Free The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass Page B

M.D.
To: Robert
Subject: your aunt's birthday
    hi robert: don't forget clover's bday dinner fri. pls do me a favor & buy nice earrings from the upscale hippie shop nr chauncy: dangly/sexy, don't worry cost, will reimburse. clara can advise? dad will pick U 2 up at your house 6:00. granddad bringing cousins--surprise so do not tell!
    xxx mom
    p.s. clover's new favorite color is orange
    "Hey, Clara," said Robert without turning from the screen. "Mom thinks you've got better taste in earrings than I do."
    "Of course she does." Clara lay on Robert's bed, reading her geo textbook.
    "Because you're a girl, that what you mean?"
    "Because I'm, one, a woman; two, a woman with a sublime sense of fashion; three, the woman your mother hopes you will marry."
    Robert laughed. That his mother approved of his girlfriend almost aggressively was an open secret; the closed secret was that he had no intention of marrying Clara, or anyone, anytime soon. He was not opposed to marriage--not personally or politically--but nowadays it was little more than a declaration of the intent to have kids. To include kids in any plans for the immediate future would have been reckless in the extreme. Never mind that his mother had given birth to him when she was still in med school. Totally insane.
    He spotted an e-mail from Granddad as well, subject Friday Night's Festivities . And zap, an IM from Turo: mtg7! dnt fgt!
    Robert knocked loudly on the wall between their bedrooms. "Hey Turo, F to F, you droid!"
    At the end of their sophomore year, it had been Turo's idea that they move off-campus together. Robert had loved their monastically snug yet privileged life in Kirkland House, their narrow beds, their institutional desks, but Turo's passionate conviction, as usual, won him over in the end.
    "We'll live economically, willfully," said Turo. "We'll partake of the community as we choose, not by daily coercion."
    Robert had glanced out his window at Kirkland's courtyard, where half a dozen half-naked girls were determined to bask in the April sun. "If this be coercion," he said, "then dude, free will be damned."
    Turo had laughed. "And look at it this way. A place of our own would give us a certain edge. I mean, if all you can think of is sex, my friend."
    Robert admired Turo's urge to resist convention, and once he'd pointed out to his dad that they'd save significant money by living off, even his parents were cool with the plan. But while the choice had been a good one for Robert (that part about the "edge" was true; even Clara seemed to crave him more for his independence), he wasn't sure it was great for Turo. Lately, he'd become so mega intense, so involved in what he called "the underground" (as if they lived in the 1960s, as if anything metaphorically subterranean, truly hidden or secret, were possible now) that he had practically forgotten how to just be with other people. Just sit around the kitchen and talk. Sports, girls, parties, profs, just stuff. Between high school and Harvard, Robert had spent a long summer working on a nature preserve in Costa Rica. Not like he'd lived a third-world life (he was just another baby fatcat, no fooling himself about that), but he definitely felt as if he'd opted out of so-called civilization: basically powered down. After the initial freak-out of going offline cold turkey, he'd concluded that plain old-fashioned hanging out, ears off the iPod umbilical, phones and laptops away, no narcotizing of any kind (okay, maybe that great cerveza the locals drank), was crucial to your baseline sanity. "I did a low-tech detox," he joked once he returned.
    He wondered what it meant that people were so busy reminding him where to be and when. Was he unreliable? Flaky? Hostile to commitment? Negativo , as Turo liked to say.
    Vertebrates started in half an hour. He spun his chair around. "Cla- rah," he whispered. "Rah-rah -raaah."
    Clara looked across the horizon of her tome. She wore a drab, almost colorless dress, yet it was