Fever Read Free Page A

across from the restaurant and Cecilia had a glass of scotch. She inhaled its fumes, finding them delicious, she let them rush into her brain.
    “He’s worse,” she said. “He may not live through the night,” but her own words carried no meaning, she frowned with theeffort to feel them, but they seemed to be as on the other side of an impenetrable glass wall. Finally she abandoned the effort; she was too tired. “I guess I shouldn’t be here,” she said, meaning that she should have stayed at Colin’s bedside, not that she shouldn’t be in the hotel bar with a strange man.
    He was thoughtful for a second, then shook his head.
    “No,” he said. “There comes a moment … If it’s his fate …” She studied him. He had such bright eyes, so blue, and the intensity in them fascinated her. She remembered Colin’s eyes the night he had gotten sick, as if, behind their transparent glistening surface, they opened into worlds she hadn’t been to, hadn’t known existed, didn’t want to know about. He took her hand and held it tightly.
    “Hold on,” he said. “You’re not alone. I’ll stick with you.” At that moment all she could feel was the pressure, almost too hard, and the warmth of his hand around hers. And then he put his other hand on the side of her face. She turned her head into his palm and breathed in the smell of his flesh, she opened her mouth and touched her tongue to his palm, tasting the faint salt taste. They sat that way for a moment, she with her eyes closed, until he loosened his hold on her hand, and slid his other hand down to her shoulder.
    “Better?” he asked. Yes, she was better. Surprised, she opened her eyes. He was staring at her with a slight frown, his blue eyes burning with a steady light.
    He walked with her to the elevator and this time, instead of letting her get on alone, he got on too, and pushed the button for his floor which came before hers. The elevator stopped, the doors opened, he got off and began to say good night to her in an oddly formal, unsmiling way, when she stepped off the elevator beside him. He stared at her, perplexed, not speaking. Shetouched his arm in a tentative, supplicating way, holding her eyes on his face.
    He hesitated, then took his room key out of his pocket and led her down the hall.
    His room was identical to hers except that it was less tidy and he had left a lamp burning. The desk was covered with papers he had evidently been working on, and his pyjamas lay across the foot of his bed. She closed her eyes again and after a pause, he kissed her.
    At one moment, finding herself in a posture both undignified and profoundly arousing, she had felt a second’s horror at what she was doing. For she had never consented to such behaviour—or even thought of it—before in her life. She was reminded of the ugly grappling of pornography, and for a second she was filled with distaste at where her body had taken her, as though she had wakened now, but only to the flesh, to the room, to the rug on the floor and the bed and the walls and the dusty tv set in the corner, and to his hands and mouth on her, and hers on him; she was filled with amazement.
    And my husband sick, dying, she thought.
    She told him what Colin had said, about the big room with the echo like silver.
    “Maybe he really is somewhere else,” the man said. “Maybe he’s somewhere in a big place and it has an echo like silver. It sounds beautiful,” he added. “It doesn’t sound like you should be worried about him.”
    “I didn’t like the sound of it,” she replied. “So remote, so cold.” She shivered, lying in his arms, and was glad of the warmth of his flesh against hers.
    “We thought it might be his pancreas,” Dr. Jameson said to her in the morning, “but now we’ve ruled that out, too.” She hadgiven him their family doctor’s number so that Dr. Jameson could consult with him about Colin’s medical history. She could have told him there was nothing: flu,