooking back,