What Was Mine: & Other Stories Read Free Page A

college and found out that other people were interested in ideas, she had settled for reading hundreds of books and letting her thoughts about what she read pile up silently. In all the years she spent at college in Middletown, she never ceased to be surprised that real voices argued and agreed and debated almost throughout the night. Sometimes, involved as she was, the talk would nonetheless become mere sound—an abstraction, equivalent to her surprise, when she left the city and lived in the suburbs of Connecticut, that the sounds of cicadas would overlap with the cries of cats in the night, and that the wind would meld animal and insect sounds into some weird, theremin-like music. Andrew was probably attracted to her because, while others were very intelligent and very pretty, they showed their excitement, but she had been so stunned by the larger world and the sudden comradeship that she had soaked it in silently. He mistook her stunned silences for composure and the composure for sophistication. And now, in spite of everything they had been through, apparently she was still something of a mystery to him. Or perhaps the mystery was why he had stayed so attached to her.
    They had lunch, and she sipped juice through one of the thin red plastic straws, playing a child’s game of sipping until the juice was pulled to the top of the straw, then putting her tongue over the top, gradually releasing the pressure until the sucked-up juice ran back into the glass. She looked over the railing and saw that only a few beachboys were still there, sanding the boats. Another sat at a table on a concrete slab above the beach, eating an ice cream. Although she could not hear it from where she sat, he was probably listening to the jukebox just inside the other café—the only jukebox she knew of that had American music on it.
    “You’ve been flirting with them,” Andrew said, biting his roll.
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “They see me every day. We exchange pleasantries.”
    “They see me every day and look right through me,” he said.
    “I’m friendlier than you are. That doesn’t mean I’m flirting.”
    “ They’re flirting,” he said.
    “Well, then, it’s harmless.”
    “For you, maybe. One of them tried to run me down with his motorcycle.”
    She had been drinking her juice. She looked up at him.
    “I’m not kidding. I dropped the Herald ,” he said.
    The archness with which he spoke made her smile. “You’re sure he did it on purpose?” she said.
    “You love to blame me for not understanding simple things,” he said, “and here is a perfect example of understanding a simple thing. I have put two and two together: they flirt with my wife and then, when they see me crossing the street, they gun their motorcycles to double the insult, and then I look not only like an old fool but a coward.”
    He had spoken in such a rush that he seemed not to realize that he had called her “my wife.” She waited to see if it would register, but it did not.
    “They are very silly boys,” he said, and his obvious petulance made her laugh. How childish—how sweet he was, and how silly, too, to let on that he had been so rattled. He was sitting with his arms crossed, like an Indian chief.
    “They all drive like fools,” he said.
    “All of them?” she said. (Years ago he had said to her, “You find this true of all Romantic poets?”)
    “All of them,” he said. “You’d see what they did if you came into town early in the morning. They hide in alleyways on their motorcycles and they roar out when I cross, and this morning, when I was on the traffic island with the Herald , one of them bent over the handlebars and hunched up his back like a cat and swerved as if he were going to jump the curb.”
    She made an effort not to laugh. “As you say, they’re silly boys, then,” she said.
    Much to her surprise, he stood, gathered up his books and tablet, and stalked off, saying over his shoulder, “A lot you