Free A Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin Page A

went blank.
    â€œHis lunchtime sweetie,” Adele said.
    Jane Louise was dimly aware that Sven’s lunches, when not with printers and graphic artists, were spent in the company of compliant women of any age. She had once expressed the belief that he went several days a week for psychoanalysis. Adele had set her straight.
    â€œHe meets girls,” Adele said. “You know what I mean.”
    â€œDo I know what you mean?” Jane Louise had said.
    â€œHe likes it with two girls,” whispered Adele, and Jane Louise found this information compelling but scarcely believable.
    Adele now deduced that one of the girls had taken a powder.
    â€œYou mean this twosome is a routine thing?” Jane Louise said.
    â€œIt’s been going on a while,” Adele said. “It started when he told this girl to bring a friend.”
    â€œMaybe he meant for a friend of his,” Jane Louise said.
    â€œHe doesn’t have any friends,” Adele said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
    â€œWhat about his poker game with Al and Dave?” Jane Louise said.
    â€œColleagues,” Adele said. “Sven only has wives, colleagues, and people he goes to bed with.”
    â€œHe had to have a mother,” Jane Louise said. “Isn’t she alive?”
    â€œBarely, and she calls him ‘Svenny,’” Adele said. “Isn’t that adorable?”
    â€œSvenny,” said Jane Louise.
    â€œThe reason he’s all over you is because you got married,” said Adele. “Any woman’s husband is his rival—you get it? It’s some primitive force.”
    Jane Louise looked at Adele with pure admiration.
    It was hard to figure out what marriage meant to Sven. On the one hand, he had been married three times. On the other hand, three times was a lot of times. Adele always said that Sven liked to get married because it made him feel more guilty. It was Jane Louise’s opinion that guilt was not in Sven’s emotional repertoire. If he ever felt the merest twinge of remorse, it was like a dab of cologne.
    â€œI think adultery means a lot to him,” Adele said.
    On this elevating note Jane Louise went back to her office. Her interior life was trisected: She was now a married woman, and with her husband, Theodore Cornelius Parker, she was creatingan entity known as “Their Marriage.” It was like a museum stuffed with breakfast conversations, fights about where the extra key had been put, dinners eaten, movies viewed, showers taken together, plans made. In sickness and in health, and in confusion. Decisions were made: to try to conceive a baby in the early summer—a communal decision. Eventually a baby would emerge, and Jane Louise would have another mental section, a quarter section to deal with known as “Their Child.” They would then have an entity to inhabit called “Their Family.”
    Also there was the office, as thick with associations and memories as any home. Her office itself was not as richly furnished as, say, Erna’s, which had family photos, children’s artworks, large fossils from Dorset, a wing chair, a scarlet sofa, and a dozen needlepointed pillows.
    Jane Louise had a photo of Teddy on her desk. She had taken it herself, of him standing by the lake wearing a striped shirt, the wind ruffling his hair. She had a poster of one of Edie’s cakes on the wall. The cake, which cost hundreds of dollars, was called “The Meadow” and had made Edie famous. It was a three-layer cake with shiny, pale green icing. Heaped and scattered everywhere, as if a child had flung a bouquet of wildflowers, were hundreds of spun-sugar-and-buttercream pansies, violets, bladder-wort, primroses, buttercups, and rose rugosa. It was a work of art.
    On her desk was a clay bowl that she had made in art school. It contained paper clips. Her paperweight was a painted bronze elephant on a green base, a gift from Teddy.
    Whatever was left over