Free The Song Is You by Megan Abbott

wish I could explain. Like a … like a river of gold running down her back. Do you believe it’s all gone?” He heard the words issuing from his mouth, but they kept surprising him. It was just so comfortable there
    —the yielding sofa, Frannie listening, hair rumpled, smelling like fresh sheets and open windows—he couldn’t stop.
    “Who’s Midge? Is she the girl who came to see you? The one who’s scared?”
    “Midge’s never been scared a day in her life. Midge is my wife.”
    “You’re married,” she said, leaning back in her seat. “Sounds about right.”
    “And the thing is, Frannie Adair, I never thought that I, Gil Hopkins, who everybody always loves, just loves, could make anyone —okay, a woman—so angry.”
    It was true. He’d always thought of himself as the kind of soft-touch, glimmer-eyed boy who begs to be smoothed over with mother love. The kind that women just wanted to curl around the feet of, like little honey kittens. Sadly, as it turned out, he was not this kind of man at all. Somehow, he was the fellow in the cartoon, the comic strip, running out the front door, pants half on, with a frying pan zooming toward his head—zzzzing—thud. He guessed it wasn’t Midge who had started it, but it sure felt that way. Her love like a slug in your drink.
    “I wonder why Jerry let her cut her hair,” Hop said abruptly.
    “Who’s Jerry—her hairdresser?”
    “No, Jerry Schuyler.”
    “Our Jerry? At the Examiner? What’s he got to do with it?”
    “You know, Frannie—can I call you Frannie?—you know what Midge said to me? The last thing before she left me. She said, ‘What, did you think you could keep throwing us together again and again, talking hot about me to Jerry and Jerry to me, practically shoving us both under the covers, and we wouldn’t end up like this?’ And yet, Frannie, here’s the funny part,” he said. “I was surprised.”
    She gave him a long look, reacting to something in his voice. Something funny.
    Then, gently, she said, “Jerry doesn’t seem the type to steal a fella’s girl.”
    “He’s a right guy,” Hop said, meaning it. It felt funny to hear himself mean something so much. “A stand-up guy. He’d give me the shirt off his back.”
    “So you gave him the wife off yours in return?”
    “My, but you’re smooth.” He finished his drink and raised it above his head, saying, “There goes another potato.”
    When he left (”I like to leave before I wear out my welcome”), he could no longer fight a sinking feeling, but he distracted himself by looking at Frannie as she walked him to the door. He stopped at the threshold and looked at her. She seemed to have the most open face he’d ever seen, at least since those Syracuse girls, snow nestling in their ringletted hair, skating around the pond behind church, making larger and larger circles, figure eights, twirling endlessly, smiling at him and waving.
    “Good night, Gil Hopkins. Sleep it all away.” “You too,” he said and, unable to resist the urge, reached out to touch the sheet crease still faint on her cheek.
    The next morning, he couldn’t remember if she’d smiled or just shut the door.
    He woke up many times during the night, propelled from dreams so vivid he was sure Jean Spangler was there crouched under his tangled sheets with him. In all the dreams, she was the same blank beauty, a glamorous maw with no center. Even in his unconscious, he couldn’t imagine a personality, even a sole trait for her. She was What Went Wrong. In one dream, he crawled straight inside her gorgeous violet mouth and found himself right back where he started, listening to her flat, inflec-tionless voice issuing word after word, none of which he could really discern—it was a low, dull stream of nothing.
    The cold-hot of drunken sleep covered him head to toe, shot through periodically with the slow realization of everything he’d said and done the night before. He couldn’t have possibly gone to that