Free Evenings at Five by Gail Godwin Page A

neither of us knew, until Odette carefully explained it to us, that you could buy a house without having all the money to pay for it up front.
    Christina would arrange herself on the black leather sofa they had splurged on in their midlife prosperity (a combined windfall of a bequest from Rudy’s late uncle in Lugano, with whom Rudy had played chess, and a lucrative two-book contract for Christina, in those bygone days when there were enough competing publishers to run up the auction bid) and which the Siamese cats had ruined within six months. She would cross her ankles on the Turkish cushions on top of the burled-wood coffee table and train her myopic gaze on Rudy’s long craggy face and familiar form reassuringly present in his Stickley armchair on the other side of the fireplace. An editor had once told Rudy he looked like “a happy Beckett.” Christina felt rich in her bounty: the workday was over and she had this powerful companion pulsing his attention at her, and her whole drink to go. They raised their cocktail glasses to each other.
    Christina’s desk with ragged thesaurus and Rudy’s metronome
    “So what did you do today?” She usually jumped in first, knowing he would tend to her novelist’s gripes or breakthroughs later.
    “I finished the next movement of my piano sonata. If you like, I’ll play it for you later. Oh, and I had a call from Henning. He wants to conduct the choral version of
Night Thoughts
in Boston.”
    “I didn’t know you had a choral version of
Night Thoughts
.”
    “That’s because you
don’t listen to me
.”
    “That’s not a fair statement. It’s just that I can’t keep track of all your works—”
    “I keep track of yours.”
    “Yeah, well, I only have ten novels and two story collections. You have
hundreds
of pieces. Please don’t ruin our evening. Tell me about Henning. That’s wonderful he wants to do it in Boston.”
    “Yes. Maybe we’ll go if I’m still here.”
    Rudy blew up quickly, but he blew over almost as quickly. Christina marinated her resentments, then simmered them over a low flame for days.
    At other cocktail hours they would sit facing each other in silence on either side of the fireplace. (Two yards apart between his knees and hers: Christina had measured the distance after his death when she was wandering around taking inventories of all she missed about him.) They would sip their drinks and she would sigh and he would brood at her from under his eyebrows, until one of them asked: “What are you thinking?”
    “I was thinking about my new book,” she might say. “It’s no good. I think it’s died on me.” And that might get them going for a whole evening, through a refill and then a bottle of wine with dinner, after which he would offer to read what she had so far. And she would creep upstairs and lie still in their bed and wait for his heavy tread on the stairs, and his shaggy head appearing round the door to say something like: “It’s magnificent, it’s going to be your best yet. But you’ve got to give Margaret a boyfriend—this is the twentieth century and she’s twenty-one years old.”
    Or: “What are you thinking?” she would ask, breaking the silence first. Sometimes Rudy exploded with a tirade against toneless composers or a particular enemy. But most often he would look pensive and a little superior, as if he’d been called back from a place she couldn’t go.
    “I wasn’t thinking. I was hearing music.”

Freezer with gin reserves and ticker-tape glass
    Chapter Two

    The gin was flavored with not the usual one or two botanicals, but
ten
. Almonds and lemon peel, from Spain; licorice, from China; juniper berries and orris root, from Italy; angelica root, from Saxony; coriander seeds, from Morocco; cassia bark, from Indochina; cubeb berries, from Java; grains of paradise, from West Africa. International, like Rudy himself. Five nationalities, but he refused to claim the German one (“That was forced on us when